The Mammoth Book of New Csi (4 page)

But Stagg replied: “I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t.”

Although Stagg never came close to confessing, he was charged with Rachel’s murder. But when the case reached the Old Bailey, the judge, Mr Justice Ognall, threw out all the prosecution evidence obtained from Stagg by what he called a “honeytrap”. The case collapsed within a day and Stagg was acquitted. Nevertheless, Colin Stagg complained that most people still thought he had done it. He found it impossible to get a job and was spat at and abused. He eventually won £700,000 in compensation, eight times the amount Rachel’s son Alex was awarded.

Just three months after Colin Stagg had been charged with Rachel Nickell’s murder, an intruder broke into the basement flat of Samantha Bisset in Heathfield Terrace, Plumstead, through a patio door that had been left open. Samantha put up a desperate struggle for life as he raped and murdered her in the hallway. There were twenty stab wounds in the body, one so savage that it severed her spinal cord.

The killer then suffocated and sexually assaulted her fouryear-old daughter, Jazmine-Jemima, nicknamed J. J., in her cabin bed surrounded by toys. He then set about mutilating Samantha’s body in a shockingly similar way to Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel in 1888.

According to the prosecution, the killer “cut open her body from the top of her chest to the genitals. He peeled her skin back and in some areas, in particular the umbilicus, pubic and lower abdomen area, removed the flesh altogether. He pulled away her ribs, causing extensive splitting of the tissue, and once the internal organs were exposed he stabbed them many times . . . Secondly, he cut open the top of her right thigh and attempted to cut off her lower leg at the knee. He cut open her left leg from the hip to the lower thigh with an extensive cut. He eventually left the flat, taking with him a piece of Samantha Bisset’s abdomen, presumably as a trophy.”

Samantha’s body was discovered by her boyfriend who let himself into the flat the following morning. It seems that the killer had been spying on them as they made love the previous evening, as Samantha had been laid out on some cushions in the same position. An experienced female police photographer, who was called to record the scene, was so traumatized by what she saw that she never worked again.

Fingerprints had been left at the scene. They belonged to Robert Napper. He admitted manslaughter due to diminished responsibility. He also pleaded guilty to attempting to rape the two seventeen-year-old girls and the rape of the twenty-twoyear-old mother, mentioned earlier. In October 1995, he was detained under the Mental Health Act, on the grounds that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and Asperger’s syndrome.

Sentencing Napper, Mr Justice Hooper said: “You are suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, characterized by marked thought disorder, paranoia and grandiose delusions. You may have also experienced tactile hallucinations and you feel you can read people’s minds. Your mental illness is severe and directly linked to the offences of homicide and rape. You are highly dangerous as a result of that illness. You present a grave and immediate risk to the public. You will require detention in hospital for many years to come.”

The officer in charge of the Bisset enquiry, Detective Superintendent Michael Banks, said at the time that he and colleagues on the Nickell team “liaised closely”. But despite the similarity between the two murders, the police continued the prosecution of Colin Stagg as Napper claimed to have been at work on the day that Rachel was killed.

After the Stagg case was thrown out, the police went to see Napper who was, by then, in Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital. But Napper refused to confess to the Nickell murder unless there was some crime scene evidence tying him to the killing.

In 2002, the Rachel Nickell case was reopened as part of a review of cold cases in light of new advances in DNA profiling. A new technique known as Low Copy Numbers allowed a DNA profile to be obtained from much smaller samples. However, when the sample from the Rachel Nickell case was sent to the Forensic Science Service, it was returned with no match – though Napper’s profile was then on the national database. It was only when the sample was retested three years later that the link with Napper was finally established.

On 18 December 2008, at the Old Bailey, Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Napper’s barrister David Fisher QC said: “He was convinced he had an MA in mathematics, that he had received a Nobel Peace Prize, that he had medals from the time he was fighting in Angola, that he and his family were listed in
Who’s Who
, that he had millions of pounds in a bank in Sidcup, that he and others could transmit their thoughts by telepathy. He also believed that he was kneecapped by the IRA and that he had his fingers blown off by an IRA parcel bomb but, because he inhaled sparkle fumes, this resulted in his fingers being miraculously repaired.”

Sentencing him to an indefinite stay in Broadmoor, Mr Justice Griffith Williams told Napper: “I am satisfied there are sufficient safeguards in place under the Mental Health Act to ensure you will never be released unless you are no longer a danger to the public. That is highly unlikely to ever happen. You are on any view a very dangerous man. You still present a very high risk of sexual homicide.”

Scotland Yard apologized to Colin Stagg and the family of Rachel Nickell for the mistakes it had made during the course of the investigation. The police were criticized particularly for their overreliance on offender profiling. Dr Britton was placed under a charge by the British Psychological Society, but the case was eventually dismissed.

I
T IS NOT
known how many people Hadden Clark killed. He boasted of killing numerous young women and burying them in the sand dunes of Cape Cod when he worked there in the 1970s. But he was certainly guilty of murdering and cannibalizing six-year-old Michele Dorr, six-and-a-half years before he was caught for another unrelated murder by a single piece of crime scene evidence.

Divorced psychotherapist Penny Houghteling lived with her daughter Laura in Bethesda, Maryland, in the United States. Laura was gifted and beautiful. She was a student at Harvard and friends called the six-foot blonde Twiggy. One day she was going to be US president, it was said, before Clark killed her during a bizarre torture ritual.

Her mother had made the mistake of employing Clark, a well-known oddball, as a gardener. Penny liked to help the unfortunate and thought she was doing a good deed when she took on a homeless man from a local church organization early in 1992. Clark was a good worker. He tended her flowers and shrubs, and began to depend on Penny emotionally as if she was his mother. His own mother, Flavia, boasted that she could trace her roots back to Plymouth Rock. But both she and his father, though outwardly respectable, were irredeemable alcoholics. Both sides of the family had antecedents who had fought on the winning side in the War of Independence. Hadden’s grandfather on his father’s side had been the mayor of White Plains, New York.

Hadden’s father had a PhD in chemistry as well as an MBA. He had developed a flame-resistant carpet, as well as cling film. Earning good money for his expertise, he moved from job to job in the tri-state area. While the Clarks were thought of highly by their neighbours, behind closed doors they had alcohol-fuelled rows in front of the children. This had a devastating effect. Born in 1950, Hadden’s older brother Bradfield had turned to drugs as a teenager. One night in 1984, drink and drugs got the better of him and he killed his date, an attractive twenty-nine-year-old named Patricia Mak. He cut up her body in his bathtub, then barbecued her breasts and ate them. The rest of her remains were packed into plastic bags. He had intended to bury them, but his conscience got the better of him. After a failed suicide attempt, he turned himself into the police and was sentenced to fifteen years to life imprisonment in Pleasant Valley State Prison in California.

The Clarks’ youngest child, Alison, ran away as a teenager and eventually broke all ties with her parents.

“I never had a family,” she said.

Only Hadden’s younger brother, Geoffrey, seemed to hold things together – to start with at least. After graduating from Ohio State University with a degree in microbiology, he married his childhood sweetheart and moved to Maryland, where he worked for the Food and Drug Administration. They lived a cosy suburban existence in Sudbury Road, Silver Spring, before they divorced. Geoffrey’s wife accused him of physical abuse before they separated. He was convicted and given a suspended sentence.

Although Bradfield turned out to be a killer, he was not in the same league as Hadden who, from an early age, was deemed to have been “born evil”. He enjoyed hurting people, lashing out at anyone who peeved him. Those who crossed him would find the headless corpse of their pet cat or dog deposited on their doorstep.

He maliciously pushed his brother Geoff off his bike while they were practising to ride “no hands”, only to rush home to tell his mother that Geoff’s bike had not been damaged, making no mention of his brother’s injuries.

Hadden’s father dismissed him as a “retard”, while his mother told him she had wanted a daughter. She dressed him as a girl and called him “Kristen” when she was drunk. The only place he found any stability was when he stayed at his grandparents’ retirement home on Cape Cod. Some noticed that he was anything but a retard, playing chess to near-genius standards.

When his mother enrolled him for a two-year chef’s course at the celebrated Culinary Institute of America, he showed a genuine talent for producing ice sculptures. Even so, he reacted badly against any perceived slight, on one occasion retaliating by urinating in a vat of mashed potatoes. Nevertheless, he graduated as a chef in January 1974. He found employment in prestigious restaurants on Cape Cod. It was there, he claimed later, that he began killing.

His strange behaviour in the kitchen, such as drinking blood, frequently lost him his job. The word spread throughout the restaurant owners of Massachusetts. Unable to find work on shore, Clark went to work on the SS
Norway
, a cruise ship. After a year, he found a job on Long Island, then at Lake Placid, New York, during the 1980 Winter Olympics. By 1982, he had been through fourteen jobs in eight years. Meanwhile, his personal life collapsed. His grandfather died and his grandmother entered a nursing home in poor health, robbing him of his only stability. Then his parents divorced and his father was diagnosed with cancer.

His career on the slide, he enlisted in the US Navy as a below-deck cook. But his shipmates had little time for a man who wore women’s panties under his uniform. He was bullied and beaten, and once locked in a meat freezer for three hours. He was moved to other duties, but the bullying did not stop. After suffering concussion from having his head beaten against the deck of an aircraft carrier, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and given a medical discharge. He then turned up on the doorstep of his brother Geoff, who took him in. But Hadden refused to take medicine prescribed to him. He was arrested for stealing women’s underwear from a local department store – not for a girlfriend but to wear himself.

“I like my ladies’ clothing,” he told his mother, who had started him down that road. “Don’t try and change me.”

Geoff had to ask his brother to leave when Hadden was caught masturbating in front of his nephews and nieces. He moved into a room he rented 5 miles (8 km) from Geoff’s house. This did not last. His landlord found him “crazy and evil” and evicted him, but not before he had trashed the house, stealing books, tools and even the vacuum cleaner. He sprayed black dye on the living-room carpet and hid rotting fish heads up the chimney, in the stove and in the family’s piano. The smell permeated the house and was almost impossible to eradicate. He left dead cats in the fridge and on the welcome mat, then perched a ten-gallon can on top of a door, so it would spill when the door opened. This led to a conviction for the destruction of property and he was put on probation.

It also led to homelessness and to the job as a minimum-wage gardener with Penny Houghteling. He also worked in a fast-food outlet at night, so he had plenty of money, saving some $40,000 by 1990. His outgoings were minimal. He slept in his Datsun pickup, or set up camp in the woods just off the interstate highway. But his general condition and behaviour were not quite bad enough to have him committed.

Penny Houghteling had no trouble with him. She trusted him and allowed him to make himself coffee in the kitchen and use the bathroom without permission. She may have been too trusting. Things began to go missing. First, it was a string of pearls, then it was her underwear, one piece at a time. She said nothing. But when some tools disappeared, she confronted him. He blew up and she backed down, believing that perhaps she had been too hard on him.

For Hadden, things got worse after Laura graduated from Harvard in the summer of 1992 and returned home. Viewing Penny as the mother he never had, he saw Laura as a rival for her affections. Understandably, Penny was closer to Laura than to Hadden. In Hadden’s mind, something had to be done. Then an opportunity presented itself. Penny Houghteling told Hadden that she was going away for a conference from 17 to 25 October. The following day, he went to a hardware store and bought rope and two rolls of duct tape. In the left-corner of the cheque he used for the purchases, where there is a box for a “memo”, he wrote the word “Laura”.

On Saturday, 17 October, Laura was seen at a horse meet in nearby Middleburg, Virginia. There was a gala dinner afterwards. The following morning, she slept in. Then she went to watch a football game with her older brother, Warren, and his housemate. Laura had taken a temporary job in Washington, DC, while she made up her mind whether to train as a teacher or a lawyer. A big project was starting the following day, so she was in bed just after ten o’clock.

Around eight o’clock the next morning, a housekeeper with a child waiting for the school bus saw a woman she took to be Laura leaving the house. But she did not arrive at work. Her employer phoned the house. There was no reply. Knowing Laura to be a conscientious worker, she was worried and sent a young woman, a personal friend of Laura, around to the house. But no one answered the door and she called Warren.