Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Before the bodies were found, Mark Manwaring had flown home from Greece to launch an appeal for information on the whereabouts of his sister and father. Soon after he arrived home, a letter came for him at his father’s home in Aldersey Gardens. It purported to have come from Alison and read:

  Dearest Mark,

  I know you are very worried about where we are. I cant begin to explain the thought that had gone into daddy and I leaving. It has been very very lonely for daddy since mum died and all he does now is drink himself to sleep every night – I cant live with him in that state so we both decided to have a break and try to forget the constant pain.

  The – sorry for the mistakes, im still a bit nervous – last straw was on Thursday night after we sold the car and daddy was so drunk he fell down and cut his chest. He is alright now though and trying to forget the loneliness. I promise you Mark im looking after him well.

  Mark, we took some photos, my sentimental jewelry, the car money, our bank books – I think we took yours by mistake too. Please understand the way we had to do things – Its but necessary, for daddy.

  I can’t tell you where we are yet, but we are in London still. I swear to you we are ok. I left my car behind plaistow station, you would have traced us too quickly so Daddy said to leave it.

  Daddy needs to be happy again Mark and ill do it for him. Please understand – we both love you so much and its hard to ask you to understand but try to for now. Once Daddy sorts out his feelings and I feel better about the termination I had to have – It hurts too much to go into that now… We will send photographs from Daddy’s camera when we develop them.

  Love Always in God.

  DADDY and ALISON

  Even the signatures were typed.

  Alison had never told anyone in her family that she had had an abortion. The police believe that Laing had forced it out of her when she came home. And no one besides the murderer knew he had been injured in the chest. But it was with this letter that Laing convicted himself. Plainly, it had been concocted by him and given to a sympathetic friend to deliver. In it, he had arrogantly given his name away. The sign-off line – ‘Love Always in God’ – spelt out Laing.

  Alison’s car was found behind Plaistow Station. Laing was now charged with kidnapping and made a brief court appearance. It was then that the police heard from his girlfriend, Sharon Thompson.

  When the bodies were unearthed, Laing blamed the Fijian Freedom Fighters, a terrorist organisation that did not exist, for their murder. Meanwhile, a police team were making a fingertip search of Cyprus Place, scrubland in London’s then derelict Docklands near Laing’s home. After a few days, they found two sets of handcuffs and were able to trace them back to the shop where Laing had bought them shortly before the murders. They also found bin-liners containing Alison’s jewellery and other property stolen from the Manwarings’ home, along with Matthew Manwaring’s driving licence that had been torn into eight pieces. But they had yet to find the gun.

  After a lengthy interrogation of Sharon Thompson, she admitted that Laing had hidden it under the stairs in her house. While the police were searching for it in Cyprus Place, she had told Laing’s best friend, 21-year-old Mark Leslie, where it was hidden. He moved it to a safer hiding place. Then Laing’s brother Peter took the gun and threw it in the Thames.

  He eventually led the police to where he had disposed of it and police divers retrieved the firearm. The murder weapon was a single-barrelled automatic that had been sawn off. At a hearing in May 1993, Sharon Thompson, Mark Leslie and Peter Laing all pleaded guilty to handling the gun and were given a conditional discharge. A charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice was left on file.

  The police then pieced together the clues to discover what had befallen Matthew Manwaring and his daughter. They believed that Laing arrived with his ‘implements of murder and torture’ in a guitar case. After letting Laing into his home, Matthew Manwaring was pushed back into his armchair, then shot in the chest at close range. The muzzle flash burnt the skin and the surrounding flesh was peppered with shotgun pellets.

  Alison arrived home about an hour later, while Laing was trying to clear up the blood. Laing fired into the doorframe to frighten her. Then he got her to write a bogus receipt for £7,750 for the Escort and sign several cheques. She was forced to tell him the PIN for her cash card and tell him details of her private life. She was then made to write the bogus note to her fiancé Gordon Healis.

  Laing made her strip naked, gagged her, tied her ankles together and handcuffed her to a radiator. He then sexually assaulted her.

  ‘Laing subjected her to all manner of degradation,’ said DS Morgan. ‘He repeatedly beat Alison around the head and face. He tortured and raped her to satisfy his needs for power and control. He enjoyed having someone’s life in his hands.’

  Her suffering continued until he finally strangled her with his bare hands. Then he put her body in the bath, cut her head off and dismembered the body with a selection of butcher’s knives. He repeated the grisly procedure with her father. The body parts were put in bin-liners and carried out to the boot of the Escort. After he washed away most of the blood and made crude repairs to the doorframe, he drove to some wasteland, where he dumped them.

  The next day, he used the car to drive friends out to Alton Towers in Staffordshire for a day out. Detectives found pictures of him laughing as he rode the giant water chute. At the weekend, he hired a Vauxhall Astra and drove back to the waste ground and recovered the bodies. Then he drove them to Sharon Thompson’s house and buried them in her back garden. He had tried to hire a mechanical digger for the task, but to save money he borrowed a shovel from Mark Leslie.

  Laing was twice tested for insanity before the trial opened at the Old Bailey on 24 February 1993. He pleaded not guilty to both murder charges. Prosecuting, Michael Stuart-Moore QC told the jury that Matthew and Alison Manwaring had been murdered simply for the paltry sum he could raise from selling their car and rifling their bank and building society accounts. ‘Perhaps the motive is so obscene as to be unspeakable,’ he said. ‘It may be you cannot believe that anyone would do, for the sake of a motor car and a few bank books, what I have described just out of sheer greed. What Laing did in order to get his way involved the destruction of a family.’

  While Matthew Manwaring had been despatched cleanly, Alison was made to suffer. ‘Alison’s fate that night and the ordeal she went through can be pieced together from a large number of terrible clues,’ said the prosecutor. ‘She was strangled to death, but not before she went through some form of mental torture or duress. She was physically assaulted as well. Her hands were manacled to render her even more helpless than she already was.’

  Stuart-Moore said that the bogus letter Laing had sent Mark Manwaring was one of the more extraordinary features of the case. It had been designed to put the police and family off the scent, but he had revealed himself in the line ‘Love Always in God’. ‘It illustrated the total arrogance of the man who killed Mark’s sister and father and believed he could get away with that crime,’ he said. ‘Had he been acquitted, he would have had the last laugh. He never intended it to be noticed and it nearly did go unnoticed.’

  When he took the stand, Laing maintained that the blueprint for murder found in his home were notes for a book his father wanted to write about revenge. The central characters were a car salesman and a customer.

  ‘I suggested that the customer set up the salesman in a suicide set-up, then sold his car and bought his business,’ he said.

  The shopping list was ‘a disposal list, to remind me of things I had to get rid of. Things that could connect me to the murder,’ he said.

  He told the court he had been framed for the murder by Mark Leslie, his best friend, Neil Philips, another friend, and Frank Cohen, a car thief. He said Leslie had confessed to him that Cohen had murdered the Manwarings, while he watched. ‘Mark told me what happened … the murderer is a monster.’

  Although Mr Laing
admitted to buying two pairs of handcuffs the day before the murders, he said they were for Mark Leslie. He denied manacling Alison Manwaring to a bedroom radiator and torturing her to reveal banking information and personal details. Four days after the murder, Laing said, Leslie and Cohen buried the dismembered bodies in his girlfriend’s garden. He denied a neighbour’s allegation that she had seen him digging the graves. ‘She couldn’t have meant me, she knows me. I am not white, the only white person is Frank,’ he said.

  Stuart-Moore suggested that Cohen was a figment of Laing’s vivid imagination. He added, ‘For Frank Cohen, we should read Benjamin Ekow Laing.’

  It took the jury of six men and six women four hours to find Laing guilty as charged. There were cheers from the public gallery. Mark Manwaring punched the air, while Gordon Healis wept uncontrollably.

  The judge, Justice Robert Lymbery, sentenced Laing to life, recommending that the serve at least 25 years. ‘Whether the Home Secretary will then find it safe to release you must be a matter for him,’ the judge said. ‘He should be on his guard. You are a dangerous man, capable of extreme violence. You are capable of deceit and dishonesty. You are utterly ruthless and have a clever and able mind.’

  DS Michael Morgan said, ‘The ease with which he dismembered the bodies of these two innocent victims was particularly horrific. He is an arrogant and calculating killer and I am convinced he would have struck again.’

  10

  PUSHER UNDER THE PATIO

  In February 1999, the police investigating the murder of drug dealer Arthur ‘Joe the Crow’ Rouse found his body encased in concrete under a patio in west London. They also dug up the garden, believing that up to six people were buried there, including hitman Gilbert Wynter who vanished in 1998.

  An officer said, ‘There may be other bodies buried in the same area. Several gangland characters have gone missing in the past year or two. We think they may have gone to the same resting place as Joe the Crow.’

  Forty-four-year-old Rouse had been blasted at close range in the face and stomach with a shotgun. Police believed he was killed after leaving his home in Chiswick, west London, in September 1998, to meet a man to settle a dispute over a £50,000 drug deal. He was never seen alive again. Relatives reported him missing in January when he failed to show up to a family party on New Year’s Eve.

  Police found his remains in the garden in Perivale after digging up the patio, which appeared to have been recently laid. They went there the day after armed officers, acting on a tip-off, ambushed a man near a house in Old Windsor, in the shadow of Windsor Castle. When they searched him, officers found he was carrying a loaded sawn-off shotgun in a custom-made shoulder holster.

  The house belonged to Thomas ‘Tommy the Gun’ Green who had dug the makeshift grave with his nephew Jack Lang and laid concrete over it. They then went to stay at a hotel in Newquay where they celebrated with vintage champagne. They were arrested there by armed police. Green was jailed for life for the murder of Rouse. Lang pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice by hiding the corpse and to two offences of selling cocaine.

  11

  BLOCK HEAD

  The head of 54-year-old Susan Craven was destined for the patio, said Kenneth Peatfield, her lover, who was convicted of her murder. But it did not make it there. Police found it encased in a 2-ft concrete block before the new patio was completed.

  Mrs Craven had met Peatfield after he had shared a cell with her millionaire car-breaker husband, Alan, who was inside for dealing in stolen parts. Fifty-year-old Peatfield, a heating engineer with Bury Council, was then serving ten years for trying to hire a hitman to murder his ten-year-old daughter Helen and wife Janet, whose life was insured for £50,000.

  The double-murder plot began when Peatfield casually asked a man in a pub if he could ‘fix’ the killings of Janet and Helen. He said that he ‘was not bothered’ how it was done. Over pints of beer in his local pub, Peatfield told hitman Bernard ‘Mr Bright’ Chadderton to make the murders look like a bungled burglary. He offered Chadderton a £5,000 deposit, with another £45,000 when the job was done. But the hitman was appalled by his callousness and went to the police saying he was ‘sickened and frightened’. The next time they met, at the Flying Horse pub in Rochdale, the conversation was recorded using a hidden microphone.

  When Janet discovered what her husband was planning, she was shocked. ‘When I learned what happened, I couldn’t believe it as Ken was a good father and husband,’ she said. ‘But he’s always been obsessed with money.’

  Helen was deeply affected by what happened. She did not speak for months after realising what her father planned to do.

  Sentencing him to ten years in jail at Manchester Crown Court, Mr Justice Glidewell said, ‘The story I’ve heard is not merely horrifying, but incredible.’

  After he left jail, Peatfield moved in with Susan Craven, who had just reached a £181,000 divorce settlement. They drew up wills leaving everything to each other.

  A week later, Peatfield invited Faith Warner, his 17-year-old girlfriend, to the house he shared with Susan. ‘I remember that day like it was yesterday,’ she said. ‘We had been out to buy a gravestone for our child and I was upset. I was nagging him all day and when we got back to his house I said I felt uncomfortable and what if Susan came back while I was there. That’s when he told me she’d never be coming back and he took me out to the garden shed.’

  In the back garden, he told her, ‘I’m going to show you something that will change your life.’ Then he pulled back a blue tarpaulin to reveal part of Susan’s body and said, ‘I did it so I could be with you.’

  He wanted to convince his teenage lover that Susan was no longer any obstacle to them being together. But Faith was horrified. ‘He grabbed both of my arms, went blood-red, literally, and shook me and said, “If you tell anybody, I will kill you and I will kill your family.” I have felt physically sick knowing what he was capable of.’

  Peatfield told friends and neighbours that Susan had walked out on him for no apparent reason. But suspicious neighbours knew she would never have left behind her treasured dog, and so they called the police. Spots of blood were found in the house and Peatfield was charged with murder. The following day, detectives decided to crack open the 330-lb block of concrete in the garage.

  ‘Nobody could believe it when the head was found,’ said one officer. ‘Even the most hardened detectives were utterly appalled.’

  The rest of the body was never found.

  During the three-week trial, Peatfield tried to accuse Susan’s former husband, who is nearly blind, of kidnapping and murdering her, then putting her head in concrete and leaving the block in his garage. The jury didn’t believe a word of it.

  Sentencing Peatfield to life with a tariff of 18 years at Sheffield Crown Court, Mr Justice Bell told him, ‘You murdered the woman with whom you had lived for some years – a woman who needed your support. You murdered her when you were infatuated with a much younger woman who you hoped would come to live with you in Susan Craven’s place.’

  Susan’s son Paul pleaded with Peatfield, ‘Come clean and tell us where Mum’s body is so that she can be laid to rest.’ He added, ‘Even 25 years in prison is too good for him. He even tried to drag our family down by shifting the blame. It was all a smokescreen for what he did.’

  Peatfield was beaten up in prison and his appeal to have his sentence reduced was thrown out.

  With Peatfield safely in jail, Faith spoke out. ‘Deep down I know that I was destined to be his next victim,’ she said. ‘I am haunted by nightmares where I see my own head inside a lump of concrete.’

  When their affair began, Faith was completely taken in by her seemingly docile lover. ‘At the start of our relationship, he seemed so gentle,’ she said. ‘Then I saw a side I didn’t like. Once, when he was cross, he put his hand on my windpipe and tried to strangle me. Now I know what he can do, I feel physically sick.’

  The scales had fallen from her eyes that af
ternoon in the back garden. ‘When Kenneth showed me the body that day I knew that if I stayed with him I would be his next victim,’ she said. ‘He said that if I told anyone about the body he would kill me and my family. But I knew, no matter what, that one day he would kill me if another girl came into his life. That’s when I decided to finish the relationship. I didn’t go to the police because I was petrified that he would kill me, my two sisters and mum and dad.’

  He had already attacked her once when an argument turned violent. She, thankfully, got a second chance.

  12

  FAMILY FEUD

  Thirty-three-year-old Lee Ford was sentenced to five life terms after pleading guilty to murdering his wife Lesley and four stepchildren and hiding their bodies in a woodshed in his back garden. Two of the bodies were moved after the police called and were re-buried in a field about four miles away.

  ‘For the life of me, I do not even understand why I did what I did,’ said Ford. ‘If I had planned to do what I did there is no way I would have left them on the property with my kids there.’

  His two natural children remained with him in his isolated home at Carnkie, near Helston, Cornwall, throughout the massacre.

  Ford’s relationship with his wife became violent after she discovered that he was having sex with her 17-year-old daughter Sarah. Ford was also ‘openly and forcefully jealous of Sarah as she sought friendship with young men of her own age,’ it was said in court.

  Lesley Ford became so concerned that she contacted social services. She also sought an injunction and occupation order on the family home. Nigel Pasco QC, prosecuting, said, ‘It is very likely that Lesley Ford was very frightened of her husband at times in the months before her murder.’