Don't Let Me In Page 2

  Oh, and the name given by the locals to this country copse car park? “World’s End”. I’ve dealt with the press coverage in a previous podcast but you wouldn’t need a degree in Media Studies to write the headlines that followed the murder of a beautiful woman at World’s End.

  Lauren Grey’s body was discovered on a Saturday morning, 9 July, at around 9.30am. The police later established she had been killed between 11.30pm Friday and 1am earlier that Saturday. A local window cleaner, he cleaned the big houses hidden back down the lane, Charles Brownhill, was in the habit of having a smoke and a coffee from his flask before he started cleaning the houses. He had pulled his car in next to Lauren’s Beetle and noticed someone slumped forward in the passenger seat.

  Charles Brownhill did what any respectable member of the public would do and he called the police. I often wonder whether he regrets that now.

  The police went by the book. They secured the scene, took witness statements from Charles and made enquires at the neighbouring properties. The victim’s bag was still in the car and inside the bag was her purse containing her bank cards and student ID. If the motivation behind her murder had been theft it hadn’t been a successful operation. Detective Sergeant Emma Pearson also made what must be the hardest of all house calls; she visited Lauren’s mother and broke the news to her that her daughter was dead and may have been murdered. This visit took place at 12.30pm.

  Khalil Bukhari was in the frame straight away and for good reason; he was Lauren’s boyfriend, you know, the captain of the cricket team, and the statistics don’t lie. Most women murdered are killed by their partners and it’s a chilling but true fact that the guy who rubs your back is the most likely person in your life to kill you. And people wonder why us feminists are angry? You’d be fucking angry if the guy eating cornflakes across from you and sending you cute emails was statistically, by a huge factor, more likely to kill you than a terrorist. But I digress.

  In the normal scheme of things the police would have been putting the squeeze on Khalil big time, and they did interview him that first day, but not until 8pm that evening by which time the story had already leaked to the press. A teenage girl, Jennifer Finch, at the same school as Lauren but in the lower sixth form, and who lived in one of those grand houses along the lane, had filmed the arrival of the police at World’s End and uploaded it to YouTube. From where she was standing in her first-storey bedroom you could see the top of Lauren’s yellow Beetle in the car park and someone recognised the car and commented “hey doesn’t that look like Lauren from the upper sixth’s car” and by lunchtime, before Mrs Grey received her visit from the police, most of the teenage population of Neston knew that something bad had happened to Lauren Grey.

  The reason the police didn’t visit Khalil Bukhari sooner was that they had a much better suspect, Charles Brownhill. As soon as he gave his name to the dispatcher when he made that 999 call the machine’s cogs began to grind and in doing so they crushed Charles Brownhill.

  When the first police officers arrived on the scene and saw the purple welts on Lauren’s neck they didn’t need to wait for the autopsy report to work out she had been strangled. When they received the background information from the National Crime Database on Charles Brownhill they moved quickly.

  You see, when Charles Brownhill was fifteen years old, he was arrested and served a two-year sentence in a youth offenders’ institution. His crime? He was convicted of assaulting his then girlfriend, Michelle Taylor. The nature of the assault you can guess. They were arguing and he put his hands around her neck and began to choke her. Who knows what would have happened if Michelle’s mother hadn’t arrived home from work early and made her way upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom, interrupting the assault? Charles had run off but it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with him.

  Charles pleaded guilty to GBH on a plea with an attempted murder charge being dropped. It was his first offence and he was a minor, so hence his short sentence. After his release he picked up a couple more minor convictions, marijuana related mostly, but there was an affray conviction four years ago following a pub fight (he received a fine and a suspended sentence for that).

  When the police initially talked with him about Lauren it also became apparent that he had no alibi for the night before. He told the police that on the night of the murder he had just followed his usual routine of picking up a takeaway from the curry house in the village, bought a six pack of strong continental lager from the corner shop and then settled down to watch TV for a few hours before hitting the sack around 1am, roughly about the time Lauren was feeling hands close around her neck. But Charles lived alone so there was no one who could provide him with an alibi.

  This was in direct contrast with Khalil Bukhari who had a strong alibi for the evening. He had been to the party. He had left early, claimed he had a headache, around 10.30pm, getting home at 11.45, where he was met by his mother, two sisters and his brother and proceeded to have a bit of a family row, almost a tradition it featured so regularly, about him hanging around with the wrong sort and his mother sniffing him to see whether she could smell alcohol, weed, cigarettes or worse, perfume. When the police first spoke with him, and it was a telephone call, which perhaps tells you that they were thinking about other suspects at this stage, he said he had been in bed by 1am. DCI Richardson followed up with a house call the next day and spoke with his family. They all confirmed his story but by then the police were fully focused on Charles Brownhill because of what his neighbour had told them and what they had found at his flat.

  They didn’t even need a search warrant. Charles happily invited them in. He had no idea that they suspected he was the murderer.

  When the police entered the flat, they found a clean but untidy (I’ve seen the photographs) apartment, typical of many bachelors. It was messy and they found some adult magazines under his single bed. But what really got them interested was the collection of women’s pants they found in drawer in his wardrobe. There were twenty-two pairs to be exact, different sizes and different types, lacy, big and bold, and seemingly used. Gross huh? Charles, it turns out, had purchased them on eBay and other specialist sites, who knew hey, and he could prove this with PayPal receipts, but it definitely ticked the box marked “aberrant behaviour” in the investigating officers’ minds.

  When the neighbour who lived in the flat below mentioned that Charles was in the habit of going out late at night on his own and he was pretty sure that he had gone out the Friday before, then the deal was sealed as far as the police were concerned. They pulled him in for questioning.

  You probably saw it on the TV. He looks weird, huh, Charles Brownhill? Wears a dickie bow even though he’s a window cleaner and has that hairstyle that makes him look like a more sinister version of Jimmy Savile? Someone, well hell, let’s name names, it was PC Ivan Williams, later dismissed after the enquiry, tipped off the press and they were there for his arrest.

  The papers went wild. Front page splashes of this odd man, pictured wearing a dickie bow whilst taking the bins out, who collected women’s panties (yup, that detail had been leaked). There was blanket coverage, interviews with his former girlfriend, who, even though she hadn’t seen him in twenty-seven years, gave an exclusive to The Sun, regaling them with tales of how he liked to read pornographic magazines (this was pre-Internet times) which they ran on page three with no sense of irony. Hell, they even spoke with classmates from school who branded him a loner and a weirdo as though that were a crime.

  The fact that Charles had been held back at school and had learning difficulties and a low IQ were leaked to the Daily Mail. It was brutal stuff, complete character assassination in the space of a few days. The guy was clearly guilty, so where was the harm, seemed to be the thinking.

  Seven days after the murder of Lauren Grey, Charles Brownhill was arrested and charged with her murder.

  The Daily Mail headline was “The Face of a murderer?”, the legal fig leaf of the question mark, a laughable attemp
t at some form of journalistic integrity.

  Two days after the publication of that now-notorious headline, Charles Brownhill was released and all charges dropped. “Thank goodness for the question mark,” whispered the lawyers.

  Everything collapsed quickly. A neighbour, Margaret Highfield, who had caught an early flight on the Saturday morning that Charles found the body, had been in Spain on holiday all week, and was oblivious to the events unfolding in her street, returned and immediately went to the police and told them that she had stayed up late on the Friday evening/Saturday morning rather than grab a couple of hours sleep before her flight and had sat up drinking coffee. Her flat was on the opposite side of the street to Charles’s flat and she recalled looking out and seeing Charles sat in his usual chair watching TV with a can of lager in one hand and takeaway cartons scattered by his feet. She was concerned about not missing her flight so she kept looking at her watch, pacing her kitchen, making cups of coffee. She was adamant that Charles was sat in his armchair all evening and that he fell asleep in it and was still sleeping when she left for the airport at 4am. Crucially, she testified he was there between 11 and 2am so there was no way he could have been, or nipped out to, World’s End which was seven miles away. Her flat is so close she could even see what he was watching on TV, an old episode of Colombo as it happens, and she turned over to watch the same episode. I checked, by the way, the episode was “A Friend in Deed”, considered one of Colombo’s most challenging cases if you’re interested. As soon as Margaret returned from Spain she went to the police and swore a witness statement confirming that Charles was at home the time the murder was committed.

  But the final nail in the coffin was the forensic evidence. The results came back after Charles was arrested. They pulled DNA from her fingernails and from the passenger seat and belt of the car. The DNA under the fingernails matched one of the sequences found on the seat; there were three sets not including her own. We can assume this is the killer, but none of the DNA produced a match on the National Crime Database, meaning the individuals were not known criminals. Charles Brownhill had given his DNA to the police when arrested and convicted of assault in 1999. None of the DNA in the car or under Lauren’s fingernails belonged to him.

  Reluctantly, as in so many other ways he was a perfect suspect – the hair, the dickie bow, the pants collection – Charles Brownhill was released.

  Without any hesitation or a remote blush at the hypocrisy, the press, who had picked away at Charles Brownhill’s life until it was a bleached carcass, tore into the police.

  And the police, in shame, in anger, in overdrive, went looking for the real killer.

  They went back to basics and pulled in everyone who had seen Lauren the night she had died. That turned out to be quite a few people at the party.

  And something else, another story, began to emerge.

  The night of the murder, Lauren had attended the eighteenth birthday party of a school friend, Shona Cunningham. Her father was a big deal locally: he owned a string of hardware shops and they lived in a large house on the coast, a couple of miles north of World’s End. It’s a pretty impressive place, detached, white plastered walls, heavy oak doors, a maritime feel about the place and a view over the River Dee to die for.

  The party, it turns out, was not the kind you’d probably remember as a kid, less a crappy stereo, cheap bottles of cider, bags of value crisps and more hired band and catering. They even had a pool, and numerous statements take time out to refer to the fact that at some point lots of the kids who attended ended up in the pool. Not Lauren though. She had arrived late to the party as she had to get her mother comfortable before leaving the house, and her best friend, Rachel Jones, told the police that she had been saving for a couple of months for her party dress, so the last thing she would do is jump in a chlorinated pool. Plus, it seems that although she liked to smoke a bit of weed and did drink, she wasn’t the type to get totally smashed. She liked to remain in control. Perhaps as a consequence of growing up too quickly.

  Her boyfriend Khalil was already at the party when she got there. More than one witness talks about them seeming happy to see each other, hugs and kisses on arrival, that sort of thing. At least at the start of the evening there was nothing amiss, although that was to change.

  Khalil’s best friend was Tom Ellis. Tom and Khalil were popular, there is no disputing it. Both looked like Abercrombie and Fitch models save that Khalil wouldn’t get in that catalogue for well-documented reasons, and despite this, or because of it (I freely admit to not being up with the zeitgeist as to whether good-looking is in or not) they seemed to have no enemies. Reading the statements, there was no petty bitching, more just cool envy. I lost track of the “he was a great guy”, “just nice to be around”, “no way would he be involved”. They were also both great athletes, Tom on the track and Khalil on the cricket field. Neither were slouches in the classroom. Khalil had a place up at Durham University and Tom was heading to Manchester.

  Both Tom and Khalil had clean criminal records and yet within hours after Charles Brownhill’s release Khalil was considered the main suspect in the murder of Lauren, and largely this was down to the row he had at the party and the aforementioned fact that most killers of women are their partners.

  This row, which I will explore in more detail, is a key moment I think, so it bears setting out. This is based on a number of witnesses but it's still sketchy as, hey, it's a party and all the witnesses ’fessed up to having been drinking and who knows what else. I mean you're not going to tell the police things they don't need to know, right? What we know is that at some point between around 10pm and 10.45 Tom and Khalil had an almighty bust up.

  It wasn't quite a fight; no punches were thrown but chests were pushed, in what my husband would describe as “handbags”.

  The account of the fight, although the timings differ, is backed up by two other witnesses who were in the kitchen: Jen Bogdanski, one of Shona's friends in the year below and thus on the outer rim of the friendship group, and Max Rowdon, who was with her on a booze hunt in the kitchen when it kicked off between Khalil and Tom.

  And for the record, in their statements and at trial, both Khalil and Tom gave a similar version of events: that they had a falling out over some weed that Tom was meant to share but had kept to himself.

  Shona and Max didn't see the start of the argument, they walked in and it was “kicking off” as Max later said. What they did witness was Tom push Khalil in the chest and Khalil apparently laugh in his face and tell him that “you're just jealous”.

  Both Khalil and Tom agree that the “you're just jealous” line did happen and related to the fact that Khalil had gotten into a better university than Tom. Kids huh?

  Max said he thought it might get physical, but at that point Lauren walked into the kitchen and the boys stopped arguing to listen to Lauren who apparently leaned in to whisper something to them both. No one overheard what was said but shortly after Tom left the room and went to join a group smoking weed in the back garden, and this was corroborated by numerous witnesses.

  Max says it was like she had this natural authority and, when I spoke with him, even after all these years, I could tell he had been a little in love with Lauren. I hope he doesn't mind me saying that, but he wasn't the only one. I've lost count of the times when interviewing her old schoolmates that they told me she was loved.

  What we know is that Lauren took Khalil to one side and they had words. Max and Shona were still in the kitchen and said that a bunch of other people were too, but they couldn't overhear what Lauren and Khalil were discussing. They could tell from the body language that it was a row. Max said it was “pretty intense”, Shona described it as “ deep and meaningful gone wrong” and Khalil stormed out, banging into Max and knocking his drink out of his hand. This was around 10.30pm. Approximately an hour and half later, Lauren left the party as well. She left relatively early because, according to her friends, she had to remain sober and be of help to her
mother the next day. No one really could explain why Khalil left early. His explanation to the police was that he had a headache. He denied that they had argued. A seventeen-year-old boy leaving a party because of a headache – you can guess what the police thought of that.

  After Chris Brownhill was released the pressure on the police was intense and they began to follow up on leads they should have chased but for the gift of Charles Brownhill. The case against Khalil began to build and the first and most devastating plank in that case was what happened to Khalil's alibi. You recall he was meant to have been at home between 11.45 and 2am? Well, it turns out he kinda wasn't there at all.

  Khalil’s alibi was based in its entirety on the testimony of his family, not historically the most independent of witnesses.

  The police checked local CCTV. There's a camera at the end of Khalil's street that belongs to a local cash and carry business. That camera overlooks the only entrance to the cul-de-sac on which Khalil's house is situated. They pulled it, and guess what? Nothing. No Khalil from 10pm to 1am and then, there it is, an HD quality moment of Khalil walking past the camera on the opposite side of the street. But at 1.30am. He even looks up at the camera as he passes, giving a crystal-clear image of his face. You can imagine the excitement in the room when the police first viewed the tape. I would bet a month’s wages that someone said “bingo”.

  The police went back and spoke to everybody who was at the party that night and they found a witness, Jack Martindale, and he told them something they found interesting. Turns out he was the last person, that we know of, who spoke with Khalil that night and what he told them began to build the motive.

  He was standing outside in the front garden of the house, smoking a roll-up, when Khalil left (he puts the time at about 10pm) and had a snatched conversation with him. He was part of Khalil's social circle; he wouldn't go as far as friends, but he was close enough to see Khalil was upset and ask him if everything was okay, and Khalil's response?