Killer Women (5 page)

When I interviewed her in the notorious so-called ‘women killers’ cottage in the grounds of the Dwight Correctional Center in January, 1992, she was still protesting her innocence and insisting that she would eventually succeed in overturning the jury’s verdict.

In a hushed voice, as various other inmates walked freely around the inside of the stone-built building, she told me, ‘I put up with a lot of shit from Keith but there’s no way that I killed him.’

As one woman inmate – imprisoned for life for murdering her parents – poured us each a cup of tea, Kathy went on, ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I ended up paying the price for working for an evil ring of drug smugglers. They killed Keith and then managed to get the police to arrest me. One day I’ll prise out the truth.’

Meanwhile, Kathy continues passing her days reading and cooking inside one of the strangest cottages that I have ever visited. It remains to be seen if her desperate attempts to appeal against her sentence will ever actually be heard.

Having spent two fascinating days inside one of the world’s most daunting prisons, I have to admit that Kathy Gaultney has a great deal of charm and intelligence. When she is eventually released, I have no doubt that she will successfully reinstate herself into society.

Stonham Parva is the sort of hamlet where you can hear the birds singing and the trees rustling in the wind. Only a handful of cars pass through each day and the biggest event of the week is during the summer months when a cricket match is played most Sundays on the village green.

Two hundred years ago Stonham Parva provided Suffolk smugglers with a perfect stopping-off point
en route inland after hauling their illicit goods ashore on the East Anglian coastline but the smugglers had long gone when teacher Vic Copperman bought one of the picturesque Georgian houses that skirt the village and decided to turn it into the Four Elms Children’s Home.

Copperman’s plans met with the approval of everyone concerned, from the local council to the authorities in the south east of England and London who would provide twelve troubled youngsters. None of the locals objected as the home seemed an admirable project and the vast amount of land attached to the house meant that there would be little danger of Four Elms affecting the peace and tranquillity of the village.

The children who moved into the home were in desperate need of love, care and attention. All were from broken homes where they had either suffered at the hands of abusive parents or simply been rejected.

By the time thirteen-year-old Joanne was enrolled in the school in the early 1980s, owner Vic Copperman seemed to be running an excellent establishment. As headmistress, he had drafted in a rather over-made-up blonde called Thea Trevelyan but the authorities who used the home as a filter for their most troubled youngsters were impressed with the place.

Joanne’s background was particularly tragic. As a little girl of seven she had been removed from the family home after her mother, Dee Washington, had a nervous breakdown following the break-up of her second marriage and because she simply could not cope.

Dee was riddled with guilt for failing to support her daughter but she was advised to start a new life and let Joanne settle into a home because there was a definite feeling that Dee might have further mental problems.

Dee then started to rebuild her own life. She developed an interest in shooting and became a top markswoman, even qualifying as an international referee for clay pigeon events.

However, she never forgot Joanne. She kept wondering how her daughter was surviving; what her life was like without a proper mother. Dee even went to her local authorities and asked them if she could visit her daughter with a view to maybe taking care of her again. The authorities contacted Vic Copperman at Four Elms to ask him his expert opinion as he was the only parental figure in Joanne’s life at that point.

Copperman responded in an extremely sensitive way. He calmly and sensibly explained that he felt it would be ill-advised for Joanne to see her mother. Copperman told the authorities that Joanne was
more settled than she had ever been before in her short and troubled life and that to reintroduce her mother for a few hours might set her development back years.

Dee was disappointed but understood the sentiments being expressed as she had suffered an unhappy, abusive childhood herself and the last thing she wanted was to add to her daughter’s suffering.

Dee eventually grew to accept that it was probably best if she did not see her daughter again until she reached adulthood. It was a
heart-wrenching
decision but under the circumstances it seemed the only answer.

By October 1987, Joanne had grown into an attractive blonde teenager of nineteen, still in the care of Copperman and his headmistress Thea Trevelyan at Four Elms. She began to express a wish to meet her family. She was naturally curious about her background but it was decided that perhaps the best person for her to meet first would be her grandmother in Devon. A few weeks later, Joanne headed off to the West Country for a short stay.

Within days of arriving in Devon, Joanne started to drop hints about certain ‘things’ that had been happening at Four Elms. Her grandmother was puzzled about exactly what she meant until she laid it on the line: Joanne had been sexually abused
virtually since the first day she had arrived at the children’s home as a thirteen-year-old virgin.

Joanne poured her heart out to her granny and made detailed allegations about how Vic Copperman and Thea Trevelyan had involved her and other youngsters in sordid sex parties and forced her to take part in pornographic movies.

Joanne’s grandmother was appalled. Not only was she shocked and horrified by what had been happening at a supposedly responsible children’s home, she was angry at her daughter for allowing Joanne to be taken away from her in the first place.

The first inkling Dee Washington had of her daughter’s suffering came when a stream of letters from her family arrived at her Essex home, condemning her for neglecting her daughter and revealing that poor Joanne had even attempted suicide in Devon because she could not stand the thought of returning to Four Elms.

‘I just cannot believe you just stay up there doing nothing. I really am quite ashamed,’ wrote Dee’s sister Joan from her home in Devon.

Another letter from Dee’s niece, a hospital sister who was on duty when Joanne was admitted after trying to kill herself, pleaded with Dee to come to her daughter’s aid. ‘Do you really not care for poor Joanne’s welfare?’ she asked. ‘Do you not think it is
time you made up for the years you neglected your motherly role?’

Not surprisingly, Joanne’s grandmother and other relatives called in the police to report the teenager’s allegations. Detectives reacted swiftly and positively and arrested Vic Copperman and Thea Trevelyan. They were bailed while enquiries went ahead.

It was even disclosed that, earlier, the home had come under suspicion because Trevelyan had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital suffering from severe alcohol problems. Investigations had later led to the decision, in January 1987, to withdraw children from the home – but Joanne had decided to stay on. No one knows why…

For Dee Washington, however, the die was cast. With the stinging rebukes of her family still fresh in her mind, the forty-one-year-old divorcee decided to take revenge.

Dee knew that if she was to pay back those two sick and perverted people she needed to psych herself up into a state of complete and utter contempt. She hired a video of the notorious Charles Bronson film
Death Wish
, about an ordinary man taking revenge on the men who attacked his daughter.

She sat in her house one afternoon and watched it over and over again. Each time she saw Bronson’s character blast his daughter’s slayers, it reaffirmed
her conviction that there was only one way to avenge the abuse Joanne had suffered.

Dee carefully packed her favourite shotgun into the boot of her car and set off on the journey to Four Elms. She felt strangely calm. Her mind was made up. There was absolutely no question of turning back. Her family’s criticisms were burning a hole in her heart. She bitterly regretted not taking Joanne back years earlier. She had always loved Joanne. Maybe this response would convince the rest of her family that she really did care.

Dee kept thinking back to the methods used by Charles Bronson. He never faltered. He never lost his nerve. She admired that and she was about to emulate it in every sense of the word.

On 26 November 1987, Dee arrived at Four Elms to collect her daughter’s belongings. The place was deserted so she drove to a nearby town and had a coffee. The delay did nothing to lessen her determination to get revenge. When she drove back up the drive to Four Elms an hour later, Copperman and Trevelyan were standing outside.

They were a little taken aback to see Dee but soon relaxed when Dee smiled at them. Upstairs, she was shown Joanne’s room which was filled to the brim with the bribes they had ‘paid’ Joanne in exchange for her co-operation in their sick sexual games.

They had bought her a BMX bike, a record
player and records, a pedal car, dolls, stuffed toys and lots of clothes. Dee felt dreadful as she stood in that room because she knew exactly what each present must have represented.

On the surface Dee seemed calm about everything, so Trevelyan and Copperman relaxed and offered her coffee, even joking about their own predicament at the hands of the police. Copperman mentioned how much they both missed Joanne. That made Dee even angrier because she knew exactly why they missed her daughter so much.

How could these two monsters sit there and look her in the eye and even joke about their activities? It just reaffirmed her mission. Dee felt an overwhelming need to get away from them. She could not stand to listen to them a moment longer. She got up and announced that she had left something in the car outside. Copperman and Trevelyan looked relieved as she walked out. Considering they were on bail accused of sexually abusing her daughter, they were astonished at how well Dee was taking the entire situation.

Just two minutes later Dee – the one-time leading markswoman – walked back in and aimed her favourite twelve-bore double-barrelled shotgun directly at Copperman. Without uttering a word she lowered the barrel so that it was directly in line with his groin and fired twice.

Copperman crumpled to the floor in excruciating agony. Dee’s intention was to make sure he never abused another child again. Those two blasts had guaranteed that.

Then Copperman started to try to crawl away.

Dee reloaded her shotgun with the ease of a crackshot, aimed the barrel at Copperman’s head and fired. He could crawl no further but he was still alive. It made Dee feel better to know he was suffering. She did not want him to die too quickly.

Trevelyan – caked in make-up as usual – sat frozen to her seat throughout. She was too terrified to leave in case Dee decided to take aim at her, but it was to be her turn next.

Dee turned and pointed the gun at Trevelyan’s chest. She knew that, with absolute precision, she could extinguish the life of this blonde in a split second. She squeezed the trigger and Trevelyan was no more.

MANSION HUNT FOR GUN KILLER screamed the headline in the
Sun
the day after Copperman and Trevelyan were shot.

‘A woman was shot dead and a man seriously wounded by a crazed killer last night.

‘Armed police cordoned off roads around a rambling mansion where the pair were found and officers started a cross-country search.

‘Neighbours in the sleepy village of Stonham Parva, near Ipswich, Suffolk, were warned to lock doors and windows…’

However, Dee Washington had completed the only killings she ever intended to commit. She was no danger to the public, only to herself.

A few hours after the killings, she nearly turned the shotgun on herself.

‘I remember thinking: To hell with it. Then a picture of my boyfriend Simon and our home flashed in front of my eyes and I did not do it.’

At the murder scene, police found Copperman near the drive of the house. He had somehow managed to crawl there after Dee’s departure. As Copperman lay dying in hospital, detectives managed to extract enough information from him to establish that Dee Washington had shot both him and Trevelyan.

At twelve-thirty that night, a team of officers surrounded the house in St Osyth, near
Clacton-on
-Sea in Essex, which Dee shared with her boyfriend Simon Harding, aged thirty-eight. They needn’t have bothered with the armed team. Dee Washington had no intention of putting up a fight. She had achieved what she set out to do and did not object when she was led out to a waiting police car in handcuffs.

The only disappointment felt by Dee was when
officers told her that Copperman was still alive. ‘I hope he dies because I have no feelings for him. I am not sorry I did it because of what they did to Joanne.’

Three weeks later, Dee’s wish came true when Copperman died.

Dee also told the investigators, ‘It was all like a dream. It wasn’t real really. I didn’t feel anything. I just felt disgusted at what they had done and wanted to hurt them as much as I could.’

At Norwich Crown Court, in July 1988, Dee denied murder but admitted manslaughter because of diminished responsibility. She was ordered to be detained indefinitely in a medium-security hospital after the court heard she was suffering from a depressive illness.

The court was told that Copperman and Trevelyan were alleged to have lured children into wild sex-and-drink parties and there was talk of a young boy’s pet rabbit being shot in front of him because he kept wetting the bed.

Former workers at the school told of often finding the drunken pair still asleep surrounded by dozens of empty spirit bottles. Bleary-eyed children would also still be in bed, recovering from wild goings-on the previous night.

Copperman was said to have groped and kissed Trevelyan during orgies in front of the youngsters.
The children also spoke of weird ‘war games’ with loaded pistols.

A handyman once walked into a bathroom and found five youngsters watching drunken Trevelyan naked, writhing and playing with a vibrator.

Copperman’s wife Pam, who ran another home called The Rookery at Stowmarket in Suffolk, later claimed, ‘I have heard gossip about what went on at Four Elms but I don’t believe a word of it. I knew Vic for twenty-nine years. We were childhood sweethearts. He couldn’t have done anything to the children.’

Edmund Lawson QC, defending, said there was ‘ample corroboration’ for Joanne’s allegations of sexual abuse at Four Elms. He revealed that Dee Washington had been in touch with Joanne. She also had the ‘entire sympathy’ of her local community in St Osyth.

The enormity of Dee’s crimes could not be overlooked. ‘But she did it out of a sense of love, guilt and anger.’

Six months after her conviction, Dee Washington was released from hospital.

Sadly, she never actually met up with Joanne, although she says, ‘We are in close touch now. I speak to her on the phone every week and we write. The letter that moved me most was the one where she said she understood why I had killed Vic and Thea, and she knew it was because I loved her.’