Authors: Paul Britton
‘He was always calm and quiet,’ another trainee Colin Underwood told the local newspaper. ‘Sometimes people lose their temper if someone else accidentally hurts them, but Paul wouldn’t. He was always in control of himself and accepted it as part of the game.’
Baker telephoned me later that evening and told me about the suspect.
‘He’s an exact fit for the description you gave us. We’re getting a warrant to search his house.’
‘Remember what I said to you after Caroline’s murder,’ I said. ‘If he’s your man, then I think you’re going to find knives, pornography and a lot of black magic paraphernalia … that sort of thing.’
Baker hadn’t forgotten. ‘Listen, I’ve got another favour to ask. In the light of what you told me about the killer’s motivation, I want you to talk to some of the other lads, particularly the interviewing officers. I want you to help them understand what they’re dealing with.’
‘When did you have in mind?’
‘Now. That’s police work for you.’
On the drive to Blackbird Lane Police Station, I kept asking myself why one of the most senior detectives in the county would come to a rather modestly placed psychologist and ask for help with interrogating a suspect? Interviewing is at the heart of what they do and my knowledge of their methods was slight.
As I crawled through the roundabouts on the outskirts of Leicester, I began to think in terms of my clinical work. If I had Paul Bostock in my consulting room for assessment, the first task would be to take his history, and to do that I’d have to build a rapport with him. Not everyone wants to revisit their past and have their deepest secrets unlocked. Some fight against it or have totally blocked out the events at the heart of their problem. To overcome this requires a particular interview strategy that slowly draws back the veil.
This is all I could offer the police, I thought, along with an understanding of the psychosexual functioning of the killer and the nature of his deviation and sexual fantasies.
At the police station I was ushered into a large room in which half a dozen detectives sat casually, some with shirt sleeves rolled up, jackets slung on chairs and elbows resting on the table. I’d met some of them already but still felt self-conscious as Baker made the introductions and told me the boys were ‘eerily impressed’ by how accurate my description had been. There was no sense of me bruising any egos despite being an outsider. It said a lot for the admiration and respect they held for David Baker; if I was OK with him, I was OK with them.
Everybody in the room was convinced that Bostock was their man, particularly following the search of his parents’ house. A collection of knives were found in his bedroom, displayed alongside other weapons such as swords, guns and kung fu stars. The walls were plastered with posters and drawings, some of which he’d done himself, which included black magic symbols and bondage scenes with topless women trussed up and being tortured. One of the symbols matched that found near to Caroline Osborne’s body. Detectives had also found a large number of violent comics and magazines.
Baker explained to me the importance of tying up every loose-end. After so much work, they couldn’t afford to see a guilty man walk free at some later date because something had been overlooked or correct procedure hadn’t been followed. Equally, he said it was important that an innocent man was not tricked or pressurized into making a false admission.
When it was my turn to talk, I began by describing the nature of sexual dysfunction and sexual deviation, much as I’d first explained it to Baker. I spoke about the patterns of how people develop, how they become who they are and the psychological defences they build to protect them from seeing themselves as they truly are.
‘Tell me about the early interviews,’ I asked.
‘Well, he’s not rolling over,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Ian Leacy in a gruff voice. ‘To begin with I couldn’t decide if he was a fucking moron or a genius. Now? Well, I don’t think he’s being deliberately uncooperative but whenever we get close to the big questions he clams up or says “No” or “I can’t remember.”’
‘What’s he like? How does he hold himself?’
‘He’s not cocky or aggressive, if that’s what you mean. He says he wants to help. He keeps asking about his mum and dad. To be honest, I think he’s frightened.’
I thought about this. ‘OK, it’s possible that he’s blacked it out and literally can’t remember, but I doubt it. He knows what he’s done. This isn’t a person who on a single occasion was overwhelmed and committed a murder - he’s been out there twice. At the same time, he’s been interviewed before and managed to avoid detection. It means that he’s built up a certain amount of face and image which makes it harder for him to now tell a different story.’
Now I had to construct a strategy and simultaneously not tread on any toes. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea of how you conduct interviews. You’re the experts. I operate entirely on my knowledge of how the human mind works.
From what you’ve told me, this man isn’t going to be a triumphant advocate of sadistic deviancy. He’s managed to get away with this for a long while without alerting those around him, which suggests that in ordinary company he’ll tend to repudiate that sort of behaviour and show horror.
‘He’s not going to sit there and think, “I know who I am and I know what I’ve done and I’m going to hold these people out.” He possibly can’t acknowledge what he did to these women or why he did it; he can’t face the feelings of shame and judgement he thinks he’s going to get, particularly from his family, so he’s recoiling from talking about what happened.’
Baker said, ‘So how do we go forward?’
‘Most importantly, you prepare, prepare and prepare. The interviewers have to know everything there is to know about the offence, the victims and the suspect. You have to make it easy for him to talk to you and treat him as though he genuinely wants to tell you what happened, but is finding it emotionally difficult. Don’t be judgemental, confrontational or show any repugnance.’
I began to lay out a strategy similar to one that I used in my consulting room when dealing with patients who recoiled from revealing incidents in their past.
‘Imagine the truth is at the centre of a series of concentric circles. You can’t go straight to the heart - the suspect won’t let you - so you begin way off and talk about family, his early life, school holidays and friends. Get him used to talking about these things in fine detail so that later, when you get close to the murders, you don’t suddenly have to change gear from talking in general terms to fine detail. The discontinuity will throw him.
‘As you do this, a rapport is building and he comes to feel good about you. He comes to know he’s safe. He still knows there’s a consequence, but he doesn’t think you’ll turn on him and call him an animal or a monster. Instead you want to understand what happened and how it came about.
‘When he’s comfortable talking about the minutiae of relationships and how things felt, you take him a step further, moving him closer and closer to the week and the day and the hour that Caroline Osborne was killed.
‘When you get too close he’ll tell you, “I don’t know”, or “I wasn’t there”, or “I can’t remember”. You can batter on that door but he’ll push back even more strongly. Give it a rest, have a break and return later. This time backtrack a little, letting him go over old territory before bringing him back again. You must take him through the day in the most minute detail - what time did you leave? Did you turn left or right? Were your hands in your pockets, do you think?
‘Then let him pick up the story and you’ll find that he goes a little further and admits, “Yes, I might have seen her on the towpath.”
‘Don’t look surprised. Don’t say, “Hey, hold on, you denied that before.” Instead, you say, “OK, that’s fine. Where exactly was she standing? What was she wearing?”
‘And so you move on until you reach another point where he can’t remember or doesn’t know. Don’t batter on the door, pull back again and employ exactly the same approach. Don’t say, “Well, this is getting us nowhere.” Tell him, “Oh well, we’ve done very well today, let’s have a break, shall we?”’
It was also very important that the interviewers explain the nature of deviant sexuality to Bostock. They had to help him know that he wasn’t alone, that other people understood. I said, ‘Tell him you know it’s hard for him but you’ve heard such things before and he’s not the first to have such feelings, even if he finds it hard to understand them.’
As they came closer and closer to the truth, the barriers would get bigger until eventually they reached a point where suddenly they crashed through one and the interview went straight to the heart. It happens in a rush because finally everything spills out in a sense of relief. ‘Don’t stop him, let hill talk freely. Later, you can take him back and ask him specific evidential questions.
‘After you’ve exhausted this, you can question the parts of his account that don’t ring true. Maybe he’s saying, “I was there, I spoke to her, I killed her but I didn’t do the things you say, not like that.”
‘Now you can be more confrontational and challenging. He won’t want to mention the sadistic or cruel acts - he doesn’t want anyone to know - but you need the precise details.’
For the next few days I listened to the interview tapes, reviewing the questions and answers. Slowly, each of the barriers was broken down and Paul Bostock was taken back to Aylestone Meadows on that warm summer evening in 1983 when he met Caroline Osborne and later to the bitterly cold afternoon when he spied Amanda Weedon beside Gilroes Cemetery. As it turned out, he had been visiting Caroline’s grave that day and as he left, he saw the young nurse. Why did he choose her?
‘Because she had red shoes,’ he said.
In June 1986, Bostock pleaded guilty to both murders at Leicester Crown Court and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His barrister released several letters that his client had written to a girlfriend while in prison awaiting trial. One of them said:
In those few moments I destroyed not only everything I have tried to be but I have ruined my victims’ family’s lives, my family’s life and the life I planned for us together.
The torment, the realisation of what I am guilty of, means that I can’t look my parents in the eye, I can’t look you in the eye, I can’t face myself and I can hardly look at the detectives. If there was anything that could change what I have done, I would do it.
By the time the trial was held, we had moved to a new house in a tiny village in Leicestershire which felt positively rural. Within a few minutes walk in any direction there were fields, woodland, hedgerows and streams. I did some of my best thinking on long afternoon walks, letting Jess run and watching the light fade.
The house was quite modern and had enough space for an office - a useful extra when I didn’t know how my career would develop with the NHS.
The Bostock case had been a one-off, I thought, but it did answer my questions about the possible benefits of using a psychological approach to analyse a crime. It could clearly be used to narrow down the number of potential suspects and allow investigators to effectively focus their resources. By saying the offender was male and aged between his mid-teens and early twenties, it dramatically reduced the number of potential suspects. By saying he was unmarried, living at home with a detailed local knowledge, it narrowed the number again. Then it was possible to sharpen the focus still more by indicating the manual nature of his work, his athleticism and comfort with knives.
I couldn’t tell the police Paul Bostock’s name or his address, but I knew things about how he lived, what went on inside his mind and his motivation.
The heart of my work had always been the assessment and treatment of people who were damaged by unfortunate events in their lives - victims rather than perpetrators. By 1986, I found myself seeing patients wall to wall, morning to evening, one every hour. Perhaps not surprisingly the extent of the challenge diminished over time, although the impact of their pain on me didn’t.
At about this time, I found my clinical work taking on a more pronounced forensic (crime-related) strand. There was nothing to flag this change but my consulting room seemed to contain a growing number of patients who had committed crimes or were on the verge of doing so; as well as the victims of their actions.
This had started off as the occasional referral growing out of my work in the sexual dysfunction clinic at Leicester General. For example, a local GP would write, saying, ‘Dear Paul, I have a patient who seems to fit most of the criteria for retarded ejaculation. Unfortunately, he also complains of feeling sexually attracted to his sister’s children. He says that nothing has happened yet, but obviously I would appreciate it if you could arrange to examine him quickly.’
Other cases were court referrals of offenders who had perhaps been charged with indecent exposure, shoplifting or criminal damage. It might be the defence solicitor looking to find something in mitigation or the magistrates trying to understand what they were dealing with before passing sentence. There were also people who hurt themselves sexually and others who had worrying urges and wanted help before they acted upon them.
Working with forensic patients requires a completely different mental-set to non-forensic work because rather than having a natural affinity with a person in trouble, you first have to overcome the realization that the person sitting opposite might have urges to do terrible things. Your first instinct is to be harsh with them instead of automatically wanting to help someone in need.
That summer I became aware that the post as head of the Regional Forensic Psychology Service had fallen vacant. For the first time I thought seriously about how far I wanted to go in this direction. It certainly meant a more highly graded post, with more money, but also a move away from the broad ranging clinical work that I so enjoyed.
It meant providing a full-time in-patient service for people who were at the least attractive end of the clinical spectrum - the most dangerous, depraved and damaged minds in the system would finish up at my door. Did I want to spend all of my working life immersed in their horrible crimes and sharing the pain of their victims?