Serious case review reveals poor police communication

A serious case review into the sexual assault and murder of a 15-year-old Polish girl by a convicted sex offender has uncovered failings in communications between the police and public protection agencies in Humberside and Leeds.

Zuzanna Zommer was killed in her family home in Leeds just five weeks after her family moved to England in 2007.

The perpetrator, 40 year-old Michael Clark, was a registered sex offender with a significant history of sexual violence, who was living two doors away from the family.

Between the age of 20 and 40 he had been sentenced to a total of 22 years in custody for offences including the serious assault of a woman and sexual offences against children, having being caught masturbating outside a children’s play area.

Clark was released from prison 11 months before murdering Zuzanna. But Humberside Police failed to warn public protection agencies in Leeds that he was planning to move to the city until the day before he arrived, so professionals had insufficient time to come up with a “risk management plan”.

The police did monitor Clark on a monthly basis when he first arrived in Leeds, but they reduced meetings with him to once every three months just four months before the murder.

While the killing could not have been predicted, the serious case review concluded that more should have been done to effectively manage the risk posed by Clark. It said: “Had everything been done that should have been done, the outcome may have been different.”

Jane Held, chair of the Leeds Safeguarding Children Board, said the agencies involved in the case have now acted on all the recommendations of the serious case review.

“This tragic incident happened more than four years ago, and since then many changes have been put in place locally to reduce the risk of something similar happening again,” she said.

“Protecting the public from potentially violent sexual offenders, who have completed their sentences and been released from custody is not a simple task.”

She added: “The serious case review acknowledges that there are limitations as to what agencies are able to do. Risk cannot be totally eliminated in any such circumstance, but the agencies involved are working together to do what they can to manage this sort of situation better to minimise the risk of something similar ever happening again.”