Retired detective on how he caught a pervert cleric

Oct 31 2010 by Darren Devine, Wales On Sunday

A WELSH detective has lifted the lid on how he caught a pervert cleric who cut the genitals off dead parishioners.

Trusted minister Emyr Owen mutilated corpses after they had been laid out in a chapel of rest.

After chopping off penises, he admitted injecting some of them with boiling water over breakfast so they would stand erect.

When cops searched his home, they found a collection of sadomasochistic pornography and three photo negatives of dismembered penises and scrotums arranged on plates.

They also uncovered a sinister collection of tools they believe the cleric used to aid his depravity.

They included a syringe, forceps, a screwdriver, handcuffs, a length of rope, cord from pyjamas, a razor and tooth extractors. The case made headlines around the world when it unfolded in the 1980s. Now, retired detective constable Gwyn Roberts has lifted the lid on the hunt for the sick snipper as he works on his autobiography, Forty Thousand Blue Days.

In a bizarre tale, Mr Roberts reveals how he first crossed paths with the Methodist minister when sheep were being disembowelled in a remote part of the old county of Meirionnydd, now part of Gwynedd. Mr Roberts believed the sheep were being savaged by a wild animal but the minister at Bethel Chapel, in Tywyn, Gwynedd, told him he believed the bizarre attacks were the work of freemasons.

From their initial contact the detective became suspicious of the respected cleric and his outlandish views.

The gay clergyman wore Cuban heels to add extra inches to his 5ft 6in frame and drove a Fiat 127 decorated with flame-blowing serpents in the small Mid Wales coastal town where trendy clergymen were unheard of.

Later the local superintendent at Dolgellau police station, Elwyn Davies, called Mr Roberts in to his office and told him anonymous letters had been sent to Tywyn police station and the then chief constable, David Owen, at Colwyn Bay.

The letters were littered with swear words and confessed an admiration for Hitler.

Mr Roberts said though the writer, who composed his letters in English and Welsh, never gave away his identity he let slip a number of important clues.

“When pieced together they gave indications that he knew Tywyn and Blaenau Ffestiniog,” said Mr Roberts.

“And the handwriting was in the style of someone educated in the 1920s or 30s, with a particularly unusual letter T.

“It was writing not unlike that of my parents and the Welsh phraseology was superior to the English, which convinced me the perpetrator’s first language was Welsh.”

The case became more serious when a woman received a letter threatening to kill her four-year- old granddaughter.

Mr Roberts, whose book is named after the number of days he completed with the force, compiled an all-male list of suspects.

The now 66-year-old soon got the breakthrough he was looking for when a farmer gave him a copy of the New Testament with a message inside the front cover signed “Emyr Owen”.

The handwriting was a perfect match for that found in the letters.

Mr Roberts, from Dolgellau, immediately headed to the cleric's home in Maethlon Close at the northwestern end of Tywyn, but it was empty.

He was also frustrated by several days of unanswered phone calls to the clergyman. But on December 22, 1984, the clergyman finally answered the phone.

Mr Roberts was warned to ensure he had the right man by superiors who felt nervous about such a high profile arrest.

The minister, who moved to Tywyn in 1976 and covered chapels over a 12-mile area, had been chaplain to the High Sheriff in 1982.

After initially denying everything the clergyman, who often shared his house with two other gay men, one of whom was a clerk to the courts, crumbled when probed by the 6ft 4in, 15-stone detective.

“Yes, yes, yes I wrote all those letters. I can’t tell you why. I was ill at the time,” the former cop recalls him blurting out.

Owen was sentenced to four years at Chester Crown Court for the mutilation of three corpses but Mr Roberts believes the reverend, 62 at the time, dismembered as many as six.

When sentenced the only explanation he could offer for the bizarre mutilations was that his personality was split between a good Emyr and “Emyr Ddrwg” (bad Emyr). Emyr Ddrwg was responsible for the letters and mutilation.

But the cleric, who died in 1991, was examined by a psychologist who said he was not deranged.

The psychologist said he believed the cleric had been having a crisis of faith and this may have prompted the mutilations.

Owen himself linked his behaviour to having his trousers pulled down as part of an initiation ritual while working in slate mining before he became a minister.

The severed male members were never produced in court – one had been fed to the seagulls on Tywyn beach, another burnt and a third thrown in the sea.

After his release from prison, Owen joined a church congregation in Colwyn Bay, where he again began a letter writing campaign before being thrown out.

Later, Mr Roberts would also uncover evidence linking Owen to a break-in at a church vault in Pentrefelin, near Criccieth, in 1982.

The body of a woman who had died in childbirth was laid out next to that of the infant with purple candle wax found near by.

The ex-detective believes Owen had been carrying out a sinister black magic ritual in the vault.

Mr Roberts said he made the crucial decision to continue searching after the twisted clergyman’s confession in the vicarage because he sensed the cleric was concealing more than crank letter writing.

“You get a sixth sense in these situations and I’ve never had it as strong as I did in that house,” he said.

“There was something very eerie and cold about the place.”

No links between the clergyman and the mutilation of sheep were ever proven.

From: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/10/31/retired-detective-on-how-he-caught-a-pervert-cleric-91466-27572828/