Many of the day center patients had no community ties and no family ties. They could be in Carlton Hayes for treatment one day and arrested the next day in Wales or Scotland. The inquiry teams were looking at ten thousand hospital patients, and many of them, according to the beleaguered detectives, were potential suspects.
Almost immediately phone calls began flooding the incident room, the most promising being about a “spiky-haired youth.” The person on the phone claimed to have seen him at 8:00 P.M. at the junction of Forest Road and King Edward Avenue, just a two-minute walk from the wooded copse where they found the body of Lynda Mann. The witness had been driving down the dual carriageway when the spiky-haired youth and a female companion stepped onto the road, forcing him to slam on the brakes. “The girl was wearing jeans and a donkey jacket,” he said. “The young man had a dyed punk hairdo. Amazing hair. Like a pot of geraniums cropped off flat.”
Within a few days after the description was reported in the Leicester Mercury, the police received a tip on another important suspect seen running on Kipling Drive in Enderby on the night of the murder. He couldn’t have been a jogger, the caller told them. He was wearing ordinary street clothes.
Along with the reports on the spiky-haired youth and the running youth was another message given priority by Supt. Coutts. Three witnesses reported seeing a young couple in the bus shelter on Forest Road sometime after 8:00 P.M. on November 21st. The description of the girl closely matched that of Lynda Mann. It was a lead that Coutts believed corroborated the message about the spiky-haired youth in the street.
Locals told police there were no spiky-haired punkers in the villages, at least not one whose head resembled a flower pot full of cropped geraniums. Coutts said there was, and that they’d find him.
Nurses at Carlton Hayes Hospital reported being too terrified to walk from the hospital to their quarters at Sylvia Reid House, just steps from The Black Pad.
“I knew something like this would happen!” a nurse told police. “We’re scared to death!”
She wanted the car park in front of their building lit, and demanded that police arrest the prowlers and vandals who came by and tossed stones at their windows.
On the eighth day they got a call from a nurse who claimed to have heard a frightened scream on the night of the murder. “A female shouted, ‘No, no, no!’” she told detectives.
“There’s a strong possibility that this was Lynda,” Supt. Baker said to reporters. He called the lead “promising.”
But Derek Pearce didn’t get excited about the scream heard by the hospital nurse. The scream was timed at 8:40 P.M. and he knew Lynda Mann had left her friend at 7:26. Despite theories about the girl at the bus stop he believed that nearsighted Lynda Mann had walked to her terrible fate immediately after leaving her friend’s house. Straight into an ambush.
“And besides,” Pearce confidentially told his men when no bosses were about, “in a madhouse, screaming might be the normal means of communication.”
The running youth began to loom larger during the second week. He’d been seen by another witness who’d been walking his dog, a witness who claimed the youth looked as though he was being chased. Described as a teenager, five feet seven inches tall, with dark collar-length hair, this one may or may not have been the original runner. The police realized there could’ve been several young men running home on such a cold night.
They began tracing anyone at all who’d been in the general area that night. A teenager had been seen getting off the bus outside a pub in Narborough. The driver could say only that he’d picked the boy up in Huncote on the 599 bus at 6:38 P.M. Nevertheless, he was hunted for days.
At 7:10 P.M. on the night of the murder, a young woman had boarded a bus from the bus shelter on Forest Road. The driver wasn’t certain, but thought she’d got off at Foxhunter Roundabout near Enderby. She was sought for weeks as a possible witness to verify the report on the young couple allegedly seen at the bus stop. Then there were two women, one in her early twenties, who’d boarded the 600 bus to Leicester. They too were hunted in vain.
After buses the murder squad started on scooters. A teenager had been seen pushing a motor scooter past the psychiatric hospital just after 8:30 P.M. on November 21st. He’d worn a long green parka, but he didn’t seem to have a crash helmet so he might have been pushing it to a garage. They sought out all youths with motor scooters, whether or not the scooters functioned.
The Leicester Mercury was of great help, printing virtually whatever the police wished. And of course, each printing brought hundreds more calls, all assigned a priority, all given to various teams.
Nearly every day either Baker or Coutts was interviewed by reporters, and made public pleas: “I urge people to cast their minds back to the evening of November twenty-first.…”
Before the second week was finished, the murder squad had checked out hundreds of reports. One of them concerned two teenage boys who’d bought a copy of the Mercury from a newsagent’s shop in Narborough on the afternoon the body was discovered.
“The lads studied the paper very intently,” police were told. “They should be investigated.”
They were.
Still another young man was sighted twice on the evening of the murder, once on Forest Road and another time walking toward the hospital. His priority was raised.
And at 7:30 P.M., just after Lynda was last seen alive, a man carrying a guitar case had been seen sitting across from the chemist’s shop in Jubilee Crescent. He was added to the list.
By the third week, the police were making even more appeals to the public through the newspapers and television. They particularly wanted the running youth.
“Perhaps some young man arrived home out of breath after ten o’clock that night,” Supt. Baker suggested to reporters, “and ran straight upstairs to avoid his parents.”
There was a “crying youth.” He’d been spotted near the murder scene five days after the crime, sitting at curbside opposite The Black Pad. A couple driving by had seen him and immediately telephoned the incident room. He was a fair-haired lad, about seventeen years of age, wearing a bomber jacket. A motorcycle was propped up by him. The crying youth was not found. Boys his age wouldn’t come in to admit to such an unmanly display.
The newspaper pleas started paying off. A guitar player called the incident room to see if he was the one they were trying to trace. More running youths were reported, including a new one who’d run under the M1 motorway bridge. And soon the murder squad began hearing about runners and punks from as far away as Birmingham. They were inundated with punks and runners. Given tips on punks who sounded like Johnny Rotten, they’d more often than not track down a youngster with dyed sideburns and an ear loop, who was just going through a phase.
On December 15th it was announced that lights would be installed on The Black Pad at a cost of £5,500, and on the same day an unnamed relative of Lynda Mann made a personal appeal to readers of the Leicester Mercury. The headline read: PLEASE HELP TRACE THIS MANIAC.
During that third week in December the police were offered a “Teddy boy.” A new witness had spotted a couple standing on a corner of Leicester Road in Narborough at about 8:20 P.M. on the night of the murder. When the driver slowed to allow them to cross, the youth said something to the driver, no doubt something cheeky, because the driver described the youth as being similar in appearance to the youthful rebels of an earlier generation.
Then there was yet another young man who’d bought a copy of the Mercury and “made suspicious inquiries as to whether or not there were details of the murder in it.”
It was notable that almost all reported suspects—hundreds of them—were youths. Village people obviously saw the murderer of Lynda Mann as someone quite close to her age, and in fact, so did the murder squad commanders. All of them—the punks, Teddy boys, runners, criers, weepers, readers—all of them were teenagers.
That December a large number of officers volunteered to keep the incident room
open during the holidays, even on Christmas Day.
Supt. David Baker took the occasion to say to the media, “Christmas is a time of year when people start reflecting. Lynda’s family will certainly be looking back, and also the person responsible, and his family. We would urge anyone who notices anything manifestly different about family members in the Narborough area to come forward and inform us.”
He then went on to suggest for the first time that Lynda’s killer had been known to her: “They were probably acquaintances, and perhaps what started off as a kiss and cuddle developed into something that got out of hand, resulting in Lynda’s death. But only the person responsible can tell us what actually happened.”
The police were thus openly offering extenuating circumstances to the killer or to anyone who might be shielding him. There were no takers.
That Christmas, Kath Eastwood had some presents to give out, presents that had been bought by Lynda. Ever the enterprising, resourceful, and self-sufficient girl, Lynda had taken money she’d saved from babysitting and bought the presents well in advance of the holiday. Kath gave them out on Christmas Day.
By now the Eastwoods desperately sought what most victims of cruel and terrible crimes want: retribution and revenge. Eddie and Kath were always honest enough to admit the latter.
Eddie told reporters who rang him that Christmas Eve, “We live each day hour by hour, minute by minute. I just hope the man who killed our Lynda is suffering as much as we are. I just hope he’s thinking about the damage he has done to our family while he celebrates his Christmas.”
Kath also gave a statement: “This man has got to be punished. And I hope anyone who knows him will think twice about harboring him. We just do not have an existence anymore and he is to blame.”
The huge Edwardian brick buildings of the psychiatric hospital, with their gray slate roofs and eccentric campaniles, looked ugly to some, especially that massive brick chimney towering over the countryside. But Derek Pearce said, “I found the old place quite handsome, except it looked very eerie coming in at night.”
The eeriness was no doubt heightened by thoughts of the poor wretches confined in those buildings. Perhaps even him, the one they hunted.
More than one detective was to describe driving into the hospital grounds on dark brooding nights, thinking of him and wondering if he was peering out a window. Watching and laughing. If you were tired from overwork, if you’d had a couple of pints, it wasn’t impossible to fancy you’d heard a soft demented chuckle in the darkness, from just across the cricket pitch.
7
Plea
By the first week in January the police were desperate enough to ask the Mercury to print more pleas for witnesses to come forth. The first request involved two men and a young woman who’d been observed in a coffee shop on Horsefair Street in Leicester. One of the men had been reading an inside page of the Mercury when he abruptly folded up the paper. After the young woman asked him what was in the news, he hushed her by saying he’d tell her when they got outside. The witness who’d observed the incident told police the page the man had been reading was “probably” page 13, which carried a story on the Lynda Mann inquiry. The young man wore a gold earring in his right ear. There were lots of earring wearers reported.
Still another published plea asked for information leading to a “mystery man” who’d scribbled the name of Lynda Mann in a telephone book in a local kiosk the day her body was found. That particular clue fizzled when the mystery man telephoned police admitting he’d jotted down the name while ringing a village friend to ask if he knew the victim’s family.
By the end of January the police were publicly releasing well-worked information on a youth who’d entered a wool shop in Narborough the day after the murder for a new pair of trousers because his were torn. The shopkeeper’s suspicions were belatedly aroused because of a published report that police were looking for a beer-bellied young fellow with a tear in the left leg of his jeans, who’d been seen coming from The Black Pad at 8:35 P.M. on the night of the murder.
Now even anonymous calls were prompting large newspaper stories. In early February a young woman rang the incident room at midnight to inform police breathlessly that she knew someone resembling the spiky-haired punk with orange hair cropped like a bunch of geraniums. She had seen the artist’s impression in the newspaper and was sure he frequented a public house in Enderby. The police interviewed everyone in and around the public house for a week, but the only geraniums they saw were potted.
By February the murder squad was still nearly one hundred officers strong. They’d taken three thousand statements and followed up some four thousand lines of inquiry. Virtually every young man going through a punk phase in Leicestershire and the surrounding counties had been interviewed. In the beginning they had thought that if they ever found one who was five-ten, slender, who wore boots with laces, and a leather jacket, and a belt with a bronze buckle, and had amazing orange hair, it would have to be their man. But they had found lots of them, all with amazing hair, many with laced boots and leather jackets. None was the punk seen with the girl thought to have been Lynda Mann, the punk who had caused the motorist to brake sharply.
He was, in the words of a team member, “as elusive as the flippin Loch Ness Monster.” And the running youth had worn out several teams. They said they’d interviewed more runners in early 1984 than had the British Olympic coaches.
Supt. Ian Coutts was still convinced the spiky-haired youth was their man and that the girl seen at the bus shelter had to have been Lynda Mann. Derek Pearce and many of the others weren’t so sure, but everyone believed the killer must be a local man in order to have known about The Black Pad and the gate leading into the wooded copse beside that tarmac path.
As far as Coutts was concerned, Lynda had probably been friendly with her killer because she wasn’t the sort of girl to talk to a stranger, and would’ve fought for her life if suddenly ambushed. They searched endlessly for a “secret boyfriend,” one not known even to her best friends. Someone with whom she might have taken a stroll, along The Black Pad.
The Police Mobile Reserve is a unit of uniformed police officers drawn upon to supplement the divisions, a pool of men for any job. The PMR did the house-to-house pro forma, and took statements from anyone not alibied.
On January 22nd, Police Constable Neil Bunney of the PMR had on his list a semi-detached house in Littlethorpe, part of a new housing estate in a street called Haybarn Close. The owner of the house was a twenty-five-year-old baker named Colin Pitchfork who’d recently moved into the house with his wife and baby from Barclay Street in Leicester, about five miles down Narborough Road.
Pitchfork’s young wife, Carole, answered the door, admitted PC Bunney, and called upstairs to her husband. Everyone in the three villages knew that the police were doing house-to-house inquiries, so the constable didn’t have to explain much.
The baker didn’t come down for several minutes.
“I had to compose meself,” he later said.
What really had the baker worried was that he’d been up in the attic putting down floorboards he’d stolen from a construction site, telling his wife he’d bought them at a bargain sale. He thought for sure he was about to be nicked for the theft, and it wasn’t the only thing he’d stolen; he’d also pinched a cabinet unit he thought might fit nicely in the kitchen. He wasn’t ordinarily a thief, but the opportunity had presented itself and he wasn’t one to pass up an opportunity. Upon talking to the policeman, the baker was extremely relieved to learn that the officer had no knowledge whatsoever of the stolen property.
In that Colin Pitchfork hadn’t lived in Littlethorpe at the time of the murder he would’ve been relegated to a low-priority classification, except that he had been discovered to have had a prior indecency record. It seemed that he was a convicted flasher, and had been from a very early age, so he was on the list. Later, after a computer match-up, he ended up on three indexes: the indecency list, the Carlton Hayes outpa
tient list because he’d been referred to therapy by the court for one of the flashing offenses, and the house-to-house resident list.
Pitchfork’s classification in the incident room was as an unalibied “code four.” Code one meant that the suspect couldn’t have done it because he was dead, in prison, or his whereabouts had absolutely been proved. Code two meant he’d been alibied by a friend or colleague. Code three was a wife’s alibi, which was never very reliable. The inquiry team could end up with a man who was part code two, part code three and part code four, if, for example, he’d seen his wife early in the evening, gone out with friends and then walked home alone.
They were looking for someone who was unalibied between seven and midnight. According to both Pitchfork and his wife, he had driven her to a night class at the community college early that evening while their baby slept in the backseat in a carrycot. The baker then had gone home to his former residence and sat with the baby until his wife was finished with her class. Technically, he was unalibied from 6:45 P.M. until 9:15 P.M., but he would’ve had to leave his baby unattended in order to go out and murder.
Psychologists maintain that flashers are a relatively harmless lot, and Pitchfork had no history of violence. Furthermore, he’d moved to Littlethorpe in December, one month after the murder of Lynda Mann. Not having been a villager at the time of the murder, he probably wouldn’t have known about The Black Pad and the gate into the copse.
He was not given a high priority, but his diabolical surname caused a joke or two in the incident room. After all, a Pitchfork would have to be guilty of some sort of villainy.
Derek Pearce’s father had always wanted him to become a doctor. The older man had been a strict parent: ex-army, railway worker, traffic warden. He’d ended his working career as the curator of the regimental museum in Leicester. Pearce’s mother was, as Derek called her, “a mum’s mum.” Pearce had a brother one year older and two younger sisters, but four weren’t enough for Mrs. Pearce. She became a foster mother, and the house was literally crawling with babies. She’d take any and all kinds, with or without birth defects.
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