This Body of Death (18 page)

The West Town Road Arcade’s CCTV tapes from that day are grainy, making absolute identification of the boys who took John Dresser impossible, should such identification rely on the tapes alone. Indeed, had it not been for Michael Spargo’s overlarge mustard anorak, there is a chance that John’s abductors might have gone unapprehended. But enough people had seen the three boys and enough people were willing to come forward and identify them that the tapes consequently act as confirmation of their identities.

The films show John Dresser walking away quite willingly with the boys, as if he knows them. As they near the arcade exit, Ian Barker takes John’s other hand and he and Reggie swing the child between them, perhaps in the promise of more play to come. While they walk, Michael catches them up with a childlike skip and hop, and he seems to offer the toddler some of the French fries he’s been eating. This offer of food to a child who was waiting hungrily for his lunch appears to have been what kept John Dresser happy to go with them, at least at first.

It’s interesting to note that when the boys leave the Barriers, they do not do so by the exit that would take them to the Gallows, i.e., by the exit most familiar to them. Instead, they choose one of the lesser-used exits, as if they already have planned to do something with the toddler and wish to remain as unseen as possible when they make off with him.

In his third interview with the police, Ian Barker claims that their intention was just to “have a bit of fun” with John Dresser, while Michael Spargo says that he didn’t know “what them other two wanted with that baby,” a term (“the baby”) that Michael uses throughout his conversations with the police in reference to John Dresser. For his part, Reggie Arnold will not come close to discussing John Dresser until his fourth interview. Instead, he attempts to obfuscate, making repeated references to Ian Barker and his own confusion about “what he wanted that kitten for,” attempting to direct the course of the conversation on to his siblings, or assuring his mother—who was present for nearly all interviews—that he “didn’t nick nothing, never ever, Mum.”

Michael Spargo claims that he wanted to return the toddler to the shopping arcade once they had him outside the Barriers. “I told them we could drop him back inside, just leave the baby by the door or something, but they were the ones didn’t want to. I said we’d get into trouble for nicking him, wouldn’t we [note the objectifying use of
nicking
, as if John Dresser were something they’d pinched from a shop] but they called me a wanker and asked me did I want to grass them up, then.”

Whether this actually happened remains open to doubt as neither of the other two boys refers to Michael having second thoughts. And later nearly every witness—who came to be known collectively as the Twenty-Five—confirms that their sightings of the boys involved all three of them and John Dresser, and all three of them seemed to be actively involved with the little boy.

Considering his past, it seems reasonable to conclude that Ian Barker was the one to suggest they see what would happen if they swung John Dresser as they had been doing but dropped him instead of landing him safely on his feet. This they did, releasing him at the apex of the swing and projecting him ahead of them at some speed, with the apparent and expected effect of John’s beginning to cry when he hit the pavement. This fall caused the first of the bruises to John’s bottom and, possibly, the first of the ultimately extensive damage done to his clothing.

With a clearly distressed toddler on their hands, the boys made their first attempt to settle him down by offering him the jam roll that Michael Spargo had taken from his home that morning. That John accepted it is clear not only from the extensive report of Dr. Miles Neff of the Home Office, but also from witness evidence, for it was at this point that the boys had their first encounter with someone who not only saw them with John Dresser but who also stopped to question them about him.

Trial transcripts show that when seventy-year-old Witness A (all witness names will be withheld from this document for their own protection) saw the boys, John was upset enough to concern her:

“I asked them what was wrong with that baby,” she says, “and one of them—I think it was the fat one [a reference to Reggie Arnold]—told me he’d fallen and banged his bum. Well, children do fall, don’t they? I didn’t think…I did offer to help. I offered them my handkerchief for his face ’cause he was crying so. But then the taller boy [referring to Ian Barker] said it was his baby brother and they were taking him home. I asked them how far they had to go and they said not far. Just over in Tideburn, they said. Well, as the baby began eating a jam roll they offered him, I couldn’t see there would be further trouble.”

She goes on to say that she asked the boys why they weren’t at school, and they told her school was finished for the day. This apparently mollified Witness A, who told them to “get the baby home then” because “he’s obviously wanting his mum.”

She doubtless was additionally mollified by the boys’ inspired use of Tideburn as their putative habitation. Tideburn was then and is now safely middle class to upper middle class. Had they said the Gallows—with all that saying the Gallows implied—her concerns might have been triggered.

Much has been made of the fact that the boys could have turned John Dresser over to Witness A at that moment, saying they’d found him wandering outside the Barriers. Indeed, much has been said of the fact that the boys had repeated moments when they could have handed John Dresser to an adult and gone on their way. That they didn’t suggests that somewhere along the line at least one of them was working on a larger plan. Either that or a larger plan had been earlier discussed among the three of them. But if this latter is the case, it is also something that not one of the boys has ever been willing to reveal.

The police were phoned once the CCTV tapes had been viewed by the Barriers’ head of security. By the time they arrived to look at the tapes themselves and to mount a search, however, John Dresser was approximately one mile away. In the company of Ian Barker, Michael Spargo, and Reggie Arnold, he had crossed two heavily trafficked roadways and he was both tired and hungry. He had fallen several more times, apparently, and had cut his cheek on a raised piece of the pavement.

It was becoming trying to be in his company, but still the boys did not release John Dresser to anyone. According to Michael Spargo’s fourth interview, it was Ian Barker who first kicked the toddler when he fell and it was Reggie Arnold who hauled the little boy back on his feet and began to drag him. John Dresser was apparently quite hysterical at this point, but this appears to have caused passersby to believe more firmly in the tale told by the boys that they were attempting to take “my little brother” home. Whose little brother John Dresser supposedly was was a detail that became a shifting target, dependent solely upon the speakers (Witnesses B, C, and D), and while Michael Spargo denies in every interview that he ever claimed John Dresser as a sibling, this assertion is contradicted by Witness E, a postal worker who encountered the boys midway to the Dawkins building site.

Witness E’s testimony has him asking the boys what’s wrong with the toddler, why’s he crying so, and what’s happened to his face?

“He said—this was the one in the yellow anorak, mind—that it was his brother and that Mum was doing the business with her boyfriend at the house and they were meant to keep the little ’un busy till she was finished. They said they’d walked a bit too far and could I drive them home in my van?”

This was, if anything, an inspired request. Surely the boys knew that Witness E would not be able to accommodate them. He was on his route, and even if that had not been the case, there was probably inadequate room within his vehicle. But the
fact
that this request had been made gave legitimacy to their story. Witness E reports that he “told them to take the tyke directly home, then, ’cause he was blubbing like nothing I ever seen and I got three of my own,” and the boys agreed to do this.

It appears possible that their intentions towards John Dresser, while inchoate when they first snatched him, began to develop with the consecutive string of successful lies they were able to tell about him, as if the easy belief of the witnesses whetted the boys’ appetite for abuse. Suffice it to say that they continued on their way, managing to walk the toddler more than two miles despite his protests and his cries of “Mummy” and “Da,” which were heard, and ignored, by more than one person.

Michael Spargo claims that during this period he asked again and again what they were going to do with John Dresser. “I told them we couldn’t take him home with us. I told them. I did,” the transcript of his fifth interview has him declaring. He also declares that it was at this point that he brought up the idea of leaving John at a police station. “I said we could leave him on the steps or something. We could leave him inside the door. I said his mum and dad’re going to be worried. They’re going to think something’s happened to him.”

Ian Barker, Michael says, declared that something
had
happened to the toddler. “He said, ‘Stupid git, something did happen.’ And he asked Reg did he think the baby’d make a splat when he hit the water.”

Was Ian considering the canal at that point? Possibly. But the fact of the matter was that the boys were nowhere near the Midlands Trans-Country Canal and they were not going to be able to get an exhausted John Dresser there unless they carried him, which they apparently did not wish to do. But had Ian Barker been harbouring a desire to inflict some sort of injury upon John Dresser in the environs of the canal, he had now been thwarted and John himself was the reason why.

John Dresser’s company becoming progressively more difficult, the boys made the decision to “lose the baby in a supermarket somewheres” according to Michael Spargo, because the entire affair had become “dead boring, innit.” There was no supermarket in the immediate vicinity, however, and the boys set out to find one. It was on their way that Ian, as Michael and Reggie report in separate interviews with the police, pointed out that in a shop they might be seen and even documented on CCTV. He indicated he knew of a much safer location. He led them to the Dawkins building site.

The site itself was a grand idea gone bad through loss of funding. Originally intended as three stylishly modern office blocks within “a lovely, parklike setting of trees, gardens, paths, and copious outdoor seating,” it had been intended to infuse money into the surrounding community in order to bolster a faltering economy. But poor management on the part of the contractor resulted in the project being called to a halt before the first tower was completed.

On the day that Ian Barker ushered his companions to the site, it had languished untouched for nineteen months. It was fenced by chain link, but it was not inaccessible. Although signage on the fence warned that the site was “under surveillance 24 hours a day” and that “trespassers and vandals will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” regular incursions into the property made by children and adolescents indicated otherwise.

It was a tempting area both for playing and for clandestine rendezvous. There were dozens of places to hide; heaps of earth offered launching pads for mountain bikers; discarded boards, tubes, and pipes could stand in for weapons in games of war; small chunks of concrete substituted nicely for hand grenades and bombs. While it was a dubious location in which “to lose the baby” if the boys intended someone to come across him and take him to the nearest police station, it was a perfect spot in which the rest of the day’s horrors could play out.