Free The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton Page A

amount of bruising in relation to the larynx I have to suggest that the sexual attack occurred after strangulation and, therefore, at or after death.’
    This was important, although I didn’t want to say anything to Tony Painter until later. The timing of the penetration can often reveal clues about the murderer’s motivation. There is a major difference between the psychological functioning of a rapist who panics and kills his victim to protect his identity and someone who takes perverse pleasure from abusing his victim at the moment of her death or after death.
    Initially the murder squad focused their attention on a young man who’d been seen fleeing from the area. A woman motorist had to brake sharply to avoid hitting the man as he ran across the Leicester-Coventry road under the M1 bridge on King Edward Avenue at about 5.30 p.m. on the Thursday. Thirty minutes earlier, a worker at Marston Radiators on the far side of the six-lane motorway heard two screams coming from the area where Dawn had been found. A courting couple who were seen cuddling in a nearby field at about 4.35 p.m. were sought and two independent witnesses, including a local farmer, reported seeing a man crouching in the grass and in the hedgerows on an embankment on King Edward Avenue at 5.30 p.m.
    ‘And then there was the kitchen porter,’ said Painter. ‘Four different witnesses reported seeing his motorbike parked near the Ml bridge between 4.30 p.m. and 5.30 p.m., and a man was seen carrying a very distinctive red crash-helmet, like the porter’s.’
    ‘How did you pick him up?’ I asked.
    ‘On the Sunday evening, a lad pushing a motorbike approached one of our boys at the checkpoint on Mill Lane in Enderby and said he’d seen Dawn walking towards Ten Pound Lane on Thursday afternoon. The officer took a note of his name and we followed it up and spoke to him two days later. That was the kitchen porter.’
    Painter drew my attention to several statements. Another employee at Carlton Hayes had returned from holiday on the day Dawn went missing. The next day, Friday, he was visited by the kitchen porter who told him that Dawn’s body had been found ‘in a hedge near a gate by the Ml bridge.’
    ‘We didn’t find her for another fourteen hours,’ said Painter incredulously. ‘How did he know about the gate leading from Ten Pound Lane and it was only ten minutes walk from the footbridge over the Ml?’
    Similarly, at 1.45 p.m. on Saturday the kitchen porter had told a local man that Dawn’s body had been found. Yes it had - less than two hours earlier - but the news hadn’t been made public. How did he know?
    ‘We pulled him in for questioning a week after the murder.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘He made certain admissions but was rather inconsistent. He’d say one thing, then deny it in the next breath; or talk in riddles and blame someone else. He admitted being on the path with Dawn, described how he attacked her and gave details of how the body was hidden. I don’t care how fertile this kid’s imagination is, there’s no way he could have made it up and been so accurate.’
    Painter produced several more statements which related to the sexual preferences of the seventeen-year-old, who apparently had come to the police’s attention previously for having anal intercourse with a fourteen-year-old girlfriend on a local railway embankment. In another incident he admitted fondling a nine-year-old girl during a sexual assault that was verified by witnesses.
    The police had obviously gone looking for corroboration and appeared to have established a circumstantial link between the kitchen porter and the anal assault on Dawn Ashworth.
    Painter said, ‘When you listen to the tapes you’ll see what I mean. He admitted it, denied it, admitted it, denied it and then said, “I want a blood test. It’s not me.”’
    I asked - ‘Did the genetic fingerprinting link both murders?’
    ‘That’s the only good bit of news - we’re looking for the