John Anslow and his forty-two-year-old daughter, Hayley-Marie Ferguson, thought they could outwit the West Midlands canal network. They were wrong. Following a harrowing trial at Birmingham Crown Court, a jury dismantled the chilling facade of a disabled pensioner and his complicit daughter, convicting them for the brutal murder of thirty-six-year-old Chereiss Bailey and the calculated disposal of her remains in the murky waters of the Walsall Canal.
This case exposes a macabre anatomy of a cover-up. It reveals how domestic accessibility aids were weaponized, how community support systems were manipulated, and how familial bonds corroded into a conspiracy of silence.
The Crime and the Calculated Cover-Up
The timeline established by West Midlands Police homicide detectives paints a portrait of chilling premeditation. On September twenty-seventh, Chereiss Bailey—a vulnerable woman living alone who occasionally worked as a sex worker—entered Anslow’s West Bromwich residence. She never left alive.
Inside those four walls, Anslow subjected Bailey to a violent and fatal assault. Sixty-five-year-old Anslow had long cultivated an image of frailty. He presented himself to neighbors and community support agencies as a disabled man confined to a wheelchair, entirely dependent on others for basic mobility.
That vulnerability was a complete fabrication.
The morning after the killing, Anslow demonstrated the cold calculation of a seasoned predator. He cancelled his scheduled visits from community care workers. He then placed a phone call to his daughter, Hayley-Marie Ferguson. Ferguson responded by taking a taxi to her father's home, carrying paving slabs purportedly intended for garden work.
This was the genesis of the disposal strategy.
Weaponizing Mobility Aids
Investigators tracking the movements of the father and daughter uncovered a grotesque choreography. On the evening following her initial visit to ferry the paving stones, Ferguson briefly returned home to attend a themed social event. She then returned to her father's address in the early hours of September twenty-ninth.
Closed-circuit television footage secured by police captured the horrific reality of their partnership. Anslow and Ferguson loaded Bailey's lifeless body into Anslow's distinctive wheelchair, which featured bright orange wheels. Together, they pushed the chair through the dark streets toward a stretch of the canal known locally as the Eight Locks near Ryders Green Road.
They did not merely drop the body into the water. They sought permanent submersion. Using a washing line cord, they bound heavy paving slabs to Bailey's remains before casting them into the canal.
The operational division of labor during the trek home underscored the duplicity at the heart of the case. Anslow climbed back into his wheelchair to be pushed, while Ferguson walked away unaided, shedding the pretense of physical limitation that she had occasionally maintained.
The Unraveling of the Conspiracy
The facade began to shatter on October fourth, when a member of the public reported that a woman had been murdered and discarded within the Great Bridge canal network.
Detectives moved swiftly. Officers executing initial inquiries visited Ferguson’s address on Heronville Road. In a wheelie bin outside her home, they discovered suspected blood-stained clothing. Ferguson was arrested on the spot. Under intense police questioning, she made significant admissions that directly implicated her father, leading to Anslow's arrest.
On October seventh, search teams recovered Bailey’s body from the water, bound precisely as intelligence suggested.
Forensic teams and digital investigators dismantled the remaining defenses. Phone records, cell site data, and extensive CCTV sweeps trapped the pair in an inescapable web of evidence. While Anslow ultimately pleaded guilty to preventing a lawful and decent burial prior to the trial, both stood trial for the heavier charges at Birmingham Crown Court.
The jury rejected every assertion of diminished culpability. Anslow was convicted of murder and the prevention of a lawful burial. Ferguson was convicted of assisting an offender and preventing a lawful burial.
Detective Inspector Michelle Cordell of the Homicide Unit noted the stark contrast between the perpetrators' public posturing and their private brutality. Chereiss Bailey left behind a grieving family who remembered her not by the grim circumstances of her death, but by her immense personality, fierce loyalty, and deep love for her relatives.
The legal system has rendered its verdict on the father and daughter who believed the canal would keep their secrets. They await sentencing, stripped of their alibis and exposed by the relentless pursuit of objective truth.
