Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  But the neat explanation that Sion Jenkins was given to fits of violent rage and simply killed Billie-Jo when she annoyed him scarcely fits the timings. Jenkins and his two natural daughters left the house to get into the car to go shopping. He returned to the house to tell Billie-Jo they would be back in a quarter of an hour. He was gone for three minutes. Those who believe Jenkins carried out the murder have to believe that he went through the house, immediately and without provocation started raining blows on Billie-Jo’s head, went upstairs to change into clean but identical clothes and returned to the children waiting in the car – all in those three minutes. It is not credible.

  This is a rare and remarkable case of a person charged with murder in effect being put on trial three times for the same crime (at a total estimated cost of £10 million), at the end of which there was still no verdict. The British legal system, elaborate and expensive though it is, has been unable to determine whether Sion Jenkins is guilty or innocent of murdering Billie-Jo.

  Is there an alternative suspect? There was always the possibility, never discounted, that an untraced prowler got into the back garden and killed Billie-Jo. The police discounted this as they regarded the only access to the back garden as being from the front and round the side of the house. Any prowler approaching from the front and leaving again by the same route would have risked being seen. It would have been almost impossible for a prowler to have done that, and committed a violent murder, all within the space of, at most, the ten minutes allowed by Jenkins’s alibi. It would also have been impossible for a prowler approaching from the front to have known that there was a young girl, a potential victim, in the back garden at the time.

  The police were sceptical about the prowler but, when he was first questioned by the police after the murder, Sion Jenkins told them he had had a confrontation with a prowler. He had spotted the intruder in the bushes in the back garden one night just a few weeks before the murder; he had chased the man off and then took the dog out to look for him in the local park. A mysterious footprint was found in the back garden. The police examined it and found that it did not match any members of the Jenkins household; it was a stranger’s.

  A close family friend, Peter Gaimster, gave evidence at the trial that supported the prowler scenario. He described how at a dinner party just days before Billie-Jo died, Sion and Lois Jenkins had spoken about a prowler who was causing them some anxiety. ‘At one point, Sion took me outside and we discussed at length how the prowler could have got round the back of the house. Sion and Lois were very concerned about this, but had not reported the matter to the police.’ It was to Mr Gaimster’s house that the Jenkins family went immediately after the murder. He described ‘scenes of chaos’ as the Jenkins family tried to cope with the situation.

  The only plausible scenario is that the hypothetical prowler did not approach from the front, but climbed into the back garden from the rear, from a neighbouring back garden, and left the same way. It is also possible that Billie-Jo had been stalked. It is not at all uncommon for paedophiles to watch their prey and learn their characteristic routines, establish where they are likely to be at certain times. So it may not have been a coincidence at all that Billie-Jo was alone in the back garden when the attacker struck. He may have been watching and waiting, perhaps behind the bushes in the garden, until he heard Jenkins shout something like, ‘Bye, Billie. Back in fifteen minutes,’ and knew she was alone.

  Jenkins claimed that he and his wife had become anxious about prowlers and break-ins in the area, that it made him have security lights and window locks fitted. On the other hand, this was contradicted by other residents who said there was very little crime in the area other than vandalism to cars.

  The person who committed the murder did so in an insane frenzy. There is one forensic detail, one piece of solid evidence, that lends support to the idea of a mentally unbalanced intruder. Two pieces of bin liner were found inserted into Billie-Jo’s nostrils. They were not mentioned until near the end of the trial and they were given very little attention, but they do imply an attack by a madman. There were claims that a man escaped from a mental hospital on the day of the murder, and that he was seen in the area. The police responded to this by saying that he had an alibi. They said that he had no traces of Billie-Jo’s blood on his clothing and was not involved in the murder, but this may be a case of the police having, by this stage, decided who the murderer was and not wanting any further suspects.

  It is nevertheless the case that a middle-aged man referred to only as ‘Mr B’ was seen near the house, and a wild-looking man was seen running through the park away from the direction of the property at about the time of the murder. Mr B was said to be mentally ill, with an obsession with stuffing plastic bags into his nose and mouth. In spite of the police dismissal of this line of enquiry, it seems that Mr B did not have a watertight alibi at the time of the murder. An e-fit picture of a man acting suspiciously in the area was circulated by the police, but no-one was ever identified from it.

  The pieces of plastic bin liner turn out to be crucially significant pieces of evidence. Overall, the frenzied nature of the crime is more consistent with a maniacal attack by an obsessive and deranged stalker. If that is what happened, there must be people in Hastings who either know, or have strong suspicions.

  After he was arrested, Sion Jenkins remarried and moved to Hampshire. His former wife, Lois, and their four natural daughters emigrated to Tasmania. Lois Jenkins claimed that her ex-husband was violent towards her and their daughters. It is not known how much truth there was in these allegations, but the judge ruled them inadmissible because in his view they had no direct bearing on the Billie-Jo case.

  The Sussex police have vowed never to close the Billie-Jo case. There is still, in spite of everything that has happened, a strong police commitment to bring to justice the killer of Billie-Jo, ‘a bright, lively thirteen-year-old girl with everything to live for who was brutally murdered on the patio of her foster parents’ home, a place where she ought to have been safe.’

  PART SIX: Recent Unsolved Crimes (2001–PRESENT)

  Walking Home From School: Milly Dowler

  Milly Dowler was a thirteen-year-old English schoolgirl who was on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames on 21 March 2002 when she disappeared without trace. Her family and friends had no idea what had happened to her. A large-scale search was launched, and teams of police officers combed the roads, streams and rivers round Hersham, where she lived. Detectives who had been involved in the earlier abduction of Sarah Payne in Sussex were brought in to assist. There were several appeals to the public for information, including a reconstruction on the television programme Crimewatch of Milly’s interrupted journey home. The singer Will Young made an appeal on the ITN news programme. Milly was a fan of Will Young’s and had been to a concert of his just the day before she disappeared. There was a possibility that she had run away from home and the appeals on the media were made partly in the hope that Milly would see them and return home.

  Milly’s family had no idea what had happened. Her father expressed the fear that she had been abducted. Her mother nursed the hope that Milly had run away, though she could think of no reason why she would want to do that. When, one week after her disappearance she had still not reappeared, the police speculated that she had been abducted, though probably not taken by force. She would probably not have gone off with a total stranger, so there was an implication that she had been abducted by someone she knew. There were several sightings of Milly just before she vanished, but none of the witnesses saw or heard any kind of struggle; it looked as if she had just stepped into someone’s car without anyone else noticing what was happening.

  On 23 April 2002, a month after Milly disappeared, a body was found in the Thames, only two miles from the place where Milly disappeared. There was naturally widespread speculation that this must be Milly Dowler’s body, but the next day it was identified as that of a seventy-three year old woman called Maisie Thoma
s, who had been missing for a whole year. By June, Milly had still not turned up, alive or dead, in spite of a £100,000 reward offered by The Sun newspaper. Milly’s parents went on sending her texts in the hope that she was alive and would phone them on her mobile, but the police sensed that the girl was dead and warned the Dowlers that they should prepare themselves for that eventuality.

  It was not until six months later that her remains were discovered; then it became apparent that she had been abducted and murdered. On 18 September, Milly’s skeleton was found in Yateley Heath Forest not far from Fleet; pathologists confirmed two days later from dental records that the remains really were Milly’s. There were no traces of any of her clothing or belongings with the skeletal remains. Presumably her killer had stripped the body of anything that might help to identify her. Her purse, rucksack and mobile phone had gone. They are still missing.

  Milly suddenly became the focus of a major media campaign as well as a major police operation, Operation Ruby, to find her killer. The police investigation involved more than 100 officers, who conducted 120 searches and interviewed more than 2,800 people. In spite of this intensity of effort, no one has been charged with the murder.

  Milly Dowler attended Heathside School. On what was to be her last day there, she left at three o’clock and boarded a train to take her home. Usually, she got off the train at her home stop, Hersham, but on 21 March she got off one stop early at the Ashley Park station, Walton-on-Thames, to visit a cafe with her friends. She conscientiously phoned her father at three forty-seven to let him know where she was (about one mile from home) and that she would be home in half an hour. She set off for home on foot along Station Avenue, the road leading north-east from the station. She was last seen about fifteen minutes later, still walking north-eastwards, close to the junction with the A244 and less than a quarter of the way home. The police believe Milly was picked up, killed and buried shortly after this final sighting at around four o’clock.

  There have been several arrests in relation to Milly Dowler’s murder, but no charge has been brought. A twenty-year old woman from Tewkesbury, made repeated phone calls to the police, Milly’s school and Milly’s parents (Sally and Robert Dowler), pretending to be Milly. She was imprisoned for five months for making phone calls to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety. In a similar way, a forty-nine-year-old man sent repeated e-mails from Nottinghamshire claiming that Milly had been smuggled out of Britain to work as a prostitute in Polish nightclubs. He had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act for being a danger to the public.

  On 6 May, police searched woodland near Milly’s home, but found nothing. On 16 May, a thirty-six-year-old man was arrested in Chertsey and questioned but later released without being charged. On 13 June another man, this time from Ashford, was questioned by police but also released without charge. At about this time, police discussed the case with other officers investigating the disappearance of two women in West London; possibly the abduction (and murder?) of Milly was not an isolated crime but one in a series. On 29 July 2002, a third man was questioned; this time the man was arrested and released on police bail. On 8 July 2005, yet another man was questioned. He was thirty-six, from West Drayton in Middlesex, and he too was released after questioning by the police.

  On 12 September, it seemed as if a breakthrough had been made. Closed-circuit television footage taken in the street at the time of Milly’s disappearance was analyzed by the FBI. Although the image was very poor the FBI experts believe the figure standing near a dark saloon car might be Milly. The police asked the driver of the car to come forward.

  In October, after Milly’s remains were discovered in Hampshire, police appealed for witnesses who saw two men with a schoolgirl in a field near the spot where Milly’s body was found. This significant sighting was made about half an hour after she went missing twenty miles away in Walton-on-Thames, and about 300 yards north of the place where she was found.

  In January, a strange new lead emerged. A DNA match was found between a sample taken from a coffee cup found after a 2002 break-in at a church at Ryhope in Sunderland and a stain on a bodice found in Milly’s bedroom. Officers travelled to Ryhope and took DNA samples from fifty-five men connected with Ryhope church: none matched the coffee cup sample. The Surrey Police came to the conclusion that the apparent match was just a coincidence and discontinued that line of enquiry. It would have been very odd indeed for Milly to have had any intimate contact with a Sunderland burglar; it is a cautionary tale about the value of DNA samples for identification purposes. Those who want to preserve the integrity of DNA testing argue that the top, which Milly bought at the New Look store in Kingston, Surrey, was never worn by her and that it was originally sold in Sunderland, returned to the shop and then redistributed for sale in the south. Maybe.

  The CCTV footage from various business premises in the street leading from the station was closely examined by police investigators as it showed what was happening there around the time of Milly’s disappearance. Most of the people and vehicles visible on the footage were eliminated from the enquiry. A few were of interest and the police wanted to interview the people concerned, believing that they may have seen Milly at the moment when she accepted a lift. One image, timed at six minutes past four in the afternoon, which is just about when Milly disappeared, showed a man in a white or pale blue shirt, walking along the road away from the station carrying a guitar in a black case. He was crossing the junction with Copenhagen Way. Another, timed at eight minutes past four, showed a woman or girl with long blonde hair and wearing dark trousers and top walking in the same direction. At eleven minutes past four a group of four people walked in the opposite direction, towards the station and carrying assorted bags and cases. Another CCTV image showed a red N registration Daewoo Nexia turning into the road Milly was walking along. The police were keen to identify its owner.

  After failing to identify even a possible suspect, the Surrey Police cast a wider net. It was possible that the murder of Milly Dowler was not an isolated, one-off killing but the work of a serial killer. The team of detectives made contact with the team investigating the murder of the French student Amelie Delagrange. They looked for possible links, but found nothing definite.

  Amelie Delagrange, who was twenty-two, was found battered to death at Twickenham Green in south-west London. It seems that she may have been murdered by the same man who committed five other attacks in that part of London, including the murder of Marsha McDonnell in Hampton. Marsha was only nineteen. The team investigating Milly Dowler’s murder have had to keep and open mind, as there is no proof either way. On the other hand, someone who makes one random attack on a stranger is very likely to commit another. A possible link between the two murders is that a few days after her murder some of Marsha’s possessions were found, dumped in the River Thames at Walton-on-Thames, in other words close to where Milly lived.

  The red Daewoo is regarded by the police as a very significant element in the disappearance. It was caught on CCTV a few yards from where Milly was last seen and at the right time, but it was never traced.

  In July 2005, the Surrey Police started to look at David Atkinson as a possible suspect for the murder of Milly Dowler, as well as the murder of Sally Geeson. David Atkinson was a thirty-one-year-old Scottish soldier serving with an engineer regiment at the Waterbeach base near Cambridge. He dropped some friends off at the Fountain Bar in Cambridge on New Year’s Eve, 2004. Atkinson’s friends described him as ‘spaced’ that night. He was grasping the Range Rover steering wheel and staring at the girls in their New Year party clothes. Atkinson was a dangerous sexual predator, and the muscle-building steroids he was taking made him doubly dangerous. As is so often the case, he did not arouse the suspicions of those around him; instead of being closely watched, for everyone’s sake, he was left on his own. Atkinson seized Sally Geeson, a twenty-two year old student, and raped her a few minutes into the New Year (2005); then he strangl
ed her.

  David Atkinson lived on for only a few more days, committing suicide in a hotel in Glasgow. He left a note saying that he had killed a woman with his bare hands. That murder case at least was solved, but Atkinson’s suicide left a great many questions. The armed forces, today as always, shelter significant numbers of misfits and fugitives. The newspaper Scotland on Sunday disclosed that the armed forces employ at least eleven convicted sex offenders. An implication is that a significant number of potential rapists and sex killers are being given a safe haven. There is the distinct possibility, given the violence of the Geeson murder, that Atkinson might have killed before. Was the army protecting him?

  The police speculated that Atkinson might have been responsible for murdering Milly Dowler. He had been stationed with the Royal Engineers at Minley in Surrey for ten months, very close to the spot where Milly disappeared. The Ministry of Defence cannot account for his whereabouts at the time of Milly’s disappearance; he had just finished a training course at Chatham in Kent and had yet to embark on another course, so he was probably on leave – and free to kill.

  Another telling fact is that Milly Dowler’s body was found on a track beside Ministry of Defence land. It was only a hundred yards from where the Royal Engineers conducted their training exercises. In other words, Yateley Heath Forest was not a place that was right off the map as far as David Atkinson was concerned; it was an area he would have known well.

  The Surrey Police said that Atkinson was ‘of interest’ as a potential suspect. His history meant that he was someone who might have committed the crime. The time and the location fitted too. In fact, at the time when the body was discovered, the police noted the fact that there was MoD land adjacent and speculated that the killer could have connections with the military. David Atkinson fitted into that hypothesis perfectly. Records of military personnel were explored at the time, but Atkinson was not spotted.