The Jigsaw Man (49 page)

Prior to the trial of Robert Napper, the inquiry teams suggested that I might give a statement about my role and the similarities between the psychological profiles I had given for the Ecclestone rapes and the Plumstead murders. Ultimately, it wasn’t necessary for me to give evidence, although in due course I did learn what had happened during the rape investigation.

It emerged that Napper had, in fact, been interviewed by detectives as a suspect for the rapes. Acting on information from a neighbour two detective constables stopped him on his way to work on 28 August, 1992. At six feet two inches tall, Napper was considerably taller than the five feet seven inches to five feet nine inches suspect that the police had chosen to seek. In addition to this, he had no convictions for sexual offences and had also volunteered to take a DNA test - something the police felt was inconsistent with the behaviour of a guilty man. As a result, he was eliminated from the inquiry.

The reference to his height is quite important. Two weeks after I provided the Ecclestone psychological profile, Crimewatch UK featured a reconstruction of one of the rapes and it prompted almost 1,000 calls from the public, eclipsing all previous appeals. With such a vast number of leads to follow and suspects to trace and eliminate, the inquiry team decided to establish ‘elimination codes’ that would help officers to concentrate their efforts.

In Operation Ecclestone this code contained obvious elimination parameters such as a suspect having the wrong DNA, or being in prison at the time of the attacks. However, it also relied heavily on descriptions given by victims and witnesses. It set the offender’s age at between nineteen and thirty years old and his height at a minimum of five feet five inches and a maximum of six feet. This is despite the fact that the last rape victim had described her attacker as well over six foot.

On the basis of this code, Robert Napper could be immediately ruled out as a possible suspect if his name came up in the course of inquiries. Therefore, he wouldn’t be invited to Eltham police station at a convenient date to supply a sample of blood, a photograph and a palm print. As I studied the elimination code it became clear that the psychological profile hadn’t been used when the parameters were established. This was unfortunate because often the main value of a profile can be to narrow the number of potential suspects and allow police to focus their attention on the most likely individuals.

Ultimately, Operation Ecclestone investigated and eliminated nearly 900 suspects for the rapes up to March 1993 when the decision was made to close the operation down because of the absence of further attacks. At this time, another 390 investigatory actions had been raised by the inquiry but still remained incomplete.

How could it have happened? I thought. I know it’s easy in hindsight to make judgements and I’m the first to appreciate the pressures placed on the police when investigating violent crime, but there seemed to be so many warning signs and clues that were misread or ignored. Samantha and Jazmine Bissett should not have been murdered.

A part of me will always believe that I could have done more. I should have been more pushy and bloody minded when I delivered my profile to the rape inquiry. I know that some of my conclusions were not well received and I should have said, ‘Listen, this is where you’ll find him. Examine your records, talk to local police.’ I should have told them to get out and keep looking or, ‘I’ll bang on your door until you do.’

Robert Clive Napper professed his innocence until his Old Bailey trial in October when several days were taken up with legal argument as to whether he was mentally able to stand trial. Five psychiatrists had reached the conclusion that he was suffering from schizophrenia or similar mental illness but that Napper was desperately trying to conceal his madness within himself.

On 9 October, 1995, only minutes before a jury was to decide whether he was fit to stand trial, the defendant decided to plead not guilty to the murder of Stephanie and Jazmine but guilty to their manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. He also admitted a rape and two attempted rapes in 1992.

Accepting the pleas, Mr Justice Hooper said Napper had been responsible for offences of ‘grotesque magnitude’ and posed a ‘grave and immediate risk to the public’. He ordered him to be detained ‘without limit of time’.

Sadly, the sentencing came too late for Mrs Maggie Morrison, Samantha’s mother, who died three days earlier at her home south of Aberdeen. According to her husband Jack Morrison, a retired builder, she had never recovered from the ‘purgatory’ of having lost both her daughter and her granddaughter in such a way.

Mr Morrison praised the police but said the system had failed. ‘The police have been excellent throughout the whole investigation but a man like Napper should never have been on the streets with the freedom to kill.’

Eight days after the search began, seven bodies had been uncovered at 25 Cromwell Street which had now been labelled the ‘House of Horror’. After dinner each evening, I shut the study door and went over the interview transcripts of Frederick and Rosemary West looking for anything that I might have missed. What else could I tell John Bennett?

He called me on 7 March with something new on his mind. Despite extensive enquiries the police hadn’t managed to trace West’s first wife Rena Costello or their eldest daughter Charmaine. No-one had seen or heard from Rena since 1969 when she was known to have been living with West in a caravan near Kempley, about fifteen miles from Gloucester.

Charmaine and her sister Anne Marie had stayed with their father and moved into 25 Midland Road in 1971. This is where Charmaine, then aged eight, had last been seen. ‘What does Mr West have to say?’ I asked. ‘He says Rena came back for Charmaine and took her away.’

‘I think they are dead,’ I said, sadly.

‘Yes,’ Bennett replied.

We both knew there was only one way to be sure. The police would have to go back to every place West had worked and every place he’d lived and start looking. The logistics and cost of such an exercise were virtually incalculable. Where would it end? How many houses would be torn up? How many workplaces? What about the poor people living at those addresses now?

Over the next two days, two more bodies were found at Cromwell Street - the first concealed under the bathroom floor of the extension and the second in the cellar. There were now nine known victims and police were confident they knew the identities of five of them. It had been a massive task checking missing persons reports from as far away as Holland and Germany.

A week later Bennett called again, keen for me to go back to Gloucester. The pathology reports had been delivered and he wanted to update me on the latest interrogations of Mr West.

‘I can probably make it on Thursday.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said, pausing as if about to add something.

‘Anything in particular I should know?’

‘Well… ah… certain bones are missing from the skeletons.’

‘Missing or unrecovered?’

‘Missing. We’ve been bloody thorough,’ he said, somewhat touchily. ‘Mainly kneecaps and neck bones, but also a shoulder-blade and parts of the sternum.’

There are several explanations, I told him. The bones could have been taken as trophies, or removed during the process of constraint and torture. ‘There’s one other possibility but I don’t really want to talk about it now. Let’s leave it till Thursday.’

Bennett had his shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows and wore the look of a man who had spent all night working in the office. Around him, the walls of his office were papered with computer print-outs and wheel diagrams. Hundreds of missing person files were being checked and cross-checked, matched against the known movements of Frederick and Rosemary West. Diagrams numbered the bodies, the locations and what order they were found in.

Bennett, an old-fashioned detective who was born in Stroud and educated at the local grammar school, had got to grips with modern technology more quickly than many younger policemen. For this inquiry, he had his own software specialist in the incident room and he explained to me, in typically sanguine style, how he managed to get what he required.

‘I told him that I had a dream,’ he began, raising an eyelid to make sure he had my full attention. ‘I dreamed that we could take all the dates and locations of missing people and match them up with all the different information we have for Mr West. That could be very useful. Can you do that?’

The software expert had shuffled nervously opposite him and said, ‘Well, there isn’t really a programme that can do that. It’s never actually been done like that before.’

Bennett smiled and issued the gentle instruction, ‘Well, you go away and you see what you can do and then we’ll talk about it.’

A few days later the specialist had come back to him. ‘I’ve done it,’ he said proudly.

‘That’s good,’ Bennett told him. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

Then the SIO paused for a few moments, before saying, ‘I had a dream’ - there was a twinkling in his eyes - ‘the computer has done this for me, but I would want it to show me even more…’

He then asked for the databases being compiled on each victim, whether known or still to be identified, to be interfaced with the database holding the computer-generated graphics of 25 Cromwell Street and the sequence in which the bodies had been discovered.

By integrating and displaying as much information as possible in this way, Bennett knew it would assist him in keeping sight of the big picture in what was a massive investigation. It would also help him anticipate the obstructions West might raise and the challenges that would surely come from the defence team in any future trial.

‘We can’t do that,’ the specialist had said apologetically. ‘There is a system that does one thing and another for the second, but they belong to different companies and have been developed along different lines.’

‘You find a way of bolting them together then,’ Bennett had said.

‘But we’re not allowed to - there are copyrights on the software.’

‘Oh, you just get the companies together and sort it out.’

The computer specialist had looked rather dubious.

‘Listen,’ said Bennett, his voice harder. ‘This is relevant to my murder inquiry. If Mars Bars become relevant to this inquiry then I shall have them in that machine outside. You just go and do it.’ He did. Although neither of them realized it at the time, the result of their working relationship was the development of a new computing tool which would be enormously helpful to investigators in the solving of future serious crimes.

Opening a file, Bennett ran through the details of those victims who had been identified. Four of the women, including Lucy Partington, the twenty-one-year-old university student, had disappeared from bus stops or the vicinity, and a fifth had apparently been hitchhiking.

Carol Cooper, fifteen, was last seen by a bus conductor on 10 November, 1973, at 9.30 p.m. getting off a bus near her grandmother’s home in Worcester after going to the cinema with her boyfriend. Juanita Mott, seventeen, of Newent, disappeared on 11 April, 1975 after telling her family she was going to take a bus to Gloucester, ten miles away. Shirley Hubbard, fifteen, was last sighted in November 1974 at a bus stop after leaving Debenhams store in Worcester to return home. Therese Siegenthaler, a twenty-one-year-old sociology student from Trub, Switzerland, was working as a nanny in London in 1974 when she wrote to her brother saying she was to spend the Easter holiday in Ireland. She planned to hitchhike to the docks at Holyhead, Wales, and then catch a ferry.

Finally Bennett turned to the pathology report and handed me a copy. As I’d feared, it revealed that six of the burial pits contained evidence that the victims had been bound and gagged in various ways including having brown parcel tape looped around their heads to form a crude mask. In one of these ‘masks’ a narrow plastic tube was inserted into the front curling upwards into the nostril.

Looking at the photograph I felt a profound sadness. It was clear to me that the pipe had been used to keep the victim alive and to open up the possibilities of what they could do to her. Unable to see or to cry out, she would be totally under their control.

Bennett turned the page and referred to the missing bones. ‘There’s something else quite odd,’ he said. ‘Some of the larger bones have marks on them. The pathologist says they don’t make sense in terms of dismembering the bodies.’

‘They make sense to me,’ I said, looking up from the photographs. ‘When you carve meat you often leave marks on the bone.’

Bennett’s face fell.

I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t want to talk over the phone. I suspected that cannibalism might be part of the ritual. It would explain the missing bones.’

‘No,’ he said, looking horrified.

Each new piece of information reaffirmed my original analysis of what had happened, but if I was to expand upon it and really walk through the minds of Fred and Rosemary West it was important to visit the place that meant most to them - the ‘House of Horror’.

Terry Moore suggested we walk from the station. We strolled side by side in the bright sunshine through the quieter streets and quadrangles, beneath trees that were just beginning to bud. As we approached the back of the house I noticed a large television van with a saucer dish pointing to the sky. Two men were standing nearby and one of them looked up, his eyes lingering on my face as if I looked familiar to him. Feeling uncomfortable, I kept walking, not wanting to be recognized.

We turned left off the road onto a very short track that ran along the back of several houses. In the garden overlooking the rear of Number 25, I noticed a scaffolding and timber plank ‘grandstand’ that Moore explained had been put together by an enterprising neighbour so the various cameramen and photographers could get pictures of the excavation.

More than 300 tonnes of soil had been removed from the garden and it looked like a First World War battlefield. Now refilled, the muddy rectangle was criss-crossed by duck boards and well-screened by fir trees along one side and the red-brick wall of the Seventh Day Adventist church along the other.