Anyone who helped out with the trips to the countryside did so off their own backs. People gave up their own time to help out with the weekly meetings and the trips. Derek was not by himself on the trip to Scarclaw in 1996; there was another adult present. He maintains that there was no real hierarchy to the group, that the ‘leaders’ were just responsible adults – people who helped out of the goodness of their hearts.
—It was the kids themselves that were determined to go to Scarclaw that summer. I mean really determined. Even if it was only going to be a few of them. They would have been gutted if we’d cancelled. We’d been booking the Woodlands Centre at Scarclaw for years. The kids loved it, knew the place like the backs of their hands. That summer as well, it was beautiful…
Sorry, I’m going on, aren’t I … So, the kids, the people who were there: there were only five kids in the end. Eva, my daughter, was one of them. She was … fifteen. They all were about that age. And then there was me, obviously. And Sally.
Sally Mullen’s son, Keith, was ill at the time of the Scarclaw trip in 1996. Sally, like Derek Bickers, was one of the original members of Rangers and she had agonised for a while about whether she would come and help out on that particular trip. Her husband, however, had taken some leave from work, anticipating that Keith would attend the trip, so he was able to stay at home while Sally went to Scarclaw with Derek and the other kids. This is another ‘what if ’ moment. If Sally had decided to stay at home, would the trip to Scarclaw have gone ahead? I don’t want to speculate on this with Derek, though, there’s no point.
Unlike Derek, Sally Mullen seemed to somehow slip under the press radar. There are several reasons I can think of why that happened. First, she is female. As abhorrent as sexism is, a man is far more likely to be a killer. That’s just how it is. Also, Sally suffers from an intense form of sleep apnoea, meaning that she needs specialist equipment, assisting her breathing while she sleeps. This made her highly unlikely as a suspect. In order to kill Tom Jeffries she would have had to get up in the early hours of the morning, dismantle her sleeping equipment on her own and then re-apply it after she had finished.
—Sally came out of it all smelling pretty clean, didn’t she?
—As she should. She’s as innocent as the rest of us. Look; I took the brunt of it, I know that. I did it to protect not only Sally but the kids as well. They were children, for god’s sake.
Derek was vociferous in his defence of the others and took particular offence at how the teenagers were treated by the police, accusing them of being heavy-handed in their questioning. I believe it was this anti-establishment tone that turned the press against Derek, whereas they left the quiet, compliant Sally Mullen alone.
—Can you tell me a bit about Eva? Your daughter.
—Eva’s a good lass; she was a good baby as well, if that makes sense? Didn’t do much in the way of crying; slept all night. She was just normal; a normal lass. She did well at school – wanted to be a vet.
—Would you say that Eva and her friends were rebels? At the time, I mean.
—Eva’s never been the rebellious type. Well, I say that, but all kids rebel, don’t they? That’s just normal. Sus and I, we always tried to be understanding, easy. ‘Chilled out’ – that’s how Eva’s friends used to describe us. I don’t think we were any more liberal than anyone else, but screaming and shouting never did anyone any good, did it? There wasn’t a lot of conflict in our house. We talked. I think that’s important when you’re raising a girl. You know what kids are like when they get older.
—That’s a good way to raise a child, Derek. No wonder Eva was happy.
—We’re tolerant people; if Eva wanted to dye her hair, wear strange clothes, that sort of thing, we always let her express herself. My thought was always that, if you start telling kids they’re not allowed to do things, the more they’re going to want to do it. Of course we had rules; Eva was fifteen, still a kid. She was a kid when what happened on Scarclaw happened. She was a child.
—You knew the other kids too, didn’t you? You and Sally knew their parents, right?
—That’s right. Most of them had been in Rangers since it began. Charlie Armstrong – he was Eva’s best friend, since they were kids.
Charlie Armstrong is the boy that Derek has already mentioned. The one who had thrown leaves with Eva in the Bickers’ garden. Charlie’s mum was involved with Rangers, but she and Charlie’s father had booked a weekend away when Charlie was due to go to Scarclaw. Both of them declined to talk to me.
—Tell me about Charlie.
—Charlie and Eva went to different schools; I think that’s how they kept their friendship going; they saw each other at Rangers and at weekends, without the nonsense you get about boyfriends and girlfriends, and all that stuff in the playground.
I’ve known Charlie’s mum and dad for years; they’re good people; they’ve got a similar attitude to me and Sus: chilled out, go with the flow, that sort of thing.
Charlie was a little more … I dunno … a bit more outgoing, if that’s the right word, than Eva was back then.
In the inquest into Tom Jeffries’ death, this was the debate that nearly saw Derek Bickers and Sally Mullen charged with negligence. As I mentioned previously, it was the parents of Tom Jeffries who were the most vocal in protecting Derek and Sally. As we will discover in further episodes of this podcast, all the teenagers at Scarclaw that night had been drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis. Charlie Armstrong was apparently one of the main instigators or ringleaders in all of that. We’ll get to it in due course.
—You say that Charlie Armstrong was ‘outgoing’.
—I don’t know if outgoing is the right word, though; he was a strong character – that’s probably a better phrase. Charlie was definitely the alpha of the group, the leader of the pack. He smoked cigarettes; and his mum and dad knew he did. He was into his music … death metal or something like that … not that that has anything to do with anything. He had the long coat, the long hair, T-shirt with bloody devils on it, or some such; all that. I think he was excluded from his school a few times.
This is another point of interest and something that was raised at the inquest. Charlie Armstrong was thought of as the leader of the older teenagers. His appearance and music preferences were raised more than once in the press, to the derision of the parents, as well as Charlie’s peers. Remember, this was before Columbine and the ‘trench-coat mafia’ hype in the US. Marilyn Manson was still relatively unheard of in the UK.
It is true, however, that Charlie Armstrong was excluded from his school a number of times. I managed to track down ex-deputy headmaster Jon Lomax to get his take on it. Mr Lomax is an old man now, but his mind is still sharp and he reminisces about his school life with an unbound delight, his answers to my questions punctuated with laughter. Our phone conversation is brief.
—Mr Lomax, you remember an ex-pupil of yours called Charlie Armstrong?
—It’s funny you should ask, actually, because, even with the attention he got after what happened up at Scarclaw, I would still have remembered him.
—What do you remember?
—He was a true rebel. Or a pain in the arse, whatever you like! He was forever stood outside my office.
—Really, what for?
—Oh, just little acts of defiance; nothing that important in the grand scheme of things. He wouldn’t tie up his tie properly – had it knotted halfway down his front or not on at all; holes in his blazer; smoking; that sort of thing.
—You must have overseen hundreds of thousands of children in your time; it’s funny how Charlie stuck with you.
—I suppose so, but you do remember the ones like Charlie, more than you do the ones who behaved… What I remember most about Charlie, was just how smart he was. He was a lazy underachiever; it used to drive his teachers potty! You know the sort, forever getting ‘could be very good if he applied himself ’ on his report. Underneath it all, though, there was no harm to him. He wasn’t a nasty
child, and, believe me, I have encountered perfectly nasty children – nine times out of ten with perfectly nasty parents!
—He was excluded wasn’t he?
—Yes. Maybe more than once, I don’t recall. But the first time does stick in my memory; mostly because of how his mother behaved about it.
It was a lot of silliness really, but the point is, schools need to have standards. It’s different these days, I know, but Charlie and his mother both knew fine well what we allowed and what we didn’t.
—What did he do?
—It was his hair. I mean, we tolerated him having it long. Ten … even five years before and he wouldn’t have been allowed to have it that long: but ‘collar-length hair for boys’ was omitted from the policy in 1990, I believe. But he stuck out like a sore thumb, a thumb that had been hit with a hammer! Bright pink, it was. I mean, he did it just for the attention, you know; just to break the rules. But his mother wasn’t having any of it. ‘How’s the colour of his hair affecting his learning?’ she said in the meeting. That wasn’t the point, of course. You couldn’t just turn up to school with bright-pink hair, could you? What would other people think of us as a school?
—So what happened?
—It was funny, you know, because we’d been tipped off. Kids don’t think teachers can hear them most of the time, but someone had overheard one of Charlie’s friends talking about how he was going to do it at the weekend – dye his hair. When Monday morning came around, we sent him home with a letter, saying he wasn’t welcome back until his hair was a ‘natural’ colour. Quite right too!
—You say his mum kicked up a fuss about it?
—She did; said she’d go to the press, that sort of thing, but it never happened. Charlie came in a few days later with it all dyed black. And his forehead too!
This interlude provides an insight into the sort of person Charlie Armstrong was back in 1996. He was impulsive; an individual; an innovator who didn’t care what anyone thought of him. I have no doubt he was heralded as a hero when he came back to school after the pink-hair debacle. Maybe that was the point: he just wanted to show everyone he could do it.
I continue talking to Derek about the other young people up at Scarclaw.
—Err … there was Anyu Kekkonen, Eva’s friend from school. She was quite new to Rangers; she joined when she was twelve, I think.
Anyu’s mum is Inuit; her side of the family came from Labrador. Her dad was an old friend of ours, but he’d died a while back. Anyu was a quiet girl back then; sweet, dark, serious, almost swarthy. Most people didn’t know a lot about her, to be honest with you: she was quiet in front of groups of youngsters; polite but … inscrutable … in front of adults. She seemed at ease; and she had a real practicality to her – she was sensible; the voice of reason. As she and Eva grew up, Anyu would be the level-headed one, whereas Eva would sometimes be a bit irrational. When they were in middle school, Anyu used to call for Eva in the morning, and it would make me and Sus laugh, Anyu’s little voice: ‘Now, you know we’ve got PE today; have you got your kit?’ And then Eva would come flying back into the kitchen with her shoelaces half done and toothpaste on her face. She was twelve going on eighty-five, was Anyu.
Besides Eva Bickers, Anyu Kekkonen was the only other female teen in the group who went out to Scarclaw that day. I have heard that Anyu and her mother relocated back to Labrador, northern Canada in the wake of Scarclaw, but no one seems to know. Derek tells me he isn’t sure but I am not convinced.
—I was friends with her dad, when he was alive. Jari was a fisherman; a Finn. I’d studied a bit of Finnish at uni, and when I worked on the docks we got chatting. He’d just moved here with his wife. Eska is nice and everything, but reserved – like Anyu really.
—Do you think Eska might have wanted to return home after her husband’s death?
—I couldn’t say, to be honest with you. I have no idea, she never mentioned it…
—Was Eska part of Rangers?
—That’s a hard one, to be fair … I don’t think she felt she was ever part of it, if you know what I mean? After Jari died, we welcomed her with open arms; of course we did. But she was distant, almost aloof. But that was just how she was. I don’t think she was being purposefully rude or anything. I think she just felt a bit of an outsider. It was Jari who’d brought her to England, taken her from what was a pretty grim place up there, poverty, all that. I think Eska always felt she was ‘below’ us in some way … which was a real shame.
—What about Anyu? She was sort of in-between worlds wasn’t she?
—Anyu didn’t start coming to Rangers till she was older. Maybe Eska didn’t like being too far from her – you know, after what happened to Jari.
—Do you think there is a possibility they returned to Canada?
—There is, I suppose, but I really don’t know.
—Anyu spoke Inuktitut?
—Did she? Oh … well … maybe then. I don’t know.
I don’t want to press Derek too hard about Anyu – or any of the others to be honest. Their stories will come. But the research I have conducted about the ex-members of the Rangers throws up very little when it comes to Anyu. It seems that being quiet, in the background of things, was her defining characteristic.
Derek and I talk instead about the dynamics of the group; specifically about the dynamics among the kids, the ones who were there on that trip in 1996.
—Kids are like packs of wild animals. And the pack has certain characters. There are leaders, voices of reason, the brains, the brawn, the wild card, the outsider … the victim. I’ve worked with kids my whole life, and you see it again and again. It’s maybe an evolutionary thing, I don’t know; maybe some sort of survival mechanism?
—Did the Rangers have defined roles like that?
—Yes, I suppose they did. Charlie, he was the leader; the alpha. My Eva, she was sort of second in command, I suppose. Anyu was the strategist; the brains behind the operation.
—You wouldn’t think, would you, that something like what happened was possible?
—Look. The way Sally and I saw it was that these were sensible kids; responsible kids. We’d known them all their lives, most of them. We understood them; respected them. And what was most important, we felt that they respected us.
—Do you think it was possible that the other two perhaps threw out the balance of the group?
—You mean…
—Tom Jeffries and…
—Brian Mings.
—Yeah … Brian Mings.
—Yes. Yes, you could say that…
We’ve reached the halfway stage in this week’s podcast and I think it is important to take a little break from the interviews and summarise what we know so far about what happened at Scarclaw Fell in 1996. It is important to mention that foul play was ruled out by the inquest into Tom Jeffries’ death. Derek Bickers and Sally Mullen were cleared of any wrongdoing or culpability for what happened, as were the remaining members of Rangers: Eva Bickers, Charlie Armstrong, Anyu Kekkonen and Brian Mings; all of whom were fifteen years old at the time. Tom Jeffries was also fifteen.
The police report states that Tom Jeffries was reported missing from Scarclaw Fell Woodlands Centre by Derek Bickers at 6.36 a.m. on August the 24th, 1996. Police attended the centre at 7.30 a.m. and a preliminary search was conducted of the surrounding woodland. The young people involved, as well as Derek Bickers and Sally Mullen, were questioned together and separately. I have been able to obtain some of these recordings, extracts of which we will hear in the following episodes of Six Stories.
After the questioning, the search parties were alerted to the idea that Jeffries may have walked off into the woods and passed out under the influence of alcohol and cannabis. All of the young people involved admitted that they were all under the influence of said substances at the time. None of them reported seeing Jeffries leave the centre, and none of the others had left the grounds of the centre that night. They all maintained that they were asleep when To
m Jeffries disappeared.
After the initial examination of the surrounding woodlands, the perimeters of the search were extended to include the lowlands of the fell, where there were disused mineshafts and marshland.
After twelve hours, Tom Jeffries’ body had still not been found.
After twenty-four hours, the search perimeters were widened further. A task force of combined police forces and mountain rescue were drafted in. The young people as well as the two responsible adults were questioned further. No arrests were made.
[Audio extract from taped interview with Derek Bickers, 24/08/96]
—Look, we knew they smoked, we knew they drank – teenagers are the least subtle people in the world. But what were we going to do? If we lost our rags, kicked off with them, they would have still done it, but further away. They would have done it where we didn’t know where they were, wouldn’t they?
—Are you saying, Mr Bickers, that you were aware that these young people under your care were drinking and taking drugs?
—Yes … yes … there’s no denying it. But I want you to know that I take full responsibility for all that. It’s on me, not them, not Sally … me.
—Who bought the alcohol for them, Mr Bickers?
—I have no idea. Is that really what’s important here?
—Did you buy the alcohol for them, Mr Bickers?
—No. No, I didn’t.
—Do you realise how serious this is?
—Do you think I’m fucking stupid, officer?
—That’s not what I said.
—What do you think is better, officer? A load of kids, who are going to be drinking and taking drugs – whatever you do to try and stop them – doing it where we know they’re safe and we can intervene if they get into problems, or doing it in the middle of a fucking forest?
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