Blooding Page 3
He did everything at his own pace, from driving a car (daringly) to mixing beer, Scotch and vodka (daringly). And Derek Pearce fed on stress. If the job didn’t supply enough anxiety, he’d find some. John McEnroe would understand.
Pearce was thirty-three years old, just under six feet tall, and slim. But he seemed very slender. Anyone who survives such an energy overload seems very slender. In a pin-striped suit he could’ve been a young barrister at Crown Court. His thatch of darkest-brown hair and Royal Shakespeare Company beard were closely cropped. He could’ve played Petruchio in Kiss Me Kate.
Pearce’s glasses made his brown eyes dilate when he was flying into someone’s face. Occasionally he was imprudent enough to take intensity-fueled flights at superior officers.
His four-year, childless marriage to a policewoman had just ended, and Pearce lived alone with a very large English sheepdog named Ollie. Police work was his life.
Pearce had been off the Hogg inquiry only one day when he received the word from a fellow detective inspector: “We’ve got another murder. This one’s in Narborough.”
“You’re winding me up!” he said. “Tell me it’s a joke!”
“It was a quirk of fate that I got on the case at all,” he later recalled. “The other DI had to go to the Crown Court, and it isn’t easy to get out of it when you’re summoned to the Crown Court.”
“It’s all yours,” he was told by the court-bound DI. “Cheers, mate.”
Pearce immediately organized the call-out of a squad that would grow to 150 men and women.
When Derek Pearce got to the crime scene that day, he was told by Chief Supt. Baker to drive to the home of Edward Eastwood and bring him to identify the body which they were reasonably certain was that of his stepdaughter, reported missing the night before.
At 11:15 A.M. Eddie Eastwood was back at The Black Pad where he met Baker and a scene-of-crime officer who was trying to gather exhibits.
When a detective lifted the shiny black sheet, Eddie Eastwood looked and said, “That’s Lynda.”
“Are you sure?” the detective asked.
“Put it down!” Eddie said. “That’s her.”
Death had sculpted and painted and done its masquerade. But Eddie knew that the pale contorted face with the half-lidded wistful gaze and clenched tongue belonged to his pretty stepdaughter, Lynda Mann. He knew because he recognized the donkey jacket that she’d been paying for a bit at a time.
Pearce was allocated to deal with the family. He took with him Detective Sergeant Mick Mason, a perfect choice. The family immediately took to Mason.
“Mick’s that kind of bloke,” Pearce said. “One hundred percent solid.”
Mick Mason promised the Eastwoods he’d keep them informed of the progress of the inquiry until it was over. Like the others, he thought it might last a week at most.
Kath Eastwood was, as she later put it, “in a daze” that day. She sat at home and offered tea to the various detectives who came.
“I had ever so much trouble,” she later remembered, “just trying to understand anything said to me.”
Did Lynda have a boyfriend? How about a former boyfriend? Lynda’s ears were pierced but she wasn’t wearing earrings. Was she wearing earrings the last time you saw her? Questions like that.
That day, Kathleen Eastwood sat and tried to recall whether or not Lynda had been wearing her ear studs. The last time you saw her. It took a few minutes even to begin to conceptualize what that must mean.
“She might’ve been wearing ear studs” was all Kath could offer. “And gloves. Perhaps she had her gloves, ones without fingertips.”
But she couldn’t be sure. Everything was mixed up. This couldn’t be happening because Lynda had planned her future so completely! It was all Kath could think about. Lynda’s future was assured.
The last time I saw her.
5
Victims
A postmortem was conducted at 2:00 P.M. on the 23rd of November at the Leicester Royal Infirmary with Chief Supt. Baker and Supt. Coutts in attendance.
The body of Lynda Mann measured five feet two inches. It weighed 112 pounds. Facial abrasions were noted on the right upper cheek and orbit, as well as on the chin and the front of her neck. Detectives speculated that she may have been punched on the chin, perhaps knocked unconscious by her assailant. There was bruising below the middle of the left and right clavicles.
As to those chest bruises the pathologist wrote: “Conditions would suggest that this girl was struck a heavy blow to the upper chest.” Detectives, however, speculated that the bruising might have been caused by an assailant kneeling on the girl to provide leverage as he tightened her own scarf around her neck as a ligature. By the left knee if he was right-handed.
The fingernails were long, partly painted and unbroken, indicating that Lynda Mann probably had not put up a terrific fight. There was no damage to the anus, and the vagina showed no tears or bruises. The tongue had been gouged by her own teeth as she died strangling. She was probably not unconscious when the final force was applied.
The principal scientific officer from the Forensic Science Laboratory at Huntingdon doubted there had been a protracted struggle. He wrote that the arrangement of the tennis shoes “indicated voluntary removal.” He found the pubic hair around the vagina to be matted with dried fluid, probably semen. Soil marks on the back of her bare heels suggested that her body had been dragged by the upper half, perhaps by the donkey jacket.
It was discovered that the zip tab on her jeans was jammed, consistent with the belief that they had been stripped from her body by the assailant who had left them rolled up, inside out. Officially, the cause of death was from asphyxia due to strangulation.
At the conclusion of the postmortem report the pathologist wrote: “Sexual intercourse was attempted and premature ejaculation occurred.”
A worried spokesman for Carlton Hayes Hospital gave a statement to inquiring reporters: “Although this tragedy is right on our doorstep, there is no reason to suspect there is any connection with the hospital.”
Which, when reported to Derek Pearce, caused him to look at the looming psychiatric hospital and say, “Oh yeah. Loonies and maniacs hanging out every flippin window and there’s no reason to suspect any connection!”
Eddie Eastwood gave the interviews for the family when reporters from all the media arrived at the little semi-detached council house in Narborough.
Eddie sat, head in hands, and said, “I feel like I’ve been hit over the skull with a brick. It just will not sink in. Lynda was such a happy, polite girl. A little old fashioned but very popular at school and conscientious about her schoolwork. It’s unbelievable that anyone could do this to her. My wife and I are devastated.”
Friends of Kath Eastwood never doubted that. Kath just sat numbed, responding when she must. She could not even weep.
The laboratory analysis offered the murder squad its first positive clue. The report showed that the killer had, after ejaculating prematurely, managed to penetrate the victim prior to death. Semen was taken from an internal labial swab and on a deep vaginal swab.
Given a phosphoglucomutase (PGM) grouping test, the semen showed strong PGM 1 + enzyme reaction. It was antigen-tested and found to contain strong amounts of Group A secretor substance.
The officers on the murder inquiry were told that only one out of ten male adults in England was in this particular blood group. The scientific label would remain the only clue they possessed. The killer was a Group A secretor, PGM 1 +. Without understanding exactly what it meant, hundreds of police officers would repeat it for nearly four years: “We’re looking for a PGM one-plus, ‘A’ secretor.” Though a blood test could not positively identify a killer, it could be used as a tool, and it was so used on Edward Eastwood.
Eddie always believed he’d been fingered by one of Lynda’s former boyfriends who had a grudge against him. Actually, Derek Pearce was following the timeworn police procedure of looking from the inside out. Edd
ie Eastwood was only a stepfather and had belonged to Lynda Mann’s family for a relatively short time. Pearce supposed Eddie could have killed her at home and dumped her there by The Black Pad.
“I’ve told Mister Coutts I want to nick Eddie,” Derek Pearce explained matter-of-factly to his subordinates. “And I’m going to do it.”
Pearce got Eddie out of bed at nine o’clock at night. Eddie complained that he was ill, but Pearce wasn’t using his bedside manner. “He’s the kind that gets sick at the drop of a hat,” Pearce said of Eddie Eastwood. “He’s always on sick leave from work.”
“I never liked him from the first,” Eddie later said of Pearce. “And me stepdaughter Susan, she came to despise him. I heard the other CID man saying to Pearce, ‘Eddie Eastwood never murdered nobody!’ but Pearce said, ‘I don’t care, we’re going to blood-test him anyway.’ A bully copper, that’s Pearce.”
“Everyone else that’s closely associated with Lynda is having to give blood,” Pearce said to Eddie that night. “And one or two people think you might be involved.”
“You saying I killed me own daughter?” Eddie challenged.
“Stepdaughter. No, I personally don’t think so, but that’s all right, I’ll take you in the car and bring you back home. This’ll eliminate you completely.”
“I’m a sick man!” Eddie told him. “I got arthritis in the lower back!”
“Yeah, well, I’m not all that fit, m’self,” Pearce said. “We’ll both feel better when this is over, won’t we, mate?”
While Eddie was shuffling past a queue of suspects in the police station that night, it occurred to him that he had actually been in the company of a policeman on the night of the murder.
“I just remembered!” he said. “I was playing darts in a pub with a copper! You can check.”
But Pearce didn’t seem to care if Eddie was a darts mate of the Lord Chief Justice. He took him to a doctor who drew blood from his arm. The doctor also took hair samples from his head, underarms and groin before Eddie got to return to his bed.
But Eddie’s alibi checked out, and, finally, it turned out that Eddie was not in the same 10 percent blood group as the slayer of Lynda Mann.
Derek Pearce, who wore eyeglasses in his everyday life, learned something of significance to him: Lynda Mann had had poor eyesight. She couldn’t recognize a friend across the street, but adolescent vanity prevented her from wearing glasses, and contact lenses were too expensive for her family.
Supt. Coutts remained convinced that Lynda Mann must have known her attacker, but then Coutts didn’t have to wear glasses to see across the street.
Pearce wondered if Lynda could have thought she knew the man, perhaps walked right up to him before realizing he was a stranger. When it was too late.
For a man like Eddie Eastwood, finding himself on the news at ten, given the attention of the national media, it was understandable if he indulged himself a bit. Eddie later said, “The humiliation of the blood test affected me speech. I couldn’t give a television interview for three weeks.”
It might be impossible for a cynical policeman to believe that Edward Eastwood could be experiencing anything like the overwhelming grief that Kath suffered, but on the other hand, Eddie had gone looking for his stepdaughter on that bitter night. Eddie had searched the streets and walked The Black Pad under a bright and brittle moon, and it was he who had to view the blood-blackened, ruined body of Lynda Mann.
They scoffed at the many interviews in which he, as the family spokesman, uttered a litany of personal heartbreak while Kath remained silent, stoic, shattered. But perhaps after the permanence of death was absorbed—after the media attention waned, after he had been taken from his bed and made to prove that he hadn’t raped and murdered Kath’s middle child—perhaps after all that, even a policeman could believe Eddie Eastwood when he said, “I went to a pub in Enderby one day. I went into the back room and just let go. I realized how much we were all victims of the one that done it. I cried like a child, I did.”
6
Village of Fear
As darkness fell on country lanes and village footpaths, women and girls rushed to their homes. Many parents insisted on walking or driving their children to school, and some threatened to keep them home until the “fiend” was caught. There were parents waiting at bus stops for weeks after the murder. Villagers in shops and pubs spoke in whispers and eyed one another strangely.
Rumors spread about a flasher who had exposed himself to another girl on The Black Pad. And a woman claimed to have once been assaulted on a different village footpath. A third told of having been “mugged,” of having her purse stolen weeks earlier on The Black Pad. None of these crimes had previously been reported.
There were calls to the Narborough Parish Council from terrified parents who wanted to light The Black Pad or close it down completely. And because a length of wood was found under the leg of the murdered girl, gossip had it that she’d been beaten half to death with a club before being raped.
The newspaper headlines referred to Narborough as VILLAGE OF FEAR. So it wasn’t just foul weather that left the village lanes so bereft of nighttime foot traffic. Not just winter mist and creeping wisps of fog that made women quicken their steps, under an oppressive stalking sky.
Chief Supt. Baker decided that it would be most convenient if the incident room could be set up in the village. He requested assistance from Carlton Hayes Hospital and was offered a doctors’ residence that the hospital hadn’t been using for everyday business. The building was called The Rosings, and the commemorative stone over the door said: A.D. 1906. Most of the brick buildings in the hospital complex had been built at that time, and The Rosings hadn’t been remodeled since.
The murder squad put its computers on the ground floor, and Supt. Coutts worked upstairs, along with several teams, the policewomen, and the card-index civilian workers. Other than that, they had one small room in which to relax and have a sandwich.
Computer retrieval was an art, the murder squad soon discovered. Two sergeants extracted all local handwritten records on everyone with indecency offenses, deleting those of men who were deceased or serving time in prison. They listed indecency offenders by putting rapists at the top, followed by those who’d committed rape in the general area of the Midlands, followed by rape in Leicestershire. The rape category was followed by less serious indecent assaults on females, all the way down to flashing offenses. They also computerized assaults on males, including boys, and broke these down to the flashing of males by males. Hundreds of man-hours were needed for this manual extraction before the information could be put in, and retrieved from, their new computer system. The overall plan was to link all information with names that might appear on the house-to-house inquiry.
It wasn’t nearly as bad in The Rosings as it was for the hospital squad and house-to-house teams who occupied the cricket pavilion. That pavilion, across from the hospital’s cricket pitch, was like a drafty shoe box built off the ground on an exposed foundation and “warmed” by an unvented gas heater. They held briefings in the pavilion, stopped there for tea and biscuits, and despite the thirty bodies working cheek to jowl it was said the pavilion stayed as cold as a lawyer’s heart.
But no matter how cold and cramped it was in the pavilion or in The Rosings, they persevered, in the belief that it couldn’t last long. Any one of them would’ve been shocked to think they’d be there at Christmas. They couldn’t foresee that they’d be jogging around that cricket pitch for exercise on warm spring days, or that they’d be there long enough to watch the birth of daffodils in the hospital gardens, and stay to see them die.
The house-to-house teams did what the name implies—they went door to door, to every residence in the three villages, filling out a pro forma document on each male resident between the ages of thirteen and thirty-four. That age had been arbitrarily selected when it was learned from lab technicians that the sperm count in the semen sample was high. Which prompted ad-libs from the over-
forty cops, such as: “Well, if I’m out of the age group, how is it I inflate the old woman every time I roll over in bed?”
Protests from middle-aged detectives notwithstanding, they investigated only younger men, and because the house-to-house teams went back five years, so did the hospital teams. It was a massive task to dig into hospital records and try to trace likely outpatients and resident patients who’d passed through Carlton Hayes over that period of time.
They had formed a hospital squad because of the number of sexual offenders, drug abusers and alcoholics treated at Carlton Hayes, not to mention the ordinary psychotics capable of rape and murder. Hospital spokesmen were cooperative after the police offered reassurances, but were understandably cautious about opening up confidential psychiatric files. The hospital would not give background information on patients but repeatedly assured police that the killer of Lynda Mann could not possibly have been one of the resident patients.
“Our wards are secure,” the murder squad was told.
After which, Derek Pearce told his men, “About as secure as Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoon. You’ll just have to be resourceful and sort out as many loonies as you can.”
When he was able to assemble a true picture of the monumental job they faced, Pearce said, “Bloody hell! There’s more people comes through this place every day than in Euston Station at rush hour, and that doesn’t even include the day center!”
There was a little brick outbuilding across the road from The Black Pad, on the grounds of The Woodlands, a large hospital residence made into a day center for people with mental problems not severe enough to be treated in the hospital. The inquiry teams discovered that teenagers would hang around the little brick building drinking beers or soda pop, eating sweets. They were able to prove that Lynda had been there once or twice with other teenagers. It was quite close to her house, closer yet to The Black Pad. They worked the lead exhaustively, but The Woodlands didn’t seem to figure in the murder.