Authors: Paul Britton
Even the descriptions of people seen in the area of Ansley Common had to be treated with care. None of them had come forward and been identified. Similarly, very little corroboration had been found. All of which raised the possibility that falsified details may be in the system. Every investigation has ‘noise’ of this type and it becomes even more important to filter out the pieces of the puzzle that don’t belong and hone in on those aspects that have real value.
Bearing all this in mind, I began to reconstruct the collision of Naomi and her killer, retracing their footsteps on that rainy night until they came together. They didn’t plan to meet. Naomi only expected to be gone for a few minutes. She posted the letter and then looked along the road towards Emma’s sister’s house to check for the car.
What she couldn’t have realized is that someone is watching her from the jitty, someone she knows. That’s why she turns back when he calls instead of simply walking home. If it had been a stranger calling from the dark she would most likely have run.
He sees what all the other witnesses see - Naomi looking up and down the road - and it allows him to ask, ‘What are you doing, Naomi? Who are you looking for? Are you looking for me?’
With no reason to be afraid of him, she walks down the jitty. There are so many things he could have said to her.
‘Hey, are ya comin’ down The Rec?’
‘Have ya got a fag?’
‘Whatcha doing on the weekend?’
Naomi has to make a judgement. She’s left the front door ajar and her parents expect her back. The jitty comes back towards her house anyway. Perhaps she decides to have a quick chat, just long enough to make plans and then she’ll go home.
But what of her killer? Why was he out on Thursday night and what was he looking for?
Although he may have watched Naomi arrive home from band practice and waited in the hope that she came out, I thought it unlikely. He was a local lad in his teens to mid-twenties; someone steeped in the local value system. He’d gone out cruising, maybe hoping to meet someone but not necessarily looking for a victim. He took a knife with him but not the bottle, that’s more likely to be something collected along the way that he wouldn’t perceive as a weapon.
His track record is one of lack of awareness and unsophisticated relationships with girls. Although he has high sex needs, he lacks the refinement and wherewithal to acquire partners. At the same time, he has a masturbatory life with a range that is probably quite broad in terms of his fantasies. They are likely to include him seducing women and women seducing him; as well as elements of coercion. Local venues will also feature in his masturbatory fantasies and he may have followed local girls and previously interfered with them and aggressively touched them. This could have reached the point of attempting rape.
This man recognizes Naomi at the postbox. He sees her looking up and down the road, attracting attention to herself. Perhaps he knows that she has older boyfriends and assumes that she must be having sex with them. If she’ll do it for them, then why not for me? he thinks.
Neither of them expected to meet like this but as they walk down the jitty, he already has the expectation or the excitement of sexual arousal. The lack of defence injuries or signs of struggle suggest that Naomi went freely to The Rec, unaware that she was going to her death. If so, it indicated that she might have been far more involved in the local value system which included underage girls having sex than anyone had imagined. She was willing to go with him to a place they both knew; a place where they could negotiate in the pitch-black. The wooden frame of the slide provided shelter and the Astroturf was drier and softer than the ground.
The closeness of the houses is important, I thought. This is a local lad trying his luck, not a sophisticated seducer. One scream would have brought people running. That’s why I didn’t believe that he started out to kill Naomi. If he had, he would more likely have taken her over the fields away from The Rec. Instead, he chose to stay close to the houses and would have to run past them when he finished.
There are various possibilities for what happens next. Perhaps he tries to kiss Naomi and starts touching her. Because of the sanitary towel, I think it less likely that Naomi wanted to have sex and would have needed some persuasion. She refuses and the knife comes out. She won’t scream now, she’s frightened and does as she’s told.
I looked again at how her shoes had been found. One had been removed with the laces undone but, by contrast, the other shoe had a complex knot - not something that comes undone with the tweak of a bow. In the darkness he wouldn’t have been able to see the knot so I think it’s likely that Naomi undid the lace. Then he helps her pull her jeans and pants down, but they’re only removed from one leg. There is no expectation here of a lengthy sexual interlude - it is going to be over very quickly.
Her buttocks are pushed into the ground and her sweater and bra are pulled up over her breasts. Naomi may go part of the way, but he can’t stop. With the bite, everything changes. Now she just wants to get away, but his anger at her surges and transforms a speculative sexual opportunity into a full-scale attempted rape.
Naomi is on her back, with her jeans down and a man lying on top of her. She won’t have lubricated and perhaps after the bite, she locks her thighs and he can’t force penetration. Because he’s sexually unsophisticated, he doesn’t know his way around this problem. This person is already prone to explosive rages, especially when frustrated and now he becomes extremely angry. There are so many possible triggers - he might blame her for teasing him, or changing her mind, or menstruating. He takes the knife to her and her silent fear becomes terror as he slashes her across the throat. Then he grabs whatever is nearby, perhaps a bottle, and assaults her with considerable force.
Afterwards, when he realizes what he’s done, there are mixed feelings. On the one level he thinks, ‘Well, I sorted her out,’ and on another level he’s quite numb with shock. The absence of light on The Rec means that he won’t have a strong visual memory of what happened. This is one of the things that normally causes a problem for such murderers. They can’t forget the vivid pictures and it can prey on their memories. The darkness will lessen the impact of such an effect.
I hadn’t discounted the possibility of there being more than one attacker. If this was the case, the scenario would have been different. There would be a diffusion of responsibility, where each of them sheds their sensation of blame or responsibility onto the other. They egg each other on and can’t afford to lose face. Naomi becomes much less important as a person because at that moment, it is the relationship between her attackers that is more significant.
If more than one person was involved, it became more likely that Naomi was coerced at the children’s slide and made to undress. Nothing I knew about her suggested that she would have readily agreed to group sex. They could easily overpower her and pin her down, covering her mouth when she became distressed.
On 21 September, a week after the murder, I returned to Bedworth Police Station to deliver my psychological profile. Early that morning detectives had arrested five men from houses in and around Ansley Common. They seized knives, clothing and shoes that were to be tested.
I had no idea about the arrests until I arrived at the station. Apparently, the raids related to the activities of young people who frequented The Rec at night. The inquiry team had been puzzled why none of the dozens of young men and women who regularly gathered at The Rec had come forward. Bayliss suspected that some of them knew the murderer’s identity and had deliberately withheld information, through fear of several ringleaders.
The five men were taken to different police stations for questioning.
Bayliss was particularly keen to see if any of the suspects matched with what I had to say about Naomi’s killer.
‘The offender is most likely to be in his teens to mid-twenties,’ I said. ‘He’s not sexually sophisticated and doesn’t have a track record of lots of girlfriends; or of being able to woo women. He’s also not particularly experienced in the finer points of sexual behaviour.’
The bite to Naomi’s breast was a sign of youthful immaturity rather than sadism, otherwise there would have been signs of a need to control and dominate. If he had wanted to inflict pain on Naomi, there were ways of doing this far more elaborately than a bite.
‘The most important points are these,’ I said, looking up from my notes. ‘Firstly, Naomi knew her murderer passingly well and, secondly, he’s very local. He’ll live within four or five hundred yards of the scene. He knows The Rec even in the pitch-dark. He knows that he can take a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl a hundred yards from her home and not be disturbed.
‘He’s of no more than average intelligence, but nothing about the offence suggests that he’s mentally retarded or slow.
‘You are looking for someone who can become very angry and very disinhibited. He’s got a short fuse and when he explodes is capable of using great force and violence. It’s possible that alcohol and drug abuse could have fuelled this anger.
‘His disinhibition may well have brought him into contact with the police previously for minor sexual offences, following and aggressively touching local girls.’
I looked up at Bayliss. ‘With a lone offender, I think it’s more likely that Naomi undressed herself to facilitate hurried, low-comfort sex, but I can’t exclude there being more than one. If this was the case, she could more easily have been overpowered and undressed, without suffering defence injuries or leaving signs of a scuffle. It raises the possibility that she offered herself to the wrong man and the other one became angry. Either way, it would account for why no-one heard her cry out.’
I explained how the anger and exhilaration would have quickly been replaced by shock and fear. ‘Because he’s a local man, he’s going to arrive home in a state that is considerably different from his normal behaviour. That’s why folks around him are going to know or suspect.’
‘So someone must be shielding him,’ said Bayliss, having suspected as much. ‘How confident are you that he lives so close?’
‘Very confident.’
‘Which means we must have talked to him already. We’ve knocked on every door.’ He glanced at a map of Ansley Common on his office wall. ‘We’ve got him in that area. Our job is to work on that.’
Because the offender was likely to be living with his family or in a communal setting I explained how this supporting cast was likely to become more deeply implicated as each day passed. If parents were involved, it became particularly difficult.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across a mother who says, ‘My son is a monster and I know he killed that young woman, I must go to the police.’ This also applies to fathers but they are often more realistic. Mothers don’t want to believe their child could do such a thing and even if they accept that something dreadful has happened, there must be a misunderstanding. Later this attitude can harden into a belief that their son must have been drawn into it, or the girl must have provoked him. Taking this one step further, the mother thinks, yes, that poor girl is dead but my boy isn’t. Even though it happened, I know him, he’s really a good boy. So what’s the use in locking him up, it’s not going to bring her back and I will watch him and make sure it won’t happen again.
The scientists had come back with a positive DNA profile. This allowed Bayliss to take the decision to run a mass-screening operation, similar to ‘The Bloodings’. He wanted to turn the pressure right up by asking men to give a mouth swab from which saliva would be used to create a DNA profile that could be matched against the one found at the murder scene.
The idea had become feasible because of the narrow search area established by the psychological profile. However, they wanted to build in insurance, so they extended the age and geographical ranges to every male aged between fourteen and forty living within a half-mile radius of the murder scene. This could mean testing 5,000 potential suspects at a cost of Ł200,000.
Bayliss had secured a budget of only Ł40,000, and at Ł40 a swabbing it meant that the money would only stretch to 1,000 tests. A rationale had to be found for choosing which men were tested and in precisely what order - something that would increase the likelihood of the killer being among those tested early and help to identify him quickly.
Bayliss decided to use the full psychological profile to narrow the search parameters. Using a newly developed computer system known as Watson; which bolted onto the HOLMES database, elements of the profile were used to tighten the list of potential suspects, bringing it down to 1,750 people and then down to 850.
The advantage of Watson is that it can be interrogated and used to follow an investigatory path through the mountain of information gathered during an inquiry. For example, a programmer might say, ‘Show me all known male associates of Naomi Smith,’ and this produces 395 names. Then he may say, ‘Now show me which of these male associates are aged between eighteen and twenty-three? And then show me which of these men has a history of violence or indecency offences?’
In this way, the computer begins to rank individuals in terms of their closeness of fit to the psychological profile and produces batches of names based on the degree of closeness. The first saliva swabbing would be requested from the twenty men who most closely matched the profile. They would be followed by the next twenty, and the next twenty, until hopefully the killer emerged.
Unlike in Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe all those years before, the procedure had been refined and great care would be taken using photographs and witnesses to avoid someone taking the test for anyone else. Similarly, particular attention would be paid to anyone refusing the test or leaving the area.
Privately, Bayliss hoped that the news of the DNA operation might put pressure on the murderer’s family or friends to come forward. He asked me to look at the press release and tinker with the wording, making it clear that this very powerful technology was being brought to bear on the case and it was only a matter of time before police caught the killer. If his family and friends realized the game was up, they might come forward rather than risk being accused of shielding him, or he might flee and make himself obvious.