The Night Stalker’s 17-year reign of terror

To millions of television viewers he was the Night Stalker, the masked burglar who spread fear by breaking into the homes of defenceless elderly victims and subjecting them to heinous sex attacks.

But despite numerous police appeals and features on the BBC show Crimewatch, one of Britain’s most depraved criminals, Delroy Grant, escaped detection for 17 years.

His arrest in 2009 brought to an end an international manhunt which cost tens of millions of pounds and involved hundreds of police officers.

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It was no cause for celebration, however, for detectives learned that Grant should have been stopped in 1999 and a paperwork blunder had left him free to carry out more attacks for a further 10 years.

Grant was a former minicab driver, a father of 10 and a full-time carer for his estranged second wife Jennifer, who has multiple sclerosis and is paralysed.

But he was also a highly-skilled burglar and was known to the police after being convicted for offences including criminal damage, fraud and attempting to rob a post office.

Between 1992 and 2009 he targeted detached and semi-detached homes in leafy south London suburbs, watching them by day and breaking into them by night, often by removing double-glazed windows with a crowbar.

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He would remove lightbulbs, cut telephone lines and then grab his victims with a gloved hand, shining a torch in their eyes to startle them as he began a conversation.

He then subjected the elderly residents to horrific sexual assaults, sometimes lasting several hours. At least one woman would later tell police she feared she would be murdered.

By 1998 Grant’s crimes were being formally linked by police under the codename Operation Minstead. More than 200 victims were identified as part of the investigation. Detectives now suspect there were more than 500.

Grant was ruled out as a suspect in 1999 after a burglary in Bromley when the DNA of a second man was confused with his. He is feared to have claimed at least 146 more victims in the decade that followed.

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Scotland Yard carried out three serious case reviews into Operation Minstead, in 1999, 2003 and 2009, but appeared to be getting little closer to catching the Night Stalker.

One senior officer admitted checking his DNA profile against the police database every day in the hope he would be picked up by chance for another crime.

But the breakthrough came in the early hours of November 15, 2009, after Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson called for a “step change” in the hunt.

Senior officers decided to treat the Night Stalker like a common burglar and to try to catch him in the act.

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More than 70 undercover officers, supported by hidden cameras and a helicopter, staked out streets in Shirley, near Croydon, and swooped on Grant’s car.

Grant refused to discuss his crimes with police and even suggested that his son could be responsible. It was the first strand of a developing web of lies.

More than a year later, at his trial at Woolwich Crown Court, Grant claimed his ex-wife had stored his DNA in 1977 and then waited 15 years to frame him for the attacks.

It was the last, desperate attempt of a villain whose luck had run out, a man described by police as a “perverted, callous and violent individual”.