Authors: Paul Britton
I thought about this for a long while and spent many nights at the kitchen table talking it over with Marilyn. The situation was complicated by my ambition to add occupational psychology to my clinical work. This covered areas such as occupational stress, teamwork and risk factors in business. Having come from industry and commerce into psychology in the first place, it seemed a natural progression.
Yet I couldn’t deny that I was fascinated by the criminal mind. What made someone want to batter a woman or rape a young child? What were the triggers that caused one person to become violent and destructive and another to be a caring, conscientious member of the community?
I knew that I could help people. If I could treat, for example, a sex offender at an early stage of his career, then dozens of people might never become victims. Just as importantly, by treating victims I could repair the damage and free them from their pain. Surely, this had to be worthwhile.
I was interviewed for the post in July for an appointment that would begin in September. In the meantime, I continued my clinical work and prepared to enter Sheffield University as a part-time postgraduate student studying occupational psychology.
It had been two and a half years since Lynda Mann had been murdered near Carlton Hayes Hospital and I still occasionally drove past the Black Pad on my way to see a patient. The crime had never been solved but periodically new appeals for help were made, normally on the anniversary of her death. This is how it remained until Friday 1 August, 1986, when I noticed the front page of the Leicester Mercury as I bought milk from a corner shop.
HUNT FOR MISSING SCHOOLGIRL
Senior detectives and uniformed police with tracker dogs have joined a huge search of the Narborough area for a 15-year-old girl who disappeared last night not far from a spot where another schoolgirl was found murdered three years ago.
Dawn Amanda Ashworth of Mill Lane, Enderby, has not been seen since she visited friends in Narborough yesterday afternoon. She left their house in Carlton Avenue, Narborough at 4.30 p.m. and disappeared.
At midday the following day, Dawn Ashworth’s body was found alongside a footpath, this one running to the east of Carlton Hayes Hospital and known locally as Ten Pound Lane. Like Lynda she had been a pupil of the local Lutterworth Grammar School.
For the next week this second murder dominated the local and national headlines. Being so busy, I caught only occasional snatches of radio bulletins or sightings of newspapers but I knew there was a real fear in the community.
This time the police quickly made an arrest, picking up a seventeen-year-old youth from Narborough. He was a kitchen porter at Carlton Hayes Hospital, working in the large canteen that provided meals for patients and staff. On 11 August he was charged with Dawn Ashworth’s murder and remanded in custody.
Within a few days a letter arrived on my doormat from the Local Health Authority - the formal contract confirming that I was to be the new head of the Regional Forensic Psychology Service. There was, however, a catch. The department didn’t feel that I could take on the added responsibility while doing a further university course. I’d been expecting to get financial support for my studies at Sheffield University but it was made clear that this wouldn’t be forthcoming. Perhaps if I deferred it for a year and concentrated on my new role the finance could be found in the future, they suggested.
I had a decision to make. Did I carry on as planned -now having to fund myself - and perhaps upsetting the powers that be? Or did I turn the university down and hope to win a place the following year? I began to doubt whether I wanted the new post, the office and forensic career after all.
Shortly before 9.00 a.m. on the first day of September, I pulled into the carpark at Arnold Lodge, Leicester, and surveyed my new domain. It was a rather squat two-storey brown-brick building surrounded by a sixteen-foot-high chain-link fence. Most of the windows were of reflective glass that couldn’t fully open.
This was a regional secure-unit housing about twenty-four patients but with plans to eventually have sixty beds. The fence and control room announced immediately that the residents were meant to stay inside, at least for the short term and normally a maximum of two years. All the same, the place didn’t look that secure. What am I getting myself into, I thought.
Inside, the overriding impression was one of darkness. The ceilings seemed oppressively low, dragged down by the dark stained wood that had been chosen to decorate the interiors. There were locks on every door and the central control room was wired up to respond to ‘incidents’ anywhere in the complex.
It was very different to the light airy corridors of Leicester General. People would now be watching my every movement. We often forget that the staff spend longer in closed institutions than most of the inmates.
The men and women at Arnold Lodge were mostly aged between eighteen and forty. Some of them had done dreadful things or had the potential to do so - arsonists, paedophiles, rapists, sadists, killers … They were young, physically fit people and I could sense an energy in the unit, but it wasn’t something exciting, rather it was something that had to be watched.
Among the patients I had to treat was a woman in her mid-twenties who had set fire to a shopping centre; a twenty-one-year-old who had tried to cut his father’s throat; a man who believed his young daughter was the devil’s child and thought he had to mutilate her eyes and body before strangling her; and another man with sadistic fantasies who tied up his former girlfriend, tortured and then killed her.
Such people had gone through the legal process, been convicted or detained under the Mental Health Act. Some of them had been sent to prison or a secure hospital such as Rampton in Nottinghamshire. Later they were transferred to Arnold Lodge for further specialist treatment on their way back to the community. It became our decision whether they still posed a risk to society or not, although some patients with particularly violent histories could only be released with the consent of the Home Secretary.
In general, if offenders were considered a grave and immediate risk but still treatable they were sent to a high security hospital. We took people who were grave risks or immediate risks but not both. The logic was that an escaped resident might be very dangerous but only in very particular circumstances, or vice versa, they might be an immediate risk but not a serious danger to the community.
Many of the patients were sent to Arnold Lodge directly by the courts, providing they met the risk management requirements and their psychological difficulties were treatable within the unit’s timescale. Others came to us from normal prisons, having developed problems while incarcerated. At the same time there were outpatient clinics for offenders and crime victims. These tended to be referrals by local doctors, occasionally solicitors and more often from clinical psychologists working in the NHS who didn’t have the inclination to take would-be axe murderers into their care.
My area of responsibility was for the whole of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire - an area of roughly 1,000 square miles. For the first few months, until I filled the posts around me, I was the forensic psychology service for a population of over five million. It would take me two hours to drive to Barnsley, or to Lincoln. Then I’d meet a local GP, probation officer, or psychologist (getting to know my referral sources) and then be on the road again.
Nothing could have prepared me for how relentlessly grim it proved to be. Each day brought disbelief and sadness until my growing professional carapace became strong enough to protect me from even the worst details. Many perpetrators had histories which revealed that they, too, were victims who had suffered abuse, neglect or violence in their formative years. If I was to help them, I had to understand what had happened and why.
Nearly three months into my new job, on 22 November, I had a phone call from a local journalist on the Leicester Mercury. He asked me if I could tell him the psychological characteristics of the person who killed Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.
‘There’s someone in custody,’ I said.
‘Haven’t you heard the news? He’s been freed. It’s this new blood test - genetic fingerprinting.’
Slightly taken aback, I told him that I couldn’t comment. I’d never heard of genetic fingerprinting or DNA tests. Remarkably, the process had been discovered only a few miles from my office, at Leicester University by Dr Alec Jeffreys, a young scientist who had been investigating the possibility of examining the genetic differences between people by isolating their DNA. Every human cell contains the blueprint of the entire human body carried as coded information in the form of DNA (deoxyribonu-cleic acid) arranged into groups called genes. Since genes govern heredity, Jeffreys reasoned that if he could isolate DNA material from a cell and present it as an image it would be individually specific. The only people on earth with identical DNA maps would be identical twins.
The technology had enormous possibilities in medicine, science and the law, but until 1986 it had mostly been used in paternity and immigration disputes. That changed on 21 November when the kitchen porter from Carlton Hayes became the first alleged killer to be set free as a result of genetic fingerprinting.
For Leicestershire CID, the result was a public relations disaster. The killer of two schoolgirls was still at large and an innocent teenager had spent more than three months in jail. David Baker faced a grilling at the news conference afterwards. The arrest had not been ‘a blunder’, he said, the youth had been charged after tape-recorded questioning in the presence of a lawyer. ‘He is not responsible for certain aspects of that murder.’
‘Has he been totally eliminated?’ a journalist asked.
‘No-one has been totally eliminated.’
Lynda Mann had been killed almost within sight of my office and I remember contemplating who might have done such a thing. Three years later, with a second girl murdered, David Baker gave me the opportunity to ask the question in earnest. His telephone call was brief and short on detail. He didn’t trust hospital switchboards and wanted to meet.
Leicestershire had a new police headquarters, purpose-built on a large campus outside the city and only a few miles from Narborough. The entrance foyer looked like a reception for a motorway hotel and after following the jinking corridors I found Baker’s office which was larger than his old one but rather sparse. The souvenirs from past operations either hadn’t made the journey or hadn’t been unpacked.
He introduced me to Detective Superintendent Tony Painter, a tall, fit man with a Romanesque face, aviator glasses and a local accent. Close to Baker’s age and experience, the two of them looked as if they’d probably risen through the ranks together. Baker was the quieter of the two but no less assertive.
‘We’ve got problems, Paul,’ he said, nursing his chin in his hands. ‘We were convinced that we had caught a murderer. We had a confession; we had witnesses who put him at the scene; he knew details about Dawn’s death that were never made public. We charged him and then his father reads a bloody magazine story about genetic testing and starts demanding that we give the boy one.’ He paused and looked up. ‘I suppose you’ve met Dr Alec Jeffreys?’
I shook my head.
He continued, ‘Well… anyway … he does a test that we’ve never heard of and comes back and says, “You’ve got the wrong guy.” You can’t challenge it. How do you challenge brand-new science? Nobody else in the bloody world knows anything about it.’
There was a short silence as the question seemed to bounce around the room.
Baker said, ‘I want to know what we did wrong.’
‘What exactly do you want me to do?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, the investigation was faultless. But I’d like you to go over the interviews with the kitchen porter. I want to know if we in any way conveyed to him information that he then gave us. Were the interviews oppressive? Did we pressurize him into making confessions and admissions? How did he know the things he knew?’
Painter explained that there were about fourteen tapes of interviews conducted over several days at Wigston Police Station. A lawyer had been present for most of the sessions.
‘But that isn’t the first priority …’ interrupted Baker. ‘We have a lot of frightened people out there … parents who don’t know whether it’s safe for their kids to walk home from school…’
Painter said, ‘One minute we got the guy and the next we’ve got Jack shit.’
Baker added, ‘Bottom line, we have a double-murderer still out there and I want you to help us catch him.’
Better prepared this time, I knew exactly what I needed. ‘It means going right back to the beginning and studying the entire investigation.’
Baker replied, ‘Fine, whatever you want. We’re not hiding anything.’
Tony Painter had headed the investigation into Dawn Ashworth’s murder and he would take me through the inquiry from day one.
Dawn had a part-time job during the school holidays, working at a newsagent’s shop in Mill Lane, Enderby. On 31 July she left the shop at 3.30 p.m. According to a friend, ‘She was happy and in high spirits all afternoon being very excited about going on holiday with her parents to Hunstanton on Saturday.’
At home, Dawn told her mother she was going to have tea with schoolmates in Narborough. She’d by home by 7.00 p.m. because she was going to a birthday party for a little boy for whom she babysat. She even dropped back into the newsagent’s shop to buy a box of Smarties as part of her gift.
She left the shop at 4.00 p.m., heading for Narborough. Dawn was five feet three inches tall and wore braces on her teeth. She had dark brown straight medium-length hair. She was wearing a mid-calf-length white skirt, a white sleeveless polo-neck top and multicoloured sleeveless top with a denim jacket. She was known to have only Ł10 on her.
The most direct route to the homes of her two girlfriends was via Ten Pound Lane, a mixture of farm track and footpath that ran from the sports fields of Brockington School, Enderby, between fields to the east of Carlton Hayes Hospital until it emerged onto the Leicester-Coventry road at Narborough.