Diamond Dust

21

AND STILL THE KILLER WALKS FREE

Six months ago this week the wife of a Detective Superintendent was gunned down and murdered in Bath's elegant Royal Victoria Park, within view of the world-famous Royal Crescent. The most intensive investigation ever mounted in the city has so far failed to find the killer of Stephanie Diamond. In this special report, we examine the conduct of the inquiry and get the views of two of the principal men involved: Detective Chief Inspector Curtis McGarvie, who leads the investigation, and Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, the victim's husband.

On Shrove Tuesday morning, last February 23rd, at 8.15, Peter Diamond kissed his wife Stephanie goodbye and drove to work as usual. It was the day in the week when Mrs Diamond caught up with household chores and shopping. On other days she worked as a volunteer in the Oxfam shop. That morning she was her usual cheerful self and showed no sign of stress. She didn't mention any arrangement to meet anyone, or visit the park, although a note was later found in her diary apparently fixing a meeting with someone she called 'T'. About 10.15, two shots were heard close to the Charlotte Street Car Park. An unemployed man walking his dog on the far side of the park heard the shots and presently found a woman's body in Crescent Gardens, beside the Victorian bandstand. Two bullets had been fired into her head at point-blank range.

Peter Diamond, the head of Bath's murder squad, arrived at the scene within a short time of the shooting, before anyone had identified the victim. One of several distressing features of this case is that he himself recognised the dead woman as his own wife. In spite of repeated appeals for witnesses, nobody appears to have seen the shooting. Police believe the gunman must have escaped through the car park, and video footage from the security cameras has been examined without any helpful result. A number of reports of drivers leaving around the time of the shooting have so far proved unhelpful. Eleven detectives and five civilians are working full-time on the case, which is believed to have cost three-quarters of a million pounds already.

The SIO (Senior Investigating Officer), DCI McGarvie, has appeared on Crimewatch and Police Five appealing to the public for assistance. A reconstruction was staged at the scene of the crime with a policewoman dressed in similar clothes to the victim. 'There was a huge response from the television audience,' the Chief Inspector told our reporter, 'and we fed every piece of information into our database, but we still lack the crucial evidence that will identify the killer.' McGarvie is convinced there are people who know someone who acted suspiciously at the time of the murder, and he urges them to get in touch as soon as possible.

THEORIES

Sitting in the incident room surrounded by photos of the victim, in life and in death, and a computer-generated map of the crime scene, DCI McGarvie outlined the main theories his team have so far produced:

1. The killer acted under instructions from someone in the underworld with a grudge against Det. Supt. Diamond. As a murder squad detective in the Metropolitan Police and Bath CID, Peter Diamond has been responsible for many convictions over a twenty-three-year career. The problem with this theory is that a criminal bent on revenge is more likely to attack the officer who put him away than his wife.

2. The killer was hired by the wife or girlfriend of a convicted man. It is felt that an embittered woman might have ordered the killing in revenge for the loss of her own partner.

3. The wife or girlfriend of a convicted man fired the fatal shots herself as an act of revenge. Such a woman with underworld connections might have access to a firearm, though shootings by women are rare.

4. Stephanie Diamond, an attractive woman looking some years younger than her age of 43, was shot by some obsessive person or stalker, a 'loner' who believed she stood in the way of their fantasies. Stalkers have been known to 'punish' the women they idolise for what they see as infidelity.

5. The 'T' mentioned in her diary was trying to blackmail Mrs Diamond about some secret, or supposed secret, in her past and killed her in frustration when she refused to pay up.

6. The killing was a mugging that went wrong. The killer drew a gun. Mrs Diamond resisted, or even fought back. The first shot was accidental and the second was fired in panic.

The difficulty with theories 4, 5 and 6 is that the shooting has the hallmarks of a contract killing. The murderer timed the shooting at an hour when Victoria Park was quiet. The scene of the crime was close to the Charlotte Street Car Park, enabling the killer to get away rapidly to a vehicle, if the police theories are correct. A.38 revolver was used. 'Two shots to the head are characteristic of a professional gunman,' says DCI McGarvie. 'People have been known to survive a single shot to the head. The second bullet makes certain.'

CONFIDENT

Curtis McGarvie remains confident of an arrest. 'This is by far the biggest test of my career in CID,' he admits, 'and it's taking longer than I expected. I thought there would be more witnesses, considering where the shooting took place. We've been unlucky there, unless someone else can be persuaded to come forward. We've done reconstructions, and we know the killer took at least ten seconds to leave the scene and return to the car park. We are pretty sure they used a car. Somebody, surely, heard the shots and saw the gunman return quickly to the car park and drive off.' He is conscious that the costs of this case are mounting and there is already pressure to scale down the investigation. 'Up to now, I've had unqualified support from the Police Authority. A long-running case is automatically reviewed by the top brass. We've had two such reviews, and my leadership hasn't been faulted. But I can't expect to carry on indefinitely at this pitch when we're up against manpower shortages and budgets.'

Detectives speak of unsolved cases as 'stickers' and hate to have them haunting their careers. The murder of a police colleague's wife is particularly hard to consign to a file of unsolved cases. 'Peter Diamond is a man highly respected by everyone who knows him,' says McGarvie. 'No one here is going to give up while there is the faintest chance of progress. He's in a difficult position, because even though he is a fine detective with substantial experience it wouldn't be right or proper for him to investigate the murder of his own wife. We owe it to him to slog away as hard as he would to find the killer.'

That killer, according to the profilers who these days assist the police on all challenging murder inquiries, is most likely to be male, efficient, unexcitable, with a link to guns, and some knowledge of Bath. He drives a car. His friends or relatives probably have suspicions about him.

FRUSTRATION

Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, the victim's husband, is 50, and has an outstanding record in bringing murderers to justice. He admits to frustration at having to stay at arm's length from the investigation. 'I know the reasons and I respect them. If I got involved I would be open to charges of bias. But it's hard. My heart wants to do what my head tells me I can't. I'd like to be working round the clock on this for Steph's sake. I'm an experienced investigator, and I have my own ideas on what should be done.' But he refuses to be critical of the detectives working on the case. 'This is about as tough as they come. You need luck on any case, and they haven't had much up to now.' Echoing McGarvie, he adds, 'My main worry is that soon the cost of all this will panic the people who hold the purse-strings into scaling everything down.'

When asked which of the main theories he subscribes to, Peter Diamond is cautious. 'They should rule nothing out until evidence justifies it. There are compelling reasons to suppose it was some kind of contract killing for revenge, but it's still possible that the killer was a loner acting for himself – or herself. It's not out of the question that a woman did this. And there may be a motive the murder squad are unaware of.'

The shooting of Stephanie Diamond on that February morning put tremendous strains on her husband. 'You find out how much you depended on someone when they are taken from you. She was a calmer personality than I could ever be, very positive, with a way of seeing to the heart of a problem. She understood me perfectly. I don't know of anything you could dislike in Steph, which makes her murder so hard to account for. The killer has to be someone who didn't know her at all, or some deluded crazy person.'

After the shooting there was the added ordeal of being questioned about his own movements. Peter Diamond shrugs and says, 'It had to be faced. I'd have pulled in the guy myself, whoever was the husband. You always take a long look at the husband in a case like this.' But if he was at work in Bath Police Station, surely he had a perfect alibi? 'Actually, no. On that morning I went straight to my office and worked alone. There was no one who could vouch for me.' He adds wryly, 'I may look big and threatening, but off duty I'm a baa-lamb. I think I convinced them in the end that I wouldn't have dreamed of harming my wife.'

Peter Diamond's fiftieth birthday came four weeks ago. 'I didn't do anything to mark it – but then I wouldn't have done much in normal circumstances. Oddly enough I discussed the birthday with Steph the night before she was killed, and persuaded her I didn't want a so-called surprise party with old cronies from years back. That's not my style. We would have gone out for a meal together, Steph and I, and had a glass or two.' He is in regular contact with Curtis McGarvie and has co-operated fully with the murder squad, even to having his home searched and his wife's private letters and diary taken away for examination. He is as puzzled as the murder squad over the diary entries mentioning somebody called T'. 'This must be the killer,' he says, 'and the odds are strong that the letter "T" was meant to mislead, but the diary mentions phone calls and an appointment in Royal Victoria Park, which Steph hardly ever visited, so it has to be the best clue we have. What foxes me completely is that she didn't say a word about going to the park that morning. My wife wasn't secretive. She was the most open of people. I find it hard to accept there was something hidden in her life, but what other explanation is there?'

Peter Diamond continues his work at Bath Police Station, busying himself on other cases, trying to block out the knowledge that the incident room for his wife's murder is just along the corridor. Shortly before the shooting he gave evidence in the murder trial of Jake Carpenter, a notorious Bristol gang leader who was given a life sentence for the sadistic killing of a young prostitute. The possibility of some kind of revenge killing by Carpenter's associates was a strong theory early in the case. It has still not been ruled out entirely, but intensive enquiries in Bristol have so far proved negative. Diamond himself agrees that it was probably a mistake to link the killing to the Carpenter conviction. 'My own reaction was the same as the squad's,' he says, 'but with hindsight we may have leapt to a premature conclusion and missed other leads. The first forty-eight hours in any inquiry are crucial.'

TENSION

They work in separate offices on the same floor of Bath Police Station in Manvers Street, these two experienced detectives. Curtis McGarvie is the outsider, the man drafted in from headquarters. He is at his desk by 8 a.m. There is an air of tension in the incident room and it isn't just the pressures of the case. For this should be Peter Diamond's domain. He has led the murder squad for eight years. McGarvie refuses to let sentiment trouble him. He is a gritty Glaswegian, thin as a thistle, with deep-set, watchful eyes, a professional to the tips of his toes, focused and unshakeable. 'If I were this killer on the run, I'd be sweating. I wouldn't want Curtis on my trail,' says a colleague at Avon & Somerset Headquarters who knows McGarvie well. He has a long string of successful prosecutions to his credit. But his team in Bath are Diamond's men and women, loyal to their chief, wanting passionately to achieve the breakthrough, yet unfamiliar with their temporary boss.

Meanwhile Peter Diamond sits alone in his office up the corridor sifting through other 'stickers', trying to give them his full concentration. He is a big, abrasive man who speaks his mind without fear or favour. Few in Bath's CID have escaped the rough edge of his tongue at some point in their careers. But right now there is a strong current of sympathy for this beleaguered man excluded from the action through no fault of his own. If commitment to the cause counts for anything, the killer of Stephanie Diamond will soon be found.