Authors: Paul Britton
For a few moments we stood in complete silence and I found myself thinking, what on earth is going on? I didn’t have an executive role and didn’t make operational or policy decisions, but my concern was for Abbie, for her parents and for her abductor. What were these other people thinking about?
‘Will you talk with them?’ asked Shepherd.
With whom?’
‘Headquarters - help them understand what they’re doing.’
‘Yes, but I’m an outsider. Are they going to listen to me?’
I felt sorry for him. He was head of a difficult investigation with enormous external pressures. He had decided on a particular strategy, coaxed the media on-side and knew exactly where the investigation was going. Now all this was in doubt and all he could do was try to limit the damage.
A meeting was convened at West Bridgford and officers from the ‘management corridor’ arrived for what I assumed would be a meeting to explain the strategy and put paid to any talk of separate television appeals on Crimestalker.
About seven of us sat in a quiet corner off the incident room, shrugging off jackets in the heat. The detective chief superintendent from headquarters was in his shirt sleeves behind a desk. He explained what they planned to do. The chief constable would make an appeal on Crimestalker and they would release the relevant photographs.
‘You know what my views are,’ said Shepherd who was sitting beside me.
‘I appreciate that, but this is a major case which is receiving attention from media all over the world. We have to respond to it.’
Shepherd replied, ‘With respect, sir, we are responding to it. We have a very detailed, carefully planned strategy and we want to maintain it.’
I explained my negative feelings as strongly as possible, pointing out that the driving focus of the existing strategy was to build up a personal relationship between DS Shepherd and the abductor. We wanted to de-emphasize the sensationalist coverage of the crime whereas using Crimestalker would have precisely the opposite effect. It would also, I argued, waste resources, be traumatic for the parents and deflect real callers.
The chief superintendent listened but made it clear that it was non-negotiable. The chief constable had a scheduled slot on Crimestalker and it was inconceivable that he could appear on the show and not make reference to the biggest case in the county and the country.
‘OK, well couldn’t he just introduce the subject and then hand over to Harry to do the appeal?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘You can’t have a senior officer taking what is clearly
a subsidiary role to a lesser ranked officer.’
Oh, come on, I thought, there has to be some way of making this work.
The chief superintendent wouldn’t budge. As far as he was concerned the chief constable would go on TV, make the appeal, release the pictures and the resultant public response would resolve the case.
And everyone will live happily ever after, I thought.
It isn’t my business what the police choose to do and not to do. I can’t say, ‘You’re being stupid or bloody-minded.’ But I’d never experienced this before. Normally, I dealt with a senior investigating officer who managed the inquiry and made the decisions. It was his case, he called the shots and if something went wrong, his head was on the block. Now I could see how internal politics could threaten this autonomy. It made me angry because I considered that people were forgetting that a child’s life was on the line, and I was completely helpless to stop it.
Having failed to halt the broadcast, I urged them to rethink the decision to release the video stills and photofits. It was, I said, a serious threat to their own self-interest. The massed media had been made aware of the strategy and, probably for the first time that I could remember, had wholeheartedly taken up their role with the understanding that should the various photofits and video images need to be released, everyone would get them at the same time.
‘If you give Central TV an exclusive first airing of those pictures, by next morning you’ll have the entire massed ranks of the media saying that you stitched them up; that you lied to them. They’ll massacre you and, given the circumstances, I wouldn’t blame them.’
This message finally got through to him. You don’t make enemies of the media groups, not when they have been public spirited enough to put the interests of the child and parents before their own.
I had the impression that Chief Constable Crompton probably had absolutely no idea that such decisions were being made. Given his commitments, he probably arrived at the Central TV studio each month without knowing exactly what he’d be talking about. Those decisions would have been made by those beneath him in the management corridor.
To make the best of an unsatisfactory outcome, I agreed to draft a script for his appeal, concentrating on all the important factors that had been identified.
I was in London on Wednesday night when Crimestalker went on air. I didn’t get home until 1.30 a.m. and was on the road to Nottingham six hours later. When I arrived at West Bridgford I learned of the previous evening’s events.
Chief Constable Crompton had gone ahead with the appeal but my script had been dropped and another redrafted by senior police and staff of the programme. Following this, a mystery caller, ‘Gary’, had phoned the hotline number several times and said that his wife was holding Abbie. He spoke for ten minutes to presenter John Stalker and assured him that Abbie was being well looked after. ‘Gary’ rang off before police could get enough details to trace him and Mr Crompton appealed for him to get back in touch.
For many it appeared to be a breakthrough but Harry Shepherd couldn’t hide his disquiet. There had been no trained negotiator to deal with the call and no offence-related knowledge had been required of the caller. To make matters worse, John Stalker had appeared on breakfast TV confidently declaring that his ‘policeman’s instincts’ told him that the caller was genuine.
Being an experienced policeman, Stalker no doubt assumed that the call had been through the formal filters that weed out hoaxers and that his job was to hang on to ‘Gary’ for as long as possible and elicit more details.
However, from my point of view, none of the formal filters had been in place and none of the technical questions had been asked - no proof of life had been sought nor analysis of the mental functioning of the caller. As I quizzed Shepherd, he could only shrug and admit it had nothing to do with him; the programme was outside the parameters of the investigation.
His mood grew even blacker in mid-afternoon, when he learned that a uniformed police officer had made a special live appeal to ‘Gary’s wife’, who ‘Gary’ had said normally watched TV between 2.00 and 3.00 p.m. Approval had been given by senior police at headquarters.
For Shepherd it was like having a second investigation being carried out without his knowledge and input.
Even so, he decided to continue with the original strategy and launch stage two. This was based upon the likelihood that the abductor had cut herself off from the outside world and not listened to the earlier appeals. As a result, as she became more secure in her new domestic environment and the baby became more identified with her, neighbours and onlookers would become less suspicious. For this reason, stage two of the appeal was explicitly aimed at those close to the abductor - friends, family, acquaintances and neighbours who might have suspicions and could hopefully be encouraged to come forward, particularly if they felt that their friend or family member wasn’t being seen as a callous criminal by the police.
At this point, the video pictures could be released because the risk of Abbie settling into the abductor’s life outweighed the risk to Abbie from possibly startling or panicking the woman. I had also suggested that it would now be appropriate if further faces could be drafted into the appeal - such as Karen’s sister - who would both give variation and confirm the parents’ anguish.
On Thursday afternoon, the much awaited video images were released, along with three photofits drawn up from descriptions given by Roger Humphries, Jim and Julie Morris and staff at the QMC. By the following morning every national newspaper carried the pictures and the incident room took more than 400 calls in twelve hours, stretching staff to the limit.
Although Harry Shepherd was still the main face of the investigation, I had grudgingly agreed to give several interviews at the request of the police and couldn’t now avoid it. I didn’t want to build up my role at the expense of the police and insisted that I was simply a resource they could use. After answering general questions at a news conference, I gave a handful of one-on-one interviews explaining the likely mind-set of the abductor.
Someone asked me what I thought she would be doing now.
‘On the one hand, she will be trying to develop a completely exclusive relationship with Abbie, blocking everything else out until she has nothing in her world except her and her child,’ I said. ‘At the same time, she’ll be trying to integrate the baby into her existing family life. She wants Abbie to be her daughter; she wants a child to love her; and she wants both of them to forget there is anyone else - in other words Karen and Roger.
‘Someone close to her must realize that this isn’t true or at least have suspicions. They are the people we want to come forward.’
That afternoon I was back behind the steel-mesh fence at Arnold Lodge, catching up on my NHS work and reviewing an interview with a young girl from a clinical case. Now it was up to the media to reach out to those people who had genuine information about Abbie Humphries.
There are many sad ironies in the work I do and the Abbie Humphries case was no exception. Less than half a mile from the incident room at West Bridgford was a home for mothers who have difficulties looking after their children. One of my patients was there, a woman with a very young baby, who had to show that she was capable of looking after the infant or risk having the baby taken into care. My task was to assess her and I found myself pondering how on the one hand there were Mr and Mrs Humphries - many people’s ideal parents - who had their new-born child snatched away from them. Yet not far away lived a girl with a baby and my decision would influence whether it should be taken away from her.
That same week I also spent a day in prison examining a man who had been charged with grievous bodily harm after his child had been scalded in a bath. The police alleged that this was done deliberately, but there was some contention about who had really been responsible because of the man’s vulnerability to suggestion.
On Friday 8 July, a week after Abbie’s abduction, the police were back in force at the QMC, reinterviewing staff, quizzing visitors and stopping pedestrians, buses and motorists outside, hoping someone might remember a vital detail. The sheer number of calls being generated indicated that the campaign was reaching every corner of the country, although I still felt sure the actual abductor would probably live within a few miles of the hospital.
On Sunday afternoon Shepherd called, apologizing for interrupting another weekend. A woman had phoned the incident room, claiming to be holding Abbie.
‘What makes you think it’s genuine?’ I asked.
‘We’re still not sure but she can’t be ignored, she’s distraught and keeps hanging up.’
I drove to West Bridgford and arrived to find that they had no trained police negotiator available in the early stages, but one was apparently en route. The woman had called again, giving vague details but hanging up before the call could be traced. I quizzed the officer who had talked to her, looking for the details that would separate this call from the many hoaxes received among the 3,000 messages from the public in the previous week. Proof of life and knowledge of the crime hadn’t been established but it was clear that the woman sounded emotionally unstable and, if she did have Abbie, nothing should be done to panic her.
When the negotiator arrived, I briefed him on what I knew about the emotional functioning of the caller, suggesting how to keep her on the line and extract information from her without tipping her over the edge.
Then we waited for her to call again. This time the police came up with a name and address - a young woman known to social services who had two children, neither of them babies.
‘I heard a baby,’ insisted the officer.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Shepherd. ‘You have to be sure. It can’t be the television, or the radio. You’re sure it was a baby?’
He nodded.
It was 11.00 p.m. and Shepherd and I found ourselves at the local social services office, trying to get hold of the files on the woman so we could learn more about her. Although she wasn’t threatening to harm the child, she clearly showed histrionic responses and rapid mood swings. We weren’t dealing with someone in charge of her emotions and it was likely the police would have to go in very, very fast.
A response team was quickly briefed and at 2.00 a.m. we drove out of Nottingham and gathered in a small village police station a few miles away. The response team was armed with riot shields, vests and battering rams. After a final briefing we drove off following several police transit vans, through darkened streets and lanes lined with sleeping bungalows and houses.
We pulled up about a mile from the house, well out of sight, and while several officers went ahead to recce the situation I waited with the response teams. In the hot night air, the two-way radios crackled loudly and heavy boots shuffled in the gravel. Soon lights came on and people wandered out of their houses to find out what was happening.
‘Everything’s fine. Please go back inside,’ the officers said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
The message to move ahead came through and we began walking, taking what seemed to be a circuitous route through quiet streets. Although we tried to spread out and look inconspicuous, it was hard to hide what looked like an army coming down the street with heavy boots, helmets and shields.
We reached the house - a small, two-storey terrace, two-up-two-down with an extension at the back for the kitchen. The plan was to telephone and have the woman come to the phone while the police waited outside, ready to enter. She’d be told someone was about to knock on her door and she was to stay completely calm. If she panicked, the response team would enter by force.