By Tim Lambert
Maartje Tamboezer was a 15 year old Dutch schoolgirl living in England. In 1986 she was the victim of a horrific murder between the villages of West and East Horsley in Surrey, England. Maartje was born on 22 March 1971 in the Netherlands. She was the oldest of three children. Her father worked for a Dutch oil company, and in 1986 he was stationed in England. Maartje and her family lived in a rented house in the affluent village of West Horsley.
Maartje went to a school in Cobham, Surrey where she was intelligent and studious. Maartje was described as a shy or quiet girl, but she was very pleasant. She was also very pretty and she had a boyfriend.
Meanwhile, in 1982 two men, John Duffy and David Mulcahy had begun a series of appalling rapes near railway stations in London. Duffy was born in November 1958 and Mulcahy was born in May 1959. They met at school were they became best friends. In 1982 the two began raping women. However, they eventually graduated from rape to murder. The first victim was a 19-year-old woman named Alison Day. She was strangled in East London on 29 December 1985.
Maartje Tamboezer was raped and murdered on 17 April 1986. It was a very sadistic murder. Mulcahy and Duffy travelled to East Worsley in Sussex and waited on a path by a railway line that led to West Worsley.
Maartje was due to go on a trip to the Netherlands the next day. In the afternoon, after school she went to buy some English sweets to take with her. Maartje cycled along the track where Mulcahy and Duffy were waiting. They watched her pass but at first they did not attack her. Mulcahy realised the would come back the same way so he strung fishing line across the path. When she returned Maarjte saw the string in time and stopped her bike.
The murderers jumped out of their hiding place. David Mulcahy pulled Maartje off her bike and ordered her to be quiet. John Duffy held her by the collar and forced her to walk across a field towards Lollesworth Wood. Mulcahy wheeled her bike along then left it in the woods. Maartje screamed. Mulcahy walked over to her and hit her with the back of his hand. He ordered her to be quiet and not to look at him. Her hands were tied.
They walked Maartje by a long and roundabout route to the site where she was raped probably to prolong her terror. When they stopped Mulcahy went to be a lookout, while Duffy raped the girl. When she tried to stop Duffy removing her trousers Mulcahy came over and threatened her. John Duffy then raped her.
Afterwards Duffy grabbed Maartje by the arm and walked her over to Mulcahy. Both men forced Maartje into a wood. According to Duffy Maartje started speaking again. Mulcahy became angry and shouted ‘You are looking at me again. I told you I would hurt you! Without warning he hit her over the head with a piece of flint. She was knocked unconscious’.
Duffy then strangled the child with a tourniquet. Duffy said Mulcahy ripped off Maartje’s belt and looped it around her throat, telling Duffy him: ‘I did the last one, you’ll do this one’.
‘He passed me the belt. It had a piece of stick through it which was twisted and he gave it to me in my hand,’ Duffy claimed. ‘I actually started twisting it while David turned away. I think I just got caught up in it. It is very difficult to explain. I just continued twisting until she was dead.’ Afterwards Mulcahy patted Duffy on the back and said ‘you done good’.
Mulcahy told Duffy to go home while he returned to destroy evidence. He wiped fingerprints on the belt and the rock. He set Maartje’s body alight, stuffing burning tissues into her vagina hoping to destroy forensic evidence. Parts of her body were burned.
By evening Maartje’s parents were very worried and they called the police. At about 10.30 pm her bike was found but there was no sign of her. However the next morning the body of Maartje Tamboezer was found in a wood among bluebells.
Detective Superintendent John Hurst said it was ‘‘Probably the worst murder I’d come across in my career’. Maartje had been raped, beaten and strangled. Her body was partly burned.
A post mortem showed Maarjte had lacerations on her head where she was hit by a blunt object but the cause of death was strangulation. Later, Maartje was cremated and her family moved back to the Netherlands.
Unfortunately DNA evidence was not available in 1986 but from semen stains on Maartje’s clothes police were able to say it came from a man with group A blood. However, the police could not match it any one individual. The police found another clue: Maartje’s hands had been bound with an unusual type of string. The factory that made it narrowed it down to a batch made in 1982. Later, the police found a matching ball of string in Duffy’s parents house.
Unfortunately Duffy and Mulcahy struck again. On 18 May 1986 they raped and strangled a young woman, Anne Lock near a railway line north of London. Her body was not found until July 1986. But the net was closing in on Duffy. The police gathered more and more evidence against him. He was arrested in November 1986.
In February 1988 John Duffy was convicted of two murders and five rapes. (The judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of the murder of Mrs Anne Lock, although years later Duffy admitted his guilt).
The judge called Duffy ‘a predatory animal’. He said: ‘the wickedness and beastliness of the murders committed on those two very young girls hardly bears description’. They were ‘as appalling as anything I have come across’.
He also said ‘You cut short those two young lives and blighted the lives of all the families of those young girls’. He sentenced John Duffy to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years. The Home Secretary later changed that to a whole life tariff.
In 1998, while in prison John Duffy claimed he was suffering from nightmares. He was referred to a psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Cutler and for the first time he admitted he had an accomplice in the rapes and murders – one who had never been caught. Duffy eventually confessed his crimes to the police, including the murder of Maartje Tamboezer. Duffy described graphically how he had strangled the child with a torniquet. He also agreed to give evidence against Mulcahy.
David Mulcahy was arrested in February 1999. In February 2001 he was convicted of three murders, Alison Day, Maartje Tamboezer and Anne Lock. He was also convicted of seven rapes.
The judge told Mulcahy ‘These were sadistic killings. Of the two of you, I have no doubt that it was you who gained gratification from killing. These were acts of desolating wickedness in which you descended to the depths of depravity in carrying them out.’
He sentenced David Mulcahy to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 30 years. He was also sentenced to 24 years for each of the rapes. It is unlikely either of the two fiends will ever be released.
Simon Farquhar wrote a book about the Railway Killers called A Dangerous Place. It was published by History Press. It is available on Amazon.
Amazon.co.uk : a dangerous place the story of the railway murders
A field between East and West Horsley