Authors: Paul Britton
The early witnesses for the Crown were people who had been on Wimbledon Common at the time of the murder and also neighbours and acquaintances of Mr Stagg. The prosecution argued that Stagg’s alibi about being at home asleep on his sofa could be shredded. A neighbour Mrs Susan Gale remembered seeing him at about 8.50 a.m. when she returned home from the common after walking her two dogs. She spotted him near the A3 underpass, close to where Stagg later spoke to the policeman, and she remembered that he was wearing some sort of black ‘bum bag’ around his waist.
Jane Harriman, a solicitor’s wife, had been walking on the common that morning with her four children and family dogs. She walked the same route as Rachel only a few minutes earlier. Near a small wood she noticed a man walking towards her who she described as being in his late twenties or early thirties, about five foot ten inches tall, with close-cropped dark brown hair, wearing a white t-shirt and dark trousers and clutching a dark-coloured sports bag. They passed each other going in opposite directions and the man appeared to turn his head sharply, hiding his features.
Mrs Harriman continued walking with her children until they reached Curling Pond where they sat for a while. On the far side of the pond she noticed a woman walking a dog into the trees and a few minutes later the man who had passed her earlier took the same path, almost as if following the woman.
Something about his behaviour concerned Mrs Harriman. After several minutes the man appeared again, retracing his route. Now he appeared to have a thin belt around his waist, over his t-shirt.
As she led her children back towards the Windmill carpark, Mrs Harriman probably passed within twenty-five yards of where Rachel Nickell already lay dead in the grass. She was able to provide police with a very clear description of the man she had seen by Curling Pond and had helped compile the artist’s impression shown on Crimewatch UK.
After Stagg’s first arrest, she had picked him out of ten men in an ID parade as being the man she had seen on the common that morning at ten minutes past ten. She had absolutely no doubt.
Another witness, Mrs Amanda Phelan, had also given a description of a man she saw washing his hands in a stream just after 10.30 a.m. She described him as acting suspiciously and thought he might have been wearing a cream or white sweater and blue jeans. Mrs Phelan did not pick out Stagg in an identity parade and neither did Pauline Fleming who told the court that she had seen a man walking near Curling Pond at about 9.30 a.m. carrying a dark bag in his right hand.
Various local traders including a butcher and a newsagent recalled seeing Stagg that day and described him as being quite excited as he talked about the discovery of a body on the common. Having known him for years, they described Colin as a loner who seemed more comfortable in the company of animals than people.
Cheryl Lewis, a friend and neighbour from Ibsley Gardens, recalled a conversation she had with Stagg after his first arrest. He had described being shown photographs of Rachel which made it look as if her head had been removed from her body and then placed back on her shoulders and that she was lying in a foetal position. He also admitted to having seen Rachel before on the common, sunbathing by a pond.
Then it was my turn. When I teach my psychology students court reporting skills, I try to help them understand that when they are cross-examined they need to have an idea of where the questioner is trying to take them. Every good barrister will at times seem to go round the houses and appear to have no clear logic to their questions. But they do have a plan and it’s important to see it early so as not to be overwhelmed or to be led into agreeing with a suggested answer to a question that you know is not quite what you wanted to say.
Jim Sturman, for the defence, is a very fine lawyer and he set out his stall early. He aimed to discredit me and therefore, he hoped, the entire covert operation. If he couldn’t cast doubt on my professional qualifications, he would attack offender profiling and, if necessary, the entire field of psychology and psychologists. Not surprisingly, it made for an interesting two days in the witness box.
The heart of my evidence concerned the integrity and purity of the covert operation, both in its design and execution, and also my finding that Colin Stagg’s sexuality was indistinguishable from the sexual deviancy analysis I had drawn up for the unidentified killer of Rachel Nickell. This was such a rare kind of sexual deviance that the chances of two people sharing these characteristics and being in the same place at the same time, other than in a special hospital or prison, were extremely small. More importantly, his behaviour during the course of the covert operation had been exactly as predicted for this very unusual person.
Not surprisingly, Mr Sturman took a more cynical view of my findings, calling them ‘speculative and unsupported’ by anything other than my instincts.
He asked me whether Colin Stagg was mentally ill.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never examined him,’ I replied.
Mr Sturman said that if I hadn’t examined Mr Stagg, how could I draw any positive conclusions? Did he suffer from any abnormality within the terms of the Mental Health Act of 1974?
‘I don’t know.’
He was trying to draw me into giving clinical opinions that he knew I could only properly give if I had examined Stagg. I think he also hoped I might make the mistake of bolstering my statement with a little extra and go beyond what I could safely say.
‘How many murders of young women in broad daylight with a young child have you analysed in your career, Mr Britton?’
‘None,’ I said. It was a fatuous question. I might just as easily have asked him how many people he had defended who were alleged to have stabbed a woman forty-nine times? My conclusions are based on my knowledge of human behaviour and experience of having worked with psychological dysfunction of different sorts.
The questioning was sharp and aggressive, but occasionally Mr Sturman tried a little too hard. During one exchange, he asked, ‘Mr Britton, was this an “overkill” murder?’
(He clearly hoped that I’d never heard of the term, or would agree with him.)
‘When you say “overkill”, do you mean that in the sense used by the FBI?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘That’s where they say that when a certain number of stab wounds are inflicted, twenty I think, then the assailant must have known the victim?’
Sturman said, ‘That is correct, when there are twenty or more stab wounds the victim knew their assailant.’
(Rachel had been stabbed forty-nine times and Stagg was thought to be a stranger to her.)
I replied, The notion that when someone has twenty stab wounds then they knew their murderer, but if they only have nineteen then they didn’t, is not a view that we think is particularly helpful here in the United Kingdom.’
Not surprisingly, Sturman dropped this line of questioning.
Taken over the covert operation in detail, I explained how it had been specifically designed to present the subject with a series of ladders that they would have to climb in a conceptual sense, rather than creating a slippery slope that a vulnerable person would inexorably slide down should they be pushed.
Sturman asked me if I thought Stagg would have said anything to Lizzie James in the hope of losing his virginity?
I told him that I saw nothing in either the correspondence or transcripts, or indeed anything else concerned with Mr Stagg, which indicated otherwise than that the fantasies were genuinely held.
How many people were likely to have responded to Lizzie James in the same way?
‘I would say the proportion that would produce the fantasies, the detail, the intensity, the aggression and who could give precise knowledge of the disposition of the body of Rachel Nickell would be vanishingly [sic] small.’
The cut and thrust continued. Sturman wanted to know how I could make such judgements and I explained my clinical work and experience treating sexual dysfunctions. I agreed that within Stagg’s correspondence there had been no fantasy that mentioned anal sex or killing anyone.
Even so, the sexual frenzy was clearly evident and I believed that these activities could have led to the death of the participant. Similarly, Stagg had reported sexual excitement at the contemplation of just such an attack as that on Rachel Nickell.
When I finally stepped down from the witness box, I felt exhausted. The committal hearing continued with evidence from Dr Richard Shepherd, the Home Office pathologist, Lizzie James, who appeared behind a wooden screen because of the nature of her undercover work, and finally Keith Pedder.
The expected fireworks when Lizzie took the stand didn’t occur. Jim Sturman had perhaps decided by then to keep his powder dry should the case be sent to trial. He questioned Pedder on what other lines of inquiry had been followed up, suggesting that Stagg had been targeted from an early stage and the police had stopped looking for other suspects. Pedder explained how all potential avenues had been followed up, including a visit to Italy to visit a gravedigger who had worked at nearby Putney Cemetery at the time of the murder.
In his summing up, Sturman launched a scathing attack on the entire operation, claiming that it preyed on Colin Stagg’s sexual immaturity and desperation to lose his virginity. He was so frustrated and embarrassed by this he would have written anything to Lizzie if he thought it would get her into bed.
According to Sturman, Lizzie’s letters were come-ons contrived to have Stagg invent wilder and wilder fantasies. She had portrayed herself as a woman who wanted to be dominated and humiliated and he had simply picked up on this and given her what she wanted. My evidence, he argued, was entirely speculative and unsupported by anything other than my own intuition. I had no medical qualifications and had ‘guessed’ at Stagg’s sexual behaviour.
‘We simply do not know what lunatic was loose on the common that day. Mr Britton is trying to prove possible guilt by giving an opinion. Not one single case can the prosecution quote in which a psychologist has pronounced guilt. You are being asked to create legal history.’
I hadn’t pronounced ‘guilt’ on Colin Stagg. I had simply said that his behaviour patterns and fantasies were indistinguishable from those I predicted of the killer. Bill Boyce argued that I was a respected clinical and forensic psychologist with many years’ experience. He said the jury should be given the opportunity to hear all of the evidence and then make up their minds if Colin Stagg was a murderer or a victim of his own fantasies.
After eleven days of evidence and submissions, Mr Terry English concluded that while the defence argument had attractions, these affected the weight to be attached to the evidence rather than its admissibility. He committed Colin Stagg for trial. Mr Sturman immediately made a new application for bail, arguing that the prosecution case had just limped through. Mr English rejected this suggestion and refused bail.
It rained in the morning, hard sheets that drummed on the plastic jackets and hoods of those who were digging. At first the neighbours paid little attention, assuming that perhaps a pipe had burst or a drain was blocked. It was simply the men from the water board fixing a problem at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.
For two days police officers in Wellington boots and dark overalls slowly removed layer after layer of the sodden soil from the back garden. Shielded by fir trees and the red-brick wall of the neighbouring Seventh Day Adventist Church, they carved out the dark black clay, first with a mechanical digger and then by hand, working into the night as the arc lights threw disturbing shadows on the mounds of earth.
The first bone found was only three inches long and proved to be that of a small animal.
Three paragraphs in the Daily Mail on Saturday 26 February, 1994, finally revealed the reason for the search.
GARDEN SEARCHED FOR LOST DAUGHTER
A couple were under arrest last night as police dug up their back garden in a search for their missing daughter.
Heather West vanished about seven years ago when she was sixteen, but her parents Frederick West, 52, and Rosemary, 40, never reported her missing. They say she left home of her own volition.
The couple were taken to Gloucester police station for questioning. The search at the semi-detached house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, is expected to continue today.
There is something quite incongruous about Gloucester; it’s almost like a piece of England’s industrial belt that has floated off like an iceberg from the Midlands and settled in the middle of beautiful rolling hills in the West Country. Strongly working class, with a large transient population, it has some of the hallmarks of a country town and others that are more suggestive of an industrial city struggling to recapture its past glory.
Cromwell Street is at the heart of bedsit land where Edwardian terraces, many converted into flats, line the narrow streets and from the windows and open doorways mothers watch their children playing on the footpaths.
Number 25 is a flat-faced, end-of-terrace house with a pebble-dash front and freshly painted green windows. Faded daisy patterns decorated the net curtains and a lucky horseshoe hung above the front door. At the neighbouring church, built from warm new brick, a notice began, ‘Is there hope for our world?’
After three days of digging, the police had found nothing but pressed on, working mainly on their hands and knees, clawing at the earth. They were tired and back-sore by the time one of the trowels struck a hard object - a human skull embedded in the clay.
The man entrusted with heading the investigation, Detective Superintendent John Bennett, was quickly becoming an old friend. He met me at the front desk of Gloucester Police Station and immediately chided me for being late with my written report for the coroner’s court on a case involving a man found with a knife sticking in his chest at Newton, near Stroud. Initially, police set up a major murder inquiry with a Ł10,000 reward, but having looked closely at aspects of the victim’s life and personality, I advised Bennett that I didn’t think it necessary to look for a killer - the wound had been self-inflicted.