Leslie Whittle: I Dreamed Where She Was Being Held

In 1975 the heiress Lesley Whittle was kidnapped and held to ransom. After much negotiating between the kidnapper, Donald Neilson, and the police, and much bungling, she was eventually found two months after her disappearance. She was dead.

At the time I was a young wife, and my first baby was 18 months old. As a new mum I felt how awful it would be if anyone took my child, and I felt anguish for Leslie, and desperately hoped she would be found alive.

During the period of her disappearance I had a dream in which I was walking down a street near my house when I heard someone crying out to me. I looked down at the gutter, and through the grid of the drain saw Leslie lying stark naked. She was very white, and she was crying and looking desperately at me. She said she had been knifed, and she was dead.

I told my husband about the dream the next morning. I knew that it was Lesley, but as the dream was so bizarre and I had never had any psychic experience, I put it out of my mind. So far as I was concerned I'd dreamed about Leslie because I was so desperate for her to be found safe.

Shock was the feeling that shot through me when some time later it was reported that her body had been discovered in a drainage shaft of a reservoir. I thought, 'I know that!'

Lesley had not died from knife wounds, but by strangulation, but she was naked.

I've never forgotten this experience, and have always been convinced that Lesley was trying to contact someone for help. What are the chances of my dreaming of her being in a drain? Maybe the 'knife' detail relates to the feeling of heart attack?

It upset me to think that the poor girl was trying to contact help.