When a household dwelling in a farmhouse on the North York Moors went to research a blockage within the septic tank they shared with the cottage subsequent door, they made a grim discovery.
Nestled within the earth beneath the tank was a bone. And never simply any outdated animal bone. A medical skilled amongst them instantly recognised it as a human jawbone.
The police had been referred to as and a serious inquiry swung into operation. Detectives swooped on Appletree Hurst Farm simply exterior the remoted hamlet of Chop Gate. Scene-of-crime tents had been erected and forensic archaeologists rushed to the scene.
Examination of the jawbone, and a second one discovered close by, revealed that they predated 1950, whereas marks on tooth indicated subtle dentistry appropriate with the RAF. Even the slightest toothache might develop into agony for anybody flying an unpressurised plane at excessive altitude, so the RAF grew to become pioneers in dentistry to maintain their pilots within the air. The forensic group additionally discovered proof of impression accidents on the bones and discolouration from contact with a helmet or chinstrap.
Alfred Milne, pictured on his wedding ceremony day to Gwendolen Margaret Oliver in July 1943 died when the aircraft he was piloting crashed simply south of Middlesbrough whereas on a secret mission
Milne was flying alongside Warrant Officer Eric Stubbs, 22, who additionally died within the crash
It quickly emerged that the stays had been of two 22-year-old pilots who had crash-landed in the middle of a secret mission in 1944.
What rang alarm bells, nonetheless, was that the bone fragments had been discovered 5 miles from the place the aircraft had gone down.
Final week, greater than 78 years after the crash, a coroner’s courtroom lastly confirmed what everybody had lengthy suspected. Detective Chief Inspector Carol Kirk, from North Yorkshire Police, and forensic archaeologist Dr Karl Harrison agreed that the bones had been a ‘secondary deposition’, coroner-speak for them having been moved from one other place.
That place was Bransdale, a valley on the moors south of Middlesbrough. It was there that Pilot Officer Alfred Milne and Warrant Officer Eric Stubbs met their ends on October 11, 1944.
That morning, that they had mentioned farewell to their family members — pilot Milne had solely married Gwendolen Oliver, a Land Military lady, a yr earlier — and boarded their Mosquito bomber at RAF Beccles in Suffolk. Their mission was to move a revolutionary new weapon designed by Dambuster bomb creator Barnes Wallis to RAF Turnberry in Ayrshire.
The stays had been discovered on the house of a perverted former army historian Kenneth Ward
Kenneth Ward, 67, pictured, was jailed for 5 years in 2011 after he terrorised a former feminine police officer Mandy Dunford. Police raiding his house in North Yorkshire recovered a cache of weapons, together with stay ammunition and a plane cockpit with loaded weapons
However midway to Scotland their Mosquito skilled a catastrophic mechanical failure and plummeted to the bottom.
What components of their shattered corpses might be retrieved from the crash website had been subsequently buried in graves in Surrey.
Unbeknown to their grieving households and RAF comrades, nonetheless, the restoration of their stays was certainly not complete and important physique elements remained at Bransdale lengthy after the struggle ended.
And years later — in a ugly act of disrespect to the struggle lifeless — somebody pilfered them. What Northallerton Coroner’s Court docket couldn’t determine was how the physique elements had been moved, or who had moved them. This, although Appletree Hurst Farm, and the derelict Appletree Hurst Cottage which sits on the property, had been previously inhabited by Kenneth Ward, an ‘obsessive’ army memento collector.
Ward, 75, has devoted his life to scouring Britain for World Battle II relics and his huge assortment of army memorabilia was housed in a makeshift ‘plane museum’ composed of tin sheds on the land surrounding his cottage.
This included remnants of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire, which collided with one other aircraft over Cleveland in 1940, and elements of a German Junkers Ju 88 twin-engined bomber which crashed in Cleveland in 1944, an occasion witnessed as a toddler by the outdated farmer who lent Ward the JCB with which to dig it up.
Different gadgets are extra private, such because the frames of a pair of sun shades and unfastened change from the wreck of a Spitfire crash in 1943.
Alongside these are hundreds of propellers, radios, parachutes and dinghies. However aside from being one of many UK’s most fanatical collectors of wartime relics, Ward has exhibited weird behaviour now and again.
In 2011 he was sentenced to 5 years in jail for harassing his next-door neighbour. A courtroom heard that he terrorised retired police officer Mandy Dunford, 62, for 9 years in her remoted property, which was subsequent to his within the coronary heart of the moors.
On one event Ward appeared exterior her house within the lifeless of winter, bare aside from a pair of army boots and a rifle slung over his shoulder.
At different occasions he climbed ladders along with his trousers down or watched her by binoculars. When police arrested him in 2010, they discovered a cache of weapons at his cottage, together with a loaded Luger pistol beneath his pillow and, in his yard, an plane cockpit with fully-functioning loaded weapons.
The RAF crew had been flying a De Havilland Mosquito, just like this, whereas carrying a secret bomb designed by Dambusters inventor Barnes Wallace. Their plane got here down 5 miles from Ward’s former house had been a few of their stays had been recovered
So Ward is an obsessive army hoarder and a convicted prison. However do his misdeeds prolong to bone amassing? Did he actually transport the stays of two deceased struggle heroes 5 miles to his decrepit cottage to be macabre additions to his assortment?
Final week the Mail visited the North York Moors to try to unravel the thriller. Swathed in heather and gorse, the dramatic hills rise to nearly 1,500ft and due to these peaks — and their place on strategic flight paths in the course of the struggle — the world has witnessed a whole bunch of plane crashes through the years, together with 14 in 1944 alone.
This has made the moors a magnet for army collectors, salvagers, historians and fans. They scour the land with metallic detectors and clipboards to fastidiously doc its wartime secrets and techniques.
Ken Ward was bitten by the collector’s bug at a younger age, as soon as telling a newspaper how he had been gathering aviation artefacts because the age of 11. He recalled how, in 1959, a faculty good friend had taken him to see the crash website of a bomber which had come down in moorland in Bilsdale, lower than 4 miles from the place the Mosquito crashed.
‘It was foggy,’ he recalled, ‘and we couldn’t see very far. We had been strolling . . . by the heather, not figuring out the place we had been.
‘We heard the sound of squeaking metallic. As we moved in the direction of the sound, the tail-plane of a Wellington — 20ft excessive and full with tail turret — loomed out of the fog.
‘It was mendacity like a large Airfix package, its rudder was swinging within the wind and squeaking like a rusty gate.’
Ward then defined simply what fascinated him about army excavations. ‘These had been struggle machines hitting the bottom at 400 to 500 miles per hour,’ he mentioned. ‘Very often, folks had been nonetheless in them. RAF restoration groups would attempt to retrieve any human stays, however generally private results had been buried when the outlet was crammed in.
‘Such discoveries deliver you nearer to the occasion — and you already know that the final individual to the touch or maintain that article was the proprietor.’ Milne and Stubbs’ Mosquito crash shaped a crater into which a lot of the wreckage was subsequently positioned by the folks charged with cleansing up the crash scene and lined over with soil.
It wasn’t till 1969 that it was excavated by the now-defunct Yorkshire Plane Preservation Society, which despatched elements for restoration by specialist collectors after which to native museums.
In accordance with the web site of Richard Allenby, a Yorkshire plane historian who gave proof ultimately week’s inquest, Ken Ward returned to the crash website ‘at a a lot later date’ and ‘did an additional dig’.
William Fern, of the South Yorkshire Plane Museum, mentioned Ward’s magpie-like tendencies revealed themselves to the close-knit army salvaging neighborhood a long time in the past.
He informed me final week of a licence the museum obtained within the Eighties to get well a Wellington bomber on the North Yorkshire Moors at Braemar.
‘A number of members went as much as do a reconnaissance,’ he recalled. ‘In some way or different Mr Ward tagged alongside. They did the reconnaissance and got here down as a result of a helicopter was wanted to elevate it off the moors.
‘However once they went again the following day, a really uncommon dustbin turret from this explicit plane had disappeared. This turret is so uncommon, it’s the one one anybody has ever heard of, not to mention seen.
‘Ultimately, Mr Ward had a dustbin turret in his assortment.’
In 1999, the MoD gave Ward an off-the-cuff warning over his possession of a pendant believed to have belonged to a Canadian airman who died in a crash in East Yorkshire in the course of the struggle.
The suspected date of the pendant offence was 1982 — 4 years earlier than the Safety of Navy Stays Act was handed, which made it unlawful to look wrecks with out MoD permission. All through the Nineties and 2000s, Ward grew to become a longtime collector, loaning items to museums, shopping for elements from the RAF and restoring no matter he might get his arms on.
However the story of his house life was one among disappointment and squalor. Native newspapers reported in 2004 —when Ward was 57, his brother Brian 65 and his mom Muriel 87 — that the household had been ‘dwelling in Victorian situations’ in Appletree Hurst Cottage.
The council had ‘condemned it as unfit for human habitation’ and ordered the landlords, homeowners of the Sion Hill Corridor stately house down the street, to pay to repair it.
Ward was the principle carer for his sick mom, who had suffered 5 strokes and had just one kidney, and the household lived amongst rotting woodwork and a slug-infested kitchen, with solely a transportable tin bathtub to wash in. After his mom and brother handed away, Ward continued to stay alone within the squalid cottage. It’s at this level that he started his marketing campaign of terror in opposition to his new neighbour Mandy Durford.
After shopping for her Studsdale property — and shifting in alone — she watched in dismay as Ward transformed a part of her land into his ramshackle ‘Air Museum’.
Even after he had been jailed for stalking and firearms offences, she lived in terror that he can be allowed to return to Appletree Hurst Cottage upon his launch.
It was because of an intervention from her native MP, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (who was then Chancellor), {that a} restraining order was obtained to forestall him from doing so. Ward moved as a substitute to a caravan park in Sutton-on-the-Forest, close to York, and police cleared his discipline of junk. ‘The bones will need to have been buried method earlier than I got here to stay right here,’ Ms Durford mentioned from the doorway of her conventional stone farmhouse close to Chop Gate.
Final Friday, the Mail tracked down the location of Ward’s shabby static caravan in an remoted nation lane. However neighbours say he was evicted and his van confiscated by police 18 months in the past — after the bomb squad was referred to as in to take care of stay ordnance contained in the caravan.
‘It was terrifying to assume what might need occurred,’ mentioned one resident, who lived simply yards away. ‘He had a turret of a World Battle II Lancaster in there that was nonetheless emitting radiation as a result of luminous dials.
‘He had so many rounds of stay ammunition in there the police and bomb squad had been right here for 3 days. They used a bomb disposal robotic as nicely.’
After he left Chop Gate, Ward was mentioned to make frequent journeys to France for extra wartime excavations. ‘You’d see him carrying stuff out of his automobile into his caravan,’ mentioned a neighbour. ‘He was typically engaged on issues with a metallic grinder.’
Police pressured Ward from the location however haven’t saved tabs on his whereabouts. Neighbours speculated he had gone again into the woods of the wild North York Moors, however nobody has seen or heard from him since.
Ward had been arrested after the invention of the bones in 2020, however launched with out cost.
North Yorkshire Police later mentioned its investigation had concluded and that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided there was not sufficient proof to warrant a prosecution.
For his half, Ward has all the time denied being related to the airmen’s stays. ‘They [the authorities] are not any additional ahead, besides that they’ve wasted a fortune in taxpayers’ cash,’ he mentioned final yr. ‘I used to be informed the investigation has price as much as one million kilos.
‘They had been on the lookout for memorabilia they thought was buried within the fields for some motive, however they discovered nothing. They raided my house, took numerous gadgets away and haven’t returned them. I used to be pressured to maneuver away and my life was turned the other way up.’
In the meantime, in reaching a conclusion of unintended loss of life on the inquest into Milne and Stubbs final week, North Yorkshire coroner Richard Watson mentioned: ‘It’s 77 years because the finish of the Second World Battle and 78 years since this incident.
‘This yr would have been Sgt Stubbs’s centennial and P.O. Milne’s would have been final yr. It is a well timed reminder to us all of these younger males who made the supreme sacrifice and it’s a reminder of the price of struggle.’
And for whoever unlawfully eliminated their bones, it’s additionally a reminder of the significance of respect for the lifeless.
Extra reporting: MARK BRANAGAN
