This Body of Death (4 page)

In looking at everything that happened to John Dresser, one must begin with the canal. Part of the nineteenth century’s means of transporting goods from one area of the UK to another, the particular section of the Midlands Trans-Country Canal that concerns us bisects the city in such a way as to create a divide between socioeconomic areas. Three-quarters of a mile of its length runs along the north boundary of the Gallows. As is the case with most of the canals in Great Britain, a towpath gives walkers and cyclists access to the canal, and various types of housing back onto the waterway.

One might harbour romantic images invoked by the word
canal
or by canal life, but there is little romantic about the length of the Midlands Trans-Country Canal that flows just north of the Gallows. It’s a greasy strip of water uninhabited by ducks, swans, or any other sort of aquatic life, and there are no reeds, willow trees, wildflowers, or grasses growing along the towpath. What bobs at the canal’s edges is usually rubbish, and its water carries a putrid odour suggestive of faulty sewer pipes.

The canal has long been used by residents of the Gallows as a dumping ground for items too bulky to be taken away by the rubbish collectors. When Michael Spargo, Reggie Arnold, and Ian Barker arrived there at roughly nine-thirty
A.M
., they found a shopping trolley in the water, and they commenced using it as a target at which they threw rocks, bottles, and bricks found along the towpath. Going to the canal appears to have been Reggie’s idea, one initially rejected by Ian, who accused the other two boys of wanting to go there “to wank each other or do it like doggies,” which can be seen as an apparent reference to what he himself had witnessed in the bedroom he was forced to share with his mother. He also seems to have harassed Michael about his right eye, as reported by Reggie. (The nerves of his cheek having been damaged during a forceps delivery at his birth, Michael’s right eye drooped and did not blink in concert with his left eye.) But Reggie indicates he himself “sorted Ian proper,” and the boys went on to other things.

As the back gardens of the houses along the towpath are separated from it only by wooden fences, the boys had easy access to properties where the wooden fences were in disrepair. Once they exhausted the possibilities presented by throwing things at and into the shopping trolley, they wandered along the towpath and found mischief where they were able: They removed fresh washing from a line behind one house and dumped this in the canal; at another they found a lawn mower (“But it were rusty,” Michael explains) and did the same with it.

Perhaps the perambulator gave them the ultimate idea. They found this object sitting next to the back door of yet another of the houses. Unlike the lawn mower, the perambulator was not only new, but it also had a metallic blue helium balloon attached to it. On this balloon was printed “It’s a Boy!” and the boys knew the words referred to a brand-new baby.

The perambulator was more difficult to get their hands on because the fence here was not in bad condition. Thus it is suggestive of a sort of escalation of intent that two of the boys (Ian and Reggie, according to Michael; Ian and Michael, according to Reggie; Reggie and Michael, according to Ian) climbed over the fence, stole the perambulator, and hoisted it over and onto the towpath. There the boys pushed each other for perhaps one hundred yards before tiring of this game and shoving the perambulator into the canal.

Michael Spargo’s interview indicates that, at this point, Ian Barker said, “Too bad it weren’t a baby inside. That’d make a lovely splash, eh?” Ian Barker denies this, and when questioned, Reggie Arnold becomes hysterical, shrieking, “There weren’t no baby, ever! Mum, there weren’t no baby!”

According to Michael, Ian went on to talk about “how wicked it’d be to get a baby from somewheres.” They could, he suggested, take it to “that bridge over West Town Road and we could drop it on its head and see it splat. Blood and brains’d come out. That’s what he said,” Michael reports. Michael goes on to insist that he spoke hotly against this idea, as if he knows where his interview with the police is heading when they get to this topic. Ultimately the boys grew tired of playing in the environs of the canal, Michael reports. Ian Barker, he tells the police, was the one to suggest they “clear out of here” and go to the Barriers.

It should be noted that not one of the boys denies being in the Barriers that day, although all of them repeatedly change their stories when it comes to what they did when they got there.

West Town Road Arcade has been known as the Barriers for such a length of time that most people have no idea that the shopping arcade actually has another name. Early in its commercial lifetime, it developed this appellation because it sprawls neatly between the bleak world of the Gallows and an orderly grid of semidetached and detached houses occupied by middle-class working families. These buildings comprise the Windsor, Mountbatten, and Lyon Housing Estates.

While there are four distinct entrances to the Barriers, the two most commonly used are those giving access to residents of the Gallows and to residents of the Windsor Estate. The shops at these entrances are rather depressingly indicative of the expected clientele. For example, at the Gallows entrance, one finds a William Hill betting lounge, two off-licences, a tobacconist, an Items-for-a-Pound shop, and several take-away food enterprises featuring fish and chips, jacket potatoes, and pizza. At the Windsor Estate entrance, on the other hand, one can shop in Marks & Spencer, Boots, Russell & Bromley, Accessorize, Ryman’s, and independent shops offering lingerie, chocolates, tea, and clothing. While it’s true that nothing stops someone from entering at the Gallows and traversing the arcade to shop where she pleases, the implication is clear: If you are poor, on benefits, or working class, you’re likely to be interested in spending your money on cholesterol-laden food, tobacco, alcohol, or gambling.

All three of the boys agree that when they entered the Barriers, they went into the video arcade at the centre of the place. They had no money, but this did not stop them from “driving” the Jeep in the Let’s Go Jungle video game, or “piloting” the Ocean Hunter on a search for sharks. It’s an interesting fact that the participatory video games allowed for only two players at one time. Although, as previously noted, they had no money, when they pretended to play it was Michael and Reggie who manned the controls, leaving Ian the odd man out. He claims he was not bothered by this exclusion, and all the boys declare themselves unbothered by the fact that they had no money to spend in the video arcade, but one cannot help speculating if the day would have turned out differently had the boys been able to sublimate pathological tendencies through engaging in some of the bellicose activities provided by the video games they encountered but were not able to use. (I don’t mean to imply here that video games can or should take the place of parenting, but as an outlet for young boys with limited resources and even less insight into their individual dysfunction, they might have been helpful.)

Unfortunately, their time in the video arcade came to a precipitate end when a security guard noticed them and shooed them on their way. It was still school hours (the CCTV film has it at half-past ten), and he told them he would phone the police, the schools, or the truant officer if he saw them again on the premises. His interview with the police has him claiming that he “never saw the little yobs again,” but this seems more like an effort to relieve himself of guilt and responsibility than the truth. The boys did nothing to hide from him once they left the video arcade, and had he only made good on his threat, the boys would never have encountered little John Dresser.

John Dresser—or Johnny, as he was termed by the tabloid press—was twenty-nine months old. He was the only child of Alan and Donna Dresser, and on a working day he was normally minded by his fifty-eight-year-old grandmother. He walked perfectly well, but like many toddler boys, he was slow to develop language. His vocabulary at twenty-nine months consisted of
Mummy
,
Da
, and
Lolly
(this last referring to the family dog). He could not say his name.

On this particular day, his grandmother had gone to Liverpool for an appointment with a specialist to discuss her failing vision. As she could not drive herself, her husband took her. This placed Alan and Donna Dresser in the position of having no child care, and when this occurred (as it did occasionally), it was their habit to take turns minding John since neither of them found it easy to take time off from work to see to him. (Donna Dresser was at this time a secondary school chemistry teacher and her husband a solicitor specialising in property sales.) By all accounts, they were excellent parents, and John had been a much-anticipated addition to their lives. Donna Dresser had not found it easy to become pregnant in the first place and had taken great care during her pregnancy to ensure the birth of a healthy baby. While she came under scrutiny and criticism for being a working mother who allowed her husband to care for their child on this particular day, it should not be assumed that she was anything other than a devoted mother to John.

Alan Dresser took the toddler to the Barriers at midday. He used the little boy’s push chair, and he walked the half mile from their home to get there. The Dressers lived on the Mountbatten Housing Estate, the most upmarket of the three neighbourhoods that touched on the Barriers and the one farthest from that shopping arcade. Prior to John’s birth, his parents had purchased a detached three-bedroom home there, and on the day of John’s disappearance they were still in the process of renovating one of the two bathrooms. In his statement to the police, Alan Dresser explains that he went to the Barriers at his wife’s request to fetch paint samples from Stanley Wallingford’s, an independent DIY shop not far from the Gallows end of the shopping arcade. He also goes on to say that he wanted a “bit of air for me and the boy,” a reasonable desire considering the thirteen days of bad weather that had preceded this outing.

Evidently, at some point while in Stanley Wallingford’s, Alan Dresser promised John the treat of a McDonald’s lunch. This seems to have been at least partially an attempt to settle the child, a fact which the shop assistant later verified to the police, for John was restless, unhappy in his pushchair, and difficult to keep occupied while his father chose the paint samples and made purchases relevant to the bathroom renovation. By the time Dresser got his son to McDonald’s, John was irritable and hungry and Dresser himself was annoyed. Parenting did not come naturally to him, and he was not averse to “swatting a bum” when his son did not behave appropriately in public. The fact that he was indeed seen just outside McDonald’s giving John a sharp smack on his bottom ultimately caused a delay in the investigation once John disappeared although it’s unlikely that even an immediate search for the boy would have altered the outcome of the day.

While Ian Barker’s interview has him claiming that he didn’t care about being excluded from the imaginary playing of video games, Michael Spargo evidently assumed that this exclusion prompted Ian to “grass me and Reg to the security guard,” an accusation that Ian hotly denied. However they came to the guard’s attention, though, they escaped his further attention when they next went into the Items-for-a-Pound shop.

Even today, this establishment is chock-a-block with goods, offering everything from clothing to tea. Its aisles are narrow, its shelves are tall, its bins are a jumble of socks, scarves, gloves, and knickers. It sells overruns, knockoffs, seconds, mislabeled items, and Chinese imports, and it’s impossible to see how stock control is managed although the shop’s proprietor seems to have perfected a mental system that takes all items into account.

Michael, Ian, and Reggie entered the shop with the intent of stealing, arguably as an outlet for the displeasure they felt at having been told to leave the video arcade. While the shop had two CCTV cameras, on this day they were not operational and had not been for at least two years. This was widely known to the neighbourhood children, who evidently made Items-for-a-Pound a frequent haunt. Ian Barker was among the most regular visitors to the shop, as its owner was able to name him although he was unfamiliar with Ian’s surname.

While in the shop, the boys managed to steal a hairbrush, a bag of Christmas poppers, and a package of felt-tip marking pens, but the ease of this activity either did not satisfy their need for antisocial behaviour or lacked a suitable frisson of excitement, so upon leaving they went next to a snack kiosk in the arcade’s centre, where Reggie Arnold was quite well known to the proprietor, a fifty-seven-year-old Sikh called Wallace Gupta. Mr. Gupta’s interview—taken two days after the fact and consequently at least somewhat suspect—indicates that he told the boys to clear off at once, threatening them with the security guard and being labeled in turn “Paki,” “wanker,” “bumboy,” “fucker,” and “towelhead.” When the boys did not move away from the kiosk with the alacrity he desired, Mr. Gupta pulled from beneath the till a spray bottle in which he kept bleach, the only weapon he had with which to defend himself or to urge their cooperation. The boys’ reaction, reported by Ian Barker with a fair degree of pride, was laughter, followed by the appropriation of five bags of crisps (one of which was later found at the Dawkins building site), which prompted Mr. Gupta to make good on his threat. He sprayed them with the bleach, hitting Ian Barker on the cheek and in the eye, Reggie Arnold on the trousers, and Michael Spargo on both trousers and anorak.

While both Michael and Reggie understood quickly that their school trousers were as good as ruined, their reaction to Mr. Gupta’s attack upon them was not as fierce as Ian’s reportedly was. “He wanted to get that Paki,” Reggie Arnold declared when questioned by the police. “He went mental. He wanted to rubbish the kiosk, but I stopped him, I did,” an assertion unsupported by any facts that followed.