The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (8 page)

The couple had three children, Zara, Ben and Roxanne, who had all grown up at Hall Farm, riding, pony clubbing and graduating to part-time jobs at the Sir Charles Napier restaurant. All this made them indistinguishable from all the other children in the area. Ben and Zara were both then in their early twenties, he away at university and she living and working in London. Only Roxanne was still at home, studying for A Levels at a local high school. Early on the Monday evening she had phoned her mother from a friend’s to say she would be staying out for the night. The friend had just passed her driving test and they were going out for a meal to celebrate. Janet Brown told her daughter she was tired and would be going to bed early. Another of Roxanne’s friends had called Hall Farm just after eight o’clock and had become the last person to speak to Janet Brown. Like Nick the builder, Grahaem Brown had also phoned later from Switzerland and received no reply.

Someone had driven past the house at about 10.20 that evening and heard an alarm ringing. They had not heard it later on their way home. The police could find no other neighbouring house whose alarm had been triggered that evening so presumed it must have been the Browns’. Their system had an internal alarm which would ring forever until it was turned off and an external alarm which would ring for twenty minutes. Both would be set off together, but only the external alarm could be heard from the road and so the police assumed that this what the witness had heard. This meant the Browns’ alarm had been triggered at some point in a twenty-minute period around ten o’clock, either by Janet Brown or her killer.

The alarm system’s control box revealed that it had been triggered by one of two red panic buttons in the house, one at the side of Mrs Brown’s bed and the other by the front door. There was slight evidence—a half-turned key—in favour of the button by the front door but there was no way of being certain. Equally, it was only possible that Mrs Brown was already being confronted by her killer during the unanswered phone calls after eight o’clock. There was no certainty about that either.

Her body was lying face down not far from the front door, at the bottom of the stairs. She had been handcuffed behind her back and her mouth had been gagged with a length of brown packing tape wrapped nine times around. The keys to the handcuffs were beneath her body. The pathologist reported that she had been killed by at least ten blows to the head with some kind of unidentified bar. There was evidence that she had been punched, once, in the face, but the pathologist could find no physical evidence of any sexual assault.

It was her assailant’s means of entry to the house that was, and remains, the most inexplicable aspect of the case. The tradition of housebreakers, a little old fashioned nowadays, is to score a window with a glass cutter, cover it with lengths of tape to prevent it shattering and tap it gently from the frame, using suckers or handles of tape to lift it down. It takes a while to complete but it is the cleanest and quietest way of entering a house. A burglar, not wishing to give himself any more trouble than is necessary, will choose a small window and avoid anything that is double-glazed.

Mrs Brown’s killer ignored all the small windows at the back of Hall Farm, and entered a high-walled courtyard at the side where there are three double-glazed glass patio doors to the main room. He scored around the entire circumference of the middle door and covered the scoring with an all-weather Sellotape. If he had properly completed the task he would have had to repeat it with the double-glazing panel. Instead he then smashed and shattered the whole pane.

When the case was featured on
Crimewatch
the item produced no useful leads but among the callers was a professional burglar who gave his name and his record and said that no burglar who knew what he was doing would ever break in to a house like that.

The police cannot be sure but they believe Mrs Brown was upstairs in bed when this happened. Her clothes were neatly piled by the bed in her tidy way and she usually slept undressed. If the police accept that the incident began before the ten o’clock period when the alarm was set off, it is hard for them to understand why she apparently did not respond to the loud noise of the shattering glass by immediately triggering the nearby panic button or putting on the dressing gown which she kept by the bed. They speculate that she may not have heard the noise—perhaps because she was asleep or the television in the bedroom was on, or both—or may have frozen in fear, but Detective Superintendent Short concedes that these are half-hearted explanations. Though she was killed downstairs a small piece of the packing tape was found in the bedroom, indicating that she was gagged there.

Michael Short has many years’ experience as a detective investigating major crimes. It was apparent that the death of Janet Brown was confusing and strange to him in ways he had not previously encountered. It was also apparent that he would not readily be defeated by it. There was no big talk or bluster about this. While police officers can sometimes seem hard and cynical his manner was calm and unruffled. There had, of course, been method and wisdom in his approach to the case. But this alone could not put all the pieces together in a way that made sense. There was almost a challenge here. You try and make sense of it because I’m damned if I can. He was protective of Mrs Brown and her family and had a police officer’s caution and scepticism about the media that was all too familiar to me; caught up in an ongoing conflict about using or being used by journalists, wondering whether he could trust and not be betrayed.

Short did say that there are one or two details of the case he is keeping back “for the usual operational reasons”. He said they would not radically alter my understanding of the case if he disclosed them. He did reveal that traces of diluted blood were found around some of the light switches in the upstairs rooms of the house. The traces were too small to be identified but the police assume they are particles of Mrs Brown’s blood from the hands of her killer after he had attempted to wash and clean himself following her death. They support the theory that he stayed on in the house for an unknown amount of time and there are additional signs of a cursory, exploratory search of the house. Nothing was stolen however and the only clue that burglary may even have been intended was that both the television and video recorder downstairs had been unplugged from the mains, as if being readied for removal. Janet Brown’s daughters noticed this when they went through the house for the police a couple of days after the killing, looking for things missing or out of place.

The police think it possible that the killer may have triggered the alarm himself, deliberately, for whatever reason, before finally leaving the house. If it was triggered by Mrs Brown before her death, the killer must have been composed and calm after the fatal assault, washing himself and, apparently, carrying out some kind of search with the internal and external alarms ringing. He must also have known that the alarm was not connected to a switching centre which would alert the police.

There is no other forensic evidence of significance. Of the sixty good fingerprints that were found only four have not been eliminated. No one can say if any of them belong to the killer. There was some excitement in the first days of the inquiry when the fingerprint dust of the scenes of crime officers showed up what appeared to be a palm print in blood on the wall near Janet Brown’s body. It turned out to be oil, not blood and the print belonged to the innocent engineer who had installed the boiler some time ago.

Along with the absence of forensic evidence there was the absence of anything associated with a struggle. No disturbance or disarray that the police would normally expect to accompany such a death. Mrs Brown did not, or could not, offer any resistance.

Most burglaries these days take place during working hours when properties are most likely to be unoccupied. The last thing a burglar wants is to meet his victim. There was no such caution from the man who smashed his way into Hall Farm. It was not late in the evening, lights were on throughout the house, the curtains were open downstairs and two cars were parked in the drive. Perhaps, for whatever reason, he wanted Mrs Brown to be there. The police considered that her killer may have been known to Mrs Brown. But if that was the case why would he take such trouble to break in, when he could just knock at the front door? Perhaps he knew her but she didn’t know him. It did not seem like a random incident from somebody who just happened to be passing. The killer had come prepared with a glass cutter, two types of tape, handcuffs, at least one bar—if the weapon that was used to hit her was the same as the tool that was used to smash the patio door—and, the police presumed, a torch and a bag to carry all these things.

None of the items that were left behind were traceable. The tapes were commonplace and the handcuffs had no manufacturer’s mark. Detective Superintendent Short said he was surprised to discover how many sets of handcuffs are imported and sold. They too were commonplace. There was no sign of the weapon which had killed Mrs Brown.

The police looked hard for anything untoward or unusual in Mrs Brown’s life. They had to consider that she might have been having an affair. They found nothing at all of significance and no evidence that she was involved with anyone outside her marriage. Neighbours who had known her presumed she must have had a life revolving around her work and been close to people there or close to old friends. People at work imagined she must have had close friends outside work and old friends imagined she must have made closer new friends. The truth was that, outside the family there was nobody who knew her that well.

In Radnage she had been one more mother supporting her daughters at pony club events, regarded by some as a woman who kept herself slightly apart from the group. We never set eyes on her from the day the children stopped riding, one villager told me. Though neighbours said they would see her out walking her dog, a Great Dane, before it died and noted that she would was not afraid to be out alone at dusk and even in darkness with the dog by her side.

On rare occasions neighbours would see both Mr and Mrs Brown out walking together. She would be the one to smile and wave. Whatever the neighbours knew of life at Hall Farm seems to have filtered through from the Brown’s children to the other children of the village, to the other children’s parents. There was talk, for instance, of the family moving to Canada when Grahaem first began working abroad but this had been abandoned in favour of the continuity of the children’s education here.

Only one couple, Lesley and Andy Bryant, seem to have had any kind of regular contact with Janet Brown and that too began through the association with their respective daughters. The Bryants have a smallholding just up the lane from Hall Farm and Lesley formed a friendship with Janet that never extended to confidences but got as far as them discussing going on holiday together. The Bryants thought Janet a bubbly woman and had no sense of any disquiet in her life. They could not imagine her having enemies and certainly not a lover. Andy thought Grahaem a bit remote, but then, he considered, perhaps all doctors are like that.

The Bryants knew the locals sometimes speculated about the solidity of Mr and Mrs Brown’s marriage but heard nothing from Janet to indicate any problem and, taking as they found, could only say that the couple seemed happy enough together. Andy sometimes said that it wouldn’t do for him, that kind of long-distance relationship, but that was the Browns’ business. Lesley knew how much Janet’s work meant to her. Janet had recently gone back to work after many years spent raising the children. She had originally trained as a nurse and midwife but had returned as a medical researcher. When she died she was approaching the end of a contract with an Oxford University health project, collecting data from hospital records about women who had successfully conceived after problems with infertility. It had been solitary work, spending hours at a desk in a hospital records department, going through files. But she had become known to the records’ staff and known to her colleagues back at the project’s office. She had enjoyed the job and had joined a course to develop her research skills, hoping her contract would be renewed. Her manager had wanted to keep her on but could make no promises until he was sure of further funding. Her position was in this limbo when she died. It was only later that the money which would have guaranteed her future employment came through.

After a couple of months there were no leads to the identity of Janet Brown’s killer. Not even the (anonymous) offer of a
£
10,000 reward had helped. The inquiry was reviewed by other senior officers and Detective Superintendent Short made presentations of the case to groups of detectives. None of this made very much difference and there was still too much that defied logic and good sense. Short then decided to seek an independent view of the case and approached the forensic psychologist Paul Britton who has been among the pioneers of offender-profiling techniques. Short was not put off by Britton’s involvement with the aborted case against Colin Stagg over the killing of Rachel Nickell. It is, after all, detectives who lead, and take responsibility for inquiries, not psychologists. Paul Britton was only one more resource in any inquiry.

Britton came down from his base in Leicester to meet Short and visit Hall Farm. He studied maps, plans, charts, the scene-of-crime video and photographs and witness statements which the investigation had produced. Short was pleased that Britton largely shared his view of the case and the possible motives behind it. Short was not prepared to share these motives with me, on the grounds that they remained speculative and might be confusing or misleading to anyone reading them who might have information about the case. He likened this to an inaccurate, or speculative, artist’s impression of an offender which, if published, could prevent the real offender being caught. He was, however, willing to arrange a meeting for me with Paul Britton. And so, we spent a couple of hours together one afternoon, in an office upstairs at Thame Police Station, not far from Radnage, where the incident room for the inquiry had been based.