With Bishop securely in place, the jury and family returned and the door locks clicked shut. The court clerk handed the card for Bishop to read the affirmation from – he had clearly not found God in prison – then Bennathan launched into the standard questions for Bishop to swear his innocence by.
‘Did you kill Karen Hadaway?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Did you kill Nicola Fellows?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Do you know who did?’
‘No.’
He missed this opportunity to point the finger back at Barrie.
Next Bennathan wanted to dispense with the thorny issue of him strangling, sexually assaulting and leaving a seven-year-old girl for dead in 1990. Of course, Bishop’s answers turned out to be all about himself with no remorse or pity for Claire. He bleated on about how depressed he had been since his arrest for the Wild Park murders. He said that day, for the eighth or ninth time, he’d discovered that his brake pipes had been cut. I don’t recall any of these crimes ever having been reported to the police at the time.
Once he’d fixed the pipes he said he drove over to his brother’s house in Whitehawk to fit a satellite dish but his brother was not in. He must have been having a terrible day as when he returned to his red Ford Cortina, he found he had a flat tyre. Of course this made him cross, but things were going to get a lot worse as, while he was repairing it, he hurt his hand, which threw him into a rage. At that moment, Claire skated past and he found himself grabbing her and throwing her into the car boot. He said all this in quiet, measured tones, as if reacting that way was the most natural thing to do in the world. Predictably, Bennathan did not want to dwell on the horror of what happened next and allowed Bishop to gloss over it by benignly admitting he had ‘done those things I was convicted of in court. I accept everything that has been said about that and I am deeply ashamed.’
This was a landmark moment. Not once, in the previous twenty-eight years, had he even come close to publicly admitting what happened on 4 February 1990.
The horror of poor Claire having to brave Lewes Crown Court to recount things no seven-year-old should even know about, let alone experience, the smearing of honest, hardworking police officers and the pathetic attempts at appeals, all happened because this coward, now holding court, could not face up to his depravity.
When asked whether he gave evidence at his 1990 trial he replied, ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you tell the truth or did you lie?’
‘I did not tell the truth in any shape or form.’ Had he forgotten that one of the questions he answered no to back then was: ‘Did you kill Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway?’
Moving on swiftly, Bennathan took Bishop back to his childhood, racing through time to the state of his relationship with Jenny back in 1986. There were affairs on both sides, pregnancy and financial worries. We even heard about a shoulder injury he sustained playing football.
Bishop talked about his previous convictions, how he met the young Marion Stevenson and his recreational use of cannabis. He did not sound that bothered when he recalled how Jenny found out about his affair with Marion, despite the fact he’d had to move out of Stephens Road. Having tried living with Marion in a bed and breakfast for a couple of weeks he went back, tail between his legs, to Jenny but carried on with the affair nonetheless.
Finally, Bennathan asked about Nicola and Karen. Bishop remembered telling the girls off a few times for following him and Marion. He may have taken them on trips out too – but only with permission and only in a crowd. He made it sound as if he hardly knew them. Occasionally his voice dropped and when it did Mr Bennathan would chide him as if a naughty schoolboy. There was a clear tension between advocate and client and it was strange to see it spill over.
Bishop’s movements on 9 October 1986 were pretty much as the prosecution had already set out. He did reveal that once his car had broken down, he went to the University of Sussex car park to steal another. Even the most cynical detective could forgive him from missing that little detail from his first accounts. He described what he was wearing – not a Pinto sweatshirt obviously – and his plans to see Marion at 6 p.m. – a plan he never kept.
It was obvious he had committed every word of his evidence to memory – when referring to his conversation with the park constable, he casually called him ‘Roy Victor Dadswell. I’ve known him for years.’ You would only normally trot out someone’s middle name if you had seen it written down, on a witness statement for example. It is not the way you would refer to someone you call a life-long acquaintance, as Bishop did.
He stuck to his story about buying the cannabis that the drug dealer Angie Cutting said she never sold him, getting home at 6.30 p.m. and speaking to an insurance salesman who called at the door shortly afterwards. In his blind arrogance – or dumb stupidity – he did not even acknowledge that the police had long since shown he received no such caller.
He then alibied himself by giving a bland account of doing the washing, reading the classified ads for a new car and describing what he watched on the television before Jenny came home at 8.40 p.m. It was strange that he now included The Runaway Train in his supposed TV viewing, echoing Mrs ‘White’s’ reason for her time changes earlier in the trial. Now Bishop suddenly remembered it too. Moving to the next day, he confirmed being in and around Wild Park, both with and without his dog Misty. He was on fairly safe ground so far; no point in lying yet. There were too many witnesses and, other than his odd comment to PC Chris Markham, nothing he did or said so far that day had been suspicious. That was until he met Smudge, with whom he rushed to the bodies.
He realized he had made some silly remarks about the girls going up north and that he might be suspected if he found them. He wandered off at a tangent, saying he had briefly been arrested for the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel and that his father Roy had been detained, then exonerated, for the 1978 Margaret Frame murder, across the road from his house in Stanmer Park. This seemed to justify his certainty that he would be blamed for anything that might have happened to the girls. These snippets, again, had not come out before but twenty-eight years in prison is a very long time to conjure up stories.
Then came the moment we were all waiting for. Which of his stories would he opt for today? In his reinterview he said, eventually, that he ‘touched no one’, so how would he explain his DNA?