The Jigsaw Man (39 page)

‘But what bits turned you on? What was the bits that really, you know, turned you on? Seeing the dead body or imagining it, what was it?’

‘Things that he did that he was actually having sex with her at the same time, force, forcing himself into her and that.’

‘Is that what he did?’

‘That’s what he must have done. Yeah. But I mean he must. He probably went just crazy while he was, you know, while he was fucking her, you know, cos she was stabbed about forty-nine times, something like that…’

After leaving the cafe, they began walking through Hyde Park.

Lizzie said, ‘Didn’t they tell you where he’d stabbed her first?’

‘No, no, all I know is that he stabbed her forty-nine times, you know, her head was decapitated.’

‘Was it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why’s that, what did he try and do?’

‘Probably just trying to cut her head off.’

‘You say she was just gaping wide open.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What, her genitals?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah she was, that’s the way it, ‘cos, ah, the photograph was like, ah [he shifts position until he is lying on the ground on his left side with his knees pulled up, his head tilted back and his arms to the side, clasped his hands together as if in prayer]. She’s like that and she was like that.’

‘Lying, what lying on her side?’

‘Yeah and her head was sort of over like that [he tilts his head right back], you know so it must have been sort of half off, but the photograph was taken from that end you know [he points to the direction of his backside].’

Again he had given detailed knowledge of Rachel’s body which couldn’t be explained by the single photograph he’d been shown. In particular, he showed how her hands were positioned, palm to palm, yet the image marked KP 27 didn’t show her hands.

Stagg also repeated his account of being on the common at the time of the murder but specifically denied that he was the murderer.

The upper time limit for the operation that I had specified at the outset had now been reached and it was clear to me that the covert operation had run its course. At a conference between the CPS, the police and myself, it was agreed that Stagg was now unlikely to confess to Lizzie, even if he was the murderer. At the same time, in the light of the Star article, he would probably find that a number of women were willing to correspond with him.

Rather than taint the material already gathered, it was decided to end the covert operation and send Lizzie James into retirement. This had to be done carefully. With the police now increasingly believing that Stagg should be charged with murder, it was vital that Lizzie break off contact in such a way as to minimize the risk of him becoming angry and being propelled into harming someone else.

The last of the letters was sent on 10 August, 1993, and the following day I was in the incident room when Pedder told me that a decision had been made to arrest and charge Colin Stagg. Senior lawyers from the CPS had reviewed all the material and agreed there was enough to make a case. Pedder and I discussed the interviews and both of us expected Stagg to immediately summon a solicitor and go ‘no comment’. However, it was still important to put all of his non-answers on the record and Pedder asked me to listen to the early interrogations.

When Stagg was arrested on 17 August there was a tremendous sense of excitement in the Wimbledon Police Station. Many of the officers had invested more than twelve months of their lives into this one case and now felt that their efforts had been justified. At one point the deputy assistant commissioner arrived to add his congratulations. He strode through the door, resplendent in his braided uniform, and he turned to Pedder. ‘We’re not going to get egg on our faces over this, are we?’ he asked.

‘Trust me,’ said Keith, unwilling to even contemplate failure.

Bruce Butler, the special case-work lawyer for the CPS, said that he’d need a statement from me to show the probity of the covert operation and to explain how it was designed to lead towards the implication or the elimination of the suspect. He explained to me the sensitivity and precedent-making nature of the case which meant the paperwork had to be perfect and every point covered.

Not being a lawyer, I wasn’t aware of the difficulties being envisaged, in particular the likelihood of a defence motion that the evidence gathered during the covert operation was inadmissible because it amounted to entrapment or an interview not under caution. Right at the outset I’d been assured that this wasn’t an issue.

‘High-level policy discussions are involved,’ Butler explained. ‘This goes right to the top.’

‘And who’s at the top?’ I asked.

‘This case sits at the top of the attorney general’s special case list. It’s reviewed weekly.’

I remember asking Pedder what would happen if the evidence was ruled inadmissible?

‘There’s no chance of that,’ he said. ‘We have the very best advice. Trust me.’

I didn’t ponder the question again, it wasn’t my business or responsibility. The decision to undertake the covert operation and ultimately to charge Colin Stagg had been made by these people - it was their show.

Over the following weeks and months, I attended a number of meetings with CPS lawyers and Treasury Counsel acting for the Crown. Having been remanded in custody, Stagg would stay in a remand prison until the preliminary hearing before a magistrate in the New Year. Any thoughts or dreams that I might have had about a quieter more normal life were rapidly punctured. Even when I took a few weeks’ annual leave in October, ostensibly for my son’s wedding, the time was hijacked by fresh cases. I was deeply involved in the murder inquiry into Nikki Allen, aged seven, who had been stabbed and battered on the Wear Garth estate in Sunderland. Elsewhere, I was looking into a number of rapes in Islington, North London, and also advising detectives from Cumbria about a series of indecent phone calls.

Some crimes capture the public’s imagination and others seem to get lost in the ebb and flow of other news events. Normally, it’s quite easy to see why, for example if the victim is young and attractive and the crime is particularly public and chilling, however, this didn’t explain why the deaths of Samantha Bissett and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine had received so little publicity in the final months of 1993.

It is something that the SIO Mickey Banks, a detective superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, asked me when we first met in southeast London a week after the murders. Publicity can be the life-blood of an inquiry, particularly when the crime is unusual and the suspect isn’t obvious. Without meaning to sound callous, Banks complained, ‘What more do the bastards [the media] want? Here you have a lovely mother and her child murdered in the most horrible way and they just won’t take it. It should be all over the place.’

I understood his confusion. I very rarely use the word ‘horrible’ because it’s uttered so often nowadays that it’s become trite and impotent, but the deaths of Samantha and Jazmine were truly horrible and their killer had to be caught quickly.

Banks and Keith Pedder were friends and Pedder had mentioned my work on the Rachel Nickell case. It led to a call on 9 November, and an appointment to meet the next day. In spite of his directions, I still managed to get lost finding Thamesmead Police Station.

I’d never seen a station that looked more like a Portakabin extension or the high school from hell. It seemed to have been thrown together and surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Now I knew why Banks had urged me to bring my car into the police compound, or risk losing it.

‘Hello, Paul. You’re late,’ he said without sounding critical. ‘Have trouble finding us? Decent trip? Glad you were able to get here. Where’s your car? Cup of tea? Sugar? Milk?’

He continued chatting as we arrived at his office door which had a handwritten cardboard sign saying ‘SIO’ taped to the outside. Banks, in his mid-fifties with a craggy face and well-lined forehead, didn’t stand on ceremony and immediately shrugged off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and lit a cigarette. He struck me as an operational-style of detective without time for bureaucratic formalities or niceties; ‘one of the boys’ who gained respect from his team because he mixed with them, drank with them and worked harder than they did.

There seemed to be more cigarette smoke than air in the room but in deference to me he opened a window and only smoked one at a time.

He asked me, ‘What do you want?’

‘Whatever you can show me.’

‘We’ve got a mum and a four-year-old daughter murdered in a bloody frenzy,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s not something you see very often and I never want to see it again. Samantha Bissett and her daughter Jazmine lived in a flat in Plumstead. Their bodies were found last Thursday morning [4 November] by her boyfriend. We’re not entirely sure of the chronology because he hasn’t been eliminated as a suspect.’

Banks pulled out an album of crime-scene photographs and skipped over the establishing shots. ‘I can tell you it was so bad that the photographer has been off work ever since. Sam was stabbed and mutilated. This is how we found her.’

The image was almost surreal. The naked body of a young woman lay on the floor with her entire torso sliced open and her rib cage pulled back so that her organs were displayed. So many thoughts raced through my mind and I felt a mixture of horror, sadness and disbelief. I’d seen dozens of scene of crime photographs before - every one of them is etched into my mind so that I’m unable to forget - but this was different. It was almost like a tableau, as if someone had butchered and opened her in a perverted display that they regarded as a piece of artistry.

Jack the Ripper would have been proud of this piece of work, I thought. I’ve seen the photographs of his victims and one in particular, the last attributed to him, Mary Jane Kelly, was left in a very similar way to Samantha Bissett. The major difference was that the man who stalked the prostitutes of Whitechapel a century earlier had opened them up crudely and quickly before escaping. Samantha’s killer had taken his time and created his tableau joyfully.

This sense of theatrical display was heightened by the almost complete lack of blood around the body. It triggered my first question.

‘Where is it? Where’s the blood?’ I asked. ‘Most of the injuries were after death,’ said Banks, turning to another photograph. A large pool of blood stained the carpet in the hall. ‘We think he killed her near the front door, then he dragged her into the lounge. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of a breakin and she had good locks; the flat wasn’t ransacked and we haven’t found any evidence that anything was stolen.’

Although he tried to describe what happened, Banks didn’t have the words and simply flicked through the photographs showing how she had been found. He pointed out a bloody shoe-print found in the kitchen - the only room in the flat that bore signs of having been rifled and disturbed - and then turned to a general shot of the bedroom.

I had to look carefully before I noticed the head of a very young child emerging from the duvet of a bunk bed in the left-hand corner of the room. Lying on her front with her face turned towards the wall, she looked like she was sleeping and dreaming of all the things that children dream about.

Sadly, it wasn’t the case. Jazmine had been stripped, sexually assaulted, redressed, put back into bed and smothered with a pillow. What sort of person would do this? What part of hell’s pit did he crawl from?

These are the questions that Mickey Banks wanted answered, along with my opinion on what the killer might do next. He took me through the incident room, introducing me to some of his team and explaining various actions that had been initiated. Officers were going door to door in the surrounding streets, others were tracking down Samantha’s friends, past boyfriends and her movements in the days leading up to her death.

She was last seen on Wednesday 3 November, picking up Jazmine from nursery school. She’d hurried to get there on foot and arrived just in time at 3.30 p.m. She and Jazmine then took a minicab for the mile and a half journey home to their ground-floor flat in Heathfield Terrace, Plumstead.

Richard Ellam had been her steady boyfriend since early 1991. He told police that he stayed at Samantha’s flat on weekends and occasionally during the week but based himself at his father’s house in nearby Sidcup in Kent. He last saw Samantha on Wednesday at 12.45 p.m. when he dropped in to the flat. They were both excited about taking Jazmine on a holiday to the Gambia on 11 November and talked about the trip. An hour later he left and walked to his job at a chemical pigments factory.

On Thursday, Ellam woke at 8.30 a.m. and went to the bank and chemist before taking a Number 51 bus to Samantha’s flat. When no-one answered the door, he used his keys and entered, calling out ‘Hello’. He noticed the dark stain on the carpet and thought something had been spilt. Walking into the lounge room, he discovered Samantha’s partially covered body lying in front of the gas fire. Moving to the bedroom he thought Jazmine might be sleeping but realized that she couldn’t be, she lay too still.

‘We haven’t ruled him out,’ said Banks, stabbing out another cigarette.

‘Is he the father?’

‘No. That distinction belongs to a New Age traveller from Hampshire. He’s been in touch and we’re checking his alibi.’

The door-to-door inquiries had also thrown up several unknown vehicles and unknown males seen in the area in the weeks beforehand. Neighbours reported hearing a man and woman shouting in the flat between 10.30 p.m. and 11.00 p.m. on Wednesday. Two witnesses reported hearing a man and a woman arguing ‘in the vicinity’ of the flat.

Ellam had told police that a week before the murder, Samantha had told him about a man looking through the window when she went to bed at night. He ran off before she could get a good look at him.

Susan Dewar, whose home overlooked the ground-floor flat, recalled being woken by the sounds of a short scream at 3.00 a.m. on 4 November. She looked out of her window and saw the lights on in Samantha’s flat. A fortnight earlier, she was ironing and saw a man staring in at her back door. She described him as being frightening and having piercing eyes.