BRITAIN: YOUR POLICE WILL PROTECT YOU

A police officer has been sacked and five others severely disciplined after they repeatedly ignored calls for help from a horse rider, who was later murdered by her jealous former boyfriend. Tania Moore, 26, was shot dead by Mark Dyche after a sustained hate campaign in which she regularly told officers her life was in danger.

Tania Moore contacted police six times before she was killed. Yesterday the Independent Police Complaints Commission condemned Derbyshire police's response to Miss Moore's fears and said that officers had ignored "all the warning signs". In a highly critical report, it highlighted 150 failings and said officers had conducted "no meaningful investigation" into allegations by Miss Moore that Dyche, an obsessive gun fanatic, was out to kill her. Their response to her, it concluded, was "abysmal".

Most damningly, it said that had the officers done their jobs properly Miss Moore might still be alive today. Dyche, 36, was jailed for life last year after shooting Miss Moore dead at point blank range and then ramming her car off a road in an attempt to make it look like an accident.

The pair had met at a Young Farmers' ball and were soon engaged. But in February 2003 Miss Moore, fed-up over Dyche's jealous and threatening behaviour, ended the relationship.

For a year he waged a hate campaign against her, which included repeated threats to kill her. In June 2003 he even paid three men armed with baseball bats £2,000 to rob and beat her at her family's farmhouse home in Alkmonton, near Ashbourne, Derbys.

Nottingham Crown Court heard that Dyche, who has a history of terrorising women, "wanted her hurting, wanted her legs breaking, wanted her eyes gouging out, wanted to be in control". He offered criminal associates £50,000 to kill her but, when no one came forward, did it himself, lying in wait on a country road in March 2004 and blasting her in the face with a shotgun.

A few days before she was murdered, Miss Moore presented officers with a bundle of threatening text messages from Dyche - yet the police did nothing. She became so fed-up that she told her mother a fortnight before she was killed: "When I'm dead something will be done."

Dyche, from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs was jailed for life with a minimum recommendation of 30 years. The IPCC said it was taking the rare step of releasing its findings in detail because of the sheer incompetence of the officers' investigation.

A two-week-long hearing into the six officers – a detective inspector, a detective sergeant, two detective constables, and two Pcs – ended with one female detective constable, based in Ashbourne, being sacked, the detective inspector being demoted and the others being reprimanded. All admitted misconduct.

Armerdeep Somal, IPCC commissioner, said: "It has to be accepted there is a possibility that, had it not been for the officers' acts and omissions, [Miss Moore's] death may have been avoided." The IPCC disclosed that Miss Moore contacted police six times in the 13 months before the murder. She reported abuse, criminal damage and threatening phone calls, and twice complained about the robbery.

Police errors included failure to take key statements from Miss Moore, her family and other witnesses; failure to take essential forensic samples and failure properly to investigate allegations concerning Dyche. Miss Somal said: "Tania was a young woman living in fear."Our findings indicate the police response was abysmal. No one individual officer took control. . . and no meaningful investigation ever took place. All the warning signs were there. But the investigation was signed off as undetected when in reality simple basic lines of inquiry were never pursued." She said the six officers should have easily identified Miss Moore as a "high-risk case" and Dyche as a suspect.

Miss Moore's mother, Stella, said last night that all the officers should have been sacked. "I hold the police responsible for failing to protect Tania and ultimately her death," she said. "In my view none of the officers involved should be allowed to remain in the force."

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