The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton

been found matted in her pubic hair. ‘Sexual intercourse was attempted and premature ejaculation occurred,’ the Home Office pathologist had concluded.
    At supper that night, I tried to push the memories of the day aside and talk about normal domestic things. After the dishes had been washed and cleared away, I helped Ian with his homework and then wandered into my study, locking the door. Tony Painter had given me copies of statements, pathology reports, maps and aerial photographs.
    Now I had to properly reconstruct what happened - not just through the eyes of the victims but also the predator. The Osborne/Weedon case had given me confidence and allowed me to develop a framework. Four questions had to be answered - what happened, how, to whom and why.
    These same questions apply to my clinical work, particularly when dealing with victims, but in a slightly different way. In my consulting room I see someone who is damaged or in pain and I have to find out who they are, psychologically, and how they got there. In this case, I didn’t have a victim across the table from me and had to rely on others to tell me about Lynda and Dawn.
    All the pain is focused on that third question and the more I learned about them - about their strengths, weaknesses, loves, hates and fears - the greater the pain because they became closer to me. This must happen to the police, I thought, and the obvious tendency is to push it away and just focus on whoever committed the crime. I couldn’t afford to do that. The rigour with which I answer each of the first three questions dramatically affects the answer to the fourth. In a sense I have to imagine that this man is in my consulting room chair and I’m conducting a one-sided interview. If I know exactly what motivated him to kill a woman, I can put a precise shape to his personality functioning. Then I can move back through his life from the offence and begin drawing up a picture of his family, friends, relationships and schooling.
    As a child what relationship did he have with his mother and father? What would it be like now? How did he get on at primary school and secondary school? Is he likely to be of average intelligence or less so, or more? Given that he did this to a particular woman, what does it say about his feelings, perceptions and assumptions about women in general? Is he likely to have had many girlfriends? Would he have one now? What sort of work is he likely to be doing? Would it be skilled or unskilled? Does he have the social functioning to hold down a long-term job?
    Sexual deviants like this man and Paul Bostock aren’t unknown. They can be found in prisons, special hospitals, regional secure-units and sometimes in outpatient clinics up and down the country and throughout the world. Although I had only been a forensic clinician for barely three months, I had already taken the histories of half a dozen men who fantasized about raping and killing young women. My clinical exposure was increasing all the time and I had access to journals, case presentations, books and research papers from psychologists and specialists who had conducted similar interviews in Britain and overseas.
    This is what I drew upon when I sat down and looked into the mind of the Narborough killer.
    Two days later, I was back in Baker’s office. I had several pages of handwritten foolscap notes in front of me.
    ‘He’s a local man or has good local knowledge,’ I said. This was indicated by his ability to disappear quickly after the offences and not attract undue attention from possible witnesses. No-one had been able to provide a description that was accurate enough to identify the killer or prompt suggestions from the public.
    ‘Everything indicates a single offender. Sexual psychopaths rarely hunt together and one person could have moved the bodies.’ At the same time, I felt that he wasn’t a classic loner or stand-out suspect. If he had been then someone in the local villages would have named