John Chapman was killed by Layton in some pathetic attempt to impress me and Gary. I was pissed at Gary for telling Layton in the first place things were not going to plan… in the dock at sentencing, Layton was sitting behind Gaz. I leant over to Layton and clearly told him, ‘I may be taking your life sentence, but you and Stretch are fuckin’ idiots.”

JOANNE DENNEHY, LETTER TO JULIE GIBBONS, MARCH 2014

If I have given the impression that Gary Stretch was an idiot, try this genetically challenged man for size, for thirty-six-year-old Leslie ‘Les’ Paul Layton must have been a great source of pride to his parents. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and at this point I would ask the reader to take a peek at his mugshot, generously supplied by the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. Layton is a weasel-like chap with a sloping forehead indicating a poorly developed frontal lobe. His ears are abnormally large. In the flesh his oversized feet don’t seem to match up with his spindly legs and, like his head, none of the rest of him seems to fit together in any meaningful way. So, now I’d like you to answer this question: If your daughter brought our ‘Les’ home for tea and cakes with Mom and Pop, would you be impressed? If not, you would be drawing upon good science, so please bear with me here.

For centuries there have been theories that certain individuals were ‘born’ to be criminals, though it was not until impetus was provided by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (published as On the Origin of Species in 1859) that anthropology as a science achieved popularity and was taken, with much infighting, into the service of criminologists to help understand the bewildering conduct of habitual criminals, Mr Stretch and Mr Layton being but two of them.

A pioneer in the field was Hubert Lauvergne, a stocky, short-sighted, indulgently bearded naval physician at Toulon, who, to the dismay of his long-suffering wife, made plaster casts of his patients’ heads either at his laboratory, or at home while she was trying to make supper. His aim, as is almost certainly already obvious to my readers, was to demonstrate ‘degenerate features of the skull’, and how that novel idea popped into his own head we will never know.

Now enter the acknowledged father of anthropometric criminology, Cesare Lombroso, who would have had a field day with Gaz Stretch and Les Layton. Cutting to the chase, Lombroso’s studies led him to the belief that a study of the criminal was more rewarding than a study of the crime itself and in this he laid the foundations of modern criminology. Lombroso’s research is well documented on the Internet and elsewhere. Fascinating stuff, it is most invaluable for weighing up a possible suitor for your daughter in the future, perhaps.

Somewhat miraculously, though he had never been to prison Layton was a typical ‘pick and mix’ low-level, low-intelligence offender whose aspirations for the good life included theft from motor vehicles and general dishonesty with a smattering of shoplifting and five-fingering anything not nailed down thrown in. Therefore, we can safely assume that he did not attend church or hold neighbourly barbecues. But, perhaps I am being a little harsh because he could add up the important things in his pathetic existence, such as how much cash his benefit payments would allow him to spend on fags and booze, but that’s about it apart from the fact that he was no stranger to police custody suits, the courts and a long-time resident on ‘Benefit Street’.

To sum Les up, when our Creator had shuffled Layton’s gene coils together he was obviously having a bad hair day, plus the fact that he was running short in the parts bin, having previously handed out large portions of commonsense, understanding, morality, wit, good looks and intellect elsewhere.

This also applied to Layton’s sidekick, another halfwit called Robert ‘Bob’ James Moore. Aged fifty-six, Bob lived at 78 Belvoir Way, Dogsthorpe. One look at his mugshot explains everything you need to know – as in ‘mentally deficient from basement to roof’ springs to mind. Usually chemically imbalanced by drink, Layton and Moore could not wash a car without spending a year figuring out what a hose was, let alone how to attach it to a tap. In Layton’s case he would steal your bucket and make off with as much water as it could carry. Somewhat remarkably, however, Moore had no previous criminal convictions, but like falling off a cliff, this was about to change dramatically.

It has now been established that on the morning of John Chapman’s murder Layton bumped into Joanne Dennehy as she left the tenants’ shared bathroom. She had been washing off John’s blood and she showed Les the dead body. In this moment Layton entered the big time for his reaction was not one of calling for help. Showing a callous indifference to the plight of his now deceased drinking buddy and housemate, at precisely 7.32am he picked up his mobile and took a picture of Chapman’s blood-drenched corpse lying on the bed, after which he deleted the photo – or so he thought. In fact, although the image was no longer visible on his screen, or in his picture gallery, it had parked itself elsewhere in the device to be recovered later by forensic technicians.

That afternoon Gary Stretch turned up at 38 Bifield in the Vauxhall Astra. Leaving Gaz and Joanne to do whatever was necessary, Layton went shopping with a mate only to learn things were going badly wrong on his return.

Amongst the topics discussed while Layton was at the shops was Kevin Lee’s reaction when he learned that another man had been killed inside one of his properties. While Lee had just about managed to cope with the murder and subsequent disposal of Lukasz Slaboszewski, there was no way he could have swept another homicide under the carpet, so it was decided in the spirit of ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ that they would not tell him but instead they would murder him, too.