The Jigsaw Man (56 page)

I heard the telephone ring and after a nerve-racking few moments the front door opened. The police went through the house fast, going through every cupboard, box, drawer, bench and panel. The officer had heard a baby crying - where was it? Had it been smothered or hidden? Had we lost control of its fate?

The woman, in her late twenties, was deeply shocked and denied having made the calls. Not surprisingly, her own children, aged four and eight, were distressed and crying as heavy boots echoed from room to room. When the search found nothing I began to relax a little. Having eyeballed her and heard her answers, it was clearly a hoax, although the police did find newspaper clippings related to the abduction hidden under the carpet.

Regardless of whether she had taken Abbie, her emotional state clearly showed that she needed counselling and care. Her children were looked after by a social worker, while the mother was taken to Oxclose Lane police station.

Although Abbie hadn’t been recovered, I didn’t attach any blame to the officer who had taken the calls. He’d been so intensely locked into the inquiry and determined to find Abbie that he had convinced himself that he’d heard a baby crying in the background. It was an index of the extreme strain that such responsibility puts on a negotiator or courier during that time when the whole focus of an investigation falls onto his or her shoulders.

Unfortunately, later that same day, the mystery caller ‘Gary’ was also exposed as a hoaxer. Amid angry scenes, the thirty-six-year-old unemployed divorcee from Gloucester appeared in court the next day (Tuesday 12 July) charged with grievous bodily harm to Karen and Roger Humphries.

Meanwhile, the inquiry team pressed onwards but risked being buried under a mountain of paper. With reports coming in from as far afield as Ireland and London, it was important that good information wasn’t lost in the wash. In my view every child of the appropriate age encountered during the search had to be checked and cross-referenced with doctors, health visitors or midwives. Questions had to be asked about where the baby was born; when it was born; who was your doctor?

Although there were rumbles from the media, Harry Shepherd didn’t let any outside pressures distract him from the strategy. His task wasn’t made any easier when his superiors at headquarters granted Central TV permission to make a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary about the hunt for Abbie. It was a policy decision, I was told, and the inquiry team had no option but to cooperate. I was asked by the media relations officer and then Central TV if I’d take part but declined. I didn’t want to be interviewed. However, the documentary team had free run of the investigation and occasionally I would look up to find them filming me through doors or in the corridors.

Twelve days after the abduction, questions were beginning to arise about whether something could have been missed. Perhaps someone had reported their suspicions and it had been wrongly prioritized among the thousands of reported sightings of Abbie.

I had time to think about this while convalescing in bed on Friday 15 July, laid low by the vagaries of whatever disc, vertebra or strained muscle damage had turned my back into a stiff plank and my slightest movement into torture. I was similarly disposed on Saturday morning when an early news bulletin announced that Abbie Humphries had been found safe and well in the early hours of the morning at a house in Nottingham.

Three people had been arrested including twenty-two-year-old Julie Kelley, a former dental nurse who admitted to abducting the baby from the QMC two weeks earlier. She shared a house with her boyfriend Leigh Gilbert, twenty-three, a motor mechanic, and his mother Susan. The story that emerged during interviews was that Kelley had taken Abbie in order to cement her deteriorating relationship with her boyfriend. The previous August, Gilbert had threatened to break it off after meeting someone else, but Kelley then told him that she was pregnant.

She kept up the charade in the months that followed, allowing him to decorate a nursery for the baby and letting his family buy a pram, cot and presents. The deception was so well thought out that she pretended to have morning sickness and food cravings. She walked around heavily padded and persuaded Gilbert to take her to prenatal appointments at the QMC, making him wait in reception while she pretended to see the doctor.

In March, craving more of his attention, she told him that tests had shown the ‘baby’ might have Down’s syndrome and this led to the couple visiting a school for severely handicapped children.

Ironically, Kelley became genuinely pregnant in May yet didn’t abandon her elaborate deception. By the beginning of July, her pregnancy had stretched to ten months and she was under pressure to produce the child that all those around her had been awaiting. Using her former dental nurse’s uniform, she disguised herself with a wig and snatched Abbie from the maternity ward. Then she returned home to the red-brick house in Brendon Drive, Wollaton, less than a mile from the hospital. She rang Leigh Gilbert at work and told him that she’d given birth at home. Amid the excitement and family celebrations, nobody questioned her account of events.

Similarly, most of the neighbours knew of her pregnancy and weren’t surprised to see the line of fluffy toys appear on the window-sill or the baby clothes on the washing line. Yet one or two had concerns, particularly because Kelley had earlier told them she was having a boy. A home birth was also unusual and there were no sightings of midwives or health care visitors who closely monitor new-born babies.

When Julie Kelley eventually stood trial, she was described as suffering from a personality disorder in which she became overwhelmingly dependent on relationships. She believed a pregnancy and a baby would solve all her personal problems.

Consultant psychoanalyst Dr Lawrence Bell, who examined her, said he felt that she had developed an obsessive relationship with Mr Gilbert, her first real boyfriend who she had met when she was seventeen. ‘She felt unable to stop the escalator and get off. She was unable to tell them what had happened. She could not bring herself to tell them the truth.’

From my point of view, the campaign to recover Abbie had been extremely successful. She was reclaimed without resistance, with no question of hostage-taking or anyone being harmed. Abbie had been well cared for and within hours was back in the arms of Karen and Roger who were both enormously grateful for the efforts of the police.

However, in the days that followed, the inquiry team faced growing criticism. It emerged that the incident room had received five tip-offs suggesting that Abbie was in the house at Brendon Drive. The first was an anonymous call, little more than four days after the kidnapping which gave only the street name. The second caller, Mrs Glenis Smith, a neighbour of the Gilberts, voiced her suspicions and two days later police visited the house and found a family celebrating the birth with presents and cards.

Shepherd told journalists, ‘They were looking for a child to rescue. What they found was a child who appeared to be in a correct and caring home.’

Two more anonymous tip-offs came from a chemist worried that a woman wanting cream to treat a baby’s navel might be holding Abbie. Later, the neighbour Glenis Smith discussed her fears with a friend who passed on the information to a midwife who checked the records and found no trace of a home birth at fourteen Brendon Drive. When this tip-off came, detectives were already preparing to raid the house.

These five calls (three of them anonymous) were among 4,700 received over fifteen days in the wake of the media strategy and illustrate precisely the lessons that must be learned for the future. I don’t blame the officers who visited the house four days after the kidnapping - they couldn’t be expected to recognize Abbie, only Roger and Karen could have done that. But what happened to their report? Were salient details lost in the mountain of paperwork?

When a successful media campaign generates so much diverse information, you need a system of accurately classifying and prioritizing it, giving it shape and order. Without this, a lot of time can be wasted chasing less likely tip-offs instead of concentrating initially on those that fit the pattern of the profile. Making these decisions isn’t easy. It means not letting the urgent, compelling, emotional thoughts about a young baby, possibly in peril, block out these information management requirements. By all means, understand the pain and the risks involved, but stand back and look at the search in almost a mathematical way.

Harry Shepherd and his team didn’t deserve the criticism. Shepherd had worked twenty-two hours a day on what he called his most emotional investigation in twenty-eight years of service. ‘But you can’t let emotion get in the way of the job you are doing,’ he told a news conference. ‘There was never any despair. Worry, yes, but not despair. I was never one hundred per cent sure we’d get Abbie back - but I always felt we would.’

Three weeks after the committal hearing at Wimbledon Magistrates Court, an entirely different prosecution 200 miles away in Leeds would dramatically alter the complexion of the Rachel Nickell trial. A mobile grocer, Keith Hall, was acquitted of murdering his wife Patricia when a judge ruled that the evidence of an undercover policewoman who had befriended him was inadmissible.

Hall’s wife had disappeared in the spring of 1992 after what the neighbours described as a fierce row. He claimed that she had simply walked out on him, taking the family Ford Sierra Estate which was later found abandoned. The driver’s seat was positioned close to the wheel, as for her, rather than him, but a milkman had recalled seeing a man in the car.

Unable to find any trace of her, police believed that Patricia Hall had been murdered but could find nothing to directly implicate her husband. On legal advice he refused to answer questions and watched quizzically as police unsuccessfully dug up the garden at the family semi in Pudsey, on the outskirts of Leeds. They also excavated a newly laid concrete roundabout near the house.

Eventually, in October 1992, the inquiry team had a call from a local woman, Eliza, who had placed a lonely hearts advertisement in the Wharfe Valley Times and been astonished to receive a response from Keith Hall. She recognized his name, having read about the case, and knew that his wife had only been dead for six months. On police advice, she wrote back to Hall to see where it would lead.

As the correspondence continued, the police replaced ‘Eliza’ with an undercover policewoman from the West Yorkshire Regional Crime Squad. The relationship progressed over the next four months from letters to phone calls that contained long meaningful conversations about life, love and ambition. Finally, they met in the carpark of the George and Dragon pub where every word and hesitant cough was picked up by a microphone worn by ‘Liz’.

They were to meet five more times over the next five months, mostly for a quiet drink at the same hotel. Unexpectedly, Hall fell in love with Liz and bought her a wedding ring. When he asked her to move in with him, Liz declared it was impossible because his missing wife might come back to him at any time.

The following evening, 26 February, 1993, as they sat in the hotel carpark, Hall told her there was no chance that Patricia could come back because he’d murdered her and burned her body in an incinerator.

He was arrested and charged with murder and stood trial at Leeds Crown Court on Thursday 12 March, 1994. After days of legal argument, the judge, Mr Justice Waterhouse, ruled that the evidence of the undercover officer - including Hall’s tape-recorded confession - was inadmissible. Keith Hall was found ‘not guilty’ without any of the evidence being put before a jury. He walked from the court a free man.

That afternoon, I was driving back to Leicester from an outpatients’ clinic when I heard about the case on a radio news bulletin. I remember being shocked. An operation that bore all the hallmarks of what had happened in the Nickell investigation had been rejected by a court. Did it mark the end of the Colin Stagg prosecution, I wondered. Had the Crown lawyers got it wrong?

I called Pedder as soon as I reached a telephone.

‘You’ve heard,’ he said.

‘Yes. Does it mean our case is over?’

‘No, of course it doesn’t.’ He went on to explain that the prosecution team had already looked carefully at the Hall case and believed that the covert operation in the Rachel inquiry had been designed and run along very different lines and could not be considered in the same light. It had been ‘whiter than white’ with no hint of entrapment.

Pedder said, ‘You know yourself, Paul, that our operation wasn’t intended to manipulate a man into making a confession. It was intended to allow him to either eliminate himself entirely, or to further implicate himself entirely by his own choices.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Which is why you don’t worry. It’s being looked at by lawyers at the top of the legal tree.’

He was right. These were decisions for experienced lawyers to make and I accepted their judgement without question. However, as the trial grew closer it became clear to me that there wasn’t quite the same optimism and confidence as previously. Until then, we’d been racing towards justice but now the probabilities had been reassessed.

The Crown had a new leading counsel, John Nutting QC, and we gathered for a final case conference in his chambers on Friday 2 September. The trial was due to begin on Monday at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. Seated around a long table covered in green baize were Pedder, Mick Wickerson, Bruce Butler, John Nutting, junior counsel, myself and several others.

Nutting went over the preliminaries and explained that the defence were likely to launch a pre-emptive strike to have the Lizzie James material declared inadmissible and the case thrown out. He advised me that I may be required to be in court on Monday.

He asked me for an opinion, ‘If the evidence of Lizzie James is not admitted do you think that your evidence would be sufficient to base a conviction upon?’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘I’m glad you said that, because that’s exactly what my view is.’