#5 The Backyard Butcher

[Disclaimer] – This podcast episode features descriptions and video footage from the outset that some viewers may find distressing. Viewer discretion is advised.

[Intro voice over] – Nothing could prepare officers for what they discovered during a drugs raid in Bassetlaw. A house of horrors masquerading as an outbuilding. Reality quickly set in. These weren't just wildlife crimes, this was a sadistic campaign of torture against innocent animals.

[Music]

[Host] – Welcome to Nottinghamshire Police's Interview Room. I'm here today with Chief Inspector Clive Collings, our Rural and Wildlife Crime Lead, and we're going to talk today about a really gruesome case involving a man by the name of Daniel Taylor. He was jailed for some barbaric crimes against animals, animal cruelty essentially. An individual who set his dogs on a range of innocent animals.

A difficult case to put into words about the distress caused. How would you sum up in your career the extremity of his offending?

[CI Clive Collings] – So I've been in the police now for 29 years and sort of come into the rural and wildlife world towards the tail end of that career. But it's by far the most barbaric and the largest in terms of scale that I've come across.

It's difficult to compare it directly with some human suffering that I've come across in my career, but certainly from a wildlife point of view, not only the extent of it, but also the delight he seemed to take in it is truly barbaric and having watched some of the videos, not all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but having watched some of the videos, it's really difficult to put into words the quite acute suffering that you see when you sort of watch them in any detail.

[Host] – And I think for the officers involved in this investigation, it was a painstaking investigation where we've had to piece together different pieces of evidence, footage included. The impact that had on our officers, and that can't be underestimated, can it? I mean, that must be with them for the rest of their careers.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, exactly. So, Mark Holland, who was one of the two investigating officers, used to work in the butchery industry, and he said it was some of the worst footage he's ever seen. It's the fact that he's trained his dogs, Daniel Taylor's trained his dogs, to attack these animals as a pack and essentially rip them limb from limb while they're still alive and not only visually what that looks like, but also the noise, the suffering that you can clearly hear and you can clearly see.

[Host] – Squeals and the agony that's being caused to them, yeah.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, which for any normal human being would be the kind of footage you wouldn't want to see. But for him, he not only enjoyed witnessing it firsthand, but then wanted to record it for his own delight so he could watch it again and again and again. I think it takes a very particular kind of person to take delight in causing that sort of suffering to another living being.

[Host] – And only one can imagine that would be why he wanted to record them, to rewatch them and take that glee out of, you know, what his animals, what his own dogs have, you know, the misery they've caused to these animals.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, and he was the owner of these dogs and these dogs suffered injuries as a result of the attacks because obviously these wild animals were fighting back, as I'm sure you can imagine. So not only is it the attacks on the wildlife that he's quite happily and quite gleefully recording, but he's also not concerned about the injuries that his own dogs are getting. You know, to delight in that sort of activity, I think it does make you question what his potential impact might be on human beings as well, because there's a bit of a saying within wildlife crime that is if a human will hurt an animal, it will hurt a human as well.

And I think he clearly lacks a degree of compassion, a degree of empathy. So, my personal and professional opinion would be that he would find it far easier to inflict pain and suffering on humans as a result of this, what he clearly exhibited in this case, which was a lack of compassion when it comes to pain being inflicted on wild animals.

[Host] – Worrying mindset, isn't it? That he's capable of letting his animals cause that harm, and what that could potentially lead to in terms of offence?

[CI Clive Collings] – Exactly that, and he was a lifestyle criminal. He'd, you know, through various different types of crimes, he was involved in causing suffering to other human beings as well as these wildlife offenses. And I think that mentality is something that, from a policing perspective, causes a degree of concern.

[Host] – So Clive, Daniel Taylor was jailed for two years and eight months, I think in March 2024, after pleading guilty to four counts of unnecessary cruelty to animals. I want to take us back really, to the moment that we arrived at his address and executed that warrant.

Can you tell me a little bit about what, before that point, what led us to actually turning up at the address in the first place? What sort of intelligence did we have about things going on in the area?

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, Daniel Taylor was a lifestyle criminal, so he was involved in a number of different types of crime. One of those was related to drugs, so it was drugs intelligence that actually led us to having a warrant sworn out in front of a magistrate. So it was a Misuse of Drugs Act warrant, but we also had suspicions that he was involved in other types of crime as well, including potentially, wildlife crime.

So there were a number of strands of intelligence from some of the local residents near where we lived in Manton, around him coming back to the house, going out of the house at all times of night with the quad bike and dogs.

So while we were looking specifically for drugs and sort of based on that drugs intel, there were also suspicions that we might find some other things as well. And, you know, as you've alluded to, that's kind of how it transpired.

[Host] – So we were getting reports from people in the area about activity, suspicious activity, and obviously we then piece the pieces of the puzzle together from there?

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, exactly. So based on some of his previous convictions, we were reasonably confident that Daniel Taylor was probably involved in some form of criminality to sustain his lifestyle. So it was a case of with that Misuse of Drugs Act warrant, going there within with the intention to look for drugs, but also if we found evidence of other criminal activity, then we'd obviously act on that as well.

[Host] – I think we have some body worn footage just to show in the moment when we did raid his address.

[Police bodycam footage] – Police, stay where you are! Police with a warrant, stay where you are!

[Host] – Okay, so we've gone into the address, Clive. In terms of what we uncover it's difficult to describe in words, such a horrific case. You could use the word house of horrors, trophy room, slaughterhouse. What did our officers come across when they went in?

[CI Clive Collings] – So, essentially at the back of the house, in the garden, there was a big workshop, kind of home abattoir. And in that room, largely wooden room with benches on it and there were buckets on the floor, there were fox tails hung up on the wall that had been pinned there.

In the buckets there were deer skulls and badger skulls that had clearly been subjected to chemicals which had removed the skin, the hair, the sinew, so essentially preserved the skulls, you know, cleanly. And on the benches there was evidence of kind of butchery, there was blood, there were fragments of hair and skin, that sort of thing.

So, it was very much what you might expect in a butcher shop, if you like, but at home. And it was, that was the area where he preserved and then prepared the animals for, you know, then being able to make trophies out of their various sort of elements.

[Host] – It sounds like a true house of horrors in his back garden.

[CI Clive Collings] – Exactly, and I don't know whether he'd initially created that building for that purpose, but it's certainly what it was solely being used for. The helpful thing from our perspective was that because he kept trophies, that obviously we could use as evidence of sort of the volume of offending he'd been involved in.

[Host] – We also have some footage of Taylor in his back garden, almost looking like he's teaching his dogs how to rip these fox tails to pieces.

[Footage from Daniel Taylor's phone] – Good lad. Look at the size of the shoulders on him now. Bone showing on that one now. Good lad.

[CI Clive Collings] – One of the things that he used, some of the trophies that he collected for, was to train the dogs to basically hone their skills, as I guess he would see it. You know, hounds, lurches, that type of dog are kind of, that's what they've been bred for ultimately to some degree.

So, to let them off the lead and to let them chase the hares, let them chase the foxes, that's one thing. And they have got an instinct whereby they will kill something. But he trained a number of his dogs to almost work against each other, so it wasn't just one dog getting hold of a hare, one dog getting hold of a fox, it was them coming together and essentially ripping these animals limb from limb.

[Host] – And sadly you can hear almost the pride he takes in his own voice on his videos as these dogs are attacking these innocent animals.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, and I think that's an example of the fact that he doesn't make the connection between the way he's training these dogs and then the ultimate act and the fact that, you know, the significant suffering that these animals are being put through.

But from my perspective, he can't negate the fact that he hears those sounds coming from those animals and he encourages that behaviour. You know, it is absolutely an example of the fact that he just doesn't care if I'm honest. He just does not seem to care about the suffering he's putting these animals through. We also found the quad bike, which had a trace of blood on it, and he had dogs as well who were sporting injuries which were consistent with them having come into contact with wildlife as well.

[Host] – So not only is he, you know, committing cruelty towards these various wildlife animals, he's setting his dogs on them. These dogs have incurred injuries as well and, you know, there's cruelty that way.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, exactly. So the animals that were being attacked were hares, foxes, badgers and deer, and certainly in the case of badgers and foxes, they, you know, understandably will fight back against whatever's attacking them and badgers can cause some quite significant injuries. So, these dogs had some nasty facial injuries which were consistent with them having been in close contact with sort of animals that were intent on trying to save their life by attacking them back.

[Host] – It's really hard, isn't it? Imagine the extent of suffering that these animals have had at his hands. What I was going to ask you, in your career, in terms of the scale and the extremity of his offending, I mean, how would you put that into words?

[CI Clive Collings] – It's really difficult. It's definitely the most extreme and barbaric wildlife offending that I've seen. It's difficult to compare with human suffering because it's slightly different, but the lack of conscience that somebody can have to be involved in this sort of crime, not just once, but then repeatedly go out, you know, two or three times a week over a matter of months and then take delight in preparing the deer skulls, you know, preparing the fox tails, that sort of thing.

And clearly revelling in what he would see as the glory of it, that I think normal people would see as the kind of the gore and the barbarism of it. I can't even begin to imagine why you would take delight in that sort of thing. I think the vast majority of the public would feel the same.

[Host] – As our officers are unfolding the evidence, as they've gone into the property, they've come across these gruesome discoveries. To make matters worse, of course, he takes delight in videoing this suffering, doesn't he? Can you tell me about that aspect? I think our officers come across then video footage of his barbarism with his dogs.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, so the difficulty is we found this haul of deer skulls and fox tails and badger skulls. How do you link the offending specifically to him? Because he would probably argue if you had, you know, the opportunity to, that he hadn't actually had any involvement in this offending at all. This was something he'd bought online or somebody had given him down a pub, whatever.

So then the challenge becomes how do we link him to the actual offence in the first place? And thankfully for us, part of the way that he was recording what was happening for his own sort of delight is that he was videoing these offences and we were able to map his mobile phone to locations in the middle of the night, which were then consistent with carcasses that had been found or locations that we suspected these offences were occurring. And additionally to that, he was recording the attacks on the animals. So, yeah, he essentially was the master of his own downfall in terms of him recording some of this stuff.

[Host] – It's an insight into the mindset, isn't it? The fact that someone has gone and filmed this suffering, you know, let alone the trophy room that he clearly took pride in of all these grisly discoveries and skulls and other things. And that must have been such a thing for our officers to have to comb through so much of that distressing footage.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, absolutely. So there were two officers who were primarily involved in the investigation from a neighbourhood policing perspective, that was Mark Holland and Ben Harrison, and they had to go through each of these videos to try and establish what kind of animal was being attacked, what animal was doing the attacking, potentially where the location was and had to piece together that evidence to try and demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Daniel Taylor was the person involved.

So they went through, I think it was 80 plus videos. You know, they were all pretty gruesome to try and piece those pieces of evidence together. As part of my preparations, so I'm the Rural and Wildlife Crime Lead for Nottinghamshire as well as Bassetlaw, Newark and Sherwood's neighbourhood Chief Inspector. I watched two or three of the videos, you know, I think like most people, I'm an animal lover and I really struggled because they were horrific.  I remember seeing a video of a badger being attacked and, you know, it's hard to forget that sort of gruesome footage.

[Host] – I think it's not just what they saw, it's what they heard as well. The terrifying screams of agony that these animals were going through as they were being attacked.

[CI Clive Collings] – Exactly, and I think to watch it through a mobile phone is one thing, to physically be there within close quarters and actually be in a position to stop it if he chose to stop it, and then not act and actually then take great delight in retaining those videos because you, you know, enjoy watching them I guess for some reason. It just gives you a bit of an insight into the mindset of Daniel Taylor.

[Host] – So going back to the evidence that we brought against Taylor, the phone was a key piece of evidence and Taylor went on to make one very, very crucial mistake. What was that?

[CI Clive Collings] – So one of the attacks, as Mark and Ben had gone through the footage in painstaking detail, they noticed that the phone was dropped. And it just so happens that as it's fallen it's fallen in a way which means that the person who was taking the video, their face was illuminated. So, for a very brief second, you can see Daniel Taylor's face on the footage and that was a key piece of evidence that really led them to be able to categorically say that Daniel Taylor was on the scene of the crime, that he was in control of the phone at the time when the video was taken, and that he was in control of the dogs at the time the dogs were attacking the animals.

So that fairly basic mistake and some painstaking police work, and going through the footage in minute detail, meant that Mark and Ben could pause the footage at a point where you could quite clearly see Daniel Taylor's face on the footage and you could hear his voice encouraging the dogs. So, essentially through his own hubris in terms of wanting to record the videos and keep them for posterity, presumably, and to be able to show off to his mates, it's also led to his own undoing, really, because that was a critical bit of evidence, which led to us being able to say that he was the person recording that footage.

[Host] – In every sense, his own phone was the digital smoking gun in the case?

[CI Clive Collings] – Exactly, and then because we could pinpoint him as being in control of the video, we could triangulate the mobile phone as to exactly where it was on particular days, at particular times that made it, there was a pattern of behaviour which meant that he was regularly out in the countryside in the middle of the night, and it was then up to him to explain over and above the footage that we've got, which specifically captured him in control of the phone and control of the dogs to be able to explain how it was that he was out in these country estates in the middle of the night, you know, moving around quite rapidly.

So, on a quad bike with footage with his dogs on them. So, it all basically led us to be able to put some quite significant evidence to him that he struggled to push back on.

[Host] – So Clive, we've been talking about the hugely distressing footage on his phone and with both what you can see and hear, he obviously drops the phone, you can see him on his phone. What about what we hear him saying on his videos? Is he narrating as he's going along, as he's going out with his dogs? Is he talking and what is he doing?

[CI Clive Collings] – So essentially encouraging them. So he's encouraging them to attack the animals and once they're attacking the animals to continue that attack. Voices are relatively distinctive, but we would struggle if that was the only evidence to conclusively demonstrate that it was his voice. But again, that added to the weight of evidence against him. So, on top of his voice during the video where he drops the phone, we've then got his voice on numerous other videos.

So again, it just helps to build that case against him, which then helped to demonstrate the fact that he hadn't just lost control of his dogs on one or more attacks, but actually he was actively engaged in that.

[Host] – He's orchestrating, isn't he?

[CI Clive Collings] – Exactly, yeah. And his dogs are clearly trained and have been trained over a prolonged period of time to engage in those attacks and then to continue them and not to be called off pretty much under any circumstances.

[Host] – Just another example of the pleasure he took in causing pain and suffering to these animals.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, and there's no doubt that, you know, if the animals had been on the lead, in some of the cases they were, some they weren't. You know, he's got the physical strength to be able to pull them away, but he allows them to attack foxes, badgers, hares for two or three minutes at a time.

So it's not just a momentary thing where they've happened to have, you know, killed a hare by grabbing it around the neck and, you know, he's not had control of them for 10 seconds, it is prolonged periods of time during which he's quite willing for them to, you know, cause all this pain to animals and, you know, really a nasty way for these animals to be killed because without wanting to be too indelicate, you know, in some cases these animals were ripped in half. They were, you know, the dogs were pulling against each other and they, you know, pulled these animals apart, essentially.

[Host] – So such was the weight of evidence that we were building at this point in time against Taylor. It looked like he had nowhere else to go. Why did he do this?

[CI Clive Collings] – Well, in truth he never told us, but he didn't seem to derive any financial benefit from it at all. So our assumption, quite reasonably I think, is that he just derived enjoyment from it and it was a control thing, and I guess it was him being able to exercise control over his dogs who then were brutally attacking these animals, and I think he just derived pleasure from the suffering he was, you know, he was inflicting on these animals.

And that's kind of borne out by the fact that he retained the videos, that he retained the skulls, retained the foxes as some kind of trophy, I guess, of the activity that he was undertaking.

[Host] – In terms of this very extreme case, how often do we come across this type of level of offending?

[CI Clive Collings] – So it's interesting really, because we do see it sort of on a reasonably regular basis nationally. But the impact of Daniel Taylor's case and the publicity that came afterwards and the prison sentence that he got, led to a real drop off in this area of that type of offending, which I think probably focused a few minds on the fact that it wasn't a victimless crime. It wasn't something that you could get away with and you would never receive a penalty for it.

The sentence that he got was one of the longest that we've had nationally for this type of offence, and I think locally people realise that you were taking a significant risk by being involved in this kind of wildlife crime because I mean, firstly, locally as a police service, we would doggedly try and detect those crimes. But secondly, if you were found guilty of them then there was a potential for you to receive a quite significant prison sentence.

[Host] – And if you would, what it also shows is that never mind the perception of wildlife crime, that we've received reports and our local officers have acted and investigated those reports, that have ultimately led to Taylor's downfall.

[CI Clive Collings] – Nottinghamshire is two thirds rural in terms of the makeup of the county, and we have wildlife crime trained officers across the rural areas of the county who are passionate about investigating wildlife crime and preserving the county and preserving the rural areas of the county, because it's a huge, huge part of Nottinghamshire's heritage is our, you know, Sherwood Forest and the beautiful areas we've got within the county that are rural.

So yeah, preserving that is really important not only to the public, but also to the police officers that serve the public in those areas. So we will absolutely, doggedly, investigate offensive wildlife crime because we see the importance of them over and above perhaps the initial perception that it's not as important as committing crimes against humans. We see the wider impact on the county, but we also see the human impact of those offences as well.

[Host] – I think, going back to Taylor, I mean, the brazenness of his, not just his offending, the fact that he's recording his offences, he's got his trophy room of some absolutely horrific remains of animals, perhaps plays into the fact that he perhaps felt he was untouchable. He would never get caught.

[CI Clive Collings] – Yeah, I think that's very true and I think you find that with a lot of lifestyle criminals, I think they see getting arrested as a bit of an occupational hazard, but ultimately, very rarely do they get sort of extensive prison sentences. And particularly, as I say, for this type of offence, I think he probably felt like he could do it in the middle of the night. He could do it unencumbered. He wouldn't get found, and if he was found, he wouldn't receive any kind of serious sort of sentence for his offending.

[Host] – I guess going back to the conclusion of the case, I mean, how satisfying was it in the sense of such horrific crimes committed against these wildlife that you've managed to put the case together, he's had to plead guilty because of the strength of that, and you've got that sentence? What was the feeling like when you realise that you've got that conviction and sentence?

[CI Clive Collings] – I think a number of different things. Hugely grateful to the CPS, who were really helpful from the very start in terms of helping Mark and Ben to build a case and give them direction in terms of which areas to focus their investigation.

Pleased, because it sends a clear message to Daniel Taylor specifically around his offending. He was clearly a really cruel individual who didn't feel any kind of conscience. He had no conscience in terms of the brutality of the offences that he was involved in. So hopefully it sends a clear message to him that he couldn't continue to offend like that and do it uninhibited, but also pleased that because he received a prison sentence and because we had the footage that we had, actually the benefit of having the footage that we had is that, albeit quite carefully edited, we could then produce some of that publicly, and use that case within the media to help to inhibit offending of other people.

Because the great thing about the Daniel Taylor case is that, as I mentioned earlier, it didn't just stop Daniel Taylor offending, it had a knock-on effect. So in using Daniel Taylor as an example, we were able to prevent further offences and reduce the amount of wildlife crime happening within Bassetlaw.

[Host] – A truly shocking crime. Clive, thank you very much for revisiting it for our benefit.

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