On 14 January 1975, Dorothy Whittle returned to the house in Highley, Shropshire, at 1:30 am. Having found her daughter asleep in bed, Dorothy took two sleeping tablets and went to bed herself. Neilson later cut the telephone line (suspecting a burglar alarm) and then entered the Whittles' home through the garage. Encountering Lesley by mistake, he decided to kidnap her instead. Gagging the teenager, who was wearing only her dressing gown and slippers, he took her to his green Morris 1100 car, where he tied her up and laid her down on the back seat. Neilson then drove Lesley to Bathpool Park in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire. There he forced her down into the drainage shaft of the nearby reservoir. Inside the shaft he placed a hood over her head, removed the dressing gown leaving her naked and then tethered her to the side of the shaft by a wire noose. There was a mattress and a sleeping bag. The following morning, after her daughter failed to come down for breakfast, Dorothy discovered in Lesley's bedroom that her daughter's clothes for that day were untouched and a ransom note punched out on a 6 ft strip of Dymotape. It demanded £50,000 and instructed the family not to contact the police, but to wait for a telephone call at a phonebox at the Swan shopping centre in Kidderminster that evening. Dorothy picked up her home telephone to ring Lesley's brother Ronald, but on finding it dead, rushed in her dressing gown to her car. She drove to Ronald's house and then returned with Ronald and his wife, Gaynor, back to the Whittle family home, where they found a second copy of the Dymotape ransom note tucked inside a box of Turkish Delight in the lounge. After finding that Lesley's dressing gown and slippers were missing, confirming that she had been kidnapped, Ronald Whittle immediately called the police. An investigation led by Detective Chief Superintendent Robert Booth of West Mercia Police, with assistance from Scotland Yard sent a team led by Commander John Morrison that included DCI Walter Boreham. During the height of the investigation, it involved over 250 officers from the Shropshire, Staffordshire and West Midlands police forces, plus Scotland Yard. But a series of police bungles and other circumstances delayed the investigation. The story quickly leaked to the press, and was carried on the evening television news that day. No telephone call came to the Swan shopping centre phonebox in Kidderminster.