The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  ‘Jesus Christ. Since when has buying a coffee been a fucking crime? You’re fucking warped.’

  Then, more to himself than me: ‘Fucking bitches.’

  I lowered my voice slightly. ‘It’s not a crime to buy coffee, Liam, but I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t ask about this. I am concerned for the safety of this woman and I want to help you too. I think it would be helpful to talk about it so that we can understand what is going on for you. What do you think?’

  Liam stood up and swept his hand across the table, sending the pile of receipts – now back in their elastic band – flying. Instinctively I put my hand out and somehow managed to catch them. He leant down on both arms and his eyes tightened into a glare. ‘I think you are an interfering old whore,’ he said. His lip curled into a contemptuous snarl. ‘I wouldn’t even touch you.’ He kicked the leg of the table, and stormed out of the room.

  There was silence as we held our breath for a couple of beats, then Sheila and I looked at each other. ‘Right then,’ I said. ‘That went well.’

  She nodded her head towards the papers in my left hand. ‘Good save.’

  I heard from her later that his MAPPA team, upon reading my report and recommendations, had decided that Liam’s restrictions were not going to be lifted any time soon.

  *

  LITIGATION BECKONS:

  I will publish all correspondence from Ms Daynes’ solicitors…unfortunately for Ms Daynes this will only further damage her reputation.

  I am prepared to make an offer to Ms Daynes to settle out of court. In view of time and effort, personal grievance and damage to my own reputation I will accept £5000 from her in full and final settlement. In satisfaction of this I will remove the website.

  A couple of months after working with Liam I found myself at the Manchester Civil Justice Centre, a modern, light-filled court which seemed to add to the strangeness of the day. I was more at home with the Victorian Gothic style of the Crown Court down the road, where the wood panelling and ornate carvings seemed to lend a seriousness to the proceedings that I missed here in this airy, wide-open space.

  I sat, flanked by my legal team, and saw for the first time the man behind the website. It had dawned on me as he walked into the court that this was the same innocuous-looking person who had, just a few minutes ago, been sitting a few feet away from me in the cafe downstairs. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a single moment of eye contact – I knew he would already be luxuriating in this grand day out with me. As he took his seat in front of me I noticed a thread had come loose on the seam on the back of his light blue suit.

  We had pursued him for defamation and libel, to get his website taken down. There was also a very real possibility that clients could mistakenly send sensitive and potentially explosive material to him and I had a duty of care to them not to let that happen. I really had been given no other option than to take it to court, thus making it a ‘civil matter’.

  He was ordered to convert his website to a blank white screen and destroy any and all material relating to me. Then came the question of my legal bill. Civil proceedings don’t come cheap, meaning that protecting yourself from a stalker’s barrage by this route isn’t something everyone can afford.

  The judge asked him to stand up: ‘Do you have £60,000 to pay Miss Daynes’ costs?’

  He started to become flustered and said, ‘Well I wouldn’t relish it,’ alluding to what was clearly wishful thinking that he had it but just didn’t fancy parting with it.

  However, I knew then that I would not be pursuing him for the recovery of my costs. He was representing himself and had incurred no fees other than the cost of his own time. He’d also been keen to try to charge me for his websites throughout this whole episode. It didn’t seem like he had any money. You can’t get blood out of a stone. And truth be told, I didn’t have any inclination to go after this presumably already deeply unhappy man. Doing so would only maintain a perverse sort of connection to him.

  The judge continued: ‘Do you understand that Miss Daynes does not want any form of business relationship with you? She does not want any other form of relationship with you. Do you understand that she has not made any form of voluntary contact with you?’

  And that is when he said: ‘It doesn’t matter because I’m finished with her now, I’m done with her. She upset me.’ As if we’d had a promising romance which had suddenly turned sour.

  I exchanged glances with the legal assistant on my left. My solicitor, sitting on my right, picked up his blue biro and discreetly opened his ring binder. He scribbled something, then positioned the folder in a way that I could read it, before closing it again.

  He had written the word: ‘NUTTER’.

  I smiled weakly and then fixed my gaze again on the errant thread on the back of my adversary’s jacket. He wasn’t a ‘nutter’ (whatever that meant) any more than Liam was a ‘psychopath’. In my mind’s eye, I crossed out the word on the paper and then replaced it, in large, red imaginary letters, with the word ‘misogynist’.

  Misogyny – an ingrained prejudice against and contempt for women and girls – is one of the few human conditions that hasn’t yet been declared a mental illness. Probably because, if it were, it would be a pandemic. In the courtroom that day it seemed clear to me that here was just another of misogyny’s foot soldiers: a man who resented a woman’s rejection so much that he wanted to punish her for it.

  I walked out of court that day a lot poorer, but feeling relief that I had at least tackled a problem head-on. It was over. I went home, switched the alarm off as I opened the door, closed my curtains and went to lie down on my sofa. The strain of the day had triggered a Ménière’s attack and I knew it would be ferocious. The room began to turn. But as I lay there with Fozzchops snoring loudly at my feet, I reassured myself that at least one situation was no longer spinning out of control.

  Or so I thought. I couldn’t have imagined then that I would still be dealing with it six years later. In this job you have to get used to unfinished stories.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING FINGER

  If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t,

  then I will put all that I can into the going.

  Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could

  Be Normal?

  By May 2013 austerity had well and truly hit. Cost-cutting measures, administered in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, were applied to public sector services with the sting of military-issue iodine.

  The Ministry of Justice was seeing its overall budget shrink by 40 per cent – among the deepest cuts to any government department. A huge slash in spending on Legal Aid meant my work as an expert witness in the courts had almost disappeared (it seems experts are non-essential when money is tight. Although given the increasing number of people appearing in criminal and family courts without even legal advice or representation, the demise of psychologists sounds trifling). Contracts that I had with charities, social care organizations and local authorities had all been cut or put out to tender and won by cheaper providers – volunteer counsellors, trainees or, even worse, life coaches. I was being asked to train fewer police officers, being consulted less frequently on interrogations and investigations. I had always told my clients that crime doesn’t pay and it was proving true for me now – requests for my services were very much down.

  Except in one area. Due in part to Operation Yewtree, the investigation into child abuse committed by former TV personality Jimmy Savile among others, there had been a wave of public awareness of and confidence in reporting child abuse offences. The number of arrests and subsequent prosecutions wasn’t rising anywhere near as fast as the disclosure rate. But, that said, in my practice demand for presentence reports about sex offenders who had committed internet-based crimes against children were unremitting. Referrals came in weekly from solicitors whose clients were men who’d been found downloading child abuse imagery online (there is and never has been
any such thing as ‘child pornography’ – just child abuse and pictures, videos and even, as I was learning, livestreaming of it). A proportion of these included those who had incited children to engage in sexual conversations or activity via chatrooms and webcams, or had attempted to meet up with them. They were mostly older men, but sometimes also younger, in their late teens and early 20s, boys who had learned the art of ‘grooming’ (the process by which an abuser manipulates a victim and overcomes any likely resistance by them over time) via their own experience of having been exploited online as children. Young or old, there was rarely anything outwardly unusual about any of them, they held down jobs, were in relationships and had little history of rule-breaking.

  Their files usually included a case summary giving three or four sample descriptions of the material that had been retrieved from their mobile phones and computers. Every image is assessed and categorized according to the severity of the abuse involved, the spectrum running from children photographed in sexualized poses through to footage of the most extreme and brutal acts.

  In 2013 a five-point grading scale was in use (known as the SAP scale; it has since been replaced by a simpler three-tier system introduced by the Sentencing Council). I always felt for the specialist officer whose job it had been to view the image, assign it to a category, catalogue it and type up the summary, the language always so remote and formal, yet unable to disguise the horror of what it detailed. I found having to read them every day hard enough to cope with. It wasn’t only the graphic accounts of what these adults had done to children that I was finding hard to process, but the sheer number of abusive images in circulation. That, and the one detail that the summary description never tells you: whether the child had been identified and was safe now, or still out there somewhere being subject to more of the same.

  The National Crime Agency estimates there are up to 80,000 people in the UK who ‘present some kind of sexual threat’ to children online. Increasingly, it felt to me as though all of them were on my caseload (the only more disturbing thought being that they weren’t on anybody’s caseload). The varied and unpredictable nature of my work and clients had always been one of the things I loved most about forensic psychology. I didn’t want to strike a whole tranche of offenders from my list, but at the same time my head was brimming with unwanted, half-imagined images and I was beginning to feel quite strongly that I hadn’t signed up for this.

  It was around this time that I was asked by BBC Wales to contribute to a Welsh-language documentary. I had deliberately stayed out of the public eye since being stalked – keeping a low profile felt the safest thing to do – and had turned down a number of documentaries. The stalker appeared to be a sleeping dog and I was happy to let him lie. But on this occasion I took a punt on the fact that he probably wasn’t that fluent in Welsh so wouldn’t be watching, and said yes.

  They wanted me to contribute to a film covering the trial of Mark Bridger. Wales had been in mourning since the previous autumn, when five-year-old April Jones, who had cerebral palsy, was abducted and murdered by Bridger. Her disappearance while out playing sparked the biggest missing person search in UK police history. Not only did Bridger kill her, he disposed of her body in such a way that she has never been found. He incinerated parts of her body in the wood burner at his home, but forensic teams found tiny particles of skull in the fireplace and bloodstains matching April’s DNA. It is believed that he scattered other parts of her in the countryside and possibly in the fast-running river near his cottage in Ceinws. April’s parents were only ever able to bury 17 fragments of their daughter’s remains.

  Bridger pleaded not guilty to the charge of murdering April, but accepted that he was ‘probably responsible’ for her death. The mystery of what had happened to this little girl, the lack of closure that the discovery of her body or a coherent explanation by Bridger might have given, contributed to a deluge of media interest in the case, and in the evidence that might emerge during his trial.

  I had been asked to watch as Bridger gave his evidence and to provide some commentary to the filmmakers. I took my seat in the narrow press and public mezzanine of Mold Crown Court for a week, fully expecting to watch events play out with the same impartial interest I had always cultivated at work. But it was the first time I’d seen anything like this from that viewpoint: high up, in the same room and yet light years away from the people whose fate is being decided below. I wasn’t an expert witness there to give my opinion and I wasn’t the victim there to see justice served. I found that I could only watch and absorb as any other member of the public might, in turns appalled by the grotesque charade Bridger played out and humbled by the quiet dignity and strength of April’s parents.

  It was a few seconds of video that got me, the CCTV footage of her in the leisure centre on the day he took her, a happy, unusually small girl struggling to open a heavy door by herself. And there he was in court, a six-foot- two man, the snake tattoo on his forearm covered by a blue shirt. Later that day she would become fragments of bone in his fireplace. Watching that clip I felt an anger rise in me, and knew it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  We heard how, in the days before he took April, Bridger had been searching the internet for images of Soham murder victims Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson who was raped and killed on a school trip to France in 1996. We were told about files on his computer containing obscene imagery of child abuse. Other searches on his computer included words like ‘puberty’ and ‘naked young five year old’.

  Bridger protested that he had been doing internet research to understand his own children’s sexual development. He had saved indecent images of children ‘to complain about them later’, he insisted. He said he accidentally ran over April in his Land Rover and that he was unable to fully recall what had happened next because he was drunk and in a state of panic. But we then heard an eight-year-old witness testify that she had seen April climbing into his car. Forensic scientist Roderick Stewart told the jury that there was not a trace of physical evidence, either on Bridger’s Land Rover or on April’s bike, to back up his claim that there had been an accident.

  It was obvious to everyone what he had been fantasizing about before he abducted April, there was really no question that he had killed her and that the crime was sexually motivated. It even emerged that he had tried and failed to get three other girls into his car that day. His lies were risible and calculated, and it seemed to me his cruelty in withholding from her parents the truth of what happened was impossible to forgive.

  On 30 May, Bridger was found guilty of abduction, murder and perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole-life tariff. It has long been my view that if you take a child’s life then the only rightful place for you to end your life is a prison. But I’m not paid to make judgements of that kind. And until then I had always somehow managed to compartmentalize my personal feelings about someone’s offending behaviour so that I was able to work with them objectively, considering the person as well as the offence. I’d met more than anybody’s share of child killers in prisons, including Robert Black, who was responsible for the death of at least four girls (and who died in HMP Maghaberry in 2016). I’d also worked with several men in forensic step-down services who were moving on from jail terms for abducting or killing children. I would introduce myself and offer them my hand when I met them, just as I would with anyone else, and think only of the job in hand, not their hand in mine.

  Apart from Ian Brady (you don’t grow up in Manchester and later shake Ian Brady’s hand without thinking of the harm that hand has caused), did I feel revulsion? Yes. But I also still managed to find a shred of compassion for Brady. What a wretched soul, I remember thinking to myself. But over those days as I listened to Mark Bridger repeatedly referring to the child he had killed as ‘little April’, I knew that I couldn’t find the detachment I needed to feel neutral about him. I had never looked at somebody like I looked at Mark Bridger
and felt so utterly repelled and disgusted.

  During that week watching Bridger’s testimony a colleague suggested I had ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. Perhaps I was suffering some kind of vicarious trauma that my standard supervision meetings with a fellow psychologist – all psychologists are required to take this time to offload and reflect on their work – weren’t enough to help. I remember thinking that if PTSD meant ‘permanently tired, sick and disgusted’ then yes, I had a bout of that for sure. I had a caseload brimming with men who looked at images of children being abused and although they weren’t all Mark Bridgers they were still part of it, buyers and traders in a thriving black market.

  I gave my analysis of Bridger to the TV crew in the professional manner expected of me. I added how, for nearly 50 years now we’ve all been told about ‘stranger danger’, mainly thanks to a 1971 government campaign, which was precipitated by the Moors murders and other high-profile child abductions in the 1960s. It is an outdated concept. Defining ‘abduction’ and ‘stranger’ in the context of homicide is no longer so straightforward. We tend to think of children being lured or snatched off the street but some of the more recent cases have involved a degree of grooming online prior to contact and murder. Even Mark Bridger was not a total stranger to April as one of his own children went to the same school as her. But, I reminded myself sitting in court, the reality is that child abductions are rare, those ending in homicide exceptionally so. They are the cases that come into the media spotlight exactly because they are the worst-case scenario. Less than half of child abductions are the work of strangers – 42 per cent according to a report, based on police data collected in 2011/12, by the charity Action Against Abduction. The approximate annual figure for under-16s taken by strangers, according to the same report, is 50, with 15 of them being sexually assaulted. Not that the low numbers involved make it any less shocking or impactful. There is some small comfort in the fact that the research also found that three out of every four abduction attempts fail.