Blooding

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Colin Pitchfork had thus officially complied voluntarily by giving samples of blood and saliva, proving his identity with British passport number P413736B, along with a valid driving license.

  When Ian Kelly emerged from the school, Colin Pitchfork watched and waited, but left Ian shivering in the road until he was sure it was safe. Then Colin emerged from the shadows and called out. When they got to the car, Ian Kelly gave Colin Pitchfork the passport and wallet.

  “Everything all right?” Colin asked.

  “Yeah,” Ian answered. “Doddle, dead easy.”

  Colin drove Ian Kelly to his house in Leicester, dropped him and said, “Cheers, mate. And mum’s the word.”

  Before Carole got home from school that evening, Colin had scratched a mark on his inner forearm with a compass point, and stuck some adhesive plaster over the wound.

  When she saw it, Carole said, “I thought they’d just prick your thumb.”

  “No, they used a needle and jabbed it in me arm!” he said. “And I didn’t like the attitude of them coppers. Treated me like a criminal, they did.”

  Then he made a big fuss, as he always did when removing an adhesive plaster. He couldn’t bear the pain. He clipped around it with a scissors and pulled it off as if removing sutures. He showed her the wound.

  “Look at that,” he said. “And they made me chew on a piece of cloth. Me bloody arm is killing me.”

  “You baby!” she said. “A teeny pinprick.”

  “They took a photo cause I only had a driving license,” he told his wife. “They may bring it round here to show people to prove it’s me.”

  When the hand-delivered letter arrived at the little house in Haybarn Close saying that Colin Pitchfork’s test was negative, essentially eliminating him from the murder inquiry, Carole Pitchfork showed the greater relief. In fact, her relief was greater than she dared admit to anyone, even herself.

  There wasn’t much time for Carole to savor the small victory of forcing Colin to take that blood test. He began wallowing in depressing again.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Carole finally asked him.

  It was a few days after the test. He sat staring and sighing. Her way, as she put it, “was just to fly off the handle and cause a row when he was like that.” So she did: “For chrissake, just tell me what’s wrong, whatever it is!”

  He looked up at her with tears welling and admitted his affair with Brown Eyes. “She had a baby,” he said, “and it were stillborn! My baby daughter!”

  Carole was never sure what she said next, if anything. She slammed out the door and went to Mandy’s house, not returning until evening. Locked out of the bedroom, Colin slept on the settee that night.

  The next day she had to talk to him about it for the sake of her sanity.

  “I can’t believe it! This woman is abrasive. She’s domineering. She’s not your sort at all. She’s thirty years old if she’s a day. By your standards she’s a bleedin hag!”

  “Didn’t you ever suspect?” he asked curiously.

  “It crossed my mind. But no, I couldn’t ever believe that. Not with her.”

  “Look,” he said, trying to be reasonable, “it’s been going on for over a year and you didn’t know, did you? It’s not doing you any harm then, is it?”

  “One question, you bastard. Did she ever hear of the pill?”

  “Forgot to take it a few times,” he said.

  “Yeah, for a year. Did she forget every time?”

  “Maybe she wanted to trap me,” he said.

  Later, Carole Pitchfork thought about it. About him, about herself, about the way he viewed things.

  “I actually believe he had this rosy picture,” she told a friend, “of us taking that woman into court for a grand fight to get custody of his baby. He probably had a fantasy of bringing baby home where we’d all live happily, with me as the mummy.”

  “Get the hell out of my life,” she told him, and he did.

  When Colin was gone the phone calls started. Brown Eyes began ringing Carole and writing notes. It got so bad that whenever the phone rang, Carole hated to pick it up.

  “Are you sure you know where Colin is?” the telephone voice would say. “He might be here with me. Anytime I want him, he will be here with me!”

  While Brown Eyes recuperated at her parents’ home, Colin went to visit her daily. He’d stay for half an hour and talk sadly about the baby. He offered to pay for the funeral and they buried the infant at Wigston Cemetery. Colin stood at the grave and wept.

  Three months later, Brown Eyes’ mother arrived at her house unexpectedly and caught her daughter and Colin Pitchfork in an act of sex down on the living room carpet. The outraged woman took her grandchild home to her own house and made her daughter promise never to see Colin again.

  The interlude was over. Colin Pitchfork had seemed to relish living a soap opera, but the star-crossed bakers were even cautioned by their foreman at work. Brown Eyes never saw Colin outside of the job again.

  She referred to him as a very gentle person.

  During their estrangement Colin visited Carole and the children frequently, and even babysat when she was at work or school. The children missed their father a lot, and he wanted to come home.

  “The idea of you seeing other men actually eats me up!” he told Carole. “Now I know what’s what. I’ve learned a lesson.”

  “I weighed it,” she later remembered. “The effect his absence had on the kids. And as usual …”

  When Carole let him return home in March they still slept apart. And she began monitoring the mileage on his car and motorbike, writing down the numbers on the odometers. When there was too much mileage, he’d always have some plausible excuse.

  It didn’t seem possible to her that he’could be going out “on a wander,” looking for girls to flash. He couldn’t be regressing to that, and yet …

  Carole Pitchfork never knew how easy it was to disconnect an odometer temporarily. Nor did she understand that there was another world out there belonging only to him, a world of heightened reality. While he lived out a mere shadow life with her in Haybarn Close, during those phantom days.

  23

  Bloodprint

  I am in blood

  Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,

  Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  —Macbeth, Act III, Scene 4

  They had a dozen GP’s taking turns at the blooding, some of whom also practiced as police surgeons and dealt with sick prisoners, Breathalyzers and police medical exams. The inquiry got them on the cheap, at £72 for a two-hour blooding, and a good doctor could bloody forty men.

  The murder squad had fine-tuned cajolery by telephone. You could walk into the incident room at any hour of the day and hear them at it:

  “Cornwall isn’t that far. What kind of car do you drive?”

  Or “Don’t you want to visit the girl you left behind?”

  Or “Wouldn’t your mum just love to see you?”

  Derek Pearce called the out-of-town trips “speed runs.” “We did them at various doctors’ surgeries around the country and knocked off four to five hundred miles a day sometimes, just to get a few blood samples. Since we weren’t given funds to stop overnight, we had to put our foot down to make it back home at a decent hour.”

  Since they got no overtime pay, even for working on rest days, and no meal allowance, the people of Leicestershire got an inexpensive investigation, given the massive scope of it. As Pearce put it: “Our goal in life wasn’t to make money. It was to detect murder. These murders.”

  On many evenings when Pearce had to stay late because of some tedious management task, he’d find one or more of his detectives dropping into the incident room after supper.

  “To sort out a thing or two,” they’d tell Pearce.

  Some of them played hard. One of the policewomen who worked on the inquiry had what she apparently thought was a private understanding with one of the detectives. She’d leave f
or twenty minutes, usually in the midst of a boring shift when everyone was busy with paperwork. Each time she disappeared, a certain detective would receive a telephone call at his desk, a lengthy telephone call.

  Sitting there among fifteen other detectives, he never had too much to say from his end, but his eyes would roll and flutter, and he’d get a cunning little grin on his face. And he wasn’t fooling anyone when he’d say things into the phone like “Yes, I think we can accommodate your needs quite nicely. Always glad to help. Cheers, mate!”

  After a while, the others decided to let it be known that it couldn’t be pulled off right under the noses of veteran police detectives. One night when they all went to the pub for a little do, the policewoman was presented with a gift from the squad: a pair of empty soup tins with the tops removed, joined at the bottom by a fifty-foot string. One of the cans bore the number of the male detective’s telephone, and the other was labeled with the number of the “secret” telephone terminal.

  “To save steps and shoe leather,” the gift givers said.

  There were a sizable number of objectors who could be eliminated on paper after their alibis were checked, but many of those who refused did so not because of personal liberties but because they were terrified of needles. The saliva test was all right as a backup, but it didn’t provide what the first-phase blood grouping required, and wasn’t always good enough for a proper DNA analysis.

  One of those who rang in refused to be stuck with a needle but was otherwise cooperative. “Look,” he said, “I want to help! I’ll come in, but I’ll poonch meself in the nose!”

  Another said, “I won’t have the needle, but I’ll let the doctor cut me with a knife. I don’t mind the knife. I’ll even cut meself with a knife!”

  Without consulting Freudian textbooks the cops just accepted that there were people with a needle phobia, so Pearce agreed to a cutting for one of them.

  When the donor showed up, Pearce was astonished: “He was a big strappin bloke! Sixteen stone, and stood six foot up!”

  The strapping bloke with the belonephobia was taken to a doctor who said, “We’ll cut you and squeeze a few drops onto the card. We’ll screen it for a certain blood factor and if it comes back negative, fair enough. But if it comes back positive, you’ll come back in for a proper test, okay?”

  “Anything! Anything,” the donor said. “But I’m not having a needle!”

  The doctor said, “Okay, turn your head away and I’ll cut your finger.”

  The mountainous donor turned away and gritted his teeth while the doctor cut his finger and took the blood. The situation was resolved. In that he had no scalpel with him, the doctor made the cut with a needle.

  Some of them adamantly refused and wouldn’t budge. In fact, an acquaintance of the kitchen porter, who openly resented the way he had been imprisoned by police, refused to come in at all. One of the sergeants went to Derek Pearce and said, “He won’t give one.”

  “What do you mean, he won’t give one?”

  “He says it’s an infringement on his personal liberties.”

  “Come on,” Pearce said, taking the detective and driving to the young man’s house.

  The objector allowed the cops to enter. As Pearce described him, the young fellow was “dirty and ugly and grimy. The kind of bloke you’d like to take out in the field and shoot.”

  Pearce didn’t shoot him. He talked. His subordinates said that Pearce was “the kind who could talk the knickers off a nun.” Even so, it took an hour before the young man promised Pearce he’d come in for blooding the next night. Several detectives made bets that he wouldn’t show, but he did.

  When he arrived he was just as dirty and ugly and grimy as he’d been the day before. He was also surly, with a total vocabulary of about seventy-five words. He grudgingly answered the questions, filled out the form, walked over to the doctor and disdainfully watched the blood being sucked out of his arm. Then he keeled over on the floor. Out cold.

  They ordered an ambulance to take him in for observation, and a detective was detailed to remain at his bedside until he came around. In a piece of profound understatement, Pearce said, “No other police force ever had to do anything like this before.”

  They had their fair share of people with AIDS and hepatitis. When they knew it in advance, they’d take the saliva tests very carefully. The gauze for the saliva was attached to a folded card, and was designed to drop out so that the subject could catch it in his mouth. They couldn’t get people to do it right. Some sucked on the gauze. Some sucked on the card. Some chewed the gauze. Some chewed the card to pieces. Some nearly swallowed the gauze and ended up gagging. It was a disgusting business, they all agreed.

  Angry young women would come in with boyfriends and say, “I want him cleared!”

  One girlfriend said, “Can you test him for syphilis while you’re at it?”

  The cops who delivered the letters to the houses used to amuse themselves by telling the donors, “The good news is you haven’t done the murders. The bad news is you’ve got AIDS.”

  They bloodied quite a few young policemen who lived in the villages, and the new headquarters building was full of officers who worked the motorway around the three villages. Derek Pearce, who’d had a few problems in his day with traffic officers, couldn’t wait. “I want to bloody the traffic cops,” he always said. “With a very blunt needle.”

  Halfway through the massive testing Pearce was involved in a personal blooding. He went along on one of the out-of-town treks to pick up a young man who’d agreed to be bloodied at the surgery of a local physician. They collected the nervous lad and drove him to the doctor.

  The physician wasn’t exactly the doctor-priest gowned for surgery and tended by starched minions at the altar of Hippocrates. This one was the kind who might treat a sick cow if the vet was drunk. Pearce handed the rumpled country doctor a syringe, swab and plaster from the test kit. The doctor had never seen a self-sealing syringe. He couldn’t manage to attach the needle. He couldn’t locate a vein.

  “He had three or four goes with the needle,” Pearce recalled, “but he couldn’t find a thing.”

  The victim didn’t say much. He just sweated, and muttered, “Blimey.”

  The doctor dropped a needle on the floor trying to attach it. Then another. He couldn’t figure out how to unscrew the plunger in case he ever did get any blood. He made a few more stabs. He started taking divots.

  In the end, Derek Pearce became the physician. The two of them slid the needle into what looked like a vein and Pearce held the syringe while the doctor pumped and the donor said, “Blimey.”

  “We’ll send you thirty quid for this,” Pearce told the doctor after putting a vial of blood safely in his pocket.

  The donor looked like he’d been dueling with Jack the Ripper. “Thirty quid for him?” he said. “I should get sixty!”

  “You get our thanks,” Pearce assured him. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Blimey!” said the donor.

  Pearce later described the donor as “now needing a prosthesis.”

  Everyone came to give blood. A former patient from Carlton Hayes Hospital came because his name had turned up on the computer list. The reason it turned up was that he’d gone to the hospital at the time of the Dawn Ashworth murder to borrow crutches! They took his blood anyway.

  A transvestite came wearing a red lame dress. They took her blood.

  They’d gotten television coverage in Australia, Brazil, the United States, Sweden, France, Holland and had been on the air live in Italy. One night a West German camera crew came to watch the blooding, and interviewed two detectives on videotape.

  “Does the process in any way hurt or cause anxiety?” was the on-camera question.

  “Absolutely not,” the detective said to the camera.

  “Do the young men mind giving blood?”

  “Absolutely not,” the detective answered.

  The next man to step before the camera took one look at h
is blood being siphoned, and keeled over on top of the detective who kept saying “Absolutely not.” He was carried out by two bobbies while the camera rolled and the blood flowed, camera or not.

  The laboratory at Huntingdon was freezing just about all of the blood by then, and not sending it to Aldermaston for the DNA test. The lab asked the murder squad to stop sending more unless it was “high priority.” The laboratory spokesman informed them that the technicians had done a year’s work in a few months and were stretched to the limit. They were drowning in blood. There were vials on every shelf. The freezers were full of it. There was more young British blood flowing in Leicestershire than had been spilled at the Somme.

  But nothing stopped them. The murder squad sought blood tirelessly. It was their best and only hope. The mere act of the blooding might cause the killer to bolt and run.

  They bloodied them all: transvestites, policemen, limpers with borrowed crutches, anyone who fell within the age group. But probably no blooding was as strange as the sample they took from the “Very Reluctant Donor,” who said that he would not, absolutely, positively, unequivocally, under any circumstances, surrender a drop of his blood whether they took it with a needle, or a scalpel, or a machete.

  He lived in a filthy flat and nothing would move him from his hovel. It was a dilemma worthy of Derek Pearce and maybe an envoy of the archbishop of Canterbury.

  Pearce had an idea, rang the Very Reluctant Donor, and said, “How about giving a semen sample?”

  “I don’t mind that!” the man replied enthusiastically.

  The next morning they took him from his filthy flat to a moderately clean doctor’s room at Wigston Police Station.

  “They stripped him off, tossed his greasy sou’wester in a corner and put him in a track suit,” Pearce remembered, “so he couldn’t take anything in with him. Wigston was packed like a railway station that day, and he took ever so long in that room alone.”