by Stephen Wade
This report has gone to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and they have had the photo in question enlarged. Bamber claims that ‘further examination of the floor area in the kitchen shows that there is absolutely no paint debris of any sort from approximately 60 cm of scratch marks that penetrate up to eleven layers of paint in places’. How he would know about the layers of paint is open to question, but the fact is that someone has stepped in now, into this chink of light in the reappraisals done by forensic science, and that man is Herbert Leon MacDonell.
MacDonell has been a leading forensic expert for forty years; his speciality is in blood-spatter analysis, and he has been involved in a number of prominent cases over the years. In 1960, he invented the MAGNA Brush fingerprint device which changed the process of fingerprint evidence. It has no bristles and so it made it possible to avoid the problem of a ridge being formed as a print was tested and recorded. Then, in 1971, he wrote Flight Characteristics and Stain Patterns of Human Blood which was officially endorsed by the US Department of Justice. This is basically a guide to blood-spatter analysis for police personnel. MacDonell later became the director of the Laboratory of Forensic Science in Corning, New York. His status as a consultant is so revered that he has been engaged to participate in cases such as the OJ Simpson trial and even in the investigations conducted into the assassination of Robert Kennedy. His standard work which explains his major cases is The Evidence Never Lies: The Casebook of a Modern Sherlock Holmes.
‘Sherlock’ MacDonell has looked at the images of the photos in question. The issue is really whether or not the body of Sheila Caffell was moved by police. MacDonell has said that in his view, the photos show that there was an unexplained ‘movement’ of the body during the time that a whole set of pictures were taken by police. The Guardian reported on 15 March 2009, ‘The newly disclosed images suggest the rifle used in the killings was at some point moved from her body, strengthening the suggestion she was murdered instead of committing suicide.’
In 2008, at the last appeal, Bamber was told by the judge, Mr Justuce Tugendhat, that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars for such an exceptionally serious crime. That is now looking to be a less likely forecast. Bamber’s solicitors, Chivers of Bingley, are reported to have obtained copies of the Essex Police notes taken from that fateful morning at White House Farm, and they have stated that there was a ‘movement’ inside the house at the time Bamber was outside the property and was in fact with the police.
The case may emerge as one in which fundamental errors were made at the first stage of forensic work and, as Vernon Geberth, the Commander of Bronx Homicide NYDD told writer Connie Fletcher in her book, Real Crime Scene Investigations, ‘Do it right the first time. You only get one chance. Once things have been moved, once things have been changed, once you lose that little window of opportunity, it’s gone forever.’
The White House Farm case is fast accruing a vast library of data: opinions, reports, appeals, letters and photographs. There has even been talk of the place having some kind of hex on it, because the previous owner, Frank Page, was found drowned in a horse-trough, and the owner before Page hanged himself inside the house. The literature around the case goes on being written. Bamber had a website and many people will have grazed there; the book by Scott Lomax has made some readers think again. The heart of the matter may well turn out to be the actions (or lack of actions) taken by Cook when the first scene of crime measures were taken. But although questions remain, there is a feeling in the air that the saga has one last act yet to be performed.
CHAPTER 16
John Straffen: Fifty-five Years Inside
Prison officers have not written many books about their lives. Maybe very few in their ranks have any urge to write down experiences; after all, who would want to take that line of work home with them and make books out of their lives? One person who has, thankfully, done so, is Robert Douglas. Not only has he given readers one of the very rare examples of a man being detailed to work with a condemned man back in the days of capital punishment; he has also left a memory of being on the Durham E Wing when John Straffen was there. As he looked out into the exercise area, Douglas saw a man who was a very striking figure. He wrote: ‘A tall, solitary prisoner is exercising … striding out. He wears a blue cotton jacket, buttoned up under his chin. His head is shaved. All he needs are a couple of bolts through his neck and he’d be a dead ringer for Frankenstein.’
The man watched the wire and when two birds landed on it, he shook the wire to chase them away. He was amused by doing that, Douglas noticed, and adds, ‘I look at him as he passes by. He exudes strangeness, menace.’ He asked the other officers if the man was out for a punishment, and anyway who was he? When Douglas was told it was John Straffen his response was, ‘Straffen! Bloody hell! This is a name from my childhood. I would’ve thought this reptile would have died years ago … As I grew up, began to try and read the papers and saw news-reels, now and again there would be some big murder case …’ Thousands of people would agree with that. The name Straffen had become a word that was known through the tabloids and the broadcasts, a name to cause a shiver of revulsion.
If writing is largely about trying to apply some empathy to the subject and to imagine what another life would be like, then to contemplate what Straffen’s mind must have been in fifty-five years of incarceration is surely beyond any writer’s ability. When he was found guilty of the murder of a girl, Linda Bowyer, in July 1952, he was initially sentenced to death, but that was reduced to life inside. He had already killed two young girls for which he had been tried at Somerset assizes in 1951. Straffen had been declared a ‘mental defective’ in 1947 and had been sent to an asylum. After being found unfit to stand trial for the first killings he was sent to Broadmoor.
In this way the massive stretch of fifty-five years began. In his first location, Broadmoor, he managed to escape, and he went out to kill again. The Broadmoor alarm system is sounded every Monday morning at ten in the morning, as a practice run for a real escape alarm. But when Straffen escaped, there were no sirens. He was free to stroll into the nearest village and take a life.
In 1952, Straffen was doing cleaning routines when he found a way out; he clambered onto the roof of a hut and climbed to freedom, then he walked to the nearest village at Arborfield and there he met five-year-old Linda and strangled her. His murderous tendencies were something that just a little earlier in history would have labelled him ‘criminally insane’ and that term certainly held good for his nature when he struck again after his escape.
Straffen’s first murder happened when he came across little Brenda Goddard at Rough Hill, in Bath, where Straffen was born. He was just twenty-one and was compelled to go to children, place his hands on their necks and strangle them to death, as he did with Brenda. Only a few days after that he came across Cicely Batstone, who was a little older; they met at the cinema and he walked out with her; and he strangled her in a field. He was woken up by police and had no idea what he had done, or so he said. But his confession soon followed.
When he died in November 2007, he was Britain’s longest-serving prisoner and the press made the most of it. He died in the health care unit at HMP Frankland.
In prison, a person finds strategies of survival if he has a sense of reality and a perception of himself as a person within a known community, but if he has, as Shakespeare said of King Lear ‘Ever but slenderly known himself’ then the experience of life inside will be a timeless frame of routine experience in which the fantasy or the dark imagination wallowing inside will fill the vacuum. Robert Douglas saw a shell of a man, and yet he was enjoying disturbing the little birds. Something in him wanted to destroy what was pure, defenceless and innocent, much as small boys swat flies or stand on insects.
But even with this in mind, the fact is that we are still talking about horrendous murders in the Straffen story. His tale begins with him being taken to a Child Guidance Clinic for truancy and petty theft, in 1938; then he
was in court for the first time and given probation. It became clear to professionals that he had no moral sense, and he was analysed by a psychiatrist. That is when the term ‘mental defective’ was applied to him. But he was still at school up to the age of sixteen and at that time, he was assessed as having an IQ of just 64. He tried to do normal work back home in Bath but he was an isolated figure, stealing from houses and being alienated from human society.
In July 1947, he was arrested. A girl had been attacked and the assailant had grabbed her, saying, ‘What would you do if I killed you? I have done it before.’ It was clear that he could not be allowed to live in society and so he was sent to what was then called a ‘colony’. In the fifties, I can recall the shiver of fear that passed through myself and family or friends when a certain phrase was spoken: ‘They’ll send you to an institution’ That word, coined in the Victorian period, has a resonance through the British psyche. Children who were ‘strange’ or ‘retarded’ – the words used at the time – could be taken away and never come out to play or sit in school again. Such was the fate of John Straffen.
But when he was a little older and back in Bath, he did the first murder. The Batstone murder took place in an area known as ‘Tumps’ and in the day’s walking around cinemas and streets with the girl, he had been seen by many people. Straffen and Cicely had even been seen by a policeman’s wife. He was soon found. After a hearing at Bath Magistrates’ Court he was committed for trial at Taunton assizes, appearing on 17 October 1951.
At court in Bath, all Straffen could say to account for what he had done with Cicely was, ‘She was picking flowers and I told her there would be plenty higher up. I lifted her over the wall. She never screamed even when I squeezed her neck, so I bashed her head against the wall.’ But there had been further explanation of exactly what had happened when he had spoken to a police officer. The Times reported this:
He carried out a demonstration in which he held Sergeant Evans facing outwards against his left breast, put his hands around his neck and squeezed. Later, Straffen said, ‘She had her back to me when I squeezed her neck. She went limp. I did not feel sorry. I forgot about it. I went back over the wall. I had no feeling about it. I forgot about it.’
Then, at Taunton, Straffen was found unfit to plead. He was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and so an explanation was needed, and Dr Peter Parkes, medical officer at HMP Horsfield, said that Straffen had been in custody as a mental defective and had been released on licence. He described Straffen as feeble minded, and Mr Justice Oliver told the court: ‘You might as well try a baby in arms. If a man cannot understand what is going on he cannot be tried.’
His destination was Broadmoor, and so he made the escape. That was to be the start of a furore about security at that special secure hospital. After the body of Linda Bowyer had been found, Straffen was found at Crowthorne and arrested. He said simply, ‘I did not kill her. That’s a frame-up that is.’ He was sent on remand to Brixton prison, but there followed a massive protest when it became widely reported that he had escaped from Broadmoor, to kill again. In early May 1952 there was a protest meeting at Crowthorne, presided over by the chairman of the parish council and the MP was there too. A resolution was passed in which the parishioners expressed ‘horror and alarm’ at the escape. They asked for a system of public warning to be put in place and that there should be such a discipline in place in Broadmoor that escapes would be impossible. They also wanted the Home Office to be put in control of the institution.
Members of that council went to Broadmoor specifically to be informed about the circumstances which had led to Straffen’s escape. Two months later a report on Boadmoor was produced for the government by the Ministry of Health; a siren warning was planned, and also there was to be ‘a prearranged plan of cooperation between the staff of the institution and the police’. It was stated that there had been a failure to exercise close supervision of inmates and some facts were given in the report: ‘The present staff is 19 below complement, and there appears little likelihood of sufficient staff being recruited in the near future.’ The first siren plan was described also: ‘There should be a distinctive siren or other audible warning to be operated by the responsible officer on duty at Broadmoor as soon as an escape has been detected. This should be coupled electrically to an alarm in Wokingham police station.’
The formative moment in John Straffen’s life, the beginning of his decades in jail, was at Winchester Assizes when he was tried for the murder done after his escape. This was a Court of Criminal Appeal; the grounds for this were put by Henry Elam, as stated in the press:
That Mr Justice Cassels was wrong at the trial in admitting evidence of two other murders of little girls alleged to have been committed by Straffen at Bath on July 15 and August 8, 1951.
That he was also wrong in admitting evidence of an oral statement made to two detective inspectors on April 30 when the appellant was in custody without the usual warning first being administered to him.
This smacks of desperation and indeed the appeal was quashed. Mr Justice Slade said that the general rule was to exclude evidence which tended to show that the accused had been guilty of criminal acts other than those covered by the indictment. The similarities between the Bath and Crowthorne cases were considered and a decision made. The judges said that the evidence was properly admitted and dismissed the appeal.
There followed Straffen’s long prison life, and as the years rolled by, there were occasional reports of him being moved, as in 1966 when he was transferred from Horfield prison in Bristol to Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, where there was a new security wing. There had been an escape attempt by a group of prisoners at Wandsworth and they had wanted to take Straffen with them. The locals wanted him moved and he went to Cardiff at first and then later to Horfield.
He went to Parkhurst, followed shortly by six of the Great Train Robbers. That was in 1966, just before he was moved yet again, to Durham, where Robert Douglas met him. Successive Home Secretaries consistently refused to free Straffen and in 1994 a special list was compiled of life-term prisoners who must never see the outside world again: Straffen was on that list. In 2002, his application to be considered by the Criminal Cases Review Commission was refused.
We are left with a recurring problem about insanity and the law. What does society do with such people – the ones who are always going to be dangerous to the public? Some will be occupied in education and forms of self-development. They may be quite capable of study and conversation, and of genuine learning processes. Yet there are others, like Straffen, who are destined to be locked in and observed, constantly supervised and checked. They live in a static condition, isolated and shut into their dark imaginations. For some, his death was merely a desirable cut in the expenses of keeping such a dangerous man away from his prey; while for others it was another reminder that we are powerless to affect, change or cure the sick minds of those beyond therapy and outside workable understanding.
CHAPTER 17
Sutcliffe: Every Day a Torment
I am beginning with a story that forms a fragment of my own autobiography, and it is something that throws light on how the years of the Ripper’s regime in West Yorkshire impinged on virtually everyone around the Leeds and Bradford conurbation. Between 1975 and 1981 the effects of the serial killings he committed were like a seismic rumble of fear and apprehension across the county; women were thinking carefully before travelling anywhere alone and parents worked hard to take extra protective measures with their daughters. The Ripper years brought all kinds of stories, and the public did not know much of the background tales and the repulsive details of the modus operandi until later when the retrospective books and articles were written.
In my family photograph album there is a picture of Churwell Working Men’s Club football team, dated around 1950. My father is in the picture, and one of his team-mates was related to a Ripper victim. I recall seeing him play on the Tanhouse pitch just between Churwell
and the Elland Road football ground and the post-war prefabs by the cemetery at Gelderd Road. This is only a footnote to the Ripper story, but it has touched me and mine, as it did so many Yorkshire people. As a teenager, I used to walk to a stamp shop next to the Gaiety cinema in Harehills. A decade after that time, Sutcliffe would be hunting for prey in streets by the cinema, and one of his victims there was the Churwell woman, sister to the footballer. I’m relating this to stress to readers who don’t know the Ripper’s hunting grounds that it is impossible to evade the repugnant essence of depravity that still hangs over local memories; it is almost as if the Leeds and Bradford streets, and their counterparts in Huddersfield and Halifax, retain some traces of his evil, like ghosts linger in oppressed houses.
There is so much in print about the horrific and murderous acts of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, that there is no need to retell everything in depth here, but before his prison life is traced, here are some summarising facts.
The career of the Yorkshire Ripper has the trajectory so often linked to that version of psychopath who has to begin with tentative approaches to possible victims, and gradually raise the risks and the excitement levels to the point at which a killing has to take place, and it has to be done in a certain way. In this case, one of the earliest attacks fortunately did not end in a death. This was in Keighley, early on the Saturday morning, 5 July, when Anna Rogulskyj was viciously attacked from behind. She had been cracked with a hammer three times and was amazingly still alive – but only just – and she was rushed to hospital. It was then found that she had also been cut across the stomach. It took a twelve-hour operation to save her life.