Blooding

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “A typical English village,” Kath called it.

  She was head of her own household and her children were village children, out of the city, out of harm’s way. But village life was not all teatime and violets, not by a long shot. Her subsidized home was actually just a cold-water flat with an outside toilet, and besides, there was a void. Kath Mann was a woman alone with two daughters for nine long years.

  Then she met Edward Eastwood in a singles club at the Braunstone Hotel in Leicester. He was nothing whatever like her first husband, and nothing like herself. Kath was a short, buxom brunet, serious and shy. Eddie was a strapping, fair-haired talker with big expressive hands. His hair had a kind of curl, and with his horn-rimmed glasses, he might (if you fell in love with him) seem a rough-hewn version of a Michael Caine Cockney. And Eddie Eastwood from Yorkshire was as glib as any east Londoner born within earshot of the Bow bells.

  He was the kind of bloke with a hundred tales, all of them colorful, replete with hyperbole. An ex-soldier, he regaled his listeners with stories of barroom brawls, and even claimed to have been shot by an Arab terrorist. No one knew what to believe when it came to Eddie Eastwood—who actually had changed his surname in a court of law—which, they said, probably made Eddie Eastwood the leading fan of steely-eyed Clint in all the British Isles.

  Eddie seemed a hard man, but it was mostly bluff. He’d lived his early years in the Braunstone Estates, called “Dodge City” or “The Badlands” by local police. They said he had had some rough chums in the old days, but he was an outgoing friendly sort, and passed many an hour in the pubs playing darts and drinking bitter. Eddie Eastwood was easy to like, and had a reputation as “a good pub mate.”

  In July, 1980, when Susan Mann was fourteen and Lynda was twelve, Eddie Eastwood moved in. He married Kath in December, and took his new family to a semi-detached home near Forest Road, by the psychiatric hospital. By The Black Pad footpath.

  Things went very well for the Eastwoods. Eddie earned a fair wage and they lived in a street called The Coppice. They had a small greenhouse, and Eddie built a huge aviary from packing cases. He got so interested in raising and caring for budgerigars that he built yet another aviary, and ended up with seventy-two of the parakeets, along with dogs, cats and guinea pigs for the kids.

  Eddie was working ninety hours a week at Spray-Rite Ltd., “paying double whack” to clear up old bankruptcy debts, yet in his spare time he won trophies, both with his budgies and his darts. The following year, when Eddie was thirty-nine and Kath was thirty-three, they had a baby girl and named her Rebecca. Those years were the best they would ever have together.

  Of Kath’s older children, Susan was the shy one. “She was a home girl,” her mother said. “Much like me, I think.”

  Susan had dark-blond hair and eyes as quiet as a spaniel’s. She liked to stay at home and play with the animals and birds. She wasn’t as attractive or as bright as her younger sister, and seemed aware of it.

  Lynda Mann had little trouble with adolescence. An adventurous girl, she liked everything about growing up: music, hairstyles, makeup, clothes. She got her share of A’s and her headmaster at Lutterworth School was pleased with her. When she turned fifteen Lynda talked about being a multilinguist, and practiced her French, German and Italian. She wanted to try Chinese, announcing that she would one day travel the entire world. Her mother didn’t doubt for a minute that Lynda would do whatever she set out to do. If money for clothes was a bit short, never mind, Lynda would babysit and earn money and make her own dresses.

  There were a few boys, one in particular, but Lynda was fancy free in 1983, a fifth-former at Lutterworth. She was particularly upbeat that term, growing more fetching every day. Lynda’s hair and eyes were very dark but her skin was fair. People referred to the fifteen-year-old as “happy-go-lucky” or “bubbly” or, at the very least, “enthusiastic.”

  The weather in November turned bitter and bleak. Monday, the 21st, was predicted to be very cold. When Lynda Mann dressed for school that day she wore tights, form-fitting blue denim jeans with zips at the ankles, a pullover, white socks and black tennis shoes. Before setting foot out the door, she snuggled inside her new donkey jacket with the stand-up collar, and, for good measure, put a warm woolen scarf in her pocket. She walked to Desford Road and traveled to Lutterworth by bus.

  Lynda came home that afternoon on the school bus, but had no time for “swotting,” cramming for exams. She had to babysit at 5:00 P.M. for a neighbor near the Copt Oak housing estate. She babysat until 6:20 P.M.

  Supper for Lynda meant plenty of salad cream, which she dumped on practically anything. She and Eddie had a quick meal together, then she changed into a mauve sweatshirt and was off again at 6:45 for another babysitting appointment at the home of Mrs. Walker, a nearby neighbor, who was waiting outside her house when Lynda arrived.

  “Sorry, dear,” Mrs. Walker told her, “I’m on sick leave from work and won’t be needing you today.”

  Lynda was disappointed, but shrugged, smiled, and said, “Well then, I’ll just go home, or maybe to Enderby to see a friend. Bye!”

  “Bye, dear,” Mrs. Walker said.

  It was 6:55 P.M. By the time Lynda got home a full moon had risen. A blanket of frost had settled on the ground in the Eastwoods’ garden. Lynda told Kath she wouldn’t be earning any money that night, then said she’d be going to visit her best friend, Karen Blackwell. Lynda had £1.50 she’d saved from babysitting to pay toward the donkey jacket, which she’d ordered from a shop-at-home catalogue that Mrs. Blackwell had shown her.

  “Are you coming straight home?” her mother asked.

  “I’ll probably stay at Karen’s for a while, then I might just stop to see Caroline,” Lynda said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be home by ten.”

  “Independent,” her mother always said, when discussing Lynda. “The child is so independent.”

  She was the sort of girl who didn’t want much parenting. Lynda seemed to know exactly where she was going in life and performed so well in so many ways it was hard to bridle this middle child. If she wanted to dye her brown hair a darker shade, well, what could you say? It was better than the henna red still showing from her previous experiment.

  There was an occasional nagging worry for her mother. Lynda had had a steady boyfriend during the prior year and a couple of casual ones, and being she was so young it caused Kath a bit of concern. And Lynda had met another boy at the Lutterworth School disco, a boy Eddie called a half-caste. Yet as far as Kath knew, her daughter did not smoke or drink, and Kath believed her daughter to be a virgin. Eddie often said that Lynda was nobody’s fool, and so a mother needn’t worry too much.

  At 7:10 P.M. Lynda walked down Redhill Avenue, not the most direct route to Karen Blackwell’s. She was seen by a friend named Margaret, who asked where she was going.

  “Down a friend’s,” Lynda replied.

  Margaret later said that Lynda “was her normal cheerful self.”

  At 7:30 P.M. Lynda arrived at the Blackwells’. Karen had been Lynda’s best friend for seven months, and they’d known each other since primary school and at Lutterworth. They were in different classes with different teachers, but were the same age and shared adolescent confidences.

  Lynda gave the £1.50 to Mrs. Blackwell who in turn would give it to an agent for Kay’s Catalogue Club. Mrs. Blackwell signed the club card, reporting the payment toward the donkey jacket.

  The Blackwells liked and approved of Lynda Mann. “A quietly spoken, well-mannered young lady,” Mrs. Blackwell said of her daughter’s best friend.

  Then Lynda said, “Well, I’m off to Caroline’s to collect a record I’ve loaned her.”

  Caroline lived in Enderby, about a fifteen-minute walk from the Blackwells’, up Forest Road, near The Black Pad.

  “I knew it was about half seven,” Caroline later said, “because Lynda was in and out the door before the music for Coronation Street came on the telly.”

  Lynda walked up Forest Road,
toward the streetlight where a footpath leads off toward the pastureland belonging to the psychiatric hospital and joins The Black Pad, the lonely path that angles down toward the cemetery behind Narborough church.

  Lynda saw a figure standing by the lamppost. He had placed himself in the light like an actor on his mark. He was not far from the gate of the Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital. On that gate was a sign warning motorists who might enter through the gateway. The sign said: DEAD SLOW!

  Kath and Eddie Eastwood had themselves a pleasant evening. First they attended a ladies’ dart tournament at the Carlton Hayes Social Club. Then they were off to The Dog and Gun, a favorite pub of Eddie’s where he managed to win a few pints of bitter playing darts until 12:10 A.M. One of his victims was a local policeman, which evoked the expected jokes about getting back some of the taxpayers’ money from the coppers.

  The Eastwoods arrived home about 1:30 A.M. and found Susan waiting up.

  “Lynda’s not home!” Susan said.

  Eddie Eastwood drove around village streets and checked teenage gathering spots. One of the places Eddie searched on foot was The Black Pad, near the Eastwood home. They were building a new housing estate of upmarket homes on one side of the footpath, opposite the psychiatric hospital’s pasture. The workers already had the foundation poured and lumber stacked, but hadn’t done much framing.

  Eddie walked the length of the unlit Black Pad, alongside the housing development. It was then that he noticed how really bright and clear it was. Walking The Black Pad at night was usually a bit unnerving, and the moonlight helped.

  Eddie called the Braunstone Police Station at 1:30 A.M. to report Lynda missing. A policeman took down the information, but policemen the world over don’t get very worked up about fifteen-year-olds a few hours late.

  “But she’s always home by ha’ past nine,” Eddie told the officer. “Unless we know, she’s always here!”

  When Eddie had searched The Black Pad, it seemed logical to him to look toward the side where the new construction was under way. If there were any teenagers up to mischief, or, God forbid, if anything bad had happened in that dark lane, he’d find evidence there by some lumber pile, he thought. The other side of the foot-path was protected by a wrought-iron fence more than five feet tall, a permanent barrier separating The Black Pad from the grounds of the psychiatric hospital. Near the top of the stanchions the black iron bars curved toward the footpath like a row of iron claws, menacing those who walked The Black Pad.

  He had seen nothing move, and heard nothing except the tree limbs, bare of foliage. They groaned in the wind under a blue-black sky, a glittering moon, a few shredded clouds. Edward Eastwood had never thought to look toward the hospital side as he picked his way through the darkness down the black tarmac footpath. He had passed within a few yards of his stepdaughter, Lynda Mann.

  4

  Mannequin

  A hospital porter who often used The Black Pad as a shortcut between Narborough church and Carlton Hayes Hospital was on his way to work at 7:20 on Tuesday morning, November 22nd, when he glanced through the wrought-iron fence, toward the wooded copse and grassy fields of the hospital grounds, white with frost on that cold morning. He saw what looked like a partly clothed mannequin lying in the grass by a clump of trees. He stopped and gaped. She was naked from the waist down. There was a smear of red about her nose. He was not sure if she was real.

  The porter ran out of The Black Pad onto the road and flagged down a car driven by a colleague, an ambulance driver from the hospital. The ambulance driver and the porter jogged back to The Black Pad and looked through the fence.

  “Is it a dummy?” the porter asked.

  The ambulance driver ran to the head of the path and found the iron gate wide open. He entered the grassy field and approached. Lynda Mann’s jeans, tights, underpants and shoes were in a rolled-up heap about ten or fifteen feet away. Her legs were extended straight out, her head turned to the right. She was supine with the upper part of the donkey jacket hiked under her head, the sleeves partly pulled up her arms. Her chin was bruised and there was bright coagulated blood from her nose. Her scarf was wrapped around her neck and crossed at the back, and a piece of wood about three feet long lay under her right leg.

  Perhaps the ambulance driver was familiar only with victims very much alive and breathing, including those who screamed and thrashed inside straitjackets. Maybe he felt the need to display medical training in the presence of the porter. For whatever reason, he reached down and felt the throat for a pulse, even though rigor was present throughout.

  Lynda Mann was white as china. As rigid and cool as a shop mannequin.

  It had been an unforgettable year for the Leicestershire Constabulary. The county police agency averaged about one homicide a year and usually that was a domestic killing. But that year had seen four murder inquiries, two of them major, culminating in the tragic discovery in July of the body of five-year-old Caroline Hogg, who’d disappeared from a fun fair near her home in Edinburgh.

  The Leicestershire police always believed that the child’s killer had arbitrarily dropped her body by the A444 road while passing through from Scotland to some southerly destination, but because they’d found the body, they had to launch an inquiry from their end.

  Detective Superintendent Ian Coutts, born and reared near Glasgow, went up to Scotland for assistance with the Hogg case, and to gain access to the Edinburgh computer. The fifty-year-old Coutts was a “typical Glaswegian”: gregarious, outgoing, tough, solid and compactly built. It wasn’t hard to imagine broad foreheads like his greeting adversaries with a “Glasgow kiss,” the kind that leaves many a bloody nose in northern pub brawls.

  It took an enormous amount of work to back-record and convert material that had to be manually accessed with the Leicestershire card index system.

  Then there had been the Osborne murder, the case of a pet groomer brutally stabbed to death and left on Ayelstone Meadows. That one had required a scene-of-crime fingertip search for evidence in ferocious driving rain. They’d remember that one. On the Osborne inquiry they’d had to access a West Yorkshire computer and put their material into it. Until that terrible year they’d always had sufficient data-processing capability in their own computer terminals.

  There was a joke making the rounds of the Leicestershire Constabulary that year: “Did you hear the good news? Yuri Andropov died. The bad news is they dropped his body in Leicestershire.”

  But until November of 1983 there had never even been a murder inquiry in the villages of Narborough, Enderby and Littlethorpe.

  The detective chief superintendent in charge of Leicestershire Criminal Investigation Department was forty-seven-year-old David Baker, a twenty-seven-year police veteran. Baker was a family man with an accommodating style. He looked more like an avuncular shopkeeper than a policeman, but he was, in the words of close associates, “one hundred percent copper.” He had five kids, and managed a squash game at least once a week in a losing battle with middle-age spread.

  At 8:30 A.M. Chief Supt. Baker arrived in Narborough, logging his location as “a wooded copse running alongside a footpath known as The Black Pad.” There were many police officers already at the scene, and Baker called at once for a Home Office pathologist. The Lynda Mann murder inquiry had officially begun.

  Several detectives, and thirty uniformed officers along with tracking dogs, began searching the copse, the fields, the building site by the footpath, and The Black Pad itself. When the pathologist arrived he made notes: that rigor was present, that there was blood showing at the nostrils, that there were scratch marks on the upper right cheek and below the right orbit, that the tip of the tongue was protruding through the clenched teeth of the strangled girl. The police had thought that her legs were painted with some sort of brick-colored leg makeup, but learned from the pathologist that extreme cold had produced the effect.

  The pathologist noted that there appeared to be “matted seminal stains on the vulval hairs.” />
  For the Eastwoods the memory of the day would forever be hazy. Eddie went to his job and told his workmates that his daughter was missing. When he was informed about a body having been discovered alongside the footpath he left work and drove straight to The Black Pad, finding the area cordoned off by several bobbies and detectives already trying to organize a house-to-house inquiry.

  Eddie tried to push through a barricade, but was stopped by one of the policemen.

  “That’s my daughter!” he told them. “I think that’s my daughter, Lynda!”

  The policeman began talking to him and making notes while Eddie Eastwood had the thought all frightened survivors have at such a moment: Well, of course! It’s all a mistake!

  He later remembered the policeman saying, “Go home. We’ll call on you.”

  The rank of inspector in the British police service is the equivalent of lieutenant in most American police forces. One of the CID inspectors, Derek Pearce, had just come off the aborted Caroline Hogg inquiry. And Pearce absolutely hated leaving an inquiry “undetected.”

  Derek Pearce was the kind of whom they say, “You either like him or you don’t.” They also say that Pearce had the ability to rise to the top of the police totem if only he weren’t constantly being dragged back down by Derek Pearce.

  Members of the Lynda Mann murder squad asked to name the brightest detective among them responded:

  “Derek Pearce.”

  “Oh, Derek Pearce, of course.”

  “Pearce, no doubt.”

  “Derek Pearce, but …”

  There would always be a “but” with a man like Derek Pearce. Some of the adjectives preceding his name were: immature, talented, abrasive, ruthless, charming, insensitive, generous. But everyone called him complex. A driven perfectionist, he expected everyone to do the job as well as he would.

  To get an idea of his energy you’d only have to watch him for an hour. If he was on his feet talking to someone he’d rise on his toes, or rock back on his heels, or slide, or bounce, or sway. If he pursued his listener through a doorway he’d stop, grab each side of the jamb, and do what looked like calisthenics or yoga: pushing, pulling, rising, settling. They said if you could harness that energy you could power British Rail.