The photographs were extremely detailed large-format prints; shots of the area around Dalkeith, aerial views of the housing estate where Jodi had lived, and of Roan’s Dyke, the footpath where she’d been found, and some neighbouring estates at the other end of the path. As I turned the pages we returned to ground level and moved down the track.
The body was sickeningly mutilated. Picture after picture showed wounds across the girl’s face, her neck and breasts, her stomach, even her eyes. The case notes had not prepared me for the gross nature of the injuries and the depravity of the killer. I didn’t trust myself to catch Faith’s eye.
Superintendent Dobbie returned and placed his large, strong hands together on the table. ‘Do you have children, Dr Hoskins?’
I told him I had a son and a daughter just a bit younger than Jodi had been.
‘Then I’m afraid you’ll find the diaries as distressing as the photographs.’
He explained that the prime suspect was Luke Mitchell, Jodi’s boyfriend. He was fifteen years old. Forensic evidence linked him to the crime scene, but Luke had claimed to have found Jodi’s body. He was not under arrest. The police didn’t have sufficient evidence. But Luke did have some unusual interests.
For one thing, he had an obsession with Marilyn Manson, the American singer. Superintendent Dobbie felt this might be significant. An alert pathologist had noticed that Jodi’s wounds were mainly inflicted post-mortem, in a pattern resembling the ritualized injuries inflicted on the victim of the Black Dahlia murder in 1940s Los Angeles and which Faith immediately recognized. She had come across the case during her psychology studies. Elizabeth Short, a Hollywood B-movie actress, had been found dead, her body mutilated. The killer was never found. Marilyn Manson was apparently fascinated by it.
I made a few meaningless notes and tried to clear my head. I knew Superintendent Dobbie was observing me. He could see how affected I was, and he probably thought I was thinking of my children. That was true, in a way. If Abigail had lived, she would have been within a few months of Jodi’s age. I felt confused and inadequate. I couldn’t see why this quiet Scottish policeman needed me: he appeared to have already made the obvious connections. He soon supplied the answer.
‘I don’t just want to solve this crime, Dr Hoskins,’ he said. ‘I want to know what gets inside the minds of people and makes them do this. I want to know what tips them over the edge. I’d like you to help me understand that. Because if we don’t understand it, I don’t see how we can ever work to prevent it.’
Later that day we visited Roan’s Dyke. There was little now under the birch trees to mark the atrocity that had been perpetrated here – striped police tape, some trampled undergrowth, coloured marker pegs stuck in the leaf mould.
Faith and I returned to our hotel in silence. I lugged my briefcase across the lobby, laden with photos, notes and reports, some of them copies, others originals that I had to guard with my life.
I dumped the bag on the bed and slumped into an armchair. Faith sat opposite me. I flicked on the television. Sky news was on and the screen filled with the face of Luke Mitchell.
Faith and I were transfixed. The boy was cool, articulate, intelligent. He accused the police of harassment and calmly protested his innocence to the interviewer over and over again. He insisted he knew nothing about Jodi’s murder. He spoke with what sounded like complete candour, directly into the camera. He was fair-haired, good-looking, clear-eyed. He looked like an angel.
Faith got up abruptly, walked into the bathroom and shut the door. After a moment I heard the shower. I looked at the closed door for a second then turned of the television. I opened my case, removed several of the photos from the folder and laid them out on the bed.
I stared at them for some time, totally absorbed and utterly repelled. At length I became aware of Faith standing beside me.
‘What were we thinking of?’ she said. ‘That we could build a glittering career together based on obscenities like this?’
‘I’m sorry.’ I shuffled the photographs together and locked them in my case. ‘This was all a mistake.’
‘Did you see the way those policemen looked at me? You could hear them asking, What’s she doing here, that wee blonde girl with her shiny lipstick? What could she know about all this? And they were right. This is way out of my league, out of any league I want to be in. How could anyone stand it, dealing with this kind of material, day after day? How could anybody mix in this world and not be contaminated by it? Do you think you can?’
We didn’t talk much more after that. We checked out, took a cab to the station and got on the first train back to London. The train was packed. The trip back was a nightmare. The weather had held and it somehow made it worse to see the fields and hills slipping brightly past. We couldn’t look at one another. We seemed unable even to offer each other comfort.
Back in London, I locked myself away for a couple of days with Superintendent Dobbie’s material. I spent a lot of time with my books and on the internet. I wanted to give us some time to recover. And I wanted to get this case off our hands.
It didn’t take long to confirm the Black Dahlia hypothesis. The cuts to Jodi’s body, especially the ones made post-mortem, echoed those inflicted on Elizabeth Short sixty years ago. And there was also a clear link with cult singer Marilyn Manson, who, as Dobbie had pointed out, was fascinated by the Elizabeth Short killing. The promotional video for his song ‘moBSCENE’ featured dancers dressed in 1940s gear with their faces made up so that they appeared to have wounds similar to Elizabeth Short’s. In the summer of 2003, the time of Jodie’s death, the song was in the charts. It was hard to avoid the notion that Jodi’s killer had been influenced by it.
But even if Mitchell was obsessed by the Black Dahlia, there were no indications that this was a religious crime. I had hoped there would be: it might have helped explain Jodi Jones’s dreadful death and the equally dreadful things that had happened to her afterwards. As it was, I was left wondering what Superintendent Dobbie expected from me.
But then, sitting in my study one dull afternoon, thinking bleakly over the case for the hundredth time, I remembered his words to me as we sat around that table in Dalkeith police station. He didn’t just want to solve this crime: he wanted to understand it.
He was not alone. How could anyone in our society do such things? What had happened to Adam had been horrible enough, but at least we could tell ourselves it was performed by people of an alien culture and beliefs, people who were profoundly not like us. Jodi Jones and Luke Mitchell, though, were disturbingly like the kids next door. They were rebellious and confused, perhaps, but no more than many other adolescents struggling to come to terms with a bewildering world and their own sexuality.
I realized that this admirable Scottish policeman, who must have seen most of life’s horrors in his time, had been deeply shocked by this case. Superintendent Dobbie gave me the impression of a man fighting a doomed rearguard action against a new and incoherent world that threatened to engulf him and all he stood for.
I talked to him on the phone several times over the next few days and weeks. I was painfully aware that I wasn’t giving him the answers he sought, but he was too courteous to say so, and instead he listened to all my observations with calm dignity.
Not long afterwards, Luke Mitchell was arrested and once again questioned by the police. New searches revealed that the boy’s alibi was false. His mother had lied for him. Neighbours reported that he had been seen burning various items in his backyard early on the evening of the killing. One by one, doors were slamming on Luke.
32
London, October 2003–January 2004
The Jodi Jones case affected me profoundly and I began to think about turning away from this wrenching line of work altogether. I could have stepped back into the sheltered life of an academic – Faith would probably have preferred it if I had – but the abuse of children had become a high-profile media issue by this stage, especially when religion or ritual was
involved. There were frequent television reports and articles in the newspapers and I was often asked to contribute, making backing away more and more difficult. Besides, I didn’t feel that I could be free of all this until the Adam case had been resolved. And that seemed to be taking longer than anyone had anticipated.
After the arrests of the previous summer everyone had expected more action to track down Adam’s killers, but there was little sign of it. Every time I called Nick Chalmers for news he was as confident as ever, but had little new information to share with me. Sam Onojhighovie’s lawyers were fighting his extradition to Germany tooth and nail, and there was every chance they’d be able to delay it indefinitely. In London there was talk of further surveillance operations with the promise of new arrests. But nothing seemed to happen. The only big fish to be reeled in so far – Kingsley Ojo the arch people-trafficker – remained in custody awaiting trial.
As the closing months of 2003 dragged by I grew steadily more frustrated, and Faith told me that she had been offered the chance to do a PhD at the University of Exeter. I knew this set the seal on her retreat from the work we had once approached together with such confidence.
The story of the eight-year-old later known as Child B started on a bleak day in late November.
A community warden, Kwame Agbo, who was patrolling with a colleague, spotted a child huddled alone on the steps of an apartment block in Hackney, east London. She was shivering in the cold, bruised and sobbing. She was softly spoken and clearly intelligent, but seemed to be unable to say why she was sitting alone out in the winter drizzle. Kwame Agbo did not press her for answers. Instead, he wrapped his coat around her and sent his colleague to a local café.
As he chatted to her, he noticed that her eyes were inflamed, blood-red and oozing. Mr Agbo’s colleague came back with a cup of hot chocolate and the child drank it gratefully, almost greedily. It was, Kwame Agbo was to recall later, as if nobody had shown her any kindness for a very long time.
When the girl had finished her drink, the two wardens led her to the nearby school, where she should have been in classes for the day. Over the next few hours the head teacher called in social workers and doctors to examine her. Finally the police were called. Child B had been subjected to horrific injuries. Forty-three separate wounds were found on her emaciated body.
I was at my desk in King’s College on the Friday afternoon when my mobile rang. Detective Constable Jason Morgan introduced himself as the Child Protection officer on the North London Child Abuse Committee. He wanted to meet.
‘I’m afraid I’m rather tied up at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ve a lecture to give in a few minutes, and after that I’m going away for the weekend.’
‘Anywhere nice?’
‘The West Country.’
‘Driving?’
‘No. Getting the four thirty-three from Paddington. That’s why I’m in a hurry.’
‘No problem. I can meet you for ten minutes in the British Transport Police office there.’ He waited, and when I continued to hesitate he said, ‘Dr Hoskins, I’ve heard about your work. This case has got your name all over it.’
The British Transport Police’s office at Paddington was just this side of squalid, with a lot of frosted glass, scarred pine tables and a permanent fog of cigarette smoke.
DC Morgan told me about Child B, a girl of eight who lived with her aunt and mother, apparently, and one other child. The family were Congolese. There was no father on the scene, but the aunt’s half-brother was a pretty constant presence. He slid a photograph of a pretty child with huge eyes across the table. She had been cut with a knife, beaten, starved, tied up in a garbage sack, threatened with drowning in the local river and with being thrown out of the window of the family’s high-rise apartment. Someone had also rubbed chilli peppers in her eyes.
Now I was sure where this was going.
‘Is this something to do with kindoki?’ I asked.
‘I’d never heard the word before,’ DC Morgan said, ‘And I thought I’d heard of most things. The girl says it’s her aunt and her mother, mostly, who did this to her. They’re born again, or something. Christians, anyway. They were trying to drive out this kindoki, the girl says. That’s like witchcraft, isn’t it? Like casting out devils? Is that the sort of thing they believe, these people?’
I didn’t answer at once. I was familiar enough with kindoki from my days in the Congo and I knew it was just as widespread a concept in other African countries. But to my knowledge there had never been anything sinister about it. It was seen as an affliction, often a passing one. It was a catch-all phrase that covered a multitude of minor ills, rather like saying one had the blues. A bout of depression or simple low spirits might qualify as kindoki, or some low-grade physical illness. It was usually quickly dealt with by a traditional healer who would offer a sympathetic ear and then prescribe herbal medicines. To describe it as witchcraft, as many Westerners did, was technically correct, but conjured up images of voodoo dolls and curses. In my experience kindoki was nothing like as dramatic.
Recently, though, through my contacts in the London Congolese community I had begun to hear whispers of exorcisms organized by revivalist churches for children affected by kindoki. It was more usually called ‘deliverance’ in African circles, but they were talking about exorcism all right. I hadn’t really credited these stories with much weight. Exorcism is not that outlandish a prospect in itself: most Western churches believe in the casting out of demons in exceptional circumstances. But I couldn’t work out how the church had come to see kindoki as the work of the Devil. In the African world view, virtually everyone suffered from kindoki from time to time. To talk about having it exorcized was a bit like having radiotherapy to treat a cold – it wasn’t necessary, it wouldn’t work and the treatment would be far worse than the disease.
All the same, I wasn’t about to scoff at such a notion. I didn’t like the reference to witchcraft, however mistaken it might be. Like everyone else I knew about Victoria Climbié. Victoria, an eight-year-old from the Ivory Coast, had died in London in February 2000 after the most appalling mistreatment by her family and carers. She had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and forced to sleep in a bin liner in an empty bath. When she had finally been taken to hospital it was too late to save her life; 128 separate scars were found on her body, all of them believed to be deliberately inflicted. In 2001 her great-aunt, Marie Therese Kouao, and Kouao’s boyfriend Carl Manning, were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
I had not been involved in that case, but I knew that her torturers had claimed to be trying to drive out demons from the little girl. They believed – or said they believed – that she was possessed, and that she was a witch. And it may have been pure coincidence, but they were also members of a new revivalist church. So it could happen, and it could happen to children in London.
Was it happening again? Was Victoria Climbié’s awful death part of some unspeakable new trend?
DC Morgan hefted a bulky document case onto the table. I didn’t want to touch it, but a few minutes later, as Paddington station slipped away behind us, the case lay on the seat beside me.
After our weekend away I took the case to my study and shoved it under the desk. It caught my eye accusingly every time I walked in and after a while I put it away in a cupboard. I even locked the door on it. I was afraid to look inside. I put off opening that document case for weeks.
I didn’t call Jason Morgan, so he finally called me. I bluffed. He asked me to ring him back. I didn’t. He rang again: I recognized the number and ignored the call.
Faith saw the effect this was having on me. She was on her way out of the apartment one morning in January of 2004 when she turned back to face me.
‘I don’t want you holding back on my account,’ she said. ‘You know you won’t rest until you’ve tackled this.’
Without waiting for an answer, she walked away down the corridor.
I went straight into the study, haule
d the case onto the desk and opened it. Four hours later I was still reading.
Child B had lived in Hackney with her mother, who could not be named for legal reasons, and with the woman whom she had known as her aunt, Sita Kisanga. Kisanga’s half-brother, Sebastian Pinto, also stayed in the tiny apartment, as well as Kisanga’s young son. All of the adults were asylum seekers, the two women were Congolese nationals and Pinto was apparently Angolan.
When found, the girl had bruises all over her and the scars of several knife cuts; she was also severely malnourished. As DC Morgan had told me at our first meeting, someone had rubbed chilli peppers in her eyes, causing the most acute agony. She told a story, echoing that of Victoria Climbié, of being left to sleep in the bath, cold, terrified and alone. She had then been bundled into a sack, which was zipped up, and her mother and aunt had discussed throwing her of the third-floor balcony, after which she was to be drowned in the nearby canal.
The adults, while all quick to blame one another for abusing the girl, were quite clear about why Child B had been so cruelly treated. She was infected with kindoki. They knew this because one night Kisanga’s son had been visited by Child B in a dream and she had threatened to fly back to the Congo with him.
Sita Kisanga was a member of a fundamentalist Christian church known as Combat Spirituel. Founded in Kinshasa, it now had a branch in Hackney and was enthusiastically patronized by members of the Congolese community. Notes made in Kisanga’s Bible confirmed that she was a worshipper there. In her early statements she suggested that she had gone to her church for guidance about Child B’s kindoki.
The police interviewed Pastor Raph, who headed up Combat Spirituel’s operations in London. He didn’t know Sita Kisanga, he said, or any of the others. Perhaps they had attended his services: he had a large congregation and could not be expected to know everyone, but Sita Kisanga was not personally known to him. Pastor Raph told police that she was certainly not a prominent member of the church community, as she had at first claimed. In any case, he said, Combat Spirituel would never have condoned frightening a child in the name of deliverance, far less hurting her.
The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London Page 17