Authors: Paul Britton
On 23 September the news broke and led to national headlines such as ‘DNA Dragnet’ and ‘Mass Testing in Naomi Hunt’.
The programme would begin the following day, said Bayliss, when a team of twenty officers would start calling at the homes of young men. ‘It is now a question of “when” and not “if” we catch this offender. I am aware that there has been concern that the inquiry was losing its momentum. I can reassure you this is not the case.’
He added that the police had no power to force people to take part but if anyone refused without good reason, officers would probe more deeply into their backgrounds. Samples had already been taken from people at the scene on the night, including relatives, medical staff and police officers - to rule them out of the inquiry.
The five men arrested by police on the previous Thursday had all been released by Sunday, although inquiries had triggered new leads and detectives visited another thirty-three houses in Nuneaton and Bedworth. More than 1,800 people had been interviewed by the inquiry team and witness statements taken from another 441.
Even so, detectives faced criticism after the dramatic morning raids. Several of the men threatened legal action, particularly when their arrests were filmed by a TV crew given permission to cover the operation.
Over the next week I made several trips to the incident room, often dropping in on my way from a clinical appointment and collecting new statements. The inquiry had already generated a paper mountain and I could see men and women stretched to their limits trying to process it all. There comes a point when the requirements of a fast moving operation can outstrip the capacity of even twenty or thirty people to deal with the information being gathered. I’d seen this in the Abbie Humphries case where vital details had been in the system but buried amongst masses of other information. It had led to delays that could perhaps have been avoided.
Here again, I could see the need for a management system to deal with the diverse information coming in and to give it shape and order. This was hammered home to me at a large inquiry team briefing in a lounge area at Bedworth Police Station when Bayliss stood at the front and detectives filled every chair, table and empty space. The SIO gave an update and asked for reports on various aspects of the inquiry such as the house-to-house inquiries and the corroborating of various alibis. Detectives stood up, gave their information and then sat down again.
The meeting was powerfully good for motivating the troops but there were indications that one or two actions hung in the air, incomplete. Unfortunately, people often make assumptions or mistakenly believe that matters have been dealt with and that nothing of note has been found. Otherwise, it would have been signalled, they think. The absence of comment is taken to mean that there is nothing to comment upon.
Take for instance the woman living beside The Rec who hadn’t been interviewed because various detectives all assumed that someone else had talked to her.
I had a long discussion about this with Tony Bayliss.
‘How many actions [leads] has the inquiry raised?’ I asked.
‘I’m not absolutely certain,’ he said.
‘And how many of the actions have been completed and what’s the outcome?’
‘The incident room will know.’
‘Fine, yes, but you’re steering the train and have to know that the important details are pointed out to you immediately. Look at the question of whether Naomi had gone out looking for someone; for briefing after briefing that issue remained unresolved yet the answer was sitting in the system.’
Bayliss agreed that it should have been caught the first time through and we discussed how to improve the information management system so that he knew exactly what allocated actions had been followed up and each of the outcomes.
I suspect that the cause of this problem was because one of the most senior detectives in the inquiry had taken leave because of a death in his family. Because Bayliss and his team had worked well together, their separate roles had never been fully understood and the absence of one of them had negative effects that no-one predicted. It’s like having a dent in the hull of a racing yacht. It still makes headway but not with the same speed and efficiency as before.
The inquiry continued across a broad front and on 27 September the coroner ordered a second postmortem. This revealed the massive force used in the vaginal assault on Naomi and established the dimensions of the weapon at a minimum of ten inches long.
Increasingly it became clear that Naomi might not have been the quiet, average schoolgirl portrayed. One resident of Ansley Common had given a statement about seeing a ginger-haired girl matching Naomi’s description on four occasions late at night or in the early hours of the morning.
The first time she’d been walking a black dog at about 11.00 p.m. A few weeks later at around two in the morning the householder had looked out his daughter’s bedroom into a dark alleyway. He could see a figure approaching slowly from the direction of The Rec. When security lights lit up the garden and alleyway, he saw the ginger-haired girl who was wearing a short skirt and ‘was dressed like an eighteen-year-old’.
She ran towards Ansley Common Road and out of sight and he thought, What’s she doing out at this hour of the morning dressed like that? I certainly wouldn’t allow my daughters out dressed like that.
He saw her again on another night in similar circumstances, wearing a short skirt. At that stage, he didn’t know Naomi’s name but he recognized her as a girl he’d seen in a papershop on Thursday afternoon, 14 September, when he went to pick up his daughter from school.
‘On Friday morning when my daughter said to me, “Dad, a girl’s been murdered on The Rec,” my first words were, “I bet it’s that ginger-haired girl.” That came to my mind because of the odd times of the night I had seen her by herself.’
The police reinterviewed Emma Jones and she admitted that she and Naomi would sometimes sneak out late at night, usually to take the dogs for a walk. Naomi would leave the back door unlocked or take a key with her. They sneaked out when Emma stayed over, mainly because they were bored. Once outside, they walked around Ansley Common, keeping to where the street lights lit up the roads.
Emma said, ‘We wouldn’t see anyone, we’d just walk around until we got tired and then go back to Naomi’s. The last time I sneaked out with Naomi would have been in May time this year.’
During various meetings with Tony Bayliss, we discussed the significance of Naomi’s night-time excursions. The idea of her being out in the early hours of the morning wearing provocative clothes seemed to confirm the complexity of her life and that parts of her existence were hidden.
This created a problem for the SIO. Quite rightly, he had taken the position that in order to use the media most effectively and to encourage people to come forward, it was far better that Naomi be seen as a mono-dimensional, sweet, ordinary schoolgirl. If any speculation leaked out of promiscuity or drug use, it could dramatically stem the flow of information. At the same time, Naomi had been killed by someone she knew and therefore it was vital to trace every associate and track her every movement.
“The problem is, we don’t really know Naomi,’ said Bayliss. ‘We have an area that is riddled with promiscuity and loose morals and living in the midst of this we have Snow White brutally murdered by a monster. On the one hand, she’s a virgin waiting for Mr Right, but Snow White also has two condoms in her back pocket and an older boyfriend.’
I asked him, ‘Remember when you were fifteen, Tony, did your folks know everything you were getting up to?’
He laughed. ‘Hell no.’
‘So you had secrets that you kept from your parents?’
‘Sure.’
‘If anyone knew your secrets, who were they?’
‘Well, my mates I suppose.’
‘Right. And who’s Naomi’s special friend?’
‘Emma.’
Two days after the murder, Bayliss had called in a specialist to interview Emma. The woman officer was teaching cognitive interviewing to the Warwickshire Police - a sign of how far interviewing techniques had developed over the previous ten years.
However, Emma had been interviewed only hours after appearing at a tearful news conference with Naomi’s mother and father. She had described her sadness at losing Naomi, her ‘best and special friend’.
‘Someone has taken her away from me. Her family and I will find it hard to live without her. She was the kindest person I have ever known. We just enjoyed being together and were happy together.’
Having so passionately and publicly shown her loyalty to Naomi and her parents, Emma would find it very difficult to reveal anything about her best friend that might harm her reputation or upset her family. She had set out her stall and would not easily tear it down. As a result, the interview with Emma did not expose the hidden elements of Naomi’s life.
At Bayliss’s request, I agreed to conduct another interview, however, first I wanted to speak to Brian Smith because there were aspects of his statement that still puzzled me. In particular, I wanted to see if I could unravel exactly how Naomi’s body had been positioned when he found her.
Catherine Smith seemed very brittle as she met us at the door of the semi-detached house at Ansley Common; her grief was palpable. In the lounge Brian sat in an armchair watching an extremely large TV in the corner. A big man, with a full beard and receding hair, he wore silver tracksuit bottoms and a vest.
Sitting on a three-seater settee beside him, I tried to start the interview and eventually had to ask him to turn off the TV. We had a long, complicated and curious conversation and I was surprised by how much Mr Smith knew about Naomi’s clothes and the make-up she used. He and Emma were also very close.
I took him through the entire day of the murder from 4.00 a.m. when he woke up and went to work at MGM Taxis, to that evening when Naomi popped out to post the letter for her mother.
Among the new details to emerge was the fact that Naomi’s house-key had been left lying on the table in the corner of the room when she went out. She always did this if she wasn’t going far or for long, he said. Again it indicated that she intended to come straight home from the post box.
Mr Smith said that it had been he who suggested searching The Rec and Emma had volunteered to come with him. This settled an anomaly in their earlier statements but didn’t explain why Emma had gone ahead into the darkness.
Importantly, Mr Smith insisted that when the car’s headlights shone onto the white shape of Naomi’s body, she was lying beside the slide and not underneath it. He was adamant about this even though the bloodstaining showed it couldn’t be true. He was sure that she was wearing both shoes and that her jeans and pants were pulled down but not removed from one leg. He couldn’t be blamed for being mistaken; he was a shocked and traumatized father under pressure from within himself to know what had happened to his daughter. However, this did affect how much weight could be given to his account of how Naomi had been left.
Ultimately, the question would never be answered fully, although Mr Smith did reveal that Naomi’s breasts had been exposed and he pulled down her jumper to somehow protect what dignity remained.
Five days later on Tuesday 10 October, I left the negotiator training course I run at Leicester and drove to the incident room for a meeting with Emma Jones. It wasn’t going to be a straightforward cognitive interview which is normally only useful when someone has told police all they can remember. In this case I felt that Emma had more to tell but had been unable to do so.
In most of my clinical interviews when I first see a patient I tell them that I know they are going to feel that they have to conceal things from me and to tell me lies. I explained this to Emma.
‘There are things in your life that you have never told anybody - you may even have hidden them from yourself. You certainly aren’t going to tell a perfect stranger these things straight off. But as we go on, you’ll feel more comfortable and you won’t be embarrassed. At some point when I ask another question, you’ll think to yourself, “Should I tell him that or not?” You have to know that I’m not going to call you a liar or think any less of you. I just need you to help me understand the truth.’
We were sitting in a room at Bedworth Police Station and Emma sat clutching a small stuffed toy that had belonged to Naomi. Mrs Smith had given it to her and she wouldn’t let it go. A big girl, wearing a black leather jacket, she looked as though she had been through the mill. She hadn’t been sleeping and feared the murderer would come looking for her now that she’d been named by the media.
I couldn’t think of many more painful or difficult situations to endure. At age fifteen, she was on the boundary between being a child and an adult and had suddenly been plummeted into the middle of a dreadful murder inquiry. Not only had her best friend been killed but Emma had actually found her body.
‘I’m sorry that I can’t take the pictures away, Emma, I wish I could. But I promise you they will gradually become dimmer and, as things go on, they’ll be moved out of the way by better things.’
I explained who I was and told Emma that in common with all ordinary fifteen-year-old girls, I knew that she had secrets that she only shared with her close friends. ‘There are things you do and say that your mum and dad maybe wouldn’t understand or approve of,’ I said. ‘Places you go and adventures that you have. Is that about right?’
She nodded.
‘In order to know what happened and who hurt Naomi, it’s really important to know as much as possible about her. Even though she lived with her mum and dad and loved them, there are things that mums and dads aren’t ready for; things that you only talk about with your best friend. Most teenagers are the same.
‘I need to know about Naomi and I need to know her in a way that only you can tell me. I know you promised not to tell anyone your secrets …’ She nodded. ‘But we’re in a slightly different situation now. Someone has killed Naomi. If you think about it, if Naomi were here now, I think she’d say, “Emma you can tell.’”