Authors: Paul Britton
At this stage it was virtually impossible to say which details were important to me and which were less so. I simply gathered them all so that I could eventually sort the wheat from the chaff. In the meantime, I wanted to visit the flat. We drove and parked the car in front of a small, low-rise development of council flats in a quiet cul-de-sac. A steep flight of concrete steps descended from the road along the side of the building to the front door of number la. Below this, the ground fell sharply away into the gardens of several houses and then rose again to form a grassy ridge upon which a half-dozen high-rise apartment blocks overlooked Samantha’s flat and Heathfield Terrace.
A large door of wood and steel had been installed by the police. It took a strong shoulder to open it and as light spilled into the hall I saw the large bloodstain on the carpet between the doorways of the bedroom on the left and kitchen on the right. A nearby cupboard had blood splatters draining down the door, but the drips were quite thin and opaque as if they might have fallen from wet hands, I thought.
It was a small flat, quite cluttered and lacking storage space but even though things were stacked in corners and behind doors there was a neatness and purpose to it. Clothing still hung on the radiators and none appeared to have been knocked down in a struggle. Similarly, there was little evidence of searching or robbery.
Going from room to room, I made a rough sketch of the layout and made a note of which windows were locked and where things were found. Was anything disturbed on the window-sills? Is anything out of place, even something as seemingly insignificant as the plug hanging from a chain in the bathroom?
Entering the bedroom, I saw a child’s bunk bed in the left-hand corner and beneath it, at right angles, was a full-size mattress with the duvet thrown back as if someone might have just got out of bed. This is where Samantha had slept. Jazmine’s toys were everywhere, lining the window-sills, spilling out of the corners and cupboards and weighing down the shelves.
The drag marks in the hallway showed how Samantha’s body had been moved by the ankles and put in front of the gas heater in the lounge room with a large cushion under her hips. A mattress in one corner of the room was possibly a spare bed. The large bamboo blind had been rolled down over the window and door to the balcony - something which Samantha never bothered to do, according to neighbours.
In the kitchen, clothing and linen had been taken from cupboards and lay scattered across the floor. This is where the footprint had been found along with traces of blood in the kitchen sink where the killer had possibly cleaned himself. The microwave door was open and there were cups on the bench. A knife was missing from its block and another faced the wrong way.
‘How do you think he got in?’ I asked. Banks had seen the flat before and would sooner have been outside where he could smoke. ‘The same way we did,’ he said. ‘I think he probably conned his way in the front door. Either that or it was someone she knew. There’s no sign of forced entry, he attacked her in the hall, it makes sense.’
I walked outside, looking up at the balcony, judging the height. Then I turned and looked across at the grassy bank overlooking the rear of Heathfield Terrace and weighed up the potentials.
Banks lit a cigarette. ‘Why don’t you think she let him in?’
‘Maybe she did. I just think this sort of man makes his own arrangements.’
Back at the station I began collecting copies of statements, photographs and the postmortem reports. It quickly emerged that Banks had another reason for suspecting that Samantha had known her killer and perhaps been expecting him. A neighbour living upstairs had earlier reported her to social services because of men visiting at odd hours.
‘We think she might have been on the game,’ he said, riffling through a bundle of papers on his desk. ‘Not big-time, on the fringes - and only just starting out.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Among her papers we found some letters and newspaper ads. The first few suggest she was lonely and looking for friends.’ He handed me a photocopied page of classified ads from the Greenwich and Eltham Mercury. One ad had been circled: ‘Single mother, 27, needs friends. I’m an honest, reliable, artistic ex-hippy who smokes roll-ups and doesn’t eat meat.’
‘That was in early 1993,’ said Banks. ‘The ads changed later in the year. She could have been short of money. Some of them were published and others were refused. We found the draft copies where she worked out the wording.’
He showed me a classified ad from the London Weekly Advertiser, dated 8-14 September:
‘Up-market, tall, erotic blonde escort, 27, and aching to hear from you generous men. Just tell me what you want. All letters answered.’
Another in a contacts magazine read: ‘Young sexy long-legged blonde requires a nice gentleman with spare cash to pay small child’s school fees in return for regular, discreet, no strings, fun liaisons. Cannot accommodate. Very genuine.’
She had also written to a photographic and video magazine: ‘Deliciously hot and sensual blonde female model, 26, available to amateur and professional photographers for well paid work. No time wasters.’
The ads appeared in a number of London free-sheets and newspapers and, according to friends, resulted in Samantha receiving several disturbing phone calls. Banks had a team of detectives checking telephone records and addresses in a bid to trace any of the men who contacted her. There was also evidence that Samantha occasionally answered advertisements she read in the personal columns from men seeking partners.
Certain things that I had seen at the flat now began to make sense, but before I could be sure, I needed to learn more about Samantha and her lifestyle. Banks filled in some of the details and promised to send me a statement from her mother, Margaret Morrison, who was under sedation suffering from shock.
Samantha, the daughter of an artist, had been born in Dundee in Scotland but spent much of her early life in London and nearby Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. Her father had died of lung cancer when Samantha was fourteen years old and she and her mother moved back to Scotland. Well-spoken and well-educated, she showed her father’s artistic flair and dreamed of going to art school. But she found life in Scotland rather restricting after London. Having an English accent didn’t help and she struggled to make friends.
Leaving school disillusioned and unhappy, she rebelled against her conventional middle-class background and took to the road as a New Age traveller, spending time in various hippy communes and ‘peace convoys’. She was a restless free spirit, almost like a sixties flower child who dabbled in various drugs, wore flowing clothes and let her hair grow long.
When Samantha became pregnant by a fellow traveller, she wrote to her mother giving his qualifications - well-educated, father a barrister, mother a teacher - as if to say that this was the father she desired for her child, but it was never on the cards that they were going to be a couple.
Jazmine was born in London and Margaret travelled down to help find Samantha somewhere to live. She settled down in the flat in Plumstead and the baby transformed her life. She devoted herself entirely to Jazmine, sparing no expense and spending her days taking her on outings and playing on a patch of lawn outside the flat. Apart from the abundance of toys, there were paintings and drawings by Jazmine on almost every door and wall.
Samantha’s free-wheeling lifestyle had changed with motherhood, although she still wore flowing dresses, sunbathed topless in the back garden and walked around semi-dressed without drawing the blinds or locking the balcony door.
She talked to her mother on the telephone every Sunday and took Jazmine to Scotland for holidays. Mrs Morrison, who had remarried, had sent her Ł1,000 to pay for the holiday to the Gambia because she sensed that Samantha needed cheering up.
But why would a woman so committed to her child and who had a steady boyfriend and a history of free and open relationships be meeting people for money? And where was the evidence of it? The answer was to be found in Jazmine’s room. Whereas the rest of the council flat was extremely modest and in need of paint and wallpaper, the bedroom looked like Santa’s grotto filled with toys and games. According to her boyfriend, Samantha had been prepared to make any sacrifice for Jazmine, even going hungry to buy her toys.
She was concerned about her daughter’s education and talked of moving to an area with better schools. Living on single mother benefits and cheques from her mother, she sometimes became depressed about her finances. Initially, she considered modelling and had a portfolio of portraits taken. She also answered ads in magazines from photographers looking for new talent. When these came to nothing, she tried the personal columns.
Here was a naive young woman, I thought, who probably didn’t fully understand the rapaciousness of what she was exploring. She was the sort of person who might easily have been seduced or steered towards the seedier areas of photography without being streetwise enough to realize the dangers.
Equally, I felt that she hadn’t seriously embraced prostitution. If so, the flat would have shown the trappings of the profits. Samantha was more than attractive enough to find men who would take care of her and Jazmine, but she lived in a modest flat, without a bedroom of her own. She had ordinary friends and inexpensive clothes; and her mother had provided the money for the Gambian holiday. All of this told me that she couldn’t really be classed as a prostitute because she didn’t have the street wisdom or ruthlessness to capitalize on her looks to make money. I think she was an idealist who had rather glossy romantic aspirations of her future and imagined falling in love, marrying a successful man and giving Jazmine the best upbringing possible.
There is not a single scene of crime which I have seen that I cannot remember in every haunting detail. They stay with me, as if engraved into my mind and I can’t always control when they come back into full focus. Samantha and Jazmine were like that. Over the next week, their images flashed back to me no matter how hard I tried to shut them out.
At night when I sat in my study reviewing the details, I didn’t mind the intrusions, but it was harder when they visited during a case conference at Arnold Lodge or a prison interview. A difficult crime can sometimes push away the rest of my life. There might be a birthday celebration at home and, amid the laughter and gaiety, the reality of a murder comes back to me and steals some of the joy away.
This work has changed me over the past fifteen years. Others around me can see the differences, although I’m not sure how much is to do with growing older and how much can be attributed to the nature of the material I deal with each day. If you look at me now, I am a relatively quiet person. I’ve always been reserved but I suspect that I was more outgoing and capable of striking up friendships a decade ago. Most people would say that I laughed more back then and mixed more easily.
Emma and Ian tease me about my unadventurous nature. We’ve lived in the same village for ten years and I know the name of the neighbours on one side but not the other. The local pub is less than a hundred yards away and I’ve been perhaps a dozen times, mostly dragged there by Ian. Emma used to joke that I’d get lost going to the local postbox.
I don’t see myself as being unsociable or a loner. Unfortunately, the reality of my life is that I spend most of it in other people’s depraved, dangerous or wounded minds so that when I get home and sit in a familiar armchair, I simply want to turn off for a while, draw my family close and try to forget.
I have no doubt that I draw tremendous strength from my faith. I know many people will think, how the hell can you believe in God when you’ve seen such dreadful things? I struggle to answer such a question, but faith doesn’t have to be explained or defended.
There was a time when I had my doubts and, equally, if I had the chance to do it again, I’m not sure I would have chosen the same pathway and become a forensic psychologist; not if I’d realized the depth of the pain and disquiet. This may sound like self-pity, but it isn’t meant to be. These are simply the kind of thoughts that occur to me at one o’clock in the morning, sitting at my desk, staring at the postmortem pictures of a four-year-old girl.
At the same time, the pain is leavened with a cold anger that says, ‘Do whatever it takes, but get whoever did this off the streets.’ Somewhere in between these two feelings, I find my balance.
Questions kept forming as I looked at the lividity marks on Jazmine’s body, indicating where the pull of gravity had caused the blood to settle in the lowest points of her body after death. She had obviously been found lying on her face but other lividity patterns indicated that for some time after death she was in a slightly different position. Why had she been moved?
Other things spoke to me. I noticed her underpants were stained with blood from the sexual assault in such a way as to mean they were replaced afterwards. Her panties were also stained with urine but the flow was wrong for it to have happened in precisely the position in which she had been found. In all likelihood she lost bladder control during the attack and the staining indicated she had probably been sitting up when it happened. Sadly, this clearly indicated that there had been a more complex interaction with the killer who hadn’t simply assaulted her as she lay in bed and then smothered her with a pillow.
Following the photographic sequence down the hall and into the lounge, I saw Samantha with her arms stretched out above her head, with her buttocks supported by a large cushion. She wore a bloodstained bathrobe which had three knife-holes over the right shoulder, dark blue socks and a bra. Her upper body and face were covered with the robe and various pieces of linen and clothing taken from the kitchen.
One by one the various materials covering her had been removed and photographs taken. He had cut through her body wall and into the internal cavity from the base of her neck to her pubic bone with a series of jagged incisions and then across her torso before her chest cavity was peeled open with enough force to snap the ribcage.