The Jigsaw Man (9 page)

This strongly suggested someone older and more secure, who was less likely to attract attention; someone perhaps in a marriage or a relationship. This man was more controlled and had been able to keep his cool when confronted by door-to-door enquiries about the crimes.

Painter asked, ‘So he could have a wife or girlfriend?’

‘I’m saying that just because a man is in a relationship you shouldn’t discount him. Each time he’s been able to control himself long enough to maximize his chances of success of not being caught. He’s careful and makes plans. People like this are more able to get into a relationship.

‘You also have to ask yourself how he’s managed to maintain his position and keep his secret without attracting suspicion even though he lives in a tight community. He knows his neighbours, they know him, but he doesn’t stand out. You have to ask, “Why is that?” Again, it suggests that he’s older and perhaps in a relationship.’

Baker asked, ‘So his family might be shielding him?’

‘No, I doubt it. Some aspects of his behaviour will possibly make those close to him feel uncomfortable, but I doubt if they know he’s a sexual murderer.’

Baker said, ‘How old?’

‘At least his late twenties.’

‘And clever?’

‘I’d say average intelligence when you look at the degree of care and planning.’ This was indicated by the ease with which he acquired the teenagers in locations that suited his purposes and then escaped afterwards.

‘You’re dealing with a sexual psychopath and the nature of his deviant sexuality is probably driven by fantasies, just as Paul Bostock was driven. He periodically experiences a growing urge for sexual control and domination. He needs to express this through aggression, to overpower, dominate, rape and kill a woman. If you look at your records, this man will have come to your attention, perhaps for only minor indecency offences.’

I could see David Baker previously struggling with this. The conceptual leap between a man flashing his erect penis at a woman and someone raping and killing was too great, yet I knew that the same irresistible urge could drive both and one could build towards the other.

I’d interviewed flashers in a clinical setting and while their reasons sounded rational, when you unpacked their pasts other elements tumbled out. For men visual stimulus is very important, which is why there are pornographic magazines full of pictures of naked women. Some flashers mistakenly assume that if a woman sees an erect naked penis it has a similar effect on her and she’ll become so filled with lust, she’ll have sex with them. Other offenders expose themselves because seeing a woman for real is far better than looking at one in a magazine - it has possibilities. There is also sometimes an aggressive or revenge element - something has happened in their own earlier life, they’ve been rejected or ridiculed by a woman and they want to shock and frighten and dominate.

All of these reasons can become mixed up and you can’t take one strand and say, ‘There’s the explanation,’ because it’s misleading.

There are many levels of deviant behaviour and if one plotted them on the axis of a graph, invariably you see a steady rise. Someone begins with minor offences and progresses up the scale. The murders of Lynda and Dawn didn’t come out of the blue. Their killer started with lesser offences and escalated through these stages.

Painter asked, ‘So he might have raped before, but not necessarily killed?’

‘Yes. But not all rapes are reported or detected,’ I said.

‘And he’s likely to kill again.’

‘Yes, when the urge becomes strong enough. He isn’t celibate. He needs and wants sex. Yet there were three years between the killings and during this time he’s likely to have found sex in some other relationship. He may have intercourse with his wife or girlfriend several times a week but this won’t be enough. He has another aspect of his sexuality that has to be satisfied.’

Although the physical assaults were very similar, Painter picked up on the differences and asked why there had been no anal assault on Lynda or attempt to hide her body.

‘A murderer isn’t always uniform in his actions. Sometimes circumstances are different and don’t allow replication, or a victim can alter events by something she says or does. At the same time, the killer will have become more confident in the time between the murders and this will affect his actions. I want to ponder that for a little longer. From a psychological point of view the vaginal and anal attacks have to be separated, because given there was no confusion over the genitalia in either case, they were intended as separate acts, and I’m not clear what sequence they happened in.’

Baker asked, ‘Is there a chance that he knew the girls?’

‘Yes - or knew of them,’ I said.

‘Is there any particular reason why he chose them?’

This is a question that I’d asked myself the previous evening, propping two snapshots of the girls on my bookshelf. Both were pretty in a young way, yet they were clearly capable of being viewed sexually by a person who was interested in women rather than children.

This predator had gone out looking for a victim who fitted certain criteria. She had to be old enough to be sexually stimulating for him but also non-threatening so that she wouldn’t attack him or ridicule him in a way that spoiled it for him. Lynda and Dawn were perfect - old enough to be sexually attractive but young enough to be insecure and unworldly. That’s why he’d chosen them.

When I finished, we sat and had another coffee while Painter told me about developments. Since the kitchen porter’s release more than a thousand messages had been logged by the incident room at Wigston Police Station. Fifty officers were working on the double-murder hunt, concentrating on Dawn Ashworth because her death was still fresh in the public’s mind.

Two Detective Inspectors, Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas, were in charge of the suspect and house-to-house teams. They were retracing their steps, interviewing suspects and asking every witness if they could remember just a little bit more. Meanwhile, the Leicester Mercury prepared a special four-page edition containing every known fact about the murders. Special constables delivered it by hand to every house in Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.

On 18 December Crimewatch UK screened a reconstruction on BBC1 focusing on the youth seen running out of Ten Pound Lane at 5.30 p.m. Thirteen million people watched the programme and afterwards sixty viewers rang in from as far afield as London and Northern Ireland. The hunt went on.

*

In the meantime, I began listening to the police interviews with the kitchen porter. Slipping the first tape into the cassette player, I heard the seventeen-year-old begin answering questions confidently but in a quiet voice. He said that he’d known Dawn about three weeks and had seen her walking about the village. That Thursday, 31 July, had been his day off and he’d slept until ten or eleven. In the afternoon he rode his motorbike along King Edward Avenue towards Narborough. Near the motorway bridge he saw Dawn walking towards the gateway into Ten Pound Lane.

‘How did you know it was Dawn?’

‘By her hairstyle and the way she walked. So I knew it were Dawn.’

‘Do you know her very well?’

‘Just by looks. That’s all.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘A sort of white skirt and a yellow or white jacket. I thought I’d stop and talk to her and ask her where she was going, and that. Then I thought, I’ve got to get home and do this oil because it might be running out quick. It got to leaking drip, drip, drip fairly fast, so I just drove straight home.’

When told about the motorbike seen parked under the bridge and the youth seen carrying a motorcycle helmet, the porter denied it was him.

‘If you stopped and had a chat with her, for goodness sake, tell us. Because if you tell lies, even though you may not have had anything to do with it, it makes you look worse. I think you stopped and parked under the bridge. You may well have spoken to her…’

‘Yeah, I can remember now,’ said the porter.

‘You stopped under the bridge, didn’t you?’

‘Got under me bike and had a look to see if the oil were coming out.’

‘And what did you say to her?’

‘I just seen her approaching the gate.’

Questions went back and forth making little headway. At one stage the teenager said he went up Ten Pound Lane, then he claimed it was the day before.

Finally the police interviewer went straight to the point, ‘The thing is, did you intend to kill her?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Right, I seen her walked up the lane. Pulled down the side, got off me bike. Started talking to her. I asked her where Queenie was and Michael. She said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Where are you going?” She says, “I’m going home.” I walked her halfway up the lane and I goes, “Will you be all right?” She says, “Yeah.” So I turns around to come back. Got straight on me bike and goes straight home.’

Again the line of questioning petered out. Growing more upset, the suspect pleaded that he couldn’t remember and said he’d be blamed.

In the next interview he was taken through his sexual history and admitted having regular sex with a fourteen-year-old girl on a local railway embankment. Once or twice ‘I could have slipped and gone up her bum but I don’t know,’ he said. Then he recanted and denied having any prior sexual experience or even having masturbated.

As yet, he hadn’t provided any detail that only the killer could have known, although his rambling answers and constant changes of direction suggested he was of below average intelligence.

When asked how he knew that the body had been found, he said Dawn’s elder brother had told him. Dawn didn’t have an older brother. He also denied ever having met the police constable on Sunday evening, claiming the policeman had made it up ‘trying to get me in trouble’.

He sometimes seemed to be answering entirely different questions to those asked.

Changing the tape, I recognized Tony Painter’s voice. He showed the teenager a photograph of Dawn Ashworth. ‘I think you were responsible.’

Detective Sergeant Dawe said, ‘I don’t think you intended to kill her.’

‘I can’t remember. I probably really went mad, and I don’t know it.’

Dawe asked, ‘Did you fancy her?’

‘Yeah, a little bit, but I can’t remember any more.’

Painter said, ‘Describe to me exactly what happened.’

‘She’d gone down and I started putting me hands on her top. She weren’t struggling at the time until I put me hands up her skirt. See, I walked her up lane and started to touch her bum. And she moved toward me and tripped over a bit. I continued to feel her and she struggled but I held her down. Then me head started spinning as if I was drunk. I couldn’t remember no more until I were running away… I just went mad. I couldn’t help it. Dawn said she wouldn’t tell nobody about it. It was like someone else took over. I just went mad. Like it was someone else in me that told me to do it. I didn’t want to do it. Someone were forcing me to do it. Making me arms and legs go all over. At first she let me but then she went down. She struggled and me mind went blank. I don’t think it were me that did it. But when I finished and were getting up I ran off.’

Almost immediately, he denied everything and became upset. ‘I never touched her. Why should I get the blame? I never even talked to Dawn …’

On Friday morning the interviews began again. Dawn was alive when he left her, he said. He panicked.

Painter asked, ‘What did you do to make her not move?’

‘I think it was when I laid down on top of her.’

‘Where were your hands?’

‘On her arms.’

‘And what were you doing to her when you were laying on top of her?’

‘Just had a laugh and a joke with her. I said to her, “I ain’t going to let you go.” She just started laughing. She was crawling all over me.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Moved up toward her face and sat on her chest and that’s what done it. Sat on her chest.’

‘Was that before you hurt her or afterwards?’

‘That were before.’

‘How did you feel when she stopped moving?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Come on, tell us more.’

‘When I realized she weren’t, I thought, Oh shit, oh Christ! I just got up and went back down the lane. I thought she’d had a heart attack or something like that.’

‘Where did all this take place?’

‘Near the hedge by the ditch. I can’t remember because I know I didn’t do it. That’s why I can’t remember for certain.’

In a later interview he tried to remember more.

‘Well, I got as far as putting me hands up her top. Then I put me hand up her skirt. She said, “No”. I forced. She started shouting. I put me hand over her mouth to shut her up … Then she were lying there still. I just pressed really hard on her mouth with me hand over her nose and her mouth. She suffocated. That’s all in my memory. I couldn’t leave her where she was so I hid her.’

‘How did you hide her?’

‘With a load of brambles underneath a hedge.’

‘How did you leave her? In what sort of position?’

‘On her front.’

‘What? Lying on her stomach, on her side, on her back?’

‘Side.’

When questioned further, he explained how he pressed his fingers around Dawn’s throat to make it appear as though she had been strangled. Then he took her drawers off and had sex with her. Afterwards, he lifted her over the fence and hid her body.

During the following interview sessions, the porter was quizzed repeatedly about the details of how Dawn had been acquired and attacked.

‘How did you knock her down?’

‘I put me feet behind her and pushed her.’

‘A few minutes ago you said that you’d already gone through the gate into the field.’

‘It was a mistake, that was.’

‘Where did you do all this? In the lane or in the field?’

‘In the gateway.’

‘When you say you took her pants off, did you take them right off?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you do with them?’

‘I don’t know. Just chucked them away.’

‘But you’ve just described how you put them back.’

‘I put everything else back. I put her skirt back on. Bra back on. Shirt. Tucked that in and that’s it…’