The Jigsaw Man (48 page)

‘He’s not just pinpointing rape sites,’ I said. ‘Some of the marks are probably surveillance locations where he knows women can be found and he can watch without being seen. Others are likely to be hides where he keeps his souvenirs and tools.’

‘Tell me about these “hides”?’

‘You have to think to yourself, “Where is his special place?” and then look at his sketches and the references to the depths of holes and drains. He knows these areas intimately and could very easily hide his knives and any trophies or souvenirs.’

Banks leaned closer. ‘How often is he likely to go there?’

‘I don’t know but it’s not something he’ll neglect.’

‘Is it worth us surveilling him? If we watched him, could he lead us to his hide?’

‘Quite possibly.’

Banks knew it was a difficult strategy. For Napper to be left out there meant watching him and never losing him because if he was the killer of Samantha and Jazmine he posed a grave and immediate danger. At the same time, the detectives had to make a case and wanted more than just fingerprints. A murder weapon or souvenir such as the missing piece of Samantha’s abdomen would remove any doubt.

As the surveillance operation got underway, I returned home with copies of Napper’s papers and details of his life and times.

An important characteristic of the British police is that once they have a particular suspect in sight, then they relentlessly pursue every possible avenue of information.

Napper’s name had come up on the intelligence files at Plumstead Police Station because he’d come to their attention twice since his arrest in October 1992. Most notably in July 1993, four months before the Plumstead murders, when Napper had been seen in the back garden of a house in Rutherglen Road, Plumstead, at 9.30 p.m. A husband and wife reported seeing a man on their side wall, peering into the house next door, where a pretty blonde twenty-four-year-old was in the habit of walking around semi-clothed with the curtains open.

While his wife phoned the police, the husband followed the intruder and identified Robert Napper to the police. Napper readily gave his name and address. When asked about his activities, he shrugged and said he’d been ‘going for a walk’.

The witness had said that Napper appeared to drop something as he jumped down from the rear wall, but nothing was found in a search.

One of the officers wrote in his notes: ‘Subject strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist, indecency type suspect.’

Equally important was the location. The properties in Rutherglen Road looked over a field towards Bostall Woods, part of the Green Chain Walk.

All of this should have immediately flagged Napper as a strong potential suspect in the serial rapes. Apart from being known to the local police, he fitted many of the other criteria in the psychological profile, including the likelihood that he had engaged in property offences and his strong knowledge of the local area.

My profile had described the suspect coming to the attention of police in one of three ways.

1) By information provided by the public or area police officers.

2) By being caught during an offence; or

3) By an elimination process based upon examination of the records.

He was always going to be in the system, it was just a case of looking for him.

My initial response was great anger and sadness. At the same time, I didn’t know what difficulties the Ecclestone rape team had faced and what influenced the decisions that were taken. I simply knew that a mother and daughter had been murdered twelve months later and it now seemed likely that the killer had been the Green Chain rapist.

The surveillance operation continued for ten days, during which Napper maintained a regular pattern of leaving home at 7.30 a.m., walking to the plastics factory where he worked a twelve-hour shift and then returning home. Over the weekend he journeyed into the West End and was seen entering several shops which sold soft pornography and also looking at knives in the windows of outdoor survival stores.

On his way home, he ignored a train to Plumstead and instead travelled to Sidcup and began walking through the back streets in the pouring rain before catching a bus home to Plumstead. This walk seemed to have no point or significance but probably included some of his favoured locations for looking at women in houses.

With no sign of Napper revealing his ‘hides’, Banks made the decision to arrest him on Friday 27 May, prior to the Bank Holiday weekend. He asked for help in designing an interview strategy and wanted to know if I’d come to London for the early interrogations.

On Friday morning, officers gathered outside 135 Plumstead High Road, a large Victorian house divided into bedsits. At 9.40 a.m. they moved in and arrested Napper for the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bissett in Heathfield Terrace, Plumstead, and also for a series of serious sexual assaults.

As he was led outside and put into a police van, Napper said, ‘I heard of the murders in the paper, I don’t know Samantha Bissett. I have never been to where you said.’ This was jotted down by the arresting officer in his notebook.

After SOCO had been through the ground-floor bedsit, I was asked to look inside in case it provided any extra insight which could assist in the interview strategy. Small, clean and well-ordered, the room had a wardrobe, two chairs, a table but no bed. This surprised the landlord who had let the room with an iron-framed bed. Napper’s possessions consisted of clothing, suitcases, footwear, a TV, music system and, most significantly, a padlocked red metal toolbox.

When opened, a card was found Sellotaped inside the lid with the message: ‘Lonesome? Bored? Like Excitement? Want to be noticed? Want to meet strange new people? Then just leave your security container open.’

When the card was removed, a footprint was found on the back made by an Adidas Phantom basketball boot. Very few pairs had been sold in the UK and it matched the bloody shoe mark found in Samantha’s kitchen.

In the top tray of the toolbox was another London A to Z street guide. When examined, this contained more markings and idiosyncratic notations, including an ink dot beside Number la Heathfield Terrace. The lower tray contained photocopied pages from a martial arts book, handwritten notes and drawings. The martial arts book gave descriptions of how to control and disable an opponent. In particular, I noticed an illustration of the neck showing how the various human muscles work and interact. Another showed the internal anatomy of the torso and, in many ways, reflected how Samantha had been found with her ribcage pulled open and her internal organs on display.

Among his notes, Napper had drawn rather grandiose diagrams of seemingly unrelated words linked by arrows or scattered on a page. He also had a list of words and their definitions taken from a dictionary and a significant number of them related to death, control, predation and distorted relationships.

His references to women were disparaging, suggesting they offered ‘instant sunshine’ but only wanted to exploit him. At one point he uses the phrase, ‘Mengele’s way’, an apparent reference to the Nazi doctor who practised surgical and psychological experiments on living and dead victims.

Having seen the correspondence and maps taken from his house in October 1992 when he was previously charged and convicted, it was interesting to compare them with the later material. All of it reinforced my belief that Napper had hiding places where he kept his more precious belongings. I couldn’t see anything to indicate someone out of control, on the contrary I saw a man who taught himself to monitor, plan and not to rush.

Appearing calm and unruffled, Napper had been taken to Bexley Heath Police Station where the first of the interviews would take place. Mickey Banks seemed to be lighting one cigarette from the other and was in his element, but he knew that only part of the job was done. I warned him not to expect Napper to be driven by any anxiety to make an easy admission.

‘I know it’s easy to think he’s mad but today this man is fully in charge of his faculties,’ I said. ‘He’s intelligent enough to recognize certain lines of questioning in advance and will try to avoid incriminating himself. To begin with, you may find he cooperates when asked general, harmless questions but as soon as you confront him with the harder evidence, he is likely to go “no comment”.’

Recognizing that a previous psychiatric examination had highlighted Napper’s risk, I had already advised that an ‘appropriate adult’ should be present during the interviews.

Napper’s statement to the arresting officer about not knowing Samantha or having been to her flat now became very important. If he confirmed this at interview it would nail down a provable lie because his fingerprints had been found at the scene. Yet it had to be done in such a way that it didn’t flag the crucial importance of the statement to the investigation and, at the same time, didn’t trick or entrap him in a way that might be considered unfair.

The interviewers had to be warm as well as authoritative in their interactive style because Napper would scan for, and be distanced by, cues of a negative disposition, I told Banks. They had to establish his account of his day-to-day life including his work schedule, his spare time and his social life. This could then lead on to his history with women.

‘Eventually, begin to focus on his sexuality and invite him to explain what may have happened in his past that first started his aggressive behaviour, who is to blame? Give him a psychological face-saving opportunity to lay the blame on someone else such as his parents, or his early life or whoever seduced him.

‘Then ask him what it was about Samantha that drew his attention to her? What was it that she did, or she said, or she was, that gave him no choice but to kill her and cut her.

‘There’s no need to mention Jazmine at this stage - come back to her later.’

I suggested they move on to the weapons and ask Napper how he came to collect his knives and what he found attractive about them. If he introduced the supernatural, or demons or other psychotic phenomena, they weren’t to resist or show disbelief but to continue collecting the information and carry on. Eventually they could confront him with the fingerprint sequence found at the flat and ask him what happened afterwards.

The first interview began at 4.01 p.m. and I watched on a live video monitor in an adjoining room. Napper, six foot two inches tall with receding brown hair, sat easily in a chair and seemed perfectly intelligent and self-assured during the preliminaries, politely giving his name and address.

When asked to confirm the all-important arrest notes of Acting Detective Sergeant Alan Jackman, Napper agreed and signed them. A provable lie had been established. Afterwards, he asked to speak to his solicitor in private and then began to ‘no comment’ police questions.

The next day, he was interviewed about the Green Chain rapes and again showed a calm assurance as he deflected questions over a number of hours. His maps and the marks on the London A to Z were ‘just doodles’ and references to his training runs and mileage points, he said. As the questions focused more directly on his alleged crimes he slammed shut and stuck mainly to no replies.

On Sunday, 29 May, he was charged with the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bissett and remanded in custody.

Detectives continued questioning him about the rapes and a live identification parade was held at Southwark Police Station on Monday 4 July. The victims Leanne and Cathy picked Napper out unreservedly, Susan thought it looked like him and only Jenny couldn’t pick him out. Her attacker had been wearing a mask. Interestingly, the teacher walking her dogs who had been assaulted in Elmstead Wood by a man she described as being intellectually subnormal, failed to pick Napper out. This simply strengthened my belief that she’d been attacked by a different man.

With positive identifications and strong DNA evidence, the police charged Napper with the rape attacks. Meanwhile, the search continued for every detail about his lifestyle and regular movements. Statements were taken from his family, work colleagues, former landlords and casual acquaintances which helped to build up a picture of Napper. Most of them described a strange, quiet individual. He paid his rent on time, went for long walks at night and meticulously cleaned his muddy shoes on his return.

The oldest of four children, Napper’s early life had been exposed to a combination of matrimonial violence, the divorce of his parents and various stints in foster homes. Raised by his mother, Pauline, on the Abbey Wood Estate not far from Plumstead, he soon attracted attention for truanting and shoplifting.

Increasingly disturbed, he was counselled at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell and continued treatment for six years. His problems were exacerbated at the age of twelve, when a cousin introduced an older man into the family who took the boys camping. Robert was sexually abused and the man was later imprisoned.

By the time Napper reached adolescence, he had become introverted and spoke to others only when necessary. Obsessively tidy, he spent much of his time alone in his room, emerging only to bully his younger brother and to spy on his sister dressing.

After leaving school and finishing the catering course, he took on a variety of jobs and didn’t leave home until the age of twenty-one, when he moved into a bedsit in Plumstead. His mother recalled an incident in early September, 1989, when Napper went missing for several days and attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose. Later he explained that some men were after him because he’d raped a woman on Plumstead Common.

Pauline claimed that she checked with the police but no trace could be found of any rape recorded on that night. It’s worth noting that the first indoor rape was four weeks before the suicide attempt and that Jenny’s house backed on to Winns Common. The Winns Common area was often called Plumstead Common by locals.

Further research and identification parades also filled in the three year ‘silence’ between the attacks on Jenny and Susan. A string of women pointed Napper out as being the man who indecently assaulted them, or exposed his penis, or peered in at their windows, or followed them home or ducked behind bushes when they approached. These incidents dated from as early as 1988 and ran through each subsequent year.