The Ham bank murder was a fatal shooting at a suburban branch of Barclays Bank in the Ham district of London on 10 November 1976. The victim, bank clerk Angela Mary Woolliscroft, was fatally shot by a career criminal named Michael George Hart during an armed robbery in which approximately £2,500 was stolen.
Hart was arrested for the crime two months later; he was convicted of Woolliscroft's murder at the Old Bailey in November 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation he serve a minimum of twenty-five years. He was released from prison in November 2002.
Background Woolliscroft Angela Mary Woolliscroft was born in Surrey on 21 August 1956, the first child born to William Walter and Juliana (née Roberts) Woolliscroft, who had married in Wallasey in 1953 and relocated to South East England prior to her birth. She lived with her family in Hook, Chessington. She had two younger sisters: Jackie (b. 1958) and Sally (b. 1960).
Woolliscroft completed her schooling in 1972 at age sixteen. The same year, she obtained employment with Barclays Bank as a trainee clerk. By the autumn of 1976, Woolliscroft had been employed by Barclays for four years and worked as a cashier at a suburban branch on Ham Parade, Upper Ham Road, Richmond. In addition to having recently become engaged, she had also recently passed her driving test and purchased her first car. Her mother would later recollect that by the mid-1970s, her oldest daughter "had reached the age where she was a friend. We were not just a mother and daughter, but really great friends ... she was a very loving and affectionate girl. She used to take the mickey out of me. The last film I saw with her was Jaws ... she wanted to see if she could scare her mother."
An athletic young woman with a passion for hockey, Woolliscroft often represented Barclays Bank at sporting tournaments and trained at the bank's sports ground in Ealing, London, with over twenty other young women who worked for other London branches of Barclays Bank on a weekly basis. These hockey tournaments were hosted around the United Kingdom and frequently required Woolliscroft to travel considerable distances. Hours after close of business on 10 November 1976, she and her teammates were due to fly to Guernsey to participate in a further hockey tournament.
Hart Michael George Hart was born in 1938. He was a painter and decorator by trade, but a violent career criminal who had amassed an extensive criminal record dating back to the 1960s with numerous convictions for offences including car theft, robbery, assault, and fraud. Beginning in 1966, several of Hart's convictions had resulted in his incarceration, although he had invariably reverted to criminal activities shortly after his release from prison. By 1976, Hart had been at liberty for three years, having served three years' imprisonment for attempted burglary and attacking a police officer with an iron bar. He lived with his wife, Maureen, and three children in Basingstoke, Hampshire, approximately thirty-five miles () from Ham.
By 1976, Hart was wanted by police in Paris for the attempted murder of a policeman, whom he had attempted to shoot near Charles de Gaulle Airport in August that year after stabbing and seriously wounding a taxi driver. This incident had occurred in August, and French police—having gradually become aware of Hart's identity—had contacted Interpol that autumn in efforts to trace his whereabouts and extradite him to France. Furthermore, on four occasions in the months prior to November 1976, Hart had been arrested and charged with various offences including burglary, robbery, and car theft. On each occasion, he had appeared before magistrates in Basingstoke and although investigators had requested he be remanded in custody until trial on each of these four occasions, he was granted bail on each occasion.
One of the conditions of Hart's bail was that he report to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary on a twice daily basis. The last occasion Hart would do so before going on the run was the afternoon of 21 November 1976.
10 November 1976 On the morning of 10 November 1976, Woolliscroft drove from her parents' home to work in her Ford Cortina, arriving shortly before 9 a.m. By 9:30 a.m., the bank opened for business as normal. Eleven staff were present within the premises.
The precise sequence of Hart's movements on the morning of 10 November are unknown, although he is known to have reported to a police station close to his Basingstoke home early in the morning, as stipulated by his pretrial bail conditions. Shortly afterwards, he drove to a multi-storey car park in Kingston upon Thames, where he selected a maroon Austin A40 to use as a getaway vehicle; he parked his own car at this location, then broke into the Austin A40 and drove to the Barclays branch on Upper Ham Road. Before exiting the vehicle, he applied brown make-up to his face and neck in the hope of being mistaken for a Pakistani, then donned a dark wig, framed sunglasses and gloves and entered the premises with a stolen sawn-off shotgun concealed beneath a woman's yellow raincoat he had found on the passenger seat of the stolen Austin. Hart loaded both barrels of the firearm prior to entering the bank.
Robbery By 12:30 p.m. Woolliscroft had been performing her usual duties as a cashier for three hours. Hart is believed to have entered the premises at approximately 12:29 p.m. A total of eleven staff were present in the bank at the time. He would later inform investigators he immediately chose to approach Woolliscroft's desk as, unlike her fellow cashier, she was not preoccupied with a customer request. Hart approached the till behind which Woolliscroft was working, took out the shotgun from beneath the raincoat and placed the barrels against the triple glass protective partition screen, demanding cash and threatening to shoot her unless she complied.
Murder Woolliscroft is not believed to have immediately attempted to alert her colleagues to the unfolding armed robbery; she is known to have wordlessly gathered several wads of money, which she placed into the tray beneath the protective screen as Hart maintained his aim with the shotgun. As Hart finished gathering the money from the tray into a bag, he fired the shotgun once, destroying the safety glass screen, hitting Woolliscroft in the hand, face, neck, and chest, severing her left carotid artery and blowing her seat backwards. Woolliscroft then slumped to the ground face-down beside her counter seat as several of her colleagues threw themselves to the ground or sought cover. Hart immediately ran from the bank with his takings, and a cashier named Sheila Reid—who had been standing to Woolliscroft's right placing chequebook covers into a cupboard at the time of the robbery—pressed an alarm button. Despite efforts from her colleagues and paramedics, Woolliscroft died on the way to hospital. A post mortem would reveal she had bled to death from a neck wound measuring one inch in diameter.
Although several individuals attempted to follow Hart after he exited the bank, he soon became lost among a crowd of workers leaving a factory entrance for their lunch break. Hart then entered his getaway vehicle and immediately drove to the multi-storey car park where he had earlier parked his own vehicle; he switched vehicles, then drove to Hampton Court Palace, where he threw the shotgun stock into the River Thames before driving home. He later buried the barrels of the shotgun in a garden close to his home.
The robbery and murder had netted Hart approximately £2,500 (the equivalent of approximately £17,150 ).
Manhunt The murder of Angela Woolliscroft caused intense public outrage, and Scotland Yard launched an exhaustive manhunt to identify and arrest the perpetrator. The individual in charge of the manhunt was Detective Chief Superintendent (DCI) James Sewell, who was assisted by Alan Wadsworth and Robert Hancock.
Extensive police and media appeals for information generated numerous leads of inquiry, and Barclays Bank offered a reward of £50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the gunman, whom eyewitnesses described as being aged approximately twenty-five, () tall, of slim build, with a tanned or dark complexion and hollow cheeks. Investigators conducted extensive door-to-door inquiries at over 15,000 addresses across South East England and over 5,000 persons of interest were interrogated.
Investigators strongly believed the armed robbery had been committed by a seasoned criminal as opposed to an amateur. As such, all known armed robbers within London and the home counties were questioned, their whereabouts on the date of the murder verified and, when applicable, eliminated from the inquiry. Several of these individuals were questioned and eliminated from police inquiries following dawn raids in relation to other criminal offences, although sixty-five individuals were prosecuted for unrelated crimes. Hart was himself interviewed by detectives shortly after the murder; however, as he had presented himself at a police station in Basingstoke on both the morning and afternoon of the murder and his physical description did not closely match that of the perpetrator, he was not initially considered a strong suspect.
Forensic developments Two pieces of physical evidence left by the perpetrator at the crime scene were the distinctive yellow, size 16 Marks & Spencer ladies' raincoat he had initially used to hide the shotgun and which had been discarded as the perpetrator fled from the bank to his getaway vehicle and a large, empty, pale orange plastic bag that had contained New Grain fertiliser—apparently also used by the perpetrator to conceal the shotgun. The fertiliser bag was soon traced to a retired gardener who stated he had used the bag to clear fallen leaves from a location close to the bank on the morning of the murder; this development yielded no tangible leads beyond the perpetrator's likely movements shortly before entering the bank.
A scrap of paper retrieved from a pocket of the raincoat had initially been an entry form for a college wine-making competition. The form had been signed with the name 'Grahame'; the reverse had been used as a shopping list. Police inquiries soon revealed that the entry form had been issued to a Grahame James Marshall, and that the raincoat belonged to his sister, who had used the entry form to write a shopping list. Miss Marshall informed investigators that at 10:30 on the morning of the robbery, she had parked her car in the Kingston upon Thames multi-storey car park, only to return to the vehicle at approximately 2 p.m. to notice the car—which she had left unlocked—had been moved, and that her raincoat was missing. She had assumed a parking attendant had moved her vehicle, and had not bothered to report the raincoat as stolen. A forensic examination of the seats within the vehicle revealed scores of glass shards of precisely the type used within the glass screen through which Woolliscroft had been fatally shot.
By 15 November, forensic ballistic analysis had determined the firearm used to murder Woolliscroft was a 12-gauge shotgun, and that the pellets within the discharged cartridge were typically used by individuals hunting wild game. As such, investigators appealed for any individual who had either lost such a firearm or had one stolen to come forward and assist with their inquiries. This development led to sections of the River Thames being searched by underwater units—to no avail.
Identification of perpetrator