Authors: Paul Britton
The photographs showed her semi-naked with her jeans and pants removed from her left leg but caught around her right ankle. Her unlaced left shoe lay close by, along with a slightly soiled sanitary towel and an empty cigarette packet. Her right shoe was still on and I noticed the double-knotting of the laces.
There was little in the way of bloodstaining, most of it confined to her neck area and down one side of her face. Her throat had been slashed rather than stabbed, according to the pathologist, and at some point she had clearly been rolled slightly and repositioned.
The assault on her vagina had been particularly savage. Something very large had been pushed inside her causing extensive damage. She’d been on her back at the time and the pattern of blood on her buttocks indicated that at some point her hips had probably been raised and then splashed down into a patch of blood. At the same time, the relative lack of bleeding from her genitals suggested that she was dead or dying when the vaginal assault occurred.
At some point her left breast had been bitten. I made a note to explore the sequence. I needed to know in what order the separate elements of the attack had happened; this would tell me more about the reason for the attack, and that in turn would tell me more about the killer or killers. I also had to be sure of exactly how Naomi’s body had been positioned when discovered. How much could I rely on the recollections of her distraught father and her best friend?
‘What can you tell me about Naomi?’ I asked, focusing attention on one of the core questions that I needed to answer - who was the victim? The media had been portraying Naomi as a sweet, gentle, much-loved teenager and the most-publicized photograph of her in her school uniform seemed to affirm all of these things. Similarly, her teachers described her as ‘a nice girl, although not particularly academic’.
According to Brian Smith, Naomi had been born in 1980 while he was still married to his first wife Jennifer. He’d been having an affair with Catherine who lived in Coventry with her three sons. Soon afterwards, his wife learned of the affair and Brian moved in with Catherine. He described Naomi as a normal teenage girl, who was quite shy and lacked confidence. She was self-conscious about a dead nerve on the left side of her face which made her face look a little lopsided. Apparently, it had led to teasing at school and playground jokes which upset Naomi and several times she had come home from school crying. Despite this, Mr Smith said Naomi was not unpopular and always had a lot of schoolfriends.
She enjoyed music and dancing and loved animals, keeping rabbits and a pet bird. Until recently the family had two dogs, Tammy and Sandy, which Naomi often would take for walks in the fields beyond The Rec. She was a below average student who struggled at most subjects, according to her father, who blamed this on the family being moved around so much.
Naomi’s best friend Emma Jones had told police a slightly different story, describing Naomi as being far more streetwise and outgoing with a strong personality. Different perceptions of a person are not unusual. It comes back to the complexity of life and of each individual personality. The phenomenon I grapple with every day is that, in the main, people are not entirely what they seem to be. Naomi wasn’t the two-dimensional figure described in the newspapers. Her life had been far richer and more complex than this. She had an image of herself that she wanted the rest of the world to see and, like all fifteen-year-olds, she would have secrets that she kept from her parents.
‘Was she sexually promiscuous?’ I asked, aware of how blunt it sounded, given her youth.
‘There’s a question mark here,’ said Bayliss. ‘She had two condoms in the back pocket of her jeans and ten in her bedroom.’
‘What do her parents say?’
‘They say she was a virgin. Dad says she was waiting for the right boy. They figured they couldn’t stop her having sex, so he gave her a dozen condoms to be safe. He gave Emma a dozen at the same time because she and Naomi both talked about boys.’
I could see this worried Bayliss a little. He had a sixteen-year-old daughter of his own and I don’t think he liked the idea that a friend’s father might decide to give her condoms.
‘He says Naomi might have had one or two boyfriends that he didn’t know about, but they can’t have been serious or she would have told him.’ Bayliss didn’t sound fully convinced.
‘What does Emma say?’
‘Much the same. The latest boyfriend is a Richard Mason who works at a local supermarket stacking shelves. He’s been alibied out for Thursday night.’
Significantly, Mason had told police that he and Naomi met quite often at The Rec after Naomi got home from school. The two of them had been dating for a month but had recently split up and were talking about a reconciliation. The fact that he was eight years older than Naomi didn’t seem to concern her parents or appear to be unusual for the area.
Naomi’s parents had also been asked about drug-use and revealed that a few months earlier, her mother had found a rolled up cigarette in the bedroom which they feared might be cannabis. They contacted the police and a local officer came to the house and gave the family advice and a stern lecture to Naomi.
‘She promised that she’d only tried cannabis and said she’d not really liked it,’ said Mr Smith. ‘She promised not to do it again.’
The Bretts Hall Estate had been built where Nuneaton runs out and the Warwickshire countryside takes over.
George Eliot may have been born near here and set her masterpiece, Middlemarch, in the surrounding landscape, but the world she described couldn’t be further removed from the realities of Ansley Common. This was the lower end of a working class area with more than its fair share of unemployment, domestic violence and boredom. Someone in the incident room described it as being full of ‘perverts, hooligans and morons’.
Of course, such comments do no justice to the overwhelming number of decent, respectable residents of the area but unfortunately it only takes a few people to characterize a place and alter the crime statistics. I look for baselines and I was learning of a community that had a high number of sex offences, particularly acquaintance-based rapes and flashings. It also had a core criminal element that commuted out to steal and then returned home.
Equally, The Rec was a normal playground during the day but after dark became an arena for local youths, some of whom tried to cure their boredom with strong lager, glue-sniffing or soft drugs. Most of them were aged between fifteen and twenty-five, with outsiders who visited at the older end of the scale.
One of the cultural and social phenomena that can characterize such areas is the likelihood of greater promiscuity and irresponsible behaviour, particularly amongst the young adults and teenagers. This is because they are exposed to a different value structure and develop different social norms from the older residents. With little money, few jobs and nothing to look forward to, a culture with gang-like elements can develop. The young can begin to see authority structures such as the police and social services as the enemy on the outside.
Three months before the murder, two rival gangs had been reported fighting on The Rec with baseball bats, knives, knuckle-dusters and crowbars. Detectives had also compiled a lengthy list of all reports of violence, indecency and attempted abduction relating to the Bretts Hall Estate and Ansley Common.
Another feature often seen in these settings is the high prevalence of relationships between young teenage girls and older men. Girls of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years old, who have reached this time of their lives without much good or fulfilling having happened to them, physically develop and notice how older boys in their twenties begin to show an interest in them.
Boys of their own age are a bit slower, shyer and less worldly whereas young adult men have money, cars and experience. Unfortunately, the older girls will have chosen the best candidates and have left behind the more unsuccessful young men. Younger girls are the only people they can impress with their macho charm.
Teenaged girls understand desire when they see it and the fact that they can make a man of nineteen or twenty interested in them is rather an exciting early sensation of power. However, they don’t understand the dangers or realize that they are playing with fire.
Bayliss had a team of fifty officers who had interviewed more than 300 people so far and taken over fifty statements. Teams were going from door to door in Ansley Common, while others were tracing vehicles, confirming alibis and checking intelligence. Jez Grew was in charge of the latter and had already been liaising with CATCHEM, the national computer database indexing all murdered, abducted or missing children since 1960.
Based in Derbyshire, CATCHEM had been championed through some hard years by Detective Chief Superintendent Duncan Bailey, who saw it achieve international recognition before he retired in 1994. It played a significant role in the conviction of Robert Black for the murders of three young girls, Susan Maxwell, eleven, Caroline Hogg, five, and Sarah Harper, ten, as well as the kidnapping of a fourth girl.
As we sat and pondered, various scenarios were put forward with different degrees of confidence. On the one hand, the horrific nature of the assault led some to suggest looking for escaped mental patients and sexual offenders with a known history of violence. On the other hand, although Naomi had been portrayed as a relatively immature fifteen-year-old, witness statements suggested she may have gone out expecting or at least hoping to meet someone. She was seen looking up and down the road beside the postbox and then very purposefully walking into the dark entrance of the jitty. Who was she waiting for? Was she hoping that someone she knew might pass along?
Bayliss was looking for a psychological profile and any advice I could give on what had happened. I gave him a shopping list of what I needed, including important statements and a detailed map of the area, showing The Rec and the surrounding streets and houses.
Coincidentally, my visit to the Bedworth Police Station had corresponded with the arrival of various specialists who had been asked to help the inquiry. These included the woman scientist I had seen earlier from the scientific laboratory in Birmingham, as well as the pathologist and an odontologist who had been studying the bite-mark to Naomi’s breast.
Bayliss chaired the meeting in a small conference room and asked me to sit in. I was more than happy because it gave me the rare opportunity to ask questions directly to the other forensic experts rather than relaying them through the SIO. Without doubt the most welcome news was the possibility that the scientists might be able to build a DNA profile of the killer from saliva found in the bite-mark.
After the various progress reports had been delivered, I asked the pathologist a question, ‘Why is there such a narrow concentration of blood at the scene?’
‘Most of it appears to have been absorbed through the Astroturf and the underlay,’ he said.
‘Was she lying on her back when her throat was cut?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any evidence of hand pressure on her neck?’
‘It’s impossible to say, the slashes will have destroyed any bruising development.’
This still left the question of whether she could have been partially strangled first, I thought.
‘Can you tell me about the wounds to the neck?’
‘There were at least two cuts, both linear lines.’
‘Could they be stab wounds?’
‘Yes but the size of the knife blade would be very small. They’re more likely slashes.’
The suggestion had been made that a bottle had been used for the vaginal assault, something quite broad and with a heavy base. I needed to know how much force would have been necessary to drive such a weapon into Naomi.
There was a long pause and I sensed that the pathologist didn’t understand the importance of my questions. Finally he said that a considerable thrust had been used.
‘Why isn’t there much blood on her lower half?’ I asked.
‘Not much was circulating at the time of the vaginal assault.’
‘Which suggests that her throat had already been cut?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would the vaginal attack have been sufficient in itself to kill her?’
‘Probably.’
‘Were the throat and vaginal wounds all inflicted from the front?’
‘In my view, yes.’
‘So where in the sequence is her breast bitten? Was she alive at that point?’
Finally losing patience, he said, ‘Exactly what is it you really want to know?’
I apologized and tried to explain why these things were vital. If the neck and vaginal assault had occurred at the same time it definitely indicated more than one attacker. Similarly, the force used suggested great anger towards Naomi, or at least great excitement.
The odontologist explained how the bite-marks to Naomi’s breast included both the upper and lower arches of teeth. These appeared too far apart which indicated that the breast had been compressed when bitten.
‘And she was lying on the ground when it happened?’ I asked.
He nodded and explained how the skin, being elastic, was not the most yielding of moulds for bite-marks because it moved and distorted. It was possible to say that the bite had taken considerable pressure, with no suction and that Naomi had been alive at the time.
‘Where was the biter in relation to Naomi?’ I asked, wanting him to show me.
The odontologist thought about this and decided that the attacker had been on Naomi’s left side, ninety degrees to her body as she lay on the ground.
I had a problem with this. This wasn’t a love bite and Naomi wouldn’t have just acquiesced. She would have experienced considerable pain. A person kneeling on her left, parallel to her and biting her left breast raised the probability of someone else being present holding her down. How many people were involved?
The odontologist - an expert on teeth and gums -offered to go back and check his findings and subsequently altered his advice, saying that the upper and lower arches were the other way around. This meant that a lone man could have been lying on top of Naomi, with her consent, or pinning her down to the ground by force, and then rotated her breast slightly before biting her.