Authors: Paul Britton
If a gang had abducted Carol, why had no-one been left to guard Mr Wardell in case he escaped and raised the alarm? If no-one stayed behind, how did they convince Carol that Gordon’s life was in danger unless she cooperated?
Where does the anaesthesia enter into it? How long would it render someone unconscious?
Having reviewed all the new information, we looked at the direction of the inquiry. Local intelligence officers were shaking the trees, trying to find any underworld link to the robbery. We all agreed that the Ł50,000 reward was likely to flush out details if they existed. At the same time, neighbours were being reinterviewed, along with friends and workmates.
‘I think it’s time to put Wardell under surveillance,’ said Bayliss. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it merits it. You should also ask him a little more about his marriage.’
‘No, from now on we are regarding him as a suspect,’ said Bayliss. ‘We can’t ask those sorts of questions without cautioning him. We’ll see if the observation brings anything up.’
The next morning, eight days after the murder, Gordon Wardell was followed as he drove to Birmingham for an appointment with his wife’s bosses. He was due to discuss Carol’s pension and insurance entitlements at the regional office of the Woolwich.
Arriving early, he went for a walk through the Pallisades shopping centre, moving freely and looking at various window displays. Then he returned to his car, collected a walking-stick and transformed into a hobbling downcast figure as he approached the Woolwich office. All of this was captured in an eight-minute video, some of it recorded by the city’s closed circuit TV system.
At the meeting with a regional manager, Wardell was told that his mortgage would be paid along with any other debts. He also stood to gain an annual pension and a lump sum of more than Ł56,000. Looking surprised, he denied any knowledge of his wife having a ‘death in service’ pension, although police later found that he had signed some of the documents setting it up.
Meanwhile, anaesthetists were casting serious doubts over his story of having been knocked unconscious for more than eight hours by some sort of chemical soaked into a cloth and held over his mouth and nose. Experts had been consulted and none of them knew of any chemical or drug administered in such a way which would render someone unconscious for more than a few minutes. It simply wasn’t possible.
Even if the drug had been injected, the amounts needed would have been substantial and been likely to cause side effects such as memory loss. Wardell had no injection marks and could remember precise details about what happened.
I was back in Nuneaton on Thursday by which time detectives had followed up 340 lines of inquiry and taken over 1,000 calls from the public. Several new strands had emerged including the sighting of a man by the Woolwich cash machine at about 5.20 a.m. on the morning of the murder and a car parked nearby with a light on and radio playing. These were being followed up.
Yet by far the most interesting development was the discovery that four days before the murder a woman claiming to be ‘Carol at Nuneaton’ had called the customer service department of the Woolwich head office in London. David Smith, who normally dealt with customer complaints, answered the call between 1.00 and 3.00 p.m. It came through the internal branch telephone system and the woman initially asked for Charles Crouch who had been Smith’s predecessor. The company’s internal phone directory still listed Crouch on that number.
The woman said, ‘It’s Carol at Nuneaton. I want some advice about a man standing outside the branch.’ She said he was acting suspiciously and was concerned about the public relations aspects of calling the police and creating a scene.
Where did this piece of information fit into the puzzle?
David Smith had advised ‘Carol’ to contact the police but no record could be found of her making this call. Peculiarly, it was also the wrong procedure for this sort of inquiry and Carol Wardell was known to be a stickler for procedure. More importantly, her office didn’t face the street so she couldn’t have seen a man outside and no member of staff reported anyone acting suspiciously. Yet whoever made the call showed extremely good local knowledge because they said they knew the name of the previous office on the site three years earlier.
After locating a recording of Carol Wardell’s voice from a training video, the police played it to David Smith who said that the caller was definitely not her. But why would somebody pretend otherwise? Whoever made the call had a good local knowledge and access to an internal Woolwich phone directory. Gordon Wardell had both of these and if he was planning a murder, such a call to head office might muddy the waters.
But who was the woman? The possibility that Wardell might have an accomplice had already occurred to Bayliss, who had yet to find anyone who could remember seeing him at the Brookland Pub on that Sunday night. It would explain how Gordon could recall exactly what he’d seen on the satellite TV in the bar.
Interviews with staff at Veng UK had also thrown up new information with various possible interpretations. Colleagues recounted conversations where Gordon had spoken of Carol’s fear about being robbed because she took the building society keys home. Michael Russell, the transport distribution manager, said that two or three weeks before the murder, Gordon had told him how the spare wheel of Carol’s Peugeot 106 had been stolen. Gordon said he reported the theft and then had to verify the police telephone call because he was afraid it might be someone trying to discover his address.
Was this evidence of a professional gang tracing Carol’s movements or another example of her husband muddying the waters to conceal what was to come? Someone had pinned a sign on the wall of the incident room which put all of these unanswered questions into context. It read, ‘It is one thing to have an opinion, it’s another thing to have the facts which support it.’
A fortnight after the murder, a major step was taken towards establishing this. In an unusual reconstruction an officer of the same height and build as Mr Wardell was asked to strip and try to replicate exactly how he had been found bound and gagged. The result was remarkable. In less than a minute the officer had tied himself to the rubbish sack holder. He then managed to move throughout the entire ground floor of the Wardell house and to shout loud enough through the gag to be heard on the far side of the street. In addition, he released himself unaided within a matter of minutes.
Other pieces rapidly fell into place. Forensic officer, Graham Smith, described 18 Bonneville Close as ‘the cleanest house he’d examined in twenty years’. He reported absolutely no trace that a gang had been there, not even a glove mark or a vestige of cigarette ash, yet according to Wardell his attackers wore gloves and he could smell cigarette smoke.
Police surgeons now confirmed that the bruising to Wardell’s upper arms was inconsistent with being grabbed from behind and that the bruising to his chest could have been self-inflicted by a hard punch. Medical experts also raised doubts about whether it was physically possible to be tied up for sixteen hours and not urinate.
By the beginning of October, Bayliss and his team were waiting for two last vital pieces of evidence before they decided whether to pull Wardell in for questioning. Home Office pathologists had re-examined Carol’s body, trying to establish a more precise time of death.
When the findings arrived, it became clear that here was the glue that could hold together so much of the circumstantial evidence gathered against Gordon Wardell. The postmortem examination had found a moderately large meal in Carol’s stomach, consistent with what she was said to have eaten for Sunday lunch. Looking at the degree of digestion, it was determined that she had died within three hours of the meal, which would have meant she was dead on Sunday afternoon and not early on Monday morning.
‘We got the bastard,’ said Bayliss, looking jubilant. ‘Let’s see him try to explain this one.’
‘You have to be careful,’ I warned.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Put the question to me. Pretend I’m Wardell.’
He paused. ‘Ah, well, Mr Wardell, the pathology report shows that your wife’s lunch was still in her stomach on Monday morning which tells me that you’re lying. She died on Sunday afternoon.’
‘Oh, that’s perfectly understandable. We had leftovers for supper,’ I replied.
‘But in your statement you say you had ham and salad for supper.’
‘Yes, I did, but Carol had leftovers.’
‘Why didn’t you mention it before?’
‘Well, it didn’t seem important.’
The enthusiasm drained from the SIO’s face. I could give him two or three entirely different but plausible answers to account for the postmortem finding. The new information was crucial but if they asked Wardell directly about the stomach contents he would realize what lay behind the question and cover himself.
There are many motives for murder in marriage and it wasn’t clear what underpinned this crime although I didn’t put greed high among the likely grounds - Carol’s pension and the Ł14,000 from the robbery didn’t warrant such planning and risk-taking.
Gordon Wardell had created an illusion about his success and abilities. He portrayed himself as a creative and visionary manager destined for great things. The reality, however, was a man unable to cope occupationally, who feigned illness, invented schemes and changed jobs to avoid discovery and to bolster his own self-image.
Carol had been excited when he joined Veng UK. A directorship was on offer if he proved himself, but how long could he maintain the facade? How did he acknowledge it himself, let alone tell his wife?
At home Gordon had presented himself as the witty achiever but he knew that he couldn’t sustain this indefinitely. For years Carol had been willing to see him through rose-coloured glasses, but now she heard whispers of him seeing prostitutes. Coupled with this, he wasn’t sleeping with her, didn’t want children and refused to take fertility tests, despite her misery at being childless. I suspect there were also money difficulties.
When you have a person who creates illusions to protect their public image and constantly fears discovery, they can become so absorbed in their own plight that they will happily sacrifice someone else in order to relieve the pressure and to have the problem taken away forever.
As a bereaved husband, Mr Wardell knew that the world would sympathize with him; his problems at work would disappear and his secret life with prostitutes would be safe. Murdering Carol wasn’t a huge leap - he’d already shown a willingness to use extreme physical violence.
What triggered it on that Sunday? Perhaps Carol confronted him about the prostitutes, or accused him of being a sham and failing at his job? Possibly, the day had been selected sometime earlier as the episode with the ‘stolen’ wheel suggests. Whatever the catalyst, he decided that ‘today is the day’. He sat opposite her all morning, telling himself that provided he didn’t lose his bottle she’d be dead by that afternoon. From what I knew of the man, he was probably very sweet and pleasant to Carol, rather than unloading the last of his venom.
I didn’t know where she was killed or how messy it had been, although with chloroform I assumed there was minimal disruption. I still wondered about the sanitary towel box on the landing - it was so out of place and out of character. Could anger over something as simple as running out of towels have led to bitter words about sex or pregnancy? I doubted if this detail would ever be accounted for.
Wardell would have tidied up afterwards and have felt quite exposed while Carol’s body was in the house - what if someone knocked on the door asking for his wife, or telephoned?
She had probably been wrapped in something and kept in the garage during the evening because there was no evidence of loss of bladder or bowel control in the house. Finding a letter among her possessions, Gordon then set out to establish his alibi by going to the postbox in Coventry. He knew this particular box had a video camera but couldn’t have known that it wasn’t working that night.
Ultimately, we don’t know whether he visited the pub on his way home. No other customers recalled seeing him and there was no record of him buying his favoured beer on the till roll. Yet he remembered what jokes the barman told and what was on the TV. Also unconfirmed are the claims of a strawberry-blonde prostitute called Tina who said that she was entertaining Mr Wardell at her fifteenth-floor tower block apartment that night. She remembered showing him her child’s model collection.
When he returned to the house, Gordon had to get his wife outside and put her into his car. Carol was quite a large woman and lifting and moving a dead body is extremely difficult. I know this because I once had the misfortune of colliding with a full-grown red deer which I then had to move off the road. It was like lifting a huge bag of heavy jelly and each time I grabbed one end the other would slide.
Although a strong man, I suspect that Gordon used something as a cradle or sling to make it easier for him to move Carol. Getting her from the house into his car was an enormously risky time and his anxiety would have continued to rise on the twelve mile drive to Nuneaton in the early hours. Feeling exposed, he drove carefully. He knew Carol’s security code because he’d accompanied her to the office on occasional Saturday mornings when she needed someone to lift furniture and boxes. He also knew about the security camera and concealed video recorder. Even so, it took time because he probably worked in the dark. He had to open the safe and organize the room as he imagined it would look after a robbery.
Afterwards, Gordon had to rid himself of the cheques, the keys, his gloves and clothing. I think he probably did this before dumping Carol’s body because he knew that once she lay on the grass verge, the stakes would rise dramatically because she could have been discovered at any time. His hiding place had to be somewhere discreet that he could reach easily and wasn’t going to make his clothes or his car dirty. It had to be reasonably close to the safest route to the lay-by.