The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE SECRET JANET TOOK TO THE GRAVE by David James Smith

The circumstances of Janet Brown’s death are as mysterious as the details of her life. Few people knew her in the remote English village where she lived. One spring evening in 1995, an intruder burst into her quiet farmhouse. Her body was later found naked and gagged. Ten years on, Janet Brown’s murder remains unsolved. This account comes from the author and journalist David James Smith [b. 1956] who writes for the Sunday Times Magazine and who has published books on the James Bulger and Jill Dando murder cases.

If I tell you that there was nothing special about Mrs Brown, that is not to demean her life or her importance to those who loved and were loved by her. It could be true of any or most of us, is the only point I’m trying to make. What will people find to say about you and I when the time comes and we are no longer around to speak for ourselves? We can all hope that time does not come prematurely and horribly, as it did for Janet Brown.

People have spoken to me about her because they hope to help catch the person who killed Janet Brown in her home on an April evening in 1995. After all these years the circumstances of her death and the motive behind it remain a mystery and a puzzle to the police.

Naturally, the police have considered that the secret of her death lies in the detail of her life. They have talked to everyone they can find who knew Mrs Brown and have discovered how little a woman can disclose to those around her. It does not appear that she had anything to hide, except herself. Likewise, the neighbours, friends and colleagues I’ve spoken to have wanted to assist but have sometimes struggled to find things to say about her.

She liked to buy clothes at Whispers in Oxford. She suffered the occasional migraine. She was good at her job and was liked and respected at work. She was slight in build but not timid by nature. She was determined. She once left her husband and children behind to take an adventurous holiday in Peru, but that was a long time ago now. Perhaps there are photographs in an album or a drawer somewhere from this holiday, but I haven’t seen them.

The photograph of Janet Brown that was published in the newspapers and shown on television was from her last foreign holiday with Mr Brown, in Kenya. The photograph shows a fifty-year-old woman in late bloom; a woman with shining eyes and long, feline eyebrows. She is smiling for the camera and appears relaxed. Though she is wearing a casual sweater in the photograph those who knew her say she was generally well dressed and careful about her appearance. They say she was fond of wearing jewellery, like the gold earrings in the photograph.

The thing most people have said about her was that she was self-contained, not confiding; she was polite, jolly and thoroughly nice but kept herself to herself; was reserved in a typically English way.

The Browns lived in a typically English little place called Radnage, a village without a shop on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. To reach Radnage you leave the M40 motorway at junction five, take the left turn just beyond Stokenchurch and enter a standstill world of curling lanes. In some places these country lanes are dauntingly narrow and funnelled by high hedgerows, and in others they reveal the up and down landscape of the Chilterns, with its fields and woods and scattered farm buildings and cottages.

Eventually you will come to a fork in the road where a turn to the right curves around to the Radnage parish church of St Mary. Mrs Brown is buried here, just outside the low wall of the churchyard. Before the ground settled sufficiently for a headstone to be erected, a temporary short stick was pushed into the earth at the top of the grave and “J. Brown” painted on it in casual white lettering.

The left hand of the fork leads into Sprigs Holly Lane where Janet Brown lived and died. It rises and falls over one of the highest spots in the Chilterns, but is one of those country roads that goes nowhere in particular and is not much used by through traffic.

When I drove there, as I did on numerous occasions over a three-week period, I would invariably see the same things. A red pick-up passing by, which was, I learned, driven by Nick, the local builder. The farmer’s dad lumbering along in a tractor. A white-haired woman, old Mrs Fox, walking her dogs or standing nattering at the side of the road with a neighbour. A couple or more women and youngsters on horseback, snaking down the lane in single file. A few pheasant pecking at the verges.

The lane is largely flanked by vast tracts of open farmland, creating an idyllic rural landscape which can be beautiful by day, harsh in winter, and black at night, when there is no streetlighting and the wind is moaning through the holly trees. “There’s only the parish lantern”, one local farmer told me enigmatically, raising his eyes at my ignorance when he had to explain that he was referring to the moon.

After Janet Brown was killed newspapers reported that the lane was known locally as Volvo Alley but I could find no one who knew that name and the implication of a uniform wealth among the occupants of the houses dotted along its length does not stand up to close inspection. True, the property developer in the big house set back from the road had comings and goings by helicopter. A helicopter is also the preferred means of arrival for some of the more flamboyant guests at the expensive Sir Charles Napier restaurant further up the lane. But there is no one conspicuously aristocratic, or even noble, as you might find elsewhere in the shires and most people are working rather than idly rich.

Perhaps it is the grand property names that are deceiving. This House, that Hall, the something Farm. There are no humble street numbers at all. The Browns’ home is called Hall Farm, disguising its lowly origins as a small farm workers’ cottage once inhabited, as I was told, by a family “only one up from gypsies”. It had long ago been known as Cabbage Hall Farm, but the Cabbage had been dropped many years before the Browns moved in and they had only continued a process of extending and developing the property into a larger family home befitting its fine-sounding name.

Though the farm stands closer to the lane than many of the other houses along Sprigs Holly it is set in several acres of land. The farm is remote but it would be wrong, even now, to try and attach any sinister quality to its appearance. From the outside, at least, it reveals nothing of the Browns’ tragedy nor of the enduring enigma of Mrs Brown’s life and death.

At the time of Janet Brown’s murder the family had been living at Hall Farm for a decade and had been trying to sell and move on for a year or two. The sale had been hampered by problems of subsidence, requiring underpinning, but a buyer had finally been found for £340,000 and they were no more than a week or two away from completion.

A survey had shown that the stable buildings were bowing and in imminent danger of collapse. Nick the builder had been called in and had begun stripping the tiles from the stable roof to protect the new owner’s investment. He phoned Mrs Brown at about 8.20 on the Monday evening, 10 April, but there was no reply. He arrived at Hall Farm to continue the job at about eight the following morning and heard the internal wailer alarm ringing out from the house. It was his teenage son who saw Janet Brown lying dead at the bottom of the stairs. She was naked, gagged and handcuffed and there was a great deal of blood. The police were called.

On the face of it, Mrs Brown was the victim of a burglary which had gone too far. But probably because, as Nick Ross would later put it on BBC 1’s Crimewatch, “she was attractive, she was affluent and she was found naked in her home” the case excited a great deal of instant media attention. Later that Tuesday morning, Mrs Brown’s elderly mother answered the phone at her home on the Isle of Wight. It was a provincial news agency reporter, quick off the mark. Are you the mother of the murdered woman? This was how Mrs Brown’s mother learned that her daughter had been killed. The family were alienated by this and what they generally regarded as the media’s insensitive persistence. They have not wanted to contribute to this article or any other.

Janet Brown’s husband, Grahaem, worked in Switzerland. A retired army officer and medical doctor he had, in recent years, moved into the management of pharmaceutical research, first for Glaxo’s in Canada and more recently for Ciba Geigy in Basle. To the villagers of Radnage he was a remote, somewhat aloof figure not at ease with casual conversation and not much blessed with the personable qualities that oil a small community. Some of them speculated that there was more than mere physical distance between the doctor and Janet Brown. Some of them wondered if he had killed his wife and, sadly, some of them still do. The police, inevitably, wanted to eliminate him from their investigation. Dr Brown flew home from Basle overnight on the Tuesday and met the police for the first time the following morning. The two Thames Valley officers leading the inquiry were Detective Superintendent Michael Short and Detective Inspector John Bradley. Dr Brown acknowledged to them that he knew he must be a suspect but they could see veracity in his grief and their instinct told them he was not involved. Inquiries confirmed his alibi and convinced the officers that Dr Brown had played no part in his wife’s death.

The couple had three children, Zara, Ben and Roxanne, who had all grown up at Hall Farm, riding, pony clubbing and graduating to part-time jobs at the Sir Charles Napier restaurant. All this made them indistinguishable from all the other children in the area. Ben and Zara were both then in their early twenties, he away at university and she living and working in London. Only Roxanne was still at home, studying for A Levels at a local high school. Early on the Monday evening she had phoned her mother from a friend’s to say she would be staying out for the night. The friend had just passed her driving test and they were going out for a meal to celebrate. Janet Brown told her daughter she was tired and would be going to bed early. Another of Roxanne’s friends had called Hall Farm just after eight o’clock and had become the last person to speak to Janet Brown. Like Nick the builder, Grahaem Brown had also phoned later from Switzerland and received no reply.

Someone had driven past the house at about 10.20 that evening and heard an alarm ringing. They had not heard it later on their way home. The police could find no other neighbouring house whose alarm had been triggered that evening so presumed it must have been the Browns’. Their system had an internal alarm which would ring forever until it was turned off and an external alarm which would ring for twenty minutes. Both would be set off together, but only the external alarm could be heard from the road and so the police assumed that this what the witness had heard. This meant the Browns’ alarm had been triggered at some point in a twenty-minute period around ten o’clock, either by Janet Brown or her killer.

The alarm system’s control box revealed that it had been triggered by one of two red panic buttons in the house, one at the side of Mrs Brown’s bed and the other by the front door. There was slight evidence-a half-turned key-in favour of the button by the front door but there was no way of being certain. Equally, it was only possible that Mrs Brown was already being confronted by her killer during the unanswered phone calls after eight o’clock. There was no certainty about that either.

Her body was lying face down not far from the front door, at the bottom of the stairs. She had been handcuffed behind her back and her mouth had been gagged with a length of brown packing tape wrapped nine times around. The keys to the handcuffs were beneath her body. The pathologist reported that she had been killed by at least ten blows to the head with some kind of unidentified bar. There was evidence that she had been punched, once, in the face, but the pathologist could find no physical evidence of any sexual assault.

It was her assailant’s means of entry to the house that was, and remains, the most inexplicable aspect of the case. The tradition of housebreakers, a little old fashioned nowadays, is to score a window with a glass cutter, cover it with lengths of tape to prevent it shattering and tap it gently from the frame, using suckers or handles of tape to lift it down. It takes a while to complete but it is the cleanest and quietest way of entering a house. A burglar, not wishing to give himself any more trouble than is necessary, will choose a small window and avoid anything that is double-glazed.

Mrs Brown’s killer ignored all the small windows at the back of Hall Farm, and entered a high-walled courtyard at the side where there are three double-glazed glass patio doors to the main room. He scored around the entire circumference of the middle door and covered the scoring with an all-weather Sellotape. If he had properly completed the task he would have had to repeat it with the double-glazing panel. Instead he then smashed and shattered the whole pane.

When the case was featured on Crimewatch the item produced no useful leads but among the callers was a professional burglar who gave his name and his record and said that no burglar who knew what he was doing would ever break in to a house like that.

The police cannot be sure but they believe Mrs Brown was upstairs in bed when this happened. Her clothes were neatly piled by the bed in her tidy way and she usually slept undressed. If the police accept that the incident began before the ten o’clock period when the alarm was set off, it is hard for them to understand why she apparently did not respond to the loud noise of the shattering glass by immediately triggering the nearby panic button or putting on the dressing gown which she kept by the bed. They speculate that she may not have heard the noise-perhaps because she was asleep or the television in the bedroom was on, or both-or may have frozen in fear, but Detective Superintendent Short concedes that these are half-hearted explanations. Though she was killed downstairs a small piece of the packing tape was found in the bedroom, indicating that she was gagged there.

Michael Short has many years’ experience as a detective investigating major crimes. It was apparent that the death of Janet Brown was confusing and strange to him in ways he had not previously encountered. It was also apparent that he would not readily be defeated by it. There was no big talk or bluster about this. While police officers can sometimes seem hard and cynical his manner was calm and unruffled. There had, of course, been method and wisdom in his approach to the case. But this alone could not put all the pieces together in a way that made sense. There was almost a challenge here. You try and make sense of it because I’m damned if I can. He was protective of Mrs Brown and her family and had a police officer’s caution and scepticism about the media that was all too familiar to me; caught up in an ongoing conflict about using or being used by journalists, wondering whether he could trust and not be betrayed.

Short did say that there are one or two details of the case he is keeping back “for the usual operational reasons”. He said they would not radically alter my understanding of the case if he disclosed them. He did reveal that traces of diluted blood were found around some of the light switches in the upstairs rooms of the house. The traces were too small to be identified but the police assume they are particles of Mrs Brown’s blood from the hands of her killer after he had attempted to wash and clean himself following her death. They support the theory that he stayed on in the house for an unknown amount of time and there are additional signs of a cursory, exploratory search of the house. Nothing was stolen however and the only clue that burglary may even have been intended was that both the television and video recorder downstairs had been unplugged from the mains, as if being readied for removal. Janet Brown’s daughters noticed this when they went through the house for the police a couple of days after the killing, looking for things missing or out of place.

The police think it possible that the killer may have triggered the alarm himself, deliberately, for whatever reason, before finally leaving the house. If it was triggered by Mrs Brown before her death, the killer must have been composed and calm after the fatal assault, washing himself and, apparently, carrying out some kind of search with the internal and external alarms ringing. He must also have known that the alarm was not connected to a switching centre which would alert the police.

There is no other forensic evidence of significance. Of the sixty good fingerprints that were found only four have not been eliminated. No one can say if any of them belong to the killer. There was some excitement in the first days of the inquiry when the fingerprint dust of the scenes of crime officers showed up what appeared to be a palm print in blood on the wall near Janet Brown’s body. It turned out to be oil, not blood and the print belonged to the innocent engineer who had installed the boiler some time ago.

Along with the absence of forensic evidence there was the absence of anything associated with a struggle. No disturbance or disarray that the police would normally expect to accompany such a death. Mrs Brown did not, or could not, offer any resistance.

Most burglaries these days take place during working hours when properties are most likely to be unoccupied. The last thing a burglar wants is to meet his victim. There was no such caution from the man who smashed his way into Hall Farm. It was not late in the evening, lights were on throughout the house, the curtains were open downstairs and two cars were parked in the drive. Perhaps, for whatever reason, he wanted Mrs Brown to be there. The police considered that her killer may have been known to Mrs Brown. But if that was the case why would he take such trouble to break in, when he could just knock at the front door? Perhaps he knew her but she didn’t know him. It did not seem like a random incident from somebody who just happened to be passing. The killer had come prepared with a glass cutter, two types of tape, handcuffs, at least one bar-if the weapon that was used to hit her was the same as the tool that was used to smash the patio door-and, the police presumed, a torch and a bag to carry all these things.

None of the items that were left behind were traceable. The tapes were commonplace and the handcuffs had no manufacturer’s mark. Detective Superintendent Short said he was surprised to discover how many sets of handcuffs are imported and sold. They too were commonplace. There was no sign of the weapon which had killed Mrs Brown.

The police looked hard for anything untoward or unusual in Mrs Brown’s life. They had to consider that she might have been having an affair. They found nothing at all of significance and no evidence that she was involved with anyone outside her marriage. Neighbours who had known her presumed she must have had a life revolving around her work and been close to people there or close to old friends. People at work imagined she must have had close friends outside work and old friends imagined she must have made closer new friends. The truth was that, outside the family there was nobody who knew her that well.

In Radnage she had been one more mother supporting her daughters at pony club events, regarded by some as a woman who kept herself slightly apart from the group. We never set eyes on her from the day the children stopped riding, one villager told me. Though neighbours said they would see her out walking her dog, a Great Dane, before it died and noted that she would was not afraid to be out alone at dusk and even in darkness with the dog by her side.

On rare occasions neighbours would see both Mr and Mrs Brown out walking together. She would be the one to smile and wave. Whatever the neighbours knew of life at Hall Farm seems to have filtered through from the Brown’s children to the other children of the village, to the other children’s parents. There was talk, for instance, of the family moving to Canada when Grahaem first began working abroad but this had been abandoned in favour of the continuity of the children’s education here.

Only one couple, Lesley and Andy Bryant, seem to have had any kind of regular contact with Janet Brown and that too began through the association with their respective daughters. The Bryants have a smallholding just up the lane from Hall Farm and Lesley formed a friendship with Janet that never extended to confidences but got as far as them discussing going on holiday together. The Bryants thought Janet a bubbly woman and had no sense of any disquiet in her life. They could not imagine her having enemies and certainly not a lover. Andy thought Grahaem a bit remote, but then, he considered, perhaps all doctors are like that.

The Bryants knew the locals sometimes speculated about the solidity of Mr and Mrs Brown’s marriage but heard nothing from Janet to indicate any problem and, taking as they found, could only say that the couple seemed happy enough together. Andy sometimes said that it wouldn’t do for him, that kind of long-distance relationship, but that was the Browns’ business. Lesley knew how much Janet’s work meant to her. Janet had recently gone back to work after many years spent raising the children. She had originally trained as a nurse and midwife but had returned as a medical researcher. When she died she was approaching the end of a contract with an Oxford University health project, collecting data from hospital records about women who had successfully conceived after problems with infertility. It had been solitary work, spending hours at a desk in a hospital records department, going through files. But she had become known to the records’ staff and known to her colleagues back at the project’s office. She had enjoyed the job and had joined a course to develop her research skills, hoping her contract would be renewed. Her manager had wanted to keep her on but could make no promises until he was sure of further funding. Her position was in this limbo when she died. It was only later that the money which would have guaranteed her future employment came through.

After a couple of months there were no leads to the identity of Janet Brown’s killer. Not even the (anonymous) offer of a £10,000 reward had helped. The inquiry was reviewed by other senior officers and Detective Superintendent Short made presentations of the case to groups of detectives. None of this made very much difference and there was still too much that defied logic and good sense. Short then decided to seek an independent view of the case and approached the forensic psychologist Paul Britton who has been among the pioneers of offender-profiling techniques. Short was not put off by Britton’s involvement with the aborted case against Colin Stagg over the killing of Rachel Nickell. It is, after all, detectives who lead, and take responsibility for inquiries, not psychologists. Paul Britton was only one more resource in any inquiry.

Britton came down from his base in Leicester to meet Short and visit Hall Farm. He studied maps, plans, charts, the scene-of-crime video and photographs and witness statements which the investigation had produced. Short was pleased that Britton largely shared his view of the case and the possible motives behind it. Short was not prepared to share these motives with me, on the grounds that they remained speculative and might be confusing or misleading to anyone reading them who might have information about the case. He likened this to an inaccurate, or speculative, artist’s impression of an offender which, if published, could prevent the real offender being caught. He was, however, willing to arrange a meeting for me with Paul Britton. And so, we spent a couple of hours together one afternoon, in an office upstairs at Thame Police Station, not far from Radnage, where the incident room for the inquiry had been based.

It was a difficult meeting, with the senior detective anxious to keep a grip on the speculation and Britton anxious not to say anything which the detective did not want said, looking to him constantly for approval before speaking to me. Is that…? Britton would say. Yes, that’s fine, Short would reply. The meeting made me think again of Janet Brown; the remoteness of her life and the elusive, troubling horror of her death. No one, except of course the person who was there with her when it occurred, could say exactly how she had come to die or why it had to happen. As Britton readily conceded, the skills or wisdom of offender profiling could never be a science of precision. He too had noticed how little there was to know about Janet Brown. It was very important, he said, to know about her. But what you had was a tight picture with very little detail available. It was not a question of the detail being concealed so much as it simply not being there at all.

When it came to the incident itself, Britton did not know what to make of the means of entry. The person had come prepared to do what they did. “You saw time, you saw effort and application, but you also saw a woefully inadequate appreciation of what was required to complete the task.” It was as if somebody was mirroring the real methods of a housebreaker without actually knowing how to do it.

This was not, he said, a situation where somebody had broken into a house to steal and panicked on seeing the occupant and hit her and rushed out again. Janet Brown had been fully controlled by her killer and she had little opportunity or inclination to resist. People did not just use handcuffs to control, they used fear as well. And it wasn’t only the victim who had been controlled; the assailant had very much been in control of his own feelings too. Britton singled out the fact that he would have had to step over Mrs Brown’s body to go upstairs afterwards, and step over her again when he came back down.

With regard to the alarm, and whether it had been triggered by Mrs Brown or by the killer, Britton said he could not decide between the two possibilities. But, if it was Mrs Brown, it would be an interesting person who could do all this while the alarm was ringing full blast. He also pointed out that, with the curtains open downstairs and the lights on, it would have been possible for a passer-by to look in and see some of what had gone on. It was a quiet area, of course, but the assailant must still be a risk-taker.

Both Short and Britton believe the killer is likely to be a local man, or at least, a man who is familiar with the area and they both believe this man will be known to a wife, partner or parent. They think this person might have noticed some change in behaviour, or be suppressing their own fear that a person they know could be involved.

Britton speculated that the killer would have had a relationship that had failed or be in a relationship that was failing now. He would not have gone around boasting about it, after killing Janet Brown, but the change in his demeanour would have been observable. He might have become very agitated, or more agitated, preoccupied and withdrawn or he might have shown disproportionate interest in the reporting of the killing, with an elevation in his mood from the buzz of achievement.

Imagine, Britton said, a person who had crossed a threshold and knew they could never go back. It was an awesome thing to have done and there would be the awareness of the police investigation and the fear of the knock at the door.

By now, the case had become defined for me by what it was not about. The removal of the more feasible possibilities was pushing it towards an altogether darker place. This could not simply be a burglary gone awry. It was not a killing with a domestic motivation. It had nothing to do with the family or a lover or anything like that. There was nothing in Janet Brown’s life, or in her past, that could suggest a motive for murder. It would have made sense as a sexually motivated crime, except that there was no physical evidence of sexual assault. It was as if it was nothing to do with her at all, except that it appeared that she had been singled out in some aberrant way and had not been randomly selected as a victim.

What you were left with was the nightmarish prospect of a stranger, a man, driven by unknowable instincts to plan and smash his way into a woman’s home. It must have been a terrifying invasion. You could picture Janet Brown, at home in bed, oblivious to what was about to happen. It was better then to picture this other person, sitting at home still, waiting anxiously for the knock at the door. You could guess that there was nothing very special about them, either.