A woman narrowly avoided a brutal death after a bomb appeared on her doorstep. Clare Bagley received a parcel on her doorstep which she initially thought was a tin of chocolates in March 2001.
The pharmacist, who was living in Formby, Merseyside, was preparing for a weekend away with her sister when she received the package. As reported by the Liverpool Echo, the then 25-year-old opened the parcel in the car with her dad and sister.
As she lifted the lid of the tin, she found what appeared to be a nail bomb before throwing it out the car. The package had a Liverpool post mark – and a bomb expert later revealed it would have killed or seriously injured her had it gone off.
Speaking to BBC Crimewatch in June that year, Ms Bagley said: “I’d never seen anything like it in my life, I didn’t know what a bomb looked like apart from what you see on the television and how accurate that is I don’t know. It had a smell, a bit like fireworks type of smell, and that frightened me more so than the sight of it.”
However, after the bomb had been thrown out of the moving car, police arrived at the scene to warn residents to avoid the gold tin that had been left in the road in Formby. A driver clipped the tin while driving on the road before police could cordon off the road, but the bomb thankfully didn’t go off.
A bomb disposal team spent four hours on the scene before making the area safe. BBC Crimewatch reported at the time how the bomb contained: “low power explosive but was sophisticated and packed with nails”.
Ms Bagley continued to tell the show: “It just feels horrible to think it could have injured so many people, it had the potential to do so much harm. If I could understand why somebody wanted to kill me or if I could see a motive for somebody wanting to kill me maybe I would feel disgusted and upset and sick but I can’t think of any reason and I couldn’t relate to somebody who would want to do that to somebody who as far as I’m concerned is completely innocent. I’ve moved far away from the area, changed my job and I’ve just been trying to put it all behind me.”
Detective Chief Inspector Bob Marsden told the show: “I think it’s personal, they spelt her name correctly, they gave the correct address, the postal code. This was personal, this was meant for Clare Bagley.”
The person responsible for the bomb being sent to the address in Formby was never found despite the reconstruction on BBC Crimewatch and the appeal for information.
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