On the morning of 14 January 1975, Mrs Dorothy Whittle awoke to be faced with every mother's worst nightmare: finding her daughter had been abducted from her room and a note left downstairs demanding a ransom. Later, a recorded message comes from Lesley herself in a telephone call saying where to leave the money but not to tell the police or she'll be killed. The family disobeys the instructions and informs the authorities, and together they struggle to understand and carry out their instructions in a complex cat and mouse game with one desperate aim: to get Lesley back alive. The recent release of Home Office papers allows the author to go behind the scenes and examine how a combination of bad luck and mistakes on the part of both the police and Donald Neilson stacked the odds against a successful end to one of the century's most despicable crimes, and what happened to Lesley as she lay naked and shackled by a steel noose at the bottom of a wet drainage shaft with a man in a black hood, the Black Panther, as her only contact with the outside world. AUTHOR: Gordon Lowe taught law in London for ten years, including a year in America. Returning to the West Country, he set up his own law practice near Bath before retiring in September 2010. He is the author of 'Escape from Broadmoor' (THP, 2013) and 'The Acid Bath Murders' (THP, 2015), and is a volunteer at Broadmoor Hospital. SELLING POINTS: . Utilises trial documents and photographs released into the public domain by the Home Office in 2010 and 2013 . Access to New Scotland Yard's Black Museum normally closed to the public . Original research in the National Archives and the British Library . Includes unpublished photographs from the author's own collection 8 pp mono and 16 b/w illustrations