A Deafening Silence E-Book

Simon Farquhar

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In a decade of researching and writing about crime, Simon Farquhar has met many of those professionally or personally affected by it. They all carry with them stories that the rest of the world has forgotten, but which to them remain unforgettable. In A Deafening Silence, five of these stories are told, in full, for the first time. Retracing these historic tragedies with a modern eye, talking to surviving witnesses and police officers, exploring Home Office files and even previously unseen evidence, each investigation reveals powerful truths about those who take away a human life and those bereaved by their actions, while shining a new light on how our society has changed – or still needs to change. Time is also taken to explore the untold stories of what happens after sentence is passed, after the press packs up and leaves, once the rest of the world has moved on. What becomes of the survivors, and what becomes of the criminals? What traces of these crimes still remain today? Exhaustively researched and sensitively written, these remarkable accounts are both harrowing and heartbreaking, presenting us with humanity at its cruellest, at its most vulnerable, at its most compassionate and at its most courageous.

Leseprobe

Cover illustrations: Front: Police officers search Wimbledon Common for Muriel McKay (Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix); Back: Graveyard shrouded in winter fog (Miravision/iStock)

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, Gl50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Simon Farquhar, 2024

The right of Simon Farquhar to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 642 4

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

To Sarahfor Saturdays in Surrey

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

A Tragedy in Fairyland

Janet Stevens (1955–1970)

High Windows

James Furze Gratton (1909–1968)

Dark Boundaries and Heart-Shaped Blades

Eleonora Essens (1920–1968)

A Fatal Collision

James William Cameron (1926–1970)

Vicious Circles

Roderick ‘Oscar’ Mayes (1948–1972)

Notes

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

A crime committed against one person has countless victims. Tragedy spreads out like spilled blood. To those affected directly or indirectly by serious crime, it makes little difference whether a case lives on in the public conscience. For them, the effects remain just as shattering and unatonable, regardless of who else may remember or care.

I have always been more interested in the victims than the criminals, in the effects than the causes. The causes are usually banal or unfathomable, while the effects are unpredictable and often unimaginable. In crime fiction, murder usually has a motive, and the cosier the fiction the more meticulously the motive can be mapped. The classic whodunnit is typically an exercise in reassuring escapism, sending us all to our beds with detailed explanations of how such things happen, making murder seem a far-fetched and faraway threat, an exotic puzzle which is fun to solve and does not involve real human suffering.

Likewise, detectives in fiction are usually at some distance from their real-life counterparts. Literary detectives, from the rose-growing Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868) to the opera-loving Inspector Morse, and most vividly Sherlock Holmes himself, are outsiders, solitaries who watch life through a window, with a darkened view of human nature, their detached, unconventional viewpoint enabling them to see the solution that plodders and bobbies miss, their superiority softened by eccentricity, their brilliance blemished by a destructive vice. Yet in my experience, real-life detectives are practical characters, determined yet diligent, resilient yet sensitive, with a pessimistic view of criminals but an optimistic view of ordinary people. It is this unrecognised sensitivity that is in part responsible for this book.

Police officers are fine storytellers – a skill crafted through years of having to piece a case together concisely and incisively, on paper and in the witness box. They find ways of compartmentalising, rationalising, even trivialising their experiences, but there is often one story which they cannot forget yet prefer not to remember. I have had the privilege to be told some of those stories. And in turn, I have found others along my own path. Some have stayed with me. The five that make up this book have obsessed me.

The fascination they hold for me is not itself reason enough to justify their inclusion. These stories are being told here for their relevance as well as for remembrance. Crimes of the past are a window into social history, revealing how the world has changed and, in some instances, how it still needs to change. While some of these stories suggest that criminality can occasionally be cured, what still seems to elude us is its prevention.

Some of the examples of societal attitudes and behaviours of the past are inevitably unsophisticated, shocking in their ignorance or their lack of compassion. While society has adopted a more compassionate attitude to such problems as delinquency, it has hardened its attitudes elsewhere, particularly regarding crimes of a sexual nature. Where we are progressing most, perhaps, is in our respect for the victims of crime and in the resources now available to them.

These stories come from a different age also in terms of attitudes towards the police. Compared with today’s aggressive controversies and scandals, these stories, which generally are examples of compassionate and diligent detection, should remind us of the value of public–police co-operation. They also warn us that an unquestioning hostility to the forces of law and order is as dangerous a stance as one of unquestioning respect, for most police officers do the best they can in a job that few of us could endure.

Recently, there have been devastating revelations of police officers being responsible for serious crimes, even murder. Such situations are rare but not unheard of. Dennis Nilsen was a former police officer and John Reginald Christie was a war reserve constable. It is an unfortunate fact that positions of authority and trust will always attract the vile as well as the valiant, for the same reason that there has been a disproportionately high number of sexual offenders among teachers and priests. Evil, predatory people see in those positions a way to gain access to the vulnerable. It is agreed that applicants for police forces need fiercer scrutiny. But police forces also need the co-operation of the public if we, as a society, are to be protected by them rather than from them.

Any writer in the genre of true crime must wrestle with those moral questions concerning intruding on private suffering and the avoidance of insensitivity and voyeurism. A great deal of trust and generosity has been shown to me during my research. I hope that those people who have shared their stories with me will not have cause for regret.

The playwright John Hopkins devoted much of his career to writing about the effects of crime. Shortly before his death in 1992, he said:

The desire to discover the truth of why a man lives in this hellish situation where he murders, where he lives with evil, compromises with evil … to use a less emotive word, does bad things … we search to understand.

The stories I told took me down dark roads, into areas that have not been good for me. I’m not well, I have Parkinson’s, but more important than that, I think that the work that I have done over the last thirty years has taken such a toll on my ability to deal with this evil that I have written about and thought about and tried to understand. But it’s an incurable obsession, and it will wreak its havoc on you.

In the end the only thing that you want to do is understand why one person hurts another person.1

This book was christened A Deafening Silence because one thing that I have learned above all else in a decade of writing about historic crimes is that for those who lose someone through murder, an enduring, inescapable silence fills their lives, a silence that remains forever unbroken. A case may be half a century old, its only remaining public trace a few lines in a yellowed newspaper, but when one comes face to face with a member of the victim’s family, you realise that, in their world, it happened yesterday.

There is a further reason why this book is called A Deafening Silence. It is a reference to the overwhelming lack of answers that there still are, and perhaps always will be, to the simple question of why such things happen, how one person can wish to take the life of another, to gain so little through causing so much pain.

Simon FarquharLondonApril 2024

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Delving into these stories to the extent that I have requires considerable access and considerable trust. Therefore, I am grateful to not only those official sources who have assisted me but also those families, friends and witnesses who have entrusted their stories to me.

My sincere thanks to Tony Forward, John Hurst, Bob Bartlett, Bob Fenton, Surrey Constabulary, Bernard Roder, Dee Elliott, Kevin Crouch, the staff of the British Library, The National Archives, Martin Rosenbaum, Surrey History Centre, Benjamin Reynolds at MACE, Kathleen Dickson of the BFI, Kaleidoscope, BBC Information & Archives, ITV Archives, Michael Milligan, HM Prison Service, the Ministry of Justice, Leatherhead Museum and History Society, Matt Ward and the Guardian Photo Archives, the Brian Rix Archive, Susan Schlicht of the House of Lords Library, Leatherhead Golf Club, Jaime McMurtie at Nottinghamshire Archives, Dr Khaldoon Ahmed, Springfield University Hospital, the registars’ offices of Bexley, Newark, Milton Keynes and Hounslow, the Open University, Kevin Cann, Mike Robinson, Rachel Colgan and Jen Monk, City & Country, Fran Tatangelo of Avon Coroners’ Court, Adam Grounds of Hounslow Local History Studies, Paul Bickley of the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard, Colin Campbell, Robert Brown, Roger Street, Rhyanneth Edwards, Chris Smith, Keith Skinner, Lindsay Siviter, Ian Greaves, Mark Beynon and everyone at The History Press, and finally and especially, Jeremy Fennell, Lucy Quinnell and the family of James Furze Gratton.

On a personal note, I thank David Wigram, Melodie Hornett, Alex Paltos, Ian Greaves, Paul Dockley, Natalie Froome, Joey Langer, Paul Russell and Jane MacSorley, and as always, Julie Peacock, Jules Porter, Debra Sergeant and Suzy Robinson.

‘All truths wait in all things’

‘Song of Myself’, Walt Whitman

A TRAGEDY IN FAIRYLAND

Janet Stevens (1955–1970)

There are carols by candlelight this evening in the thirteenth-century church of St Michael and All Angels, Pirbright. This is the community’s overture to the season of goodwill, to be followed in the coming week by singing in the churchyard and a crib service for the children. Then, once again, it will be Christmas.

Although close to the noisy town of Woking, the Surrey parish in which this clean, cherished place of worship nestles is sweetly rural, the village green framed by two welcoming pubs and a sprinkling of little shops and crowned with a twinkling, duck-splashed pond. In summer, a team in cricket whites flutter dove-like across the grass to rippling applause; in December, clusters of fairy lights hang from handsome gables heralding Christmastime. Tonight, the choir lead the congregation in the solemn beauty of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, while outside in that chilly churchyard, beyond the tall granite headstone of Sir Henry Morton Stanley,* there lies an unmarked grave, an unseen memorial of an unforgivable and unfathomable crime.

A crime committed at Christmas underlines the callousness of those who visit such horrors upon the world. At a time for kindness, for families, for children, still devils walk among us, impervious to the season’s fashion for compassion and felicity. The last day of Janet Stevens’ life had all the ingredients of an idyllic greetings card scene: a child and her mother by the fire, picture-book stories and a rural snowscape – a white Christmas that was blackened by cruelty.

My introduction to this devastating story came when I was interviewing John Hurst, a retired senior officer of Surrey Police. I asked him, as I always ask police officers, how he coped with the horrors that an officer must face in the course of duty.

‘Inevitably,’ he said, ‘some cases stay with you. I remember a dreadful case where a baby was killed by the teenage babysitter.* And many years ago, I worked on what the press called “the Red Riding Hood murder”.’

When I asked about this, he said, mournfully, ‘A young girl delivering presents to her grandmother on Christmas Eve in the snow got killed by two dreadful guys.’1

The stark summary captures exactly the incurable cruelty of the case – and its abject senselessness. Despite it being a major news story over the Christmas of 1970, it has barely been written about since then, and despite spending a year researching it, I wrestled for a long time with doubts over whether I could justify telling it here. The reason that I am doing so is because, while the case may have been forgotten by the wider public, it remains important in what we can learn from it, and how much we still have to learn about how such crimes occur. What follows is the first full account of this tragedy and my attempt to make some sense of something that I simply cannot understand.

Today, Pirbright is very much a realm of affluent commuters but in 1970 this was a rural Trumpton, which five years earlier had been named ‘Best Kept Village in Surrey’. Noted Pirbrightians included the village’s much-loved GP, Dr McCall, who was also at one time chair of the parish council; Mr Cherryman, the captain of the bellringers; and Major Jim Slowly, landlord of the White Hart, a pub eccentrically decorated with his vast collection of brasses, Toby jugs and miners’ lamps.2 At the other end of the green was the Cricketers pub, with a brood of chickens out back, eggs sold on the bar and an annual tug-of-war out front. West of the village, woodland and heathland serve as rifle ranges for the nearby barracks of recruits for all five regimental companies of footguards. Tucked into the edge of the forest, the imposing mock-Tudor mansion Admiral’s Walk was at this time home to eccentric board game inventor Baron de Veauce. This was a happy land, rich in delightful place names such as Cockadobbin, Christmaspie and Surprise Hill.

A ‘quiet, shy girl’,3 Janet Stevens was born on 12 March 1955, the first child of Alf and Brenda Stevens, who in December 1970 had just celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary. Alf was a transport foreman at Vokes, a nearby engineering firm. Janet lived with her parents, younger sister Patricia and tortoiseshell cat in a council cottage on West Heath, at the north-western edge of the village, just a short walk from the church and the village green. Also living in the village were her father’s identical twin brother Frank and his family, and her 80-year-old paternal grandmother, Kit.

At 15, Janet was studying for her O levels in the fifth form of the Winston Churchill School in Woking, which former headmaster Bernard Roder described as ‘a lovely new school, just three years old at the time. It was designed in the old-fashioned way, with a hall that could be extended to hold everyone, making it a real community and allowing the children to be assembled easily to be talked to about anything.’4

‘Janet and I sat next to each other for English at school,’ remembers Dee Elliott:

Playing on her name, we were fond of calling her ‘Janette’. She honestly was one of the sweetest, most pleasant people you could meet, and a very gentle girl. Of all the girls in our year, she would be the least likely person such a thing could happen to. It was so horrific, she had done nothing to anyone.

She had lovely dark hair in a style that always made me think of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. She was always friendly and chatty though she kept herself to herself, and she was never unkind. There was a girl in our year who was always heavily made-up, always in trouble and clearly heading for trouble, and I can remember us both saying how we wouldn’t want to end up like her. I remember her telling me that she hoped to become a hairdresser.5

Janet was planning to leave the following summer but in the meantime was ‘very much looking forward to a school trip to Switzerland’.6

‘I was a few years younger than Janet,’ remembers villager Kevin Crouch:

… but everyone knew the family, a lovely family. My dad was very close friends with Janet’s uncle Frank and used to go shooting with him. Alf had a little Hillman Imp, Frank just a bicycle. I can still picture the family sitting outside the Cricketers on the village green, watching the game.7

The morning papers on Christmas Eve that year delivered hope of a white Christmas, which in rural superstition promises a prosperous year ahead. Despite industrial unrest which had already led to a state of emergency being called over a dock strike, tensions in the Middle East and the boom and brightness of sixties Britain symbolically coming to an abrupt end with the crotchety break-up of the Beatles, the tabloids looked on the bright side as the year drew to a close, reporting ‘the jingle of coins as well as bells’ in department stores enjoying last-minute spending sprees.8

The Railway Children opened in British cinemas in time for the holiday season, and hearts across a bitter Britain were warmed by a gift of a story about a premature new-born baby found abandoned in a dustbin in Glasgow and taken to the Royal Maternity Hospital, where she was now in an incubator. She was nearly frozen when found but, in the words of a paediatrician, had ‘virtually come back from the dead’.9 Nursing staff knitted her a baby jacket and readers anxiously called the hospital for updates, while police and well-wishers gifted her toys and sent money and offers of adoption.

The baby girl, whom the nurses had christened Carol, since she had been brought in during a carol service, was now making good progress and was pictured on the front page of the morning’s Daily Sketch as two nurses stood over her, depicting ‘The looks that tell an unwanted baby that somebody loves her … despite being dumped in a dustbin to die’. It was the perfect seasonal story and, unlike the story that succeeded it on the front pages immediately after Christmas, it had a happy ending.

The Stevens household stirred at 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve when Brenda Stevens rose to go to work. She cycled back from the village green at 1.40 p.m., arriving home to make egg sandwiches for the family lunch, after which Patricia went across to a neighbour’s house and Alf said that he was going for a walk to his brother’s cottage. Mother and daughter settled by the fire.

Unlike most children on Christmas Eve, Janet was thinking not of her own presents to come but of those she was giving to others. Brenda Stevens later told police, ‘Janet and I sat by the fire and she said, “I haven’t got much for Dad for Christmas. I would like to get him something else.” So I suggested she bought him a large box of chocolates at Marshall’s stores.’10 Mrs Stevens gave her daughter her 12 shillings pocket money and Janet put on her coat and scarf, saying that she would also take Granny Stevens her Christmas presents, since the family were planning to spend Christmas Day with Janet’s maternal grandmother in Aldershot. Janet said that she would be back by 5 p.m. and asked for something special for tea.

She took two presents from under the Christmas tree. Her gift, in a blue seasonal wrapping, was a pair of Brettle’s lisle stockings which Mrs Stevens had bought from Bentall’s at Kingston. Patricia’s gift, in a red seasonal wrapping with candles and holly on, contained a glass dish and a dainty brooch. She had won the dish at the Brookwood Hospital Flower Show in the summer and decided to give it to Granny ‘because she likes that sort of thing’. The brooch was bought from a stall at Kingston Market. The presents were both crowned with ribbon rosettes made by Patricia. Janet slipped them both into her bag, then went next door to see if her sister would accompany her, but Patricia was engrossed in a BBC1 screening of Hansel and Gretel.* Mrs Stevens said that Janet left at about 2.45 p.m. She would never see her again.

There are so many heart-breaking elements to this story, one of which is a page of Mrs Stevens’ police statement, where she is asked to describe her daughter’s clothing that Christmas Eve. She stated that Janet was wearing a turquoise raincoat, a white polo-neck sweater, a black cardigan, deep red cord trousers and black shiny shoes, but it is the loving detail that only a mother would know that haunts the mind – the raincoat, bought from Marks & Spencer, had one button missing, the cardigan was bought from C&A two days earlier, as were the cords, which Janet had taken up herself, the jumper was given to Janet by Mrs Frear at Marshall’s Stores, the shoes were size 5 with big clumsy heels, bought from Lilley & Skinner in Guildford and had ‘had reasonable wear’. Janet’s scarf, which she usually wore once round the neck and untied, had been hand-crocheted by Patricia.

The last person to see Janet alive was student Jane Oldfield, a neighbour who was working as a temporary postwoman while on her Christmas break. As she was taking mail to the first house on the close, she saw Janet leaving her home and waved ‘hello’ to her. She saw Janet turn left at the end of the close, towards Church Lane, then continued her round. She saw nothing suspicious.

As the light faded, shops closed up and families settled into Christmas Eve. With storybook timing, snow began to fall across the county, but as it grew darker, Brenda Stevens grew more and more concerned about her daughter. She later said, ‘Janet was thoughtful. She would never have let me sit and wonder where she was. It wasn’t her, not my Janet. She would have phoned.’11 It was quickly established that she had never reached her grandmother’s or Marshall’s. The walk to her grandmother’s was less than a mile by road and, although it was quicker by following a footpath across the fields, she probably would not have done so because she needed to go via the village green for her father’s present.

By early evening, Janet having not returned, the family were frantic and reported her missing to the police at Woking. Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Jeff Bloomfield immediately drove to Pirbright to interview them and left convinced that Janet had not run away and suspecting foul play. He reported to Chief Superintendent Maurice Jackman, who organised for an extensive search to be carried out in daylight and began recalling officers from leave. It was police policy at this time to encourage single men to work over Christmas, giving married officers a chance to spend the holiday with wives and families. ‘It is organised as amicably as possible, on a more or less voluntary basis. The men who do work are not paid but given extra leave instead.’12

That evening, house-to-house inquiries began in the village. At a dance at the Pirbright social club, officers made the first announcement of Janet’s disappearance and appealed for information and assistance.13 At the church’s midnight service, the new vicar, Reverend John Cunningham, appealed to the ninety people who had attended to take Communion and welcome in Christmas to help in the forthcoming search.14

For the rest of the county, that year’s Christmas story would read ‘like a fairy tale’.15 Despite the weather, there were record congregations not only for the midnight service at Guildford Cathedral, where more than 1,200 attended on Christmas Eve, but for many village parish churches across the county, many of which held collections for the east Pakistan relief fund after a catastrophic cyclone in November. ‘For those dreaming of a white Christmas, the snow fell with a vengeance on Christmas Eve, accident figures were among the lowest ever, swift action from the various local authorities prevented the chaos which struck the rest of England, and Christmas Day brought a bumper crop of Christmas babies.’

The snow fell, snow on snow, through the night. At 2 a.m., council trucks called at the homes of the county’s brigade of volunteer snow clearers, who worked until 9 a.m. to keep the roads safe. By Christmas morning, the temperature was perishing, the conditions appalling.

As well as relying on help from the community, the police needed help from the media. Tony Forward was a detective inspector with thirteen years’ experience in the Surrey Constabulary and had recently been appointed as its public relations officer:

My wife and I had invited our next-door neighbours in for a drink and they happened to ask me, ‘D’you ever have to work on Christmas Day?’ I said that this was actually the first Christmas Day that I hadn’t had to work. Within about ten minutes of me saying that, the telephone rang and I was told, ‘You’re wanted at Pirbright. A little girl’s disappeared and they want to get the press involved.’16

The weather and the public holiday were both immediate and serious challenges to the situation. The police needed a command post to run the inquiry from, but no mobile HQ was immediately available. ‘The governor of the White Hart on the corner of the village green, Major Jim Slowly, was a lovely man and very pro-police,’ remembers Tony:

I went to see him, and he said, ‘If you want my saloon bar to be your headquarters, do it.’ So we did, it temporarily became the headquarters for the inquiry.

At this stage, we still have a missing child. I was tasked with the job of interesting the press, television, et cetera, but it was Christmas Day, and no reporters were working. In those days, there was only BBC and ITV; in our area the ITV region was Thames Television. I tried to contact both, to no avail. I could raise no interest at all in this from a television or a newspaper point of view. I did have the home number of Don Cassidy, who was a partner in Cassidy and Leigh, the Southern News Service, based in Guildford. They were a press agency that picked up news within the Home Counties and fed it to the national press or television. I got on very well indeed with him but when I called it was the same story, there was ‘nobody to pass it to today’.

As inquiries progressed, Tony remembers:

The Chief Constable of Surrey, Peter Matthews, actually turned up in the freezing cold with a boxful of warm chicken pies, bottles of brandy and a stack of plastic cups. He’d got a local bakery and an off-licence to open up. That was our Christmas lunch, but it taught me a valuable lesson for later on in my career: look after the welfare of those working under you.

The police had enlisted the help of the skeleton staff of thirty on Christmas duty at Pirbright Guards depot a mile away, but they were overwhelmed by the help they received from the villagers. At 3 p.m., as the Queen’s Christmas Message was broadcast to the nation, in which she spoke of learning to be concerned for one another, treating your neighbour as you would like him to treat you and caring about the future of all life on earth, matters of the spirit being ‘more important and more lasting than simple material development’,17 nearly fifty volunteers assembled on the green to search Stoney Castle rifle ranges, the large area of wood, scrub and heathland to the west of the village. One of them was Dr Michael Milligan. ‘I was a very young doctor at the time, 25 and newly qualified,’ he recalls. ‘I was staying with my brother in Pirbright over Christmas. We heard about the missing child and decided to join the next search.’18

The party spread out in a line and trekked through the ranges. Half an hour into the search, a group who had taken a wrong turn were searching the dense woods towards the Mychett Road when one of them, 23-year-old labourer David Bowler, looked down to his left and amid the mossy tuffets saw a face on the ground. His first thought was that she was asleep. A blanket of bracken was covering her up to her chest, upon which was a coating of snow. After the initial shock, he alerted the others then hurried back to his car. He drove to the incident post on Pirbright village green and took a uniformed officer and a detective back to the frightful scene.19

Dr Milligan was searching nearby when ‘there was a shout that something that had been found and I was asked to examine the body’. He noted that, as well as the lower half being covered with bracken, ‘her shoes were off her feet and lying to one side by her hip, the zip of the trousers was undone, the upper clothing was disturbed and the skin was showing’.20 There was also no bra on the left breast. ‘I put my ear to the body and found there was no heartbeat.’

Detective Constable (DC) Charles Mitchell would later remember ‘standing with Chief Superintendent Maurice Jackman, looking at the girl’s body lying in the snow’. Jackman, the head of the Woking subdivision, despite being a former RAF gunner with twenty-three years’ experience as a police officer, ‘was crying and in a violent rage at what had happened’.21

Jackman sent for the pathologist, Dr Mant, and Dr Milligan was then driven by Dr McCall to West Heath. As they approached, they saw Janet’s parents walking down from their house. ‘We picked them up, took them back to their home and broke the news to them.’22

Under the Christmas tree, Janet’s present from her parents still lay unopened. It was a hairdryer set, which was to have been the first stepping stone towards the career that she would now never reach.

Dr Mant arrived at the scene at 4.45 p.m. as photographs were being taken. His superficial examination recorded that the body was very cold and the face partly frozen, suggesting that death had occurred not less than eight hours previously. There was a broad ligature impression on the neck which could have been made by the scarf, and a narrow one which could have been made by a lanyard which was found loosely looped around the right wrist. The cardigan and raincoat had been pulled down on the right arm, but despite the bra having been pulled up under the partly raised jumper and the trouser zip fastener having been pulled down, a post-mortem examination that evening at St Peter’s Hospital, Chertsey, revealed that there had been no sexual interference. Cause of death was given as asphyxia due to strangulation.23 Janet’s 12 shillings and 4 pence was still in her pocket.

Alf’s brother Frank identified the body of his niece. He had last seen her alive three days earlier, when she was walking along the village green. He said that he had seen her almost daily since the day she was born. He was also her godfather.24

Further examination of the crime scene was impossible due to the ferocious weather, so for the time being the area was being protected with a canvas and a polythene sheet. An army tent and vehicles were put at the police’s disposal, all police leave was halted and fifty detectives were assembled for the inquiry.

With the discovery of the body, the investigation was taken over by Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) John Plaice, the head of Surrey CID, and his deputy, Walter Simmons. Plaice had joined the police in 1935. Rustic-voiced and with a hobby of coin collecting, he was, in Tony Forward’s words, ‘a real gentleman’. Simmons was an equally assured detective with twenty years’ experience since serving with the Royal Marines.

The snowfall which had begun on Christmas Eve was so heavy that barely any rail services could function in the days after Christmas, despite the points heaters having been left on throughout Christmas Day.25 It was a quiet Britain, with the M1 deserted and British Rail running empty ‘ghost’ trains through the night to keep the tracks free of ice. Surrey’s volunteer snow clearers were out again for seventeen hours on Boxing Day clearing main trunk roads.

The south of England had been the worst hit, seeing more snow than at any Christmas since 1927, with a fall of 8in in parts of Kent. Fifty counties were befallen by snow, fog and ice. In Pirbright, the traditional Boxing Day meet of the Bisley and Sandhurst Hunt was sabotaged by the weather. The white Christmas delighted children but paralysed Britain, yet the investigation ploughed on determinedly.

While Janet’s parents were treated for shock and her sister was placed under sedation, officers continued with exhaustive door-to-door enquiries, with patrol cars frequently snowbound while trying to reach isolated cottages. The freezing, lonely guard on the protected murder scene continued until the thaw came. The snow had covered not only any scents, making tracker dogs useless, but any tyre tracks that the killer may have left.

For John Plaice, a priority was locating the one thing it seemed that Janet’s killer had taken, along with her life – her red shopping bag and the two Christmas presents it had carried. It also seemed probable that Janet had been abducted in a car. The desolate location where her body was found suggested local knowledge,26 which in turn, offered up the possibility that Janet may have known her killer. Every male in the village was a potential suspect, but it was unlikely that any marks had been left on her attacker in a struggle, as she had been wearing gloves.

‘Things started to happen now,’ says Tony Forward. ‘Quite a few press people started to appear, and at last I had a television crew too so I could get news coverage.’ On the BBC Evening News on Boxing Night, John Plaice appealed to anyone who was in the Pirbright area between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve for the shopping bag and its contents, making it clear that ‘every house in Pirbright will be visited’.27 Film was also shot at the murder scene. In a ghastly foreshadowing of events, BBC cameras had visited the ranges just ten weeks earlier, when the site was used as a location for an episode of Z Cars which had concerned a missing child who had been picked up in a car.*

By now, a mobile HQ had been set up outside the White Hart, so customers were able to use the saloon bar again, ‘although it did get used fairly well by us too,’ says Tony Forward. There were no newspapers over the Christmas period, the next being the editions of Sunday, 27 December, so resourceful journalists spent Boxing Day scrambling for information, flocking like the villagers to the pub to hear the latest developments:

Jim Slowly united all his local customers, they were all desperate for us to make an arrest. It was a little girl, so feelings were running high in the village. People who probably weren’t normally patrons of that pub went there because it was the hub, they wanted to find out from each other what was going on.

Dee Elliott says:

The first that I knew of what had happened was when I walked up to see my boyfriend who lived at Brookwood, just along from Pirbright. It was over Christmas and, in those days, not many people had telephones, so we would meet by the box on the corner. He didn’t turn up, so I walked up to his house and found him and his parents being interviewed by the police. It was very scary to realise that all the boys in your group were being questioned. Janet was such a gentle person, didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t really mix with the boys, so you started to wonder why every male was being questioned and how anyone could suspect anyone that we knew. We were all friends, no one would have harmed her. My father worked at the Fox garage at Bisley at the time and knew quite a few of the policemen. He came home and told us they’d found her. One of them had said to him, ‘We’ve found our little Red Riding Hood.’28

The phrase was to become tabloid shorthand for the case, and although the name obviously derived from the circumstances of a girl ‘loved by everyone’, who lived in a cottage ‘in a village on the edge of a large forest’ on her way to deliver gifts to her grandmother, one also cannot help but be struck by her desolating resemblance to the Ladybird book painting of the character.29 The Sunday tabloids led with the broken fairy tale, the People noting that the news had not yet been broken to Janet’s grandmother.30

While the nationals and locals continued to talk to villagers and police, a bag identical to Janet’s had now been obtained, which Tony Forward showed on the television news. With the daily newspapers returning the following day, pressure grew for an interview with Janet’s parents.

‘I said to the press, “Hold on, they’ve just lost their daughter in terrible circumstances. Let me go and talk to them first and see if they are prepared to be interviewed”, which I did,’ says Tony:

I went to see them, and they said that if it would help then, as long as I was there throughout, they would agree to it. I have been with many recently bereaved parents, both as a police officer and in my later role as a funeral celebrant. Because of my police background, funeral directors would often book me for funerals that were particularly troubling – traffic fatalities, suicides, children’s deaths, murder victims. Janet Stevens’ parents were like all parents who had lost a close relative in circumstances that were totally unexpected. Numb is probably a good word. If they had said, ‘No, we don’t want to talk to anybody’, then that would have been it, it would not have been pressed.

Having gained their consent, he then had to make the situation as endurable as possible:

I said to all the press, ‘Look, I just want one of you, please, to represent everybody. I don’t care whether it’s someone from the Press Association who will feed everything to the rest of you, or our local press agency, who would do the same.’ They agreed, and a guy from the Press Association came in with me to do the interview. As we went in, I said to him, ‘Please be gentle with these people.’ We went in and chatted for about half an hour. After a while the parents relaxed a bit. They were really just talking about their daughter, and their shock. And that all got fed into the national press.

Sitting by the fire, Mrs Stevens said, ‘I want this man caught so that nobody else goes through this. I never want anyone to suffer like we have’, but she admitted, ‘if he is caught it is not going to help me’.31

Stories were starting to circulate that Janet had been seen talking to a Scots Guardsman at the bus stop on the green a few days before her death. In response, her mother said, ‘Janet was quiet and very shy. She had not reached the boyfriend stage yet. She was one for the home. She liked cooking, made her own clothes and wanted to learn the guitar.’32 Janet was ‘not friendly with any Scots Guardsman’ and never went out by herself or with other girls, except to go babysitting. Janet did occasionally go to dances at Pirbright Social Club and soldiers there used to ask her to dance to ‘bring her out’ as she was so shy, but she was always with her parents or uncle.

The family were then left in peace while reporters fled to phone in their copy. As well as reporting on heavy absences across the country leaving factories and offices deserted, the following morning’s tabloids were electrified by the garbled reports that Janet had been seen talking to a soldier, and The Sun souped this up into a report that she had ‘made friends with a Scots Guardsman shortly before her death’.33 A villager was quoted as saying that she had seen Janet with the soldier at a dance and then again a fortnight later at the bus stop, while the Daily Mirror reported the case as one of four unconnected Christmas murder probes being hampered by snow.*

The press all captured something of the shock, confusion and devotion of the villagers. One said that Janet was ‘a lovely girl, a real angel. She was very shy and timid.’34 The then head of the parish council, Mr Laker, said:

This has been a great shock to our little village. It has been an appalling time, it’s so close to us all. Janet was a sweet little girl, and they are a lovely family. It is hard to believe that this has happened. Her father plays for the village cricket team and the family is well liked here. That was shown by the way people turned out on Christmas Day to search for Janet. We are all dreadfully upset by this tragedy.35

Chief Constable Peter Matthews paid tribute to the villagers, saying, ‘When you hear so much tripe about police–public relations, my God, you should see the way those men and women turned out, coming back from church and before having their Christmas lunch. They were tremendous.’36 In the Evening Standard, headmaster Bernard Roder said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. She was a hard-working, well-behaved girl, always neatly dressed and well liked. This has been a terrible shock for me and my staff.’

Through the press, the police appealed for local girls who had been assaulted to come forward.37 There had been a spate of attacks on women in Weybridge by a teenager on a bicycle, and on 12 December, the attempted rape of an 11-year-old girl at Pirbright, for which a 21-year-old man was now in custody.* The Pirbright attack had not been publicised and, although none of these cases was connected to the murder, Janet’s mother was reported as saying that if she had known of these attacks, Janet would not have been allowed out on her own.

Police considered staging a television reconstruction of Janet’s last walk but, even without it, the public response had been colossal with over 100 telephone calls offering information, sadly all of it so far having proved useless. Then, on the afternoon of 28 December, came the breakthrough.

It is perhaps apt that a crime committed against a child and populated by so many images of childhood innocence ultimately was solved by children. On the afternoon of that Bank Holiday Monday, three mischievous but alert youngsters were playing by some garages on the Worsley Road council estate at Frimley, 5 miles from Pirbright. The garages, in a small close behind the houses, were looked after by the stern Mr Heed, whom the children had christened ‘Mr Grumpy’ after a previous scolding from him for playing in the area. After playing a game of hobby-horses, when they saw him approaching again, they hid in a gap and waited for him to park his car and go.

The ground was slippery, and as one of the children, Cheryl Amanda Wright, turned to help one of her friends, she happened to notice two loops and the top of a red plastic bag sticking out from under the leaves. She immediately connected the sight with the television appeals. Although sheltered from the snow, the bag had a shovelful of leaves on top of it and some soil, which made the child deduce that someone had scraped them over it. She told her friend, ‘Go and pick it up, it might belong to Janet Stevens.’38

Her friend, Jane Titmuss, looked inside the bag and saw a rosette which appeared to have come off a present. The children took the find to their mothers who, on exploring it, also found a bus ticket for the Aldershot & District Traction Company. They telephoned the police. A search of the area the following morning by Detective Superintendent Simmons revealed a glass dish lying in the field beside the hedge where the bag had been found.

The following day, after Janet’s inquest had been postponed for four weeks, the incident room relocated to Frimley Village Hall, where Simmons briefed officers to interview and search everyone who used the garages. On the afternoon of 30 December, Detective Sergeant (DS) Brian Cane and DC Charles Mitchell called at 119 Worsley Road. The door was opened by the nondescript 21-year-old David Smith. The officers identified themselves as members of the Woking murder office and asked Smith whether he owned one of the garages. He said that he owned No. 9 and that his father owned No. 4. He was the first of the garage owners who had been at home, the officers having already tried four others. They asked him why he wasn’t at work, to which he replied that he was off sick, having been ill since Christmas. DC Mitchell was immediately suspicious.

After stating that they were there concerning the murder of the girl at Pirbright, they were led by Smith to garage No. 9. Immediately after they arrived, he said that he thought that it had been broken into. The officers said that they doubted it, and after he had backed out his Morris 1000, they began to search, asking Smith to give an account of his movements on Christmas Eve.

Smith said that he had risen at 9 a.m. and he and a friend who lived opposite, Kenny Stevens, had then picked up another friend, Peter Baker, who lived on nearby Frimley Green Road, and driven to the Fox pub in Bisley. It was at this point that the officers noticed two items in the garage which ‘did not fit the person we were talking to, who was quietly dressed and of a different demeanour’.39 The first was a studded leather jacket, the other, the latest edition of the lurid magazine True Detective, with headlines about a rape story inside. Smith dismissed it as having ‘been there a long time, I might have brought it home’.40

Continuing the search, Cane moved back a piece of square boarding that was leaning against the wall. Behind it on the floor was a bone-handled sheath knife. Smith said, ‘I don’t know about that, it’s been here a long time.’ Cane then searched the car and asked Smith to unlock the boot. Beneath the floor beside the spare wheel was a screwed-up piece of paper which, when opened out, appeared to be wrapping paper – red with candles and holly depicted on it. Smith said that he had perhaps used it to wipe his hands after working on the car.

After relaying their concerns to the incident room, the officers took Smith to Camberley Police Station. On the journey, nothing was said about the case, but as Mitchell led the suspect into the interview room, he gave a discreet ‘thumbs up’ to the onlooking officers. Sitting down in the interview room at 4.30 p.m., Smith immediately volunteered that he had found the wrapping paper beside a shopping bag by the garages. Apparently, the bag, which was shiny and had a tartan lining – though he couldn’t remember it was red until pressed – was empty when he had noticed it on Christmas Day.