Hi Joe, Long Time No See

The public address system at London's White City Stadium was blaring the strains of Hello Dolly! and the hearts of the crowd were echoing the brassy refrain, "It's so nice to have you back where you belong!" But it was no musical comedy star they were welcoming. It was the sleek, black racing greyhound Hi Joe, whose mysterious disappearance from the racing kennels of Trainer Noreen Collin in Epping, Essex 13 months ago (SI, Jan. 25, 1965) had sparked the widest, longest and most unrewarding dog hunt in British police annals. Now Hi Joe, once the top racing greyhound in all Britain, was back again, parading proudly around the track at the end of a lead held by Miss Collin and to all appearance as fit as ever.

For more than a year the search for Hi Joe had extended not only the length and breadth of the British Isles but to France as well. Trainer Collin had received over 100 phone calls, all of which appeared worth checking out but none of which produced the lost dog. As time went by, the conviction that Hi Joe had been done in grew strong. When, for a period of about four months, nothing significant was heard and the phone at Epping rang less constantly, only Noreen Collin continued to hope—feeling as she had all along that "somehow, sometime he would emerge."

The first solid justification of that optimism came about two weeks ago in the form of a telephone call to the Greyhound Express, the dog tracks' equivalent of the Daily Racing Form. The voice on the line, Irish by the sound of it, wanted to check Hi Joe's earmarks. Like all Irish-bred greyhounds, Joe had been given a distinguishing mark—in his case, the letters V H X tattooed on the inside of the left ear. This was the first of four critical phone calls. The second concerned the reward. When Hi Joe first disappeared, his owner, Victor Chandler, a prosperous bookmaker, had offered �2,000 for the return of the dog. After the first phone call Noreen Collin got in touch with Chandler, who was about to go off to the Bahamas on vacation, to ask if the original reward offer still held. Chandler answered that he was now willing to give only �1,000, provided the dog was in good condition. Next day when the Irishman called again, Noreen told him of the drop in reward. He hung up, saying he would have to consult a friend.

There was a lapse of two days before the third call came through. During this conversation it was agreed that the transfer of the reward should be arranged through a lawyer and that Noreen would meet the two men in a pub in Soho, called, appropriately, The Three Greyhounds. From the time of the second call, the police had been kept informed of what was happening. On the evening of the planned meeting, Detective Sergeant Peter Jarrott, who had worked on the case from the beginning, was in the pub posing as a customer. At 8 p.m. Noreen Collin arrived as specified.

"I've never had such an ordeal in my life," says that respectable lady. "I wouldn't have done it for anybody except Hi Joe. I went in and bought a whiskey and gingerale. The proprietor gave me a bit of an odd look, as you can imagine. Suddenly somebody sidled up to me. He said, 'I think you're waiting for me—sit down.' I sat down. He sat down. And another man, who'd been at the bar when I walked in, sat down on the other side."

One of the men was elderly, the other quite young. Noreen Collin believes that neither of them was implicated in the theft of Hi Joe. Certainly, the tone of the conversation seemed to bear this out. She gave them the address of the lawyer whom they would have to see to tie up the details of the reward. During the talk they told her that one of them worked for a building contractor and the other in a pub.

The next time they telephoned (from a public call box) the conversation went on so long that the operator had to butt in to ask for more money. Noreen quickly asked the operator to reverse the charge. During the call, it was agreed that they would phone her again the next day, at 10:30 in the morning, to say where the dog was being kept.

That morning 20 policemen stood ready to swoop into action when the call came through. "Everybody was keyed up, like High Noon," said Noreen Collin. Midday passed and the call never came. At 3:30 in the afternoon it was decided to cancel the operation. But, by then, two clues had come neatly together.

Noreen Collin, remember, had asked the telephone operator to reverse payment on the fourth call. Because of this, the police were able to ascertain that the two men had called from Dunstable, a town only about 30 miles away from Epping. During the conversation at The Three Greyhounds one of the men had also revealed that he worked in a pub. Putting these tips together. Detective Sergeant Jarrott systematically combed the pubs of Dunstable until he found his man, who was called Jim.

When confronted, Jim agreed to tell where Hi Joe was being kept, but only in the presence of Noreen Collin. Noreen accordingly went to Dunstable in the early evening of Wednesday. Persuaded by her that, if the reward was going to be paid, he and his associate would receive it, Jim gave the police the address of a 27-year-old automobile worker called Bartholomew Casey. The police made their way to a semidetached house in Evelyn Road and walked into a wooden garage. They called Noreen Collin in after them.