The Scapegoat: One Murder. Two Victims. 27 Years Lost.

Carman said he looked over the hedge of the cemetery somewhere near the phone box and saw Wendy walking along a path. At this point on his route he would have already passed Stephen, who was heading to the shop. So, Wendy must have been uninjured after Stephen had left the cemetery. Why then had Carman not been quizzed over this anomaly? Had Stephen ever queried this with the police or his defence team?

I also noticed a major time discrepancy. Carman said he had spotted Wendy at 12.50, but everyone agreed that Stephen did not leave the cemetery until around 1.08. If Stephen saw Carman, and vice versa, then Charlie’s timing was well out.

There were many parts of this puzzle that didn’t make sense. But I also needed some more answers from Stephen. Why did he change his story at the police station? Why admit attacking and, moreover, sexually assaulting Wendy? Why did he wait 13 days before retracting his confession?

I was also interested in knowing more about Nita’s assertion that he changed his boots when he came home at lunchtime.

She claimed it was because he had put on the wrong boots in the morning. And I also needed to clear up the allegation concerning this mystery man in the cemetery who had poked Stephen in the back and threatened him. Why on earth had that allegation not formed part of his defence? I knew I would still need to ask some difficult questions, which many people, the Downings included, might not like.

I wrote to Stephen again and asked him if he could answer some additional queries. In particular, I wanted to hear his version of the interrogation at the police station. Ray told me the confession was forced out of him, but I needed to hear it all directly from Stephen.

CHAPTER 7

Believing the Beebes

I realised my presence and my nosey-parker attitude was making an impact around Bakewell. Perhaps I was beginning to upset some locals who thought their secrets had been buried with Wendy Sewell.

I noticed it far more on the council estate near the Downings’ home, where quite often people would stop and point at me as I drove past, no doubt muttering something about me under their breath.

I was apprehensive about becoming involved in such a delicate and controversial case. I knew my involvement was likely to make enemies in this small rural community, and was bound to reawaken many thoughts and emotions that had been suppressed for decades.

One morning as I breezed into work, Elsie, the receptionist, who was on the telephone, began frantically beckoning to me with her free arm. I was about to ask her what the matter was when she put a finger to her lips.

I hurried through the door and round the back of the counter to where she was sitting.

‘Really, young man,’ she was saying in her best telephone manner, ‘now do go away and stop being so silly!’ With that she slammed the receiver down.

‘Who was it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Don. But he said he wanted to kick your head in,’ she replied, raising her eyebrows. Elsie had been with the Mercury for donkey’s years and was used to dealing with irate callers. She was not easily fazed.

‘Did he say why?’

‘He just said you would know why.’

‘Well, I might.’

She peered at me over her glasses. She was a tall, thin woman with a quick temper who was in her late forties and was always impeccably dressed. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a real bee in her bonnet about ‘time wasters’ interrupting her regimented routine.

Elsie then added casually, ‘To be quite honest, it’s the second time he’s rung.’

‘When was the last?’ I enquired.

‘A couple of days ago. I wasn’t going to mention it. He was more abusive the first time, rather than threatening. But if he’s starting to talk about beating you up, well, you should know. It was definitely the same chap. He didn’t sound particularly old.’ She paused, obviously waiting for me to explain.

‘I’m sorry, Elsie. If you get any more, don’t talk to him. Just put him straight through to me. Or if I’m out, hang up.’

I walked through to my office, leaving Elsie burning with curiosity. I was angry that someone was upsetting my staff, but if they thought they could put me off that easily, they had another thing coming.

Even at that early stage, I had a gut feeling about the case. Lots of people kept singing the same tune – Downing was serving time for someone else. I had an overwhelming desire to seek out the truth once and for all. If Stephen Downing was guilty and I could prove it, then it would at least end the mystery.

But what if he was innocent?

Certain prominent local characters and traders began to show a peculiar interest in my preliminary enquiries, displaying a curious nervousness about the victim’s past. Calls came in to me from a publican and several shop owners in Bakewell, asking me why I was suddenly ‘digging up dirt’ about this old case.

Feedback about my investigation also came from my advertising reps. They felt that pressure was mounting for me to drop the case. Advertisers were becoming nervous that it could have an adverse effect both on advertising revenues and the tourism trade, as Bakewell was not that sort of town.

More interesting to me, however, was the reps also confirming that the town was buzzing with gossip about the victim’s love life. It was being said that she had had several boyfriends, echoing what Ray and Sam Fay, my deputy editor, had told me the first time the Downings came to my office, and there was even mention of a love child, despite it being said at the trial and in the Home Office report that the Sewells had no children. I would have to look more closely at the life and times of Mrs Wendy Sewell.

My reporters also added that the local ‘plods and pips’ weren’t happy about me kicking up dust over an old case like this, which was already long gone and forgotten.

Reputations were on the line. I asked Jackie to make an approach to the duty inspector, but he seemed to be advising us to leave well alone. I asked her if he gave a precise reason. She shook her head and replied, ‘All he said was that Downing was guilty. A right little pervert.’ This claim was something I would come to hear a few times – but why?

‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘But that’s what some other contacts have said. All very interesting, but I can’t find anything to substantiate their claims.’

All this was happening despite the fact that I had not yet published one word in the Mercury about the case. I did, however, start to gain a lot of support from many people who were starting to express their doubts and opinions about the case. The residents of some houses that overlooked the cemetery had lived there for years and confirmed that no routine house-to-house enquiries were carried out at the time.

Marie Bright, an elderly lady, asked to see me urgently. When I visited her home, she told me she was still worried – even now – about possible repercussions. She explained she’d seen a ‘pasty-faced’ man with a bright orange T-shirt hanging around the main entrance gates about an hour before the attack.

She claimed the man got off the bus from Bakewell at about noon. Mrs Bright said, ‘This man was aged about 40 to 45 and was acting rather queer. I hadn’t seen him around before and I think he was a stranger because he kept looking around, and at his watch. He looked suspicious, as though he was waiting for someone. I saw this man coming over the top of the wall, out of the cemetery, about an hour later.’

She said she had also seen another man parked up in a dark-coloured van near the phone box by the cemetery gates some time that lunchtime. She described him as a fat, bulky figure.

Margaret Richards, another elderly woman who lived close by, told me she too had seen a man standing close to the beech hedge by the cemetery gates. Her description of him was almost identical to that given by Marie Bright of the man in the orange T-shirt. She claimed he appeared to be acting suspiciously, looking at his watch, and was very nervous.

Both Bright and Richards said they had been to Bakewell police station to report their sightings. They had seen PC Ernie Charlesworth, who hadn’t seemed interested and told them they already had someone in custody charged with the murder. I knew Charlesworth and believed him to be an arrogant and lazy beat bobby. He was considered something of a bully by junior colleagues.

I wondered why he had not referred these witnesses to a more senior investigating officer. What I wasn’t aware of at that time was the fact that he had been the one who got the confession out of Downing, which he had boasted about for years.

I wondered, too, whether the noon bus driver had been questioned, or whether he had seen any suspicious characters running around. In those days everyone knew everyone, and a stranger would be noticed.

I was then contacted by another witness, a Mrs Gibson from a neighbouring road, who said the police did call at her home on the Saturday night after the attack and actually took a statement. She claimed she was told not to tell anyone or say anything to anyone else. But she too confirmed the police didn’t make general house-to-house calls.

This was agreed by housewife Pat Shimwell, who explained she had been chatting with a friend at the door of her house on Burton Edge, overlooking the cemetery, and noticed Stephen Downing leaving by the main gate at about 1.10 p.m. with his pop bottle.

She was standing at her garden gate with her arms folded as we spoke, relating her story in a matter-of-fact manner. Like many of the women who were eager to talk to me, Pat Shimwell was in her mid-fifties and had been at her home near the cemetery all day on 12 September.

I believed the police would have had a ready-made set of witnesses with any one of these plain-speaking women who apparently noticed everything – if only they had bothered to talk to them. Pat Shimwell later told me that she was in her bedroom tidying up when she heard a ‘commotion in the cemetery’, with several workmen yelling at each other.

She remembered someone shouting out something like ‘leave her!’ At about 1.30 she saw the policeman in the cemetery. She told me that a bobby asked if she had seen anything. And then claimed that she was quite remarkably told, ‘If anyone asks, I haven’t been here.’

I asked her if she could be sure that Stephen had left the cemetery at around 1.10 p.m. She said she could because she had seen the bus at its scheduled stop at the same time. Once again, I had reason to thank Hulleys buses for helping to plot the course of the day’s events.

Pat Shimwell asked if I’d spoken to any of the youngsters who were playing around the area that lunchtime. I recalled Ray saying something about children when we walked around the cemetery.

She suggested I should track down Ian and Lucy Beebe. The story was that something ‘horrible’ had frightened them in the cemetery that day. Shimwell admitted that they were very young at the time, and told me they used to live along Burton Edge but had since moved away.

I soon discovered that the Beebe family played a crucial but often maligned role in this murder inquiry. The eldest daughter was Jayne Atkins, a fifteen-year-old at the time, who was a half-sister to little Ian and Lucy, then aged four and seven. Jayne appeared as a major new witness at the Court of Appeal in October 1974 to give evidence in support of Stephen Downing.

Jayne told three appeal court judges she had seen ‘a man and a woman with their arms round each other’ in the cemetery on the day Wendy Sewell was attacked. She confirmed the man was not Stephen Downing.

She explained that only a few minutes before she saw the couple embrace, she had seen Stephen leaving the cemetery. She said the couple were standing on the lower path, behind one of the chapels, and not far from the very spot where Wendy was later found bleeding to death.

Jayne told the court she had been afraid at first to tell the police about what she had seen, for fear the man had recognised her – and that she might become a victim as well.

At a pre-trial hearing, the three law lords decided she could not be believed. They maintained that, had she been a credible witness, she would have come forward much earlier with such vital information. They decided her evidence was therefore ‘not credible’ and rejected it, and Stephen’s appeal against his conviction was hastily dismissed.

I wanted to meet Jayne Atkins, and to see if her story had changed over the years. I was also keen to track down and interview the younger children and find out what had frightened them.

This proved no easy feat. Former neighbours told me the Beebes had moved to a new house because they had been so terrified of reprisals after Jayne had given her evidence to the Court of Appeal. They said the family had received several anonymous threats.

Back at my office, after spending much of the morning on the estate, I received a telephone call on my direct line. ‘Been snooping around again, then?’ a man’s voice sneered.

‘Who is this?’ I asked. It was not the same voice as before. This man sounded much older.

‘Never you mind. That little sod got what he deserved. If I see your car on that estate again, you’re dead,’ he claimed, before slamming down the phone.

My heart was pounding, and my thoughts turned to Kath and my two boys. What if this person knew where I lived? Not for the first time, I wondered just what I was getting myself into.

* * *

Later that week, I finally tracked down the Beebes. They were living on the outskirts of Chesterfield, in a council house in Renishaw, on the road out towards Sheffield. Margaret Beebe opened the door. She was a very pleasant lady in her fifties with a strong local accent.

She greeted me with a friendly smile. When I told her the purpose of my visit she appeared enthusiastic and ushered me inside. She told me that the children, by now in their twenties and thirties, had all left home. She and her husband Ken lived on their own.

Once she started talking about past events, her mood changed. She told me that she and her family left Bakewell in 1977, moving first to Lichfield in Staffordshire before ending up here in Renishaw, about 15 miles from Bakewell. She confirmed what I had already been told – that they were forced to move because they believed their lives were in danger after Jayne gave evidence at the Court of Appeal.

They had received anonymous threats for more than two years, and could take it no more.

‘The worst thing was,’ she said, ‘no one believed us. No one took us seriously, except for our immediate neighbours. We were just left to get on with it and deal with all this bother on our own. It was very upsetting. And it was terrible for the little ones.’

‘So, tell me what happened that day, Margaret,’ I said.

‘The children, that’s my Ian and Lucy, and their little friend Pam Sheldon, were all out playing on waste ground, then in the cemetery, when something frightened them. I think they told me at the time that somebody with blood on them jumped over the wall out of the cemetery and frightened the life out of them. They wouldn’t go into the cemetery for a long while after that.’

‘What time of day was this?’

‘Ian and Lucy had come home at lunchtime from infant school and were out playing on their bikes,’ she said. ‘Then Ian came in as white as a sheet. He’d left his bike somewhere. He couldn’t say anything at first. I sat him down on the couch. He was very scared and talked about a man with blood on him.

‘He had nightmares for a long time afterwards. He couldn’t go back to school and had to stay at home.’

Margaret Beebe was sitting on the sofa next to me but was talking thirteen to the dozen, and flailing her arms around like a windmill, as she became more and more engrossed in her story.

I had to duck several times.

‘I put my little one, Adrian, in the buggy,’ she continued, ‘and took Lucy back to school. As I passed the cemetery there were police there, and an ambulance. I remember seeing them putting a body into the ambulance.

‘When I went back home, Ian had messed himself with fright. I thought I’d fetch a doctor, then he calmed down a bit and said, “Mummy, that man got blood all over him!”’

‘Were the police told about all this?’ I asked.

‘They came around on the Friday night, two days after the attack, but didn’t take any statements. Ian was in bed asleep, so they said they’d come back to talk to him. They never did, though.’

‘And this was the first time the police came to your house? They didn’t come on the day itself?’

‘No, the Friday was the first time. They didn’t go to any of the houses on Burton Edge on the day it happened.’ Margaret added that some time after 1.10 on the day of the attack she popped her head round the perimeter hedge of the cemetery to look for the family’s pet dog.

Her daughter Jayne had already gone out to look for it. Margaret said, ‘I didn’t see anyone.’ A few minutes later, though, she recalled hearing a shout, something like ‘Hey!’ or ‘Help!’

‘It must have been a shocking experience for your family,’ I said.

‘Well, later that day, when I went to work at Cintride at six o’clock, I heard all about this woman who had been battered in the cemetery. I kept Ian off school till the following Monday, but he continued to suffer with his nerves until 1977. It was four years of misery until we moved to Lichfield.

‘I had a breakdown after all this. Our family was called a pack of liars by the police. We only said what we saw. I used to work at Cintride on the 6 till 10 p.m. shift. One night, when I was walking there on my own up Bagshaw Hill, a car came alongside me and slowed down.

‘There were people in the front and back, and someone wound down the window and shouted, “You had better keep your mouth shut or else things will happen to you and your girl!” I think this was after the trial but before the appeal. When Jayne gave her evidence, the judges basically called her a liar.’

Margaret Beebe added one other interesting fact to my ever-increasing portfolio of information. Her husband Ken, a quarry worker, had been approached by a workmate during one of his breaks, some two or three years after the murder, who told him, ‘It’s a shame Stephen Downing is doing time for someone else. I know who did it.’

This gem of information was typical of many statements I was to encounter over the next few years. If it was all true, then the identity of the murderer of Wendy Sewell had been one of the worst-kept secrets in the Peak District.

The more I talked to people, the more it appeared that half the population of the town and its surrounding villages knew what had ‘really happened’, and were ‘certain’ who the murderer was. About half-a-dozen names regularly cropped up.

I quickly came to realise that in a small community during that period, gossip and rumour spread like wildfire. Yet if you attempted to trace it back to its source, a wall of silence would suddenly descend, the more usual response being, ‘I don’t want to get involved.’

Amazingly, I was to encounter tales of drunken boasting in the town’s numerous pubs of many men claiming to have been ‘involved’ with Wendy and/or her killing. Many of the claims were contradictory, yet one remark was uttered consistently: ‘Stephen Downing didn’t do it.’

I thanked Margaret Beebe for her help and asked if she could put me in touch with her children, Ian, Lucy and Jayne.

Ian and Lucy were a possibility, she said, although how accurate their memories would be after 21 years was debatable, considering their tender ages at the time.

She wrote down my number and said she would pass it on to them. She added that they both lived nearby. Jayne, however, was another matter. Mrs Beebe confirmed that Jayne was now in her late thirties, but had lived in fear of her life ever since she was a teenager.

Despite the passage of time, Jayne remained convinced that the person responsible for Wendy Sewell’s death still meant to harm her after she had dared to speak out at the appeal. Mrs Beebe said she had promised her daughter that she would not reveal Jayne’s whereabouts.

* * *

Lucy Beebe, or Lucy Wood, to use her married name, telephoned me a few days later at the Mercury office. She was very helpful and described the events quite clearly, saying, ‘I went into the cemetery looking for my brother Ian and my friend Pamela at lunchtime on the day of the murder. We used to play there all the time. We were little devils. We used to play with the flowers on the graves. Ian and I were playing hide-and-seek that day.’

‘So, did you see anything unusual on that particular day?’

‘I saw Ian. He was pale and shocked, and I helped him back home. He didn’t or couldn’t say anything. I remember that it took him a while to recover. He even left his bike in the road. He’d obviously seen something that really frightened him.’

‘Did he say what had scared him so much?’

‘He spoke later of a bloodstained man on the graves.’

I didn’t press Lucy any further, or ask her any leading questions, as I wanted her memories to be untainted by suggestion as far as possible.

So many rumours had flown around Bakewell for the past 20 years or more, and I was acutely aware that someone who had been a child at the time may have been influenced by half-overheard adult gossip or repeated theories.

I asked Lucy to get in touch with me if she remembered anything else, and I remained determined to speak to her half-sister Jayne Atkins. I had been making strenuous efforts to discover her whereabouts, pressing the family to let me know where she was. I was still convinced Jayne could be a vital witness, as she had recalled seeing Wendy embracing a man after Stephen had left the cemetery.

Jackie, who had been eavesdropping on my call, obviously felt as I did. Once I had put down the receiver, she said, ‘Don, we really must talk about Jayne Atkins.’

For the past week or so, Jackie had immersed herself in the details of the failed 1974 appeal. Margaret Beebe had agreed to talk to her on the telephone, and Jackie had spent hours questioning her about Jayne and talking to the Downings about the case that had been prepared for the Court of Appeal.

She had studied the newspaper reports and court papers from the time, as well as old police notes provided by my friendly informants in the force. They all confirmed that Jayne’s evidence was rejected mainly on the grounds that too much time had passed before she came forward. I was desperate to chat with Jayne to find the reasons why.

I was delighted by Jackie’s enthusiasm. ‘We’ll arrange a proper meeting, Jackie,’ I replied. ‘We need to go through everything with the team.’

* * *

A few days later I met up with Allan Taylor, a presenter on Central Television, in a pub far away from the madding crowds of Bakewell. Allan was tall and wiry, and spoke in a deep, slow Scottish drawl. I had known him for many years, and during my time at the Mercury we had co-operated on many stories.

I outlined the case and my findings to date. Allan was particularly concerned about Stephen Downing’s original statement and the amount of time he was detained without support. Over the next few days he began making some enquiries of his own and even went to see the Downings.

On his way back to Nottingham one day, he called in at the Mercury offices. Jackie got her chance to tell us about her research on Jayne Atkins. She filled in Allan with the background, explaining how Jayne was a 15-year-old girl at the time, living in a house on Burton Edge, along the topside of the cemetery.

Jackie explained, ‘She had come home during her school lunch break from Lady Manners and was looking for her pet dog. She remembered she had left the house after listening to the one o’clock news headline on the radio. She had turned right along the path by the top of the cemetery towards the junior school. Halfway from her home to the end of the cemetery there’s a bit where the hedge stops, and then there’s a wall.