How one receipt helped to lock up a prolific burglar

Message from Humberside Police:

Have you ever contacted us to report something and wondered what happens with that information next?

Or maybe you’ve been the victim of a burglary and months later had an update to say someone has been charged in connection with it and have wondered what happened in those months in between? 

If so, then this article may help answer your questions as we lift the police tape to take a look at the fantastic work our intelligence team do to identify suspects and put them before the courts.

Nestled away in an office at Clough Road Police Station are our Intelligence Team also known as the Force Intelligence Bureau (FIB).  

Specially trained officers and staff work hard every day to piece together little snippets of information and intelligence to build up a full story and identify suspects, or recognise patterns of behaviour. 

When a crime is reported, trained call handlers will ask a series of questions to skilfully gather all of the information available about the person responsible.

This information is passed to our intelligence team who comb through it and use it to learn more about crime in our area.

Almost like putting together a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle, the teams take every morsel of detail available to us and use it to tell a story and lead us to offenders. 

Intelligence comes in through all kinds of different routes; from a person reporting a crime on 101, to someone speaking to an officer on the street, to a direct message on our force Facebook or Twitter accounts or even from what our teams witness whilst out and about on the beat. So piecing it together is no easy task, however when done correctly it can lead to outstanding results.

Just last year prolific burglar Bradley Dyer was sentenced to eight years after he admitted a total of 83 offences across the north of the country: 11 in our force area and 72 across West Yorkshire, Cleveland and Durham.

Here’s how our intelligence team helped connect these offences to him.

In November 2018 we saw a series of burglaries where keys were stolen from properties then used to steal cars. These were happening regularly in both our area and in other Force areas in the north east of England.

Officers in North Yorkshire recognised that the method of committing the burglaries was similar to previous ones done by Dyer, who was out of prison on license, and began to consider him as a potential suspect.

Then in the early hours of Thursday 13 December a Land Rover was stolen from an address in Holme on Spalding Moor, in East Yorkshire, after keys were taken from inside an address – using the same method that had been recognised by North Yorkshire as being previously committed by Dyer.  

A short time later a burglary was reported at a farm nearby and when officers attended the Land Rover, stolen in the previously burglary, was seen leaving the farm grounds. The vehicle crashed shortly after leaving the farm, however the driver and passengers all managed to flee the scene on foot.

As part of our enquiries, officers carried out searches at the address in Holme on Spalding Moor, where the first burglary took place, there they found a receipt, which had been left behind by the offenders, showing that a phone top-up was bought at a shop nearby the previous day.

The team visited the shop and reviewed the CCTV which showed a man buying the top up and putting petrol in a car. An eagle eyed officer recognised the man shown in the footage making the purchase to be Dyer.

Checks on the car, using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, showed the vehicle being driven in the areas the burglaries took place, shortly before they occurred – further linking Dyer to the offence.

Dyer was arrested and whilst being interviewed by our officers he admitted the offences, along with a third burglary where an Audi was stolen from Pocklington. 

Once these offences had been admitted, we worked with other forces to look at the intelligence and information we had about Dyer and his method of offending to see if it matched any of their reported burglaries.

We found that it matched dozens of reports across the north east, which resulted in him being charged with 83 offences in total.

In February last year, 2019, Dyer was sentenced to eight years behind bars for the offences he had committed.

His information helped us recover a number of the stolen vehicles to be returned to their rightful owners.

This just highlights that knowledge of offenders and their patterns of behaviour along with something as simple as a receipt left at the scene of a crime, can result in one offender being linked to dozens of offences.

So if you have any information, or you see something suspicious, no matter how small it may seem at the time, please always report it to us.

You never know what our teams are working on and that nugget of information might just be the last detail that we need to help put a prolific offender behind bars, or bring down an organised crime group.

You can report information by calling our non-emergency 101 line, sending us a direct message on Twitter or Facebook or speaking to an officer directly. Alternatively, if you would prefer to report something anonymously you can do so via the independent charity Crimestoppers by calling 0800 555 111.