• Published

When Det Con Tom Ryan came across a diary entry about an old cattle trailer in July 2025, he knew he had finally solved the murder of a man who had disappeared six years earlier.

Richard Dyson vanished without trace in November 2019. He was last seen alive on 17 November that year and was reported missing eight days later when he failed to meet his daughter, Bethany.

"He was by all accounts a very good father, and he was regularly in contact with his daughter Bethany who was, I believe, 19 at the time of his disappearance. It was totally out of character," Ryan recalled.

"It was clear that he had disappeared off the face of the Earth."

Richard, who was 55 at the time, had been living in his car at Parkside Cottage on Christopher Wright's farm on Sheffield Road in Barnsley, helping with small jobs around the farm.

The farm was searched, but other than a collection of illegal weapons belonging to Wright, nothing more unusual was found and there was no sign of Richard.

His phone, however, showed it had never left the farm.

Police believed from the outset that Richard had been killed and that Wright and his childhood friend, Karl Schwalbe, were responsible, according to Ryan.

"We very much suspected their involvement, but without a body it's very difficult to prove murder," he said.

On 28 July Wright, 73, and Schwalbe, 72, were convicted for their roles in Richard's disappearance and murder, ending a six-year wait for answers for Richard's family.

At a sentencing hearing at Sheffield Crown Court on Thursday, Wright was jailed for 35 years for murder and Schwalbe was given a three-year sentence for perverting the course of justice.

But how did police finally catch them?

Nearly six years had passed when Ryan reviewed phone records relevant to the case.

Among several calls made by Wright, one to Ian Ollerenshaw on 20 November 2019 caught his attention.

"I went round to Ian's house and I asked him, 'Can you by any way remember that phone call that you received over six years ago' - and, to be entirely honest, I expected him to say no," he said.

But the farmer, who lives at Alderthwaite Farm, just over a mile from Parkside Cottage, did remember.

More remarkably, he produced a leather diary from 2019, in which he had noted that Wright had stopped by to drop off an old trailer.

"As soon as I spoke to Ian and he remembered the phone call and he said 'the trailer is still here, do you want to go and see it' - as soon as he said that, I knew I'd found Richard," said Det Con Ryan.

The farmer told him the trailer had been sitting padlocked and undisturbed in the corner of a field for years.

By the time Det Con Ryan came across it, it was partially obscured by overgrown hedges and long grass.

Most of the trailer was empty, but about a third of it was crammed from floor to ceiling with junk.

And there, tucked away in a corner and covered by a baby changing mat, was a blue barrel.

"The barrel was full of concrete, but it quite clearly had human bones protruding out of the top of it," said Det Con Ryan.

A post-mortem examination later confirmed the bones belonged to Richard and that he had been shot with a shotgun before his body was dismembered, placed inside the barrel and encased in concrete.

A jury would later hear how Wright had worked as a butcher for several years in the 1970s.

Alongside Richard's remains, police found something else that would help them bring the person responsible for his murder to justice - an ID card in the name of Christopher Wright.

Wright and Schwalbe were both arrested the same day.

Between 2019 and 2023, police had spent more than 286 hours searching Parkside Cottage.

But what they found during their searches in 2025 dwarfed their earlier discoveries.

Instead of a handful of firearms they had discovered previously, officers found an arsenal of weapons, including dozens of guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, swords, 30 to 40 axes, daggers, crossbows and even tripwires.

"It's obviously a man who has a fascination with weaponry," Det Con Ryan said.

"It is the most weapons that I've ever known to be found in a person's house.

"He had as many weapons and guns as you would need to arm an army."

CCTV footage of Richard's last movements on 17 November 2019 further supported what officers already knew - Wright had been the last person to see him alive.

The cameras captured Richard returning to Wright's farm shortly after 23:00 GMT.

About 20 minutes later, Wright called his friend, Schwalbe. The first call went unanswered, but minutes later a second call, lasting only a few seconds, connected.

Not long after, footage showed Schwalbe's car making its way towards Wright's farm.

"The extent of the physical assistance that Schwalbe provided to Wright is unknown to everybody other than the two men," said Ryan.

"What is known is that Schwalbe could on any day in the last seven years have helped stop the suffering of Richard's family, but he chose not to."

Three days after Richard's disappearance, bank transactions showed Wright went to Allendale Building Supplies in Hoyland.

While it was never proved, it was suggested he went there to buy cement.

Long before Wright's and Schwalbe's trial began, prosecutors expected Wright to argue that someone else must have been responsible for Richard's disappearance and murder.

But senior crown prosecutor Jamie Barton said the investigation consistently pointed in one direction.

"All lines led to Mr Wright and Mr Schwalbe," she said.

However, she said the six-year gap between Richard's disappearance and the discovery of his body left investigators with limited forensic evidence, poorer-quality CCTV than would be expected today and little mobile phone data.

Even the murder weapon remained elusive, with none of the weapons seized presenting a link to Richard's fatal injuries.

Although prosecutors did not have to prove motive, Barton said detectives uncovered evidence supporting long-standing rumours that Richard had stolen from Wright and, therefore, Wright killed him.

"It's a case theory, it's not something that we can be certain of - but it's one thing that is relevant," she said.

During the trial, jurors were played a covert recording of a conversation between the two men outside Barnsley Police Station.

On the recording, Wright can be heard apologising to his friend for getting him into trouble and Schwalbe saying he wished he had never gone to the farm that night.

In another recording, Wright can be heard praying.

"He was saying things along the lines of 'I only did what I had to survive, they bit the hand that fed them, I hope the police don't find my weapons'," said Ryan.

After six years of unanswered questions, it was not the covert recordings, the diary entry, the animal trailer or the weapons that mattered most to detectives.

"I think more than anything, it's the fact that Richard's daughter knew that her dad had gone," said Ryan.

"She knew he must have died because he'd not been in touch for all this time, but you hold on to that 5% of hope because you don't quite want to believe it.

"To give her some closure has been wonderful and I hope they get the justice they so richly deserve."