The Blooding (28 page)

The driver said, "Where you going, m'duck?"

She looked inside and asked, "Are you going to Oadby?"

I'd only had three hours' sleep the night before, but I had to go out that night. Carole was gone with the kids on a Saturday night camp. When I got on a high like this I had to drive around. Sleep and fatigue just didn'
t m
atter. You become superhuman! So at midnight I went out for a wander .1 drove through the center of Wigston and saw a young girl saying good night to another girl and a bloke. She walked off and I drove round the block and come up to the roundabout and out comes her thumb! I thought, "Fuckin hell, Colin! This is your lucky night, ain't it?"

"I'm going up the A-Six," he said. "Any help?"

"Oh, superb!" she said, and hopped in.

"What's your name, m'duck?" he asked.

"Liz," she answered.

I knew she was no older than eighteen, blond and full of bounce. Lives with Mum and Dad. Been out with friends for the night. Just the type!

She secured her seat belt and they rode for a few minutes, but Liz started getting very nervous. He was expressionless and didn't speak anymore. She hadn't liked his menacing grin.

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"What?"

"You said Oadby was on the way to where you were going." "No," he said. "No."

They were driving to the center of Oadby then, to the junction of the main A6 road.

"That's the turning there!" she said.

But he silently drove past it.

"There's a turning here!" she said. "Go back!"

Still he didn't reply.

"I want to get out!" she cried.

He slowed for a second, but only to change gears, then he sped off, heading for the countryside.

They passed a pub and she screamed, "There! Turn in!"

But he was driving down a dark country lane.

Suddenly she grabbed the steering wheel and he had to hang on and mash the brakes!

"We'll crash!" he yelled as the car skidded to a stop.

"I thought you wanted it!" he said, while she sobbed hysterically. "I thought this is what you wanted!"

"All I want is to go home!" she wailed.

He started the car warily and turned around in a field entrance. His whole demeanor changed. He said quietly, "I've had a drink or two, yo
u s
ee.

When they got near the A6 he pulled over and quickly opened her door. But he held on to the handle. "Give me a kiss then," he said.

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 u
s t
o him."

It was the same old story. The police were asking for help and gettin
g n
othing 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

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 th
e c
hurchyard 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.

Chapter
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 fe
w l
ame 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 m 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!"