The Whole Truth
Page 14
‘All too many of our clients are in that position,’ she says softly. ‘It’s very sad.’
‘Of course. But in situations like that, people can get desperate – they do things they’d never think of doing otherwise.’
‘We guarantee our clients complete confidentiality, Constable.’
‘I know. And I appreciate why.’
‘I want to help – believe me – you’ve put me in a rather difficult position. Not that you meant to, of course. But I need to talk to a couple of my colleagues so we can decide what’s best to do.’
Asante knows a departure signal when he hears one. He gets to his feet and she comes round the desk to shake his hand. Behind the heavy glasses her eyes are a brilliant green, but her face is troubled.
‘So you’ll get back to me?’
She nods. ‘As soon as I can. I appreciate the urgency, I really do.’
Outside, there’s a Mums and Toddlers group going on in the main hall, and judging by the smell, Silver Threads had fish for lunch.
He drops a fiver in the Samaritans donations box on his way out.
* * *
Telephone call with Colin Boddie, pathologist
10 July 2018, 12.50 p.m.
On the call, DC G. Quinn
CB: Ah, Quinn – I gather you’re in the hot seat while Gislingham’s away.
GQ: For my sins. What have you got?
CB: Fatality on the railway line last night. Ring any bells?
GQ: Yeah, think I saw the incident alert. Suicide, right?
CB: Wrong. Her neck was broken, yes, but that didn’t kill her, for the simple reason that she was already dead –
GQ: OK –
CB: – and had been for at least the previous two hours. I would estimate TOD as sometime between nine and eleven. The high overnight temperatures make it harder to be much more specific than that, I’m afraid.
GQ: Hang on, I’m writing this down –
CB: Though whoever did kill her clearly wanted us to think it was suicide. And he’d probably have got away with it too – if those hard hatters hadn’t spotted her, there wouldn’t have been anything left to autopsy. I have to hand it to him, if you want to obliterate the evidence 15,000 tons of freight train are a pretty definitive way of doing it.
GQ: So what was the actual cause of death?
CB: Suffocation. There’s bruising around the nose, but no fibres in the airway so he probably did it with his bare hands. I’ve taken some swabs in case there’s DNA, but don’t hold your breath – it’s a fair bet he was wearing gloves.
GQ: You said ‘he’ –
CB: Almost certainly.
GQ: Just because it usually is –?
CB: No, because there was evidence of sexual assault. No semen present, but extensive bruising in the thigh and genital area, and a pubic hair that I strongly suspect isn’t one of hers.
GQ: Shit.
CB: And for the record, no signs of a ligature, either on the wrists or elsewhere.
[muffled noises in the background]
Right. I think that’s everything. I’ll finish the formalities and email everything over. BTP will be handing this one off to you. It’s a Thames Valley case now.
* * *
When Everett gets back to the office Quinn comes over to her at once. She only has to look at him to know something’s wrong.
‘What?’ she says, her heart stumbling. ‘What is it?’
‘Colin Boddie just sent me this.’
He holds out his phone. She doesn’t want it to be true but there’s no mistaking the picture – the hair, the face –
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’
Everett swallows. ‘Yes,’ she says, her voice catching. ‘It’s her.’
* * *
When Quinn puts his head round Fawley’s door the DI is standing by the window, looking down at the street. Quinn can’t remember the last time he saw him doing that.
He clears his throat. ‘Sorry to bother you, but I’ve just had a call from Colin Boddie. There was a fatality found on the railway line at Walton Well last night. First responders thought it was a suicide but turns out she was suffocated.’
No reply. Fawley’s so still Quinn wonders if he even heard him.
‘Boss?’
The DI starts a little and turns round. ‘Sorry – what did you say?’
‘There was a fatality last night, on the railway line. Looked like suicide, but the PM says otherwise.’
Fawley frowns. ‘They’re sure?’
Quinn nods. ‘And there’s evidence of prior sexual assault.’
Fawley takes a breath. ‘Do we have an ID?’
‘That’s just it. We were already looking for her. That woman who was reported missing this morning? Boddie sent over a picture. We’ll need someone to do a formal identification but it’s definitely her.’
‘Right,’ says Fawley, brisker now. ‘What’s her name?’
* * *
PC Webster’s day is looking up. What started as a routine housesitting job has turned into a full-on crime scene supervision. He’s got CSI on-site already, a couple of squad cars out the front and a Sky News van just pulling up a few yards down the street. At this rate he’ll be getting on the telly. He drags his phone out of his pocket and surreptitiously texts his mum. No harm in being prepared.
Inside the flat, Clive Conway is working his way through the sitting room. He’s bagged up the handbag and taken prints from the door handles and obvious flat surfaces. When Nina Mukerjee appears in the doorway ten minutes later he’s on his hands and knees taking carpet samples.
‘Any luck?’ she says.
‘Nothing obvious. I’ve retrieved a few hairs from the sofa, but they could just as easily be the victim’s. Someone’s worked pretty hard to make it look like there’s nothing to see here.’
‘CID say she definitely let a man in last night.’
Conway glances up. ‘Doesn’t mean this is the crime scene. He could easily have taken her somewhere else. Specially if she knew him.’
‘True, but he was in here, though, wasn’t he? Even if only for a few minutes. There’ll be touch DNA somewhere, however careful he was.’
‘Oh, he was careful, all right,’ says Conway grimly.
Nina looks around. ‘I’ve finished in the bedroom, so if you need a hand –’
‘I’m nearly done here, but you could tackle the hoover bag. Can’t see him going to all this trouble and not bothering to run a vac round.’
* * *
[ARCHIVE OF SPEECH BY CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT MICHAEL OSWALD, THAMES VALLEY POLICE, 7 SEPT 1998]
[JOCELYN]
That’s Chief Superintendent Michael Oswald, addressing a press conference on Monday September 7th 1998. The previous Friday night, the Roadside Rapist had attacked a third young woman.
The rape of Erin Pope in January that year had been followed, almost exactly two months later, by an equally savage assault in Botley, to the west of Oxford.
And now, the same predator had struck again.
I’m Jocelyn Naismith, and I’m the co-founder of The Whole Truth, a not-for-profit organization that campaigns to overturn miscarriages of justice. This is Righting the Wrongs, series 3: The Roadside Rapist Redeemed?
Chapter three: Predator
[THEME SONG – AARON NEVILLE COVER VERSION OF ‘I SHALL BE RELEASED’]
[JOCELYN]
The rapist’s second victim, 19-year-old biology student Jodie Hewitt, had been so badly beaten she had to spend ten days in hospital. Jodie was in her second year at Wykeham College at the time, and in the weeks after her rape, rumours had begun to circulate that a serial sex assailant was operating in the city. People started to panic, there were calls for more police on the streets at night.
But then – nothing. The days started to get longer, the students went down for the long summer vacation, and even if the police hadn’t made any obvious progress investigating the first two attacks, at least there hadn’t been any more.
; Not, that is, until September 4th. It was a Friday, and after a drink in town that night with friends, a 24-year-old trainee solicitor was on her way home. She was on a quiet Oxford side street, only a few hundred yards from her flat, when her attacker struck. She wasn’t raped, but only because another man saw what was happening and came to her rescue just in time.
[ROSEY MABIN]
‘His name was Gerald Butler, and he was a former soldier, and a bouncer at one of the city’s nightclubs.’
[JOCELYN]
That’s Rosey Mabin. She reported on the Roadside Rapist for the Oxford Mail, and attended Gavin Parrie’s trial at the Old Bailey.
[ROSEY]
‘Butler told the jury that he spotted the young woman face down at the side of the road. She had a plastic carrier bag over her head, and there was a man straddling her, trying to tie her hands with cable ties. The attacker was thin, about five foot eight, and wearing a dark hoodie.’
[JOCELYN]
There was no social media back then, needless to say, so it took days rather than minutes for the news of the third attack to spread, but Thames Valley Police knew their worst fears had come to pass: their bête noire was back. They called that press conference we heard at the start of this episode because they knew they had to do something to allay local fears.
There was another reason too, of course.
Women needed to be warned.
[ROSEY]
‘It was actually me that came up with the Roadside Rapist nickname. A couple of the nationals had been referring to him as the Oxford Ripper, but after that press conference I wrote a front-pager calling him the Roadside Rapist and it just stuck.’
[JOCELYN]
And you can see why. It’s a name that captures all the terror of a predator who targeted his victims out in the open, on streets they walked every day, only yards from other passers-by. Those victims were normal girls, going about their normal business. But it was that very normality that was so terrifying. Because if it happened to them, it could happen to anyone. No wonder people were scared, no wonder young women in Oxford were avoiding going out alone, especially after dark.
As for the investigation, the police were scarcely any further forward. Of course, DNA science wasn’t as sophisticated back then as it is now – so-called ‘touch DNA’ was a long way in the future, for a start. But that didn’t matter anyway, because – as the trial would later confirm – the Roadside Rapist never left any DNA at all. No hair, no skin, no semen – there were basically no forensics (a fact which has also hampered subsequent attempts to have the case re-opened, including our own).
The other challenge for the police was that, unlike Paula in Manchester, none of the Oxford victims ever saw their attacker’s face. The police speculated – with some justification – that the rapist was using plastic bags for precisely that reason: to make doubly sure he couldn’t be identified. There was no CCTV either. In the late 90s, very few buildings had their own cameras, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that there was never any footage in the area of the crimes. Of course, this could just have been bad luck, or a coincidence, but some of the officers on the case started to wonder whether there might be rather more to it than that.
[‘MR X’]
‘As time went on you could definitely see a pattern emerging.’
[JOCELYN]
Those are the words of one of the detectives who worked on the case. We’ve disguised his voice, to protect his identity.
[‘MR X’]
‘It wasn’t just the MO that was the same each time. The plastic bag, the cable ties, the hair, the taking of trophies like jewellery or underwear. Over time, we became convinced that this man was also choosing the locations of the attacks very carefully. They all took place on stretches of road that had no speed cameras or CCTV, where there was dense undergrowth adjacent to the pavement, and no overlooking houses or buildings. That suggested to us that this perpetrator was recce-ing the sites in detail beforehand.’
[JOCELYN]
Thames Valley officers did question people who lived or worked nearby, but it never yielded anything useful. They had no evidence, no leads. But in due course they did have a new theory.
[‘MR X’]
‘It was one of the Detective Sergeants on the team who first suggested that the rapist wasn’t just casing out the sites of the crimes in advance: he was stalking his victims too.’
[JOCELYN]
The name of that Detective Sergeant was Adam Fawley. And this wasn’t the only significant contribution he would make to this investigation. In fact, his work on the case would eventually earn him a commendation from the Chief Constable, and accelerate his rise to Detective Inspector. Because it was Adam Fawley who helped secure the evidence that convicted Gavin Parrie.
So you could say, with some justification, that this case changed Adam Fawley’s life. And not just professionally, either.
In September 2000, not quite a year after Gavin Parrie was pronounced guilty and sentenced to life at the Old Bailey, Adam Fawley married a woman called Alexandra Sheldon.
She was a lawyer, and had lived in the Oxford area all her life. She was also the Roadside Rapist’s third victim.
[UNDER BED OF ‘EMOTIONAL RESCUE’ – THE ROLLING STONES]
I’m Jocelyn Naismith and this is Righting the Wrongs. You can listen to this and other podcasts from The Whole Truth on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[FADE OUT]
* * *
Alex Fawley presses stop and pushes her tablet away. Her hands are trembling.
She knew this would happen – she’d steeled herself against what they’d say, but knowing it and hearing it are not the same thing.
She folds her hands about her belly to still them; the skin that shields her child is warm, but her fingers are freezing.
She needs to talk to Adam.
She’d prayed she wouldn’t have to – she didn’t want him to know she was listening to this thing. But now – now she has no choice.
* * *
Back at St Aldate’s, Somer is feeling the worst kind of sidelined. Because she can’t blame anyone else; she’s managing to do it all by herself. Ever since the news came in from Boddie, the team has been hectic with adrenaline, but she feels muffled, quarantined. Like those adverts where there’s someone sitting in the middle of a busy office, barely moving, while people buzz around them in fast-forward. Those marooned people always have something wrong with them – a cold, a headache, flu – but it’s never anything serious. It’s always easily fixed. She sighs. It’s not that she doesn’t care about what happened to the woman on the railway line; she just can’t find the energy to do anything about it. She’s achieved precisely nothing all morning, and is now rapidly running out of thankless tasks that will stop her thinking and require no thought.
She gets up and wanders over to where Baxter is staring at his screen, the blue light reflected back on his face. There are three empty chocolate wrappers by his mouse pad. As stress indicators go, that’s pretty reliable.
‘Need a hand with anything?’
He glances up briefly and frowns. ‘Fuck me, that’s a first. You feeling OK?’
How long have you got? she thinks. ‘Hey, don’t look a gift horse, and all that.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, if you’re sure, you could have a look at that Twitter feed the Super’s getting so uptight about. The one that exposed Marina Fisher. I’ve had a quick look but I haven’t gone through all the replies and that.’
‘Great,’ she says. ‘Just send me the details.’
He gives her a dry look then turns to his screen and taps at the keyboard. ‘Knock yourself out.’
Somer opens what he’s sent her, then sits back. ‘This is the one? This is definitely the username?’
Baxter glances up and frowns. ‘Yeah. So? Didn’t mean anything to me.’
‘No,’ she says softly, almost to herself. ‘But it means something, all the same.’
* * *<
br />
It’s Ev who picks up the call. ‘Asante?’ she says, looking up. ‘Line three for you.’
He recognizes the voice straight away.
‘Ms Monroe, what can I do for you?’
A slight pause. ‘What you said before, when you were here –’
Asante reaches for his pen. ‘Oh yes?’
‘You were asking about any of our clients who might have had a motive – some sort of grudge? I’ve spoken to my colleagues and even though it goes against all our professional instincts, we’ve agreed that the circumstances justify making an exception.’
She stops, takes a breath. Asante says nothing. He knows the value of silence.
‘There was someone. A couple she was assessing as potential adopters. Unfortunately, they didn’t turn out to be suitable.’
‘I see.’
‘And they were in their forties. It was probably their last chance. The gentleman – he was very angry. Shouting, making threats –’
Asante frowns. ‘Physical threats?’
‘Oh no,’ she says quickly. ‘Nothing like that. He said he had “contacts”, that he’d ruin her career, that sort of thing. It was very unpleasant. We were on the point of calling the police.’
Asante gets out his notebook. ‘And can you tell me why they were rejected?’
‘Not “rejected” – “not considered suitable”,’ she says quickly. ‘And no. I’m pushing it as it is.’
‘But that makes it difficult for us to –’
‘It was only two or three weeks ago,’ she says, cutting across him. ‘Couldn’t you just say you’re speaking to all the clients who’d seen her recently?’
She’s shrewd, this woman.
‘Fair enough. We can probably get away with that. Can you give me the address?’
He starts to write it down, only to find himself stumbling at the postcode and checking his prejudice. Because it’s not Cowley or Blackbird Leys or Littlemore, but sought-after OX2.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I’ll do my best not to land you in it.’
She sighs. ‘I still feel bad about it. But I’d never be able to forgive myself if it turned out to be him and I hadn’t said anything.’