The Blooding (31 page)

Because it's really a story of my life, not just the story of a month or two."

So he was attempting control even before they got him to the station.

Mick Thomas assigned a man to phone everyone on the team and t
o k
eep ringing until they were all found. He didn't want anyone to get th
e n
ews secondhand, not after four long years. He discovered that he and
Mick Mason were going to finish this job themselves, even though a superintendent would ordinarily conduct such an important interview. But there was no senior officer present.

Every member of the team was bewildered. Supt. Tony Painter had gone home before they'd made the arrest that would conclude the most important murder inquiry ever conducted by the Leicestershire police. But Tony Painter was a very proud man. Perhaps, after clinging so long to his belief in the guilt of the kitchen porter, he just needed some time to deal with it.

After Colin Pitchfork made his phone calls and had a cup of tea, Mick Mason turned on the tape machine. The prisoner said, "You know, before we actually go into the rigmarole of the details, can we sort out other bits and bobs?"

He began with his earliest memories. He started by telling them of a friend he'd had when he was eleven. He'd never had many friends in his life. He told them of the Scouts, of his triumphs there. When he had finished describing his first fourteen years on earth, they wanted to please talk about the murders. But it got him angry. Colin Pitchfork threatened to shut down the confession unless they did it his way, beginning with his earliest recollections to the present. Every fascinating event in his fascinating life. It took hours. The stage was his. They were bored to tears.

After Carole Pitchfork had attempted to attack her husband, she lost touch with the flow of events.

"Next thing, I was outside with all those coppers," she later recalled. "And soon he was gone from our house."

When she got her wits about her, she asked the police to call a neighbor to look after the kids. When the neighbor took the children home for the night, her older son cried. He wanted to watch The A-Team, and to make pictures with the new set of paints they'd just bought him.

Carole remembered shouting at the cops about the searching, and being told, "We have to have your permission to search."

"Get on with it!" she cried. "Get on with it." Then she picked up a toy fire engine and threw it across the room.

After she deliberately pushed over the bookcase, Derek Pearce persuaded her to calm herself. They searched the house until 1:00 A
. M
. but found no significant evidence.

The couple who lived next door came to assist her, and along with Carole they consumed a bottle and a half of brandy during the course of thepolice search. Then Colin's brother arrived with a girlfriend and offered to sit up all night with Carole. She rang her father who cut short his vacation to run to his daughter.

Carole got a blinding headache that evening, the worst of her life. Pearce offered to send for a police surgeon, but Carole refused. Then he rang her family doctor who came to the house, examined her briefly, and said, "You've got a migraine."

When Carole said, "I don't get migraines," the doctor replied, "You've got one now."

The journalists came the next morning. In droves. She hid inside behind locked doors and drawn curtains. The reporters photographed everything in sight--the house, car, street, windows--waiting for those curtains to move or even twitch. Their cameras rooted into every crevice.

One of Carole's more irrepressible neighbors, who finally despaired of making the reporters go away, went to the window, opened the curtains, raised her T-shirt and bared her breasts.

"Put those in your fucking paper!" she yelled.

They were the only things they didn't photograph.

When at last Mick Thomas and Mick Mason were permitted by Colin Pitchfork to ask questions about the murder of Lynda Mann, the prisoner again took his time setting the stage. He described how he and Carole had been preparing to move into Littlethorpe in December, 1983, and how he was recording music that night for a going-away party. He told of dropping off Carole at the college and going on a wander for a girl to flash, then of driving down Narborough Road and turning on Forest Road where he saw the young girl walking.

"Which way was she walking?" Mick Thomas asked.

Colin Pitchfork grinned triumphantly and said, "This is one of the questions you've always wanted to know, isn't it? She was walking from Narborough up to Enderby. At that time the new housing estate wasn't there, was it?"

"And then?"

"Then I turned the car around, my red Ford Escort. I reversed in the drive of The Woodlands, there across from the mental hospital. And I left the car in the drive. The baby were in a carrycot in the back. Always been a big believer in restraints, you know. Car restraints."

Apparently satisfied that he'd vindicated his parenting, he said, "I set myself a walking place to meet her under the light. It was very dark there. And cold. With me only wearing jeans and a jumper. Have to be under a light. It's no good flashing yourself in the dark, is it? And when she got u
p t
o where I stood, I did it. The shock, I would say shock, made her run backwards toward the footpath. She left the main road."

"You were surprised?"

"You see, the way she'd been traveling toward where I parked, I couldn't flash her and run back to my car right away or she'd have seen it. If she'd just walked by me like all the others did, I would've started walking down the road, then doubled back and got the car after she got out of sight. But it never happened like that."

And then what?" Mick Thomas asked. "After she ran in shock toward the footpath?"

"It were the thing," he said. "The flashing. It got the excitement. . . . It was there She suddenly ran herself back into a dark footpath. On her own. There were an open field by the footpath. She had run herself into . . ."

Mick Thomas said, "A worse position."

"Yeah. She ran herself into a dark footpath on her own, and she just froze."

"And what did you do?"

"I went up to her and grabbed her and she didn't really resist me when I grabbed her. I took her off the footpath and had a conversation with her."

"What did Lynda say?" Mick Mason interjected.

" 'What are you doing to me? What about your wife? Where have you come from? What are you doing this for? What have I done to you?" Then Cohn Pitchfork said to the detectives, "This is the thing I don't understand about flashing. One percent of the time you get someone who goes mad and screams and you have to disappear quick. But all the others walk by you. Just walk by you and ignore you. But she turned and ran into a dark footpath. She backed herself into a corner."

"Her mistake?"

"If she'd walked by, the situation would've disappeared. But she ran back and stood there. She froze. Her two big mistakes were running into the footpath and saying, 'What about your wife?' She'd seen my wedding ring."

"What happened next?"

"By then the urge hadn't subsided at all," Colin Pitchfork said. "It was just getting stronger. Because not only had she got herself into the situation, she hadn't screamed. She hadn't struggled. If she'd screamed she would've probably scared me off. I suppose you'd say I raped her. You'd have to say I raped her."

Mick Thomas said, "You tell us what happened."

"I raped her in a way," Colin Pitchfork said. "But it wasn't forcible, like if I ripped her clothes off and jumped on her and beat her up. I just said I was going to do it to her."

"Did you remove any of her clothing?"

"No, she did. You might think I'm a bloody crank confessing to it. I know this is a daft thing to say but I can remember every bloody detail because it's haunted me. She had on a black donkey jacket. Her trousers had got zips. She were getting most anxious taking her trousers off because the zip jammed. So I just told her I'd do it. 'Don't you do it,' she said. `You'll rip my new trousers.' I said, 'Where do you live?' She said, 'There.' I said, 'Where have you been?' She said, 'At my friend's to get some records.' She was trying to calm me down. Talking me out of it."

And at this point, Sgt. Mick Mason--who later admitted his "emotional involvement"--wasn't merely trying to establish the legal elements of rape when he said, "And was she terrified?"

Colin Pitchfork just shrugged and said, "Yeah. But rather than scream and struggle and fight, she decided just to let me do it. It were then that I actually satisfied myself. But I suddenly realized that I got myself into deeper shit than I ever got myself into. Before that, if the police had a look at me it was as a flasher. It was a pain in the arse, but never actually did nowt to me, that flashing trouble. But not now."

"This was different."

"The thing that was preying on me mind was that she said, 'What about your wife?' She knew I was married. Was that because I'd said something? No! She saw the ring!"

"Your wedding ring," Mick Thomas said.

"Yeah. I also realized I'd got an earring on. And I'd been losing me bloody hair. She could describe those things. She'd almost stopped fighting then. She thought it was over."

"Yes. And then?"

"I suddenly realized I were going to come and live there in the village, in a month. She lived there. Almost certainly she'd see me in the village. The earring, the hairline, the wedding ring. There was no way out. I was trapped."

When they changed tapes Mick Thomas tried to establish exactly where Lynda Mann had been murdered. At first Colin Pitchfork had said on the path, but then he described the killing ground as "a copse," an area beside the path. He didn't seem comfortable with admitting that Lynda had been dragged off the path, through the gate and into the copse, whic
h w
ould have presupposed initial force and violence, such as a hard blow that could have caused the bruise on her chin. Colin Pitchfork said that the gate was already open when she ran into the wooded area beside The Black Pad.

When it was time to talk about the semen having been found on th
e g
enital hair, he brushed off the suggestion of premature ejaculation. Mick Thomas asked, "Were you erect? Was your penis hard?" "Yeah," he answered at once.

"Did you insert your penis into her vagina fully?"

"Yeah."

"Did you ejaculate inside her?"

"Yeah."

"Fully?"

"I dunno," he said, testily. "I says to her, 'Is it hurting you?' She says, `A bit.' I says, 'Try and relax. I'll try not to hurt you. Are you all right?"

"When you say you ejaculated inside her, what happened immediately after you ejaculated?"

"I thought, 'You just can't leave her. Because if you leave her you're going to court.' That's when I strangled her."

"How did you strangle her?"

"Hands. I was still inside when I thought, 'Shit! You've got to do the lot!' I was still inside her when I put my hands up to her throat. Her immediate reaction was to struggle, so I came out of her. I got to kneeling, but she'd twisted around and half sat up. She was struggling."

Mick Mason jumped in then and said, "Do you think she knew you were going to kill her with your hands going to her throat?"

It may have been the look in the older detective's eyes; it may have been the tone of his voice, his inability to maintain the detachment of his younger superior officer. Colin Pitchfork was obviously put off by Mason. He said, "I don't know. I suppose that's difficult to say: what somebody's thinking in blind terror"

Mick Thomas, wanting to get the prisoner relaxed again, said, "Yes. And then what did she do?"

"She squirmed sideways," Colin Pitchfork said. "Kicked her arms and legs, jumped half up, started going mad. And then she got sitting up and I leaned me weight on her to knock her down again. I put her on her back, basically to stop her fighting."

Mick Thomas said, "When she was jumping and panicking, did it change your attitude toward her?"

"Yeah, because it became a threat. When she were still calm, I had control of the situation."

Mick Thomas said, "When you didn't have control, did you hit her?"

"Hit her? What, physically? I don't think so. I may've knocked her, to get her into a position to strangle her. I never really hit her. Not with any force."

Colin Pitchfork had been trying to explain control and the loss of it while he was trying to control the interview, even as Mick Mason was losing some control and causing Colin Pitchfork discomfort. Unlike other clever sociopaths, Colin Pitchfork had never taken the opportunity to imitate appropriate responses to emotions he couldn't feel, therefore his frowns and smiles were utterly out of sync with the subject.

Mason pointed to Colin Pitchfork's bulky upper body and said, "You'd be intimidating even to a big bloke. I'll be dead straight with you. I can't comprehend what these girls must have felt!"

Colin Pitchfork stared into the eyes of the big detective, eyes as blue as wisteria, and said warily, "Yeah, I can see by your face that you're amazed by it." Then he turned to Mick Thomas for empathy, and said, "I mean, I ain't proud. I'm just staying calm because you want the story out of me. So if we do it together, easy. Okay?"