Blooding

by Joseph Wambaugh

  During his last conversation with Supt. Tony Painter, the seventeen-year-old decided to come clean and confess all his crimes. It could be that Painter had sensed the boy had something to add, because he said, “Now, son, is there anything else you’d like to tell me while we’re here? I’ll gladly listen.”

  “I should tell you about something that I was forced into doing,” the boy said.

  “Well, you tell us,” said Painter.

  “This were about six or seven months ago.…”

  The kitchen porter then described an event that was quickly investigated and verified. He told about a young girl who he said was eleven years old, but who detectives would learn was only nine. He described how she and he had been together watching a teenage couple kissing and cuddling and how the young child had made advances to him.

  “She hopped straight on me bike. She were rubbing me up. Getting jealous. So I started to rub her up. Me friend was fingering his girl, but I couldn’t finger this one. She’s too young. Can’t do it. Then she made this big commotion, yelling to the others, ‘He’s got this thing up in me!’ She were shouting.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just felt her up outside her pants. I didn’t go down inside! I didn’t want to touch her! I just had no choice!”

  “You got carried away, did you?” Painter said.

  “If I refused, she’d hit me!”

  “I see.”

  “She’d kick you!” the boy said.

  Painter said, “Tell me this: Has it happened more than once?”

  “Yeah, twice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  The police quickly found and interviewed the child, and got the story of the kitchen porter’s putting his fingers in her “money box.”

  They’d also had Green Demon examined by a physician and got signed statements from her as to the boy’s proclivity for buggery when he was fourteen years old.

  “We were praying for somebody to come in and speak to us,” the kitchen porter’s mother later said. “We wanted to tell them our boy didn’t do it. We just wanted to tell them anything. Later, when people did talk, they said they’d wanted to come, but they just didn’t now what to say. A few crossed over the street when they had to pass by our house. It was the same as when somebody dies. You just don’t know what to say.”

  “I swore I’d never work again if my laddie went inside,” her husband said. “If they did that to us I vowed they could bloody well support us on the dole!”

  Like their son, they felt imprisoned. The two policemen detailed to look after them came frequently to see if they were all right, and to provide their tenuous contact with all of “them,” those omnipotent minions of British law who, the parents believed, had stolen their son.

  That Monday, the kitchen porter was in the dock for three and a half minutes. He answered yes a few times, and that was all. He was remanded to police custody for seventy-two hours. His defender, Walter Berry, raised no objections and made no bail application.

  The boy wasn’t his usual “scruffy and mucked-up” self, as his mother described him. He’d combed his hair and wore a buttoned shirt and proper trousers and a black corduroy jacket. He was flanked by two uniformed policemen at all times.

  As to how his family fared, things were both better and worse than village gossip had it. There was no “hassle” at court, and the village rumors that their house had been stoned were unfounded. They did receive several phone calls like those received by the Ashworths when Dawn was missing. They’d pick up the phone and be met with silence. They told their police bodyguards about it, and the next day the police arranged for an ex-directory telephone number.

  They received only one hate letter and it was anonymous.

  Like the Ashworths and Eastwoods, the kitchen porter’s parents isolated themselves during that time. For the first three days they didn’t eat at all. Then they were put on medication: five tranquilizers a day and three sleeping pills at night. To shop for food for their younger son, they went to a butcher shop in nearby Hinckley. It was there that the kitchen porter’s mother suffered her first anxiety attack.

  “I couldn’t reckon the money out,” she later explained. “I couldn’t make change! The item was ninety-nine pence and I couldn’t count it out! The man had to help me. Then I went into another shop and bought the same thing twice. It were just as though I got word-blind during those first days. I’d look at a thing and couldn’t make it out. I’d put water into the kettle without a tea bag.”

  “We was both on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” her husband related. “I couldn’t drive me taxi no more, but being a self-employed driver I couldn’t claim unemployment. The taxi firm stood by me all the way, though. They even took up a collection at work.”

  As the weeks wore on, there were rumors that the family had been driven out of their home and had moved to another part of England. And it was generally believed that the father had been fired by the company from which he operated his independent cab. The newspaper printed a report that he’d had to leave his job because of threats.

  None of it was true. The fact is they stayed put in Narborough, and visited their son in Winson Green Prison at Birmingham, a high-security facility where he was being held while the police prepared the case.

  The kitchen porter’s younger brother was about the same age as Dawn’s younger brother and knew Andrew Ashworth slightly. One or two boys had reportedly made vague threats against the kitchen porter’s brother but that was all.

  “Two of me mates said, ‘You stick around with us and nobody’s gonna tooch ya,’” the brother later said. And nobody did.

  When police came to their home in Land-Rovers to take away the kitchen porter’s motorbike for forensic work, the family was verging on paranoia. “I think there’s something wrong with our phone,” the father said, after ringing Tony Painter. “Are you tapping our phone?”

  “You have to go to the Home Office and get written approval to tap somebody’s phone,” Painter told him. “You need a bloody good reason. In fact, a reason involving national security, and this case hardly applies.”

  The crudest of all for the kitchen porter’s family was the alienation.

  It was similar to that reported by the Eastwoods and the Ashworths. The alienation and loneliness of victims.

  Four weeks after she was taken from a village footpath, Dawn Amanda Ashworth was buried in the little cemetery behind St. John Baptist Church in Enderby, after a simple service for the family. The vicar described her as a “bright, lively, charming young lady, obedient to her parents, loyal to her family and full of the joy of life.” They sat in the old granite church, honeycombed with wine-yellow light streaming through Gothic arches, and smelled candle wax, flowers, old hymnbooks, mortality. And tried to fathom what cannot be fathomed—chaos, caprice, discontinuity.

  Like Lynda Mann, Dawn was buried in the village where she’d lived, and just a few minutes’ walk from the footpath where she’d died.

  Two hundred showed up at the cemetery behind the stone church to bid farewell to a girl who’d seemed to be acquainted with everyone in the village. Dawn’s parents and brother, dressed in subdued grays and blues and black, followed behind the vicar and server clad in cassocks. They walked through the churchyard to the graveside piled high with wreaths, including one from Lutterworth School that said: “We love you.”

  Barbara carried a long-stemmed rose and after they lowered the casket she kissed the flower and dropped it into the open grave.

  As was the case at Lynda Mann’s funeral, detectives came, but this time only to pay respects. Not to scan the crowd of people who waited for the family mourners to depart before they filed past the open grave. Not to look for a killer.

  A lesser misery the Ashworths had to endure was trying to cope with condolences to parents of a murdered child—condolences no one knows how to offer, and no one knows how to receive. After the funeral, Robin refused to go near that
churchyard. Barbara was able to tend Dawn’s grave by constantly reminding herself that her daughter was not really down there.

  Afterward, when her husband would make any sort of tentative sexual approach, Barbara reported that she’d “almost crack up.” In describing it, she said, “Then I’d think: That’s all he wanted from her. Why not let her walk away afterwards if that’s all he wanted?”

  Even when a more normal relationship gradually resumed, she’d be in tears afterward, still thinking, That’s all he wanted from her! Why not have it and let her walk away? He must’ve done others and let them walk away! Why not Dawn and Lynda?

  “It was something I could never get over,” she said. “Or if that’s all he wanted, why not go to a prostitute? Or if he had to rape, why not just let her walk away? Because I could have seen her over that. There would’ve been mental scars as well as the physical, but she’d still have been here. I could’ve seen her through it.”

  When Chief Supt. David Baker and Supt. Tony Painter invited the Ashworths to police headquarters, Baker explained that they could at least be consoled by the fact that their daughter’s killer had been caught, would undoubtedly be convicted, and would be imprisoned for a long time.

  Robin Ashworth said, “You’re sure then? You’re sure you’ve got the right one?”

  “There’s virtually no doubt,” Supt. Tony Painter said. “We’re convinced.”

  But Barbara Ashworth still lived in torment, dwelling on Dawn’s last moments on earth. “Your imagination runs riot as you tend to imagine what she went through. The only real consolation I got, if you can call it that, came from knowing a lot of what he did to her he did at the point of death. Which means she didn’t know about it.”

  As the case against the young kitchen porter was meticulously assembled, it became apparent that he, in the words of one detective, was “thruppence short of a pound.” Another detective who’d investigated many reports about the boy’s bizarre behavior called him “the flippin village idjit you always hear about.”

  Sgt. Mick Mason, who still visited the Eastwoods, said to Kath, “Yes, well, he must have murdered Lynda too.” But then recalling his own statement—“Lynda would’ve been able to sort out a fourteen-year-old”—he may not have been entirely convincing to Kath and Eddie Eastwood when he assured them that Lynda’s killer had been caught.

  There were a great many attempts during the hours of interviews to break down the kitchen porter’s stubborn insistence that he did not have anything to do with the murder of Lynda Mann. As incredible as it seemed, what with the identical modus operandi, it had to at least be considered that there could have been two separate killers in the Mann-Ashworth murders.

  Of course, the seventeen-year-old had been given a blood test and found not to be a PGM 1 +, A secretor, but the forensic scientists who had tested the semen stains were dealing only in “probably’s” and “maybe’s” and seldom could exclude anyone “positively.” It would have been hard to find a detective anywhere who would stake his reputation on something as iffy as blood typing and grouping.

  As far as the police and public were concerned, it was a matter of tidying up. It was reckoned that the speedy inquiry into the murder of Dawn Ashworth had cost £113,000 in overtime payments, a report of which was made to the county council. The incident room was closed and officers were returned to regular duties.

  Undergrowth at Ten Pound Lane was to be drastically cleared, and the path opened wide, never again to be the secluded pastoral footpath where leaves brushed your face on a bright summer day.

  What prompted the next move is open to debate. According to the kitchen porter’s father, he asked the head of the inquiry if his son had had a semen test and was told it wouldn’t be needed.

  “Then I got to thinking,” the father recalled. “I’d read somewhere, maybe in Reader’s Digest or Tomorrow’s World, about this DNA testing that the chappie in Leicester had discovered. I told my laddie’s solicitor to look into it.”

  The solicitor later reported to the family that Tony Painter hadn’t read anything about DNA testing, but promised to check it out.

  The police version is that, unprompted by a solicitor or anyone else, Chief Supt. David Baker had decided to try the new technology in order to make a case against the kitchen porter for the murder of Lynda Mann.

  However it came about, the semen sample from Lynda Mann and some blood from the kitchen porter were delivered to a young geneticist at nearby Leicester University who claimed to have come up with a wondrous new discovery called genetic fingerprinting.

  17

  The Window

  Derek Pearce wasn’t an easy man to pity. He often berated subordinates in the presence of their peers. It wasn’t uncommon to hear him barking something like “Don’t be a lazy twat! Pull your finger out!” Eighty years ago he’d have carried a sword cane.

  But there was another Derek Pearce behind it all—the torchbearer. If one of them ever mentioned the ex-wife, he’d clam up. Once he was heard to say, “It’s a yacht-club kind of life she lives in Hong Kong. But she’s all right.” There was more than a note of regret in his voice when he added, “No woman could mean more to me than my job.”

  When the kitchen porter got arrested, Derek Pearce was “on division,” engaged in ordinary police work, but he tried to keep in touch with what the Dawn Ashworth murder squad was doing. He listened to the recorded confessions of the kitchen porter when the lad was, in Pearce’s words, “eerily toing and froing” as to whether he had or had not been in Ten Pound Lane when Dawn Ashworth was murdered, and had or had not committed the murder.

  Pearce envied Insp. Mick Thomas and the others for being able to detect and arrest the killer of Lynda Mann, the failure he’d never gotten over.

  During most of 1986, Dr. Alec Jeffreys had received great honor within the scientific community and he’d helped to make a bit of legal history by proving, in a highly publicized lawsuit, that a French teenager was the true father of an English divorcee’s child. His continuing work in deciding paternity for immigration disputes had brought him a degree of attention that was disrupting his research.

  Still, he hadn’t had the kind of high-profile forensics case that excites the imagination of the public at large. He was quoted that summer as saying, “It is a perpetual struggle trying to get funds.”

  Whether or not he was anxious for a famous forensics case, he was about to get one that would put his face and name into news stories throughout much of the world.

  Jeffreys was asked by a detective inspector from the Leicestershire Constabulary to analyze samples of blood and semen to assist in the prosecution of the confessed killer of Dawn Ashworth. The police hoped to prove that their killer was also the slayer of Lynda Mann.

  Having read a great deal about the horrific murders, Jeffreys eagerly accepted, and in September he analyzed the rather degraded semen sample from the Lynda Mann inquiry. During the final stage of the process, he studied the radioactive membrane with the DNA on it. “And there,” Jeffreys later recalled, “we could see the signature of the rapist. And it was not the person whose blood sample was given to me.”

  The next move was obvious: A sample from Dawn Ashworth had to be obtained and tested. Jeffreys was forced to wait a full week before he was able to pick up enough radioactive material from the Ashworth sample. Jeffreys called it “a nail-biting week” because he’d been virtually assured from the beginning that the same rapist must have killed both girls.

  When the plastic film came up, he studied it and rang Chief Supt. David Baker’s representative “at some dreadful hour.”

  “I have bad news and good news,” Jeffreys told him. “Not only is your man innocent in the Mann case, he isn’t even the man who killed Dawn Ashworth!”

  Jeffreys said that the detective’s first response to that was not repeatable.

  Finally, the detective said, “Give me the bleedin good news then!”

  Jeffreys told him, “You only have to catch on
e killer. The same man murdered both girls.”

  As quickly as he could assemble reinforcements, David Baker rushed to Jeffreys’s laboratory at Leicester University. His entourage included a forensics scientist from the Home Office.

  Jeffreys pointed to an X-ray photo and said to those assembled, “This is the genetic fingerprint of Lynda Mann, which we found in the stains composed of a mixture of semen and vaginal fluid. We can compare this to the DNA from her own blood sample and see her genetic characters, as expected.”

  Jeffreys again pointed to the picture, which looked to the cops like nothing more than the bar codes on a box of washing powder. “And then we see two more. The last profile is of the assailant.” Jeffreys stopped pointing and said, “There are two bands so it means there was one man. If there were two men involved in the attack, there would be four. Three men, six bands or stripes. Terribly simple, if you understand it.”

  Well, sure. To men who’d done “old-fashioned bobbying” for nearly as long as Jeffreys had been on earth, with little enough help from people like him with his bloody Oxford accent and his hand-rolled fags, to these coppers who’d put more hours and sweat into the Mann and Ashford inquiries than had gone into any others in the history of Leicestershire, it was “simple,” all right. It was simply bloody outrageous!

  Jeffreys went on. He put up another X-ray photo and said, “This is the genetic profile of Dawn Ashworth. There are two semen stains taken from the vaginal swab and from the clothing stain. It shows two bands not attributable to her blood sample, but it’s the same as found in the semen stain from Lynda Mann. First conclusion, both girls were raped and murdered by the same man. Second conclusion, your man isn’t the killer. We have here the signature of the real murderer!”

  “We couldn’t challenge it,” David Baker said later. “How do you challenge brand-new science? Nobody else in the bleedin world knew anything about it!”

  The Home Office forensics scientists were to be trained in Jeffreys’s method from the technology he’d passed on to them. In a few weeks they’d be able to verify or challenge Jeffreys’s conclusions, Chief Supt. David Baker was promised.