By Carol Anne Davis

Britain has been understandably shocked by the case of two juvenile delinquents - brothers from Edlington in Yorkshire - who extensively tortured two other children. The attackers were age 10 and 11 at the time of the offences which took place in April 2009. But the case was only made public in September after a youth court hearing. Sentencing will take place next month.

The assault was prolonged and sadistic. The brothers stamped on their victims, beat them with bricks and sticks, burned them repeatedly with cigarettes and cut them with barbed wire. The victims, aged 9 and 11, were stripped and one was forced to perform sex acts on the other. The brothers also tried to make them eat glass. The youngest boy, so brutalised that he needed plastic surgery, managed to flee the scene and led rescuers back to his older friend who was lying, unconscious, in a stream. He was so badly injured that he had to be airlifted to hospital and was only half an hour away from death.

Needless to say, this wasn’t the brothers’ first attack. They had terrorised the local children for years and were infamous for acts of vandalism and violence. They often hit strangers in the street without provocation and had been known to mug girls who were in their late teens. Numerous people in the neighbourhood had complained to the council, aware that it was only a matter of time before the boys went on to seriously maim or kill.

So what kind of childhood produces such embryonic psychopaths? Unsurprisingly, the brothers were underfed, underclothed and unwashed. They were frequently beaten by their father and their food was allegedly laced with cannabis by their mother. She had other children who were similarly left to run riot. She even gave her eleven-year-old cigarettes to take to school as she claimed that they calmed him down. The boys, already well known to social services, have now been taken into care but, as usual, it’s a case of too little, too late.

Thankfully, amid all the hysteria - some right wing zealots have been calling for the brothers to be birched, ironic when they’d been beaten viciously for years - the head of Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, has spoken out and proved to be the voice of reason.

Martin Narey said `It sounds terrible but I think we try too hard with children’s birth parents. We can’t keep trying to fix families that are completely broken.’ Later in his statement he added `If we really cared about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put them into permanent adoptive families.’ He said that social workers believed that, if a parent failed, they should be given another chance, but that this hurt the children terribly.

The following week, the new chief of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers told a London union that many children nowadays start school without having been taught basic life skills by their mothers. (From chaotic homes, these kids rarely know their fathers.) At five years old they aren’t toilet trained, are unable to dress themselves or use cutlery. She talked about the poverty of aspiration, of parents who have no interest in their offspring or their education. They live impoverished Dickensian lives.

Eighty children die in Britain every year at their parents hands, and thousands more suffer hourly - and may eventually pass on that suffering. If babies were removed at birth from neglectful and violent parents and given to good, adoptive parents we would have a very different society.


All of Carol’s books are available from amazon.co.uk in Britain and some are on sale at the American amazon.com. For further details please see her website at www.carolannedavis.co.uk

By Carol Anne Davis

Sadly, I was spoilt for choice when researching my latest book Parents Who Kill as approximately eighty children a year die in Britain at the hands of their mother or father. Many of these are as a result of physical discipline taken to extreme. But I only produced a short chapter on such baby batterers, choosing to concentrate on those with more interesting psychological motives, such as parents who deliberately murdered their offspring and made it look like an accident in order to collect the insurance money or those who killed beautiful adult children in so-called honour killings. I was also interested in mothers who kill as a result of Munchausen’s-by-Proxy and interviewed In Cold Blog's very own expert, the highly-respected Dr Marc Feldman, about this.

The following cases didn’t make it into the book as I ultimately concentrated on more recent headline-making killers. But they are typical of certain types of murderers.

AMY ELLWOOD

Amy Ellwood, for example, fits into the Tell No One category of baby killer. The daughter of a teacher and a high school principal, church-going Amy got pregnant at seventeen whilst living with her family in Long Island. Her boyfriend was almost three years older than her and had been expelled from the high school where her father was principal. As such, the couple tried to keep their relationship secret and Amy - a good student who co-edited the school literary magazine - was in denial when she first realised that she was expecting a child.

But, when her parents went away for a week, she bought a pregnancy testing kit from the chemist and it was positive. She told her boyfriend Chris and he said that she had the right to choose what to do next. Unfortunately, Amy chose to do nothing, deciding that it would be wrong to abort a love child.

By the time she graduated from high school in June 1989 she looked pregnant and her parents gently suggested she take a test. Insisting that there was no need, Amy avoided them for a few days by travelling around with Chris. Her family decided not to pursue the matter as they were terrified that she’d leave the state permanently with him, that they might not see her again.

In August, when Amy was almost full term, a friend asked her what she was going to do and she lied and said that she’d made plans to put the baby up for adoption. But she awoke on 8 September with labour pains and still hadn’t decided on a strategy. She began to pace up and down in agony in her bedroom and her mother shouted through the door to ask if she was alright. Amy replied that she was fine. She’d later say that she’d convinced herself that she would have a miscarriage and get her life back to normal immediately.

Her parents and brother left for work and, after a couple of hours in labour, she gave birth in the shower and put the baby in a bucket, covering him with a towel. Exhausted, she went back to bed.

Later, she washed the sheets, showered and put her dead baby in the boot of her car. She drove to a friend’s house and told her that she’d had a miscarriage. She phoned her boyfriend Chris and told him the same thing.

At 10pm she left her friends and drove to Laurel Lake where she dumped the body. It was found in the reeds by two swimmers, and word soon spread throughout the town. Someone tipped off the police that Amy had been looking pregnant but denying it, and she was questioned by detectives, arrested and charged.

At her trial, her pastor said that dumping the baby in the lake had been an act of baptism, but the judge was more prosaic, noting that her actions had been selfish. She was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to between two-and-a-half and seven-and-a-half years in prison, though on appeal it was agreed that the sentence could be deferred until after she’d been to college.

CHRISTINE MASON & ROY ASTON

Amy acted alone, but it’s not uncommon for a couple to both fatally abuse their children or stepchildren. Christine Mason became pregnant by a Turkish man who offered her marriage, but she refused him and ended the relationship. Whilst still pregnant, she met Roy Aston and very quickly began living with him. Christine’s previous baby, Karl, had died in suspicious circumstances so, when she gave birth to another baby, whom she called Doreen, the infant was immediately put on Southwark Council’s ‘at risk’ register.

Doreen was abused by the couple from the start and was so traumatised that she never smiled and never learned to crawl. She was repeatedly battered and burned. She slept on the floor and they threw junk food down for her to eat. The couple even broke her leg and the break remained untreated - the social worker who saw the baby was apparently new to the job and out of her depth.

The little girl died of her injuries and of neglect on 13 September 1987 when she was sixteen months old, whereupon both parents were convicted of manslaughter and cruelty and received sentences of twelve years each.

EVAN GEORGE CARTER

Sometimes the motive for murder is financial as in this historic British case.

Evan Carter, always known by his middle name of George, was born in 1930 in Aberbargoed, Wales. He left school at fourteen and became a drayman’s assistant, after which he was drafted into the Royal Air Force where he had a good record. Afterwards he returned to being a drayman’s assistant, then moved on to various factory jobs.

In 1949. the teenager met a young woman from Birmingham called Ruby May and married her, and, in 1955, they had their first child and called him Alun. The family set up home in a cottage in Penlline, Glamorgan and he found a job at an asbestos factory whilst his wife secured employment at the local girls school.

George’s work was dull and the first allure of marriage and parenthood had worn off by the time that their son turned six, so he treated himself to a new car. His hire purchase payments on the vehicle were sixteen pounds a month and he paid out another sixteen pounds annually on car insurance, plus ten guineas for new tires. In total he owed sixty pounds but the family’s total monthly income was only eighty pounds. Already struggling to pay his creditors, Carter was devastated when his wife told him that she was pregnant again. He told a work colleague that they couldn’t afford a second child, and asked the man if he knew of a druggist who could perform a termination. The man said no, and George apparently brooded then decided to take matters into his own hands.

In the early hours of 2 January 1960 he fetched one of his tools, a metal object weighing six pounds, and battered it three times into his sleeping wife’s head, killing her and the foetus inside her. Afterwards he put a pillow over her face to hide the horrific injuries. He then went to Alun’s bedroom and battered the six-year-old, fracturing his skull.

George Carter broke into the couple’s locked bureau drawer and took thirty five pounds to make the murders look part of a robbery. Afterwards, he drove to work for his 5.30 am start, throwing the metal tool into a field en route.

He did his morning shift at the factory, where his fellow employees noticed that he had about thirteen pounds on him, unusual for a man who was always claiming poverty, but he explained that this was to pay his car tax. When his shift ended, Carter went to his wife’s work as usual and peeped the horn. When she didn’t come out, he drove home and pretended to find her corpse.

But he was genuinely horrified to find that his six-year-old son was still alive. Unable to bring himself to strike the child again, he took him to a doctor but only rang the bell once. No one answered and he took the badly-injured Alun to his mother, who immediately fetched a doctor. The doctor thought that Carter’s actions were strange as he refused to return to the cottage, explaining that his wife was dead and that the sight was horrible. Relatives went to the scene and found Ruby Carter’s head smashed into twenty six pieces. She had died of shock and loss of blood.

George Carter now made television appearances to help find his wife’s killer. But he appeared too calm and talked too much – liars tend to talk too much as they think that others will disbelieve them so they keep adding detail to substantiate their tales.

Meanwhile, Alun was left with no memory of the incident and with an impaired recall of recent events. He also had weakness in his hands and toes and lost half of his vision as a result of the damage done by the metal bar.

George Carter continued to portray himself as a bereaved husband and doting father – but the evidence against him was mounting. His jacket had thirty four blood spots on the sleeves, spots which weren’t observable in the artificial light of the cottage but which were visible in bright daylight. And the metal murder tool was found lying in a field near Carter’s home en route to his work. There were no fingerprints in the cottage other than these of the Carter family, and – despite it being a tiny village where everyone knew everyone else – no one had seen anyone acting suspiciously in the vicinity.

In court, the prosecution showed the jury the forensic evidence and spoke of Carter’s desperate desire to get rid of his unborn child. They also queried how likely it was that a burglar would go into a shed, find the metal tool in the biscuit tin, break into the house without waking either of the two occupants and bludgeon them. And why would a burglar throw the metal tool away in a field rather than taking it with him to a safe place or leaving it at the scene? The supposed burglar had also left no fingerprints.

The defence countered that only a mad man would kill his pregnant wife and batter his six-year-old son in this way then go on to work and act as if nothing had happened yet George Carter had no history of mental illness. Carter himself continued to protest his innocence.

But the evidence against him was damning and it took the jury only thirty five minutes to find him guilty of murder, whereupon he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

TYPOLOGIES

In total, I identified twenty-four distinct types of homicidal parent, from mothers who killed in order to enjoy a love affair with their brand new boyfriend to fathers who killed their beloved children in order to exact revenge on their ex-wife. I was aided, as usual, by my excellent interviewees, in this instance the aforementioned MBP expert Marc Feldman, the British crime scene investigator Paul Millen, Scottish editor and journalist Jerzy Morkis and US true crime writer and novelist Gregg Olsen.

All of Carol’s books are available from amazon.co.uk in Britain and some are on sale at the American amazon.com. For further details please see her website at www.carolannedavis.co.uk

By Carol Anne Davis

Last month, 41-year-old Vitas Plytnykas was found guilty of murdering 35-year-old Jolanta Bledaite. Jolanta had moved from a village in her native Lithuania to Brechin in Scotland, UK, to save money for her father’s cancer care. She worked long hours in order to send money home to her impoverished family.

Jolanta shared a flat in Brechin with another Lithuanian, twenty-year-old Aleksandras Skirda. He would later admit his part in her murder, and police would find footage of him and former Russian soldier Vitas Plytnykas dragging a suitcase, later found to contain Jolanta’s torso, through the streets.

Both men believed that Jolanta had money, and they plotted for months on how to get it, deciding that killing her and disposing of her body was the best option. They even went out driving throughout the region, looking for body dump sites.

On 29 March 2008, they put their plan into action, turning on her at her home and torturing her until she revealed the security number of her cashline card. Then they smothered her with a pillow and cut off her hands and head in the knowledge that this would prevent her being identified. The two men put her torso in a suitcase and threw it into the water at Arbroath harbour. They made another trip to Arbroath holding a Lidl carrier bag which contained the murdered woman’s head and hands. This too was disposed of in the sea.

Three days later, two sisters, aged eight and eleven, were playing on the beach when they found Jolanta’s head. The police were called and they swiftly discovered her hands. Four days later, an underwater search team found the suitcase containing her torso at the bottom of the harbour: by now, Jolanta’s workmates had reported her missing. It didn’t take detectives long to track down her flatmate - and from there, it was easy to trace his friend, Vitas Plytnykas. Ironically, they later found that the latter had been jailed in Germany in 2001 for manslaughter, having stabbed a man to death in a fight over money.

It’s likely that Plytnykas childhood wasn’t good - but neither was Jolanta’s. When her alcoholic mother split from her father, she was raised by her grandmother, who did her best under difficult circumstances. The old woman, who loved her and her sister very much, begged her not to go to Scotland, but Jolanta saw it as a way to help her family.

Skirda admitted the murder and was sentenced to life, but Plytnykas denied it and there was no DNA at the murder site to link him to Jolanta’s final moments. But the CCTV footage of himself and Skirda with the suitcase and carrier bag containing her remains convinced the jury and they took just two-and-a-half hours to deliver a guilty verdict at Edinburgh High Court.

Plytnykas has refused to speak about the murder but Skirda’s case is being aided by limbs-in-the-loch killer William Beggs, a jailhouse lawyer who features in this author’s book Sadistic Killers. Beggs also decapitated and mutilated his victims and the two men have struck up a prolific correspondence.

The case will have lasting implications for everyone who unwittingly became involved. Those in the Lithuanian expat community who dared give evidence against the men are fearful of reprisals. Jolanta’s mother, grandmother and sister are shellshocked and her father died, still only in his fifties, in October 2008. And what must life be like for the two little girls who found the severed head?

Those in authority also have questions to answer, for how did a convicted killer manage to enter the UK with an apparently unblemished record? Vitas Plytnykas sentence will be determined after background reports.

By Carol Anne Davis

A woman races from her home clutching a few belongings in a carrier bag. Her violent husband has popped out to the off-licence and she’s got ten minutes to make her escape. Meanwhile, another young girl hitches a lift with her two children to a nearby town, whilst her drunken boyfriend is asleep.

I saw numerous cases like this when I worked for the UK charity Women’s Aid, met women who had travelled to the other side of the country with little more than the clothes that they were wearing. They left behind mothers, siblings, and sometimes even teenage sons: they had no option if they wanted to survive.

So I was delighted when American publisher Freya’s Bower asked me to write a foreword for their latest anthology, Dreams & Desires volume 3, with the net proceeds going to a refuge in New Orleans.

In the foreword, I wrote about my own violent childhood and about how my first serious boyfriend had a record for Grievous Bodily Harm. I was fortunate in that I’d escaped into academia by my early twenties, where they give you a roof over your head and a grant on which to survive.

But many young girls don’t have this option. Believing that they have nowhere to go, or fearing loneliness and change, they remain with their abuser. They tell themselves, in a desperate triumph of hope over experience, that he’s going to change. But if you don’t leave after the first punch, you’ve essentially told him that punching you is acceptable. If you return to him after he’s knocked one of your teeth out, he takes away the message that your teeth are expendable.

Ironically, such men are often very loving in the first few weeks of dating and will push for an early cohabitation date or even marriage. Then, when cracks appear in the relationship, he’ll blame someone else. He’ll work hard at convincing the woman that everything would be fine if only they didn’t live close to her interfering mother/party-mad sister/jealous best friend. You can sometimes see such couples on daytime chat shows, complaining that they’ve ‘been through so much together in the four months that they’d been dating.’ He’ll blame it on her relatives - who can see that he’s bad news - and she’ll usually concur. If he can convince her to leave town with him, he’s succeeded in taking her away from her support network and her job.

Up until now his behaviour may only have been emotionally abusive, perhaps criticising her appearance and suggesting that she’s somehow being unfaithful during the ten minutes that she nips out to the shops to buy tampons. But, once she’s geographically isolated, it’s easier for him to start pushing her around. If she doesn’t leave at this stage, the shove becomes a slap then a punch then a full-blown kicking. I’ve seen women with both their eyes blacked and every rib broken, looking like car crash survivors rather than women who have spent the evening with the man they profess to love.

Thankfully, I’ve also seen women leave such relationships and slowly rebuild their self-esteem. Over time, they began to like themselves again and formed friendships with other women. They found work and hobbies which they enjoyed, sometimes for the very first time. Equally important, they watched their daughters become less timid and their sons become less violent, free at last of their abusive father’s influence.

Dreams & Desires volume 3 was published on 1st February and is available from www.freyasbower.com

By Carol Anne Davis

Karen Matthews (pictured) is due to be sentenced later this month for the kidnapping and false imprisonment of her nine-year-old daughter Shannon.

Matthews first came to the British public’s attention on 19 February 2007 when she phoned police and said that Shannon had gone missing. This sparked a huge manhunt which cost over three million pounds. The quiet schoolgirl had told a friend earlier in the week that ‘you can’t trust anyone’, leading police to fear that she’d been targeted by a paedophile.

For the next three-and-a-half weeks, search teams combed the neighbourhood of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire whilst locals did what they could to comfort the apparently-distraught mother and keep the child’s disappearance in the news. A representative for Matthews asked the Madeleine McCann fund to provide a reward, though, after due consideration the fund decided not to step in at that point.

But, unknown to everyone, Karen Matthews had masterminded her daughter’s disappearance in a cynical attempt to become rich. She knew that Shannon was really being held nearby at her step uncle Michael Donovan’s house. The little girl was kept sedated and was possibly tethered to stop her going to the window of Donovan’s modest flat. She spent most of her time watching cartoons and had no idea that up to eighty officers were working full time on her case. Matthews planned to wait until a national newspaper had raised a £50,000 finder’s fee, then have Michael Donovan pretend to find Shannon wandering about the area. They would subsequently split the cash.

Meanwhile, Karen Matthews - looking much older than her thirty-three years - invited television crews and journalists into her poorly-furnished and dirty council house and spoke at length about how much she missed her daughter. The unemployed mother-of-seven was often comforted by her toy boy cohabitee, Craig Meehan, who had moved into Chez Matthews when he was still in his late teens. (Meehan, who worked on the fish counter of the local supermarket, later went to jail for downloading child porn.)

As the days passed, detectives tried desperately to unravel Matthews complicated family tree, later joking that it was ‘more like a bramble bush.’ But, over time, they tracked down and visited her - and Craig’s - many relatives. On March 14, they arrived at Michael Donovan’s house (he was Craig’s uncle) having been alerted by neighbours that Donovan lived alone yet they could hear a child walking back and forth. When he didn’t answer, they broke in and heard Shannon’s voice, saying ‘you’re frightening me’, coming from the base of a bed. They pulled the divan apart and found forty-year-old Donovan and the nine-year-old concealed inside. Child psychologists asked her if she wanted to be reunited with her mother and she immediately said no.

So what kind of woman is Karen Matthews? She grew up in a large, impoverished family and was so unhappy at home that, age fourteen, she went into council care. Other than a brief stint as a shop assistant, she has never worked. By the time that she helped mastermind Shannon’s disappearance, she had seven children to five different fathers and was apparently motivated mainly by the welfare benefits which she got for each. It was money which she spent on cigarettes and alcohol rather than on baby food and clothes.

She showed little maternal instinct, pointing to one infant and saying ‘take it with you’ when her relationship with the father broke up. Thankfully, he did. At the time of her arrest, only four of her seven children were living with her, the others being in the custody of their dads.

At the time of Shannon’s kidnapping, her twelve-year-old brother had started running away from home and social workers were involved with the family. Indeed, Shannon had been on the child protection register before she started school, as her nursery head teacher had warned the authorities on six separate occasions that the little girl was dirty and neglected. And neighbour Claire Wilson had reported hearing Shannon and her siblings crying at night. Claire also warned social services on three different occasions in 2002 that the children were unwashed, unfed and not being properly taken care of, yet the authorities removed Shannon’s name from the register in 2003.

Needless to say, the children’s ordeal continued - when police were searching the house, they found notes between Shannon and her brother wondering if they would get a bag of crisps for their evening meal or if they would be beaten. Matthews also admitted to hitting her boyfriend Craig.

Sadly, she is so emotionally damaged that she couldn’t even pretend to respond normally when police told her that Shannon had been found. Seconds later his cellphone rang again, and, instead of asking how her daughter was or where she had been, she told the policeman ‘I like your ringtone’ and asked him to send it to her.

Her co-conspirator, Michael Donovan, is equally inadequate. The youngest of nine children, he met his wife whilst he was in a psychiatric hospital being treated for depression. The couple had two daughters who are both now in care. Prior to being found guilty of Shannon’s kidnap, he had been convicted of everything from arson to shoplifting, though he had held down a series of jobs, which is more than can be said for many of Karen Matthews’ friends and acquaintances. He looked distraught when found guilty of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice, whereas Karen showed no emotion when convicted of the exact same crimes.

Ironically, even if she had been given her half of the £50,000 finder’s fee, it’s unlikely that Karen Matthews would have been happy in the long term. Would the money have stopped her latest and future love affairs breaking up? No, because she is too damaged to maintain a loving relationship. Would it have turned her into a nurturing mother? Decidedly not as she doesn’t have the capacity to care. Looking at her heavily shadowed eyes, lank hair and prematurely-worn skin, it’s clear that this is a woman who cannot look after herself, far less others. Her days were spent watching television through a haze of cigarette smoke, her nights spent partying with various lovers, including boys who were allegedly as young as fourteen.

The only good thing to have come out of this whole sorry mess is that little Shannon now has the chance of a better life. The police bought her a kitten which she dotes on, and she is apparently doing well in foster care.

By Carol Anne Davis

Convinced that you’ve gotten away with murder? Think again, as British detectives are to examine every unsolved homicide between 1985 and 1999 in a mammoth cold case review. They are applying modern forensics to up to 700 historic cases where blood, semen or other bodily fluids were found. At the time, DNA technology wasn’t equipped to analyse tiny quantities of such fluids, but now they can be successfully tested and the results run through the National DNA Database. The new review, codenamed Operation Stealth 2, will involve all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and will be co-ordinated by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Even if the killer himself isn’t on the database, one of his close relatives may be, and this is enough for detectives to track him down.

Ronald Castree murdered eleven-year-old Lesley Molseed in October 1975, leaving sperm on her underwear. A year later, he was fined for abducting a nine-year-old and sexually assaulting her, but detectives still didn’t tie him to the Molseed case. By then, they had bullied a vulnerable young man, Stefan Kiszko, into confessing to the murder and he spent sixteen years behind bars, dying of a massive heart attack shortly after his release. He was forty-one years old. (Stefan features in the Wrongful Convictions section of my book Youthful Prey.)

Meanwhile, Castree, a married father, preyed on the drunken young women who hired his taxi, often persuading them to have sex with him in lieu of paying the fare. He also targeted pre-teen girls at the holiday camps where he vacationed with his wife and sons and was once involved in a fracas with a neighbour in the street.

But, in the autumn of 2005, the comic shop owner made a fatal error, allegedly raping a prostitute. She went to the police and he was arrested and had a saliva sample taken as a matter of course. The case was later dropped as she was considered to be a poor witness, but by then police had run his DNA through the computer and found a match to the semen found on Lesley all these years before. After thirty years of freedom, Castree was arrested, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, with the recommendation that he serve at least thirty years.

One of the other paedophiles in Youthful Prey was also caught by DNA advances. A prolific offender who bullied many of his young victims into having rough sex, he’d killed a child in 1968, leaving semen traces on the body. For decades he literally got away with murder. But, in 1999, he was stopped for drink-driving and had a saliva sample taken. Shocked detectives soon realised that they had a DNA match. After three days of questioning, the killer admitted responsibility and was sentenced to life.

As every true crime writer knows, most criminals commit multiple offences, albeit stopping at different levels of the anti-social continuum. Thus, the man who is convicted of beating a stranger is liable to also have a history of beating his pets, his children and perhaps his wife. Similarly, the man who gets into a road rage incident probably has prior convictions for breach of the peace or, at the very least, for parking illegally. From now on, every small illegal act will leave them at risk of being arrested and put on the DNA database, linking them at last to historic murderous acts.

Distraction burglaries of vulnerable elderly victims in Britain are on the increase. Street muggings are also on the rise.

Some left wing think tanks would have us believe that, if we simply threw more money at the people who commit these crimes, these thefts would die out, but I suspect that it’s a lot more complex than that. After all, many of my grandparents’ generation were considerably more impoverished than today’s welfare recipients, yet they didn’t automatically resort to theft.

My maternal grandparents had their family in the 1920s in Dundee, Scotland, when there was no welfare state. He broke stones in the quarry but often there wasn’t enough work for everyone and he would be sent home without a penny in his pocket. To feed themselves and their three daughters, my grandmother would walk miles to the homes of rich people, collect their laundry, carry it back to her own house where she washed it by hand in the sink, put it through a mangle, dried it in her backyard, ironed it then carried it all the way back to the big house, where she fetched another load. She was often treated disrespectfully, with one home owner arbitrarily telling her to ‘knock on the back door in future.’ (The implication being that she was too scruffy to be seen on the front doorstep.) And there was no continuity of employment, the lady of the house suddenly announcing that they wouldn’t be needing her any more.

In this them-and-us atmosphere, it would have been easy to turn to theft, but they were law abiding people. (That said, I’m not looking at them through rose-tinted glasses - my paternal grandfather beat the hell out of his kids and verbally humiliated them, and when my maternal grandfather was left to care for his three daughters, he shouted at them a lot and refused to give them anything to eat.) But they didn’t feel that the world owed them a luxurious lifestyle and they had an attitude of make do and mend. An uncle rented an allotment and would give them about-to-seed cabbages and potatoes, so my grandmother often fed her family of five on vegetable soup and stews. In winter they picked potatoes and in summer they gathered berries for local farmers, earning some cash in hand to boost the household income. But, such seasonal work aside, they frequently went to bed hungry in a house which was mainly unheated and where they had one bath per week. There was no boiler so my grandmother would heat saucepans of water on the stove and pour them into a tin bath by the coal fire. Grandfather would have the first bath, she the second, and her three daughters would follow in single file, all using the same increasingly-dirty water. The girls slept in the one bed throughout their childhood and into adulthood as there was no money for a second or third divan.

No one stole from their immediate neighbours, so there was consternation when cigarettes (in those days marketed as a healthy stimulant) and sandwiches began to go missing from the wooden hut near the quarry where the quarry workers left their jackets and packed lunches. For the first time ever, they began to regard each other with suspicion. Soon, they decided to keep watch and were relieved to see that the culprit was a goat. The animal simply went up on its hind legs and pulled down the bar which held the door shut, went in and daintily removed a packet of Woodbines from the inside pocket of a jacket, ate them and trotted out again. They changed the locking system to a heavy bolt, Billy was foiled and cordiality was restored.

Contrast this with today, where even the poorest welfare recipient is given enough money to feed himself. Medical help is also state-funded, whereas my grandparents had to sell an item of furniture to fund a doctor’s visit when one of their children became ill. Granted, living off of a welfare cheque is challenging - I’ve done it, and it’s possible providing you cook your meals from scratch, walk everywhere to avoid transport costs and buy your clothes from charity shops and jumble sales. Yet the police frequently enter homes where the householder has never worked but has everything from a home cinema to plasma TV, all funded through burglaries and fraud.

Nowadays, we have a plethora of free or inexpensive entertainment options - libraries, community centres and sports centres, whereas earlier generations had only a modest transistor radio. And yet I wonder if other entertainment forms, notably television, the internet and glossy magazines, aren’t at least partly responsible for the kind of discontentment which leads to crime today. An increasingly sophisticated marketing system tells us that we need the latest laptop or high definition TV if we’re to appear modern and successful. Teenagers also have to have ‘the London look’ or they’re written off by their peers. As an educated, unconventional person I can easily resist these blandishments, but it’s obvious that some of our society can’t or won’t. Unable to afford these goods, they turn increasingly to crime and we have kids mugging other kids for their sneakers. Women get mugged for their jewellery and designer handbags, men for their watches and mobile phones.

Yet all is not lost, for surely we can change this unhealthy mindset if we start teaching children different values at primary school, encouraging them to question whether designer goods are really so much better. Was that £50 anti-wrinkle cream that their mother bought any better than a £5 tub of emollient? Aren’t the ingredients similar? What size of advertising budget does each seller have?

In similar classes, teachers could encourage children to deconstruct the news, politics and alternative medicine’s more outlandish claims, so that they understand when they are being lied to. The result would indisputably be a more contented, better educated and less crime-ridden society.

from Carol Anne Davis

Publicising my latest book, Youthful Prey, subtitled Child Predators Who Kill, has been challenging as most of the media wanted me to endorse the naming and shaming of paedophiles. When I explained that I was against this, they publicised the work of other talking heads instead. But I’d interviewed detectives at length who were totally against identifying these men to the general public and I knew that children would be safer if I echoed their experienced views.

At the moment, the system works like this. Let’s assume that a newly-operational paedophile lures children into his van by telling them that he’s putting together a girl band. He hands them fake business cards and has recording equipment in the back of his van. A six-year-old girl gets into his vehicle to audition and he abducts her and drives her to his home where a neighbour overhears her screams and calls the police who arrest and charge him. He’s found guilty of molestation and sent to prison for three years. His physical description (he’s tall and thin), address, details of the lure which he used and his preferred victim age range and gender are logged into the Sex Offenders Register and the system keeps tabs on him when he’s released from jail.

Eighteen months after his release, a seven-year-old girl goes missing from a park and police question various parkgoers. Her friend says that a tall, thin man with a van told them that he was auditioning kids for a pop band, film or advert. Within minutes, the police can be at the paedophile’s door and can save the victim or at least lock up her assailant before he strikes again.

Contrast this with times where naming and shaming campaigns have taken place and a baying mob breaks the paedophile’s windows. Fearful of attack, he flees his home in the early hours and starts moving from town to town. He hasn’t reoffended since leaving prison yet overnight he’s become a pariah. He’s no longer connected to society as the community links which he’s built have suddenly been removed. This man may revert to his previous offending behaviour as he suddenly has twenty four hours a day to fantasize about children and nothing to lose by molesting one. This time, when a little girl is driven away by the man with the audio equipment, the police will have no idea where to find him - and he’s more likely to kill as he’s so full of hate. One of the killers in Youthful Prey - a cross-dressing bisexual believed to have molested his own children before participating in a group orgy during which a youngster was killed - went underground after his address was publicly identified and another would have done the same if he hadn’t been rescued by police.

A further problem with naming and shaming is that it gives children the erroneous impression that they are only at risk from Mr Smith who lives on the corner of their road. They let their guard down when they are around a seductive teacher, friend’s father or babysitter. Even I was surprised when researching the book at the number of ways that men (and occasionally women) found to get close to children in order to violate them.

I’m saddened by how often the media criticises chief constables for refusing to implement schemes which identify paedophiles. These law enforcement officers have decades of experience in dealing with child molesters and know at first hand how best to deal with them. One of the detectives whom I interviewed had spent ten years working with Britain’s Paedophile Unit and taught courses internationally on how to identify and arrest these manipulative deviants. He emphasised repeatedly that naming and shaming makes the situation worse.

Short of chaperoning them endlessly, it’s almost impossible to protect children from a homicidal paedophile, but thankfully these are in the minority, responsible for around six to eight deaths a year in Britain. Children are much more likely to encounter a seductive paedophile who grooms them over weeks or even years. Happy, nurtured and assertive youngsters who aren’t afraid of their parents are less at risk than lonely, neglected or frightened children as the child molester looks for a weakness which he can exploit.

The paedophile abuses a child’s trust and does terrible things to his or her mind and body. Would you rather they were being monitored by police and social services or roaming the country, free to indulge their unnatural lusts?

Youthful Prey is published by Pennant Books.

If the British media is to be believed, juvenile knife-carrying is a new phenomenon. In truth, though the incidence of teens using knives has gone up, the problem has been around for many years.

The first boy to ask me out at age eleven (for a while I thought that he’d also be the last) was stabbed to death in his teens by his brother during an argument about drugs. Another boy, who attended the same Primary School, stabbed a same-age boy who’d been bullying him, although the bully lived.

At my secondary school in the 1970s (a good school in a residential area) a teenage boy stabbed another during a fight, albeit not fatally. And a girl who I was friends with, whose upper class mother had a drink problem, started bringing a knife to school after bullies pulled down her shorts in the gym.

At thirteen, a group of us started to congregate in a large and apparently abandoned shed on a piece of wasteland. We bought snacks and left them there for a later celebration, by which time they’d disappeared. Each of us secretly assumed that one of the others was to blame. One night, I was walking home when the sister of one of the pack – a girl of fourteen – backed me against a wall and accused me of stealing the refreshments. As she spoke, she stabbed her penknife through the thankfully-oversized cuff of my jumper again and again. By the time that she let me go, I was shaking, though I followed the teen code and didn’t tell anyone. A few weeks later I heard that she was seeing a psychiatrist as she’d manifested similarly odd behaviour at home, including demanding that her parents call her by a boy’s name.

Ironically, we discovered the food thief shortly afterwards, walking into the shed one summer’s night to find him already in residence. He was a scary-looking teenager from a nearby approved school (a juvenile young offender’s institution) who was even more lost than we. He had a menacing look and an even more menacing voice and we shakily agreed with every word that he said. ‘Got anything to eat?’ he asked, and we just as wildly shook our collective heads. Moments later, the conversation having petered out, we watched through the window as a rabbit raced across the field. ‘We could kill one of those and eat it,’ he said, producing a knife and hitting a switch on the handle to produce a blade. Fortunately the rest of the bunny population remained in their burrows and, after a show of camaraderie which should surely have won an Oscar, we took leave of our cutting edge friend and never returned to Chez Shed again.

Sadly, this wasn’t my last encounter with knife crime as I became friends with a boy in Dundee who ended up with the dubious distinction of Scotland’s Youngest Attempted Murderer when, at twelve, he stabbed a teenage girl after a petty argument: she survived, though she lost part of one lung. He’d previously received frequent beatings at the hands of his alcoholic father, though, until that almost fatal day, he’d turned his anger inwards and was ultra quiet. I’d known the family for years and watched each member become dysfunctional in a different way.

In a similar time frame, I got to know various social workers who admitted that some of the kids from the local orphanages carried knives and would pull them on others during even the pettiest arguments. Unloved and unwanted, these children often imagined that people were disrespecting them, and took a ‘who are you looking at?’ approach to life. Lack of nurturing, or years of abuse and head injuries, had left them with poor impulse control. One boy pulled a knife on a social worker, and the man pushed the boy against the wall to disarm him, whereupon the kid filed an assault complaint with the orphanage’s management.

In May 1977, I left school and became the world’s worst office junior. It was obvious that I’d have to leave before they could fire me, so I began applying for various jobs. One firm was looking for a typist-receptionist but when I arrived the other girls all looked deeply depressed, even tearful. Only later did I find out why. A few days before, one of the firm’s clerks, a pretty teenager called Linda Batchelor, had been walking through Dundee city centre on a sunny August evening when she was attacked by a complete stranger, eighteen-year-old Brian Mearns. He forced her into a shop doorway where he stabbed her repeatedly, undressed her below the waist and shoved a pickaxe handle up her vagina. She died within moments of her injuries. The knife wielder was arrested within the hour, but could give no explanation for the murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Carrying knives, then, isn’t new – but why are more people using them? Idealists would have us believe that poverty is at the root of the problem and that, if we just threw more money at the poor, we’d have a veritable utopia. But the facts don’t bear this out, as we had real poverty before the advent of the welfare state yet stabbings were nowhere near as common as they are now. What has changed is that we now have a large subgroup of teenagers who’ve been raised by parents who have never worked, who have relied on welfare for decades. These teens have no positive role models, no sense of work ethic yet a strong sense of entitlement. Living off junk food and often illiterate, they are badly nourished, permanently irritated and endlessly bored. Chillingly, their long term plan – for want of a better word – is often to ‘get a bird and have a kid.’ In other words, to bring another child into this poverty-of-the-imagination environment. Until then, they’ll settle for picking fights with anyone smaller, weaker or in some way vulnerable, and occasionally stabbing them.

Yet there is hope, as the recent criminological experiment, reported in the Banged Up series (broadcast on the UK’s Channel Five) delineated. The project took several angry teenage boys who had been getting into fights and put them into a Scarborough prison alongside former-prisoners-turned-mentors. The youths balked at the loss of freedom, with one commenting miserably that he’d ‘been reduced to reading a book.’ One of them became so claustrophobic that he was sent home within twenty four hours and several of the others wept at visiting time because they missed their mums. The boys admitted to the psychologist that they had often been angry at their fathers, and one commented that the only time he got attention was when he caused pandemonium. Several of the youths became very attached to their mentors, potential older versions of themselves who spoke honestly of their wasted prison years. It was a wake-up call and, in the months after the experiment ended, only one boy had reoffended and been sent to a juvenile reformatory.

My new book, Youthful Prey, which explores the crimes of homicidal and seductive paedophiles, has just been published in Britain: more details on next month’s blog.

(from Carol Anne Davis)

On Friday 1st August 2008 - having spent the previous eight years in jail - Barry George was acquitted of shooting celebrity Jill Dando on her London doorstep. It’s an acquittal which his defence team believe is well overdue.

So how did Barry George end up on the police’s radar when they were investigating the popular Crimewatch broadcaster’s shooting murder? First, it was his misfortune to live a six minute walk away from her home. Second, he already had a record for violence and had learned how to shoot a pistol whilst attending voluntary training days with the Territorial Army, though he failed a proficiency test and they wouldn’t let him join. Third, he realised that the police would question him and went to a disability centre which he frequented and asked them to give him an alibi.

Understandably, this initially made him look good for the April 1999 murder - but further investigation should surely have cast doubts. The killing had been swiftly and neatly executed, with a single shot to the temple, yet Barry George is an epileptic with cognition difficulties who led a chaotic life. (The condition appears to be genetic as one of his sisters died during an epileptic fit.) The murder bore the hallmarks of a sophisticated hitman killing, yet George has an IQ of 75 - a mere 5 points above the retarded range. He lived in a fantasy world, telling everyone that Freddy Mercury, Gary Glitter and Jeff Lynne were his cousins and that he was in the SAS. He also pretended to be a detective (doubtless emulating his policeman father who had deserted the family when Barry was seven) and a martial arts champion.

Violence usually takes place on a continuum and this was true of Barry George between 1980 and 1983. In the summer of 1980, he approached a woman, struck up a conversation and touched her breasts. She hit him with her handbag and fled to her car. Later that same night, he put his hand up another woman’s skirt. Aware that he was simple-minded (he told police that he saw no harm in showing affection), the authorities gave him a three month suspended sentence. The following year, he engaged a student in conversation, pushed her to the ground and attempted to rape her. He then ran off. In January 1983, he was found hiding in the grounds of Kensington Palace but was intercepted by security guards. He was then belatedly linked to the attempted rape and sentenced to thirty three months in jail, serving about half of this. There has been a tendency for Barry George’s supporters to play down his criminal past, but the reality is that he seriously frightened these women. A marriage to a Japanese student which lasted for four months also ended in violence.

Still, prison appears to have been a wake-up call for Barry George as, from the time of his 1985 release from prison to his arrest in 2000 in connection with Jill Dando’s murder, he didn’t add further convictions to his criminal record. He spent these years wandering around London, taking photos of women that he was attracted to. Desperately lonely, he talked to local shopkeepers or went to the council offices to invent complaints about his council house. He also visited doctors’ surgeries and hospitals complaining of various imaginary ailments.

Unsurprisingly, he was one of ‘the usual suspects’ whenever there was a sexually-motivated crime, so was questioned by police over various offences committed by other men, including the stabbing murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. (A psychiatric patient and multiple rapist, whose DNA was found on Rachel’s body, was recently charged with her murder and the wrongly-accused Colin Stagg is in line for some much-deserved compensation.) But, apart from committing the nuisance crime of striking up conversations with various females, Barry George apparently didn’t reoffend.

Jill was shot dead in April 1999 and the rest of the year went by without the arrest of the killer. Barry George was one of many names on the possible suspects list because of his previous record and because he lived in the area. But a disability office which he frequented had confirmed that he was with them around about the time that Jill was killed on the doorstep of her London flat. Later, after he’d heard about the murder on the news, he’d returned and asked them to confirm his alibi. Now, a detective requestioned the staff and they said that they could have gotten the time wrong, that Barry could have made his first visit later in the day. This took away his alibi.

Taken in for questioning, the forty-year-old repeatedly denied having any particular interest in the victim. And the crime didn’t fit his offending pattern - his previous convictions had all been clumsy attempts at forming sexual relationships, very different to the single shot to the head which claimed Jill Dando’s life.

A single metallic residue - so small that it was invisible to the naked eye - from a firearm was found in Barry George’s coat pocket, but the coat had been taken from its sealed bag and photographed at a police photography studio, leaving it open to contamination. And a nylon thread, half a millimetre in length, which could have come from his clothing (or from the clothing of anyone else who owned a blue-grey nylon garment) was found on Dando’s body many hours after her death.

It was hardly a watertight case, yet police proceeded to trial in 2000, even after witnesses failed to pick Barry George from a lineup. The registered-disabled defendant didn’t take the stand. But his defence team pointed out that he’d had no particular interest in Jill Dando, that it would be ‘incredible’ to convict a man on a single particle. In turn, the prosecution noted that he had told police that he had never owned a gun, whereas he had - they had discovered an old photograph of him posing with a replica gun, incapable of firing, which he had subsequently sold. The jury - apparently convinced by the single particle - returned with a majority guilty verdict and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In prison, Barry George feared for his safety as several of the other prisoners threatened to attack him and many of them spat in his food. He later tried to commit suicide.

But his lawyers continued to protest his innocence, and most of the authors who wrote books about the case also saw it as a potential miscarriage of justice. His first appeal failed, but his second succeeded and, in 2008, he was retried at The Old Bailey, this time with the dubious particle evidence disallowed. After thirteen hours of deliberations, the jury gave their verdict and his conviction was unanimously overturned. Close to tears, Barry George whispered ‘thank you, my lord.’ His Ireland-based sister Michelle, who has worked tirelessly for his release, was in court to support him and was ecstatic at the news.

As to who did kill Jill Dando, it’s likely that this will never be known. There’s speculation that it was a Serb assassin as, three weeks before, Jill had made a televised appeal on behalf of Kosovan refugees and raised six million pounds for them. But, nine years on, the trail has gone cold.

Hopefully the case will ignite debate about how we, as a society, treat our most vulnerable members. Clearly, Barry George (and many others like him) need to be in a structured environment rather than part of our so-called care in the community. The psychologist who was with him throughout his second trial has promised that he will have the support of a community mental health team.

Barry, now 48, has promised not to follow women anymore, telling a Sunday newspaper ‘I know it’s wrong. I am never going to give anyone the chance to send me away again. I have changed.’

Though the victims are often forgotten in murder cases, Jill Dando is still remembered fondly in her home town of Weston-super-Mare, and has a beautiful area of parkland - Jill’s Garden - to commemorate her life.

By Carol Anne Davis

This is the first artist’s impression of a man who has been burgling - and sometimes raping - senior citizens in South London for the past eighteen years. In June 2008, Scotland Yard released the drawing reproduced here in the hope that someone would recognise the deviant that they’ve named the Minstead Rapist and turn him in. (Detectives launched an enquiry called Operation Minstead in the 1990s to try and trace him, hence the name.) British newspapers now call him the Night Stalker, but this is confusing to true crime aficionados as it’s the moniker given to the even more reprehensible Richard Ramirez.

The Minstead Rapist most often strikes in Croydon and Orpington, but has also raped and sexually assaulted elderly victims in Brockley, Bromley, Beckenham, Catford, Coulsdon, Dulwich, Forest Hill and Sidcup. In May and June 2008, he carried out attacks in south-east London, namely Norwood, Bromley and Lee. On one occasion he struck outwith London, attacking an OAP in Warlingham in Surrey. His victims, aged between 68 and 93, so far include 98 women and 10 men.

So what do we know about him apart from his gerontophilia? He most often strikes on a Friday or Saturday night, though has also struck on weeknights. He has surveilled the house and its owner in advance, always targeting a side or back window. He’s organised as he either brings tools to the scene or steals them from the victim’s shed and gains entry via an open window or by removing a window pane.

He moves quietly once inside the house, disabling the lights and the telephone - the victim usually doesn’t know that they’ve been targeted until they awake from sleep to find him shining a torch into their eyes and demanding sex. He wears a balaclava or mask, a cap and gloves and often tells the victims not to look at him, but several of them have described him as a light-skinned black man who was probably in his mid-twenties when he began offending in 1990 but is now in his forties.

He sometimes emanates a sweet smell - could this be from a medical condition such as diabetes where the breath can smell of pear drops? Or be the side effect of a prescription or non-prescription drug? Or could he work with sweet-smelling substances or deliberately apply a particular perfume to make himself more personable? Psychologists believe that he feels inadequate and that he was probably abused by his father or an older brother, and was failed by his mother, during a disturbed childhood.

He’s slim but athletic, approximately 5ft 9 and wears a size 10 shoe - in October 2002, he left behind a footprint from a size 10 Nike Air Terra Contego trainer. He probably rides a motorbike.

Police believe that he may have worked with elderly people in the past or have been raised by an elderly person as he knows how to lift and carry them. He can also be kind, and sometimes stays in the property for several hours, talking to the traumatised householder. Though he’s broken into over a hundred homes, he has raped between a fifth and a third of his female victims and only one out of the ten men. Police suspect that there are other elderly victims who haven’t come forward or who have reported the burglary but been too embarrassed to admit that they were raped. But burglary isn’t his main motive and sex is the first thing that he asks for. He has been known to take money from a house, only to discard it outside. He seemed ashamed when one elderly woman asked what his mother would think of him and left without attacking her. This level of conflict isn’t unusual in sexual offenders - one of the Railway Rapists burst into tears after raping a victim and Fred West wept after raping Caroline Roberts and begged her not to tell his wife Rose.

But the Minstead Rapist can also be exceptionally violent, raping one 88-year-old woman in her home in August 1999, though she begged him to use a prostitute. In answer, he raped her a second time, perforating her bowel and leaving her semi-conscious on the floor, where she almost bled to death. She spent a month in hospital followed by another two months recuperating in a nursing home. Yet the man who professes to like spending time with old people continued his sexual attacks - and, earlier this year, one of his victims died whilst being treated for her injuries in hospital.

Unusually, he can go for years without raping anyone in London, for there were no reported gerontophile rapes between his first attack in 1990 and his second, four years later. Was he so ashamed of his actions that he fought his urges? Or did he have an elderly or age-appropriate girlfriend? Or was he abroad or in jail? And why was he so active in the summer of 2003, committing at least seven attacks in quick succession? The police desperately need someone to put all of the clues together and give them a name in an operation which has cost almost twenty million pounds.

Police have his DNA on file (he doesn’t wear a condom during the rapes) so can ascertain that he hasn’t been to prison later that 1995, the year when they began to routinely add prisoners’ DNA to the database. The DNA suggests that he’s of north Caribbean ethnic origin - possibly his ancestors came from one of the Windward Islands such as Jamaica or Trinidad.

Several of this man’s victims have gone to their graves knowing that their attacker is still out there. Others have been left in emotional turmoil. Given that the vaginal canal of an elderly, sexually-inactive woman can shrink so much that the cervix can be felt by a doctor using her little finger, his rape victims have been left with permanent scarring and are in considerable pain. Many of these senior citizens have been too afraid to continue living independently and have moved into residential care or in with their adult children. Even so, they are unlikely to sleep soundly again.

Police believe that this man is in employment. But even if he’s a veritable recluse, he has to shop somewhere. Someone must be able to put all of the clues together and give detectives a name.

By Carol Anne Davis

Recently I read Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s beautifully-realised memoir Girls of Tender Age in which she recounts the murder of her eleven-year-old schoolfriend Irene Fiederowicz by sex offender Bob Malm in December 1953. It’s an evocative look at growing up in small town America - but what struck me is that Bob Malm’s journey mirrors the offending patterns of sex criminals throughout the world today.

He had a difficult start in life, as his mother died eight days after giving birth to him. He and his two sisters were taken in by an aunt but, within months, she placed an advert in a magazine offering them up for adoption - contemporary sex offenders such as Lawrence Bittaker often spend some of their formative years in foster care. Bob and his five-year-old sister were taken by a middle class couple whilst his other sister was fostered elsewhere, but it was too little, too late. Robbed of the early stimulus and nurturing that a baby needs, he was already on the way to becoming a remorseless sociopath.

At twelve he molested a girl who lived down the road and was sent to juvenile hall for three months. Again, this early offending is common in sex offenders. America’s worst historical sexual sadist, Jesse Pomeroy, began to torture other children at age twelve and Britain’s Peter Dinsdale - active in the 1970s - started his first lethal sexually-motivated fire at the same age.

Like the aforementioned killers, Bob Malm’s sexual offending continued at a steady pace. At 15, he attempted to rape a 10-year-old girl and was sent to reform school for a year - sex offenders don’t learn from past experiences. He went into the navy, using his travels to force himself upon prepubescent females. He took to clambering through the windows of sleeping girls - sex offender Richard Davis took Polly Klaas from her home in this way before murdering her. This time Bob Malm served a year in jail for trespass, after which his adoptive family understandably wanted nothing more to do with him.

The day that he was released from jail, Bob Malm climbed up a fire escape which led to the bedroom of a thirteen-year-old girl. Fortunately her father caught him and he was given a suspended sentence. A year later he attacked a seventeen-year-old girl and was sent to prison for seven to ten years. But he only served five due to good behaviour - sex offenders are invariably model prisoners as there are no women in jail for them to assault and rape.

Released, he began to prowl an adjacent neighbourhood where he wouldn’t be recognised, just as modern offenders do. He attacked a seventeen-year-old girl called Patricia as she walked home from a friend’s house, twisting her scarf tightly around her neck and ejaculating during the assault.

Days later, thirty-year-old Bob was trawling for victims when he espied eleven-year-old Irene Fiederowicz who had gone to the local store for her mother to buy potatoes. He grabbed her - children playing some distance away saw two figures struggling but assumed it was a couple fooling around - and dragged her under an overturned boat which was being kept on an empty lot. But local children threw stones at the boat so he went in search of a more private setting, hauling Irene across various fences until he found a shed in a dark back yard. The shed turned out to be locked, but by now Bob Malm was so aroused that he threw her to the ground, undressed her and rubbed against her, ejaculating during this act. He re-dressed Irene and warned her to keep the matter secret, but, too young to understand that it was wisest to play along with him, she said ‘I’m going to tell my mother,’ whereupon the sociopath used her scarf to strangle her to death.

Fortunately, seventeen-year-old Patricia, who had been attacked in the same neighbourhood a few days earlier, was able to give the police a good description of the tall, dark and handsome Bob Malm. With his prior record of sexual offending, he was considered a prime suspect by local detectives and was quickly brought in, whereupon Patricia picked him out in a line-up, though she was close to collapse at seeing him again.

Bob Malm then did what most of today’s sex offenders do - blamed the sexual assault on the victim. He told detectives that Irene had winked at him and that she’d gone with him willingly. Detectives fought hard to hide their disbelief and disgust, remembering that his victim was eleven-years-old and had been kept behind a year at school because she struggled to understand her lessons. She was also an exceptionally timid girl who was quiet even amongst friends. Still self-serving, Bob Malm added that he’d only tied the scarf tightly around her neck to punish her for saying that she’d tell her mother, that the intention hadn’t been to kill.

Unsurprisingly, the judges weren’t convinced and he was strapped into the electric chair in Connecticut on 12 July 1955. The current didn’t kill him outright, and he moaned and jerked for several minutes before his heart stopped - but, as author Mary-Ann Tirone Smith points out, Irene’s death was no less easy, and she spent a terrifying thirty minutes being dragged around by the sex killer before he finally strangled her.

By Carol Anne Davis

Three British killers were recently caught because they were on the DNA database for minor offences - anyone suspected of a recordable offence has a DNA sample taken as a matter of course.

Mark Dixie, a chef, was involved in a fight at the pub where he worked, so police took his DNA. They found it to be a match to the knife murder of teenager Sally Anne Bowman, who had been stabbed and sexually assaulted after her boyfriend had dropped her off outside her Croydon home. Dixie had previous convictions for assaulting women in several countries, often attacking strangers. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Steven Wright, a wife-battering truck driver, had his DNA taken after stealing £80 from an employer. Police subsequently matched it to the semen found in several murdered prostitutes, though the prosecution’s case was weak as Wright admitted to having sex with four out of the five murdered girls. Found guilty of multiple homicide, he was given a life sentence.

Levi Bellfield, who ran a wheel-clamping business, was on the database for fraud, though he didn’t leave his DNA on the two girls that he beat to death with a hammer. However, he had a previous history of battering his common law wife and assaulting police. He is also suspected of the abduction-murder of thirteen year old Millie Dowler and will probably die in jail.

Given such impressive results, many MPs are calling for a national database where everyone has their DNA logged at birth. But those of us au fait with true crime cases are understandably wary. I can remember a horrendous case - overviewed in a TV documentary - where a man climbed into a woman’s bedroom wearing a mask and viciously raped her. He spoke to her during this ordeal and she didn’t recognise his voice.

Police subsequently arrested the victim’s best friend’s husband, even though the victim swore that he wasn’t responsible. They sent his DNA off to a laboratory and apparently it came back as a match so he was taken to court and sent to jail. Subsequently, police admitted that there had been problems with the overworked lab, with DNA samples being put into test tubes which bore traces of earlier DNA samples. But they didn’t reopen the case.

In a similar case involving fingerprints, a partial print was found on a jewellery box after a house robbery. The print was already in the database as it belonged to someone who had been convicted of burglary as a youth. Police arrested the man who was now a successful china-and-giftware warehouse owner and respectable family man. He pointed out that he touched thousands of items every year when packing and unpacking items in his warehouse, which would legitimately explain his print on the jewellery box. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sent to prison where he became clinically depressed at missing his baby daughter’s formative years.

Much more recently, Dr Gene Anthony Morrison, director of the Criminal And Forensic Investigations Bureau in Manchester, was exposed as a conman who had no relevant qualifications. Yet he’d worked for over 20 years for various solicitors and had given evidence in court as an expert witness dozens of times. He claimed to have carried out blood tests, polygraph tests and handwriting analysis using his science degree and numerous postgraduate qualifications. In reality, he’d read a few detective magazines and studied the Channel Five series CSI.

Incredibly, forensic scientists aren’t licensed in Britain so Morrison wasn’t committing any offence when - for example - he carried out his own bizarre variation of the lie detector test, linking his subject to a computer loaded with voice-stress software rather than measuring sweat and pulse rate in a proper polygraph. But he had misrepresented his qualifications in court so was jailed for five years for perverting the course of justice and for perjury.

With so-called experts like this in the system, I wouldn’t personally volunteer to be on a DNA or fingerprint database and would be very wary of a compulsory one.

(from Carol Anne Davis)

Recently I was having a cup of tea in a community centre when four teenage boys sat down at the table next to me. A constable popped in for a takeaway sandwich and one of the youths started muttering about the ‘fucking police.’

Feeling brave in the presence of the law, I asked the boy if he’d had a bad experience with such an officer. He looked startled for a second then mumbled that everyone knew that the police battered suspects and fitted them up.

In truth, the situation has improved immeasurably since the 1984 inception of PACE, the Police & Criminal Evidence Act. I’ve met several humanitarian detectives who have admitted that they sleep better at nights since PACE was introduced. Interviews with suspects are now taped, making it harder for an over-zealous officer to force a vulnerable man or woman into making a false confession as happened with, for example, Stephen Downing in 1973. (Seventeen at the time of his conviction, he spent twenty-seven years in jail proclaiming his innocence, whereas he would have been freed a decade earlier if he’d gone on ‘admitting’ to a crime that he didn’t commit.)

Sadly, the notion that all police are bastards is one that still resonates in certain communities. Yet it’s a complete misnomer. I’ve met many caring detectives who work tirelessly to put sex offenders and killers behind bars. Many have lost their marriages and subsequent relationships because they’ve given all of their resources to the job. They feel an affinity for the victims and regularly return to cold cases in the hope that new evidence will emerge. Moreover, when these men retire, they often devote their lives to charitable work.

Now, you can argue that a true crime writer only sees the Force on its best behaviour, say whilst being given a tour of the local police station or when interviewing a detective about his most successful case. But I’ve also seen the boys in blue on the street and been very impressed. I used to live beside a pub from which revellers spilled out in the early hours. (Okay, were forcibly ejected onto the pavement.) They’d mill about outside and fight amongst themselves. One man sounded so animalistic and paranoid that he must have been on some particularly powerful drug like crack cocaine.

Eventually his enraged shouts would turn to unearthly screams and a public-minded citizen - not me, as I’d called them so often that they probably thought I had a handcuffs fetish - would phone the police. They’d park the Panda car outside the pub and approach in a surprisingly friendly manner, telling the numbskull (sorry, inebriated and substance-abusing gentleman) to calm down. They really did take the softly softly approach - ‘It’s alright, mate. You’re going to be fine’ - when they could have been forgiven for using a stun gun to put him out for the count. They invariably got the crowd to peacefully disperse, knowing that they’d have to do it all over again the next Friday and the next. They encounter even more mayhem at dance clubs every weekend where the women are often as violent as the men.

Several years ago I was on a panel at a crime event with one of Britain’s first female police officers, quaintly described at the time as ‘lady policemen.’ She summed the situation up perfectly when she said ‘You can’t really label the police force as good or bad. It’s made up of individuals who are all unique.’

*** POST BY CAROL ANNE DAVIS ***

Should one man’s word be enough to condemn another to a life sentence for serial murder? I’ve pondered this question ever since researching the case of the Railway Murders for my book Couples Who Kill.

The crimes which led up to the murders began in 1982 when a young woman was dragged into an abandoned building near Hampstead Railway Station in London by two men wearing balaclavas who bound and gagged her. They raped her at knifepoint then fled. The men went on to commit another four rapes that year and three more in 1983. They clearly had some forensic knowledge for they demanded that the victims wipe their sperm onto paper handkerchiefs which they took with them when they left the scene.

By 1984, the men were still raping together but one of the men - later identified as John Francis Duffy (pictured) - was also raping women on his own. In 1985, he was taken to court for raping his ex-wife and for assaulting her lover at knifepoint. Police duly added him to their database of possible Railway Rapist suspects. At court, Duffy recognised one of the women that he’d raped (she didn’t recognise him) and it seems that he decided to kill future victims so that he couldn’t be identified.

On 29th December 1985, a nineteen-year-old secretary called Alison Day was abducted from a railway path in Hackney Wick and dragged to a nearby garage where she was bound in an unusual way and gagged. She was battered and strangled with a ligature (Duffy had once tried to commit suicide by using a ligature) before being thrown into the River Lea. Duffy would later say that he chose this East London location so that the police wouldn’t connect it with the North London rapes.

The second murder took place four months later in April 1986, when fifteen-year-old Maartje Tamboezer, cycling through a sunlit wood, was forced from her bike by a piece of rope which had been deliberately strung across the path. She too was bound in an unusual way, stripped, raped, beaten and strangled with a ligature before burning paper handkerchiefs were stuffed into her vagina in the hope of destroying any semen there. Shortly afterwards John Duffy raped a fourteen-year-old at a railway station but he let her live.

In May 1986, another woman died after entering a railway station shed to collect her bike. Twenty-nine-year-old Anne Lock was gagged, blindfolded, raped and eventually strangled before her genitals were burnt to erase forensic evidence.

Meanwhile, the police found that semen traces on Maartje Tamboezer’s corpse were the right blood group for John Duffy, though the technology of the day wasn’t advanced enough to let them match semen samples. They interviewed Duffy and he knew that further interviews were pending. Determined to beat the system, he got a friend to assault him and was admitted to hospital claiming that he’d been mugged and was suffering from amnesia. Unfortunately, he was let out of hospital for the day, whereupon he raped another schoolgirl. And his release in September coincided with another rape near Barnet.

On 7th December 1986, Duffy was arrested and put into a line-up where five of his victims identified him. Police were convinced that the other rapist - the one who had latterly backed off from committing further rapes - was Duffy’s best friend David Mulcahy, a married man with children. They put him in several line-ups but no one identified him. Mulcahy was released without charge whilst Duffy went to court, where he was found guilty of the murders of Alison Day and Maartje Tamboezer. He was found not guilty of Anne Lock’s homicide as her body was so decomposed when discovered that it no longer bore his distinctive bondage ties. Numerous factors linked John Duffy to the murders - at his mother’s house, they found a skein of the unusual string found to bind his victims and fibres from Alison Day’s coat were found on his clothes. He was a long-term martial arts expert and one of the bones in Maartje Tamboezer’s neck had been broken by a martial arts blow. Still claiming hysterical amnesia, he was given life imprisonment.

The rest of the Eighties and early Nineties passed as Duffy served his sentence in various British prisons. Meanwhile, his former friend David Mulcahy remained married and had four children, though one died as a result of illness. The police were convinced that he was the second rapist so brought him in for questioning every time that another rape was committed in London and its surrounds.

Then, in 1998, Duffy hinted to his prison therapist that the murders had been committed in tandem. The police were called in and he told them that his partner-in-crime had been David Mulcahy. Taken back to the Old Bailey, Duffy admitted to seventeen more sex crimes, taking place between 1975 and 1986.

Police now re-examined traces of semen left from one of the 1984 rapes and found that it was a match to David Mulcahy. He was tried at the Old Bailey in October 2000, still protesting his innocence. Duffy gave evidence against his former friend, saying that they’d attacked Alison Day on 29th December 1985. But David Mulcahy had been ill in bed with pneumonia that month. Various other statements that John Francis Duffy made were similarly questionable.

When it came to DNA evidence for one of the rapes, the prosecution noted that there was only a billion to one chance that it was not David Mulcahy’s DNA. He was, unsurprisingly, found guilty of seven of the rapes - but, more controversially, found guilty of all three of the murders.

Interestingly, one of the policemen involved in the early rape investigations told a friend of mine that his colleagues were convinced that Mulcahy had committed the earlier rapes with Duffy but didn’t have the stomach for murder. They were surprised when a different police force pursued him for the homicides.

I wrote to David Mulcahy in March 2004, whilst researching the case for the hardback of Couples Who Kill and he replied and sent me numerous relevant documents. By the time that the paperback of Couples Who Kill came out in 2006, he’d put some of that information online at http://www.davidmulcahy.com/. He states that John Duffy’s bank account received a twenty-thousand pound deposit shortly before he implicated Mulcahy in the murders, and that, when police enquired where the money had come from, he asked for time to think about it and then said that it had come from his mother, a part-time cleaning lady.

Did John Duffy’s belated confession arise from the desire to expose a triple murderer? Or did someone induce him to expose a rapist who eventually turned away from a life of crime?

by Carol Anne Davis

On the morning of 15 July 1992, 23-year old Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common as she walked her dog. The only witness to the murder was her son Alex who was a month shy of his third birthday. He was able to tell the police that a bad man had hurt mummy, pushed him out of the way then washed blood from his hands at the nearby stream. Another dog walker had seen the man crouching down by the stream, having previously noted him acting suspiciously.

A local introvert named Colin Stagg was walking his dog towards the Common shortly after the victim was discovered and was stopped by a policeman who asked for his name and address. Colin readily provided his details and, in turn, was told that a young girl had been stabbed to death. For an unemployed man leading a quiet life, this was fascinating - if shocking - information and he passed it on to various shopkeepers and neighbours as he went about his day.

He was duly arrested and the police made much of the fact that he had an interest in paganism and was still a virgin at age 29. They believed that this was a case of ritual sacrifice as well as a sex crime, the killer having thrust his knife into Rachel’s anus. But there was absolutely no evidence against him, so they reluctantly let him go.

The police now got in touch with profiler Paul Britton who suggested that the killer would have deviant fantasies probably involving knife play. They arranged for an undercover policewoman, Lizzie James, to become Colin’s girlfriend. She sent him salacious fantasies - made up by the police following Britton’s guidelines - which involved her getting turned on when he cut another woman’s nipple with a knife whilst they had outdoor sex. She asked Colin to write similar fantasies, and the lonely virgin obliged.

As the weeks went by, Lizzie James upped the ante, saying that she’d taken part in a black magic sacrifice as a teenager and could only have sex with a man who’d done something similar. During their meetings in the park, she talked about the Rachel Nickell murder and said ‘I wish you’d done it.’ Colin still didn’t make the confession that police were hoping for, but they arrested him again regardless and he spent thirteen months in prison awaiting trial. Most of the prisoners recognised that he’d been set up, but he still suffered violence at the hands of two of them, being punched in the face and having his hand scalded with boiling water. Meanwhile his beloved rescue dog languished in the kennels.

Thankfully, when the judge read details of the honeypot lure, he threw the case out of court and Colin was free to go. But his ordeal was just beginning as the media gave the impression that he was a guilty man who had simply gotten away with it. Again and again he was called a killer by strangers and near neighbours, was beaten up by vigilantes and had his windows repeatedly broken. Newspaper columnists and journalists referred to him as scum, a danger to all women and a pathetic excuse of a man.

But when I looked at the case, I realised that Colin Stagg was an unlikely killer. For a start, he had no record of violence - and violent behaviour usually takes place on a continuum. I’d have expected the killer to have a history of cruelty to animals, domestic assaults or date rape and possibly a prior murder or murders, given that he’d had the confidence - or madness - to attack in broad daylight in a popular beauty spot. In contrast, Colin was a nature lover who doted on his dog and whose hobby was reading history books.

My conviction that he was an innocent man deepened in 1999 when I read a book called Who Really Killed Rachel? by Colin Stagg and crime author David Kessler, which included excerpts from the damning letters sent by Lizzie James. I subsequently invited David Kessler onto a panel which I was hosting at a London crime event, where he spoke eloquently about how appallingly the press had treated Colin and how the profiler refused to appear on television with Kessler to debate the case. They had had to go to New Zealand to get the book published as no one in Britain was prepared to publish anything which championed this unfortunate young man.

I went home and pitched to a monthly men’s lifestyle magazine for a commission to write about how unfairly Colin Stagg had been treated and about who the real killer might be, and the female features editor gave me the go ahead. She left shortly afterwards and the feature didn’t appear in the scheduled issue or the subsequent one. When I contacted the new features editor, I was curtly told that they wouldn’t be using the piece, that I could have a kill fee. It was clear that he’d bought into the media hype that Colin was guilty. Thankfully, the feature was immediately bought and used by True Crime Monthly, so a few thousand readers suddenly had access to the truth.

But Colin remained a pariah on his council estate and in the press, becoming so depressed at one stage that he contemplated suicide. He married a divorcee who had written to him in prison but the relationship was under appalling stress from the start as she too received death threats and eventually ended the relationship. His spirits lifted in September 2003 when he heard that scientific advances had allowed police to identify a tiny piece of DNA found on Rachel Nickell’s underwear. Colin’s solicitor demanded that he be tested so that he could be ruled out, but police refused to conduct the ten second test.

However, they eventually admitted that the DNA was that of Robert Napper, a schizophrenic who had committed over seventy outdoor rapes and stabbed to death a young mother and her daughter. He was already locked up in Broadmoor mental hospital for this double murder and his mental health was so precarious that they could not interview him for several years. In December 2007, they finally charged Napper with Rachel Nickell’s murder and he was returned to hospital to await trial.

Since Napper’s arrest, the media have been largely silent about their maltreatment of Colin Stagg. Fortunately, he has been able to tell the entire story in his new book, Pariah, written with the help of veteran reporter Ted Hynds. It makes shaming reading for anyone who maligned this completely harmless man without knowing the facts. Sadly, the public are rarely given the full story as newspapers alternate between copying each other’s take on a subject and inventing sensational stories. When perusing a high profile crime case, it’s wise not to believe everything that you read. Ironically, one of the tabloids which originally demeaned Colin Stagg has done so again since his book came out, suggesting that an unemployed ‘layabout’ like him shouldn’t be entitled to compensation.

***By Carol Anne Davis***

In May 1993, 24-year-old nurse Beverly Allitt was sent to jail for murdering four children at a hospital in Lincolnshire, England. She was given thirteen life sentences with the recommendation that she serve at least forty years. In August 2006 she petitioned for a reduction in her sentence - her case is still pending and the public is understandably concerned.

Allitt attacked more than a dozen babies on her ward between February and April 1991. Most survived because staff transferred them to other wards or to different hospitals. But she succeeded in murdering four, injecting them with overdoses of insulin and potassium. In February 1991, she injected seven-month Liam Taylor, who was recovering from pneumonia, destroying the left ventricle of his heart. The following month she murdered eleven-year-old Timothy Hardwick, a disabled child who had been hospitalised after suffering an epileptic fit. He, too, went into cardiac arrest. Three weeks later she killed two-month-old Becky Phillips with a large quantity of insulin. Later that same month, she took the life of fifteen-month Claire Peck who was being treated for an asthma attack.

Several of Allitt’s surviving victims suffered hugely at her hands. One boy, injected with potassium chloride at age seven, endured agonising pains in his chest and later became angry and aggressive. Doctors and psychiatrists blamed the potassium. Katie Phillips (the twin sister of Allitt’s murder victim Becky Phillips) was also injected with insulin and potassium. She survived but has been left with permanent brain damage. She is also partially paralysed and has limited sight.

The so-called Angel of Death is herself a pitiful figure, displaying Munchausen’s Syndrome traits from age twelve, repeatedly self-harming to gain attention. Later this became Munchausen’s-Syndrome-by-Proxy, and she deliberately injured her patients in order to be the centre of attention when she administered CPR. By her trial she had lost four stone and was diagnosed as being anorexic. Later, despite claiming that she wasn’t eating anything, she had repeated vomiting attacks. Prior to becoming a nurse, she had set small fires and smeared excrement on her fellow lodgers’ possessions in her unhealthy quest to create drama and uncertainty. She has no compassion for others and is clearly deeply disturbed.

Beverly Allitt will be forty in October 2008, potentially capable of giving birth for another ten years. Given her capacity to harm children, no sensible authority will free her until she has gone through the menopause.

(from Carol Anne Davis)

Do violent computer games create vicious teenagers? The British government fears that there’s a link, so have ordered an inquiry. Public concern was fuelled in February 2004 when seventeen-year-old Playstation games fan Warren Leblanc killed his fourteen-year-old friend Stefan Pakeerah. Stefan’s parents were shocked by the level of violence in Warren’s favourite game Manhunt and believed that it had influenced the boy, noting that Manhunt had characters being beaten to death with a hammer, the implement that their son had been battered with. Several right wing newspapers, known for their sensationalistic responses, immediately called for the game to be banned.

On the day that Warren Leblanc was to be sentenced, a TV news station asked me to speak about the case. By now the tabloids were using headlines like Murder By Playstation and suggesting that Leblanc was totally addicted to Manhunt. But he wasn’t as he’d lent it to the victim two days before murdering him. The game, which has an 18 certificate so shouldn’t have been viewed by either boy, was found in Stefan’s bedroom after his death. Ironically, one of the tabloids which called for the game to be banned had previously called it the ‘must have game of the year.’

Leicestershire police stated that the game didn’t play a part in the murder of Stefan Pakeerah and the broadsheets conscientiously reported this, but the gutter press never lets the truth get in the way of a good story. They continued to tell their readership that Manhunt had turned a nice young man into a homicidal maniac.

But the luckless Warren Leblanc didn’t murder simply because he played with a Playstation. He’d had an unhappy and disruptive home life and tried to self-medicate with drugs. He ran up a drug debt and his dealers were threatening to beat him up if he didn’t find the money. Fearing for his own life, he killed Stefan whilst attempting to rob him of cash. The media made much of the fact that there are hammers used to kill characters in Manhunt. But everything from baseball bats to sickles and machetes are also utilised in the game.

Played for a half hour or so a day, these games provide portable amusement for dexterous teenagers. Medics who regularly play such games are the most skilled surgeons. But some alienated teens are playing for six or more hours daily - six hours that they should ideally be spending with family and friends. It’s the fact that these games are substituted for real life that is more of a problem, though six hours of violent images - Manhunt has gangs killing each other in the most brutal ways imaginable - arguably isn’t the ideal fodder for a child who is already angry and estranged.

So what’s the solution? Surely preventing the sale of 18+ games to minors is a sensible start. The alternative, outright censorship, takes us down a very dangerous path. After all, the pressure groups which object to screen violence are often also the ones who object to sexual images and want to ban all films and series with an erotic content, despite the fact that these are enjoyed by millions of law-abiding adults. They’d have us return to a diet of Little House On The Prairie, Heidi and The Waltons which bear no resemblance to real human desires, to contemporary life.

Thankfully, the government enquiry is being headed by Dr Tanya Byron, a bastion of common sense. A child psychologist and presenter of the TV series House Of Tiny Tearaways, she has delineated consistently that many childhood problems are the result of well-meaning but flawed parenting. The parents who were courageous enough to feature on her show were largely devoted to their young, but sometimes unwittingly babied them, resulting in developmental problems. Some only fed their child his or her favourite food, resulting in nutritional deficiencies and delay in speech development. Others were letting five year olds sleep every night with Mummy whilst Daddy languished on the settee and unhealthy jealousies were formed.

An example typical of the Leblanc case, who was also from a broken family, was that of a single mother who had been brought up in care. History all too often repeats itself, and she was now unconsciously rejecting her oldest daughter. As a result, the little girl was having terrible tantrums and the pair had become increasingly estranged. By intervening and showing how children need praise and positive one-on-one time, Tanya Byron mended the relationship and the family bonded beautifully.

If Warren Leblanc had received the intervention of such a gifted psychologist, he arguably wouldn’t be serving a life sentence and the media wouldn’t be waxing hysterical about interactive computer games.

Aaron Gilbert, murdered at thirteen months, suffered terribly during the last eight weeks of his life. His mother Rebecca Lewis stood by as her new boyfriend, Andrew Lloyd, swung the child around by his ears, bit his face and punched him in the head and body. He died of brain damage on 5 May 2005 after Lloyd battered him against the wall.

Just another case of cruelty to children, you might say. But this case made legal history because his mother was the first woman in Wales to be convicted of familial homicide. Prior to this law, women like Rebecca Lewis weren’t held accountable for letting their partner abuse their child.

As is usual in such cases, many adults in the vicinity knew that something was wrong. Aaron was seen to be badly bruised within days of twenty-three-year-old Andrew Lloyd moving in with twenty-one-year-old Rebecca Lewis. Neighbours noticed that the baby was terrified of the heavy-drinking man. A family friend heard Lloyd screaming ‘fucking shut up’ at Aaron and saw him blow cannabis smoke into the infant’s face.

Lloyd, who had suffered severe physical abuse during his own childhood and who had made two suicide attempts the previous year, clearly hated the baby. Psychiatric services knew that he’d been violent towards a previous partner’s child, the prison and probation services knew that he’d served a jail sentence for Grievous Bodily Harm and social workers were tipped off that Aaron was covered in bruises. A total of seven agencies were involved with Andrew Lloyd but they didn’t share information and most didn’t know that he was living with Rebecca Lewis and her child.

Social workers received a phone call from a female cousin of Rebecca’s stating that Aaron was being abused, but they decided that the call could be malicious so opted not to visit the house. Three days later they wrote a letter to Rebecca. But they’d been given the wrong address and the letter didn’t reach the twenty-one-year-old. She took her young son to the Accident & Emergency Department of her local hospital after Andrew Lloyd damaged Aaron’s arm, but ran out when questioned by doctors as to how he had sustained the injury. A member of staff planned to carry out a home visit but it was called off because of ill health. Rebecca’s cousin phoned again, telling social workers that Andrew Lloyd took drugs and that he’d been seen out with the baby at 2am. Again, they failed to react appropriately. Aaron now had eight days left to live.

Shortly afterwards, neighbours noted that the baby’s face and body were so swollen that he resembled the Elephant Man. He had over fifty injuries on his tiny body. And still Rebecca Lewis did nothing to help her terrorised son.

On 4 May 2005, she went out shopping, leaving her baby with Andrew Lloyd. He picked Aaron up and swung him violently against the wall. When Lewis returned, Lloyd was giving the child CPR. For the next eighteen hours, doctors battled to save the infant but he had suffered massive brain damage and could not be revived.

Andrew Lloyd admitted Aaron’s murder and was jailed for 24 years. But Rebecca Lewis denied familial homicide and was tried at Swansea Crown Court in December 2006. The jury heard that she’d done nothing to prevent her boyfriend’s attacks on her baby. They found her guilty and she was jailed for six years. The judge told her: ‘You put your own interests first, and above and beyond that of your vulnerable child. You could have stopped the violence that Lloyd was subjecting Aaron to. You could so easily have got the authorities to stop it.’

Afterwards, the Welsh division of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stated ‘Without this new law it is likely that Rebecca Lewis and Andrew Lloyd would have joined a long list of couples who have been acquitted or not even brought to trial for murdering a child.’

Whilst applauding the decision to imprison Rebecca Lewis, I’m tempted to suggest that our grossly mismanaged social services should also be put on trial...