‘All I’m seeing is maggots’: Cop who investigated grisly murder of mother lured into sex work by her drug addict boyfriend reveals he’s haunted by sight of her dismembered body

The grisly murder of a mother-of-three who was lured into sex work by her boyfriend before he killed her has been laid bare in a documentary which examines the dark underbelly of Hull’s drug scene in the 1990s.

Natalie Clubb was 25 years old when her boyfriend Darren Adams reported her missing in May 1998. Two months later, in July, a severed arm was discovered at a pumping station which was identified to be the remains of Natalie’s body.

Nearly three decades later, the gruesome tale has been re-examined in a true crime series about Britain’s most notorious murder investigations.

The episode, which airs on Friday, details the shocking discovery of Natalie’s dismembered arm in a drain at the pumping station that would ultimately lead police officers straight into the city’s heroin hell. 

The series features former Detective Chief Inspector Paul Davison, who recalled in chilling detail how aspects of Natalie’s murder have stayed with him to this day. 

From the beginning of the investigation, DCI Davison’s team were working on circumstantial evidence. All they had to go on was a faded blue tattoo that read ‘Chaos’ and was scratched on to the lower part of the severed arm. 

It was this blue scrawl that helped detectives identify the body part as belonging to Natalie, who had been reported missing around the same time that Hull was rocked by ‘a sequence of tragic murders’ of sex workers, and eventually uncover Adams as her killer. 

Anthony Snowden, the pump attendant at Great Calvert Pumping Station in Sutton, made a terrible discovery while walking his dog on the morning of July 30, 1998. 

‘I think I’ve found a body,’ Snowden – who appears in the new documentary – said, as heard in a recording of his 999 call. 

He had upon a human arm among debris and rubbish removed from the station. 

‘I noticed the word ‘Chaos’ in faded blue scrawl,’ Davison recalled. ‘It didn’t look to me like it had been done professionally.’ 

The Humberside Police force knew there was a missing person report for a woman called Natalie Clubb, who had a similar tattoo on her arm, and had been arrested in relation to her job as a sex worker. 

Upon discovering what police thought was Natalie’s body, dozens of theories began whizzing through Davison’s head. 

‘Was it a punter where something’s gone wrong, and the punter’s murdered Natalie Clubb and then tried to get rid off her body?  

‘Could it be somebody closer to home? There had been other sex workers murdered in recent months, and I’m thinking this is possibly a sequence of tragic murders,’ Davison continued. 

Among the victims were Samantha Class, whose badly beaten and strangled body washed up on the banks of the Humber river in October 1997, and Hayley Morgan, who died of a heroin overdose just months before Natalie’s body was found. 

‘Despicable’ double-murderer Gary Allen was eventually convicted for Class’ murder in 2021, over two decades after he was initially cleared by a jury. 

Commenting on the three murders at the time, Davison said: ‘The only obvious and undisputed link at the moment is that these three women were all prostitutes and drug users operating in Hull and it is the people associated with prostitution and drugs that may hold the key to the deaths.’ 

As the investigation progressed, police came to the shocking conclusion that Natalie’s body had been ‘cut up’ after they found her head – wrapped in a bin bag – in the middle of the debris. 

Recalling the ‘completely decomposed’ state of the severed head, Davison said: ‘There are no eyes, no nose. 

‘All I’m seeing is maggots. It was probably one of the worst things I’ve seen. How on earth can anyone do that to another human being?’ 

Despite a thorough search of the drain near the pumping station, no other body parts were recovered immediately –  leaving the investigators scrambling for any clues about the murder weapon, scene of crime, and motive. 

‘All I’ve got at this moment is an arm, a head and a couple of bin liners,’ Davison said.

Coupled with the ‘chaotic lifestyle’ of ‘people like Natalie’ embroiled in the sex work industry, the now-retired officer added, the murder had all the makings of an investigative nightmare. 

The post-mortem finally revealed that the arm and head that had been recovered belong to Natalie Clubb who, Davison said, was ‘just an ordinary mum’. 

He added: ‘She suffered from her past and, her family said, she tattooed ‘Chaos’ on her arm because that’s what she caused wherever she went.’ 

Before turning to sex work, Natalie ‘found brief happiness with her husband’ with whom she shared three children. 

After the marriage fell apart, she is believed to have moved to Hull ‘looking for a brighter future’ but, said Davison, ‘unfortunately that’s where she met Darren Adams’.   

Adams, who would eventually be found guilty of murdering Natalie and dismembering her body, was her boyfriend and pimp. 

He was also the person who reported Natalie missing from a public phone box on May 14, 1998. 

Prior to meeting Adams, one of her children later told Hull Live, Natalie ‘lived a chaotic life’ and ‘wasn’t perfect’ but never touched drugs. 

‘She was a free spirit and enjoyed life,’ they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ‘But she made one mistake in getting involved with drugs and she paid a terrible price.

‘Some people get into trouble all their lives. My mum had an 18-month period where she was involved in drugs and was killed.’

Post-mortem analysis of other body parts that were eventually recovered from the pumping station in Bransholme revealed Natalie had been stabbed in the chest multiple times. 

The team investigating Natalie’s murder decided to keep the cause of death confidential as they began interviewing her friends and associates. 

‘The only other person who knew how she died would be the killer – or killers,’ Davison reasoned, explaining his ‘policy decision’ during one segment of the ITV show. 

‘I knew I’d have to keep that as a card up my sleeve.’ 

Another hindrance to solving the case would be the force having to rely on the testimony of those who knew Natalie – most of whom, Adams included, were heroin addicts. 

Inspector Shaun Weir, who interviewed Adams and also appears in the documentary, revealed he was ‘somewhat of a career criminal’. 

He explained that Natalie would lure her clients back to the boarded-up home in St John’s Grove she shared with Adams, who would be lying in wait for them with a baseball bat and knuckle-dusters. 

‘The associates of Darren Adams were, generally, of the criminal fraternity – dealers, users. Very much the underbelly of the city,’ Weir continued, sharing insights into the police’s list of suspects. 

One of the persons of interest in the case was Neil Pattison, who owned Natalie and Adams’ dilapidated house and was one of the suspects they interviewed ‘who wasn’t an addict’. 

Officer Andy Marshall, who interviewed Pattison, said ‘it was quite obvious’ he was shocked by Natalie’s murder and willing to help the investigation. 

The only problem was he was on remand for the ‘vicious murder of an elderly lady during a robbery’, Pattison added. 

In exchange for information about Natalie’s murder, Pattison asked to be removed from the prison where he was being held and brought into police custody.  

The police’s months-long investigation helped them rule out any connection to the other murders of sex workers in Hull – with the team turning their full focus on Adams. 

in their search for evidence, they followed the trail from Bransholme to 119, St John’s Grove – Natalie and Adams’ home. 

‘It was stomach-churning squalor. Urine-soaked furniture, hypodermic needles, rubbish, bin liners,’ Davison said. 

At that point, Marshall recalled how crime rates in the city had risen in the Nineties, against the backdrop of Hull’s heroin crisis – that came into sharp focus during Natalie’s murder investigation. 

‘It was a real problem,’ he said. ‘People were having to commit crime to fund their habits, to be able to afford the heroin.’ 

Davison deputised a surveillance operative to track Adams’ movements in the weeks and months after Natalie’s murder.  

After he walked into a house while a family was watching television and ‘ripped the television out’, Humberside Police finally had cause to arrest Adams. 

With Adams in police custody, Marshall began pressing Pattison for information in what was a ‘slow process’ that involved ‘chipping away [at him] on a daily basis’. 

Eventually, Pattison told the interviewing officer that he bumped into Adams on the drain bank near his and Natalie’s house in St John’s Grove, adding ‘Darren served her up’ – prison slang for stabbing somebody. 

After 10 months of digging, the truth of what happened to Natalie that fateful night in May of 1998 was finally revealed. 

Adams reportedly told Pattison that he had a row with Natalie while ‘we was drugged up on some Russian s***, some temazepam’. 

‘I just picked up a knife and stabbed her. Woke up and there was a knife sticking out of her chest,’ he continued, in a chilling confession. 

He later dismembered her body with the help of her friend, before disposing of them in the drain near the pumping station. 

With the help of Pattison’s testimony before a jury at Sheffield Crown Court, the police were able to secure a conviction – with Adams, then 37, being sentenced to life in prison for Natalie’s murder. 

Adams spent 18 years in Garth prison in Lancashire before being transferred to medium-security jail HMP Lindholme in 2017. 

Six days after he was transferred, he was found hanging in his cell. Adams, 55, died in hospital the following day. 

Murder: The Tattoo Clue will premiere at 9pm on January 17 on ITV1. It is currently streaming on ITVX.