The Met Police Officer who would've got away with the perfect crime had Bitcoin existed.

In August, 1988, a typewritten letter arrived at the head office of Pedigree Pet Foods Ltd in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, addressed to the managing director. It was attached to a tin of dog food which outwardly looked no different to the millions of others sold every year.

The letter was a demand for £100,000 per year in order to prevent their products being contaminated with toxic substances. The accompanying tin of Pedigree chum dog food had had its contents mixed with toxic substances. The letter went on to demand that were payment not forthcoming then a large number of similarly contaminated tins will appear on retailers shelves throughout Great Britain. When sales of that product had slumped another will be sabotaged if payment has not been received. The process will be repeated until payment is finally made or your company dissolves. Its fate will then be an example to other pet food manufacturers.

This letter set out the details of how Pedigree were to make contact, which was through the personal columns of the Daily Telegraph newspaper using code names. The blackmailer warned that five contaminations would be made daily at supermarkets throughout the country, with the media informed by coded telephone calls.

Experts were called in to assess the gravity and seriousness of the threat. After much debate and investigation, it was concluded that the threat was immediate and a deadly serious one at that. The contaminated tin was still at the Police laboratory but it seemed unlikely that the poison had been introduced during the manufacturing process. The product had been purchased and then tampered with by someone who knew how to use a soldering iron and how to soak or steam off a label.

A strategy was devised and Pedigree had to weigh up the risks of keeping quiet, not going to press and hoping that nobody loses a pet. Removing products from shelves was not an option for a huge company which spends millions marketing its brand - and in any case, the blackmailer would just move onto the next product.

It waa established that negotiation was necessary to draw the blackmailer out into the open but also stop him carrying out his threats.

A Police team carried out the communications with the blackmailer through Daily Telegraph personal columns as instructed and waited on a dedicated Pedigree telephone line.
A second letter arrived detailing a list of bank accounts at the Halifax, Abbey National and Nationwide. Each had been opened in the joint names of John and Sandra Norman over a two month period beginning in September 1986. The savings books, cash withdrawal cards and PIN numbers were sent to an accommodation address in Hammersmith, West London.

There were literally thousands of automatic teller machines throughout the country with customers allowed to draw up to £300 a day from each of their accounts. The blackmailer could withdraw the money from anywhere, removing it bit by bit from thousands of different locations. He could get someone else to collect it for him - possibly even a team of people. The ramifications were enormous. Normally, the most dangerous moment for any blackmailer is at the pick up point. The specific time and place when he breaks cover to collect the money. The problem being, there were thousands of pick up points - how could the Police guard them all? A very clever plan for its day but imagine if it were modern day and instead of various false bank accounts the blackmailer had used 5 or 6 different crypto wallets, insisting on payment in Bitcoin before moving funds to a new wallet and exchanging to Monero which is virtually untraceable. The perfect crime indeed - eliminating the riskiest part of the operation for him, which was collecting the cash from the cash point machines which he used all over the United Kingdom, driving from place to place and using a crash helmet to conceal his identity from prying cameras.

The withdrawal transactions were monitored, as each time he punched in the PIN it meant the bank computers would show exactly which geographic location the blackmailer was in and this information could be assessed to see if a pattern was forming. This man had shown an awareness of how Police gather information. He knew that accounts could be traced and results put him near Hornchurch, an area to the east of London.

Operation Roach was proving expensive. Even with a massive team of detectives, working in pairs, less than half of the cash point machines could be covered at any one time. This carried on through January and February, costing an estimated £1 Million a week, but the blackmailer always seemed to be one step ahead. Remarkably, he never made withdrawals from machines which were under surveillance. Every time the Police were active he would go quiet. The biggest and most expensive surveillance operation ever mounted in Britain had failed to turn up a single clue. Something was amiss but what?

By the beginning of March, the ransom demand had risen to £1,250,000 and the number of contaminations to fourteen. Each time a warning was issued. The blackmailer had withdrawn more than £18,000 but instead of more threats he went quiet.

It turned out that the blackmailer had been spooked by the media leaking the blackmail story, which had been splashed all over the pages of the national newspapers. He then turned his attention to the food manufacturer, H.J.Heinz. They had received a demand for £300,000 after their product range had been attacked with most lethal substances and boycotted by the public. On the same day, a jar of Heinz baby food arrived in the post at a Police station in Leicester. It had been laced with caustic soda at a concentration big enough to kill 27 children. The accompanying letter made it clear that more would follow if payment was not made. After stalling for time, it was agreed that five controlled payments were made into the Norman accounts but with requests to slow down the reaction times of the machine once the blackmailers PIN was entered, and an instant alert was sent to Police identifying the location. Instructions were issued so that only Halifax machines could be used with Heinz placating the blackmailer by insisting that there was a problem with their bank. This was deliberately done to close the net and narrow down the amount of cash machines which needed to be surveilled. A week after the first payment was lodged, a cash withdrawal of £300 was made at Reading, south of London. Afterwards, they were made almost daily from machines as far north as Glasgow, as far south as Exeter and as far west as Aberystwyth in Wales. Most were made after 11pm. The blackmailer continued this pattern, never using the same machine twice until he became greedy and lazy, starting to use London cash machines which he had previously used and by a stroke of luck and the fact that a severed electricity cable had brought down all the cash point machines in the London area, the Police caught a break. Shortly after midnight, two Special Branch officers posted near a machine in Enfield, North London, saw a burly, grey-bearded man park his car nearby. He approached the cash machine, realised it was out of order and retraced his steps. The thing that struck the officers as odd was the fact that he was carrying a crash helmet and so they moved in. When challenged, the man fainted.

Rodney Whichelo had been a Police officer who had served in the Regional Crime Squad in England. He was still good mates with many serving Police officers and would socialise with them in his old hunting ground, gleaning information about the investigation and the means of pursuing him. He would often call into the Police Station, pretending to be there to chat with his Police buddies before checking out what was written on the whiteboard under Operation Roach, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the Police and evade capture for so long. Rodney Whichelo had been passed up for promotion and had held a grudge. He was determined to prove his superior intelligence to that of his compatriots, and so set out his plan in meticulous detail, before embarking on his reign of terror. Whichelo profited to the tune of just £32,000 and was sentenced to 9 years imprisonment for his crimes. He is now a free man. One mother whose daughter was injured by razor blades contaminated in baby food said she was not scared of Whichelo but that he was an evil man who she hoped she would never have to meet.