Tony Painter became annoyed. He said, “You will not mention Whetstone. We will not bloody Whetstone!” Of course, he didn’t know that Mick Mason was already blooding Whetstone.
Derek Pearce jumped in to say, “All right, let’s pack it up and go home!”
Painter rebuked Pearce about the need for a DI to control himself, but the clamor persisted. Somebody actually said that if the inquiry was closed, the Police Complaints Board should bring a complaint against the chief constable himself!
Baker and Painter and their superiors were facing kamikaze dedication here. Maybe they realized that these last sixteen were foundering in a bloodlust frenzy. They might bloody every goddamn mammal in Leicestershire!
A new television story was aired that didn’t exude confidence. Chief Supt. David Baker, Supt. Tony Painter, DI’s Derek Pearce and Mick Thomas were all videotaped by a news team during a blooding session. Baker made another appeal. He said, “We have not got that vital piece of information which allows us to put the jigsaw together completely.”
When he was finished, newsmen made sotto voce comments about whether or not the squad had any puzzle pieces. The announcer called Baker’s statement “a painful admission.”
More painful to the murder squad was a visit by an inspection team from the deputy chief constable and the high sheriff of Leicester, who, after being given a brief summary of the mountain of work accomplished by the inquiry, had only one comment: The sign they’d posted for civilians that said, COFFEE 10P, TEA 5P, was “unprofessional.”
Such is the policeman’s lot, as Gilbert and Sullivan had long ago observed.
On a more upbeat note, a Midlands newscaster said, “As more men come forward the net slowly closes on the killer. If the police hunch is right, and he is a local man, he dare not run the risk of giving blood.”
On the day of that newscast, David Baker offered a statement to the print media—a prayer almost—that proved to be prophetic. He said, “Somebody’s bound to say something in an unguarded moment. Now that’s the kind of information we need!”
The beginning of an answer to Baker’s prayer had already taken place on the 1st of August, one year after Dawn Ashworth’s murder. It happened in a pub.
The Clarendon Pub in Leicester was a pub for locals: students, university people, journalists. It was a bit Bohemian in an area that had become trendy. A nice pub, the Clarendon had salmon-colored drapes and valances, coordinated wallpaper, and plush banquettes. It was near one of the Hampshires Bakery outlet shops, off Queens Road.
During the lunch break on that Saturday afternoon Ian Kelly went to the Clarendon, along with a twenty-six-year-old woman who managed one of the bakery outlets. Another woman and a young man, both Hampshires employees, tagged along.
They sat in the busy pub having a “cob,” a Leicester snack consisting of a roll filled with meat, cheese or anything you fancy. The talk turned to bakery tittle-tattle, centering on Colin Pitchfork, whom the manager of the outlet shop knew by sight and reputation.
They gossiped about Brown Eyes and her stillborn, and the fact that Colin couldn’t stay away from women. As Ian Kelly sipped his drink, a bemused smile crossed his face and he blurted, “Colin had me take that blood test for him.”
The bakery manager said, “What test?”
“For the murder inquiry?” the male companion asked. “That one, Ian?”
Ian Kelly got up and went to the bar for another pint. When he was gone the bakery manager turned to the other young man and said, “What’s that all about?”
“It’s odd,” the young baker said. “Colin asked me to do it too. Offered me two hundred quid to take the blood test. He’s just scared of coppers. A weird bloke, that Colin.”
The shop manager was deeply disturbed. She tried to broach another question, but it was lightly dismissed as though the implication was preposterous.
Still she couldn’t get it off her mind. A week passed, and she took aside the young baker who’d been offered the money and said, “What are we going to do about Colin Pitchfork?”
He said, “Leave it. He’s a friend. You don’t even know him.”
She couldn’t leave it, but she was fearful of involving someone in a double murder—someone who might be innocent—not to mention getting Ian Kelly into police trouble.
Three days later while the bakery manager stewed, history was made in London at the Old Bailey. Genetic fingerprinting was used in a criminal court for the first time in the case of a man accused of unlawful intercourse with a fourteen-year-old mentally handicapped girl who’d given birth to his baby.
Dr. Alec Jeffreys was quoted as saying, “The use of the test in a court case is exciting for us. It is an historic occasion.”
The bakery manager knew that the owner of the Clarendon Pub had a son who was a police constable. She inquired but found that the bobby was on holiday. It was six weeks before she rang him up.
It had been a good summer for Carole Pitchfork. She’d been noticing a marked improvement in her husband’s attitude since she had allowed him to return home in March. She felt that he was trying very hard to make a go of their marriage. He seemed to be maturing and accepting responsibility for his past actions. She didn’t even have to nag him to change clothes anymore. He was dressing better, as befit a budding entrepreneur.
His scheme for opening the cake-decorating studio was beginning to jell at last. Colin had been to a banker, and was discussing things like cash flow with an accountant. He’d even accepted a small commission to make a birthday cake for a policeman’s twenty-first birthday. It was cleverly conceived and skillfully executed. The policeman loved it. Colin had done an icing sculpture of a bobby’s helmet, alongside a set of steel handcuffs.
Friday, the 18th of September, started off in a river of blood like all the others. Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers were on a London run to pick up four blood samples and to interview one man. Whenever they took trips like that they’d call in several times a day. But they got caught in motorway traffic coming back and it was some time before they could get to a phone box. They found one occupied by a girl who had about three pounds, all in tenpence coins, spread out in front of her.
She gave the impatient detectives a glance or two but wasn’t about to give up the phone. They jumped back in the CID car and kept going.
When they got to the office at 9:00 P.M. there were messages all over the door. One said, “Don’t go home!” Another said, “Got a job on!” A third said, “Don’t go home. Got a job on!”
When Pearce got to his desk he found a huge one saying, “DON’T GO HOME!”
Phil Beeken had taken a telephone message that afternoon from a bobby whose father owned a pub near the Queens Road outlet shop of Hampshires Bakery. Beeky relayed the information from that telephone call directly to Insp. Mick Thomas and they pulled an old house-to-house pro forma from the Lynda Mann inquiry. They compared the signature of the resident of a semi-detached house in Littlethorpe with the pro forma from his blooding in January. The two signatures of Colin Pitchfork didn’t match.
Mick Thomas and Phil Beeken tried to keep each other from getting too excited. After all, signatures can change over a period of three years, particularly with young people. But Pitchfork wasn’t a kid. Then they looked at each other and decided, The hell with it! They were over the moon and rising!
Mick Mason was telephoned at home and given the job of immediately contacting the others from the bakery who’d been present in the Clarendon Pub when Ian Kelly blurted an admission during an unguarded moment. Thomas and Beeken went to the manager’s house and took her written statement.
She began by saying, “This is probably a waste of your time, but my conscience forced me to ring the police.” She kept apologizing until they reassured her.
By the time Mick Thomas and Phil Beeken hooked up with Derek Pearce and Gwynne Chambers later that evening they were practically hyperventilating.
Mick Thomas said to Pearce, “Roger and Tracy are still
in Yorkshire trying to bloody some bloke! You and Gwynne were in London! Everybody else had gone home! I was going crazy with no one to tell!”
One of them noticed something very peculiar. The conversation in the Clarendon Pub, that unguarded moment, had occurred exactly one year after the day that Dawn Ashworth’s body lay undetected in a field by Ten Pound Lane. It seemed to be an omen.
They unanimously elected to go immediately to a pub, and they did. While drinking his second pint Pearce said that going to bed was out of the question. He wanted morning to come without having to sleep through the interim. Mick Thomas suggested that they’d better not get drunk because of the importance of the following day. But they didn’t have to worry—the booze couldn’t compete with the adrenaline rush.
Each man later reported that he spent a near-sleepless night. Each later reported that he felt he was facing the most important day in his police career.
As far as Pearce was concerned: “It was the most important day of our lives.”
Ian Kelly had not been having an easy time at the bakery since he’d given blood for Colin Pitchfork. It seemed as though too many things were going wrong, and Colin Pitchfork was always around to “help” him. Once when they were making buns, Ian burned them. Colin observed the error and told Ian not to worry, he’d take care of it. Ian later heard that Colin “took care of it” by informing the foreman.
There was a more serious incident when Ian was making buns with another baker. A huge steel machine cover was propped against a wall. Ian pushed a baking trolley past it and was absolutely sure he had sufficient clearance, but somehow the heavy metal cover fell over and crashed into his partner’s legs.
The man bellowed and swore and accused Ian of crippling him. It turned into such a row that the gaffer came out and shouted, “Stop behaving like kids, the two of you!”
The injured baker was so outraged he told the boss to stuff it. The baker quit his job that day, saying that Ian Kelly was the one who should’ve been sacked.
Ian went back to work, absolutely baffled as to how the machine cover could’ve fallen. Until he later learned that Colin Pitchfork had been standing nearby when it happened. It was beginning to look like somebody wanted him out of Hampshires Bakery.
On the morning of Saturday, September 19th, it was decided that Pearce and Chambers would arrest Ian Kelly. And they might arrest the young baker who’d been offered £200 by Colin Pitchfork, depending on his answers. Mick Thomas and Mick Mason were to call on that young man. Even though they were off duty, DC Brian Fentum and Phil Beeken insisted on being there. Nothing could’ve kept them away.
Ian Kelly opened his door that morning to a pair of visitors he knew weren’t selling magazines. Derek Pearce showed his warrant card and said, “We’re from the murder enquiry incident room at Narborough, investigating the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. Have you given a blood sample regarding those enquiries?”
“No, not me!” Ian said.
“I don’t believe you,” Pearce said. “I have reason to believe you’ve given a blood sample.”
“No, I haven’t!” Ian said.
“We’ve talked to other people at the bakery,” Pearce said. “I believe you have.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Ian said. “I did it for another lad at work.”
“Who’s that?” Gwynne Chambers asked.
“Colin Pitchfork,” Ian Kelly answered.
Pearce said, “I’m arresting you for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and we’re taking you to Wigston Police Station.”
“Yes,” said Ian Kelly. “I’ll just put me shoes on.”
They took Ian Kelly to the station, which was already humming, and put him into an interview room where his statement was recorded.
Pearce said, “I must tell you, you do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you understand that?”
Ian began by saying, “Yes, well, the gentleman in question, Colin Pitchfork, he come up to me and asked if I’d do him a favor. I didn’t know it were for them murders. I didn’t know what it were really for cause he didn’t explain what it were for. He just had to give a thingybob cause he got a letter from the police station.”
Then Ian related the story that Colin Pitchfork had told him about giving a sample for the other bloke, and Ian told about the photo strip and altering the passport. But he stuck to his claim that he didn’t know that the blooding was for anything as serious as murder.
Derek Pearce didn’t look quite as dangerous as a Shi’ite with an AK-47 when he said, “Yeah, you’re Mister Muggins. And you’ve just gone along and given the sample. And he got what he wanted: full protection. You’ve delayed us eight months!”
Ian started to understand what was facing him. He said, “Well, when I went to his house, more or less … well, the day before, he told me it were a murder enquiry. But I didn’t know which murder it was at the time!”
And he admitted to having been given a little schooling on the dates of birth of the children and other personal information. He said, “I knew it were for a murder but I didn’t know whose it were for, cause at the time when I walked in I were that sick. I’d got a temperature. I was feeling really low. I mean, when I began writing his signature I got shaking like a leaf!”
Supt. Tony Painter was called in that afternoon and found Derek Pearce bobbing and bouncing like a dinghy in a storm.
“Let’s go nick him!” Pearce said to their commander.
“No, take it all down on paper,” Painter said. “And then go get him.”
Pearce said, “We want him now!”
“I’m the boss and I say paper first,” Painter said.
“Quite right,” Pearce said. “Paper first.”
So they had to wait another two hours until all statements were transcribed and put in some semblance of order. By the time six of them got to the house in Haybarn Close, the blue Fiat was gone. There was nobody at the Pitchfork home. One stayed; the rest returned to the station, trying to be philosophical. After all, they’d waited four years.
26
Blind Terror
The most important feature of the psychopath is his monumental irresponsibility. He knows what the ethical rules are, at least he can repeat them, parrotlike, but they are void of meaning to him.…
No one wears the mask of normality in so convincing a fashion. He is strikingly cool and sure of himself in situations where others would tremble with sweat and fear.… He retains a superhuman composure.
—PAUL J. STERN, The Abnormal Person and His World
A surveillance and arrest of a major felony suspect is done differently in Britain than in the United States. In Britain a suspect under observation is often allowed to enter his house so that he can’t run away. In a gun-crazy country like the U.S. the last thing the police want to do is let any suspect enter his house, where he may have enough firepower to take the Persian Gulf.
Late that afternoon the murder squad allowed the blue Fiat to pass into Haybarn Close and proceed to the end of the cul-de-sac. They waited until Colin Pitchfork parked the car, until the entire family was safely inside the house.
Derek Pearce, who said he lived to cover back doors, ran around to the rear with Gwynne Chambers. The two Micks, Thomas and Mason, went to the front. Phil Beeken and Brian Fentum backed up the two Micks. At 5:45 P.M. Mick Thomas knocked.
Carole Pitchfork later said, “At first I thought they were insurance men. I thought perhaps it was about the car accident on Narborough Road. They came in and said they were police officers and asked to speak to Colin in private.”
Mick Thomas and Mick Mason walked Colin Pitchfork into the kitchen while the others stayed in the living room. Phil Beeken later said, “I saw him and thought, Yeah, it’s him! He looks the way our man ought to look! It’s him!”
Mick Thomas said to Colin Pitchfork, “From enquiries we’ve made we believe you’re responsible for the murder of Dawn Ashworth on
the thirty-first of July, 1986. We believe another man gave a blood sample for you. I’m arresting you on suspicion of that murder. I must inform you that you don’t have to say anything, but anything you say may be taken down and given in evidence. Do you understand?”
Colin Pitchfork very calmly said, “First give me a few minutes to speak to my wife.”
Mick Thomas had a feeling from the look of resignation on Colin Pitchfork’s face, and so did Mick Mason, who suddenly asked, “Why Dawn Ashworth?”
Colin Pitchfork replied, “Opportunity. She was there and I was there.”
Mick Thomas then asked, “What do you want to speak to your wife about?”
“It’s going to be a long time till I see them again. You’ve got to let me say goodbye.”
Just then Colin Pitchfork’s four-year-old son cried, “Daddy, the telly won’t work!”
Mick Thomas nodded an okay and Colin Pitchfork walked into the living room to adjust the tuning. Mick Mason grabbed all of the kitchen knives off the counter, just in case, and opened the back door. When the pub singer got outside, he did a little saber dance with those knives, and Derek Pearce knew it was over.
A few minutes later, Pearce and Mick Thomas were in the little kitchen with Colin Pitchfork, while a very frightened Carole Pitchfork was asked to take the kids upstairs.
Colin Pitchfork asked, “Why’s there a need for the other officers to be going round my house?”
“There’s a number of things we need to search for,” Mick Thomas told him.
“Like what?”
“The passport that was used.”
“It’s not here,” Colin said. “Honestly. It’s at work. Let me speak to my wife.”
Mick Thomas said, “You can speak to your wife, but only in my presence.” Then he called for Carole Pitchfork and she came down and entered the kitchen.
She looked from one to the other. She looked at him, leaning against the kitchen cupboard.
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