![]() ![]() The men responsible for the armed robbery that left Sharon Beshenivsky’s husband a widower, and her three children moth- erless, were later brought to trial and jailed for life. ![]() ![]() ‘And we had some very good forensic results that really contributed to the case as well, not just at that scene but at the peripheral scenes as well: the getaway vehicles and the premises they went to afterwards.’ ![]() Others who knew her were even more upset, but they all swallowed their grief and got on with the job.’ The fact that Sharon was a police officer made her part of my family. Not because it was so high profile but because it was so personal, because it was a colleague that had been murdered. I remember being absolutely exhausted after- wards, but at the time I didn’t care. I’d start at seven in the morning and wouldn’t get home till midnight. ‘I spent the best part of two weeks processing that scene. I wanted to support the officers in terms of getting the cordons up, making sure we’d got the scene preserved, because it was very emotive at the time, as you can imagine, and we just needed to bring some order to that. Then I heard over the radio that someone had been shot, possibly a police officer. ‘At first I didn’t know what was going on. I’ve never seen so many police officers running at one time, it was like a fire evacuation. And suddenly there was a sea of police officers running up the road. I could see the scene from the police station it was literally just up the road. Peter Arnold, a Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) for the Yorkshire and Humberside Scientific Support Services, heard the code call on the radio. I could feel blood running down my nose and blood over my face, and I was gasping for breath.’ Yet she managed to press the panic button and alert the control room with those fateful words ‘Code Zero’. Moments later, Teresa was also shot in the chest. I heard a bang and Sharon fell to the ground.’ She stopped dead – she stopped that quickly that I overstepped. Later, at the trial of Sharon’s killers, Teresa said, ‘We were a stride apart. Sharon was shot in the chest at point blank range. They parked up opposite the shop and crossed the busy road to the long single-storey brick building, its picture windows obscured by vertical blinds.Īs they reached the shop, they came face to face with a trio of armed robbers. The two women would be passing anyway on their way back to the station, so they decided to take the call. A silent attack alarm linked directly to the police central control had been set off in Universal Express, a local travel agent’s shop. Then, just after half-past three, a message came through. Sharon was looking forward to getting home for her youngest child’s fourth birthday party and, with less than half an hour till she and Teresa clocked off, it looked like she would be in time for the cake and the party games. Teresa and her partner, PC Sharon Beshenivsky, just nine months into the job, were near the end of their shift in their patrol car, their task a roving, watching brief. That afternoon, the fear that cops live with every day became a bleak reality for two women. Her message heralded a case that touched everyone in the police community. One grey November afternoon in Bradford in 2005, PC Teresa Millburn’s broken words on the radio sent a chill round the West Yorkshire Police control room. It’s the call sign every police officer dreads. ![]()
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