Authors: Paul Britton
The mystery surrounding the ransom excited him and he used it to support his claim that he had an accomplice who was now merrily spending all the money. The evidence to counter this was exceedingly strong but the police wanted to tie up the last of the loose-ends.
After months of vainly searching, a meeting was arranged at Tally Ho, the police training centre in Birmingham. I joined the combined investigating teams from West Midlands and West Yorkshire, who had assembled in a banked lecture theatre to discuss the latest developments. An SAS colonel who had established much of our current expertise in search techniques had been consulted. It was hoped that his success in finding IRA arms caches in Northern Ireland could now help in pinpointing the missing cash.
The theory was quite fascinating and based on the belief that the IRA wouldn’t use permanent or more obvious sites such as a layby on a road or the corner of a field to hide weapons. Instead they would look for sites that could be relocated using landmarks that were not necessarily prominent unless you specifically knew to look out for them. For instance, instead of using corners of fields, hides’ would be located beneath the fifth fence-post, cross-referenced with the third lamppost on the opposite hedgerow.
The key question in this case, however, was where to start looking? We went through a review of the life and times of Michael Sams, discussing his known habits, prior history and what letters and numbers might be important markers at the location.
There were many possibilities and, as expected, Sams had left numerous false trails, but eventually the discussion centred on Stoke Summit, an area south of Grantham and only 1.7 miles from where Julie Dart’s body had been found. Other factors linked Sams to the area. A local farmer had reported seeing an orange-coloured car similar to Sams’ Metro on the day Julie was dumped. A railway line ran through the site and a viaduct crossed over the line and provided an ideal vantage point to look at trains.
Sams had probably relocated the money in a panic so it had to be somewhere that he knew and felt comfortable with - somewhere that he’d been before. In September, the police had mentioned Stoke Summit during an interview and Sams talked of visiting the area quite often. He let slip that the last time was on a wet Wednesday in February.
The money had to have been buried some time between 30 January when Stephanie Slater was released and 21 February when Sams had been arrested. A meteorologist confirmed that it had been raining on 19 February in the Grantham area. This was also the day that Sams had phoned Shipways and threatened Sylvia Baker to keep her mouth shut - an act that suggested he was under pressure because he knew that twenty-four hours later his voice would be broadcast to millions of people.
The SAS colonel looked over Stoke Summit and gave pointers as to natural hiding places. Preliminary searches revealed nothing but the application of a ground-probing radar to the sites revealed signs of a disturbance. Eventually, Ł120,000 was recovered from two separate hiding places on a railway embankment.
The ‘accomplice defence’ that Sams had tried to construct now lay in tatters but I did not doubt that he would invent another story to explain the new circumstances. It had been ten months since his arrest and another six would pass before he faced a jury at Nottingham Crown Court.
I was mildly surprised to hear from John Bassett again when he telephoned late in September. One of his officers had a request, he said, and then he introduced Detective Inspector Keith Pedder.
Pedder chose his words carefully. ‘I’ve spent about fourteen hours interviewing a man whom we have reason to believe might be able to help us in connection with the Nickell murder. Now I don’t particularly want to reveal the details, it might colour the way you see it. What I need to know is if there is anything in the interviews that would allow you to say, categorically, that in your opinion this man could not be responsible for the murder of Rachel Nickell, based upon the offender profile and deviant sexuality analysis that you gave us.’
‘Can you get me the tapes?’ I said.
‘I’m arranging it now.’
That night I started listening while Marilyn plied me with coffee, closing her ears as she opened the door and gently shooed cats away from her feet. I didn’t mind burning the midnight oil; perhaps it is a legacy of my marathon, all-night crams for university exams and essays. I don’t know if Marilyn saw it in quite the same way; she thought those days were long gone.
The tapes consisted of a series of police interviews with Colin Stagg at Wimbledon Police Station. He was quizzed about his movements on the morning of the murder and also asked about his lifestyle, history and habits. Almost immediately it became clear that he had an extraordinary knowledge of the Common, using the proper names for the various hills, paths, ponds and woods. He walked there two or three times a day and occasionally visited his father’s grave at the adjacent Putney Cemetery.
Stagg said he remembered the day of Rachel’s murder because he had been suffering from a painful headache and from cramps in his neck. He woke at 6.30 a.m., delivered papers for a local newsagent and then took his dog Brandy for a walk on the common at 8.30 a.m. He showed the police his route on a map and explained that it had been a shorter walk than usual because of his headache.
‘I wanted to get back to get some sleep,’ he said. T felt really drowsy.’
He said he went back to Ibsley Gardens, ate several crispbreads and fell asleep on the settee watching a game show on the television. He couldn’t remember which one. Later he was woken by the sound of a police helicopter overhead. A local shopkeeper had told him about the murder on Wimbledon Common and he’d read the stories in the newspapers.
When asked if he’d ever seen Rachel on the Common, Stagg remembered seeing someone who could have been her about two years earlier. She’d been pushing a baby in a buggy and lying by the pond.
‘She was a nice-looking girl. I saw her take her top off and sunbathe in a bikini. I stayed for quite a while,’ he said. He went back to the common the following day, hoping to see her again.
When asked if the police could examine the shoes he’d been wearing on the day of Rachel’s murder, Stagg said, ‘I threw them away two days ago… They went into the bins in the block.’
Admitting to still being a virgin, Stagg described having had several girlfriends but his efforts at intercourse had failed because he ‘just couldn’t get it up’.
Throughout the second day of interviews, Stagg maintained that he knew nothing about Rachel’s murder. He claimed that the policeman that he’d met at the A3 underpass had told him the murder victim was a young woman. He denied being the man seen near Curling Pond carrying a black bag or wearing a belt around his waist. He would also never wash his hands in the stream which he said was polluted and smelled.
Keith Pedder and I spoke several times over the next few days as I worked my way through the tapes. I discovered that Pedder had previously had a somewhat ‘open mind’ about psychological profiling, bordering on scepticism, but this had altered when he went to arrest Colin Stagg at his flat because the similarities between the profile and the suspect were so great. Now he was keen to learn more.
‘On what basis could you say, “Yes, he’s eliminated himself from the investigation”?’ he asked.
‘Well, for example, if he said he’d been happily married for two years and has a baby, that wouldn’t be consistent with the killer. Or if he had a long-term occupation that required a high level of intellect; or if he demonstrated that he had had successful, stable relationships with women. These things would eliminate him.’
Having explained all this and listened carefully to the tapes, I told Keith Pedder that I found none of the factors that would definitely eliminate Colin Stagg from the inquiry. It didn’t mean in any sense that he was guilty, only that he should not be disregarded.
The tapes also contained a surprising confession. Mr Stagg admitted that he had indecently exposed himself on Wimbledon Common in the days following Rachel’s murder. A woman exercising her dogs on the playing fields had seen him lying completely naked apart from sunglasses with his clothes piled nearby. As she passed him, she claimed that he opened his legs and smiled.
Stagg was charged with indecent exposure and fined Ł200.
Throughout three days of questioning, Stagg’s denials were persistant and emphatic. Yet despite the lack of physical proof he remained an important suspect for the police.
This was reinforced a month later when police were handed a letter written by Stagg to a woman who had placed a lonely hearts advertisement in Loot magazine. Julie Pines had initially corresponded with Stagg but had broken it off because she said his letters became too obscene.
Two years had passed but she recognized his name in the newspapers following his arrest. She contacted the incident room and provided police with one of Stagg’s letters which she’d kept hidden away. In it. he imagined sunbathing naked in a local park and beginning to masturbate. An attractive woman surprises him and, instead of being horrified, she invites him to have sex with her outdoors.
I knew nothing of this until late September 1992, when I was contacted by John Bassett who came to my office at Arnold Lodge in Leicester, with Mick Wickerson and Keith Pedder. I was intrigued. Why would the three leading figures in a murder investigation drive two hours out of London to see me?
We sat in the seminar room and I noticed that no pads or pens were produced. Bassett was first to speak.
‘Paul, I want to ask you a hypothetical question. I need to sound you out on a few things. Based upon your analysis of the murderer’s deviant sexuality, is it possible to design a covert operation that would allow us to either eliminate a person from the inquiry or in which a person might further implicate themselves?’
I was surprised. It was a question nobody had ever asked me. All three detectives were silent.
‘You mean an operation where knowing the particular sexual deviancy of the murderer can be used to give someone the space to reveal their involvement in the killing by letting them build up some sort of relationship with someone who they feel safe with?’
They nodded.
I thought about this for a long while. ‘Yes, it’s possible.’
‘Fine,’ said Bassett. ‘That’s the first hurdle …’
A notebook was produced.
‘There are several ways to do it, but it would mean that someone would have to get close to the suspect.’
Pedder asked, ‘An undercover policeman?’
‘Or a woman. Basically, the covert officer would make contact and allow the suspect to befriend them. This relationship would be designed to create an escalating pathway of revelation whereby the suspect might eventually choose to disclose aspects of their sexual functioning. There would be lots of cut-outs along the way - decision points where the suspect could choose to go in several directions. Only if he chose the previously specified and very particular pathway would there be any basis for the operation continuing. If any other pathway was followed then the operation would end because the suspect, from my point of view, would eliminate himself.’
No names were mentioned. It made no difference to me. My analysis of the killer’s powerful and violent fantasies had been written before anybody had come under suspicion. Nothing had happened since then to change my opinion.
Pedder asked, ‘So how would it work specifically?’
Using a white-board, I outlined two hypothetical covert operations designed to exploit the powerful deviant psychosexual functioning of Rachel’s killer.
‘Let’s assume that communication is established - based on a chance meeting or perhaps an exchange of letters for example. In the right circumstances and with the right confidante - someone with a specific history and personality - the offender would begin to reveal the fantasies that demonstrate his need for extremely violent non-consensual sexual activity.
‘These would include the use of a knife to stimulate, penetrate and control the woman in his fantasy; also the degradation and extreme domination of her to the extent of dehumanization. At the same time, he would become sexually and aggressively aroused.
‘As he reveals more, the fantasies would increasingly come to feature a venue that closely resembles the woodland in which Rachel was murdered. At their highest intensity they would replay important aspects of the killing itself, and the offender would derive potent sexual gratification from recounting them. This isn’t for intellectual stimulation, it’s his most powerful aid to masturbation.’
‘And this can be done by letter?’ asked Pedder, referring to the operation using a female officer.
‘In the initial stages yes but the murderer would quickly try to progress the relationship from written correspondence to personal meetings and an intimate relationship. He will want to present himself as a person attractive to the confidante and is likely to fabricate whatever story he thinks is necessary to secure physical intimacy in the early stages of the relationship.’
Bassett asked, ‘He’d invent things?’
‘He won’t immediately implicate himself in the murder - remember, he has a strong sense of caution and self-preservation. But as his deviant sexual arousal intensifies this would overwhelm his caution and could lead him to reveal knowledge of the circumstances of Rachel’s death that would only be known by the killer.’
I explained that the behaviour of the offender and the course of the relationship could be influenced by external events, such as media coverage of the case. ‘The murderer is cautious. As long as he believes the police investigation is getting nowhere and public attention is shifting away, then he’ll be less concerned for his safety - he’ll think he got away with it. But if he has reason to suppose that the police have a continuing, high-level interest in the case, then he’s going to be more cautious and suspicious of any relationship.’
Bassett and Wickerson exchanged glances.
‘Nothing like this has ever been done before,’ said Wickerson.