Chapter 3: A Second Fatality

A week passed without any further incidents. Shreds of Doreen’s clothes revealed one fingerprint that didn’t belong to her, but without a suspect it wasn’t of any use at that time.

Then the following week events took a sinister turn. A seventeen-year-old girl had spent the evening at her grandparent’s house in an area very built up with rows and rows of old terraced houses. Denise only lived a few blocks away from them, so no one saw any problem in her going home on her own, just as she had done so many times before.

Several hours passed before her parents, unable to get a reply on her mobile, rang the grandparents to ask if she was coming home, only to be told she had left over two hours ago. Concerned, but not too alarmed as she had many friends in the area whom she might have called on, they waited another hour then rang a few of the more likely ones.

Having no success, they started to get alarmed. Whilst her mother continued to ring friends, her father went round to the grandparent’s house by the route he thought she would most likely have taken.

They had always impressed on her not to cut through entries at night, but to walk around the road. Having no success, her father decided to try the direct route through the entry.

He hadn’t gone far before he came across Denise’s body, clothing ripped apart and lying in a pool of blood. Rushing to her side, he found that her throat had been cut and promptly threw up.

Distraught, he ran back to the street screaming. When a few neighbours came out and managed to calm him a little, between sobs he told them what he had found. Whilst one rang the police, another went to check. Coming back a few minutes later, looking decidedly white, he nodded to his wife, telling her to take him inside and look after him until the police arrived. ‘I’ll keep an eye on things out here,’ he said.

Soon the area was cordoned off. The father who had touched the body was taken home to change so that the police could take his clothes away to check for evidence. News soon spread around the area, angry crowds gathering for Denise had been a well-known and popular local girl.

The post-mortem showed that Denise had died instantly when her throat was cut, but that there had been violent sexual intercourse before and after death, which had caused internal tissue damage. A semen sample had been recovered that later matched exactly that of Doreen’s attacker.

Examining the evidence from this and the previous cases, there was one noticeable difference. The previous four had all been in semi deserted parkland areas. This was the first one in a built-up area. One of the theories the team discussed was the possibility that the killer lived in the area, normally going away from home to commit an attack.

This one they reasoned, could have been an unplanned one. Perhaps he just happened to see Denise turning into the alley and overcome by lust, went after her on the spur of the moment.

None of which got them any further forward. None of the CCTV in the area showed anything of use. Appeals to the local community brought no reports of any sightings, whilst the evidence that they did have was no use until they had a suspect to match it to.

The officer in charge, Detective Inspector Tim Wallace, decided that as there was not much else that he could do, they would do a house-to-house call in the immediate area. During this they would collect a list of males, their colour and their age who lived in each house in that area. Once that was done, if nothing else had turned up, they would start working their way through the list, asking all males to give a DNA sample.

Tim got out a local street map. He drew a square box on it four streets in each direction of the spot where Denise’s body had been found. He made lists of every address in the streets that were inside his box, then set his team to go door to door.

They were to ask if anyone remembered anything from the night Denise died, then to make a list of males who lived there. If they got no reply, they were to ask the neighbours each side who would generally know how many males lived there and their colour. They were also to ask if anyone had moved since that night.

By the end of the second week, they had covered the whole square. They had a list showing four thousand eight hundred and sixty-two males over the age of sixteen lived in the marked area.

Of those, three thousand nine hundred and twenty-four were white and in this case could be eliminated. Of the remaining nine hundred and thirty-eight, after a number of revisits to catch people at home, five hundred and eighty-six were put on a separate list on the grounds of being too short, disabled, Japanese, Chinese or considered unlikely to be Muslim.

Of the remaining three hundred and fifty-two, two hundred and ninety-five had willingly given a DNA sample. Forty-three had given a sample under protest, one had refused point blank. The remaining thirteen had still not been contacted.

Detective Sergeant Tommy Bell had worked with DI Wallace on previous cases with a good rapport, so he was happy to have him in charge. He knew he would have a fairly free reign to investigate. Once the DNA sample matched the one taken from Doreen, he ordered the DNA samples from the two hundred and ninety-five who had willingly given a DNA sample to be kept on hold for now.

The forty-three who had protested were to be processed first. In the meantime, the missing thirteen were to be chased up urgently. A court order was requested for the one who had refused.

The following day when DS Bell checked the reports from the previous night, ten of the missing thirteen had responded to the request left through their door and had attended the station to give a sample. These were added to the list for processing.

Three cars were sent out to the remaining address’s, with instructions to check with the neighbours if there was still no reply. If a work address was located. They were to be visited at work.

Later that morning, Steve Thomas, a local roofing contractor, was sitting on a roof pointing a chimney. Unknown to him he was working within the search square.

Because he had been doing other work on the back of the property, his ladders were up at the back of the house, with only the tip of his roof ladder showing at the front. As he was sitting quietly pointing, he really didn’t catch the eye of anyone in the street below.

About ten thirty, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and looked down to see a man come out of a house on the other side of the road. He took two steps, then turned and ran back into the house, closing the door behind him. Steve thought nothing of it until a minute later a police car drew up and two officers got out and knocked on the door.

Steve couldn’t see the house number, but he could see the number of the one directly opposite him, so was able to work out it was number seventy-two. He made a mental note of it and carried on pointing.

Getting no reply after several knocks, the two policemen split up and went to the houses each side. Steve thought it odd that they had got no reply, but then the man might have gone out the back way for a number of genuine reasons or even been in the shower or on the toilet.

He watched as they each spoke to the next-door neighbours then went on to the next house along. This time one of the neighbours seemed to be giving some information worthy of the police officer writing it down.

Leaving there he went along to his colleague then the two of them gave another knock on the original door. Still getting no reply to two knocks, they got back in their car.

The car stayed there for a while, then drove away. Steve had only done a little bit more pointing when he saw the front door of number seventy-two open and what appeared to be the same man came out, looking up and down the street several times before stepping right out and closing the door.

Steve took his phone out and took a picture, then as the man walked up the street and got into a parked car, he waited until it pulled out, then took a photo to include the number plate, although it was too far away for him to read it.