wanted to get back to my house, put on a video of some old
Tom and Jerry
cartoons or something like that, and let it wash all the horrid thoughts and images out of my mind. But they wouldnât let me do that.
I felt very lonely too. Although there were always people around â indeed, they wouldnât leave me on my own for a second â none of them were friendly. They all looked at me as if I was carrying some awful infectious disease. I wanted someone there whoâd just talk to me in a relaxed, simple way. Iâdâve loved to have one of the children from the park there to talk to. At one moment when I was particularly stressed, I said that to Detective Inspector Bracken. He gave me a very strange look.
The lawyer they got me â there was no way I could have got one for myself, Iâve never had any cause to need a lawyer â was, Iâm sure, fine, but she didnât seem very interested in my case. Maybe it was just a job of work for her. She didnât seem concerned about putting my side of things. But maybe that wasnât what she was there for. Certainly she didnât stand up to Detective Inspector Bracken much. He was so strong, so dominant, so like Papa.
It was the same at the trial. There was this woman barrister who defended me. Iâve nothing against women. I like women. But I donât think of them as strong. Probably that comes from having grown up with my parents. It was always Papa who was in charge. Mama was a kind of shadowy figure in the background. So I never really expected the judge and the jury to take much notice of my barrister.
Also I donât think she took the right approach for my defence. She kept saying it wasnât just Bethany Jones who was a victim. I was a victim too. Then she said things that were a bit hurtful. She said just because I was odd, it didnât automatically make me a criminal. She said, yes, I was a sad, rather pathetic figure, somebody who didnât fit societyâs norms. But that didnât make me a murderer.
Iâm not sure that was the right way to go about it. Calling me âoddâ and âsadâ and âpatheticâ made me seem as if I
was
all those things. I thought she was playing into the hands of the other barrister. He was a man, much more forceful in his manner. He was like Papa, or Detective Inspector Bracken. He spoke in a way that didnât brook argument. Iâm not surprised that the jury believed what he said rather than the arguments my barrister put forward. If Iâd known nothing about the case and Iâd been sitting in that jury box, Iâd have done the same.
But of course I did know something about the case. I knew Iâd never touched Bethany Jones, never touched any of the children. At the time those dreadful things happened to her, I was in my house watching Childrenâs BBC.
There was another thing I knew, too. I knew my secret bits didnât work like menâs are supposed to. I knew my body wasnât capable of doing the things that had been done to her body. But I didnât like to mention that. It was a bit embarrassing. Maybe, if Iâd had a male barrister . . . But to talk to a woman â any woman â about that kind of thing . . . well, I couldnât ever have done that.
It wasnât nice before the trial, or while the trial was going on. I was kept in this prison. âOn remandâ, they called it. They didnât have any golden syrup in the prison. I asked for it, but you couldnât get it. And you werenât allowed to watch Childrenâs BBC.
Also, the other prisoners were horrid to me. They all seemed to take it for granted that Iâd done all those things to Bethany Jones. There was more than one occasion when only the intervention of the prison officers stopped something rather unpleasant happening.
After the trial was over, though, and that horrid wrong verdict had been given, the prison