At the beginning of December in 2002, traders in Heather’s neighbourhood began a collection to raise money to enable Terry and Caitlin to have a mountain of presents that Christmas. Of course, no amount of money would buy them the one and only gift they really craved – the return of their mother.
Heather’s murderer had killed more than a single individual; he had destroyed for ever the joy of adolescence and natural maturing within the embrace of a loving mother for these two children. Everyone was doing their best for them; they were showered with gifts. Materially, they did not want for anything. Murders like this one had devastating impacts way beyond the initial victim.
As Caitlin would later say in her victim impact statement read out in court at Danilo Restivo’s trial, ‘I used to have nightmares and flashbacks reminding me of the events of the 12 November. I also don’t like going into bathrooms. I used to think that someone might be waiting for me. Now I just hold a fear of what’s behind the bathroom door. It was several years before I accepted the help of a child psychologist to help me cope with what happened that day.’
Early in the new year of 2003, a £10,000 reward was offered by the Crimestoppers Trust for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Heather’s killer. The police, as always, were still keeping a considerable amount of information out of the public domain. For example, it was not until September 2003, ten months after the crime, that detectives released details of the bloody trainer footprints. And not until exactly a year after the murder did the police go public about how Heather’s breasts had been cut off and placed by her side.
Some people, understandably, were critical of the police handling of the investigation, particularly about their reticence over certain pivotal issues, such as the footprints and breast amputations. In some quarters, there was a feeling that the killer would have already been caught if large parts of the investigation had been sub-contracted to Scotland Yard. However, much of this criticism stemmed from ignorance.
The truth is that the Dorset Police were playing a very clever game of cat and mouse. They were hoping to tease out the killer from the shadows of his safety zone. The emphasis on the urgency of finding the Nike trainers was an example of this astute psychology. As highlighted in an earlier chapter, they already had in their possession a pair of trainers bearing traces of blood. If Restivo was their man, maybe he could be tempted to believe that he was out of the frame. If the police were genuinely still looking for the killer’s trainers, then the inference was that those taken from Restivo had been discounted.
The public statements by the police were couched in such ambiguous language that the killer was invited to be cushioned by complacency. An absence of DNA clues did not translate into a void of vital forensic evidence. Subconsciously, the police were probably steered by the old maxim that it takes a thief to catch a thief. They needed to start thinking like the killer, and force him out into the open, if this investigation were to have a successful ending.
One crucial clue, which the police kept secret, came from a green towel in Heather’s home – a green towel on a chair beneath the sewing machine in her workroom, together with a piece of cream-coloured fabric, on which there were bloodstains. DNA profiling indicated that the blood ‘could have’ come from Heather. There was no DNA from anyone else.
However, the towel was considerably more helpful. Much of one side of the towel was stained with blood; there were smaller amounts on the edge of the reverse side. Laboratory tests established beyond all doubt that this blood had come from Heather.
Saliva was also detected and, like the blood, was submitted for DNA profiling. Although not conclusive, the odds favoured the saliva also having been deposited by Heather. Detective scientists reported back that there was ‘no indication’ of the presence of DNA from anyone else.
In her report, forensic scientist Claire Stangoe wrote:
The nature, extent and distribution of the bloodstaining on the green towel and the cream fabric indicated that it was very unlikely that all staining on the green towel was the result of contact with the cream fabric.
At least some of the areas of bloodstaining on the towel were not exposed surfaces, indicating that the bloodstaining could not all have been deposited whilst the towel was in this position on the chair. This would suggest that the towel was placed, or fell, on to the chair after it became bloodstained. One possibility is that the towel was placed on the back of the chair and fell on to the seat. Another is that the towel was placed directly on to the seat of the chair.
The towel was in a location away from the main areas of bloodstaining. One possibility was that the towel could have been used by Heather Barnett’s killer to wipe blood from his face or hands before leaving the premises by the front door. This possibility becomes much more likely when taken together with the cluster of Luminol footprints beside the work table, which suggest very strongly that he (the killer) changed his clothing beside the work table.
In view of this possibility, attempts were made to detect any DNA that may have been present on the surface of the towel. Tapings were taken from the towel, in order to detect any DNA that may have been present on the towel.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was not until 2008 that the original tapings were examined for possible flakes of skin and the result led to a massive leap forward in the investigation. With so many tests for the most likely presence of DNA evidence, and so much analysis being done by various investigating agencies, it took a while for the police forensic experts to identify the presence of skin flakes, and then eventually deliver their findings.
The skin flakes on the towel came from two people; one set had come from Heather. The other samples had come from the skin of a man. This was a hugely significant finding, but not one that would secure a conviction on its own – after all, DNA matches from saliva or blood carry a probability of anyone else having the same DNA of millions or billions to one. With the skin flakes evidence, the police were advised that, at best, there would be a 57,000:1 chance against someone else matching that DNA profile. And for the CPS, these were not good enough odds to secure a conviction without other compelling evidence.
Claire Stangoe further advised the investigators that it was not possible to determine where on the towel this DNA was originally located, although it is hard to appreciate the pertinence of this. More important was her statement that ‘it is also not possible to determine how long the DNA has been on the towel, although washing or repeated use by other people would tend to remove previously deposited DNA loose on the surface’.
Public dismay surrounded the secrecy of the lock of hair in Heather’s right hand. The killer obviously intended the police to be mystified by it and knew only too well that it would be forensically analysed. This was clearly intrinsic to the ‘game’ he was playing. Not only was it a cocky calling-card, an extrovert display of bravado and arrogance, it was also a smokescreen. The police obviously would devote a great deal of time and resources to the clue. The killer would also have known that the hair, not being his or Heather’s, would be yet another DNA dead-end, adding further confusion – a malevolent red herring. Valuable detection time would be lost through what, in essence, might turn out to be nothing more than a sideshow.
Only a Jekyll and Hyde character fitted the personality profile. Psychopaths, such as the Yorkshire Ripper and his progenitor, the even more infamous Jack, could apparently lead normal lives by day and then turn bestial slayer by night, and they never chanced venturing into the homes of any of their victims. Like most psychopaths, they murdered randomly. Setting out to kill on a given night was the extent of their premeditation. They were nocturnal opportunists. Their victims were chosen merely because they were available at the appropriate time and, for them, in the wrong place.
For the police, what to make public and what to keep under wraps required a fine balancing act, which was bound to be more subjective than objective. It had to be their call. The media, of course, had a completely different agenda. In cases of this magnitude, the interests of the investigative team and the media will always be incompatible. Coexistence is difficult and these relationships will always become frayed at the edges, until the job is done and dusted, when both sides come together for mutual benefit. In many respects, the police were damned if they did open their books for inspection and damned if they did not. Catch the killer and you are heroes; fail, and you’re incompetent.
Supt James could take the flak as well as the accolades, even though there had been very few failures – if any – blemishing his track record. Although prepared to publicise the clump of hair in Heather’s hand, Supt James was far more circumspect on the matter of what was being done with it.
The hair, after routine forensic testing, was sent to Dr Stuart Black at Reading University, Berkshire. Dr Black ran the Department of Archaeological and Environmental Services, specialising in the analysis of human remains. Dr Black and his colleagues had for years been developing techniques with hair as a non-invasive and proven means of testing for drugs and alcohol abuse. They could determine through hair samples if a person had ingested medically prescribed drugs, such as antidepressants and tranquillizers, or illegal substances, including heroin, cannabis, cocaine and even steroids.
A procedure known as Stable Isotope Analysis (SIA) had revolutionised the science of criminal forensics. SIA is the identification of an isotopic signature; an isotope is one of two or more forms of an element differing from each other in atomic weight, and in nuclear but not chemical properties. That is the scientific mumbo-jumbo, but to the police, astonishingly, it meant that Dr Black and his technicians could categorically confirm that the 9cm-long strands of hair, representing nine months of growth, revealed that: (i) they came from a woman indigenous to the UK; (ii) the woman had made a trip to the Valencia or Almeria regions of Spain or the Perpignan area of southern France, staying there for up to six days, about eleven weeks before the hair was cut; the woman had visited urban Tampa, Florida, just over a week before losing the hair; (iii) she had changed diets twice in three months.
All of this extraordinarily specific detail came from this one lock of hair. The woman was clearly a globetrotter; did this mean that the killer was someone who lived out of a suitcase? And if so, had he killed in a similar, diabolical fashion before, perhaps abroad? There was only one way to find out. The time had come for the manhunt to go international, which meant involving Interpol.
Just before Christmas 2003, a woman called the investigation team’s direct hotline to say that she had vital information about the killing. She was clearly distressed and highly agitated. When the officer fielding the call asked for a name and contact number, she said that she would talk only on the understanding that she was allowed to remain anonymous.
‘That’s OK,’ said the officer. ‘In your own time, there’s no pressure.’
But at that moment, the caller guessed that their conversation was being electronically recorded and hung up. The call had been made from a public phone box in the Charminster Road area. A police car was instantly despatched to the location of the pay phone but, of course, by the time it arrived, the caller, and all trace of them, had gone.
* * *
Because of the ritualistic features of the killing, thoughts turned to the possibility of Heather having been some sort of sacrifice by a satanic cult; not a typical crime in urban Britain, but already there was nothing normal about Heather’s murder. Furthermore, although Bournemouth, as an entity, was a sophisticated town, the history of the county of Dorset was steeped in witchcraft and Devil-worship. One did not have to travel far north-west of the conurbation sprawl to come upon rural pockets where civilisation had seemingly shed very little light since the Dark Ages.
Just north of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset, looms the Cerne Giant. Almost twice the height of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, the giant is a chalk carving on a hillside some 500 metres north of the ancient church of Cerne Abbey. He is 55 metres tall and wields a knobbly cudgel, 37 metres long, in his right hand.
Some criminologists were quick to note the comparison with the lock of hair squeezed into Heather’s right hand, particularly because of the sexual significance of this towering landmark. In the biblical story of Sampson and Delilah, it was Sampson’s hair that, legend had it, endowed him with such superhuman strength. By cutting off his hair, while he slept, Delilah believed she had sapped his strength, a symbolic form of castration, depriving him of his manhood and reducing him psychologically to a eunuch.
In the warped mind of Heather’s killer, was there a connection between hair and male virility? Was there some kind of crazed message that made sense only to the murderer? Nothing could be ruled out; nothing ruled in. In terms of motive, the police accepted that anything was possible.
There is contemporary relevance drawn from the history of the Cerne Abbas giant that links directly with grotesque killings, such as that of Heather Barnett. Legend has it that a giant did live in the countryside near where the towns of Bournemouth and Poole are situated. In the 18th century, the Rev John Hutchins, a respected historian, wrote that the marauding giant terrorised hamlets, devouring sheep and babies, before sleeping on the hillside, now named ‘Giant Hill’ after him. The fable continues that the locals managed to pin him to the ground while he slept one moonless night and slew him, tracing the outline of his body on the hillside to ‘commemorate’ the exorcism, and a man had cut a lock of hair from a ‘fair maiden’ companion and placed it in the giant’s right hand with the club. It is also quite possible that the overpowering of the giant sparked the storyline for Gulliver’s Travels.
The great 18th – 19th-century poet and novelist Thomas Hardy maintained there was an even more sinister feature to the folklore; the giant ‘threatened to descend upon Cerne and to ravish all the young maidens on a particular night and to kill the young men the next day’ – presumably so that, from then onwards, he would have exclusive ravishing-rights to the young maidens.
Throughout the ages, the Cerne Giant has represented sex and violence and the way the two are interlaced, resulting in his being elevated to iconic status by many sadomasochists in the south-west of England and even further afield. Hardy also made reference to the giant feeding on rashers of baby-flesh for breakfast. Perhaps this notion might appear as fantastical and outlandish as our modern-day vampire stories, but it is not a huge leap for the mentally unstable to accept these fables as historical fact.
If the tales of the Cerne Giant were authentic, then the message was that sex and violence had a certain historical credence and, in today’s vernacular, separated the men from the boys. At sunset, the giant was reputed to lope down to the River Cerne for a drink and to feast on virgins – a ritual that is parodied today. Young couples walk from the giant, first kissing the tip of its phallus, to the river, where they drink wine, rather than the muddy, polluted river-water, and make love. The virgin element has lost its credibility because many of the couples are regulars; born-again virgins each time, just to keep up the pretence for the thrill of living the folklore.
Heather had grown up a mere 16 miles from Cerne Abbas. The giant was the nearest attraction of note. It was also central to so many of the fables on which children around her were nurtured. One of her erstwhile boyfriends, John Tandy, remembered cycling with her the 32 miles round trip several times in summer for a picnic beside the giant. ‘There were so many stories about the giant,’ he recalled, ‘many of them quite smutty, as you can imagine. When I was younger, we’d always be passing drawings around in class at school of the giant. We’d have competitions among ourselves to see who could come up with the wittiest caption; they’d all be rude, of course, and the rudest would invariably be judged the best.
‘Of course, to kids, the giant has always been a joke figure. Kids will always snigger when they pass it. When I was about 14, girls would say things to me like, “I bet you wish you had one to match that!” They’d be referring to the phallus, not the cudgel. It would be meant as a saucy put-down and I must admit that those kinds of remarks did make me blush. But Heather was never like that. She was always very shy and retiring. Down to earth, yes, but never coarse. Sweet and homely is the way I remember her.
‘Although we local lads would never have admitted as much, I think there’s truth that we lived in the shadow of the Cerne Giant; the men, too. Stupidly, it gave us a sort of inferiority complex.
‘While it made me feel inferior as a male, it was also intimidating to young women, like Heather. She was daunted and even embarrassed by the carving when we first ventured there. It was something of an adventure for us kids. It wasn’t the sort of thing you expected to see in public in those days. Vicars were always tub-thumping from the pulpit on Sundays about it being the Devil’s drawing and the true test of being a Christian was whether we could turn away from it and not look. We used to joke, “Does he mean we ought to turn the other cheek?”
‘Of course, Heather had seen many pictures of the giant and she may have been to Cerne with her family but, according to her, never alone with a boy. I was flattered.
‘For quite a time that day, she wouldn’t even look at the phallus, as if not acknowledging its existence, following the pleas of the clergy. To be honest, though, I’m not sure how religious she was; I think it was more coyness. We walked round and round the giant and took photos from a distance; it was absolutely riveting. He’s such a monster, I tell you! Somehow you just get mesmerised by it because it’s so dominating and domineering. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that you’re soon under its spell. It’s very easy to understand how it would be worshipped as a pagan god.
‘By mid-afternoon on that first trip of ours, Heather’s inhibitions had waned and we ate chunky sandwiches and drank Coke from the bottle, sharing it, before we sat on the phallus. For me, it was something of a challenge to get her to do it, but by now it was a giggle for both of us.
‘We local lads firmly believed that your virility was topped up and we were physically empowered by straddling the tip of the phallus. Whatever the truth of that, it certainly worked psychologically; a sort of placebo effect.
‘One childless wife took a camp-bed and slept for a fortnight on the phallus. As far as I know, she never did get pregnant, but she lost her husband. He pissed off with another woman while she was sleeping with the giant. And the other woman later gave birth to twins! That’s a true story. At the time, we found it hilarious but, on reflection, it’s rather sad. You see things differently as you mature.’
Heather’s fascination with the Cerne Giant seems to have continued into adult life, but probably no more than out of idle curiosity, something memorable from her childhood, perhaps.
What is known is that she drove at least twice to Cerne Abbas in the six months prior to her death. She was seen walking on the hillside towards the giant, her car parked on the roadside grass verge. She was in ordinary clothes and not dressed for hiking, and she was alone.
Later, she confided to a friend in Bournemouth that she had driven to the Cerne Giant just for ‘something to do’; a nostalgic trip down ‘memory lane’. The female friend had never seen the Cerne Giant in person and was intrigued about its origins and legend. There was no suggestion that Heather believed in the folklore or was linked with any cult that was involved in pagan worship or fertility rites. She was considered ‘far too practical’ for any of that ‘mumbo-jumbo’.
But one thing she did reveal to her friend was that on the second visit to the Cerne Giant she had felt uneasy there. She was sure that she had been watched from a distant hedgerow, at one moment dazzled by what she recognised as the sun reflected off the lenses of binoculars.
‘You certainly wouldn’t get me out there after dark,’ Heather remarked, shuddering. ‘In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever be going again.’ She was right about that.
Witnesses were talking to the police about Heather’s daily life in and around Bournemouth. There was no evidence of her having been followed to the Cerne Giant and back to Bournemouth, and the experience had not left her fearful in her home or neighbourhood. While the police were still baffled, they continued to ‘keep an open mind’ while pursuing all avenues of enquiry.
Indeed, ‘all avenues of enquiry’ still included even the most outlandish theories, with pagan rituals and macabre, satanic rites being considered as possible motives for the killer. And this wasn’t so far-fetched, given the long history of dark arts practiced throughout Britain, and particularly in this area of Dorset.
Witchcraft has been prevalent in the county for centuries. It still thrives, but not just in rural backwaters; the towns have their witches and covens, too. Mostly, the witches will claim to cast spells for people’s welfare and general wellbeing. These have traditionally been known as ‘white witches’, as opposed to practitioners of the dark arts, as in the Harry Potter books and movies.
During the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, there was a spate of demonic rituals against animals, particularly horses, in Dorset. Many horses – even top show-jumpers and other equine thoroughbreds, having won international rosettes for dressage – were found slaughtered in fields or their horseboxes. Most of the wretched animals had been knifed many times and also badly burned, as if by red-hot pokers. Some had been completely drained of blood. And in numerous cases, witchcraft symbols had been carved into the flesh. The overpowering smell of incense was often in the morning air after the butchery had been performed in stables at night. The animals must have been terrified, going through hell as they were ceremoniously tortured. Yet somehow there had not been sufficient noise to wake the owners, even those who lived next to the stables or fields.
Vets soon discovered that the creatures had been paralysed with injections, rendering all movement impossible, yet not numbing them from pain. On two occasions, hatchets were used to decapitate majestic show-jumpers who were each worth thousands of pounds.
While one could be forgiven thinking that the original Godfather movie had been the macabre inspiration for this barbarism, the truth is, perhaps, even more bizarre. These sacrifices had been part of a consistent satanic culture of more people in Dorset and south-west Hampshire than society’s leaders would care to admit. Cows and goats had been slaughtered in fields at night; cows’ udders had been amputated and laid beside the dead animals; cats had been stolen and killed horrifically. The torture to which they had been subjected sickened the entire community. Often, the dead animals were recovered in isolated spots where there was evidence of black magic ceremonies having taken place.
Although the majority of these obscene and offensive activities, emblematic of sorcery, occurred outside the residential areas, police intelligence pointed to most of the culprits being town dwellers, unlike the stereotype image of the hunched, wizened old crones commuting by broomstick and mixing evil potions in their covens, deep in the forests. These were people who drove out of town in their 4x4s and held down conventional jobs Monday – Friday, playing the part of ordinary citizens by day and indulging in the unspeakable at night.
Neither was it uncommon for bestiality to be an abhorrent feature of these satanic rites. Some of the animals even bore human teeth-marks, made to resemble incisions mirroring vampire bites.
A short time after Heather’s last visit to the Cerne Giant, police were told that she went for a day out to Tarrant Gunville, another rural beauty spot in Dorset with a colourful and infamous history. Tarrant Gunville nestles on the tail of Cranborne Chase, just north of Blandford Forum, a market town a few miles north of Bournemouth, an easy drive and a picturesque one on any day between spring and late autumn.
Over time, more and more people have heard of the dark and unsettling tales associated with Tarrant Gunville, which are so at odds with its noble heritage as a former royal hunting ground. But a vampire legend persists around the place, and proves even now to be a draw to those who feel an affinity with witchcraft and the undead.
The legend starts with the coffin of a William Doggett that was opened during the rebuilding of the village church. Doggett was a steward at Eastbury House, one of the grandest mansions in the land at the time, where kings, princes, dukes and their mistresses chose to enjoy their illicit affairs. Doggett shot himself after stealing from his master and was buried in the church’s porch in 1762.
When the coffin was prised open, more than 60 years after his death, the exhumers were petrified by the sight; Doggett was as rosy-cheeked as the day he died and there had been no decomposition of the body. Even more noticeable were the two, bloodstained, vampire-like teeth protruding from his mouth and overlapping his lower lip.
No one has ever explained why, in those austere, God-fearing days, a reprobate who committed suicide should have been on sacred land. Because there is no record of the exhumers having driven a stake through Doggett’s heart – the time-honoured method of definitively despatching vampires – the mythology of the undead in those parts has been kept alive. It is good for the tourist trade, after all. The downside, of course, is that it also attracts the mentally unstable and diabolic cults that leave sheep and cattle dead after roistering nights of sex and sadism.
Heather undoubtedly went to Tarrant Gunville as an innocent sightseer, someone who enjoyed seeing landmarks and landscapes of historical note and worth in the spectacular county of her birth and upbringing. Maybe she had been there as a child or as a young woman before marriage; after all, it was only a few miles from where she grew up.
Sooner or later, the police hoped they could start to tighten the noose around the neck of Heather’s killer.