Most murders are easily solved. They are unplanned, barely concealed, frequently witnessed and often confessed. But then there are the others, the ones whose solutions are deeply buried, the real-life murder mysteries.
Just before six o’clock in the evening on Thursday August 21 this year, a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Marshall pushed his pink-and-red mountain bike out of the driveway of his home in the village of Happisburgh on the jagged Norfolk coastline, just north of the sprawling broads, and peddled off down the lane.
Thomas spent half his life on his bicycle, or else on the little Yamaha scrambler motorbike which his parents had bought him. He was a boyish boy, mad about making model planes and mending things, and although his father, John, used to say that he was old for his age, in many ways he was still a child.
They had just been up in Yorkshire on a farm holiday and Thomas had gone off with the farmer one day bringing in the harvest and then away with the gamekeeper the next day. He was full of excitement now about the new kitten called Lucy which they had just bought, and he had also started to broadcast on CB radio, where he liked to play loud Oasis music and announce to anyone who was listening: “This is Radio Thomas, bringing you all the biggest hits in Norfolk.”
He had told his mother, Carol, he was just going off to see his friend, Adrian, in the next village, a couple of miles along the coast. She had said that was fine as long as he was back by nine. She knew he’d be all right. The village was a safe place, full of fresh air and open spaces, a good place for a boy to scamp around. She was sure he’d be back before dark.
So Thomas peddled off down the road, between the thatched cottages and the chestnut trees, past the little sign that warns drivers about the ducks which sometimes march out of the pond and across the village street. But when darkness came that night, there was no sign of Thomas.
His parents rang his friend, Adrian, who said he had not seen Thomas all day. They rang other friends and relations, who all said the same. By eleven o’clock, they had run out of reassuring explanations and they called the police to report that their only child was missing.
Dawn that Friday saw uniformed policemen and coastguards combing the country lanes and pebble beaches around Happisburgh. By noon, with no sign of the boy, police were so worried that they contacted their most senior operational detective, Les Parratt, to warn him that they might have a major crime on their hands.
By six o’clock that evening, Thomas had been missing for 24 hours and Les Parratt decided to join the search. He was on the road, heading north from his base in Norwich, when his bleeper brought him news that that at seven minutes past five that afternoon, a motorist who had stopped in a lay-by on the edge of Thetford Forest, 40 miles south of Thomas’ home, had found the body of an adolescent boy in the undergrowth. Minutes later, there was a second message. Thomas’ bike had been found in the bracken in a copse three miles from his home. So the murder inquiry began.
Les Parratt is a bright man, a superintendent at 37 after only 14 years in the police, and he knew what he had to do. He sealed off the two sites, where the body and the bike had been found, and sent teams to video them, map them and search them inch by inch. He called in a Home Office pathologist from London and set up a post-mortem in Norwich. He organised teams of officers to start knocking on doors, looking for sightings of the boy or anything that might give them a lead.
As soon as he had seen the two messages on his bleeper, he had recognised one simple fact about the killer – he had access to a car, which he had used to carry Thomas, dead or alive, to the lay-by. Immediately, he set up another team of officers to pull in every video tape that might have caught sight of the car – from transport police, petrol stations and high street security cameras. But already, he knew, he was dealing with a nightmare.
It was a bank holiday, the whole area was swarming with strangers and over the next few days, Parratt knew, tens of thousands of potential witnesses and suspects would start pouring out of East Anglia, running off into every corner of the country. Desperate to catch them, he set up units by the side of the roads leading out of Norfolk, appealing for help. But the nightmare got worse. It started to rain, heavily and relentlessly, and hundreds of motorists who might have been tempted to stop simply wound up their windows and drove on.
Now there was only one way to reach them – through the press. But Parratt had not yet exhausted his bad luck. As the bank holiday ended, he approached the BBC Crimewatch programme and arranged to make a national appeal on the following Monday, September 1. He could follow this up with national press coverage as the Crimewatch leads started coming in. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, August 31, a car crashed in a Paris underpass and the media was consumed by the biggest story since the armistice. The earnest pleadings of a Norfolk detective were lost in the outcry.
It was two weeks before the media calmed down and by then, Les Parratt was surrounded by mystery. The whole crime was a puzzle.
The house-to-house inquiries had come up with a couple of sightings of Thomas just outside his house. And then nothing. There were all sorts of reports of boys on bikes in country lanes near by, but none of them was confirmed as Thomas. Parratt could not even be sure which of the three roads from the village the boy had taken. He had simply vanished.
The search at the two sites had found all kinds of scraps – magazines, bits of paper, foot prints, litter and debris. But none of them seemed to lead anywhere. And there was no sign at either site of a struggle. Parratt needed to know where the boy had been killed. And why had the bike and the body been dumped so far apart? Perhaps Thomas had been abducted at the place where the bike was found, driven down to Norwich and killed there and then abandoned in the forest lay-by. But if that was right, what on earth had Thomas been doing in this lonely copse three miles from home? Perhaps he had been abducted elsewhere, but then why would the killer not dump the bike and the body in the same place? Were there two killers? Anything was possible.
The post mortem had revealed a little, but only enough to deepen the mystery. It showed that Thomas had been strangled. But why? It was easy to assume that he was the victim of a paedophile, and Parratt had already asked the National Criminal Intelligence Service in London for a list of all known paedophiles in the area. He had also contacted the database on sex crimes in Derby, looking for any similar offence. But now the post mortem revealed that there was no sign of any sexual attack on the boy’s body. Not one button of his clothing had even been disturbed.
Perhaps Thomas had been attacked by someone who took pleasure from the killing itself, wanting no sexual contact. Perhaps this was a sex attack which had simply left no trace. Perhaps it had nothing to do with sex at all. There were altogether too many possibilities.
It was possible that Thomas had never intended to go to his friend Adrian’s house at all, that he had fibbed to his mum and gone out to meet some voice he had come across on the CB radio; or that he had gone to join any of the three groups of CB enthusiasts who happened to be holding ‘eyeball’ meetings in the area that day; or that he had gone off to see one of the adults he had met through scrambling; or that he had set off to see Adrian and then met another friend by chance. Perhaps he had argued with the friend, who had hurt him more than he intended and then persuaded a parent to help him conceal the crime. Perhaps. Almost anything was possible.
Parratt looked at the sites where the body and the bike had been found. Both happened to be next to designated nature trails, used by long-distance hikers. Was that the line to follow? But then again, the lay-by was often used by truckers, and truckers used CB radio. Maybe that was the line. But equally, the lay-by was a haunt for gay men, who liked to go cottaging in the public toilets there. Perhaps that was the clue, even though there was no sign of sex in the crime.
Parratt looked everywhere for a lead. He sent Thomas’ bicycle off to a forensic science lab in the West Midlands where they could use the most advanced laser technology to search for finger prints. He sent Thomas’ clothes off to a lab in Huntingdonshire, looking for any foreign fibre that might lead him to the killer’s shirt or to a carpet in a house or perhaps in the footwell of a car. The lab gave him priority because of the seriousness of the offence, but even so he had to wait weeks for the results to seep through to him.
He wondered about Thomas. All children, even the happiest and most secure, kept little secrets from their parents. Did Thomas perhaps have some kind of secret life? He sent officers to interview his friends and to ask the teachers at Stalham Middle School, where he had been a pupil for four years, to keep their ears open for any special comments.
From all the sources he was tapping, information started to flood into the incident room he had set up in North Walsham police station, seven miles from Thomas’ home – 1,800 statements, 4,000 house-to-house inquiries, the results of 6,000 different actions. But which fragment of information was the one that mattered?
Parratt thought he was probably looking for a local man who had known about the lay-by on the edge of Thetford Forest. From the road, it looked shallow, too easily visible from the road to be safe to dump a body. But close up, it turned out to have a second lane, leading deeper into the forest, where it was easy to move undetected. Parratt hoped it was a local man. His worst fear was that he was dealing with a predatory stranger who had no connection to his victim or to the area, who had simply killed and then moved on.
In all this sea of uncertainty, there was one island on which the detective could rest. The killer had used a car. This was where Parratt decided to concentrate his effort. And here, finally, for the first time, there was a decent lead.
His officers set out to trace and eliminate every vehicle that had been sighted near Thomas’ home or near the copse where the bike had been found or in the lay-by on the edge of the forest. The traffic videos they had seized showed up thousands of cars. The public appeals which had finally worked their way into the media produced hundreds of responses. Parratt’s officers started trawling, tracing owners, asking questions, eliminating suspects. And very soon they noticed the recurrent references to a dark Saab 900.
On the Thursday evening when Thomas disappeared, a cluster of witnesses reported seeing this car near Thomas’ home – with a bicycle strapped to its roof. This was around 6.30 pm, just over half an hour after he left. Then other witnesses said they had seen a dark Saab about two hours later – near the copse where Thomas’ bike was found. And finally, several others reported that they had seen a dark Saab in the lay-by where Thomas’ body was left. One of these witnesses was sure that it was a black Saab 900, which had been in the lay-by at about three o’clock on the Friday afternoon, two hours before the body was discovered.
Yet even this promising lead plunged into mystery. Parratt’s team appealed for local Saab-owners to come forward and also contacted the DVLC in Swansea and Saab dealers all over the country. Eventually, they found a man who agreed that he had been driving his dark Saab near Thomas’ house with a bicycle slung on the roof at about 6.30 on that Thursday evening. But he had a perfectly good explanation and he was ruled out as a suspect. So that was the end of the Saab lead. Not quite. This man insisted he had not been near the copse two hours later, nor had he been in the lay-by on the following afternoon.
The Saab remained a mystery, as did one other car – a white Ford Orion which had been seen clearly by a lorry driver as it pulled out of the lay-by at about two o’clock on the Friday morning. Another man, who had stopped his car in the lay-by to sleep, had noticed the same white Orion at the same time. And yet despite all the appeals by police, its driver had not come forward.
The mystery is deep, but Les Parratt has only just started. He still has 60 officers working full time in pursuit of the killer. And he is making some progress. He has suspects. At the moment, the list is too long, but each day, he receives a little more information from the police labs; he eliminates a few more vehicles from the thousands which have been logged; and, every so often, he knocks another name off his list of possible killers. He says he won’t give up until he has only name left, and his officers say the same.
On the rain-stained parish noticeboards, in one Norfolk village after another, in amongst the announcements about line dancing and coffee mornings, the face of a boyish boy looks out from a poster with one thick-black word as a caption – Murdered.
At the house where he used to live, his father, John, has taken himself back to work in the county archive where he repairs old books that have been damaged by fire; his mother, Carol, is still at home, with the kitten called Lucy, in a house full of silence, waiting for the end of a mystery.
