The Mammoth Book of New Csi (18 page)

Hodgson was found in possession of property from the car and was later convicted, but granted conditional bail after making a further statement about the man against whom he had made the earlier allegations. The following June, Hodgson was arrested in London’s Trafalgar Square and charged with other offences. A set of keys were taken from him. At his trial he confessed to a large number of relatively minor offences, some of which he could not have committed as he was in custody at the time. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment. While serving time in Wandsworth Prison, he called the guards to his cell and said that he needed to see a priest. Though a protestant, he wanted to make a confession.

Father Frank Moran was called to speak to Hodgson, who confessed to the rape and murder of Teresa de Simone and wanted people do know what he had done. Hodgson said that he had been a drunk and had broken into cars to sleep it off. Later, at the trial at Winchester Crown Court, Father Moran told the jury: “He said he was sleeping in a car in Southampton about 2 a.m., when a woman got in and started to scream. He said to stop her screaming he put his hand over her mouth; he was frightened, and she was frightened.”

The girl tried to scream again and Hodgson said he grabbed her around the neck. Then he remembered tearing at her clothes. Hodgson also told a prison officer he needed to confess because he could see a mental image of the girl screaming as he tore at her dress and beat her to death with a wine bottle. The face of the woman kept coming back to him, he said, particularly around the anniversary of her death.

The day after talking to Father Moran, and after seeing a solicitor, Hodgson told a prison officer that he had confessed to the Tom Tackle murder in Southampton to a priest. The prison officer made a note of what he said. According to this written record, Hodgson said that he had hit the girl to keep her quiet. He had later taken her by the throat. He had ripped her clothes and taken her oval-shaped wrist watch, which he sold in a public house the next day. He said that he had been questioned by the police in Southampton and had admitted other offences so that he would be taken away from the scene of the murder.

So there could be no mistake, Hodgson even made a written confession. In a note, he wrote: “After much deliberation and thought and confession with the priest here in Wandsworth, after all the trouble I have caused, not only to you, the police, but myself, the mental torture I have gone through, the family of the person concerned, I must for my own sanity and the punishment I will receive for this horrible crime, I wish now that it was me that was dead and not the person I killed at the Tom Tackle pub . . . I did the murder, why I don’t know. So all I can say is let justice be done.”

When interviewed by detectives, he repeated his confession, this time giving a long, detailed description of how he strangled Teresa after a desperate struggle. Information had been released that the victim’s clothing had been torn, but not which items of clothing had been torn or that one leg of Teresa’s tights had been torn away from the other. In one of his confessions, Hodgson appeared to describe these details.

He also said: “There was all foam coming from her mouth.” This was consistent with what the pathologist had found, but was not publicized at the time. He ended by saying that he had to tell someone what he had done.

In further questioning that day, he described how the girl had “sat on the seat with her legs outside, and then as she swung them in, she pulled the door shut”. That matched with her mother’s description of how Teresa got into her car. Hodgson also described how afterwards her legs were left in “a funny position to describe” after the attack, but he said that he did not think that he had assaulted her sexually. However, he did describe the watch and broken chain.

When asked why he had made the earlier allegations against another man, he said: “To take the heat off me so that you wouldn’t ask me questions. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Hodgson was then brought to Southampton and taken over the various routes he said he had used during the crucial days. Later, he identified a public house where he had sold the watch. This information had not been previously reported.

He described how he had thrown away the girl’s diary and, in a sketch, showed a red brick wall and an area with a broken wall. This appeared to match the place where the victim’s handbag and purse were found.

Hodgson said that he had twisted Teresa’s clothing around her neck to strangle her, which was consistent with the marks on her neck. Again, the method of strangulation was not public knowledge. Also, it was never disclosed that she was injured in the vaginal area, or that there had been bleeding from the vaginal area and damage to the anal area, but he seemed to know about this.

After asking to see another prison officer, Hodgson dictated at great speed an account of how he had “done the murder and must face my punishment”. Again, he provided a considerable mass of detail. He said, correctly, that the deceased’s car had an “N” registration. He said that he had opened the empty car with his keys and started it. The bunch of keys taken from him after he was arrested in Trafalgar Square contained what he described as a “jiggler”, which he said could unlock all Fords and start them. This was what he used to open Teresa’s Escort. The police tried the key and it worked.

Hodgson said he moved the car a couple of yards and went to sleep. Then he described the struggle and the fact that her clothing was torn. He said that afterwards he had made his way from the yard and that he had been sick. However, in the sudden rush of words, the officer taking the notes thought that Hodgson had said that he had stabbed the girl in the lower part of her body with something he had found in her car.

Two days later the appellant handed two exercise books and six pieces of paper to another police officer. In these accounts he asserted that he knew his victim, who had spurned him. The account in the first exercise book contained less detail, but asserted that he had asked, time and time again, for someone “to help me put this statement in my own words . . . I would like the truth to be known. So, please, can I have help?”

The next exercise book asserts that he “did the murder” and that there was nothing he could do himself to bring her “back to life. What am I to do to punish myself for this appalling crime?”

However, no assessment was made of the mental competence of the prisoner. Hodgson also confessed to two other murders – that of a newspaper seller in Covent Garden and “a homosexual in a flat in North London at the end of ’78 or ’79”. Investigations showed that the confessions were false and neither of the crimes had actually happened. But even though two of the three “murders” appeared to be figments of Mr Hodgson’s imagination, police were certain he was the Crucifix Killer.

In letters found by a prison officer, Hodgson claimed that “since 1964” he had “led a very bad path of crime, killing, maiming, all for drugs and drink”.

In January 1981, in front of his solicitor, Hodgson made a further statement. In it, he asked whether the police had “the jacket which had slime from her vagina on it and pubic hair – bits and pieces from down there, and blood, I think?” After describing the strangulation, he said that he had tried to rape his victim. Later he spoke of trying to have sex with her again, that is, after he had forced her to have sex with him, when he had ejaculated. He said that he had tried to push a tyre lever inside her vagina. By the end of the incident “one of her legs seemed to be up on the back parcel shelf and the other one was down behind the driver’s seat”. Again this accorded with the crime scene and, although it had been reported that Teresa was half naked in the back of the car, no details of her exact position were given. The interview was recorded and the statement was signed by Hodgson, with his solicitor adding that he had advised his client not to make the statement.

He was then asked about the other two murders he had admitted to and was told that these incidents were not known to the police and probably had not occurred. Asked why he admitted them, he said he wanted to clear things up. He said that he had been told about the death of the victim of the first murder, who had actually died of a heart attack. He wondered if it was the same man he had “gone over the cubicle to”. As to the second, he had “done a homosexual over”, though he did not know if he had killed the man and he was worried in case he had died.

Later he described how, after killing Teresa, he was left gasping for breath, heaving, trying to be sick and crying with no tears. Then a light came on and somebody looked out of the window of flats above a shop. That was consistent with the evidence of a witness who, after hearing sobbing, turned on her bedroom light before looking out to see a man, sobbing and vomiting or trying to vomit. This had not been reported at the time.

After the interview, Hodgson wrote two letters to the investigating officers. The first expressed his concern that his confessions might not be admissible. In the second he said he wanted to be charged because he felt so much remorse over the whole affair. He would never forgive himself for killing Teresa. He just wanted to be charged. He would plead guilty and take whatever punishment was meted out to him.

“Nobody in their right mind would hold their hands up to murder as I have done with the thought of a life sentence,” he said, “but I did because I did it. So can you do what you can to sort things out and get the wheels in motion, as they say.”

Shown the black comb found at the crime scene, he examined it closely for scratch marks, then identified it as his. He said that it was a prison-issue comb with his initials scratched on it, pointing to some scratches and said they were “R” and “H”. He said that he last saw the comb on the night of the murder but did not know what had happened to it. The comb was of a type issued by the Home Office for distribution in prisons and microscopic examination of the scratches on it confirmed that they had been made deliberately.

Asked about a red Ladbroke’s pen found near the scene, he claimed that it was his. A matching green pen was found with his property. He said he had last seen the red pen the day before the murder.

These confessions seemed to corroborate everything at the crime scene and Hodgson appeared to have personal knowledge of details of the crime that had not been reported in the press. However, when he came to trial in 1982, Hodgson changed his mind and claimed to have made them up. Nor would he take the stand.

“I would like to tell the members of the jury why I cannot go into the witness box,” he said in an unsworn statement. “Firstly, it is because I am a pathological liar. Secondly, I did not kill Teresa de Simone. Thirdly, every time I have been nicked by the law and that has been many times, I have made false confessions to crimes I have not committed, and this is the reason why I am not going into the box.”

Without going into the witness box, Hodgson had no opportunity to explain how he knew significant details of the crime that had been withheld from the public, while the confessions he had made about the murders that had not occurred contained no such details. Nor could he explain why he had made the confessions at all, nor his movements and whereabouts at the time of the killing.

The prosecution maintained that Hodgson, “under the influence of drink, broke into the deceased’s car, intending to steal it, but then fell asleep on the back seat. When the deceased returned to her car, she put her handbag on to the back seat and brushed against [him]. He seized her by the back of her jumper, twisted it and strangled her, and when she was dead or dying he raped her, removing her underwear and tights with such force that one leg of the tights was torn from the other. Thereafter he made away from the scene after taking various items from the deceased.”

DNA profiling was not available at the time – it was first used in a UK court in Leicester in 1986 – and the only crime scene evidence against him was blood analysis, which showed the killer had blood group A or AB. Hodgson was in that category, along with a third of the male population. The police said that Hodgson gave them details of the killing unknown to the public, which tallied with the crime scene investigation. These included the way Teresa died, the body’s position in the car and the whereabouts of her clothing in undergrowth. The prosecution relied heavily on Hodgson’s confessions and there was no reason to think that those who heard them were mistaken or lying, or that Hodgson had been coerced or pressurized into making them. They were made voluntarily.

The defence maintained that Hodgson was a compulsive liar. He had confessed to 200 different crimes, including murders, that not only had he not committed, but had not happened at all.

After a fifteen-day trial, Hodgson was convicted by a unanimous verdict. It took the jury just three-and-a-quarter hours to reach a verdict. The judge, Mr Justice Sheldon, said: “It is a verdict with which I entirely agree. I have no doubt whatsoever that you were guilty of this appalling, horrible crime of killing that girl.” Hodgson was refused leave to appeal.

In prison, Hodgson maintained that he was innocent of the crime. However, it was only after he had served twenty-six years that a new team of “no win, no fee” lawyers took his denials seriously.

“We looked at it and thought we were on to something,” said solicitor Julian Young. “We went to see him in prison and he continually denied he had killed her. He has repeatedly denied he was the killer throughout his time in prison.”

He was surprised that the case had not been re-examined before.

“I don’t know if he had made any other attempts to officially plead his innocence since his attempted appeal was turned down,” said Young. “I can’t say why his case wasn’t looked at before now, but he has been in a psychiatric ward for much of the time since then, and maybe it was just that nobody listened to him.

“He was aware DNA evidence existed but my colleague decided it was the ideal case to take forward, particularly when we’re looking at old samples because science has moved on fantastically in the last few years.”