Beeston Rape: How Police Caught Zdenko Turtak
It was a crime which hung over Leeds for nearly three months, and was described by police as one of the most ‘nasty, predatory’ rapes they have ever dealt with.
On the evening of March 6, an 18-year-old woman was waiting at a bus stop on Beeston Road when Zdenko Turtak, 22, grabbed her from behind and dragged her into a garden. He clubbed her 18 times over the head with a rock, before brutally raping her and leaving her for dead.
There was no match for Turtak’s DNA on the UK police database, and detectives say it is 'incredibly rare' for somebody to commit a crime so serious and brutal seemingly as their first offence. This was an unprecedented challenge for West Yorkshire Police, knowing this individual could attack again.
He has been in this country for four years ‘on and off’, working cash-in-hand jobs like car washing. It was found that he originally came to the UK on a bus from Bratislava using his Slovakian identity card. The journey takes 24 hours and goes through other European countries before entering the UK via Dover and dropping the passengers off in Bradford.
Police say it is rare in 2015 for somebody to live totally off the grid as Turtak did, but ‘certainly doable’. He never opened a bank account and stayed with family and friends rather than renting his own property; ultimately, he lived a ‘hand to mouth’ existence.
“He was not registered anywhere, not claiming anything – with the borders as they are with freedom of movement, it is very difficult to get a good understanding of who is living in our communities,” says Detective Superintendent Nick Wallen, who led the case.
The incident in Beeston was captured on a private CCTV camera overlooking the garden. With serious concerns that the attacker could strike again, police took the decision to release a sanitised version to the public in an appeal to identify him.
It generated a huge response which Det Supt Nick Wallen says highlights the impact this crime had on Leeds: "Our phones were ringing off the hook most of the time.
"We were getting Facebook messages, our control rooms were inundated with calls from people saying 'I think I've seen this person'. So there was a real will amongst the public to try and help.
"On the night we did Crime Watch, our investigation got more calls than the reconstruction and appeal that the Madeline McCann enquiry did, so that just shows what a massive impact it had on the city."
As a result of the continued publicity, two women came forward separately to report being followed by a suspicious man around the Kirkstall Road, Welllington Street and Burley Road areas earlier on the night of the attack.
"We asked our colleagues at Interpol to launch worldwide DNA database search," says Det Supt Wallen.
"Whilst that was going on, colleagues and I literally sat down with a map of Europe and said 'if you were coming to the UK from Europe, what countries would you most likely have come from with the thought that you would get a better life in the UK?' And Slovakia was one of the countries I flagged up as somewhere we should centre some investigations on.
"Within three or four days we had that positive result."
Turtak’s DNA had been taken in Slovakia when he was arrested some years before for a burglary at a large steelworks next to the Roma settlement in which he lived in Velka Ida, in the Kosice region of Slovakia.
Although it took nearly three months to arrest Turtak, Det Supt Wallen says it actually could have been a great deal longer if Slovakia had not been at the top of their list of countries, highlighting the challenges of modern policing: "With every investigation we do, there seems to be an international aspect.
"That's a challenge for us, whereas before we used to be locally based. We're not now, we're internationally based in most of our investigations. So I think there is a conversation to be had around how the police share intelligence with one another, and I don't mean that nationally, I mean that internationally.
"We should also look at whether we should have access to a European database of DNA. That would certainly have helped us in this case."
When police went to Slovakia to arrest Turtak, they found he was living in ‘third world’ conditions. He belonged to the Roma community, which is heavily ostracised in Slovakia. They say it was therefore not unusual for him to deliberately avoid engaging with the state in the UK.
Officers describe Velka Ida, the slum in which he was living, as being 'in a horrific state’, with hundreds of people ‘crammed into third world conditions’.
Part of the investigation involved a potent smell that the victim had been unable to get out of her nostrils for days after the attack: "Our colleagues in Slovakia told us that a drug of choice being abused by young Roma men was something called toluene, which is an ingredient found commonly in glue," says Det Supt Nick Wallen.
"The young boys over there put it on their sleeves and inhale it and it gets you instantly high. We took a sample from Slovakia and brought it over here, and amongst other things we'd asked her to sniff for us, we later on asked her to sniff this toluene. And the impact on her and her reaction was immediately 'yes, yes that's it."
Turtak put up no resistance to his arrest, and did not speak to the police officers who accompanied him back to the UK. They describe him as maintaining ‘an empty gaze’ for the entire journey.
In sentencing him at Leeds Crown Court, the Recorder of Leeds, Peter Collier QC, said: "I have read the victim's personal statement. The effect has been profound.
"She believes it will affect her whole life, including her prospects in marriage.
"In those eight minutes you destroyed her young life.
"All her youthful hopes and dreams ebbed away in those few minutes."
Turtak has been given a 20 year sentence - he will spend 14 in prison, and can be released on licence for 6 years.