the Blooding (1989)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Mick Thomas said, "The medical evidence shows that she was entered per anus as well."

  Mick Mason said, "Do you understand what that means?"

  Colin Pitchfork was really annoyed now. He said, "Yeah, I know what that means."

  Mick Mason started getting rhetorical. He said, "You went up her bottom. That's shown because tissues were ripped inside her. Now, we haven't thoroughly covered that particular aspect of the murder. It may be that you're aware it happened, but it's too distasteful to discuss. But it's a point that we feel we should clarify with you. To discuss your mental attitude at that moment. That you were in control. The answer you gave suggests that you knew exactly what you were doing, albeit you were going along this natural progression. . . ."

  The prisoner interrupted him, saying, "I wouldn't say that I knew what I was doing. Although I can recall it, it wasn't as though I had the control to stop it."

  Mick Thomas said, "I'm saying that you were under control in that you knew what you were doing, but couldn't stop what you were doing.

  Now if I've read you right, you would know if you inserted your penis in that girl's bottom. Whether because you chose to do it or whether it happened because she was struggling, or you were excited, or whatever." He tried to placate him by saying, "I mean, nowadays it's perhaps not as unacceptable as it was twenty years ago. Probably consenting adults do partake in that particular way."

  But Colin Pitchfork wasn't buying consenting adults. He said, "As far as I'm concerned, I rolled on top of her and raped her and that's it as far as I'm concerned!"

  Mick Mason simply could not let go of his need for a sign of contrition. He felt this was the most "evil and chillhig" man he'd ever met or ever would meet in his police career. He was trying to do what cannot be done: locate a nugget of genuine remorse in a sociopath. He said, "She must have been in traumatic pain when you were doing this."

  That simply irritated Colin Pitchfork all the more and he said, "So what's that mean?"

  Mason said, "It means that the girl as you describe her, and as she's been described to you, is this straightforward girl. Well, were you using some other means to control the situation but not heighten her trauma too much?"

  "Such as?"

  "Well, with what force were you having to insert yourself, and hold her down?"

  "I wasn't! I told you she was already down. She was laying down. She wasn't attempting to get up!"

  Fearing that the prisoner's cooperation was being jeopardized, Mick Thomas again made peace. He said, "Mick brought that up because obviously you had been hurting her. Now, we're not trying to rub it in, but when you think about how you've hurt somebody it's reason for you to feel very uncomfortable about telling it. As you know, a woman's first experience is not the greatest in her life."

  Colin Pitchfork said sullenly, "I asked her if it hurt and she said, 'Yes, it hurts me!' And I said, 'Just lay still and it'll be done quicker."

  They tried one final time to get a description of the "horrific" vaginal and anal assault described at the postmortem.

  Mick Thomas said, "When the girl's body was found, it was examined by a pathologist and he was able to say that the girl sustained injuries not consistent with ordinary rape. Which suggests other violence had been used towards her. Can you explain that?"

  "No. Can you be more specific as to what the pathologist actually said?"

  "At the moment I haven't got the statement here, but what I can say to you is that even though injuries occurred just prior to death, bruising started. And he was able to say that violence was used, other than that connected with more ordinary intercourse."

  "I can't really recall any other violence. I say the most violent bit was when she turned her face and I sort of grabbed her round the neck. It's possible that she may've moved my arm across her neck if there was bruising on the side of the face. I can't remember no overwhelming blows, et cetera."

  Colin Pitchfork denied concealing the body as completely as they'd found it, recalling only a heap of nettles, a little hay and a log. But since a police photo taken three feet away couldn't even reveal a body, the bizarre theory would persist with some detectives that perhaps the kitchen porter had found the body, tampered with it, and concealed it more thoroughly. Unlike those in genre murder mysteries, confessions are rarely tidy in real life.

  After he'd concealed Dawn Ashworth's body, Colin Pitchfork said he'd walked across the motorway footbridge instead of going back down Ten Pound Lane. He'd taken the route that Robin Ashworth had always urged his daughter to take. Before getting to the other side of the motorway Colin Pitchfork had removed his motorcycle jacket so that no one would describe a cyclist walking.

  He'd been entertained by the police inquiry. There was the thing about the kitchen porter on the motorbike. Colin Pitchfork had also been riding his motorbike the day he killed Dawn Ashworth. It was an amusing coincidence, but that's all. It wasn't his motorbike they were always writing about, the one parked under the motorway. Colin Pitchfork had left his on a side street near King Edward Avenue. And he certainly hadn't climbed up any embankment and run across the bloody motorway. The fact is, nothing--not a single lead the police had announced in four years--had ever applied to him.

  Nobody had ever seen him. It was just that easy to rape and murder and stroll away. Just that easy!

  Upon arriving home after murdering Dawn Ashworth, Colin Pitchfork found a small drop of blood on his nylon jacket, two inches down from the left shoulder. He described how he cut a swatch the size of a match head out of the jacket. Then he realized that he'd lost his watch.

  First he told Carole that he'd left the watch at work in his locker. The next day he told her it wasn't there, and the only thing he could figure was that he'd lost it while riding his motorbike. He did some worrying that the police would find that watch in the field and show a photo of it in the newspapers, but it never happened.

  He did manage to bring home the food coloring on the afternoon of the murder. After strangling Dawn Ashworth, he baked a cake.

  Chapter 28.

  Homage . . . The psychopath shows a superficially adequate adjustment. He is not anxious or distressed. . . . He shows no blatant irrational thinking and displays no bizarre behaviors. His initial charm and verbal ability distract attention from his deviant and unfeeling behaviors.

  --RIMM and SOMERVILL

  Colin Pitchfork seemed in better spirits when it was time to be interviewed by Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers on other subjects. Even as a listener, Pearce had an energy that generated conversation, and with Chambers there was a sensitive tranquility that was reassuring. The prisoner was so comfortable with these two, he became more grandiose, and laced his speech with macho profanity.

  Colin Pitchfork told Pearce and Chambers that he'd flashed a thousand girls in his lifetime. Ordinarily, he talked in a monotone, but when he told of the flashings he spoke with relish. Pearce decided to test him and asked the prisoner to describe some that could be verified. Colin Pitchfork quickly ticked off three, and each of them did check out. He bragged that he could spot a good-looking bird three blocks away, and could correctly guess things about her at first sight.

  He claimed to have flashed a girl in Cosby, figuring her to be another hairdresser. He later followed her, undetected, right to a beauty salon. He said newspaper girls were easiest because they were so available. He described such triumphs with gusto.

  Shortly after his confinement, Colin Pitchfork managed to secrete a shoelace, and he somehow removed a bolt from a brass plate in his cell. If it was an escape plot he never explained how he was going to escape with a shoelace and a metal bolt, but during the interview he produced them from his sock and put them on the table, expecting homage. The cops later said it must've been hard for him to pass through jail corridors wrapped in all that aura.

  He described other crimes he'd committed, older crimes they weren't even aware were his: against the girl who'd walked home on a country lane, the girl he'd dragged ba
ck into the garage, the girl he'd picked up in his car and then dropped off after she'd grabbed the steering wheel.

  He described many incidents, but in each there were little details he couldn't bring himself to admit, things like a screwdriver held to the neck of the young hairdresser. She told the police about that; he never did. He denied ever masturbating in front of the thousand girls he'd flashed in his lifetime and he was always quick to skip past any reference to premature ejaculation.

  And he never changed his story that both Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth ran into danger on their own, through gates that opened on their own, while he was merely trying to let them pass. And he'd never verify the anal rape of Dawn Ashworth, which of course he may have done after he'd killed her. He'd never admit anything so unsavory, so unmanly.

  Pearce always believed that Colin Pitchfork may well have had a weapon when he took both Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth into the fields, and Pearce never believed that either of them had engaged in small talk during or after their rapes. A suggestion the prisoner made that Dawn had actually joked afterward seemed particularly grotesque.

  Of course, rapists often claim that their victims didn't resist them, even when physical evidence refutes such claims, but Carole Pitchfork did verify that there could not have been a prolonged struggle with either murdered girl.

  She told Pearce, "You were always announcing you were looking for someone with wounds. But he didn't have a mark on himl"

  Colin Pitchfork had an explanation for not trying to rape and murder Liz, the blonde he'd picked up hitchhiking.

  He said, "I never touched her. Why? That's what you're wondering, ain't it? The reason is, I was on me own that weekend. Carole was always checking on me, and if another one turned up dead, she'd start to wonder. I felt safe letting that one go because the blue Fiat would look a different color to her under the sodium streetlights."

  But that explanation was totally at odds with a previous description of how he'd felt when he'd picked up the blonde: "Fuckin hell Colinl This is your lucky night, ain't it!"

  A more plausible explanation is that Colin Pitchfork didn't attack Liz for the same reason that he never attempted to murder the one person who controlled his destiny: Ian Kelly. And for a sociopath, how insufferable that must have been--to be under another's control.

  Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth did what most intelligent, even brave, people do when met with sudden overwhelming violent force: They reasoned, and they believed they'd be spared. The girl he picked up in his car did not reason. It wasn't a matter of greater courage, just different instincts. Her grab at the steering wheel indicated to Colin Pitchfork that a death struggle was imminent. He could indeed get marked up by this one. He might lose control. It had already gotten dangerous.

  Colin Pitchfork admitted that he'd thought many times about killing Ian Kelly, but said that if Kelly had ended up drowned, for instance, in a canal down by the bakery, there might be a link back to him.

  Maybe, but there were jots of ways and other places to effect the murder of Ian Kelly if one had the stomach for taking on a full-grown man. Many sexual offenders, flashers in particular, have no taste for violence and pain, not when it's directed at them.

  When he talked about his other crimes it was during an evening interview. He was more comfortable than ever with Pearce and Chambers, laughing and using more macho profanity: Everything was fuckin this and fuckin that. Halfway through the interview he decided he wanted a Chinese dinner. Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers had to cough up twenty-five quid for it. The prisoner loved that: coppers buying him dinner.

  He'd spoken of the Scouts and of being in the same troop with a boy who later became a policeman in Coalville. He said he'd never flashed in Coalville for fear of seeing that copper.

  When they asked about friends, he talked warmly of an old chum in Bournemouth as though they were still constant companions. But Mick Mason later located that man, rang him, and was told, "Colin Pitchfork? Yeah, I remember a bloke by that name. Haven't seen him since I was fifteen."

  Mick Mason reported, "He had very little to cling to in the area of male friends."

  Colin Pitchfork told them that he'd been far more nervous waiting for Ian Kelly during Ian's blooding on that cold night in January than he was during any of the interviews after his arrest. He was starting to sound like the kitchen porter: Prison weren't too bad!

  As Colin Pitchfork was being brought to the interview room by Pearce and Chambers for one of their talks, a young constable standing in the hallway happened to step aside to let them pass. When their prisoner got inside the interview room, he said, "Did you see that? He knows who I am. Did you see the effect I have on people?"

  The Monday after he was arrested, Colin Pitchfork was taken to Castle Court in Leicester for his first remanding. Castle Court looked exactly the way an old English court should look: stone walls and oak pillars, with arched windows going halfway toward a sixty-foot ceiling divided by blackened beams. Some of the ceiling beams were original, among the oldest in Europe, dating from A. D. 1105 when the building had been an armory. A cracked and buckling oil painting hung high over the bench, and the county magistrate sat beneath a carved canopy at a most commanding height. It seemed a proper place for a remanding on this, the most massive police inquiry in the county's history.

  The stone entrance to the castle yard was part of a fortified gate that used to surround the armory, and portions of it dated from the 14th century. The drive to the yard was over cobbles, past brass streetlamps. Waiting for him there were reporters and television crews, as well as a small crowd, mostly women, who booed and jeered and shouted threats and oaths as the CID cars passed, escorted front and back by marked police cars. Colin Pitchfork, unkempt and unshaven, bent forward, his head hidden under a blanket while they screamed things like "Cowardly bastard!" and "Bring back hanging!"

  The twenty-seven-year-old defendant, who, at his best, could project a sardonic air, seemed disdainfully attired in jeans and a casual shirt. He was represented at the remanding by Walter Berry, Tony Painter's acquaintance, who seemed to represent everyone connected with the case. The defendant was charged with the two murders as well as two indecent assaults: on the girl he'd pulled from the country lane in 1979 and the one he'd dragged into a garage in 1985. He was also charged with kidnapping in the case of Liz, the girl who'd grabbed his steering wheel.

  He was in the dock only long enough to answer that he understood the charges, then he was whisked back to the lockup. As he was driven out of the castle yard, people in the crowd yelled, "You bloody murderer!"

  Hiding under the blanket, handcuffed to Mick Mason, the prisoner said, "Yeah, that's right!"

  There was a shock awaiting Derek Pearce on the 23rd of October. He'd completed the court file on Colin Pitchfork at 12:10 P. M. and submitted it for final vetting, thus officially ending the inquiry into the footpath murders. At 2:10 P. M. he was suspended without pay from the police force.

  Despite earlier assurances to the contrary, he was going to receive a summons to criminal court and be prosecuted for causing actual bodily harm to the policewoman.

  When Pearce left the office of the deputy chief constable after turning in his warrant card and key, Chief Supt. David Baker brought him into his private office.

  Baker poured Pearce a huge Scotch and they had a long chat, but Pearce was too upset to do more than catch the drift of it. Baker said he'd been unaware they were going to prosecute Pearce. Now he was obviously afraid for his DI. From the look in Pearce's eyes, Baker just couldn't be assured that Pearce wasn't going to do something crazy.

  "Tell you what I'm going to do,. boss," Pearce said finally. "I'm going to collect my things and bugger off "

  "Sit down and talk some more," Baker urged.

  "I've got no ax to grind," Pearce said. "I'm going."

  "Please sit down a bit," Baker said.

  But Pearce thanked Baker for the drink and walked out.

  David Baker immediately ordered M
ick Thomas to babysit. He said to Thomas, "You're to stay with Derek until he goes to bed. You're to put him in bed, if necessary!"

  But this was one baby who wouldn't behave. Pearce ran to his black Ford, popped it in gear, and squealed out of the police car park before Mick Thomas could catch up. Baker ordered Mick Thomas to find him, but Pearce spent the evening safely in a pub with Gwynne Chambers and Phil Beeken who collected and delivered his remains at evening's end.

  The internal investigation against Derek Pearce quickly turned nasty. It seemed to Pearce the investigators were trying to prove that he'd been a discredit to the police force since 1983. That was a bit hard to do since he'd been helping to ramrod the Narborough Murder Enquiry since then.

  Nevertheless, they went back in his police diary and prepared a discipline form loaded with infractions such as "ripping up police forms with the intent to destroy." Things like that.

  While it was being proved that Pearce was a discredit to the force, and while he required a uniformed escort even to enter a police station, they discovered that they needed him again. Mick Thomas probably wasn't as good on paper as Pearce was, and there were problems with the Pitchfork court file.

  Mick Thomas was sent to Pearce's home to learn how statements of Colin Pitchfork fit into sequence. Pearce was too much of a cop to refuse.

  But they wouldn't let Derek Pearce's solicitor interview any police witnesses without a senior police officer being present. In short, he was denied the advance disclosure that an ordinary criminal is granted. And a colleague who'd witnessed a prior physical row between Pearce and his policewoman accuser in a pub declined to testify on his behalf.

  Pearce obviously felt surrounded by disloyalty and betrayal. Cambridge in the '30's hadn't spawned so many traitors.

  For those in the Leicestershire police who may have been eager to extinguish this Roman candle of a cop, Derek Pearce made the job a bit easier. After attending a rugby match on December 26th, he offered to drive home a friend who'd been imbibing too much. During the ride, according to Pearce, the friend made a rude gesture to another driver, and while Pearce attempted to quiet him, he swerved. The angry motorist took down Pearce's registration number, and four months later he discovered another criminal charge added to his first: driving without reasonable consideration for other road users. This meant that Pearce would be in Crown Court and Magistrate's Court on the same day in June, 1988. Not many had accomplished such a feat.