T.Hodden.

One.

Adrian Moss looked at me from across his modern desk in a freshly decorated office, a mug of herbal tea clutched between his talon like fingers. He was hunched forwards in his chair, his elbows resting on the desk, waiting intently for me to begin. I turn on my digital recorder and place it between us on the table.

Moss is a criminologist. He lectures here, at the University of Kent, he has written a number of books, and has presented a fairly long running series on Radio Four. When the radio show ended he instead published a number of short lectures on various cases as spoken word albums, many of which continue to get good reviews on a popular Download site. His specialist subject of many decades has been the sexual serial killer. He has written books on Jack the Ripper, a memoir of his time on the panel looking into the Zodiac Killings, a brief history of Serial Killers in Kent, and a Brief History of Cricketer in Canterbury, which some what breaks the pattern.

"So what causes a serial killer to do what they do?" I ask, at last finding my nerves.

"Well, that is the question. We don't know for sure what makes somebody become a monster. Is it a pre-ordained destiny written in their genes? Or is it all psychological? Is it a momentary snap, or is it something that festers for a long time? We don't know for sure, but what we can do is look at the patterns. Look at the common factors in a number of cases."

"Oh." I coughed, my throat was feeling like a hand full of dried leaves.

"For example, research shows that a certain area of the brain, if damaged will break down the normal barriers we impose on ourselves, our inhibitions. If this certain area is damaged," he points to a small white bust of a shaven human head he uses as a paperweight. Several parts of the brain have been mapped, one of which has been coloured a bright red. "and the subject wishes to lash out angrily at somebody, they will. The part of their mind that normally holds them back and makes them think of the consequences has no effect. They feel a desire, an impulse, and they act." He pauses. "Several of the Serial Killers we are aware of have suffered a head injury in the years before they began their... Work."

"I see." I paused. "What else?"
"Well, they tend to be white males, under thirty, though both of those are tenancies, not hard and fast rules." He smiles, "Which is what the movies get right. What they get wrong is the assumption that the killer will be a grotesque and horrible figure, a socially inept outcast, or the old man in a dirty coat. But that is simply not true in the majority of cases. There are some of course, but there are others who are sweet, charming and handsome, with the gift of the gab and a twinkle in their eyes." His smile freezes, and suddenly it is not a comfortable smile. "They adopt a mask, a guise. Their family and friends will simply argue against accusations of the crimes because he is just one of the guys. Their work tends to follow a set pattern, or rules of engagement, even if it is to only attack the same kind of target. But more often than not there will be a similarity between the kills. A kind of ritual. The murders may not be identical, but they will seem to be the same hand. And in a number of cases there is a sexual connection."

"OK." My fingers trembled a little, I forced myself to take my time.

"Are you alright mister Dexter? Do you need a glass of water?" Moss asked, suddenly seeming every inch the kindly school master he sounds like in his lectures.

"What can you tell me about Burt Webster?" I croaked the words out while I still could.

Moss sat back in his chair, placed his mug neatly on the coaster and clucked his tongue several times. "My first piece of advice," he began gently, "would be to forget any of the rules I just mentioned. Sexual Serial Killers do not tend to be psychotic, this is another common mistake people make, muddling two different kinds of monster."

"Burt Webster was psychotic?" I asked nervously.

"Mister Dexter, Burt Webster was Psychotic and Sadistic, and an awful lot more besides. He is a monster, and frankly when he claimed to no longer be human I was tempted to believe him."

"Is a monster? Do you mean Was?"

"Unfortunately his kind tend to haunt us even after their death." He shook his head. "The memory of Webster is one we shall all carry with us for some time yet. And perhaps for the better, while he scares us, we are wary, we are nervous. I know that when Webster was in the news my own daughter began to take date rape and spiked drinks as a much more serious threat."

"I see," I tried to match his smile. "Can you tell me about him?"

"Well, that depends." He gave me sly look. "When you made this appointment you said it was research, what exactly is this research for?"

"A personal matter." I flexed my fingers nervously. "I considered writing about it, but I am not much of a reporter, I'm not entirely sure I would know where to begin."

"If you do intend to write about the subject," he warned delicately, "be aware that the Webster Murders are still a very sore point in some of the smaller communities around here. There are a lot of people still have nightmares about him. And with good reason." He shook his head. "You must have seen the photographs."

"I think I have found a related case." I admitted. "Something similar, possibly connected."

"Interesting," Moss said. "Though I doubt there is a connection. There have been lines drawn between Webster and some other cases before. None of them pan out."

"There was a case at Devils Foot, during the second world war. Animals were killed in almost exactly the same way as Webster's victims." I began, my well rehearsed speech.

"Ah yes, and one of the evacuees was from Kent, from Canterbury, near where Webster was raised. A strange coincidence but there was no evidence it was that evacuee, it could have been any number of farm hands or..." His voice trailed away as I lifted a file onto the desk, and showed him some photographs.

"He had done it before," I told him firmly.

"Ah, well, if these are real, then it changes an awful lot, but it doesn't prove a connection to Webster."

Despite his scepticism, he studied the pictures hard.

***

These days Arden Street is considered an outskirt of Canterbury, but back when Mark Johnson was born and raised it would have still felt as though it was a village in its own right. Complete with a railway station, post office, a bakery, a general stores and a handful of houses. These days to find it you have leave Canterbury and follow the A2 towards the coast, or the old coastal road that runs alongside the dual carriageway. The old village is surrounded by the housing estates and developments that have spread out since the second world war, as the village expanded and grew.

Mark was the son of the couple who ran the post office, and lived a fairly normal childhood, with the advantages of a life that straddled both town and country. To some people the young boy seemed a bit of a bully, but saw him as a jovial trickster. Although he was often cheeky and had a love of pulling pranks matched only by comic book heroes. He was fairly good in school, helpful at home, and the kind of boy who would find adventures for himself in the fields and the woods.

When he was eight years old he seemed to find more than adventures. On a bright July morning he came running home from the woods, with something wrapped in his jumper, screaming for help from his parents. He claimed to have been playing by the brook when he stumbled onto a number of dead animals in cages woven from brambles. He had brought one home to prove his story. The local constable, Mark and his father retraced the boys steps. Sure enough when the group reached the brook they found six more rabbits and birds in cages woven from brambles. Each of the animals had been killed by a single blow to the head with some form of club. The men were clearly disturbed by the scene, and the policeman used his own camera from home to record the scene.

The cruelty was investigated, but no action was taken. It could have been that the culprit was never caught. Though my personal theory is that Mark was the culprit. I can't help but feel that his claim to have "found" the animals was a part of the "prank" to divert blame away from him. I think it is possible, but by no means certain, that if the village constable had known it was Mark he may well have dealt with the matter off the record. It would not have been the first time.

If Mark was the culprit, it might shed further light on the events that took place in Devils Foot, three years later when Mark was evacuated there.

Devils foot is a small farming community in the north west of England, well away from any potential air raid targets. Mark was evacuated to a well established farm on the outskirts of the village. As well as Mark, the family had agreed to house two other evacuees, and an a small number of Land Girls who were helping the farmer in the absence of male farm hands. Judging by the way his fellow evacuees describe him Mark was a far less self assured individual when removed from his familiar environment. It seems to have taken him some time to come out of his shell and let anybody see his cheeky, joker side. He instead became the timid, shy boy, following the bigger, louder personalities, and easily lead into misadventures.

On the first morning of a bitterly cold frost, Louise and Emma White, two of the Land Girls were making their way across the largest of the fields in the farm, to start the days work, when they noticed something unusual. Girls clothes seemed to be strewn across one of the trees. As they went closer to inspect the strange decorations they realised that an almost entire outfit was hanging there. Undergarments caked in mud and roughly torn. Socks, a coat, an underskirt, shoes, and a scarf. All stained by grass, mud, and torn.

Beneath the tree the frost-hardened ground had been dug up in large clumps of sod, and piled back unevenly. The girls suggested even then, on first seeing the dirt mound it struck them as being some form of grave. Louise said she would run back to the house and raise help, but Emma was gripped my a morbid fascination, and thought she had seen movement beneath the pile. Worried that some one was alive under the grave and struggling to be free she dug away at the dirt with her bare hands.

When Louise arrived back at the grave, accompanied by the farmer and his wife, they discovered Emma sobbing and screaming at the uncovered grave. The following description is from her statement, given a few hours later to investigating police officers:

"As I was lifting the mud away I cut my fingers. I realised there was a bundle of thorns in the grave. A bush. A blackberry bush. Yes, that's right, brambles. But they weren't a bush. As I uncovered more it was like a woven basket, made of the brambles, they were green and fresh. The bramble basket was moving around and I saw something inside that looked human, and something in side that looked like a dog or a cat, and it was moving."

She is later asked for a more detailed description. She states: "The basket was maybe four feet long, and roughly cylindrical, but floppy and loose, maybe like a sack rather than a basket. It was loosely woven enough to see some of what was inside. The thing that looked human was a Guy, you know, like guy Fawkes. Stuffed with straw, and a sack for a head. It was wearing a little girls skirt. The thing that was alive was a fox. It was mad and cut and bleeding. It was cut all over by the thorns on the brambles."

The clothes, including the skirt belonged to Karen Chambers, a local girl who lived in the village. They had been stolen from the washing line late the previous afternoon. How or why the scarecrow was buried, and the clothes ruined was a mystery that no body has ever solved once and for all. There were speculations of course. I have already admitted that I consider it likely that Mark Johnson was involved, at least in some way. But the simple fact is, he, like everybody else, seemed to have a fairly strong alibi. A farm then, as with now, was a busy place that during the working day required organisation and simply put: Somebody always knew where somebody was. They bumped into each other, saw each other, and noticed each other.

Much has been made of the idea that back in those days kids could run around with a lot more freedom, and were trusted to play with out adult supervision. This is true to an extent of course. But, it is worth noting that the guardians of Mark and the other evacuees had been given responsibility for the care of other some body else's child. Now I did not live through the evacuation, and I can not speak with any credibility on how this responsibility was taken by others, but I have no reason to suspect that the kind farmers wife, who I can not name for legal reasons, took her matronly duty with anything less than absolute seriousness. I have tracked down surviving evacuees, the Land Girls have been interviewed numerous times, and surviving members of the Farmer's family all claim, with out any doubt, that the duty was undertaken very seriously indeed. Yes, she allowed the children a measure of freedom, but at the same time she strictly enforced the limits of that measure. And it is, if the statements are correct, unlikely that Mark, or any of the other children, could have perpetrated the ghastly and cruel act on their own.

But, that said, the very fact that there are such similarities between two events in Mark's life suggests a connection. Animals buried in woven pockets of brambles just doesn't happen that often, and although it possible that Mark happened to be in spitting distance of two such strange cases seemed too much of a coincidence for me to ignore. Hence my interview with the esteemed Mister Moss, who was currently staring at photographs of the dead animals in bramble cages found in Arden Street.

As Moss confirmed, the photographs, and other records of the earlier animal killings could well have proven Mark Johnson to be a key player in two brutal and strange events, but did not supply any kind of link to a sadistic killer born decades later. Except perhaps as an inspiration. It is not beyond the realms of doubt, I suppose that the strange story of that Johnson boy could have become rumour, and spread as word of mouth. He may have become the local boogeyman, the Watcher in the Wood, who "haunted" the road in and out of the school for generations.

I know that when I was a young and stupid boy at Arden Street Primary I was one of the many kids who listened to the stories of the Watcher in the Woods, and retold them in that brilliant cross generational game of Chinese Whispers. Of course, I had never heard the name Mark Johnson before. I would not have known him from any body else. But I knew all about the Watcher. Every single one of the pupils at that school knew about the Watcher, and, as far as I can tell the story had been bouncing around the playground for decades. I can even remember at least two of my teachers using the story as a threat. "Come along Dexter! For the love of... Don't dally boy or the watcher will get you!"

If you will indulge me a moment, one of my fellow pupils mentioned, when I talked to him about this project, that I should use the following. they are used with kind permission of a social network site on the inter-net. One of the many user groups on the site is an Arden Street School Pupils group, and as you might imagine the Watcher is a hot subject of discussion.

"Oh God yeah!" One enthusiastic former pupil writes, from her desk in well respected law firm where she is now a Solicitor. "I was terrified walking home for years, because mum would make us take a shortcut through the woods. The story as I know it is this: Ages ago, maybe in the Victorian times, but that was probably just how I imagined it there was cruel boy who liked to hunt down animals, like cats and rabbits, and would hang them from the trees by stinging nettles and vines and brambles."

Another, who is now assistant manager of a supermarket, expands on the story. "He haunts the woods because he got lost. he had graduated from killing animals to killing people, and tried to chase a girl. but she got away and he got lost, now he is always haunting the woods looking for kids to snatch."

The details change, but the basic core is the same. The Watcher is a strange young man, in a long dark coat, who lurks in the woods watching kids and being mean to animals. Sometimes with brambles.

It may of course have nothing to do with either Johnson, or Webster. But there is an amazing similarity of images that I keep finding in Arden Street: Cruelty, Animals and Brambles. It seems strange that the same themes appeared time and again in the same small community.

Two:

On the sixteenth of October, in nineteen eighty seven a storm came to Arden Street that was infamous across the South East, and the nation. Earlier that evening a weatherman had firmly informed the viewing public that a Hurricane was not on the way, and was instantly cursed with infamy, as the clip was cursed to forever haunt "TV's Greatest Mistakes" shows. Which is a little unfair, because the next words he said were to the effect that a gale force storm was going to attack the country none the less. Even more unfairly a metrologist friend of a friend assures me the poor man was technically right: Hurricanes are a specific kind of storm fulfilling specific requirements and tracked across the world. What hit us were, exactly as the weatherman had said, hurricane force winds, but not a hurricane.

Which explains why it does not have a name. When Weather Centres across the world identify a hurricane they label it with a name, that follows a set alphabetical pattern by the way. The hurricane that devastated New Orleans was "Katrina", it had been tracked across its path from the moment it was born to the moment it faded away. The storm of that night in eighty seven is called "the Hurricane," or "the Storm." It was not, I am reliably informed, an actual bona fide hurricane.

But it did scare the living crap out of me. Ninety four mile an hour winds do that to young boys cowering under bed covers as the television aerial is ripped from the chimney. The next morning the world around Arden street was completely changed. Trees had fallen. buildings had been torn open, and flimsy little man made structures had been toppled the hand of nature.

Two girls walking their dog early in the morning, (another chilling but possibly meaningless coincidence comparable to Devils Foot) noticed something strange as they approached a tree that had been uprooted by the storm. Their little dog bounded ahead of them to play in the crater left by the tree being hoisted over by the storm. It soon re-emerged with what appeared to be a pair of flimsy panties in its mouth. The sisters shared an embarrassed giggle over the idea that some one had been misbehaving in the woods and left some evidence, when they noticed there were more clothes scattered in the crater. Clothes that were torn and muddied, and stained with looked like dried blood. One of the girls knelt down for a closer look, and began to scream loudly as she realised that the shapeless form beneath the clothes was a naked body.

The first of Burt Webster's victims had been found. No, I have worded that badly, this was his first victim to be discovered, but she was far from his first victim.

Her name was Anna Birch, she was nineteen years old, and a student at the University of Kent. She had last been seen the previous Friday night, when she had failed to make her way back to her shared house after becoming separated from her friends during a night out clubbing. Her friends had last seen her leaving the club with a guy she had met, to, ah, get to know him better shall we say? She was then spotted saying god bye to him at the station as he got into a cab, and she started a walk home in good spirits. Her housemate Lucia was Spanish, and noting that the two girls shared the same dark hair, olive tan and chestnut brown eyes they had planned to masquerade as sisters. Anna adopted a fake accent that was reasonably impressive to an untrained ear. For the entire night the girls had giggled as Anna spoke in a cod Spanish tongue.

She then seems to dissolve away, nobody else saw her, no other witnesses came forward. We now know that she was lured into a perfectly normal looking taxi by a perfectly normal looking guy. We know now that Burt Webster would have offered her a lift home, and probably made his usual remark about "There being all kinds of freaks out on the street at this time of night. I think you should jump in so I can see you home safe." With perfect hindsight a number of other writers have spoken of how the Police should have been able to solve the case there and then from the moment that the body was first discovered. All kinds of leaps of logic have been made by such commentators to suggest that Webster should have been hauled in there and then to nip the horror in the bud. Some of these are fair, and would have made Webster a suspect, some are simply based on information that the police would not have had at the time, and most of them fall somewhere between the two. Take for example one journalist who, on noting that the crime scene photographers had had found evidence of a set of tyre marks left in a muddy track near the crime scene by a Ford Escort wrote in his (nineteen ninety three year of publication) memoirs that, "In that instant the police should have been talking to the many Taxi Drivers who work in and around Canterbury. The white coloured Ford Escort was an incredibly popular car with Taxi drivers." Which is odd for a number of reasons. For a start the tracks were left several days after the girl was buried, and the police wanted to talk to the owner of the car because they may have witnessed some important clues before the storm obliterated them. Next was the fact that the author (who, by the way, is taking legal action against me, hence my not naming his book, or the newspaper that employs him by name) seemed to be able to deduce that the Escort was white from its tyre tracks (a feat that forensic science has yet to master) and based his connection on the fact that Escort was a popular car with taxi drivers in the nineteen eighties. This is of course true. But it was also a popular car with boy racers, family drivers, dentists, and pretty much everyone who wanted a mid range five door saloon with a perky engine and a reliable track record.

In the weeks that followed there were two stories unfolding. One is a detective drama, in which the Kent Constabulary put together a team of experienced and capable investigators to filter through the evidence, interview witnesses and establish a prime suspect against whom they try and build a case for arrest. The other is the story that was in the public eye, that which can be put together from the headlines that screamed out from the newspapers as "revelation" after revelation was revealed, and question after question was asked, in a way that looked like the reporting of fact.

There are of course other stories too, that mingle and intertwine with those in the press. Those of the villagers caught in a world being besieged by reporters and rubber necked members of the public drawn to crowd near the woods in morbid fascination. Those of the family who had lost a daughter and found themselves as suspects, being tried not in a court of law, but in a court of rumour and speculation. The noose of suspicion hangs over Mister Birch today. The fact he was in Norwich at the time of the murder is a mere trifle in eyes of gossipers like my mother who "always felt there was something not right about the way he acted." Thee are the stories of the creeping veil of fear that descended on the county as people began to worry if they were safe going out at night. Mr Moss's daughters are not the only girls who became far more aware of the threat of spiked drinks and strangers on the dance floor. It was a common idea that Anna Birch had been drugged, to get her to go willingly with a stranger, and even to keep her subdued while she was bound in thorns.

"Burt Webster became a suspect surprisingly quickly." Claimed Detective Inspector Fred North, as his wife handed me a fresh cup of tea and two jammy dodgers. North is retired now, and lives in a detached bungalow in the countryside, far from anywhere but closest to Tunbridge Wells. He is tall, thin and graceful with a shock of silver hair and deep eyes. "We had a checkpoint on the main road through the village and were asking for information from anybody who may have seen or heard anything in the weeks between Miss Birch disappearing and her body having been found. He was one of the cars that stopped, and he volunteered a lot of information. And, well, there was something about his manner that raised the heckles of the constables asking him the questions."

"That was enough to make him a suspect?" I ask, quickly swallowing my tea.

"No, but it was enough to make them curious." North tapped his nose knowingly. "The Constable asking him the question begins to wonder you see, because he normally comes to the village to see his parents, but that night he says he was dropping off some people who had a late night in town and missed the last train home. By several hours judging from his estimate of the time. He says he was driving these customers home, three nights after she went missing, and he saw a mysterious car acting suspiciously near a field. Not the woods we are looking for, but this other field, and he says that one of the passengers on the back seat swears loudly that the... Well... I don't like the word used in the statement so I will say that he described an Indian gent of colour, carrying a dead body. North swears blind that his passenger saw this Indian man carrying a dead woman. Then he goes further, by saying he thought no more of it, that he glanced in his mirror and saw something that could of been a man with a dead body in a field, but assumed it was something fairly innocent and thinks no more of it until he sees the police."

"So what does this policeman do as this strange happy faced taxi driver is giving him this story?"

"The lad does his job." North states with obvious pride. "He asks if the taxi driver knows where he dropped the passengers. And Webster says no. Sorry, he can't remember for the life of him. So the copper asks if Webster can get the log from the office? Oh no! It was a job out of hours for a back hand payment, says Webster. All of a sudden he is squirming and the story is changing. And the Copper is thinking there is something bloody off here." North shakes his head. "So he makes as many notes as he can and asks Webster to come in and give a statement the next day. Then he goes to have a look at the field."

"And that was when he found them?"

"The other bodies? No. He saw a pair of knickers in a tree, and got straight in contact with me. And my gut was churning and I was thinking: Bloody hell! There are bodies in that field. But thinking it, knowing it and proving it are all different."

"So what did you do?"

"I spoke to the farmer who owned the field, and told him some taxi driver had claimed to see a man burying a body on his land, and we thought it was probably guff, but would he mind if we checked, just to rule it out? And well, the farmer was OK about it. He thought it was probably guff, but would rather prove it was guff than live with a niggling doubt, so we went to look for fairly recent digging. And we only bloody found it."

"And that was when you really suspected Webster?"

"Well, suspected, but there were procedures to follow. For all I knew he may have been honest about having clients. We needed to disprove his story before we asked why he was telling lies."

"What did you find in the field?"

"Girls. Girls we didn't know were missing. Girls we sure as hell didn't know we were looking for." He stopped for a second, rubbed his temple. Then frowned a little. "Four girls, all estimated to have been aged between seventeen and twenty three years of age, all of them had been buried alive, while tied and wrapped with the vines of a blackberry bush. All of them had been alive and awake and struggling. We found evidence that the ground had been disturbed and dug first, in a corner, out of view and out of the way. It was field being left fallow you see, the farmer had not being paying too close an eye to it, and the girls were buried in a ditch, on the far side, in the shadows of the tree where the copper had spotted the knickers. Well, we had a horrible feeling what was there so we got the scene of crime officers to dig it up, slowly, carefully, studying everything. Like an archaeological dig it was. and I have to tell you, that long day, spent watching those poor girls slowly being uncovered was the most bloody terrifying thing I have ever felt. Ever."

"It must have been terrible." I mumbled, not coming close to finding something suitable to say.

"And the whole time." North added in a whisper. "The whole day I was sure he was watching me."

I knew the feeling.

***

Around this time I was a few years into primary school, and Terry, my older brother and Jo, his twin sister, were at secondary school in Canterbury. There was an evening when my parents wouldn't be able to pick me up from school, so my Grandad was waiting for me at the gates. He was the kind of man who always took the least direct path anywhere, and as we started to take a bridal path that meandered scenically in the vague direction of my house. As we passed through fields dotted with islands of trees he wondered why I would stop and stare at the shadows and the undergrowth.

"Looking for your lover?" He asked with a sly laugh.

"No. The watcher."

"The who now?" He asked happily. "Is he from television? Like that Knight you like, and the karate animals?"

"No. He is the one doing the killings. He's the school ghost."

"Oh?" He rubbed his hands with genuine enthusiasm. "A ghost eh? Want to tell me about him?"

So I did. As we walked I told him the stories that had heard in the schoolyard, the tall tales of ghosts and friends of friends of friends who had seen him. Granddad did not look so happy any more.

"What does he look like?" He asked quietly.

"A tall man in the shadows with dark eyes and dark hair. He has a long coat and sharp fingers. He watches from the trees and snares young kids." I babbled, the words falling from my mouth far too quickly. I'm not sure where we got the idea that it was the Watcher murdering people, I guess it was just one of those conclusions that children tend to reach.

"Come along now smelly." Granddad demanded, taking me forcefully by the hand and leading me directly back to the main road. "Lets not dally."

That night he spoke to my mother. I heard him telling her that he didn't want any of us kids going out into the woods or the fields on our own, ever, with out an adult. Maybe they became aware that I could hear them from the living room, as the door to the kitchen was closed, and the conversation continued in hushed tones.

One of the Police officers talking to the farmer who owned the field asked him if he knew Webster. The farmer admitted that the name was not familiar. So the officer gave a brief description. A look of recognition crossed the farmers face. The policeman described the Taxi. The Farmer chuckled. "Oh him!"

"He says he was driving some clients past the field. Don't suppose you know who they might have been. Must have been that way down the lane."

"Oh no." The farmer chuckled. "If he was driving around here it would have been to one of my fields. It's where he comes late at night. With company. To be alone if you get my drift."

The newspapers were of course speculating over the strange nature of the death of which they were aware. Was it a cult killing? One asked. Another suggested it was inspired by a movie that featured a scene in which an animated tree attacks a girl. A protest group made it clear that the death was heavily influenced by the "Dark Pagan and Satanic magic" at the heart of a pen and paper story telling game that was just about reaching the height of its popularity at the time. One "Lead" followed by a journalist of repute for a brief but intense period was the claim that the killer was an illicit lover who indulged in very strange sport that went horribly wrong. The story was quickly revealed to be a hoax, but even today the "evidence" is often quoted as fact in books with an interest in conspiracies.

It seems inevitable now, with the eyes of the world hungrily devouring the scraps of information that were allowed into public hands, that the rest of the bodies would end up in the news sooner or later. Fred North clung to the veil of secrecy as long as possible, his team trying to identify the girls as soon as possible. Although the press had marked Anna as a random victim of a killer with motives yet to be recognised, the Police had not yet excluded the possibility that there was a motive that may connect the bodies. Find the motive, find the connection and you will find the killer.

Three days after the discovery of the other victims, the secret was out of the bag. The front pages of newspapers across the country were plastered with grainy long distance photographs of the forensic teams at work, along with dark and ominous headlines.

The identification of the girls was a task that was far greater than you might assume. Adrian Moss explained some of the problems to me back when I interviewed him:

"This was before the Fred and Rose West case spurred on the reform of the way we look at missing persons cases." He told me. "Back then the charities who helped trace missing people and kept the registers of missing people did not have such a close working relationship with the police forces as they do today. The Police were relying on the reports made to them of missing people, which were by no means complete. Even before you consider the types of people that he targeted, then the task was already difficult."

The type of people we now know that Webster targeted those he did not think people would miss. Those who had run away from home, dropped out of view. Those who squatted or lived homeless, or were travelling alone with no destination in mind. Of the four new bodies none had a fixed abode, regular jobs, or regular living arrangements. This is what he had mistaken Anna for: A foreign traveller stopping in Canterbury before hitching her way back to dover to find a way back home.Why she was buried in a grave so distant from the other four is one of the mysteries that he took with him to the grave.

Slowly but surely though, names were put to three of the faces. Eve Brittany, Marie Venus, and Sara Blanc. The last days of their lives were far harder to piece together. When their last known homes or friends, or lovers were tracked down they were normally bound to the sort of people who considered themselves to have good reasons to be suspicious of the police. At least two were heavy and regular drug users. Another was discovered to have numerous run ins with the police as a child for petty thefts and other misdemeanours.

The fourth and final victim has never been identified.

Webster attended Canterbury Police Station to give his statement. It was a long and laborious interview, in which Webster casually mixed truth and lie in a story that was pliable and changed as he tried to second guess what the Police knew, what they suspected, and what they might be able to prove. Even though every care was taken to assure Webster he was not under arrest or even a suspect, he had a cocky arrogant air.North was trying to treat Webster as a star witness. Some one who had seen the vital clue, and whose help could be key to the entire affair. Webster had cast himself as some kind of trickster or master criminal in a daring game of verbal chess.

"For a while I wondered if he was a kook." North admitted when I interviewed him. "I had this terrible suspicion that he was trying to make himself a suspect for attention, or something. But some of the things he said... Some of the things he hinted to have known, even though he clearly shouldn't have."

Webster infuriated the police with his arrogance. When they asked if he had actually been dropping off clients that night, he shrugged, smiled and said: "If you know what I was doing you will have to prove it wont you." He would sit back in his chair and grin at North as though they were in a nightclub and Webster had just made a damned pithy remark to the hottest blonde in the room. Even when the questions were the simplest and most obvious kind he refused to give a straight answer with out feeling the need to draw the police into an argument.

"Can you describe what you saw?" Was one question.

"Like I already told you, I was driving some clients home, and I saw a bloke, in a field with a body."

"Can you describe the person you saw?" Was a simple enough follow up question. It was greeted with a dramatic sigh that suggested this was all a waste of time. He then described a man who was everything he was not: tall, stocky, Indian, horrendously ugly, walking with a limp, gap toothed and slimy.

"Are you sure?" North asked. "Anything else you want to add?"

"I don't know." Was the reply. "Want to ask again when i have a lawyer?"

"Even as I was interviewing him," North admits, "I was thinking I needed a search warrant for this guys house, garden, shed, lock up, his car... everything. I have seen people who have committed murder desperately try and hide it. I have seen people who have committed murder fall to pieces under the weight of what they have done. But I have never before seen a guy sit opposite me and do everything he can to look guilty with out making a confession. It scared me. Then as I was about to end the interview he said something that made my spine frost over."

"Let's be honest with each other." Webster said, as he sat back away from North and gave him that superior smile once again. "Even if you think you know what I have done, even if you think you can prove what I have done. Even if you put me in fucking court. You can't touch me. You can do fuck all about me."

"Why is that?" North asked. Before adding for the benefit of the tape recording: "let it be noted that Webster has answered by shaking his head and tapping his nose."

As Webster was taken to a holding cell he was in high spirits. He laughed as he left the interview room and kept asking North: "Did I Make you look like a cock? Oh dear. Never mind." Before asking the same question over and again like a schoolboy bully who had just made the shy geek blush in front of the pretty girl. The same attitude was there all the time he was in custody. When the officer in charge of the holding cell checked on the prisoner Webster would insult or berate the officer and made it quite clear that when he was released the entire force would be on their knees apologising profusely to worm out of the trouble they would be in.

A solicitor was found to represent Webster, despite his making it obvious he neither wanted or needed legal aid. Phillip Myth was, and still is, one of two highly experienced solicitors to specialise in Criminal Law for the Canterbury branch of a firm of some considerable local repute. He arranged to meet Webster in the interview room of the station and tried to convince the taxi driver to take legal advise. Webster was sceptical and kept accusing Myth of just being after his money.

"What money?" Myth asked. "I'm offering you Legal aid. Compared to my normal fees? I will be losing money for taking on your case."

"Fuck you." Was Webster's eloquent response. "They can't touch me. Don't you get that?" He then flew into a rage, and attacked the solicitor, and the officer who rushed in to break them apart. He clawed at them with his fingers, and tried to bite them both.

He was instantly placed under arrest and charged with assault and actual bodily harm. He would remain in custody. He screamed loudly, for several hours after he was returned to his cell, that "You can't send me to a court! You can't make me swear on a fucking bible when I answer to a higher authority!" Before descending into personal and vulgar attacks on the characters of North and Myth.

"We didn't have any trouble getting warrants to search the properties owned by Webster and his parents. What I was terrified of finding was another victim. Some one buried out there, alive but on the verge f death." North, as always used a brutal honesty as he described his story to me. "His parents owned a house in Arden Street, with a big garden and a double garage. North himself had a smaller property in Canterbury. We swooped on them all."

"Were you sure you were going to find something to prove he did it?"

"No. I expected him to have hidden the evidence a hell of a lot better to be honest. I thought his arrogance was because he assumed he committed the perfect crime and destroyed all the evidence. But it wasn't. It was because he thought he could not be touched for his crimes. He acted as though he could sign a confession and walk down the street screaming his guilt and we could still not touch him."

Any doubt North may have held over the guilt of his prime suspect was quickly snuffed as the Police investigators looked in the spare bedroom of his terrace house near the centre of Canterbury. He had kept records of his victims and his activities. From before he started his campaign he had plotted who his victims would be and how to snatch them, where to bury them, and how to cover the evidence of his crimes. He had met his first four victims on several occasions each, trying to befriend them, or at least become familiar enough to tempt them into his car. He recorded his triumphs as Eve and Marie began to regard him as a friend, maybe not a close friend, but certainly one that was always good for a quick hit on their addiction. His agony as the still unnamed girl (he only ever referred to them by the month in which they would be shown their grave. Miss August, Miss March, Miss May and Miss September) kept backing away, finding him creepy and far too boastful for her tastes. Shockingly Miss October was not Anna Birch. His intended victim was a girl who one of the uniformed officers helping with the search recognised as a homeless girl who seemed to share her time between squats in Kent and one on the Sussex coast. The afternoon before Anna Birch was abducted the intended Miss October was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Faversham town centre. She was held in custody until the morning after before being granted bail and absconding to Brighton.

Birch was a last minute choice. The diaries recall in detail the desperation he felt as he looked for a suitable replacement when he could not find October, the relief as he stumbled upon Birch, then the sense of having been unfaithful to the girl he should have chosen.

The car and house were dismantled as the Police and their Scene of Crime Officers built a water tight case against Webster. The Pathologists were able to garner an impressive salvo of evidence from the bodies, and soon they were able to recognise not only which drug was used to subdue the victims, which victims took the drug themselves, and which were attacked with a syringe against their will. A supply of the drug was found hidden in Webster's bathroom. Trace evidence placed the victims in his car, and placed the underwear and other clothes buried with the victims in his hands. Traces of Webster's saliva was found on some of the clothes as well. The journals he kept were in his hand, with his fingerprints locked forever in a smudge of ink and clearly visible on photographs.

While his house was being searched Webster was in his cell at the police station. He was checked often by the custody officer, but was able to hang himself to death. The custody officer attempted to revive him, as did the para-medics who were called, but he was announced dead shortly after. There is a strange story however that has become something of folk lore among policemen in Kent. The Custody officer had repeatedly tried to shout at Webster to shut up, but the killers screaming of slurs and insults was unrelenting. When the poor criminal in the next cell begged the officer to do something to "get the idiot to shut his trap," the officer approached Webster's cell and banged on the door with his truncheon.

"That's enough now Mister Webster!" The Officer shouted. As he opened the observation hatch the shouting was unabated. When he looked through, the shouting stopped dead. Webster was hanging from his neck stone dead.

The coroner inquest found that all the girls had been murdered in cold blood by a "Cruel and thankfully unique" killer. The case was closed.

Three.

It was a bitterly cold November morning when I found the dogs. I was crossing the village to buy some milk and a loaf of bread from the little shop, and for some reason I fancied a circular walk, so I went there via the play-park, and was going to come back the more direct route down the main road.

The grass crunched beneath my feet as I ambled through the small green. As I approached the climbing frame in the shape of a rocket. Laura was there, in the depths of her hooded sweater, smoking a crafty B&H while the day-glow sack of newspapers rested at her feet and the mountain bike was leant on the swings. She always stopped for a smoke at the halfway mark of her round, and the park was her favoured venue. She rolled her eyes as I approached. I have no doubt that she realised I liked her, and that any attempt I made to make it look as though I was casually going out my way and in had no way expected to say hello was completely pointless. "Hey stranger." She greeted me, a small smile on her face."Got an early morning?"

"We need groceries." I mumbled, as always completely failing to make much of an impression. My eyes fell upon something on the other side of the gree. A silver mist of steam seemed to be rising from a patch of ground near the other side of the green. There was a shapeless form laying there. "What's that?" I asked, and was answered by a shrug.

I crunched my way across to it. First with a quick and curious pace, then with slower steps as I felt a sudden lurch of nervous energy weighing heavy in my chest. The form was a dog, It was the Jack Russell that belonged to old Mrs Archer. The dog was normally a whirlwind of yapping playful energy, but now he lay, whimpering and cold, and strangely still. His head was was laying back at an unnatural accent. His neck was broken.

Laura, a confirmed pagan whispered a prayer to Jesus under her breath at the sight. "His neck is broken." She croaked.

"Yes." I agreed numbly, before realising that there were two more patches of steaming ground where something hot and feverish was melting the frost into clouds of mist. They were The Bale family's chocolate Labrador and the Heinz Fifty Seven mongrel that lived with the odd family at the house opposite the church. all three dogs were suffering from terrible internal injuries, with very few external signs of injury. I ran to the shop and got the lady who ran it to call the police, before hot footing it back to the park to wait for the police to arrive. As I sat there on the swings keeping guard on the animals I stared out at the trees.

I had the uncanny feeling of being watched. I stared into the shadows of the trees on the far end of the playing fields, but I saw nothing, I had nightmares for weeks about something snapping my neck and leaving me in the park.

Twelve years later I spoke to Mrs Archer about the incident. She now lives in a retirement home in Scotland. I met her in the comfortable lounge of the home, as we drank tea from small and delicate cups.

"Jack was in my house the night before." She assured me, "He had a basket in the kitchen he slept in." She had a wistful look in her eyes as she spoke. "The doors were locked, the windows were shut, because of the cold." She sipped her tea. "In the morning the first I knew that anything was wrong was when a Policeman was wrapping on my front door and ringing the bell.

"Was there a sign of a break in?"

"When I got up I found my back door had been left open. But I had locked it the night before you see?"

"I see." I thought for a moment. "You are sure that you had locked the back door?"

"Of course!" She was clearly insulted by the suggestion that she may have neglected to lock her door. "I had locked the door Mister Dexter?"

"So how did somebody take your dog?"

"I didn't take the How as the important bit." She seethed. "It had been done, and that was all that mattered."

"You weren't worried somebody could break into your house again?" I asked.

"What?"

"Well, weren't you worried that if some one had unlocked the door to your house and broken in once, that they might do it again?"

"Oh." Cogs were turning in Mrs Archers head that obviously had not clicked into place before. "I'm sorry I can't be more help." She told me briskly. "But I think I should just go and telephone my daughter. I haven't spoken to her in a while." She was lookin remarkably pale.