But once again, the kitchen porter quelled the detectives’ excitement by backing up and denying what they’d just heard him say. “I never had no sex before,” he said. “I don’t feel in meself that I was responsible for her death. I feel like it’s not me that done it. I walked up there and done a few things and said I were going, and then I went. She was about to get up, and that’s the last I seen. Apart from being down toward the bridge I were in kind of a trance making me do it. I can’t remember I done it.”
Then he began a rambling, disjointed account of going to his friend’s house in Narborough twice on the afternoon of July 31st, and he repeated that his friend had told him about a body hanging by one leg.
The interviewers informed the kitchen porter that they’d already followed up with his friend who hadn’t even seen him that day.
“He’s lying!” the boy said, but then admitted he couldn’t actually remember what day it was. He said, “I can only see her walking in Green Lane!”
Then he became angry and cried out, “I never touched her! Why should I get the blame? I never even talked to Dawn in Green Lane!”
And suddenly, in the midst of a confession that was confused, disjointed, bizarre, the boy said something eminently sensible: “I want a blood test!”
When the kitchen porter was no longer angry and things were under control, Supt. Tony Painter asked, “If you’re now denying everything, why did you say the things earlier?”
“To settle your story,” the boy said sullenly.
Then they replayed the earlier parts of his confession where he’d admitted attacking Dawn Ashworth.
“Did you say these things?” Painter asked.
“Yeah, I should’ve done what me dad said. Keep it quiet because I’ve not done a thing.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you tell a uniformed officer on Sunday night that you’d seen Dawn walking to the gateway of Green Lane?”
“I talked about … I discussed it with me father,” he said. And at the mention of his father the boy suddenly threw himself across the table and started to cry.
The police, who were now trying to check out every utterance from the mouth of the kitchen porter, discovered another young witness who’d watched the police searching a field on August 1st, the day before Dawn’s body was found. The young man said that the kitchen porter had ridden up on his motorbike and casually remarked that the police should search the culverts by the M1 motorway. Another witness had seen him three times during that day of searching. He seemed to have been everywhere that afternoon. Watching.
During one of his more incoherent statements to police, he mentioned being with another friend on Thursday during the hour when Dawn was murdered, and the next day as well. But the friend was contacted and told detectives that he had not seen the kitchen porter that day or the next.
When the interview was resumed early Friday evening, a question was followed by a suggestion. “You’ve told us you walked up the path with her. You were laughing and joking and touching her up and she didn’t mind it. You don’t know exactly what you’ve done, do you?”
Once again answering unresponsively, the boy replied, “Not all night. I was probably in the garage.”
Tony Painter said, “You weren’t probably in the garage.”
They were all getting tired, impatient, frustrated. The sergeant said, “It’s not probably. It’s not probably at all.”
“I don’t know! I wasn’t there, was I?”
“You were.”
“I know meself I weren’t there!”
“You’ve told us twice that you were there,” Painter said. “You were. Now come on!”
“Was she alive when you left her?” the sergeant asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you panic?” Painter asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you panic?”
“I don’t know. I just did.”
“Why did you panic? Wasn’t she moving?”
“No.”
“Why wasn’t she moving?”
“I don’t know.”
Then Painter asked, “What did you do to make her not move?”
“I think it was when I laid down on top of her,” the boy answered.
“Where were your hands?”
“On her arms.”
“And what were you doing to her when you were laying on top of her?”
“Just had a laugh and a joke with her. I said to her, ‘I ain’t going to let you go.’ She just started laughing. She was crawling all over me.”
“So what did you do?”
“Moved up towards her face and sat on her chest and that’s what done it. Sat on her chest.”
“Was that before you hurt her or afterwards?”
“That were before.”
“How did you feel when she stopped moving?”
“Dunno.”
“Come on, tell us more.”
“When I realized she weren’t, I thought, Oh shit, oh Christ! I just got up and went back down the lane. I thought she had a heart attack or some like that.”
“Where did all this take place?”
“Near the hedge by the ditch. I can’t remember because I know I didn’t do it. That’s why I can’t remember for certain.”
Sgt. Dawe said incredulously, “You say you didn’t do it? You don’t think you killed her?”
“I can go up the lanes.… I don’t even know what happened!”
“But you were just telling us a few seconds ago that you sat on her chest!”
“I was telling what I would have done!”
Later that night it continued. There was more disjointed talk about “feeling” her and then the kitchen porter said, “I’ll have a try telling you. If I can remember.”
“Go on then,” he was told.
“Well, I got as far as putting me hands up her top. Then I put me hand up her skirt. She said no. I forced. She started shouting. I put me hand over her mouth to shut her up. Put me hand down her pants. She wouldn’t let me. She turned her head over.… It’s all I can remember. Then she were lying there still. I just pressed really hard on her mouth with me hand over her nose and her mouth. She suffocated. That’s all in my memory. I couldn’t leave her where she was so I hid her.”
“How did you hide her?”
“With a load of brambles underneath a hedge.
“How did you leave her? In what sort of position?”
“On her front.”
“What? Lying on her stomach or her side or her back?”
“Side,” he said.
And that was more or less how she was found.
“Where was this load of brambles then?”
“It was on the Green Lane path.”
“Did you have to pick her up to hide her?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Painter said, “Son, you’ve told us so much. Just continue.”
“I’m trying to tell you the truth! I’m trying to prove to you that it’s not me that done it. I don’t even know where she was hid. I said to that officer, ‘Point out where she was found’ when I pointed to that gate to find out where she was found.”
At 9:37 P.M. they put on a new tape and again cautioned him as to his rights.
And Painter said, “You were telling us what happened.”
“When I put me hand up her skirt she were shouting and screaming so I put me hand over her mouth to shut her up.”
“What did you do after that?”
“So I thought, ‘I’ve got to put some mark on her like she were strangled.’ So I did. She were strangled.”
“What sort of mark was that?” Painter asked him.
“Grabbed her round the throat and squeezed her dead hard. Pressed her about there. Really hard.”
“What else did you do?”
“It’s all I can remember doing.”
“So you were sexually excited, were you?”
“
Yeah.”
“You’d got an erection, yes?” Painter said. “What else did you do?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“You’ve told us everything else, son.”
“I lifted her skirt right up, took her drawers off and I had sex with her. That’s all I done.”
“Then what did you do?”
“That’s when I moved her. That’s when I moved her into that deep undergrowth. I carried her over the fence to the field where I hid her.”
“How did you knock her down?”
“I put me feet behind her and pushed her.”
“A few minutes ago you said that you’d already gone through the gate into the field.”
“It was a mistake, that was.”
“Where did you do all this? In the lane or in the field?”
“In the gateway,” he said, offering a compromise.
“When you say you took her pants off, did you take them right off?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I don’t know. Just chucked them away.”
“But you’ve just described how you put them back!”
“I put everything else back. I put her skirt back on. Bra back on. Shirt. Tucked that in and that’s it.”
“Have you anything else to tell me?” Painter asked.
“No. Nothing at all.”
“How were you rough with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just tell me.”
“I hit her.”
“What did you hit her with?”
“That,” he said, showing his clenched fist.
“Where?”
“In the face. It was here, round the chin.”
“Around the chin?”
“I think so, yeah. I hit her in the mouth.”
“Did you do anything else?”
“I just hit her three times.”
“Was that before you indecently assaulted her?” Painter asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was that because she didn’t want to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“What else did you do?”
“That’s about all I did. Hit her. Kicked her a few times. That’s about all.”
“Kicked her a few times, did you? Where did you kick her?”
“In the ribs and that.”
“What made you do what you did?”
“What? Hit her?”
“In the field. Just tell me what made you do what you did.”
“Just cause I liked her at the time. I wanted someone to have sex with and I didn’t think she’d let me so I tried it on. All right so far. Then she started panicking so I thought, If I leave her she’ll tell her mum and dad and I’ll be in trouble. So I did something about it. She started screaming so I put me hand over her mouth and with me other hand I fingered her. I took her pants off and had sex with her and buried her and that’s all I remember doing. I walked straight back down the lane.”
“What time did you get home?”
“I got home about five.”
“Anybody see you?”
“Me mum seen me come in.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell us about it?”
“Nothing else.”
“How do you feel?”
“Not very good. I feel bad that I done something I shouldn’t have done.” Then he added, “I’m not quite sure what I done.”
“What made you have intercourse with her?”
“Because I had an erection. I wanted to get rid of it somehow so I wanted to find out what it was really like so I done it.”
“Normally?”
“I think so. There ain’t any other way else to do it!”
The police quickly contacted more witnesses who could testify to the peculiar ways of the kitchen porter.
A young woman told them that one night in the Red Lion Pub he had walked up and said, “I wouldn’t half like to fuck you,” and tried to put his hand up her skirt.
And finally, a woman from Carlton Hayes Hospital reported that the kitchen porter had shocked her by saying he was the last person to see Dawn Ashworth alive. And the woman had noticed that he had some scratches on his hands.
He said to her, “If they found the body could they revive it?”
At first she thought he was joking, but he was such a thick sort of lad that she bothered to assure him that resurrection was not possible.
“What would happen if they could?” he asked her, no doubt with his sly little smile.
The headline announced it boldly:
DAWN: MURDER SQUAD POLICE ARREST YOUTH
The grandparents of Dawn Ashworth took the girl’s death very hard. Barbara Ashworth’s mother was never able to talk about it and her father couldn’t talk about it enough. Her mother told Barbara that she’d stopped having periods on August 10th, the day after the arrest of the killer was announced.
And Barbara reminded her mother of the time when Dawn, less than five years old, had said to her grandmother, apropos of nothing: “I won’t know you when I’m fifteen.”
Since Barbara’s parents didn’t live locally, they indeed had not seen Dawn since her fifteenth birthday on June 23rd, and now never would.
To console her mother, Barbara said, “Perhaps children have a way of foreseeing events. Perhaps it was inevitable.”
Parents of murdered children quickly learn that all they have for barter and trade is a bit of solace.
16
Beyond Imagination
When he’d finished breakfast on Saturday morning, after he’d been locked up at Wigston Police Station for twenty-four hours, the kitchen porter was presented with a typed statement for a legal endorsement and signature. Sgt. Mick Mason, hoping at last to be able to tell Kath Eastwood that her daughter’s killer had been caught, was there at Wigston when Supt. Painter concluded for the record that the kitchen porter’s knowledge of the crime “went far beyond imagination and was consistent with facts.”
The seventeen-year-old had decided to clear the air, even to his buggery of Green Demon, as described in the document. The boy read the statement, nodded, and said, “Yeah, what’s in that paper there, I did. I did go up her arse.”
And since the boy customarily dropped his h’s, Tony Painter thought he’d said “ouse” and asked him, “Which house was that?”
The kitchen porter pointed to the document and said, “Up her anus! What you’re saying here!” Then he added, “She didn’t mind it none.”
The boy’s parents were allowed to see him Saturday evening. After talking to him, they tried to tell all who would listen that their son was a bit simpleminded and couldn’t have killed anyone.
His mother offered an alibi: “Heidi were on TV that Thursday. I got talking to my friend and she said her kids always watch it. Heidi comes on at quarter to five and stays on till quarter past five. My son were sitting in our house watching Heidi. Susan, my brother’s daughter? You can talk to her. She’ll tell you!”
She later added, “He came in the day the Dawn Ashworth stuff were on the telly, and he said, ‘I seen her. I seen her go cross the road to Green Lane.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I asked him. ‘I were testing me bike,’ he said. ‘I seen her. I’m going to the incident room.’ I said, ‘Look, you got to be sure. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble.’ I said, ‘You keep away!’”
“He went to work and somebody at work told him to go down to the incident room,” his father explained to the police. “They told him it could help. And he did do. I think it were the reward. Somebody fingered him. And anyway, you’re looking for a lad with blond hair, the one that ran across Leicester Road and across the motorway. Not my laddie!”
It hadn’t happened exactly the way the kitchen porter’s parents thought it had, and the police weren’t about to give them details of what had been said in the confession. And of course the police were no longer looking for anyone.
A detective listened to the parents politely a
nd said, “You should call a solicitor as soon as possible.”
“We don’t have no solicitor,” the father replied, and the detective gave them a list of four law firms.
One of them was familiar, having represented the boy’s grandmother in a dispute with a neighbor. When the kitchen porter’s mother mentioned to the detectives that they wouldn’t be able to reach a lawyer on Saturday evening, Supt. Painter said, “Well, I know somebody who works for that firm. I know his personal number. I can ring him for you.”
The man to whom Painter referred was Walter Berry, the same solicitor who had represented Eddie Eastwood in his bankruptcy problems.
Painter told the parents, “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. He’ll be in Magistrate’s Court on Monday.”
At 2:00 A.M. Sunday morning, while lying awake in bed, the kitchen porter’s father broke into a sweat. “It hit me like a brick on top of me head!” he later said. “Monday morning there’s going to be a lot of problems down at the court! They caught the bloody murderer as far as the public’s concerned! Our name and address was in the evening paper already!”
Late Sunday morning he managed to contact Tony Painter by telephone and said, “There’s going to be a hassle down at court!”
“Possibly,” he was told.
“What help can you give me?”
“I can assign two officers to be your bodyguards,” Painter told him.
And true to his word, he sent a pair of detectives.
“They was two of the biggest blokes you could imagine,” the father recalled. “Both family men with girls and lads. What a grip they had when they shook hands! Wouldn’t need handcuffs, those two.”
“Ever such nice chaps,” the mother said. “‘You get any problems, phone calls, letters, give us a ring,’ they said. ‘You want some shopping done, we’ll do it.’”
“Of course we always wondered if they were told to write down anything they heard in our house,” her husband said. “Still, you couldn’t fault those two.”
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