Blooding

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The girl threw herself against the door and leaped out, crying and running.

  He shouted into the night, “I bet you’ll never accept a lift again!”

  When she talked to police about the incident she said, “He had unusual staring eyes. Like dead eyes.”

  The murder squad was cut back to sixteen officers in all, and both inspectors—Derek Pearce in his hot-blooded confrontational style, and Mick Thomas, cooler, more detached and businesslike—battled to keep the top brass from shutting them down. Though it was decidedly unpolitical, Pearce let it be known that if the chief constable’s office tried to close up the incident room and disband the squad, he was going to the press.

  Yet they had tested four thousand men, and undeniably, the budget was stretched. A newspaper headline said: NO LEADS TO KILLER OF LYNDA. It was followed by a huge story on the 31st of July:

  DAWN’S KILLER IS STILL AT LARGE

  The family of Lynda Mann was contacted in Lincolnshire and Kath Eastwood said, “It’s a process of elimination at the moment. I don’t think they can do any more. I’ll never give up hope and I’m sure they will find him in the end.”

  Supt. Tony Painter issued a statement saying, “Dawn was murdered on July 31st and we mean to use the anniversary to give the enquiry another boost. We know there’s a risk that this evil man will strike again, and we know that there’s information in the community that could lead us to him.”

  It was the same old story. The police were asking for help and getting nothing of value.

  For nearly a year Dawn Ashworth’s grave had not been marked by a headstone, and the Ashworths were getting reports that Dawn’s friends kept placing flowers on various wrong graves. They decided to get a headstone, and secured a loan to do it. They chose one made of black marble, with a carved gilded path winding toward a sunrise. The inscription said:

  Treasured memories of our dear daughter

  DAWN AMANDA ASHWORTH

  Born 23rd June 1971

  Tragically taken 31st July 1986

  What we keep in memory is ours unchanged forever

  “It was all we could do for her sixteenth birthday,” Barbara Ashworth said.

  The Ashworths were asked to pose as a group for another news portrait that summer. It was nothing like the one taken in front of the bay window when Dawn was alive, when all of them had linked arms and beamed at the camera. In this photo the three surviving family members looked soberly at the photographer. The extraordinary thing about that photo was that Sultan, their English setter, perhaps reflected his family’s emotional vibrations. Their story was written in the dog’s face.

  Sitting at Barbara’s knee, Sultan posed patiently, like the others, but with slightly averted eyes. Eyes that looked utterly grief-stricken.

  Prior to the anniversary of Dawn Ashworth’s death the police put posters in the shops and on all the notice boards in Narborough, Littlethorpe and Enderby. But Carole Pitchfork didn’t hear much talk about the murder anymore. Nobody speculated about the picture of the punk with the spiky hair. Carole’s friends and neighbors seldom bothered to cast back their minds to remember someone who was “badly marked” from a death struggle with Dawn Ashworth. Villagers stopped speculating whether or not a wife or mother or father had taken the killer’s bloody T-shirt and buried it in a garden.

  The only thing that Colin Pitchfork had to say to his wife on the subject of the reinvigorated murder hunt was “You’d think they’d have left the posters up all year. You’d think they’d make more of an effort.”

  When the anniversary of the murder was approaching, the murder squad wanted to do a covert operation, what they called a “discreet observation” of the gravesite in the churchyard of St. John Baptist.

  Derek Pearce visited the vicar of Enderby one afternoon, accompanied by DC Phil Beeken, a tall, handsome young fellow who was a friend to Pearce both on and off the job.

  Pearce needed to find a good observation point from which to watch those who might pay a visit to the grave on that occasion, but there wasn’t any. Putting someone as large as Phil Beeken out there in the middle of the churchyard wouldn’t do. Beeky would be about as inconspicuous as a solitary tooth.

  Then Pearce noticed that the graveyard was in a terrible state, all overgrown with grass and weeds. So he made the vicar of Enderby an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  He asked the vicar, “How would it be if one of our lads tidied up the graveyard and cut the grass for a week or so? No charge!”

  “I’ll do it for you, boss,” Beeky said to Pearce. “If it’s okay with the vicar.”

  The vicar was enthusiastic, but before allowing Beeky to go to work, he insisted on demonstrating the use of a grass-cutting “strimmer.” While he was demonstrating it to the cop, the vicar strimmed Beeky’s trousers and the leg inside. He apologized profusely to the young detective who told him not to worry, it wasn’t bleeding all that much.

  Phil Beeken immediately became part of CID trivia: Who was the only detective ever to be wounded on duty by the vicar of Enderby?

  Beeky had volunteered for graveyard duty on a bright sunny day. But when he went to work as a cemetery gardener it rained all week. He had a hand-held radio, but not one that worked, so he usually had to brave the rain to monitor the movements of mourners. Frequently they offered him money for tidying up the graves of loved ones. He didn’t accept the money, but made many friends while getting soaked to the bone.

  They’d put a video camera on Dawn Ashworth’s grave, just as they’d done on Lynda Mann’s grave during the various anniversaries since she’d been murdered. It was a time-lapse video, and though they studied the tape they never saw anyone who might be him.

  Yet one of the visitors to Dawn Ashworth’s grave did stir a bit of notice. He was a salesman up from the Thames Valley who had half an hour to kill, and had decided to take a stroll through the old churchyard. By pure chance he stood at Dawn’s grave, and was swooped on by police observers.

  The salesman was interviewed and released, but the police in his hometown were contacted and asked to verify his reputation. As bad luck would have it, his local constabulary was also investigating the murder of a schoolgirl, so the salesman got grillings on that murder and the Dawn Ashworth killing before the police were satisfied he was innocent.

  He vowed that he’d never enter another graveyard, alive.

  The local cops told him he was lucky those Leicestershire ghouls hadn’t taken his blood.

  Nine days after Dawn Ashworth’s murder they’d questioned a patient at Carlton Hayes Hospital, a man twenty-five years older than any other suspect on their list. He had previous convictions for indecencies and was one of those few who’d been blood-tested back in 1983 and found to be in the PGM 1 + category. His old blood sample hadn’t been preserved.

  It turned out that he was also unalibied for the afternoon that Dawn Ashworth had been murdered, but he died of natural causes just hours after being questioned by members of the murder squad. He’d been placed in the top category of suspects and they’d spent months trying to get court approval to exhume his body.

  Dracula jokes were rampant. Nobody was safe from these vampires: neither the living nor the dead.

  The Ashworths had decided to take a trip that summer of 1987 to visit Robin’s sister who’d emigrated to Australia seven years earlier with her son. Robin and Barbara planned their departure carefully. They left on Thursday, July 30th, and arrived in Sydney on Saturday morning, August 1st. By crossing the international dateline they’d managed to make July 31st disappear. That dreaded anniversary of their daughter’s death just didn’t happen.

  25

  Unguarded Moment

  His emotional reactions are simple and animal-like, occurring only with immediate frustrations and discomfort. However, he is able to simulate emotional reactions and affectional attachments when it will help him to obtain what he wants from others.… His social and sexual relations with others are superficial but demanding and manipulative
.

  The simple psychopath’s main characteristic is an inability to delay the gratification and biological needs, no matter what the future consequences to himself or to others.

  —ROBERT D. HARE, Psychopathy. Theory and Research

  As the summer of 1987 began to burn itself out, the murder squad had some of their most difficult times. They drove blood buses to housing estates and factories in order to call people out. In larger work places they even took a doctor with them: a daunting display of mobile blooding. But they were exhausting their bloodlust.

  They tried other tacks. They raided a traveling fair in Blaby with two dozen officers, searching the caravans of carnival workers. And they caught a flasher on a village footpath, a professional tennis player who was a psychiatric patient at Carlton Hayes. But he was good only for a few lame jokes about flashing and tennis balls. Always they returned to blooding for the answer.

  The DI’s, Pearce and Thomas, often went to the blooding. Those were long nights when they bloodied, and sometimes the doctors treated them to dinner. The DI’s had to keep it lighthearted for nervous donors as well as weary cops. One night they conducted a lottery where everyone tossed in fifty pence and guessed how many they’d bloody by evening’s end. Some of the frightened donors, many of whom had never been in contact with police before, wanted in.

  Then one of them said, “Wait a minute! If I win, how will I know?”

  “We’ll drop the money in your letter box,” Pearce told him. “If you can’t trust us, who can you trust?”

  “Okay, I’ll have a go!” he said.

  Then they planned a prank in which one of the local bobbies, himself scheduled for a blooding, was to pose as a civilian and come in protesting furiously, whereupon four of them were to pounce on him, snap on the handcuffs and carry him to whichever doctor looked most horrified. Supt. Tony Painter got wind of it and stopped that one.

  There was a traveling construction worker from Nottinghamshire whom they particularly wanted to bloody, but he was a fugitive on an assault charge and kept avoiding them. The best they could do after much effort was to leave a message for him to ring the incident room.

  He complied, demanding to speak to a superior officer. Pearce handled the telephone call, and after a long conversation they struck a bargain. The fugitive agreed to be bloodied if Pearce would give his word of honor not to arrest him on the warrant.

  Not only did the fugitive show up on schedule, he brought with him another traveling worker they’d been seeking. Both men were bloodied, and when they were finished and walking out the door, Pearce suddenly appeared and yelled, “Hold on! You can’t just walk out!”

  The fugitive crouched, ready to run or fight, or both, but he didn’t know about the inspector’s offbeat sense of humor.

  Pearce grinned and said, “Fancy a pint or two?”

  He took both men to a pub and stood them some drinks, after which it was discovered they didn’t have bus fare. Pearce had to give them five pounds to get back home.

  It was like that: trying to keep everybody interested, entertained and, above all, dedicated. Pearce’s own dedication had gotten a boost just before the Ashworths left on their Australian holiday. When he’d taken a can of soda to gardener/cop Phil Beeken at the cemetery, he’d found Barbara Ashworth tending Dawn’s grave. Pearce had met her on only one other occasion, but Barbara talked to him in the graveyard for thirty minutes.

  When Pearce returned to the incident room he commented that whenever someone’s killed you always hear that the victim was a nice person, but in this case it was true. “Lynda and Dawn were lovely, bubbly girls,” he said to his detectives. “Pleasant, helpful, and ever so well liked, weren’t they?”

  He really didn’t have to arouse any member of the small group that was left. The hunt for the footpath killer had consumed them all. They were becoming more fearful of the rumors that they were going to be closed down.

  The squad held a meeting where everyone put forth arguments to be taken to Chief Supt. David Baker and beyond. They wanted it noted that Dawn Ashworth II had been opened on a restricted budget because the first Dawn Ashworth inquiry had eaten up so much of the budgetary allowance. They pointed out that the reopening should have been treated as a new murder inquiry and budgeted accordingly. They promised not to drag in donors so indiscriminately, but said that in the long run it was still cheaper than a time-consuming verification of alibis. It wasn’t their fault, they argued, that the laboratory was months behind in analyzing the blood, perhaps even the blood of the murderer, for all they knew.

  They’d begun getting time-and-a-third pay for working more than eight hours in a day, as well as £5.54 for a meal allowance. They offered to give it up, as long as the inquiry was kept open.

  They began a renewed search into computer print-outs of everyone in Britain who’d been imprisoned in the interim between the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. It seemed a long time between murders for a serial sex killer, at least according to the psychiatric profile.

  There had always been speculation that the kitchen porter, who seemed to know too much, could have had something to do with Dawn Ashworth’s murder after all. Several of the police continued to believe that it had been his motorbike seen parked under the motorway bridge. There were bizarre theories about why samples taken from the vaginal and anal cavities had not shown a transfer of fluid back and forth, the implication being that perhaps two men had raped Dawn Ashworth, front and back, with only one leaving a sample. Perhaps one of them was a voyeur who had assaulted the dead body after the murderer was gone! There were macabre theories like that, because that’s the way a murder cop’s mind works after he’s been in the business awhile.

  Each of the sixteen officers still on the inquiry reiterated that morale was high, and that there was no doubt they’d flush him out sooner or later, one way or the other. They debated as to how the footpath phantom might try, or perhaps had already tried, to beat their system. The consensus was that he would induce a brother or close relative to take the test for him. A few thought he might be gambler enough to take it himself and hope that Jeffreys’s system was not foolproof, and who among them could say it was?

  Sgt. Mick Mason, like Insp. Mick Thomas, had been on the Lynda Mann inquiry as well as Dawn Ashworth I and II. Only the “two Micks,” DC John Reid and Detective Policewoman Tracy Hitchcox had been on all three. Tracy Hitchcox worked with DC Roger Lattimore, who lived in the village and harbored personal fears for his own teenage daughter. Lattimore never forgot to ring the Ashworths or to stop by with hopeful reports as the hopeless months dragged on.

  Mick Mason was the CID opposite of Derek Pearce. Where Pearce was fiery, the kind to shoot from the hip (sometimes hitting his own foot), Mason was deliberate, methodical, with a completeness compulsion. He didn’t just dot his i’s and cross his t’s. They said he duplicated every bleedin i and every ruddy t. He was the kind to stress over the menu at a sandwich shop: Swiss or cheddar? Swiss or cheddar? Swiss or bloody cheddar! But when he finally made up his mind he was implacable.

  Mick Mason would come to work fifteen minutes before he had to and might stay hours after he could have gone home. He was one of the first that Pearce and Mick Thomas had chosen when Supt. Tony Painter wanted a squad on Dawn Ashworth II “to sort out the business once and for all.”

  Until you got to know the big middle-aged cop, he was the last you would imagine in a pub after an evening of blooding—after they got the music going and had a few pints—doing his version of Tom Jones doing “Delilah,” complete with bumps and grinds! Mick Mason, “the pub singer,” had that other side. But he’d been devoted to Kath Eastwood from the day her daughter had been murdered, and always promised her that he’d never forget Lynda, that they’d get the killer. The pub singer was, by his own admission, obsessed with this murder hunt. Possibly, he wanted the killer more than any of the rest of them.

  Mason had become convinced that the motorway runner heading toward Whetstone was t
heir man. His fixation on Whetstone was at first subtle, and later not so subtle. He kept finding reasons for going to Whetstone. He usually sought permission from Derek Pearce who was more likely to approve questionable blooding.

  “I’ve been for a walk by the motorway,” he said to Pearce one afternoon. “Do you know there’s a footpath up to Whetstone?”

  Another time he said, “I stopped this chap walking back toward Narborough from Whetstone. He looked like the punk from the Lynda Mann enquiry.”

  After several of these, Pearce finally said, “This is one you’re dragging in on your own private sweep of Whetstone, isn’t it?”

  The murder squad had arbitrarily concluded that a blooding cost about thirty pounds. Pearce finally got to the point where he’d say to Mick Mason about a Whetstone man, “Well, is he worth thirty quid?” which would cause Mason to grin and disappear with blood in his eye.

  Even with Pearce’s “when in doubt, bloody him” philosophy, it got a bit much when Mick Mason began tying up the computer with descriptions of punkers, wanting print-outs on suspects with a residence in Whetstone.

  When frustrated voices were raised in the incident room, when the possibility of closure loomed, nobody even looked up if it was Derek Pearce’s voice; they were used to that. But when Mick Thomas started raising his voice, as one later put it, “We’d think, ‘Blimey! Maybe something is wrong!’”

  The three-month duty charts had been changed to one-month duty charts. As far as the top brass was concerned, the end was near, and that was obvious to the two inspectors. The remaining sixteen held a very tense meeting with Supt. Tony Painter. He informed them that Chief Supt. David Baker was getting great pressure from the chief constable who in turn was being pressured by the Home Office. The inquiry could not stay open indefinitely.

  There was an extraordinary clamor at that meeting. People wondered aloud what the press would make of a surrender after four years of hunting the footpath killer. Sgt. Mick Mason openly suggested they should have the courage to begin blooding other places. Like Whetstone, for instance.