GARDNER AND UPDIKE DEPLANED AT HEATHROW AIRPORT red-eyed, dry-mouthed, fuzzy-headed, and pumped up with enough adrenaline and caffeine to power the British Airways jet back to Washington.
“Let us take a quick shower, put on some fresh clothes, and then we can go talk to Jens and Elizabeth,” Updike said as soon as they were in the car with Beever and Wright.
“You can’t,” Beever said.
“What do you mean?” Updike asked, surprised.
“British law. You can’t question them until they’ve been remanded.”
“When will that be?”
“Thursday.”
“Today’s only Tuesday.”
“I know. I feel badly about it, especially after you’ve traveled all this way on such short notice. But there’s nothing I can do. It’s the law.”
“Exactly what do you mean by ‘remanded’?” Gardner asked.
Beever explained that under British law, suspects in criminal cases may be held indefinitely as long as they are brought into court regularly for their cases to be reviewed. The process is called
remand
, and it must be performed at least once a week. Beever said he planned to ask for a seventy-two-hour remand for Elizabeth and Jens, although the time would actually be 96 hours because the legal clock did not run on Sundays. The plan was to have them remanded on Thursday so investigators would have until Monday to question them.
In their case, particularly, location was as important as time. Normally, Beever said, suspects are remanded to
whatever prison has space. At that time, Elizabeth was being held at Holloway Prison, the main institution for women, and Jens was across the city in the Ashford Remand Centre. It would be easier for investigators to conduct their interrogations if both were in the same place, so Beever intended to ask the court to order them to the Richmond jail.
Updike, who was warming quickly to the capable British detective, asked if a judge had been selected to hear the request. Beever chuckled. In a British court a remand decision in a case such as the one involving Elizabeth and Jens was not handled by a judge but by a panel of three magistrates. He added that the magistrates were not trained in the law but were community leaders who volunteered their time.
Updike was aghast. If they were not legal experts, he wanted to know, who interpreted the law?
That was the job of the clerk of court, Beever explained.
Updike slumped back in the seat. In many ways, he was discovering, the British legal system, which was the foundation of the American system, was as different from what he was accustomed to as baseball was from cricket.
“Do they have any idea what’s coming?” asked Gardner.
“Not the foggiest,” said Beever. “They still think we’re interested only in the fraud case. They haven’t a clue that we’re onto them for murder.”
Gardner and Updike exchanged grins. “I hope we can keep it that way,” Updike said.
Until the hearing, there was not much Updike and Gardner could do except go through the documents that had been found in Jens and Elizabeth’s apartment and work out strategy with their British counterparts.
In the thirty-six hours they had to kill until the remand hearing, the two Americans discovered that the infamous British reserve was a myth, at least as it applied to law enforcement officers. On the first night they were there, jetlag and emotional exhaustion forced Updike and Gardner to curtail their celebrations. On their second night, however,
they buried their inhibitions; they wound up in a policemen’s pub, and Updike found himself defending the United States’ honor in a drinking bout with a burly British imbiber. No one remembered who won.
DESPITE THEIR WELL-LAID PLANS TO KEEP THEIR PRESENCE in London a secret, the story leaked to the press. On the morning of the remand hearing the tabloid
Daily Mail
published a story about how Updike and Gardner had come to London to question the pair about a grisly “voodoo killing.” Up to then, Jens and Elizabeth had escaped public attention, but that shattered their anonymity. It also ruined Gardner and Updike’s planned surprise.
When the couple’s lawyer met with Jens minutes before he was to be taken to the Richmond magistrate’s court, he thrust a copy of the
Mail
into his hand. “You’d better take a look at this,” he said.
Jens scanned it, then hurriedly scribbled a note to Elizabeth that she should get rid of all evidence. He slipped it to her when they met minutes later in the hallway of the police station. She read it quickly, then handed it back. He tore it into little pieces and threw it on the floor. A few minutes later, a police officer picked up the tatters and spent hours piecing them back together. It would be another link in the evidence chain.
THE MAGISTRATE’S COURT IN RICHMOND IS HOUSED IN A modem, two-story building, a cold-looking, soulless edifice painted a stark white with black ironwork trim. At midmorning Thursday a white van with a red stripe carrying Elizabeth and Jens in the back pulled up to the massive iron gate that guards the entrance to the basement garage. Once the vehicle was inside and the gate had been slammed closed, they were led through a blue steel door and put in separate holding cells, effectively unable to communicate with each other. Designed for utility rather than comfort, the cells contain only a wooden bench built into the back wall and a bell-push to summon a warder.
A few minutes after they arrived, they were led up two flights of steel stairs into the courtroom itself. Like the cells, the courtrooms are small and conspicuously spartan, furnished with about fifty pull-down chairs for spectators and permanent benches with tables for the lawyers. In Britain prisoners are relegated to the dock, a small box with chesthigh walls. Elizabeth and Jens filed into the box and stood, according to British custom, while Detective Inspector Peter Shepperdson outlined a case for holding the two for investigation of the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Elizabeth, looking pale and much thinner than when she had been arrested five weeks previously, kept her eyes focused on the floor the entire time. Jens glanced up once, focusing briefly on Gardner. He looked away without acknowledging his presence. He had never seen Updike before.
The court consisted of one woman who served as chief magistrate and two men. After Shepperdson’s speech, the solicitor representing Jens and Elizabeth argued against the proposal for half an hour. When he finished, the three magistrates consulted in a backroom for ten minutes and returned with their verdict: Elizabeth and Jens could be held at the Richmond police station for seventy-two hours, at which time another hearing would be held.
Gardner sighed in relief. Leaning over to Beever he whispered, “When can I talk to her?”
Up until then, Jens and Elizabeth had felt secure about their ability to escape the past. They had hardly talked about their “little nasty” since they left Virginia, and, from all indications, they never expected to hear again about the deaths of Elizabeth’s parents. Even while they were being held in British prisons they apparently gave little thought to the possibility that Ricky Gardner was going to catch up with them.
In retrospect, the month of May had not been an unduly uncomfortable one for the two. Prison was not a pleasant place, by any means, but during that period they still had hope that they would soon be freed. In a six-page letter to Jens, Elizabeth poured out her frustrations and fears, chronicling
her ups and downs and complaining about one thing and another. She never mentioned the possibility of facing murder charges.
Although the letter was undated, she did write in the days of the week. And, as she had done in her letter from Loose Chippings over the Christmas holidays in 1984, she strung several days’ worth of thoughts into a single document. Beginning with a two-page paean to sex with Jens which rivaled letters printed in
Penthouse
, she slid into the more practical side of their situation—namely, how, when, and where they were going to get out.
Since they were both foreign nationals, they had the option of appealing to their embassies for aid. Elizabeth, with no political influence, made very little headway in her pleas to the Canadians. In her notes on “Friday” she said the embassy was not able to do very much and that no one was particularly interested anyway.
Jens, on the other hand, being the son of a career diplomat, had considerable influence at the German Embassy and was offered ample aid, which he shared with Elizabeth. At this stage of their relationship, Elizabeth was content to have these details arranged by Jens; she said she had confidence in his judgment.
On Tuesday, she wrote about the possibility of being deported, maybe to Canada but, better yet, to Germany with Jens. Undoubtedly she was aware of the difference between deportation and extradition, that deportation meant that she would no longer be able to stay in Britain and would have to go to another country. It did not mean that she would face charges there. Extradition, on the other hand, was a proceeding under which she could be expelled from Britain to face specific charges somewhere else. There were no criminal charges pending against her in Canada, and she apparently did not even consider the possibility of any being filed against her in the United States. Her main concern seemed to be what she would do and where she would live in Canada. It is curious that she made no mention of the fact that she had three half-brothers and a half-sister in Canada. As a
last straw, she wondered if the German government would recognize her as Jens’s fiancée.
The next day, Wednesday, Canada was still on her mind. In a more depressed mood, she pondered if it might not be better to volunteer to be sent there. At least, she moaned, she would be free.
In the meantime, she wrote, Jens should continue to fight to be released on bail because he had a much better shot at it, what with his enviable governmental connections. In the next breath, however, she cursed those same connections, angrily attacking the representative from the West German Embassy who had brought her some clothes as a “stupid woman” who was so thoughtless she included a white sweater when she should have known how quickly white would get dirty in a prison cell. The rest of the clothes, she groused, consisted of a pair of Jens’s trousers and a pink tee shirt.
FOR HIS PART, JENS WAS HAVING HIS OWN PROBLEMS. While he continued to profess his love and devotion in letters to Elizabeth, he apparently was having second thoughts about their relationship. On May 18, maybe during the same period that Elizabeth was writing him about her rampant sexual desires, he began an eleven-page letter to Neil Woodall, a friend who, Elizabeth would testify, Jens had made earlier when the two spent a week together in a cell.
In typical Jens fashion the letter was introspective, pseudophilosophical, and self-centered. It did, however, give some valuable insight into how his relationship with Elizabeth was evolving.
The fact that he was in jail and separated from his lover had made him take a closer look at their situation. What he was discovering was that each had come to depend on the other to an unhealthy degree. For different reasons both were looking for love, he because his mother had always loved him unselfishly and he feared losing that attachment, Elizabeth because she felt she had never really been loved. In the long run, he wondered, had he and Elizabeth—while
they gave lip-service to the notion that they were in loves—simply been embarking on a course of mutual destruction?
Even the pleasure they received from sex was suspect. In fact, he said, he was forced to admit that their sessions of self-proclaimed marathon sex might not have been as satisfying as he had once thought. He admitted that, in retrospect, he did not enjoy making love to her as much as he thought he had. But maybe, he equivocated, that was because she was the only one he had ever made love to and he was without a basis for comparison.
Before he ended the letter, he threw out one more intriguing thought: a hint that he was examining, perhaps at a level he did not yet want to admit, his own potential for violence. He decided that he was going to have to examine his inner feelings more closely to see where this wellspring of possible violence lay and how it manifested itself, that is, whether it came out in actions, thoughts, or attitudes.
Curiously, the letter did not mention the status of the proceedings against him or Elizabeth, what he might be doing to prepare his defense, or if he was worried that police had by then read the letters that he knew they had recovered from the flat he had been sharing with Elizabeth. Elizabeth would say later that she did not know the letters still existed, that she thought they had long ago been destroyed. Jens, however, had to know they were there and what the results would be once the police read them. Perhaps in his arrogance he had convinced himself that the police would not find the letters, would not take the time to read them, or would not recognize their significance even if they did. Why he kept them at all is a mystery.
Instead of giving some hints to his thoughts on these issues, Jens’s letter to Woodall focused almost entirely on his “philosophy,” his “separateness,” and his need to think of himself first. More than a year later Elizabeth would see a copy of the Woodall letter and would be so outraged that it would have tremendous repercussions on her own legal proceedings and ultimately on Jens’s as well.