The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page A

published plea asked for information leading to a "mystery man" who'd scribbled the name of Lynda Mann in a telephone boo k i n a local kiosk the day her body was found. That particular clue fizzle d w hen the mystery man telephoned police admitting he'd jotted down th e n ame while ringing a village friend to ask if he knew the victim's family.
    By the end of January the police were publicly releasing well-worke d i nformation on a youth who'd entered a wool shop in Narborough the da y a fter the murder for a new pair of trousers because his were torn. Th e s hopkeeper's suspicions were belatedly aroused because of a published report that police were looking for a beer-bellied young fellow with a tear i n t he left leg of his jeans, who'd been seen coming from The Black Pad at 8:35 P . M . on the night of the murder.
    Now even anonymous calls were prompting large newspaper stories. In early February a young woman rang the incident room at midnight to inform police breathlessly that she knew someone resembling the spiky-haired punk with orange hair cropped like a bunch of geraniums. She had seen the artist's impression in the newspaper and was sure he frequented a public house in Enderby. The police interviewed everyone in and around the public house for a week, but the only geraniums they saw were potted.
    By February the murder squad was still nearly one hundred officers strong. They'd taken three thousand statements and followed up some four thousand lines of inquiry. Virtually every young man going through a punk phase in Leicestershire and the surrounding counties had been interviewed. In the beginning they had thought that if they ever found one who was five-ten, slender, who wore boots with laces, and a leather jacket, and a belt with a bronze buckle, and had amazing orange hair, it would have to be their man. But they had found lots of them, all with amazing hair, many with laced boots and leather jackets. None was the punk seen with the girl thought to have been Lynda Mann, the punk who had caused the motorist to brake sharply.
    He was, in the words of a team member, "as elusive as the flippin Loch Ness Monster." And the running youth had worn out several teams. They said they'd interviewed more runners in early 1984 than had the British Olympic coaches.
    Supt. Ian Coutts was still convinced the spiky-haired youth was their man and that the girl seen at the bus shelter had to have been Lynda Mann. Derek Pearce and many of the others weren't so sure, but everyone believed the killer must be a local man in order to have known about The Black Pad and the gate leading into the wooded copse beside that tarma c p ath.
    As far as Coutts was concerned, Lynda had probably been friendly with her killer because she wasn't the sort of girl to talk to a stranger, and would've fought for her life if suddenly ambushed. They searched endlessly for a "secret boyfriend," one not known even to her best friends. Someone with whom she might have taken a stroll, along The Black Pad.
    The Police Mobile Reserve is a unit of uniformed police officers drawn upon to supplement the divisions, a pool of men for any job. The PMR did the house-to-house pro forma, and took statements from anyone not alibied.
    On January 22nd, Police Constable Neil Bunney of the PMR had on his list a semi-detached house in Littlethorpe, part of a new housing estate in a street called Haybarn Close. The owner of the house was a twentyfive-year-old baker named Colin Pitchfork who'd recently moved into the house with his wife and baby from Barclay Street in Leicester, about five miles down Narborough Road.
    Pitchfork's young wife, Carole, answered the door, admitted PC Bunney, and called upstairs to her husband. Everyone in the three villages knew that the police were doing house-to-house inquiries, so the constable didn't have to explain much.
    The baker didn't come down for several minutes.
    "I had to compose meself," he later said.
    What really had the baker worried