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?