The High Street Abduction
How a toddler was snatched
by two teenage girls from a
busy Primark store
Child abduction is very rare - and when other children are responsible it can be particularly hard to comprehend.
So when police in Newcastle upon Tyne were told that a missing toddler was last seen talking to two teenage girls, one notorious case from the 1990s immediately came to mind.
As the kidnappers crossed the city, police used hundreds of CCTV cameras in a desperate hunt for the missing girl.
This is the inside story of what happened.
The call
16:55 - 13 April 2016
Northumbria Police Southern Control
The 101 non-emergency call, taken by handler Kate McCafferty, seemed routine.
“Hello, I'm one of the managers at Primark in Northumberland Street in the middle of Newcastle,” the caller began.
“We've got a lost child in store, three years old, but it's over 20 minutes now, and we've had the staff scouring the place and we just can't find her.”
The caller, Thomas Clay, was calm but a little concerned.
Staff at the busy store are used to dealing with lost children.
It can happen several times a day, and the children always turn up within a few minutes, hiding under the clothes displays or wandering around the store.
McCafferty was typing away as Clay spoke, creating the police log.
“The little girl's mother says the last time she saw her she was standing with two schoolgirls that the mother estimates to be approximately 13 years old. But we haven't seen the schoolgirls either.”
“Were these girls talking to her?” asked McCafferty.
“She was playing with them, the lady says.”
“Right...” said McCafferty.
It was two minutes 23 seconds into the phone call.
On the recording of the call, all that can be heard is 15 seconds of typing as McCafferty updates her log.
But, as she later explains, that mention of the two teenagers sparked an immediate change in the police response.
It was the point at which she decided the call was a “grade one response” - the highest priority for the police.
Across the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, a huge emergency response was about to get under way for Northumbria Police.
55 minutes earlier
Northumberland Street, Newcastle upon Tyne
It had been an ordinary day for Deborah and her daughter Rose [not their real names], who cannot be identified for legal reasons.
Deborah, a college student, had been in the centre of Newcastle to see her supervisor about an assignment. She had taken her daughter with her and, by late afternoon, Rose was starting to feel hungry.
They visited a cafe on Northumberland Street to grab a bite to eat.
Rose, who was two years and nine months old, was still feeling a little fractious. So, at about 16:00, Deborah led her across the road to Primark, a major fashion discount chain, to buy her some clothes. Deborah had hoped it would cheer Rose up.
But as she browsed the rails in the second-floor children's clothing section, Rose was pulling against the restraints of her pushchair. So Deborah let her out.
“I just went to get a few clothes for her,” she says. “[Rose] was running to-and-fro and playing. I could hear her laughing hysterically and calling out to me.”
Deborah was more relaxed now that her daughter was able to let off some steam. At last she could give some thought as to what she might buy.
But almost half an hour after entering the store, Deborah was stopped cold by the eerie absence of her daughter's voice.
Suddenly I couldn't hear her. I couldn't hear her voice. I couldn't hear her laugh. I couldn't hear her calling out to me. I just started panicking.”
“And then I remembered those two girls who were paying serious attention to her. My mind went straight back to them.”
The girls had seemed like any other shoppers in Primark, sifting through the clothes rails. They were aged about 13, the mother thought, and wearing their school uniforms. It was the after-school rush and the store was busy.
“They stopped by to say how cute she was,” recalls Deborah.
“I said 'thank you'. [Rose] was running around, playing with them. But I really didn't give it a second thought.”
The girls had offered Rose a sweet and although Deborah had at first refused, she relented after her daughter became upset.
“So I said, 'OK, just give her one'.”
Now, with Rose nowhere in sight, Deborah was starting to panic. She wondered if she had followed the teenagers somewhere else in the store.
Deborah sought help from a staff member, and swiftly other staff joined the search. They tried to reassure her that it was not unusual for children to go missing, and that they always turned up.
But with the minutes ticking by, Deborah was feeling increasingly anxious.
“After five or 10 minutes, I just knew she wasn't in the store. If she was, she would have been crying loudly 'I want my mum'. If the girls were with her they would have brought her back then.”
Literally my world stopped. I could not think straight. I could not stop feeling bad. I could not stop feeling guilty.”
“I was beating myself up. How? How could it have happened? How could my child disappear right under my nose? How? And I have no idea of how she left. Who did she leave with?
“It's the worst feeling anyone can go through. It's every parent's worst nightmare.”
Haunting memory
PC Mick Miller, one of several officers who had been dispatched to Primark in response to the 101 call, had made his way to the shop's CCTV room.
PC Mick Miller
He immediately set about locating video of the missing girl.
His priority was to work out whether Rose had left the store, so he focused on the surveillance feed covering the main entrance and exit.
It took about 15 minutes to find the evidence he had been looking for.
“I remember the exact time on the tape,” he says, referring to the 16:29 time stamp of Rose leaving the store.
It was the moment everything about the search changed. Police were now sure they were no longer dealing with a missing child - they had a child abduction on their hands.
This was now a critical incident.
Miller called in the disturbing evidence on his radio, detailing what the teenage girls had been wearing and the fact that one of them was “holding hands with the missing girl”.
This image, which police have not released to the public, of a trusting toddler unwittingly being led away from the safety of parental care, has a chilling resonance.
It is chilling for several reasons - including how commonplace it must have looked to any passers-by. Two older girls leading a toddler.
How could anyone have known that the girl was being abducted?
And then there's the uncanny similarity between this image and that of another child abduction - a notorious crime that is seared into the consciousness of the country.
It is a grainy image from 1993 that shows a toddler named James Bulger being led away to his death by two young boys.
CCTV image of James Bulger's abduction - 23 Feb 1993
(image: PA)
Just as the Bulger image shows young James being spirited away while clasping the hand of one of his killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, so the Primark image shows one of the schoolgirls holding Rose's hand.
Both images appear to show older children acting in a caring and protective way to a vulnerable youngster. But their intentions couldn't have been be more different.
It was the Bulger image that had sprung into Kate McCafferty's head when she had taken the 101 call from the Primark store assistant.
Viewing the footage in the store, PC Mick Miller's mind also jumped back 23 years.
“I'm 44 years old. I'm old enough to remember the Jamie Bulger case,” he says, before summoning his thoughts about the day of the Primark abduction.
I remember making the radio transmission, and there was a split second of silence when everyone digested what had just been said. Everyone's worst fears had been realised.”
Miller had no time to lose. He immediately snapped a picture of the CCTV image with his phablet and sent it to the control room, for wider circulation around the force.
Northumbria Police office with a "phablet"
The image sent a shockwave through the police control room where Insp Steve Byrne, in operational charge of city centre policing that afternoon, was based.
Immediately, he knew he had to deploy every available police resource.
“They'd left the store. They'd been in close proximity to the mother. For me that's certainly something much more sinister,” Byrne explains, describing the thoughts that had raced through his head that day.
“The girls would have passed a number of staff members. If they'd had genuine concern for the child they could have alerted the staff.”
Insp Steve Byrne
Within minutes - at just before 17:20 - there was an eyewitness sighting from a member of the public.
Rose had been spotted earlier with the teenage girls, further along Northumberland Street.
But time was slipping away.
It was now more than 45 minutes since the girls had left Primark.
Crucial minutes
All police officers are trained in the principles of the “golden hour”.
In any major criminal investigation officers think of the first hour as being a critical window in which to secure evidence, crime scenes, locate witnesses, find missing people and track down suspects while they are still relatively close by.
As time goes on it gets harder to do these things.
In an abduction case, the golden hour is even more critical - with every passing minute the risk to the abductee increases.
CCTV camera feeds
For Byrne, who was now in charge of the search, the clock was ticking loudly.
“First and foremost in the golden hour it's the recovery of the child - the preservation of life. That's what it's all about. But secondly it's about bringing offenders to justice.”
With the schoolgirl abductors three quarters of an hour in front, police had some serious catching up to do.
Insp Steve Byrne
Byrne's strategy was to “flood the city centre with officers”.
The aim was to put a cordon around the area, which hopefully would contain Rose and the two teenage girls.
And while Deborah was deeply distressed by her daughter's disappearance - one witness later described seeing her banging her head against a wall - police needed information from her.
She was able to describe the two teenagers and confirm sightings on CCTV. And, by luck, she had taken photos of Rose while travelling into the city on the bus earlier that afternoon.
There was now a detailed record of her appearance and what she had been wearing.
The police were pulling out all the stops, yet Deborah still felt helpless.
As a parent, you just feel the police are not doing enough. You just feel you want to get out there to look for her yourself.”
A cordon was put in place around the northern end of Northumberland Street.
Officers swamped the precinct around Primark, questioning members of the public and searching other shops and the bus station a few hundred metres away.
But while Byrne had effectively secured the area, he was painfully aware of a vulnerability in the police seal - a Metro station.
Haymarket station is only a couple of minutes' walk from Primark.
With the Tyneside Metro providing rapid access to the Northumberland coast and to the airport, the teenagers could, by now, have travelled far beyond the city centre.
Byrne could see a tiny search area rapidly growing to one that was more than 200 sq miles. And no-one has the resources to cordon off an entire city.
“We were playing catch up,” says Byrne. “[Forty-five minutes] is an extremely long time and at that point we were extremely concerned for the welfare of that young child.”
But had anyone been closely observing the girls' behaviour that day, they would have realised Rose's teenage abductors hadn't acted on a whim.
They had been building up to this kidnapping for hours at least - honing their tactics and even trying, though failing, to spirit away another young girl.
Teenage truants
Both teenagers had played with the little girl, and complimented the mother on her daughter, saying that she was beautiful.
Later her mother glanced up from the clothes she had been looking at and realised her daughter was missing.
CCTV shows the 13-year-old leading this little girl away by the hand, while the older teenager deliberately misdirects the mother, claiming her daughter had gone in a different direction.
As it happened, the mother ignored the false advice and eventually found her daughter - who by this time was with both girls near the lifts leading down to the ground floor.
The mother assumed the girls had found her child wandering, thanked them, and later left the store.
Det Sgt Stu Liddell
The teenagers had clearly showed a degree of persistence and planning, says Det Sgt Stu Liddell, although their tactics were naive.
“It was a very juvenile plan, in that they did not have a focus on CCTV and 'how could we get caught here'? But I have no doubt that their purpose, from getting on the train, to travelling into the city centre, was to take a child.”
Once they had led Rose out of the store, their persistence didn't let up.
As they ushered her through the rush hour crowds on Northumberland Street, they were challenged by passers-by, who asked them if the little girl with them was lost.
Some members of the public had clearly reacted to seeing Rose, who is black, in the company of two teenage white girls.
In each case the teenagers deceived well-meaning strangers into thinking everything was OK.
But all this was learned in the aftermath of the event, with the benefit of hindsight.
In the melee which followed Rose's disappearance, the rapid use of CCTV had not only proved that she had indeed been abducted, it was to be the vital tool for tracking the kidnappers, and predicting where they would go next.
The cameras
17:20 Newcastle Civic Centre
After radioing in the sighting of the suspects by a council worker, PC Marie Chapman, along with two other officers, made a bee-line for Newcastle City Council's CCTV nerve centre.
Their urgent task was to use video footage to find out where the teenagers had been going with the child.
It's a darkened room with a wall of monitor screens showing images from hundreds of cameras placed around the city centre and on the Metro train system. Racks of computer servers make a constant whir as they record the multiple video feeds.
PC Marie Chapman
Chapman, who later recalled a palpable sense of tension and urgency in the room, and the other officers, enlisted the help of a CCTV operator.
Their aim was to track Rose and her abductors' getaway route by piecing together snippets of video from the hundreds of feeds, and all in double-quick time.
“He had three of us shouting, we need to check this - we need to check that. Hold on a minute. Can you go back? That's them. Right we've got them, so we need to concentrate on this particular area.
“Obviously the main thing is to try to get the child back as quickly as possible. As officers, we're still human beings, and we panic, and we're trying to get it done as quickly as possible. The radio is going, and everyone is shouting up, and everyone wants the information straight away.
“It was panic stations, if I'm honest,” Chapman recalls.
More than an hour after the girls left Primark, police radio recordings captured the moment officers spotted the teenagers on CCTV.
The CCTV images showed them walking into Haymarket Station, with the toddler, at 16:34. Further film showed them travelling down the escalator, on the platform, and getting on a train.
After apparently dragging the little girl, the CCTV showed one of them picking her up and carrying her down the escalator, to wait for a northbound train.
The city centre cordon had been breached at its weakest point.
Senior officers started dispatching police to every Metro station on the northbound line.
But the CCTV evidence confirmed that with every passing minute, the teenagers were getting further and further away.
Later, passengers who had seen the teenagers on the train, described them giving the little girl sweets and Coca Cola, and telling her “don't worry, we'll get you to your mummy”.
But what the girls were really doing was putting as much distance between Rose and her mother as they could.
Insp Steve Byrne, who was still steering the operation, describes hearing at the time a report about Rose being dragged and carried, and how this set alarm bells ringing even louder for his officers:
It was extremely worrying. I was standing in the office with two other sergeants. Looking at their faces you could see the horror.”
Finally, one of the sergeants gave voice to the dread that everyone had, until then, been keeping to themselves - James Bulger.
“As soon as I heard that the child was being carried in a direction away from the store, away from her mother, [Bulger is] what sprung to mind, yes,” says Byrne.
“For a uniformed inspector, or for another officer on duty at that time, I think most of us felt that way. It's an incident that you don't think you'll ever encounter, and hope you won't ever. But there we were, faced with just that.”
17:20 Newcastle Civic Centre
After radioing in the sighting of the suspects by a council worker, PC Marie Chapman, along with two other officers, made a bee-line for Newcastle City Council's CCTV nerve centre.
Their urgent task was to use video footage to find out where the teenagers had been going with the child.
It's a darkened room with a wall of monitor screens showing images from hundreds of cameras placed around the city centre and on the Metro train system. Racks of computer servers make a constant whir as they record the multiple video feeds.
PC Marie Chapman
Chapman, who later recalled a palpable sense of tension and urgency in the room, and the other officers, enlisted the help of a CCTV operator.
Their aim was to track Rose and her abductors' getaway route by piecing together snippets of video from the hundreds of feeds, and all in double-quick time.
“He had three of us shouting, we need to check this - we need to check that. Hold on a minute. Can you go back? That's them. Right we've got them, so we need to concentrate on this particular area.
“Obviously the main thing is to try and get the child back as quickly as possible. As officers, we're still human beings, and we panic, and we're trying to get it done as quickly as possible. The radio is going, and everyone is shouting up, and everyone wants the information straight away.
“It was panic stations, if I'm honest,” Chapman recalls.
More than an hour after the girls left Primark, police radio recordings captured the moment officers spotted the teenagers on CCTV.
The CCTV images showed them walking into Haymarket Station, with the toddler, at 16:34. Further film showed them travelling down the escalator, on the platform, and getting on a train.
Escalator to Haymarket metro platforms
After apparently dragging the little girl, the CCTV showed one of them picking her up and carrying her down the escalator, to wait for a northbound train.
The city centre cordon had been breached at its weakest point.
Senior officers started dispatching police to every Metro station on the northbound line.
But the CCTV evidence confirmed that with every passing minute, the teenagers were getting further and further away.
Later, passengers who had seen the teenagers on the train, described them giving the little girl sweets and Coca Cola, and telling her “don't worry, we'll get you to your mummy”.
But what the girls were really doing was putting as much distance between Rose and her mother as they could.
Insp Steve Byrne, who was still steering the operation, describes hearing at the time a report about Rose being dragged and carried, and how this set alarm bells ringing even louder for his officers:
It was extremely worrying. I was standing in the office with two other sergeants. Looking at their faces you could see the horror.”
Finally one of the sergeants gave voice to the dread that everyone had, until then, been keeping to themselves - James Bulger.
“As soon as I heard that the child was being carried in a direction away from the store, away from her mother, [Bulger is] what sprung to mind, yes,” says Byrne.
“For a uniformed inspector, or for another officer on duty at that time, I think most of us felt that way. It's an incident that you don't think you'll ever encounter, and hope you won't ever. But there we were, faced with just that.”
The big break
Yet, just when it seemed the odds of finding the girls were lengthening, there was a lucky break.
PC Graham Dodds was working a late shift in the North Tyneside area of Northumbria Police - known to officers as Delta 3. He was a few miles north-east of the city centre, and so was not involved in the rapidly escalating response to the kidnapping.
Instead of going straight out on patrol, he had begun his shift at his desk, dealing with paperwork.
At 17:35 - 66 minutes after the abduction - he was handed a missing person report.
It was a routine one about two teenage girls who had been reported missing from school earlier in the day.
“I was literally just reading it. I was at the stage where I'd just read the description of the girls, read the circumstances - that they had left home, hadn't turned in at school, had been reported as missing - and I was just busy working my way through it to build a big picture.”
Sitting on the desk was his radio. Experienced officers like Dodds are used to multitasking, dealing with the job in hand while keeping half an ear out for the two-way radio.
The radio was buzzing with updates on the child missing from Primark.
“As soon as [I heard] the description of the two girls who were with the young girl - approximately 13 years old, wearing school uniforms - straight away I thought, hang on, this sounds like my two girls,” says Dodds.
It was just too much of a coincidence, to hear about these two young schoolgirls. Not to sound too cliched about it, but I just had this sixth sense that it's got to be them.”
Dodds phoned the control room - he couldn't get through on the saturated radio channel - and told them about his suspicion that the two teenagers were the same missing schoolgirls.
Seventy-eight minutes after the abduction from Primark, an operator relayed Dodds' crucial piece of intelligence over the police radio.
Officers were immediately dispatched to the teenage girls' home.
Now police had potential names for the two teenage kidnap suspects. Further inquiries would be needed to confirm it, but at last they had a vital lead.
Dodds was liaising with another officer who'd been sent to the teenage sisters' home.
Their mother confirmed that they'd not been home since leaving that morning, and that they matched the description of the two wanted girls.
“It's gone from having two unknown females, to now having two names to them,” says Dodds.
“Now you're able to look into the background of them. To use the information you have in front of you to try to find out where they're going to hopefully go.”
Dodds went on to the force computer system to see what intelligence they had on the girls.
They'd not been in trouble with the police before, so there was little information recorded.
But within a few minutes of combing through records he found one intriguing note on the system, entered by a social worker.
It referred to an earlier example of truanting from school and set out how the sisters liked to hang around in a particular park in a leafy suburb north of Newcastle city centre.
“I was thinking, I'm 99.9% sure that it's the two girls,” says Dodds.
Now able to get back on the police radio, he passed on the details of his hunch. Officers were dispatched to Gosforth Central Park.
Every minute of Rose's absence was another minute the abductors had to put distance between themselves and the search.
If police couldn't close that widening gap it would become ever harder to rescue the child and catch the suspects.
Insp Steve Byrne admits it felt events might had been in danger of overtaking them. He made a phone call to his boss.
“I remember the very words I used. I said we're very close to the end of the golden hour, and in fact we're over the 60 minutes from the time the child went missing.
“Past experience tells me - once you get past that time, things get a lot more difficult.”
Yet, just when it seemed the odds of finding the girls were lengthening, there was a lucky break.
PC Graham Dodds was working a late shift in the North Tyneside area of Northumbria Police - known to officers as Delta 3. He was a few miles north-east of the city centre, and so was not involved in the rapidly escalating response to the kidnapping.
Instead of going straight out on patrol, he had begun his shift at his desk, dealing with paperwork.
PC Graham Dodds
At 17:35 - 66 minutes after the abduction - he was handed a missing person report.
It was a routine one about two teenage girls who had been reported missing from school earlier in the day.
“I was literally just reading it. I was at the stage where I'd just read the description of the girls, read the circumstances ie that they had left home, hadn't turned in at school, had been reported as missing, and I was just busy working my way through it to build a big picture.”
Sitting on the desk was his radio. Experienced officers like Dodds are used to multitasking, dealing with the job in hand while keeping half an ear out for the two-way radio.
The radio was buzzing with updates on the child missing from Primark.
“As soon as [I heard] the description of the two girls who were with the young girl - approximately 13 years old, wearing school uniforms - straight away I thought, hang on, this sounds like my two girls,” says Dodds.
It was just too much of a coincidence, to hear about these two young schoolgirls. Not to sound too cliched about it, but I just had this sixth sense that it's got to be them.”
Dodds phoned the control room - he couldn't get through on the saturated radio channel - and told them about his suspicion that the two teenagers were the same missing schoolgirls.
Seventy-eight minutes after the abduction from Primark, an operator relayed Dodds' crucial piece of intelligence over the police radio.
Officers were immediately dispatched to the teenage girls' home.
Now police had potential names for the two teenage kidnap suspects. Further inquiries would be needed to confirm it, but at last they had a vital lead.
Dodds was liaising with another officer who'd been sent to the teenager sisters' home.
Their mother confirmed that they'd not been home since leaving that morning, and that they matched the description of the two wanted girls.
“It's gone from having two unknown females, to now having two names to them,” says Dodds.
“Now you're able to look into the background of them. To use the information you have in front of you to try to find out where they're going to hopefully go.”
Dodds went on to the force computer system to see what intelligence they had on the girls.
They'd not been in trouble with the police before, so there was little information recorded.
But within a few minutes of combing through records he found one intriguing note on the system, entered by a social worker.
It referred to an earlier example of truanting from school and set out how the sisters liked to hang around in a particular park in a leafy suburb north of Newcastle city centre.
“I was thinking, I'm 99.9% sure that it's the two girls,” says Dodds.
Now able to get back on the police radio, he passed on the details of his hunch. Officers were dispatched to Gosforth Central Park.
Every minute of Rose's absence was another minute the abductors had to put distance between themselves and the search.
If police couldn't close that widening gap it would become ever harder to rescue the child and catch the suspects.
Insp Steve Byrne admits it felt events might had been in danger of overtaking them. He made a phone call to his boss.
“I remember the very words I used. I said we're very close to the end of the golden hour, and in fact we're over the 60 minutes from the time the child went missing.
“Past experience tells me - once you get past that time, things get a lot more difficult.”
A trip to the park
In retrospect, the time advantage the suspects had achieved over the police was chilling.
A full 12 minutes before even that first 101 call from the Primark manager, the teenage girls and their victim were stepping off the Metro at South Gosforth station - more than two miles away.
They walked, via side streets, to a shopping centre next to the park. It was 17:00 - just five minutes after police had received the initial alert.
In the city centre, officers were dashing to Primark. Soon they would be locking down the city centre and beginning their hunt for the teenage abductors.
Their targets though were now in an area with comparatively little CCTV.
Rose must have calmed down somewhat by this point because witnesses described the girls swinging her between them in a playful way, and asking her if she wanted to go to the park.
They tried to get into a children's soft play centre, but it was shut to the public.
At 17:10 - abduction plus 41 minutes - the teenagers wandered into the South Gosforth Sainsbury's and stole a baby bottle and some milk, presumably to keep little Rose happy and quiet. Then they headed to Gosforth Central Park.
While frantic investigations were under way in the city centre, the abductors stayed in the park.
Bizarrely - considering the seriousness of their offence - they passed time with the toddler by playing on the swings and trying to keep her entertained. They showed no sign of having a particular plan in mind.
By 17:50 the girls were getting ready to leave the park.
A couple of streets away, Police Community Support Officer Shaun Cowan was making a routine visit to a local resident when he heard the call on his radio about the possible location of the teenagers. It was just around the corner.
While the most senior officers on Northumbria Police were frantically trying to trace Rose and the girls who took her, it fell to a young officer on the lowest rung of the police ladder, to try to bring the emergency to a close.
Cowan arrived at the park an hour-and-a-half after the abduction.
“I was thinking straight away if I had a young child with me I'd probably be in the play-park, with the swings and slides and such like, but they weren't there.
“But past the play-park, and through the trees, I could see the two girls and the missing child, walking across a green area.”
They were heading for the exit.
With about 100m between Cowan and the girls, he was worried they might slip away. He used his radio to report the sighting.
“As I did that, the girls looked in my direction, saw me, and I got the impression they were going to run towards the exit at that point.”
So I just ran directly towards them, shouting, 'Stop! Stop where you are!'”
The girls froze in their tracks, just short of the park exit.
Cowan believes had he arrived 30 seconds later, they would have been gone - a perfect example of why the golden hour response time was so crucial.
As he approached, he was weighing up exactly what to do.
“Do you grab a hold of the two offenders? Do you grab a hold of the missing child?”
Without being asked, the teenagers tried to explain away their situation. But it was a highly confused account.
“They said this little girl followed them from the city centre on the Metro system. I asked them if they knew who the girl was. They replied 'no'. I asked if they knew who the parent of the child was and again they said 'no'.
“But then they said they were going to return the child back to the parent, and I said, 'well how are you going to do that if you don't know who the child is and who the parent is?'”
He took the sisters' arms, while Rose stood alongside them, looking calm and relatively unharmed, and waited for back-up from other officers.
Insp Steve Byrne clearly recalls the delight among his officers, who had been co-ordinating the operation.
His instructions to Cowan were direct and straightforward:
The child goes nowhere, and neither do the girls. They're to be detained and arrested for child abduction.”
Looking back at that swift end to the drama, his mood is sanguine.
“Did we get a lucky break? Yeah, but you make your own luck. And I think that was achieved through good policing.”
Standing in the park as he held the teenage sisters, Cowan waited a matter of “seconds” before back-up arrived.
“They were arrested in the park straight away. The little girl seemed fine. Unharmed. She wasn't upset. She didn't seem distressed or anything at all.”
Back at Primark, Rose's mother Deborah was in a side room when she heard a commotion next door.
“You'd think the police would be all professional and macho, but I heard a cheer in the other room before someone came in with a big smile on his face and said, oh she's been found!”
I think everyone there could identify with me. By this point it was like she was 'our child', not 'your child'. It was amazing.”
Rose had not only been found alive but also apparently unharmed and oblivious of the huge hunt to find her.
It was a matter of minutes before she was delivered back into her mother's arms.
“It was just like I'd given birth to her again. Holding my child again, seeing she's good, she's OK. All she could say was that she went to the park. I knew she was a bit shaken. She was quite clingy. But she was OK. She was OK.”
But the feeling of relief would not eclipse the deep unease that had set in during the desperate and frantic hunt for Rose, and had only grown the more police found out about the sisters' actions and motives.
Their clear-headed planning.
Their tactics for befriending young children and the eerie echoes of the James Bulger abduction.
Their ploy for wrong-footing the mother of the first child they had tried to abduct.
And the speed at which they had whisked Rose away from the city centre.
After the crime, came the questions.
Looking for the motive
As Deborah clung to her newly returned daughter, she noticed another example of the abductors' twisted behaviour.
“[Rose] looked very different. Her hair bobbles had been pulled out, and her hairstyle changed.”
Her hair had been pulled back into a single bun. Previously it was in braids.
“It was then it dawned on me how serious the whole thing was. Even until then I was just attributing it to teenagers being naughty. But this shook me. It was a moment which had me re-evaluating the whole thing and thinking, what were they up to?
“Even when I try to do her hair very gently, it's a struggle. I don't think she would have enjoyed it in any way.
“I was really, really worried at that stage,” remembers Deborah with a shudder.
Child abduction is rare in the UK. Child abduction by other children is so rare that figures are not recorded.
It is no surprise that so many of the police officers involved in Rose's disappearance immediately thought of the James Bulger case.
Despite the passage of almost 24 years, it remains a notorious case, and its seriousness has fortunately never been repeated.
A study of UK Police statistics by PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) found that in 2011/12 there were 592 recorded cases of child abduction.
But Pact estimated that only 50 children a year are abducted by strangers - and the vast majority of these abductions are stopped within moments, often by members of the public who happen to be there.
Investigators from Northumbria Police have spent a great deal of time trying to find out the motive of Rose's abductors.
They were not helped by the fact the girls refused to answer questions during police interviews, and would only supply written statements which were easily disproved.
It was “quite a chaotic home”, says Det Ch Insp Shelley Hudson, who prepared the case for prosecution.
“They only seemed to have each other as friends. They spent a lot of time together, which is quite unusual because most children that age have quite a large circle of friends.”
Det Ch Insp Shelley Hudson
Investigators looked at all the computers and phones in the home. They interviewed family, friends and teachers.
“But we still don't know why,” says Hudson.
Those searches did, however, throw up some deeply troubling results.
A Samsung tablet given to the 13-year-old girl as a Christmas present in 2015 betrayed an alarming history of internet searches. Sites visited included those with graphic sexual content relating to rape and kidnap.
“It wasn't the sort of normal sexual contact that you'd expect a teenager to be looking at,” says Hudson.
When the case came to court a graphic list of subjects the girls searched for was described. It included forced sex and slavery, girls collected, trained and tormented for auction, and children being abducted, dragged into a van and raped.
Detectives were extremely alarmed by the evidence.
“A hypothesis could be that they were actively going out to kidnap a child with the intention of sexually abusing that child,” says Hudson. “That's certainly one line of inquiry we followed.”
Investigators had to account for the fact other people in the house could have been using the tablet. They focused on the exact times the pornographic sites were visited, which itself revealed an extraordinary pattern of behaviour.
Not only did this pattern make it unlikely someone else had been using the tablet, it also suggested a worrying mindset.
One moment a girl would be using the tablet computer to research a topic for her school homework. The next search, moments later, was about rape and kidnap, followed immediately by another search concerning the school project.
“It really is very unusual, very bizarre,” says Hudson, “but then to kidnap a child is as bizarre. Whatever was going on was incredibly worrying.”
The findings were enough to charge the girls not only with kidnap, but also with intent to commit a serious sexual assault.
However, after review by the Crown Prosecution Service, the evidence for the latter was not considered strong enough to secure a conviction.
Police were sure Rose had not been sexually assaulted.
The teenage girls pleaded guilty to kidnap, and the sexual offence was withdrawn.
They were each sentenced to three-and-a-half years detention in July 2016.
The judge, Mr Justice Globe, said he was convinced that they had intended to seriously harm the little girl.
“It is not possible to state with any certainty who was going to cause the harm or exactly what that harm would have been except to come to the conclusion that it would have mirrored some aspect of the physical or sexual violence and/or exploitation that was found on the tablet,” he said.
“In my judgement it was the true reason why she was taken.”
The police investigation had only uncovered one other hint to the girls' motives - some, limited, evidence that the 13-year-old had been in contact with a man, using an online chatroom.
It seems the girl had alerted a teacher at her school to the fact a man had asked her to send photos to him.
The teacher took some screen grabs of the chat session, and it is clear that the conversation was of a sexual nature. But then the trail ran cold. There was no evidence the man was involved in encouraging the kidnapping.
The school is said to have alerted the girl's mother, and the tablet computer, along with the teenagers' phones, were confiscated.
The chatroom exchange was at least two months before the abduction in April and by the time the police seized the tablet, the app it had been on had been deleted and all records of the chat wiped.
The teenagers refused to explain any of their online activities to the police, but claimed to others that the man in the chatroom was called Nazzer, and that he had put them up to the abduction.
Police were not convinced. They examined thousands of hours of CCTV, but saw no evidence of anyone suspicious being present during the kidnapping.
The sisters' only explanation for their actions came in the form of a written statement, which repeats claims the little girl followed them and that they intended to return her to her mother - says Det Sgt Stu Liddell:
We are not dealing with two angelic young schoolgirls. They were devious, manipulative and proficient in lies.”
Looking back on the traumatic afternoon several months later, Rose's mother says she forgives the teenage girls and feels pity for them.
“I think everybody asks themselves that question why? Their parents must ask why? Their classmates must ask why? The judge asked why? But unfortunately that is one answer which has not been given.”
