The Blooding (17 page)

And finally, a woman from Carlton Hayes Hospital reported that th
e k
itchen porter had shocked her by saying he was the last person to see Dawn Ashworth alive. And the woman had noticed that he had some scratches on his hands.

He said to her, "If they found the body could they revive it?"

At first she thought he was joking, but he was such a thick sort of la
d t
hat she bothered to assure him that resurrection was not possible. "What would happen if they could?" he asked her, no doubt with hi
s s
ly little smile.

The headline announced it boldly:

DAWN: MURDER SQUAD POLICE ARREST YOUTH

The grandparents of Dawn Ashworth took the girl's death very hard. Barbara Ashworth's mother was never able to talk about it and her father couldn't talk about it enough. Her mother told Barbara that she'd stopped having periods on August 10th, the day after the arrest of the killer was announced.

And Barbara reminded her mother of the time when Dawn, less than five years old, had said to her grandmother, apropos of nothing: "I won't know you when I'm fifteen."

Since Barbara's parents didn't live locally, they indeed had not seen Dawn since her fifteenth birthday on June 23rd, and now never would.

To console her mother, Barbara said, "Perhaps children have a way of foreseeing events. Perhaps it was inevitable."

Parents of murdered children quickly learn that all they have for barter and trade is a bit of solace.

Chapter
16.

Beyond Imagination

When he'd finished breakfast on Saturday morning, after he'd been locked up at Wigston Police Station for twenty-four hours, the kitchen porter was presented with a typed statement for a legal endorsement and signature. Sgt. Mick Mason, hoping at last to be able to tell Kath Eastwood that her daughter's killer had been caught, was there at Wigston when Supt. Painter concluded for the record that the kitchen porter's knowledge of the crime "went far beyond imagination and was consistent with facts."

The seventeen-year-old had decided to clear the air, even to his buggery of Green Demon, as described in the document. The boy read the statement, nodded, and said, "Yeah, what's in that paper there, I did. I did go up her arse."

And since the boy customarily dropped his h's, Tony Painter thought he'd said "ouse" and asked him, "Which house was that?"

The kitchen porter pointed to the document and said, "Up her anus! What you're saying here!" Then he added, "She didn't mind it none."

The boy's parents were allowed to see him Saturday evening. After talking to him, they tried to tell all who would listen that their son was a bit simpleminded and couldn't have killed anyone.

His mother offered an alibi: "Heidi were on TV that Thursday. I go
t t
alking to my friend and she said her kids always watch it. Heidi comes on at quarter to five and stays on till quarter past five. My son were sitting in our house watching Heidi. Susan, my brother's daughter? You can talk to her. She'll tell you!"

She later added, "He came in the day the Dawn Ashworth stuff were on the telly, and he said, 'I seen her. I seen her go cross the road to Green Lane.' Are you sure?' I asked him. 'I were testing me bike,' he said. 'I seen her. I'm going to the incident room.' I said, 'Look, you got to be sure. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble.' I said, 'You keep away!"

"He went to work and somebody at work told him to go down to the incident room," his father explained to the police. "They told him it could help. And he did do. I think it were the reward. Somebody fingered him. And anyway, you're looking for a lad with blond hair, the one that ran across Leicester Road and across the motorway. Not my laddie!"

It hadn't happened exactly the way the kitchen porter's parents thought it had, and the police weren't about to give them details of what had been said in the confession. And of course the police were no longer looking for anyone.

A detective listened to the parents politely and said, "You should call a solicitor as soon as possible."

"We don't have no solicitor," the father replied, and the detective gave them a list of four law firms.

One of them was familiar, having represented the boy's grandmother in a dispute with a neighbor. When the kitchen porter's mother mentioned to the detectives that they wouldn't be able to reach a lawyer on Saturday evening, Supt. Painter said, "Well, I know somebody who works for that firm. I know his personal number. I can ring him for you."

The man to whom Painter referred was Walter Berry, the same solicitor who had represented Eddie Eastwood in his bankruptcy problems.

Painter told the parents, "If there's anything I can do for you, let me know. He'll be in Magistrate's Court on Monday."

At 2:00 A
. M
. Sunday morning, while lying awake in bed, the kitchen porter's father broke into a sweat. "It hit me like a brick on top of me head!" he later said. "Monday morning there's going to be a lot of problems down at the court! They caught the bloody murderer as far as the public's concerned! Our name and address was in the evening paper already!"

Late Sunday morning he managed to contact Tony Painter by telephone and said, "There's going to be a hassle down at court!" "Possibly," he was told.

"What help can you give me?"

"I can assign two officers to be your bodyguards," Painter told him. And true to his word, he sent a pair of detectives.

"They was two of the biggest blokes you could imagine," the father recalled. "Both family men with girls and lads. What a grip they had when they shook hands! Wouldn't need handcuffs, those two."

"Ever such nice chaps," the mother said. " 'You get any problems, phone calls, letters, give us a ring,' they said. 'You want some shopping done, we'll do it.' "

"Of course we always wondered if they were told to write down anything they heard in our house," her husband said. "Still, you couldn't fault those two."

During his last conversation with Supt. Tony Painter, the seventeenyear-old decided to come clean and confess all his crimes. It could be that Painter had sensed the boy had something to add, because he said, "Now, son, is there anything else you'd like to tell me while we're here? I'll gladly listen."

"I should tell you about something that I was forced into doing," the boy said.

"Well, you tell us," said Painter.

"This were about six or seven months ago. . . ."

The kitchen porter then described an event that was quickly investigated and verified. He told about a young girl who he said was eleven years old, but who detectives would learn was only nine. He described how she and he had been together watching a teenage couple kissing and cuddling and how the young child had made advances to him.

"She hopped straight on me bike. She were rubbing me up. Getting jealous. So I started to rub her up. Me friend was fingering his girl, but I couldn't finger this one. She's too young. Can't do it. Then she made this big commotion, yelling to the others, 'He's got this thing up in me!' She were shouting."

"What did you do?"

"I just felt her up outside her pants. I didn't go down inside! I didn't want to touch her! I just had no choice!"

"You got carried away, did you?" Painter said.

"If I refused, she'd hit me!"

"I see."

"She'd kick you!" the boy said.

Painter said, "Tell me this: Has it happened more than once?"

"Yeah, twice." "Are you sure?"

"yeah
. V,
The police quickly found and interviewed the child, and got the story of the kitchen porter's putting his fingers in her "money box."

They'd also had Green Demon examined by a physician and got signed statements from her as to the boy's proclivity for buggery when he was fourteen years old.

"We were praying for somebody to come in and speak to us," the kitchen porter's mother later said. "We wanted to tell them our boy didn't do it. We just wanted to tell them anything. Later, when people did talk, they said they'd wanted to come, but they just didn't know what to say. A few crossed over the street when they had to pass by our house. It was the same as when somebody dies. You just don't know what to say."

"I swore I'd never work again if my laddie went inside," her husband said. "If they did that to us I vowed they could bloody well support us on the dole!"

Like their son, they felt imprisoned. The two policemen detailed to look after them came frequently to see if they were all right, and to provide their tenuous contact with all of "them," those omnipotent minions of British law who, the parents believed, had stolen their son.

That Monday, the kitchen porter was in the dock for three and a half minutes. He answered yes a few times, and that was all. He was remanded to police custody for seventy-two hours. His defender, Walter Berry, raised no objections and made no bail application.

The boy wasn't his usual "scruffy and mucked-up" self, as his mother described him. He'd combed his hair and wore a buttoned shirt and proper trousers and a black corduroy jacket. He was flanked by two uniformed policemen at all times.

As to how his family fared, things were both better and worse than village gossip had it. There was no "hassle" at court, and the village rumors that their house had been stoned were unfounded. They did receive several phone calls like those received by the Ashworths when Dawn was missing. They'd pick up the phone and be met with silence. They told their police bodyguards about it, and the next day the police arranged for an ex-directory telephone number.

They received only one hate letter and it was anonymous.

Like the Ashworths and Eastwoods, the kitchen porter's parents isolated themselves during that time. For the first three days they didn't eat at all. Then they were put on medication: five tranquilizers a day and three sleeping pills at night. To shop for food for their younger son, they went to a butcher shop in nearby Hinckley. It was there that the kitchen porter's mother suffered her first anxiety attack.

"I couldn't reckon the money out," she later explained. "I couldn't make change! The item was ninety-nine pence and I couldn't count it out! The man had to help me. Then I went into another shop and bought the same thing twice. It were just as though I got word-blind during those first days. I'd look at a thing and couldn't make it out. I'd put water into the kettle without a tea bag."

"We was both on the verge of a nervous breakdown," her husband related. "I couldn't drive me taxi no more, but being a self-employed driver I couldn't claim unemployment. The taxi firm stood by me all the way, though. They even took up a collection at work."

As the weeks wore on, there were rumors that the family had been driven out of their home and had moved to another part of England. And it was generally believed that the father had been fired by the company from which he operated his independent cab. The newspaper printed a report that he'd had to leave his job because of threats.

None of it was true. The fact is they stayed put in Narborough, and visited their son in Winson Green Prison at Birmingham, a high-security facility where he was being held while the police prepared the case.

The kitchen porter's younger brother was about the same age as Dawn's younger brother and knew Andrew Ashworth slightly. One or two boys had reportedly made vague threats against the kitchen porter's brother but that was all.

"Two of me mates said, 'You stick around with us and nobody's gonna tooch ya,' " the brother later said. And nobody did.

When police came to their home in Land-Rovers to take away the kitchen porter's motorbike for forensic work, the family was verging on paranoia. "I think there's something wrong with our phone," the father said, after ringing Tony Painter. "Are you tapping our phone?"

"You have to go to the Home Office and get written approval to tap somebody's phone," Painter told him. "You need a bloody good reason. In fact, a reason involving national security, and this case hardly applies."

The cruelest of all for the kitchen porter's family was the alienation.

It was similar to that reported by the Eastwoods and the Ashworths. The alienation and loneliness of victims.

--k....5.,.

Four weeks after she was taken from a village footpath, Dawn Amanda Ashworth was buried in the little cemetery behind St. John Baptist Church in Enderby, after a simple service for the family. The vicar described her as a "bright, lively, charming young lady, obedient to her parents, loyal to her family and full of the joy of life." They sat in the old granite church, honeycombed with wine-yellow light streaming through Gothic arches, and smelled candle wax, flowers, old hymnbooks, mortality. And tried to fathom what cannot be fathomed--chaos, caprice, discontinuity.

Like Lynda Mann, Dawn was buried in the village where she'd lived, and just a few minutes' walk from the footpath where she'd died.

Two hundred showed up at the cemetery behind the stone church to bid farewell to a girl who'd seemed to be acquainted with everyone in the village. Dawn's parents and brother, dressed in subdued grays and blues and black, followed behind the vicar and server clad in cassocks. They walked through the churchyard to the graveside piled high with wreaths, including one from Lutterworth School that said: "We love you."