The Sedgemoor Strangler and Other Stories of Crime

The Stalker

As the senior detective on the Sharon Eakins case, I bear the responsibility for what happened. Only now, many months after my resignation from the police, can I face the task of setting down my version.

It started with one of those calls you dread, at 2.15 am, when you’re in no state to pick up a phone. Ten minutes later DC Baker’s car was at my door. Scarcely awake, I slumped into the passenger seat and we drove to 17 Dacre Street, Southsea. We arrived at 2.42. The door stood open. The victim, later identified as Sharon Eakins, aged twenty-four, was lying in the hallway.

Small, slim and dark-haired, she was dressed in lemon-coloured cotton pyjamas and a white dressing gown made of towelling. A young life ended. You’d have to be callous not to feel some pity.

The marks of her killer’s hands were around her throat. I’ve seen several stranglings in my years with the murder squad. You get case-hardened, to a degree, but I was shocked by this one. The way I viewed it, anyone who crushes the last breath out of his victim with his bare hands is in a class of his own.

I interviewed the neighbour, Barry Campbell, from number 19, a single man, a bricklayer. He said he went to investigate after waking to the sound of thumps and screaming next door. He found the front door of number 17 had been forced inwards, the wood around the latch splintered. In the open hallway Miss Eakins was lying with her back to the door. After checking that she was dead, Mr Campbell returned to his house and called 999.

Dacre Street consists of small terraced houses with thin dividing walls. The family at number 15 confirmed that they, too, heard the screaming. They were a timid, retired couple, not the sort to do anything about it at that time of night.

Sharon Eakins was said by both sets of neighbours to have been independent and quiet in her way of life. Occasionally they heard her playing classical music. She had no regular visitors. She had lived in the house as a tenant for about eight months. She worked as a library assistant in Portsmouth.

We examined the rest of the house and found it in an orderly state. The curtains in the bedroom were closed and the edge of the quilt was pulled back, suggesting that Miss Eakins had gone to bed and been wakened by the sound of the front door being forced downstairs. Her handbag, containing her credit cards and thirty-five pounds, was still with her clothes on a chair in the bedroom. In the front room downstairs, the music centre and TV were still in place. Obviously theft was not the motive for the attack.

House-to-house inquiries next day gave us no significant information. Nobody had been seen entering or leaving 17, Dacre Street during the night.

Portsmouth Library spoke of Sharon Eakins as a reliable member of staff who joined the service eight months before with good references from her previous employer, Haldane Homes, the estate agents. Two of her librarian colleagues confirmed the neighbours’ impression of a young woman leading a quiet life, with no obvious problems. She confided little about herself. They thought she was not dating anyone.

The post mortem was carried out on February 10th by Professor Jarvis of the Portsmouth Infirmary. His conclusion was that Sharon Eakins died of asphyxia caused by manual strangulation. She had not been sexually assaulted. In fact, she was still a virgin. Some particles of skin were recovered from the fingernails of her right hand, suggesting that she may have scratched her assailant. These were sent for DNA analysis.

The examination of the scene by forensic officers confirmed what I’d seen for myself, that the front door had been kicked in. Part of a heel mark was left on the surface, but all we could tell from it was that he was probably wearing boots or leather shoes. (I say “he” because I’ve never yet come across a case of manual strangulation by a woman, nor heard of a woman kicking in a door) The attack took place in the hall and fibres were collected and sent for examination.

So the murder investigation was launched. Our first line of enquiry centred on Miss Eakins’s work at the library. It was suggested she may have attracted the attention of a stalker, a user of the library who had seen her there and become obsessive about her. A number of men known to visit the library frequently, either as book borrowers or newspaper readers, were questioned, without result.

The investigation then shifted back to Dacre Street. Two men in particular, residents of Dacre Street, were questioned about their contacts with her and their movements on the night of her murder. One had a record of violence and the second was a youth of sixteen who was receiving psychiatric counselling for depression and delusions. Both submitted to DNA testing and were swiftly eliminated from our enquiries.

The neighbour who reported the incident, Barry Campbell, was asked to provide samples, and co-operated. Some of the fibres found at the scene matched his dressing gown, but these were consistent with his stepping into the hall after the attack to check on the victim. The skin particles found in the victim’s fingernails did not match his DNA.

For all the extensive enquiries and appeals for information, nothing more of significance emerged for six months. The “stalker” theory was still my best bet, but I had to concede that a sexual motive was unlikely, allowing that Sharon’s pyjamas had been buttoned up and there were no indications of interference.

That’s when the shrinks get a look in, when all other systems seem to have failed. The offender profilers deduced that the killer was not attracted to the victim, but deeply hostile to her. He had kicked down a pretty substantial front door to reach her. They gave us a picture of a man with a grudge against women in general, or Sharon in particular. The attack could have been triggered by something from his past, or something Sharon did, or said. He was likely to be obsessive and mentally unstable. Men in the Southsea and Portsmouth area known to have pestered or threatened women came under particular scrutiny, without result.

Personally, I’ve always treated offender profiling with scepticism.

The breakthrough came in September, 1998, out of routine inquiries. From the beginning, I had assigned a team of officers to assemble information about Miss Eakins’s past. We succeeded in tracing a woman who had worked in the same Portsmouth office of Haldane Homes as Sharon for a spell of three months, July to September, 1996. She was Mrs Nicola Meagen.

This stable, dependable witness told us that in August, 1996, she noticed that Sharon was slow in sending out particulars of certain flats and houses on the agent’s books. Descriptions of the properties were supposed to be routinely sent to all enquirers on the distribution list, but only a few were being sent out promptly. Sharon was late with the rest. Mrs Meagen suspected the delays were deliberate. When she was sure of her facts, and found that some clients she herself had dealt with were affected, she asked Sharon what was going on. Such behaviour is not unknown in the flat-letting business; usually it means back-handers are being paid to the agent to get priority, either for the vendor, or, more commonly, the purchaser.

Sharon was upset that any malpractice was suspected and denied it absolutely, blaming pressure of work for the delays. Soon after, Mrs Meagen left the job, and did no more about it.

This presented us at last with a new line of inquiry. What if the murderer was an aggrieved client who felt cheated by Sharon? Finding a place to live is one of the most stressful experiences people have to undergo. Competition is strong, and they expect a fair playing field. It was not impossible that someone blamed all his troubles on the young woman in Haldane Homes.

We took Mrs Meagen back to Haldane and asked her to pick out the files she knew had been affected by the delays. The names and addresses of people seeking properties in 1996 were still on file and we succeeded in tracing over ninety per cent of them. Nobody with an obvious grievance against Sharon was found. No one except Mrs Meagen seemed to know about the delays.

But an interesting pattern emerged. The details Sharon had been slow in sending out were all from properties in one area. She was being selective in sending out particulars of addresses close to her own, in Charity Avenue, Gosport. Some flat-seekers had been sent the details immediately, but the majority got them anything up to two weeks later.

At first, all our efforts were concentrated on the people who received the information late. I favoured the aggrieved client theory. Nothing helpful emerged, so I looked instead at the people who were the winners in Sharon’s game.

Was she helping old friends she wanted living close to her? We ran a check on everyone had been found homes by Sharon. Four were still living close to Charity Avenue. One had moved again within six weeks of taking the flat. The four still in residence claimed not to have known Sharon prior to going to the Haldane Homes office. After questioning them we were satisfied that no favours had been asked and no bribes offered or accepted.

The fifth tenant — the one who didn’t stay long — was a single man in his mid-twenties. He was eventually traced to an address in Southsea. He had changed his name, but he explained that he had changed it a number of times in his life, and we believed him. He was obviously a drifter. He described himself as a free spirit, unwilling to be labelled, or pigeon-holed. He played the guitar and at one time had made a number of recordings. Currently he was getting occasional work playing music in clubs and wine bars. Like the other tenants he denied receiving any favourable treatment from Sharon and said his dealings with Haldane Homes were perfectly in order. He had paid his rent for the short time he was there. He had moved to the new address simply because it was a better “drum.” Something about his denials and his demeanour under questioning made the officers suspicious. He was asked to provide a DNA sample and refused. He was brought in for questioning.

I interviewed him myself. He was gaunt, long-haired, antagonistic towards the police — typical of many of the losers in the “baby-boomer” generation. We called him by the name he was currently using, Tom Hegarty. On the Haldane books he was Tom Hitchins. He said he couldn’t even remember Sharon.

We had nothing to pin on him except his refusal to co-operate over the DNA, and he insisted it was his right to withhold a specimen. I couldn’t guess what motive he might have for strangling Sharon. After all, he’d been one of the lucky ones who had got a flat.

We kept him almost the full twenty-four hours permitted. When the time was nearly up I hauled him back to the interview room and tried a piece of deception, simply fishing, and he took the bait. I let him believe we had picked up one of his hairs from the interviewing room and matched it to another found at the murder scene.

Hegarty rolled over and told all. It was an extraordinary story. He had first met Sharon when he called at Haldane Homes to enquire about flats. She gave him some particulars right away. She took him to see two he didn’t like, but said she was confident one would soon come in that would suit him. He looked at several more before choosing the one in Gosport. Sharon was friendly and helpful, and he assumed she was good at her job and that was all.

After moving in, he received a number of phone calls from Sharon. There were queries over details and she asked him to come to the office to sign a form that could have been dealt with through the post. Later she phoned several more times to ask if he was satisfied with the flat. He could tell she was simply making excuses to talk. He said he wasn’t hostile to women, but this one, so pushy and so humourless with it, didn’t appeal to him at all. He tried to let her know he was not interested, but she persisted, as if he owed her some attention, stressing that she had gone to some trouble to find him the best flat on the agency’s books.

How true the claim was, Hegarty didn’t know at the time. He assumed she was just putting the best gloss on her work as a flat-finder. Thanks to Mrs Meagen, we knew better. Sharon had fiddled the system to make sure he was offered a place near hers.

It became obvious that she was infatuated. He met her on a couple of occasions near the flat and suspected she had been waiting for him. She remarked that she lived in the next street and if he ever wanted to borrow anything, he shouldn’t hesitate to call.

So it was a complete about-turn. Sharon had been the stalker.

As Hegarty described it, he first felt embarrassed by her behaviour, then impatient, then scared. Sharon took to phoning him whenever he was home, asking why he hadn’t called yet. The more he made his anger obvious, the more persistent she got. Eventually she said she couldn’t help doing it, and if it made him angry, she couldn’t blame him. She said she was unable to stop herself. Even if he got violent with her, she would still want to be with him. He began to suspect that she wanted him to turn nasty. The calls came at all hours. She rang him at two in the morning saying she was sorry.

The next evening he returned early from the pub and to his amazement found her inside the flat. Apparently she had kept one of the keys. She admitted that she let herself into the place quite often just to be nearer to him and his things, and wasn’t she a wicked girl? He said he would call her boss at Haldane next day and see she was sacked if she didn’t hand him the key and leave at once. She gave the key up so readily that he suspected she still had a spare one. A couple of evenings later when he went to bed he smelt her perfume on his pillow. The after-midnight calls started again. He disconnected the phone. But he knew he couldn’t stay off line every evening. Most of his gigs came through phone calls.

Twice next day she approached him in the street. When he went to the pub, she came in with one of his drinking mates she had chatted up just to be one of the party.

As Hegarty explained it to us in the interview room, Sharon’s arrival in the pub was a turning point. He was a man who had always found relationships difficult. At school, he had been a loner, an easy prey for the bullies. He felt he had let down his family. He had got no sympathy or understanding from his father. Before he was seventeen, he had left home for good. But lately, for the first time in his life, he had found a few friends he felt comfortable with. He was beginning to break out, talk a little in company, make jokes. Sharon was trampling on these tender shoots.

I believed him. But I ought to record that none of my colleagues did. They wouldn’t accept the idea of a man driven to murder by a female stalker.

Hegarty decided the only remedy was to give up the flat and move out of Gosport altogether. He went to an estate agent in Southsea and deliberately used another name. A flat was available, not so nice as the one he was leaving, but he was glad to take it. Acting like a fugitive, he moved to the new address at six in the morning.

Sharon took about ten days to trace him.

The first he knew of it was a phone call about three in the morning. Sharon said as if it was the best news he would ever hear that she too had moved to Southsea and was living at 17, Dacre Street and wasn’t she a naughty girl?

As Hegarty expressed it, “I was desperate. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think straight. I got up and went to her place and kicked the door in and grabbed her. I knew she would give me no peace. Until you’ve been through it, you can’t understand what that kind of torment does to you. I strangled her.”

He signed a confession. He asked what kind of sentence he could expect and I said in view of his full and frank confession he might be treated leniently by a sympathetic judge, but he was still likely to get a custodial term of several years. He said he doubted if he could face being in jail. He valued his freedom above everything.

I’m sure he was speaking the truth. It was consistent with everything else he had told us.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I take full responsibility for what happened subsequently. I was at fault in letting him keep his belt in the cell.

I was the first in there after the alarm was raised. I cut him down myself, but he had been dead some time.

I resigned from the force the same day.

He was my son.