Behind the Crime

by Colin Ferguson

  The area was then also one of much poverty and crowded housing. Even where we were in more up-market Streatham, one of the most notorious brothels in London was just at the other end of the road.

  I was given my own ‘case-load’ of forty-two probationers which, apart from those on a straight forward probation order, also included youngsters on borstal and detention centre licence. I also had about three reports to write each week for the court and to be in court once a week to pick up cases for referral as well as those who had come for advice. We had also just taken over the prison welfare service, which meant that anyone released from prison could voluntarily ask for our help.

  There were six officers there plus a senior manager and a small team of secretarial staff that I soon discovered were the real front line. I was given Edna as my secretary. I wasn’t actually scared of her but she was somewhat intimidating and determined to lick me into shape which was probably a good thing.

  It took me nearly three months to even find all my ‘clients’. Finally, I took the last three cases back to court for what was called a breach of their probation order. I was cycling around the area at the time and failed to get to the South Western Magistrate’s before the court session began. That week all three of the missing group turned up.

  I continue the stories with a number of oddities.

  Oddities

  Not everything is worth a chapter because they were as the title says, oddities, Brian for example, was on Borstal license. He had been in a lot of trouble in the past for burglary. On this occasion that he had an appointment with me, it was apparent that he was disturbed. I asked him what was wrong.

  “You know that first time I got nicked five year back, well I was with one of my mates but he legged it over the back fence and they never had him, but I just met him again and he’s only a ***** copper now.”

  Billy and one of his friends had stolen a mini-van and driven it around Tooting and Balham all afternoon and were only stopped when they tried to persuade two girls to get into the back of the van. What’s so odd about that? Well they were both 11 years old and one worked the steering wheel while the other did the pedals because they weren’t tall enough to do both. The case was referred to social services.

  When you ask people why they did what they did you do not expect them to say it was because they had a red nose and wanted to get the money for an operation. Clive’s problem was one of anxiety and shyness. His nose was perfectly normal. When he was able to drive he got a car and then a girlfriend and never worried about his nose again.

  Lofty was just that, 7ft tall. He had several prison sentences and the story was that his trousers had to be passed from one prison to another as they had cut one pair in half to lengthen the legs of another pair. He was an interesting character in that he was a free-lance artist who spent most of his summers in Cornwall, living in a tent and selling his work to tourists. The police would arrest him from time to time for vagrancy and he would be fined. In time, as he never paid the fines he was arrested and sent to prison, which he always seemed to do when the bad weather came.

  The Brixton area was not a good place to be at night and when the fifteen year-old sister of one of my clients was gang raped, there seemed so little that anyone could do except to hope that the gang was caught. My ‘client’ had his own ideas about finding them. Often, that was the way that ‘justice’ happened.

  Courts are not supposed to be funny but occasionally the pontification of some magistrates can be unexpectedly so. The case of 80-year-old Fred who walked round his house naked came about after the council cut down the hedging outside his front room.

  The result was that children on their way to school were blessed with a vision of Fred every time he drew his curtains. The court was reasonably sympathetic and gave him a warning and finished by saying, “I am going to give you a conditional discharge but you must promise not to do this again. Now go home and pull your socks up!”

  Kevin was a gambler and in heavy debt. He was married, though this was greatly strained and had two children. He had resorted to stealing the family shopping as he had spent the money on another second-place horse. Things came to a head while I was writing the report for the court as he went home one afternoon and thought he would do the hoovering to at least show willing. He couldn’t find the hoover and called out to his wife, “Where is the hoover?”

  When she appeared at the door, he sensed that all was not right. “They came and took it away.”

  “How will we clean the carpet?”

  “We won’t,” she replied, “They took that as well.” Upon which she slammed the door. A week later, she had started divorce proceedings. As his bed had also been taken away he was then sleeping on the bare floorboards while his wife returned to her mother with the children.

  His three-month prison sentence was almost a relief to him but by then she had returned to the flat and changed the locks. I lost contact with him after that as he had to move out of the area to stay with his brother.

  Gambling is one of the most insidious addictions of all as you don’t look ill but it can have the most terrible effects on family life as well as on the individual. It is one of the main causes of homelessness and can lead to other life destructive addictions and sadly to a high rate of suicide.

  Tony was a ‘jiggler’. This was a new word for me but he was a professional car thief and had keys filled down to make it easier to open car doors. This time he had been caught with the keys in his possession. His story was very plausible but it soon fell to pieces and was a good lesson for me to be less trusting of the sad story.

  He used a form of faction; that is fiction with just enough fact in it to make it believable. The magistrate was not confused. He went to prison for six months.

  Writing reports had its hidden pitfalls such as the time I wrote a report on Simon X who was still at school but had become involved in a fight at a local pub. My interviews with him and his family showed that he was following in his father’s footsteps. Father was a large bully of a man and had convictions for violence himself, whereas his mother spoilt him. My report described Simon as being dominated by his father and that his mother over indulged him. Father came in to see me after the court hearing and he was very irate. When I pointed out to him that his behaviour to me was exactly what I meant, he stopped, “Nah,” he said, “I know that, but his mother doesn’t drink that much.”

  I never used the word ‘overindulge’ again.

  The Sex Crime

  Steven was in his early twenties. He had shared an incestuous relationship with his mother from the age of fourteen and this had left him unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy as when he drove his car around without wearing any trousers or underwear and invited young women to join him.

  He later committed a rape in a nurse’s home but could not recognise the wrongness, insisting that she had ‘wanted it’. Even a spell in Grendon Underwood prison with its special psychiatric unit failed to prevent him from reoffending within a month of his discharge.

  On probation, he attended as required and talked about his problems but it had no effect on his actual behaviour. He saw me as someone who understood what he was doing, likewise the psychiatrist.

  He listened to our words but could not relate them to his behaviour. He returned to prison for a lengthy sentence.

  Steven was the first sex offender I had to supervise. Not surprisingly they were among the least successful cases I had to work with because few of them had any sense of wrongdoing. The sex crime is directly aimed at a victim whether it be as Jim who exposed himself along the towpath (wilfully, lewdly and obscenely as the charge puts it) and then ran away or whether it is aimed at molestation of children.

  The computer age has given the child pornographer and abuser more opportunity now than anything in the 1960s or ’70s. The worst of that age were the men (mostly but not only) who got work in places where children were in some form of care. Many are now paying the price for their historical
abuse.

  John G was on parole after serving a sentence for a violent sex attack. He reported to see me on his way back from work and then went home to be in by the curfew that had been imposed as a condition of his parole. Looking back, I can now recognise the signs of his danger. He was very correct, a placid personality, did everything he was told. A week after his parole ended, he attacked a young woman in a car park and raped her. The fact he was sentenced to a long prison sentence was no consolation to her, us or his family.

  I learned very quickly that you could not take risks with sex offenders and the rules nowadays are entirely appropriate. There is a world of difference between teenage fumbling and grooming young victims. Some as Steven had a deep-rooted psychiatric problem but the man who tries to control his relationships by violence is little better.

  Danny and the Dole

  Danny had been supervised by almost everyone in the office. He was totally on his own, illiterate, innumerate, unhygienic. Nobody wanted to supervise him, but I was the newcomer and I didn’t know him. Danny became my lost cause. He was a very sad cause. Abandoned by his mother when a baby, he was raised in an orphanage in Ireland run by the Christian Brothers. I will not describe their raising of their wards except to say it was neither Christian nor brotherly. When I worked later in Holloway, many of the young women there had come through the same system. Its effect was to destroy their self-confidence and leave them vulnerable to exploitation.

  We were his family. He was scared of everyone else and terrified of the social security staff who kept asking him questions that he could not answer, then gave him forms to fill in which he took because they told him to. Being unable to read or write, he simply kept them in a box in the room a social worker had found for him. He had received a letter from them which a friend had read for him. It was demanding the filled in paperwork otherwise his benefit would be stopped. I went with him to the office, which was a first time for me. I sat with him for forty minutes until his name was called.

  “Who are you?” asked the officer.

  I told him and it was as if a veil had been lifted, “You should have said you were here and we would have seen you sooner.”

  Suddenly, Danny became somebody. I explained that he was unable to read and that he had a probation order which had been made because of a fraud. It was because he could not understand what he had to do and had been too scared of the policeman to disagree with what he was told. I left them my name and number so that they would have a point of contact for Danny in the future.

  Life began to be easier for Danny and demanding on me but I was determined not to give up on him, I found a local Catholic Church where they had teaching sessions for the illiterate and where their opinion of the Christian Brothers was even stronger than mine. Danny enjoyed being in the fellowship of the Church, it was after all, slightly familiar to him.

  The next great triumph was to find a job and thankfully this was undemanding and repetitive which is what he could do. Even his landlady became an ally and did his laundry for him. He had to pay for it but it was a step in improving his acceptability.

  By enlarging his trustworthy community, Danny began to grow. He did begin to learn basic reading and writing. He found friends in the Church and satisfaction in his job. Even the Social Security discovered that a bit of time explaining what was needed, paid off because once he had it in his head it became part of his pattern.

  His probation order came to an end and a year later when I left the area he had not come back.

  Polly – Sometimes Justice Is Not Enough

  Polly was only twenty when I met her. She was on probation with a condition that she stayed in a probation hostel in our area. Her home was in Liverpool and so were her two very young children. She had been in care from the age of fourteen having been placed there following her mother’s death from an overdose of drugs. At seventeen and already the mother of her first child, she was found a small flat on the tenth floor of a high-rise block.

  It wasn’t long before she was pregnant again. She loved her children but had very little idea of how to care for them and her boyfriend was no help, preferring the pub and his mates to fatherhood.

  Her social worker tried to help her as much as possible but with a heavy case load of other needy people, she was limited in what she could do. Especially, she was not there in the night. For six months Polly struggled to cope. There were two other women on the same landing: one of whom kept complaining about the baby crying and the other who did talk to her and the children but was drunk most evenings.

  She met one of her friends from the children’s home while she was out shopping, “We’re having a party tomorrow. Why don’t you come? It will be fun and give you a bit of a break.” Polly was by this time desperate to get out and it was just going to be a couple of hours.

  The woman next door promised to keep an eye out for the children and Polly went to the party. The children were both asleep when she left and all seemed to be OK. It was only two hours and she had a lovely time and she did have a drink.

  When she got back to the flat, all hell had been let loose. The children were screaming and so was the woman who always complained and the police were there. The woman who had promised to look out for the kids was nowhere to be found. Polly was found guilty of neglect and sent to the hostel while her children were put into care. She was totally confused and desolate by what had happened. She said several times, “But I love my kids, why can’t they understand that.”

  We spoke many times until I was able to get her transferred to a hostel in Liverpool where she could have contact with her children and work to be reunited with them. Although she had a new officer, she still wrote to me.

  Then the miracle happened as she met a widower who was twice her age and with four children of his own. She went to live with him and married him after four months. It was not long before the children were staying with her full time again.

  Polly continued to write to me with news of her new family and it was clear that she was happier than she had ever been. But happiness would not last long as she was diagnosed with cancer and we lost contact.

  Sugar Daddy

  Jenny was a prostitute and survived by taking downers as her drug of choice was called. She lived with her boyfriend/ponce, Karl and her story was one of the weirdest I ever dealt with. To start with she had stolen a mirror from a local cinema by unscrewing it from the wall with her nail file. Why? Because it made her look thinner. In her late thirties and with her life style, she was indeed showing signs of a careless way of living. Karl was arrested with the mirror when he tried to sell it. They were both referred to me for reports.

  Superficially, it did not seem to need much deep work. She had no intention of changing her life and it wasn’t harming anyone but herself. His part was low-level stuff and there was no previous offending that we knew of but he had only come from Zimbabwe recently.

  How wrong you can be? By the time the case was closed, I had attempted murder, armed robbery, pornography, child abuse and police corruption to add to stealing a faulty mirror. And to add to this was Albert, Jenny’s sugar daddy, seventy-seven years old and a member of the Magic Circle.

  It was a casual comment by Jenny that blew it all out. I asked her what was worrying her, as she was very reticent about answering, “I get worried in bed because he’s a bit rough and don’t like him keeping his gun under the bed. It’s always loaded and I don’t want it going off when we are – moving around.” I told her that I would have to report this to the police. “Yes,” she replied, “I don’t want it there and I don’t want him to get tied in with the robbery his friends are planning.”

  After she had gone, I contacted her arresting officer and asked him if he had searched the flat for other stolen goods.

  They hadn’t. “I think it would be a good idea, especially under the bed.” That evening the police came to her flat with a search warrant. Karl was there and tried to stop them coming in but they did and the gun was w
here she had said. Karl had run away when they started the search.

  Two evenings later, Jenny was viciously attacked on Tooting Bec and left for dead. She was in hospital for three days and as she was unable to return to her flat, she turned to Albert for help.

  Certainly, Albert was one of her regular ‘clients’ but he had a genuine liking for Jenny. As he described their relationship, “We don’t do much, just talk. It’s nice to have someone younger to talk to and she’s such a nice girl really.”

  Karl was soon arrested and remanded in custody to Brixton where I went to interview him. He really was the most unlikeable person I have ever met and he didn’t seem to think much of me either as he threatened to kill me when he got out.

  When the trial came to court, Jenny was given a conditional discharge.

  Once she had begun to talk, she told the police about a paedophile ring that she had been involved with.

  The result opened up a proverbial can of worms which resulted in a police raid. There were few prosecutions though there were some resignations in both public office and the police force itself. Jenny had always said that Karl had a friend in the police.

  Karl however received a three-year prison sentence with a deportation order at the end. I was rather glad of that because I did think he would be a danger to me in the future.

  Jenny however became the target of intimidation and felt forced to move away from South London. She soon found a new ‘boyfriend’ and continued to work as a prostitute and to take drugs so it was no surprise when six months later, Albert came to see me to say that Jenny was dead. One drug overdose too many.