Now that the trial is over and Gow has been convicted, an army of questions remains unanswered. How could Gow cruise the same small group of women in an area the size of Regent’s Park, kill five, and only be caught because he confessed? Why was a multiphasic task force not set up until after the third death? Why did no one in the NCSOD claim jurisdiction over the series of crimes? Where is the companion who helped him with the first and third murders?
The DNA evidence was not foolproof: the semen samples from the bodies were badly compromised by the bleaching. Other than that, all the evidence the police had against Gow was the blood in his car and his lack of an alibi. Why didn’t his defense argue that Gow, while admittedly a rapist and possibly the driver, was not the killer? It hardly feels like justice at all.
Alice Thompson’s name has not even reached seventeen hits in the coverage. She has been mentioned only twelve times because her family refused to release a photograph to the press. Her two sons are thirteen and fourteen now. They came to the court with their father and sat next to him. Their father was drunk and shouted abuse at Lara Orr in the lobby of the court. He hadn’t lived with Alice Thomson for six years. The boys hadn’t seen her for three.
Elizabeth MacCorronah was a registered heroin addict. Her husband, also an addict, had been killed in a house fire two years before. Her three children were in care at the time of her murder. No one from her family came to the trial. Martine Pashtan’s husband moved back to Birmingham, taking with him their son, now a year old. Mary-Ann Roberts was forty-one years old and the most experienced of the women. She left no one.
This series of articles is depressing, but I think they’re meant to be. Excused as a cry for justice and a forum for pointing out the inadequacies in the police handling of the case, they’re really designed to give the middle classes a frisson of terror at the missing social safety net. I heard Donagh argue on a radio-show debate that he wasn’t cashing in by writing these articles. He was moved to pursue the case because none of the victims’ families were able to demand answers or to comment on the quality of the police investigation. He got a big round of applause, and I think he was right. These victims won’t be celebrated; they won’t be remembered as anything other than a footnote in a true-crime book. Not for them the self-named foundations doing good or ardent family campaigns advocating a cosmetic reform to some small point of law. Grief-stricken campaigning families used to mystify me, but they make perfect sense now. If I could think of anything to campaign about, I’d love to set one up for Susie. I could pour my energies into it, meet new friends through it, work really hard at wrestling order from a chaotic universe.
Donagh makes you feel sorry for Veronica Dempsey, but still, there does come a point where you have to admit it: you need to be pretty thick not to know what a broadsheet is at thirty-six.
The description of Lara Orr in his last article is genuinely touching. The poor woman isn’t very bright and doesn’t know how to present herself. She seems not likable, exactly, but certainly very innocent.
Box 2 Document 7 Article by Fergus Donagh, Guardian, 3/23/95
Lara Orr sips her cup of tea and looks out the steamed-up café window. The shadows under her eyes show the recent strain, and her roots need doing. It took twelve phone calls to arrange this meeting. Her friend Stevie Ray fields all phone calls and controls access to her husband. Stevie, she says, has been looking after both of them. He has given up his job at the minicab firm where he met Gow and is dedicating himself full-time to managing Gow’s career as a serial killer and celebrity. Of the £1,000 he is charging me to interview Lara Orr, she will get £750 and Stevie Ray will get £250, twenty-five percent of the final deal. Lara isn’t worldly enough to know that Stevie’s cut is far too high and Stevie isn’t smart enough to make it a proviso that I don’t mention the money in this article. It’s a case of the blind managing the blind.
Lara was born on the south side, the middle daughter in a family of five girls. Her mother was a telephone operator and her father a park keeper. They were not happy times. As she grew up, her ambition was to move out of the family home. She got her wish at sixteen. She was sent to live with an aunt in Liverpool while she studied hairdressing. It was in Liverpool that she met Andrew Gow. It was an August night in the Taboo nightclub; Lara was with some girls from her hairdressing school; Gow was alone. They got to chatting because they were both Glaswegian and one month later Lara and Andrew were engaged. After Laura had a fallout with her aunt, Andrew brought her home and they stayed with his family, sleeping on the floor of his young sister’s house until the council allocated them a flat of their own. They were married in the spring of 1991, two years before the first riverside murder.
“I didn’t know he was a monster,” says Lara, looking out the window. “He was always gentle with me. He was kind to me.”
I ask her about the story she sold to the Mirror, about Gow dressing her up as a prostitute for rough sex games. Lara looks sick, curls a tress of bleached hair around her finger, and says she was afraid of him. This means that Gow was simultaneously gentle and kind and frightening. It’s hard to know which is true. Both sentiments seem quite genuine.
She’s divorcing him, she says, at some point in the future, perhaps when the financial value of being his wife is mitigated by the passage of time. She is alone now. Having fallen out with her family and her husband, she’s sorry to say that Gow will be keeping Stevie Ray as his manager, so she will have to cope with being his ex-wife alone. I suggest that she might get a better agent.
“There is no one better,” she says. “Stevie knows how to do it all.”
Donagh never got to interview Stevie Ray and went on about it later in the radio series. Ray kept charging him money and then not turning up. Donagh titled the series after him, something about Stevie Ray-“Good-bye, Stevie Ray” or “Tell Stevie Ray Hello” or something like that.
It occurs to me that Stevie Ray might be interesting to talk to. He was in contact with Gow and Donna right up until the end. Susie has a photo up on the wall here, taken on the steps of the court on the day of Gow’s appeal. It was on the front page of the tabloids. Stevie is holding Gow’s hand up in the air like a triumphant boxer, and they are both grinning maniacally. Gow has those white children’s sunglasses on. He seemed to wear them all the time. Donna was camera shy suddenly and is lurking in the background. Stevie Ray might even know something about the phone call from Durness.
I didn’t get to know Stevie during Susie’s trial, but I don’t think I’m being presumptuous in saying that he understood what I was going through; after all, he’d watched someone he was close to go on trial for horrible crimes. We spoke only once: we were waiting to get back into the court after lunch and he was crying. As I remember the incident now, it doesn’t seem at all strange or alarming to me that he was crying, so it must have been around the time that the prosecution brought evidence about the extent of Gow’s injuries. Stevie Ray was standing next to me, crying silently. I remember little silver trails of snot on the backs of his hands catching the light in the dark corridor. I said, “Sorry, pal,” and handed him a disposable tissue out of a packet.
He took it between two fingers, nodded sadly, and, without looking up, said, “Sure, sure,” and moved away. I’m sure he’d talk to me.
I don’t know why I keep coming up here to write this rubbish down. I find myself tramping up here night after night, my eyes smarting and wanting to sleep, and still I pass the door to the bedroom and come up here. I’ve always wanted to write, but not all this rubbish about feelings; I want to write clever things about the death of empire, about big theories and themes that will win me the respect of Martin Amis and get me into Soho House. Writing this stuff down has become a sick compulsion, and the only reason I can find for it is that, like a petulant child, I want to have my say. I’m presenting a defense to an absent audience and I haven’t even done anything wrong.