The Case I Can’t Forget is a weekly series that hears from the people working at the coalface of public service about the cases they have carried with them throughout their careers.
This time, forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes remembers watching the now-convicted child killer Mark Bridger give evidence during his trial for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones.
If you have a story you’d like to tell, email lucy.pasha-robinson@huffpost.com
It was May 2013 but Wales had been in mourning since the previous autumn, when five-year-old April Jones was abducted and murdered by Mark Bridger. Her disappearance while out playing one bright evening sparked the biggest missing person search in UK police history. Not only did Bridger kill her, he disposed of her body in such a way that she has never been found. He incinerated parts of her body in the woodburner at his home. It is believed that he scattered other parts of her in the countryside and possibly in the fast-running Ceinws river. April’s parents were only ever able to bury 17 fragments of their daughter’s remains.
Cost-cutting measures had begun to sting my private practice like military-issue iodine. The Ministry of Justice was seeing its overall budget shrink by 40% – among the deepest cuts to any government department. A huge slash in spending on Legal Aid meant my work as an expert witness in the courts had almost disappeared (it seems experts are non-essential when money is tight.) Contracts that I had with charities, social care organisations and local authorities had all been cut or put out to tender and won by cheaper providers – volunteer councillors, trainees or worse, life coaches. I was being asked to train fewer police officers, being consulted less frequently on interrogations and investigations. I had always told my clients that crime doesn’t pay and it was proving true for me now – requests for my services were very much down.
Except in one area. Demand for pre-sentence reports about sex offenders who had committed internet-based crimes against children were unremitting. Referrals came in weekly from solicitors whose clients were men who’d been found downloading child abuse imagery online (there is and never has been any such thing as child pornography – just child abuse and pictures, videos and even, as I was learning, live-streaming of it.) A proportion of these included those who had incited children to engage in sexual conversations or activity via chatrooms and webcams, or had attempted to meet up with them.
Their files came in, usually including a case summary giving three or four sample descriptions of the material that had been retrieved from their mobile phones and computers. Every image is assessed and categorised according to the severity of the abuse involved, the spectrum running from children photographed in sexualised poses through to footage of the most extreme and sadistic acts.
At that time, a five-point grading scale was in use. I always felt for the specialist officer whose job it had been to view the image, assign it to a category, catalogue it and type up the summary – the language always so remote and formal, yet unable to sanitise the truth of what it details. I found having to read them every day hard enough to cope with. It wasn’t only the graphic accounts of what these adults had done to children that I was finding hard to process, but the sheer number of abusive images in circulation. That, and the one detail that the summary description never tells you: whether the child had been identified and was safe now, or still out there somewhere being subjected to more of the same.
The National Crime Agency estimates there are up to 140,000 people in the UK who ‘present some kind of sexual threat’ to children online. Increasingly, it felt to me as though all of them were on my caseload (the only thought more disturbing being that they weren’t on anybody’s caseload.) I didn’t want to strike a whole tranche of offenders from my dwindling practice, but at the same time my head was brimming with unwanted, half-imagined images.
I didn’t meet with and assess Bridger, at least, not in the usual sense of my work.
I had been asked to watch as he gave his evidence and to provide some commentary for the media. He had pleaded not guilty to the charge of murdering April, but accepted that he was “probably responsible” for her death. The mystery of what had happened to this little girl, the lack of closure that the discovery of her body or a coherent explanation by Bridger might have given, had contributed to a deluge of media interest in the case.
I took my seat in the narrow press and public mezzanine of Mold Crown Court for a week, fully expecting to watch events play out with the same impartial interest I had always cultivated at work. But it was the first time I’d seen anything like this from that viewpoint: high up, in the same room and yet light years away from the people whose fate is being decided below. I wasn’t there in my usual role as an expert witness. I found that I could only watch and absorb as any other member of the public might.
It was a few seconds of video that got me, the CCTV footage of her in the leisure centre on the day he took her, a happy, unusually small little girl struggling to open a heavy door by herself. And there he was in court, a six-foot-two man, the snake tattoo on his forearm covered by a blue shirt. Later that day, she would become fragments of bone in his fireplace. Watching that clip, I felt an anger rise in me, and knew it wasn’t going anywhere soon.
We heard how in the days before he took April, Bridger had been searching the internet for images of Soham murder victims, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson who was raped and killed on a school trip to France in 1996. We were told about files on his computer containing obscene imagery of child abuse. Other search terms on his computer included ‘puberty’ and ‘naked young five year old.’
Bridger protested that he had been doing internet research to understand his own children’s sexual development. He had saved indecent images of children “to complain about them later,” he insisted. He said he accidentally ran over April in his Land Rover and that he was unable to fully recall what had happened next because he was drunk and in a state of panic. But we then heard an eight-year-old witness testify that she had seen April climbing into his car. Forensic scientist Roderick Stewart told the jury that there was not a trace of physical evidence, either on Bridger’s Land Rover or on April’s bike to back up his claim that there had been an accident.
It was obvious to everyone what he had been fantasising about before he abducted April, there was really no question that he had murdered her and that the crime was sexually motivated. It even emerged that he had tried and failed to get three other girls into his car that day. His lies were risible and calculated, his story almost laughable, and his cruelty in withholding from her parents the truth of what happened, it seemed to me, impossible to forgive.
On 30 May, Bridger was found guilty of abduction, murder, and perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole-life tariff. It has long been my view that if you take a child’s life for the purposes of your own sexual gratification, or to cover up a sexual offence, then the only rightful place for you to end your life is a prison. But I’m not paid to make those judgements. And until then, I had always somehow managed to compartmentalise my personal feelings about my clients offending behaviour so that I was able to work with them objectively, as whole people. I’d met more than anybody’s share of child killers in prisons (including Robert Black, who was responsible for the death of at least four girls). I’d also worked with several men in forensic step down services who were moving on from jail terms for abducting or killing children. I would introduce myself and offer them my hand when I met them, just as I would with anyone else, and think only of the job in hand, not their hand in mine.
But as I listened to Mark Bridger over those days, repeatedly referring to the child he had killed as ‘little April’ I knew that I couldn’t find the detachment I needed to feel neutral about him. I had never looked at somebody like I looked at Mark Bridger and felt so utterly repelled.
During that week, watching Bridger’s testimony, a colleague suggested I had PTSD. Perhaps I was suffering some kind of vicarious trauma? I remember thinking that if PTSD meant permanently tired, sick and disgusted then yes, I had a bout of that. I had a caseload brimming with men who looked at images of children being abused and although they weren’t all Mark Bridgers they were still part of it, buyers and traders in a thriving blackmarket.
I gave my analysis of Bridger to the TV crew in the professional manner expected of me but when I left Wales and got home, I still felt so angry. It was a pitchfork-wielding kind of bile, virulent and nasty. The anger didn’t subside, it bubbled up in quiet moments and, increasingly, in the early hours of the morning where I would find myself wide awake.
I carried a general grumpy malaise around the whole summer after the Bridger trial, one that no amount of dog-walking, my preferred method of mindfulness meditation, could seem to alleviate. I knew my objectivity was under strain and for a forensic psychologist that’s a big deal; a tightrope walker who has missed their step and may or may not take the next one. I was having doubts about my career and where it was going. Was I making any real difference?
Kerry Daynes is the author of The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories From My Life As a Forensic Psychologist, published by Endeavour
The Case I Can’t Forget is a weekly series from HuffPost UK that hears from those on the frontline of public service about the cases they have carried with them throughout their careers. If you have a story you’d like to tell, email lucy.pasha-robinson@huffpost.com.