Authors: Paul Britton
To the east, running almost parallel to Ten Pound Lane, was the M1 motorway which cut across the eastern tip of Narborough and turned directly north through Enderby near the sports fields.
Dawn had a choice as she walked towards Ten Pound Lane. She could turn left over the motorway footbridge and then follow a path to King Edward Avenue, or turn right and take the shorter route down Ten Pound Lane.
In Narborough, Dawn visited several friends and the last person to see her was Mrs Valerie Allsop, the mother of one schoolfriend from Carlton Avenue. She’d seen Dawn walk past the front window as she was leaving.
Dawn appears to have then retraced her steps, walking towards home. A passing motorist sighted her at 4.40 p.m. crossing King Edward Avenue, as she headed towards the farm gate across the entrance to Ten Pound Lane.
Her half-naked body was found by police at noon on Saturday in a corner of a field next to the footpath. It was almost totally concealed by grass, nettles, twigs, branches and leaf litter which had been heaped on top.
Painter opened the first album of crime scene photographs. With the foliage cleared away, Dawn was visible lying on her left side with her knees pulled up toward her chest. She was naked from the waist down although her underpants were hooked around her right ankle and white shoes were on her feet. Her bra was pushed up over her breasts and a trail of dried blood was smeared across her left thigh. She’d been in the field a considerable time in the middle of summer and the insects had found her first. Although her eyes were closed, the lids and orbits were marked out in a creamy white mucus left by their passage.
I wanted to look away. I wanted to give the young girl some semblance of decency and turn the camera aside. Taking a deep breath, I turned the pages, mentally noting the numerous scratches, insect bites and nettle stings on the body.
Painter turned to the pathology report, explaining the important details. Dawn had two abrasions on her upper left forehead, a swelling over her left cheek and bruising from the left eye down to her jaw-line. There was a cut inside her mouth caused by her braces and other abrasions on her face, chest and the back of her neck. Some of these injuries occurred when her body was being moved and concealed, according to the pathologist.
She died of manual strangulation and possibly received a knife-hand blow before a stranglehold was imparted, possibly a forearm pressed against her larynx by an assailant behind her.
Dawn, a virgin, had been viciously raped and sodomized. The pathologist reported, ‘When one considers the amount of bruising in relation to the larynx I have to suggest that the sexual attack occurred after strangulation and, therefore, at or after death.’
This was important, although I didn’t want to say anything to Tony Painter until later. The timing of the penetration can often reveal clues about the murderer’s motivation. There is a major difference between the psychological functioning of a rapist who panics and kills his victim to protect his identity and someone who takes perverse pleasure from abusing his victim at the moment of her death or after death.
Initially the murder squad focused their attention on a young man who’d been seen fleeing from the area. A woman motorist had to brake sharply to avoid hitting the man as he ran across the Leicester-Coventry road under the M1 bridge on King Edward Avenue at about 5.30 p.m. on the Thursday. Thirty minutes earlier, a worker at Marston Radiators on the far side of the six-lane motorway heard two screams coming from the area where Dawn had been found. A courting couple who were seen cuddling in a nearby field at about 4.35 p.m. were sought and two independent witnesses, including a local farmer, reported seeing a man crouching in the grass and in the hedgerows on an embankment on King Edward Avenue at 5.30 p.m.
‘And then there was the kitchen porter,’ said Painter. ‘Four different witnesses reported seeing his motorbike parked near the Ml bridge between 4.30 p.m. and 5.30 p.m., and a man was seen carrying a very distinctive red crash-helmet, like the porter’s.’
‘How did you pick him up?’ I asked.
‘On the Sunday evening, a lad pushing a motorbike approached one of our boys at the checkpoint on Mill Lane in Enderby and said he’d seen Dawn walking towards Ten Pound Lane on Thursday afternoon. The officer took a note of his name and we followed it up and spoke to him two days later. That was the kitchen porter.’
Painter drew my attention to several statements. Another employee at Carlton Hayes had returned from holiday on the day Dawn went missing. The next day, Friday, he was visited by the kitchen porter who told him that Dawn’s body had been found ‘in a hedge near a gate by the Ml bridge.’
‘We didn’t find her for another fourteen hours,’ said Painter incredulously. ‘How did he know about the gate leading from Ten Pound Lane and it was only ten minutes walk from the footbridge over the Ml?’
Similarly, at 1.45 p.m. on Saturday the kitchen porter had told a local man that Dawn’s body had been found. Yes it had - less than two hours earlier - but the news hadn’t been made public. How did he know?
‘We pulled him in for questioning a week after the murder.’
‘And?’
‘He made certain admissions but was rather inconsistent. He’d say one thing, then deny it in the next breath; or talk in riddles and blame someone else. He admitted being on the path with Dawn, described how he attacked her and gave details of how the body was hidden. I don’t care how fertile this kid’s imagination is, there’s no way he could have made it up and been so accurate.’
Painter produced several more statements which related to the sexual preferences of the seventeen-year-old, who apparently had come to the police’s attention previously for having anal intercourse with a fourteen-year-old girlfriend on a local railway embankment. In another incident he admitted fondling a nine-year-old girl during a sexual assault that was verified by witnesses.
The police had obviously gone looking for corroboration and appeared to have established a circumstantial link between the kitchen porter and the anal assault on Dawn Ashworth.
Painter said, ‘When you listen to the tapes you’ll see what I mean. He admitted it, denied it, admitted it, denied it and then said, “I want a blood test. It’s not me.”’
I asked - ‘Did the genetic fingerprinting link both murders?’
‘That’s the only good bit of news - we’re looking for the same man.’
Silently, I considered the implications of this statement. If it was the same man, then he had already killed twice. What’s to stop him striking again, I thought.
Painter drove me to the scene and we parked at the foot of Ten Pound Lane on King Edward Avenue. After checking in at the mobile incident room, a caravan, we walked up a concrete ramp leading to a gate that marked the entrance to Ten Pound Lane. Weak sunlight filtered through the hawthorn bushes on either side of the footpath. Autumn had arrived late and there was still a lot of greenery among the brambles and tangled bushes.
After a quarter of a mile the path started to narrow and the hedge closed around it creating a narrow green-sided gorge, broken occasionally by farm gates leading to adjacent fields.
‘You can see where a lot of it was cleared during the search,’ said Painter, breathing more heavily. ‘In some sections the nettles and brambles were shoulder-high.’
‘And she was here at what time?’ I asked.
‘A motorist saw her in King Edward Avenue walking towards the farm gate at 4.40 p.m. It would have taken her another ten minutes to reach here.’
So much undergrowth had been cleared, it was hard to picture the scene as it looked on the afternoon Dawn was attacked, yet I clearly recognized it as a pocket of isolation. First contact had to have been on the footpath and it began with an exchange - a conversation, or a threat, or simply a look. Depending on how Dawn reacted, she may have been able to influence what happened next but I didn’t know enough about her to predict her behaviour.
She probably died on the path and then her body was taken through or lifted over a nearby gate into the corner of a field. The grass and nettles were quite high because the farmer’s tractor would swing and miss the elbow formed by the hedges.
A withered bunch of flowers lay propped against the gatepost. Painter said that the Ashworth family had been devastated by the murder and continued to bring flowers back to mark the spot.
‘Once you start, how do you stop?’ he asked. ‘Do you say, “Well today I won’t do it any more.” Then how do you get over the guilt of not doing it any more?’
Unlocking the padlock with a key, we pushed against the gate which groaned on rusty hinges. It would have taken two hands to open, I reasoned, which meant that Dawn had probably been lifted over. I felt the unevenness of the ground beneath my feet and noticed the clumps of stinging nettles and brambles. It all helped to recreate a picture of what had happened.
We walked further along Ten Pound Lane towards Enderby and I noticed where the footpath forked and one path led towards the footbridge that crossed the M1 and the other to the playing fields. How exposed is the crime scene? I asked myself. Is it possible to park a car on the Ml, walk down the footpath, commit a murder and take off?
Five fields away, on the western edge of the hospital grounds, was the scene of Lynda Mann’s death. We parked at the Woodlands Day Hospital and walked along Forest Road towards the entrance to the Black Pad.
A few yards along the black cinder pathway, I looked through the iron fence into the small woodland glade where Lynda’s body had been found. The footpath was now flanked by street lights but in 1983, on a cold November evening, it was very dark and quiet.
Again we had a teenager who had been acquired on the footpath. She was then taken through a gateway and killed amid the silver birch and holly trees only yards away. Like Dawn, she was found lying with her legs slightly open and a branch underneath. I couldn’t understand the significance of this, if any.
The postmortem had revealed abrasions on Lynda’s cheek and chin as well as heavy bruising around her collarbone and upper chest. Painter suggested that the killer had knelt on her as he tightened her scarf around her neck. There was no sign of entry into her vagina or anus but dried semen had been found matted in her pubic hair. ‘Sexual intercourse was attempted and premature ejaculation occurred,’ the Home Office pathologist had concluded.
At supper that night, I tried to push the memories of the day aside and talk about normal domestic things. After the dishes had been washed and cleared away, I helped Ian with his homework and then wandered into my study, locking the door. Tony Painter had given me copies of statements, pathology reports, maps and aerial photographs.
Now I had to properly reconstruct what happened - not just through the eyes of the victims but also the predator. The Osborne/Weedon case had given me confidence and allowed me to develop a framework. Four questions had to be answered - what happened, how, to whom and why.
These same questions apply to my clinical work, particularly when dealing with victims, but in a slightly different way. In my consulting room I see someone who is damaged or in pain and I have to find out who they are, psychologically, and how they got there. In this case, I didn’t have a victim across the table from me and had to rely on others to tell me about Lynda and Dawn.
All the pain is focused on that third question and the more I learned about them - about their strengths, weaknesses, loves, hates and fears - the greater the pain because they became closer to me. This must happen to the police, I thought, and the obvious tendency is to push it away and just focus on whoever committed the crime. I couldn’t afford to do that. The rigour with which I answer each of the first three questions dramatically affects the answer to the fourth. In a sense I have to imagine that this man is in my consulting room chair and I’m conducting a one-sided interview. If I know exactly what motivated him to kill a woman, I can put a precise shape to his personality functioning. Then I can move back through his life from the offence and begin drawing up a picture of his family, friends, relationships and schooling.
As a child what relationship did he have with his mother and father? What would it be like now? How did he get on at primary school and secondary school? Is he likely to be of average intelligence or less so, or more? Given that he did this to a particular woman, what does it say about his feelings, perceptions and assumptions about women in general? Is he likely to have had many girlfriends? Would he have one now? What sort of work is he likely to be doing? Would it be skilled or unskilled? Does he have the social functioning to hold down a long-term job?
Sexual deviants like this man and Paul Bostock aren’t unknown. They can be found in prisons, special hospitals, regional secure-units and sometimes in outpatient clinics up and down the country and throughout the world. Although I had only been a forensic clinician for barely three months, I had already taken the histories of half a dozen men who fantasized about raping and killing young women. My clinical exposure was increasing all the time and I had access to journals, case presentations, books and research papers from psychologists and specialists who had conducted similar interviews in Britain and overseas.
This is what I drew upon when I sat down and looked into the mind of the Narborough killer.
Two days later, I was back in Baker’s office. I had several pages of handwritten foolscap notes in front of me.
‘He’s a local man or has good local knowledge,’ I said. This was indicated by his ability to disappear quickly after the offences and not attract undue attention from possible witnesses. No-one had been able to provide a description that was accurate enough to identify the killer or prompt suggestions from the public.
‘Everything indicates a single offender. Sexual psychopaths rarely hunt together and one person could have moved the bodies.’ At the same time, I felt that he wasn’t a classic loner or stand-out suspect. If he had been then someone in the local villages would have named him as being an odd sort who made women feel uncomfortable or acted strangely.