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 back 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 him!”
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 street-lights.”
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, Colin! 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 lots 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 p
oured 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 Mick 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.
The embattled detective got himself a good barrister, a man known as a tough advocate in criminal cases. Pearce said it was impossible to imagine himself on the other side at a criminal trial.
It was unusual to find a red-robed judge adjudicating minor infractions like those Pearce faced, but Pearce was a police inspector, a controversial police inspector. His prosecution was being vigorously pursued.
Pearce had repeatedly told friends that he was innocent and couldn’t even conceive of a conviction and imprisonment. But when he learned what sort of judge would be assigned to adjudicate his case, he knew that he and Colin Pitchfork had something in common. They’d both be facing a red-rober.
29
Outrage
When confronted with his misconduct the psychopath has enough false sincerity and apparent remorse that he renews hope and trust among his accusers. However, after several repetitions, his convincing show is finally recognized for what it is—a show.
Nearly every type of treatment method has been tried with the psychopath. In general, the treatment … has not been rewarding nor enlightening.
—SUINN
The first snow of winter fell on January 22, 1988, as Colin Pitchfork was driven to Crown Court in Leicester inside a van with blacked-out windows. The prisoner, who’d grown a full beard, was rushed from the van into the courthouse, blinking his eyes in the watery winter light.
That courthouse isn’t old and steeped in history like Castle Court. It’s red-brick modern with tinted windows, so serviceable and boring that graffiti might improve it. But the courtrooms are large enough to accommodate about a hundred people. The spectators, mostly press, all queued to pack themselves inside.
Except for a coat of arms behind the bench, the courtroom was stark, but there was a red-robed judge, black-robed advocates, and bleached horsehair wigs to add a note of dignity to the Crown Court’s Holiday Inn decor of white oak and earth tones.
The national press wanted the family reaction.
Barbara Ashworth said, “I had to come. I had to see him. To lay the ghost to rest.”
Eddie Eastwood spoke for himself and Kath, saying, “We had to go. I just wanted to see his face. I wanted to know what sort of man could do it.”
It was decidedly anticlimactic, that sentencing of the Narborough murderer. The judge had several serious cases to deal with and didn’t appear to place special emphasis on this one.
Ian Kelly, referred to by the police as an “extremely gullible person,” was told by the judge, “I just about believe you did it because you accepted the story put forward by Pitchfork.”
Ian was given an eighteen-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, which meant he would not have to serve time. When Ian stepped from the courtroom, trembling like a whippet, he wiped his eye. And with his sturdy young wife on his arm for support, he said to the television cameras, “I was wrong for doing what I did. I’m sorry for whoever I’ve caused grievance to. And I’m, well, shocked!”
The prosecuting barrister, Brian Escott-Cox, Q.C., read a summary of Colin Pitchfork’s crimes from the court file. He added that the defendant “showed amazing self-control with a total lack of remorse” in that not even his wife had had any idea he was a killer.
Colin Pitchfork was dressed in summer clothes: jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He pleaded guilty to the murders of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, and to those two indecent assaults he’d revealed from out of his past, and to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by his use of Ian Kelly. He pleaded not guilty to kidnap in the case of the hitchhiking girl whom he’d “spared.”
By way of mitigation, David Farrer, Q.C., the defendant’s barrister, said, “He recognizes he can do nothing to alleviate the over-whelming suffering and grief inflicted on the families of his victims by his frightful evil—and those are his words, not mine.”
The barrister then added, “He will remain forever haunted by the images and knowledge of what he has done.”
The court’s psychiatrist no doubt could’ve explained that Colin Pitchfork’s concept of being “haunted by images” was very different from that of his barrister. When the defendant had talked to Mick Mason and Mick Thomas of being “haunted” by Lynda Mann, it was with bemused detachment. The “hauntings” of a psychosexual sociopath provide not horror but inspiration. Probably his barrister could not envision the ecstasy such hauntings would bring.
Colin Pitchfork received a double life sentence for the murders, a ten-year sentence for each of the rapes, and three years each for the sexual assaults in 1979 and 1985, along with another three years for the conspiracy involving Ian Kelly. These were concurrent sentences, and much to the astonishment of the murder squad, the judge didn’t give a recommendation for a minimum term. Without such a recommendation, the “life” s
entence in Britain was similar to that in the United States, which meant that Colin Pitchfork could conceivably be released in ten or twelve years. The police were outraged.
While passing sentence, the high court judge, Mr. Justice Otton, said, “The rapes and murders were of a particularly sadistic kind. And if it wasn’t for DNA you might still be at large today and other women would be in danger.”
The judge added that a psychiatrist’s report compiled by a Broadmoor doctor diagnosed Colin Pitchfork as a “psychopath of a psychosexual type.” And the judge said that the defendant would receive therapy in prison for his condition and would not be released until that therapy was complete, which would be in “many years.”
That led a few observers to note that if prison doctors had found effective therapy for a sociopathic serial killer, they should patent it and eclipse Alec Jeffreys’s discovery of DNA fingerprinting. A “cure” implies change, a discovery of contrition. But to a sociopath the absence of a crippling emotion like remorse is a blessing, not a curse.
Eddie Eastwood later said, “Pitchfork looked at me, eye to eye. He just stared me out as if to say, ‘Well what’s the matter with you?’ I couldn’t make him out. He looked almost human.”
Kath said, “It was the shock of seeing him. The shock! I didn’t look up when the lawyer passed those photos of Lynda to the bench. Those photos of how she looked when they found her. The cover dropped open and the audience gasped when they saw the photos. My brother saw them and cried. Luckily, I didn’t look up.”
The mother of Dawn Ashworth wanted a trial, a real trial, with trappings and finality. Colin Pitchfork didn’t have a real trial, she later said, just a hearing. With a trial he’d be exposed for what he was, she thought. A guilty plea seemed just a clever ploy to avoid real exposure. She listened in amazement as the prosecutor read the summary of his crimes, how he’d killed Lynda while his baby lay in a carrycot in the back of his car.
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