Ladderback Moor lies several miles out from West Garside, a bleak and barren moorland deep into the valleys, slopes and moors of the Pennine foothills. Macaulay’s body had been discovered there by James Allcock and Elizabeth Collins, a young couple hiking across the moor when they came across the body lying face down in a trickling moorland stream.
They had quickly made their way back to the nearest village, Back Rookhill, and phoned the police from the telephone box there.
The body was quickly identified. Although he had been dead for more than five months, the winter ice and snows had kept him partially preserved and so he was not greatly decomposed, his fingerprints sufficiently intact to identify him. The autopsy confirmed that he had been shot in the back, a single 9mm bullet being
