At 2:25 on the afternoon of April 29, 1952, a patient on a cleaning detail at Broadmoor climbed a stack of disinfectant drums onto the slate roof of a lean-to shed, pulled himself over the last eighteen inches of a ten-foot wall and dropped to the ground outside. He had his own clothes on under his work uniform. Four hours later he was back in custody, caught in a field after a short chase, and a five-year-old girl in the village of Farley Hill was dead. The man was John Thomas Straffen, twenty-two, and he had been sent to Broadmoor six months earlier because a court had decided he was too mentally deficient to be tried for strangling two other children.
He was born on February 27, 1930, at Bordon Camp in Hampshire, the third of six children of a soldier, John Straffen, and his wife Elizabeth. The family spent six years in British India, and his mother later said the boy showed nothing unusual until he caught encephalitis there at about six. After the family settled near Bath in 1938 he began stealing and truanting. A probation officer found that he did not understand the difference between right and wrong, and a psychiatrist certified him as mentally defective. Tested in 1940 he had an IQ of 58 and a mental age of six. He spent the next six years in residential schools for mentally defective children at Sambourne in Warwickshire and Defford in Worcestershire.
The record between his release in 1946 and 1951 is one of small, solitary offenses that nobody read as a warning. He broke into empty houses and hid or threw away what he took. In July 1947 a thirteen-year-old girl reported that a blond youth named John had put his hand over her mouth, assaulted her and asked what she would do if he killed her; police linked Straffen to it only much later. Weeks after that he strangled five chickens belonging to the father of a girl he had quarreled with. Committed to Hortham Colony near Bristol under the Mental Deficiency Act, with paperwork describing him as not of violent or dangerous propensities, he was allowed home to his family in Bath in 1951 and found work at a market garden.
Brenda Goddard was five and lived with foster parents, the Pullens, at 1 Camden Crescent in Bath; her widowed mother, Constance, worked full time at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases and saw her regularly. On Sunday afternoon, July 15, 1951, Brenda crossed the road from her garden to pick flowers in a meadow. By Straffen's own later account he asked her what she was doing, told her he knew a wood with more flowers, and lifted her over a fence into a copse, where he strangled her and struck her head against a stone. Then he went on to the cinema, as he did most Sundays. A police officer found her body at 7:10 that evening, three hundred yards from her home, with cut white flowers scattered around it. She had not been sexually assaulted. Police questioned Straffen on August 3, because he had a record and had been seen in a navy suit near the house, but they had nothing to hold him on. His employer let him go on July 31, a dismissal he blamed on the police.
Cicely Batstone, nine, went to the Forum Cinema in Bath alone on August 8, because her mother had said it was children's day. Straffen sat with her, gave her a sweet, and afterward offered to take her across town to see the western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and pay for her ticket. They rode a bus together. At about eight o'clock Violet Cowley, the wife of a policeman, watched them walk along Bloomfield Road toward a meadow called the Tumps and felt uneasy enough to mention it to her husband. Cicely was strangled in the meadow. Straffen walked home and bought fish and chips on the way. Her parents believed her sixteen-year-old sister Gladys was expecting her, so she was not reported missing until nearly eleven. The next morning Cowley led searchers to the spot, and Cicely's body was found under a hedge at 8:30.
This time there were witnesses everywhere: the bus driver, a conductor who knew Straffen from a former job, and a courting couple who had passed a laughing child with a blond young man in the Tumps. When detectives arrived at his home on the morning of August 9 he asked whether it was about the girl he had been to the pictures with the night before. At the station he first said Cicely had been asleep when he left her, then that she was dead but they could not prove he had done it, and then he admitted Brenda Goddard as well: the other girl, he said, he did the same. He told officers he had killed them to give the police something real to do. He denied any sexual motive, and none was ever found.
He was charged with Cicely's murder on August 10 and with Brenda's later that month, and the magistrates in Bath sent him for trial on the Batstone charge. At Taunton Assizes on October 17, 1951, before Mr. Justice Oliver, the hearing lasted about eight minutes. The only witness was Peter Parkes, medical superintendent at Horfield, who had seen Straffen repeatedly since 1947 and said he could not follow legal proceedings. The judge told the jury that in England insane people were not tried, and that they might as well try a baby in arms. The jury found him insane and unfit to plead, and he was ordered detained at Broadmoor. Some accounts of the case name Mr. Justice Cassels as the Taunton judge; the contemporary reports name Oliver.
Linda Bowyer was five and had a new bicycle. Straffen had walked about seven miles from Crowthorne to Farley Hill in two hours, and at around 5:30 a villager saw him sitting on a bench watching her ride around the village. She was last seen alive at about 5:50. Soon afterward he knocked at the door of a Mrs. Loyalty Kenyon to ask for a glass of water and the way to Wokingham, then thumbed a ride from a woman motorist toward the Bramshill Hunt bus stop. Seeing men waiting there he asked whether they were police. They were Broadmoor staff and officers; he got out and walked off, and was taken in a field at 6:40. Linda's mother missed her at 7:30. Soldiers from the Arborfield camp joined the search, and at 5:25 the next morning Sergeant Percy Axford found her, strangled and fully clothed, under an oak in a bluebell copse.
Chief Inspector Frederick Francis went to Broadmoor that morning and asked Straffen whether he had been up to any mischief the day before. Before anyone had mentioned a child, Straffen said he had not killed her, and then that he knew he had killed Goddard and Batstone, but he did not kill the little girl on the bicycle. Hospital staff said he had not seen a newspaper. He was charged on May 1 and held in the hospital wing at Brixton. Broadmoor's security was rebuilt within months, and a ring of warning sirens was installed around the hospital and tested every week until 2016.
Because he had escaped, the Bowyer charge went to an ordinary criminal trial. It opened at Winchester Assizes on July 21, 1952, before Mr. Justice Cassels, with the Solicitor-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, prosecuting and Henry Elam defending. That first jury was discharged after one of its members was overheard at a local club saying a prosecution witness was the real killer; the judge made him sit through the retrial and apologize in open court. The decisive ruling came early: Cassels allowed the prosecution to put the two Bath murders before the jury as similar fact evidence, on the ground that the killings shared a pattern, with young girls, manual strangulation, no struggle, no sexual assault, no apparent motive and no attempt to hide the bodies. Manningham-Buller told the jury that witnesses accounted for every part of Straffen's four hours of freedom except a vital twenty minutes after Linda was last seen, and that the walk from the bench to the copse took about six and a half minutes.
The pathologist Donald Teare testified that the pressure on Linda's neck had been applied at exactly the right points, as if by someone experienced, and that it matched what he saw in the photographs and reports of the Bath children. The defense did not call Straffen, arguing that a man found unfit to plead could not follow the evidence, and left his sanity for the jury to decide. It also called a woman and her son who said they heard a girl scream from the direction of the copse at about 6:45, after he was already in custody. Broadmoor doctors testified that he now knew right from wrong; one, Thomas Munro, said Straffen had told him murder was wrong because it broke the law and because it was one of the commandments. The jury took twenty-nine minutes to convict. The official government record of the case dates the conviction and death sentence to July 24, 1952; several published accounts give July 25. His mother was led from the court calling out that he didn't do it. The mothers of all three girls were in the room.
The Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed his appeal on August 26, rejecting both grounds, that the Bath murders should never have been put to the jury and that his words at Broadmoor had been taken before any caution. The ruling became a standard authority in English law on similar fact evidence. Leave to go to the House of Lords was refused, and the hanging was set for September 4. On August 29 the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, advised the Queen to reprieve him, and the sentence became life imprisonment. Records examined decades later by the journalist Bob Woffinden indicated that most of the doctors who examined Straffen before the Winchester trial had considered him insane, and that this, not mercy in the abstract, lay behind the reprieve.
He never came out. He went from Wandsworth to Horfield in Bristol in 1956, where more than twelve thousand people signed a petition against his presence, then to Cardiff in 1958, back to Horfield, to the new maximum-security wing at Parkhurst on January 31, 1966, to Durham in 1968 and later to Long Lartin. Every Home Secretary refused to consider him for release, and in 1994 Michael Howard put him on a list of about twenty life prisoners who were never to be freed. In 2001 his solicitors asked for the case to be reopened on the ground that he had never been fit to stand trial, and Woffinden questioned the Bowyer conviction itself: Straffen bit his nails to the quick, yet fingernail marks were found on the child's neck, and two local witnesses put her death after his recapture. The Criminal Cases Review Commission turned the application down in December 2002.
Straffen admitted Brenda Goddard and Cicely Batstone to the end and denied Linda Bowyer to the end. He died of natural causes after a short illness in the health care center at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham on the morning of November 19, 2007, at seventy-seven. He had been held for fifty-five years, three months and twenty-six days, at the time the longest any prisoner had served in British history. Brenda Goddard's age is given as five in most accounts and six in the police file on the Bath murders.