Authors: Paul Britton
Studying the crime-scene photographs, I kept tripping over more inconsistencies in Mr Wardell’s account. On the one hand he described elements of a carefully prepared crime, the masks, gloves, boiler suits and staccato commands, yet despite all this planning, police were asked to believe that the gang didn’t bring their own equipment to tie him up. Instead they had to find something and chose to look in the garage. They came across the yellow plastic ties that Gordon used in the garden. It was an unusual way to bind someone, I thought.
A photograph of the garage showed one or two of the ties just visible in one of the plastic shelving bins attached to the wall. Yet there were so many other more obvious things in the garage to bind someone with - material that was closer at hand and more effective. Not only had the gang ignored these things, they found the ties without causing any disturbance or signs of searching.
Similarly, I would have expected a semi-professional gang to tie someone up more effectively, with his hands behind his back, not in front, and a gag that wouldn’t allow him to utter a sound. Instead they wrapped a simple cloth around his head and brought the refuse sack holder from the garage. It was a nonsense. He could have been tied up to the table or the chairs; or his wrists and feet could have been bound together.
All of which begged the question - could Mr Wardell have staged the attack and used the ratchet-ties as DIY fasteners?
I came to the crime-scene photographs of Carol’s body. She’d been found lying face-up on the grass, wearing casual weekend clothes, with a sling-back blue sandal near her left foot. The strap was done up, just as it had been on the sandal found at the Woolwich. To lose one sandal in a struggle seemed possible, but to lose both in different locations began to stretch the imagination. There were no scuff marks or drag marks on the road or grass verge near Carol’s body. Equally, the sandal had no marks to indicate it had been dragged off her foot or along the ground. Postmortem lividity suggested that Carol hadn’t been wearing the sandal for any length of time after death.
I noted a question for the pathologist, ‘Can you put the sandals back on her feet at the same buckle setting as when they were found? Are they a good fit? Do they come off easily?’
I remembered something Wardell had said in his statement. He described how Carol normally wore her slippers around the house and kept a pair upstairs in the bedroom and downstairs beside her chair in the lounge. Surely on a Sunday evening, at home in front of the TV, she’d be wearing them? Why would a gang of brutal robbers have let her change into her sandals before taking her out to rob her own building society?
Finally, I studied the third ‘scene of crime’ - the Woolwich branch - and quickly realized that the raiders must have had a good knowledge of the security system. They had to get inside, blackout a security camera, move a desk to reach the video recorder that held the tape and then open the office safe - all probably done in darkness. Such knowledge was far too complex to have been interrogated from Carol. Either she had to be there or the gang already had an intimate knowledge.
On Monday 19 September, a week after the murder, police stopped cars and passers-by at three locations, trying to piece together Carol Wardell’s final hours. From 4.30 a.m. road blocks were set up at the lay-by, in Nuneaton town centre and also near her home. Later that morning, I was back at the incident room. Some joker had cut a large photograph of me from the Sunday papers and pinned it to the wall. The colours had been two-toned to make me look more Machiavellian.
The crime advisory team consisted of Bayliss, Gino Varriale, myself and the manager of the Intelligence cell.
Occasionally, we were joined by the assistant chief constable (Crime).
Gino, I soon realized, was the sort of officer central to the inquiry because he made sure things happened. As the SIO, Bayliss was responsible for the strategy and gave the orders but it was Gino who ensured that they were carried out.
As we began to review the case, every possible interpretation was examined. Little had been found to support Mr Wardell’s account apart from two pieces of information that hadn’t been corroborated. A neighbour, Sarah Harper, had reported that in the fortnight before Carol’s death, she’d seen a white transit-type van being driven along the road leading to Bonneville Close. Twice she saw it parked in the road and thought there were possibly two men inside. Another witness told of seeing a metallic silver or misty-green Austin Montego near the Woolwich early on Monday morning with several men inside.
These pieces of information could be vital or mean nothing at all. I had to ask myself, How far does it lead before the information falls down?
‘Gordon hasn’t been entirely honest about his perfect marriage,’ said Bayliss.
He had my full attention.
‘He’s been getting some on the side.’
‘An affair?’
‘Seeing prostitutes. We’ve got statements from two of them and the names of two more.’
Christine, a mother of three, had been seeing Wardell regularly for six or seven years after they met in the Hillfields red light area of Coventry. Paying up to Ł50 a time, Wardell liked to be driven to the open countryside, tied up with rope from the boot of his car and then to have his penis handled extremely roughly.
She’d last seen him three months earlier when Wardell had been driving a small Peugeot with soft toys in the back (possibly Carol’s car). He only had Ł15 on him which she accepted ‘out of kindness’ and then masturbated him and talked dirty for about five minutes.
Another prostitute, Jenny, had described being taken to Wardell’s house ‘somewhere towards Nuneaton’ during the day. Gordon had referred to his wife as ‘Her’ and said she was at work.
As police continued to delve into Wardell’s past, it emerged that seven years earlier a friend of Carol’s had told her that she had seen Gordon going into a pub of low repute in Coventry. Carol wouldn’t believe her and later challenged Gordon who denied it. The issue appeared to be forgotten.
Bayliss had managed to get the details of the teenage attack that had led to Wardell’s imprisonment. ‘Her name was Brenda Jane Hayes - the wife of Wardell’s geology teacher at Woodlands School in Coventry,’ he said.
‘When was it?’
‘June 1970. He was seventeen.’
I began reading. Wardell had telephoned Mrs Hayes at home during a weekend and introduced himself as one of her husband’s pupils. Brenda was surprised that a schoolboy had their home phone number which had only been connected the week before. Her husband Peter was away on a school field trip to Derbyshire and she was looking after their two young sons.
Wardell told her that he’d found a plant that Mr Hayes wanted and asked Brenda to collect it because he was on his bike and couldn’t manage it without help. She agreed and met the teenager on a country lane not far from where the family lived. Leaving her sons, aged five and four, in the back seat of the car she took a trowel and seed tray from the boot and followed Wardell a little way off the road, through into a small wooded area. Motioning her ahead of him, he then grabbed her from behind and put a sheath knife to her throat.
‘What do you want?’ she pleaded.
He said he was Paul Newman and wanted her money. Then he asked her to lie down on the ground so he could tie her hands. She refused so he tied them while she was standing. Brenda said that she had money at home, hoping Wardell would take her there. He led her to the car, stopping once and trying to force her to her knees. When she refused he yanked her arms up and kneed her in the back.
He forced Brenda into the passenger seat and drove off, ignoring the boys on the back seat. She pleaded with Wardell to let them go, promising to tell no-one, but he pulled into a gateway further along the road and hit her in the face. Then he sprayed de-icer in her eyes and put his hands up her skirt, tearing her panties. The eldest boy tried to protect his mother but Wardell swung a blow at him.
They set off again in the car and stopped in another gateway. This time Wardell got out of the driver’s seat and took up a position at the passenger doorway. He punctured the back tyre with his knife and then forced Brenda to move into the driver’s seat before stabbing her once in the throat and twice in the back of the neck.
As he stood back from the blood, she slammed the passenger door. He attacked it but Brenda managed to drive off and find a passing motorist. An ambulance was on the scene within six minutes but Brenda needed nine pints of blood in a transfusion and was extremely lucky to survive.
The entire incident had lasted forty-five minutes. Afterwards, Wardell fled on his bicycle and was arrested when the eldest son gave a detailed description. He was initially charged with attempted murder but this was eventually changed to grievous bodily harm. A Warwick court heard that the attack was wholly motivated by sex with a strong degree of fantasy. Wardell was said to have been gripped by a ‘Paul Newman infatuation’.
The alarm bells were ringing. Clearly, Gordon Wardell had once had a very serious problem and if it hadn’t been treated there was no reason to expect it had gone away. Although the precise nature of the sexual fantasy that underpinned the attack on Brenda Hayes wasn’t clear to me (I didn’t know what he wanted from her or if he brought the knife to control rather than stab), but it clearly showed a willingness to use potentially lethal physical violence and a fair degree of planning. He had to get Mrs Hayes’ phone number, make the call, entice her into the woods and bring a knife and rope with him.
That was twenty-four years ago, yet Wardell’s predilection for prostitutes and his uncommon sexual preferences showed that his sexually deviant interests were still in place and being covertly maintained. However, Wardell had put his marriage forward as being almost sacred and had talked of his profound distress at not having children. In similar vein, he portrayed himself as a successful business manager yet his career consisted primarily of temporary contracts and redundancies. For all his apparent promise, things never quite came to fruition for him. He blamed poor economic conditions for this, but I saw a man who exaggerated his own worth and abilities.
Certainly, his bosses at Veng UK were beginning to recognize this and described him as incompetent and disengaged from the actual work task. They were due to have a meeting to discuss his lack of progress in specific projects but Wardell chose that day to be sick. Quite clearly he ducked it and chose instead to spend the rest of the week at home and going to job interviews.
This use of deception had also emerged during discreet interviews with medical staff and others who had seen Mr Wardell after the murder. Paramedics who treated him at the house told detectives that he displayed none of the symptoms of trauma which would normally have been associated with such an ordeal such as increased blood pressure and pulse rate. At the hospital he had a normal appetite and was quiet and unemotional.
Others spoke of him being cold and unresponsive unless discussing his own injuries. At the same time, the physical pain he expressed seemed to be greater than his actual injuries and he continued to need sticks to walk although doctors could find no reason why he should.
When told of Carol’s murder, Wardell had asked whether she’d been badly hurt or interfered with sexually but hadn’t asked any questions since then about the progress of the inquiry.
There were various ways of understanding this behaviour. Under stress some people disassociate and become self-absorbed, but it doesn’t mean they’re killers.
‘What else can you tell me about his demeanour?’ I asked.
‘He’s very careful,’ said Gino. ‘In safe areas of conversation he talks quickly and confidently but when he’s answering other questions he pauses and takes his time. When he was having his injuries photographed, one of the sergeants casually asked him, “Where were her sandals?”
‘Wardell says, “They were in the back bedroom,” then pauses and says quickly, “What sandals do you mean?”’ Gino raised his eyebrows. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How could he have known about the sandals - he was unconscious all night.’
‘What does he say about the previous attack?’ I asked.
‘He blames exam stress and a domineering mother,’ said Bayliss, unable to hide his disbelief.’
‘Is he talking to anyone in particular?’
‘His mother and father were at the hospital every day,’ said Gino. ‘She got a bit hostile about him being questioned, said he was too frail. His dad seems more laid-back.’
As they talked, the picture that emerged of Gordon was of an egocentric and narcissistic man who expressed no anger at what had happened to himself or his wife. He gave details of his injuries to anyone around but made no reference to his marriage or to Carol. He wondered if he still had a job and was uncertain of how his colleagues would regard him now that his past had become known.
As if acknowledging that his behaviour might be considered strange, Wardell referred to ‘blocking things out’, using concepts and terms that he would have heard decades earlier when he was treated at Grendon Underwood during his prison sentence.
I told Bayliss that I expected Gordon to have good face-to-face skills and to be able to withstand some interpersonal pressure. He was obviously accustomed to managing his image and would be reluctant to admit any negative personal characteristics. He was proud of his logistical training and also claimed to have communication and audio-visual experience, which indicated practice in visually rehearsing desired scenes and story lines. At the same time, he was confident, intelligent, good at DIY and someone who claimed to channel his stress by training and jogging.
No-one was surprised when I produced another list of questions that needed considering.
Did Mr Wardell have his own blue boiler suit for DIY work?
Were the clothes on the floor of the lounge the ones he actually wore or were these a feint to deflect forensic examination from the actual clothes?
Why are his glasses so comprehensively broken, yet he has no facial bruises or injuries at all?