The Trouble with Harry

The police were everywhere. Detectives mingled with sunbathers beside Hyde Park's Serpentine Lake, barged into Soho nightclubs, shone lights on the faces of couples necking in cars. Police search parties combed the London docks, held up the departure of two boat trains at Victoria Station, boarded freighters in three ports, and closely examined departing passengers at London Airport. Army helicopters hovered over 200 policemen fanning through the fields of Berkshire. Led by Alsatian dogs, hundreds of armed officers tramped for days through the forests of Epping, Savernake and Watford. A police patrol boat even picked up a vacationing German canoeist who had been paddling happily from Ireland to Argyll.

Asking Mitzi. Britain last week was in the midst of the greatest manhunt in its history. Object of the hunt was Harry Maurice Roberts, 30, who is wanted "for questioning" in connection with the slaying of three London policemen on Aug. 12. To find him, Scotland Yard has mobilized every available man, questioned Roberts' estranged wife (a Manchester stripper known as "Mitzi the Pocket Venus") and all his friends. Roberts' mug shot has appeared on the front page of nearly every edition of nearly every newspaper in the land, together with police warnings that he is armed and dangerous and pleas to report him on sight.

The British, who love nothing better than a good crime story, responded enthusiastically. Harry was spotted almost simultaneously in Cornwall, Glamorgan, Cumberland, Great Yarmouth and Leicester, then on the Isles of Sheppey and Wight. He was reported hiding out at Tilbury Fort, at a girls' school in Essex, and with a terrorist Republican band in Ireland.

A motorist in Surrey claimed that Roberts held him up and stole his sandwiches. Fifty armed bobbies combed through Dagenham when a bus conductress reported that a passenger had dropped a pistol (which turned out to be a toy). Singer Alfred Hancock, 46, was arrested five times in one day because of his vague resemblance to Roberts. "Why do I have to look like him?" complained Hancock. "Why can't I look like Mario Lanza?" At Sadler's Wells Theater, Tenor Emile Belcourt was singing the title role of Offenbach's Bluebeard when police broke in with growling dogs in pursuit of a tip.

Mother's Plea. By week's end Scotland Yard had received and investigated more than 3,500 reports of Harry's whereabouts. They had arrested two others in connection with the cop murders, put his mother on television to ask him to give himself up. But there was still no sign of Harry.

Britain's "wanted men" have a knack for avoiding police. James White, a member of the 1963 Great Train Robbery gang, posed as a fisherman in Kent for 21-years before he was caught. Baby Strangler John Edward Allen lived for two years within 200 yards of a police station, was spotted only when his curiosity led him to the station bulletin board to look for his own wanted notice. Harry Roberts may not be so lucky. "Even if Roberts remained free for two years," noted the Observer, "every policeman in Britain would still go to sleep remembering his face."

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