THEY KNOW WHO DID IT
Brian Masters reveals hitherto unpublicised
clues suggesting that French country people are shielding Caroline Dickinson's killer
THE MURDER of Caroline Dickinson in the early hours of Thursday 18 July last year, in the soporific, eventless village of Pleine-Fougeres, was a tragedy with a bit- ter residue. Within three days the examin- ing magistrate, Gerard Zaug, had arrested a homeless beggar whom a string of wit- nesses placed miles away at the material time, yet who had supposedly confessed (he hadn't — he merely said yes to every proposition put to him after six hours of relentless questioning). Zaug's other, inex- plicable mistake was to decline to subject the local male population to DNA testing, despite clues pointing to the murderer being a local man. The Appeal Court at Rennes has dismissed him from the case and appointed in his stead Renaud van Ruymbeke, a man of thorough tenacity. Meanwhile, a year has been lost.
The circumstances of the crime were peculiar. Caroline was with a school party from Launceston in Cornwall; there were four teachers, five boys, 30 girls and a driv- er. They stayed in the youth hostel at the end of the village, a handsome, quiet building set back from the road. The mid- dle front room on the first floor, Room 4, had four bunk beds assigned to girls, and Caroline Dickinson, perhaps because she did not want to be separated from her friends, slept on a mattress on the floor between them. One of these friends touched her in the morning and found her cold; she had been violated and smothered as they slept. Another recalled hearing her feet drum on the floor during the night and assumed she was dreaming.
Because the French system of criminal investigation enjoins total secrecy, Zaug was answerable to nobody and was not required to inform Caroline's parents about anything. His only press conference was to announce the arrest of the vagrant and, by the way, add some miserably absurd remarks about the nature of the criminal which sounded as though lifted from a translation of Patricia Cornwell. Deprived of news, the British press were driven (as usual) to invent it. One head- line pointed to a serial killer at large, and compared the attack upon Caroline with a similar attack at another youth hostel on the coast some miles away. I went there to check. The manager of the hostel knew nothing of any such event, it was entirely cooked up, yet it surfaced again this week.
What, then, are the facts so far as it is possible to know them? In the first place, the youth hostel at Pleine-Fougeres is well- known to the local children. There is a drinks-vending machine just inside the front door and people congregate around it for gossip and laughter. Not much else beckons in the village, which has a church, a post office, half a dozen shops and a town hall. Mothers who wonder where their ado- lescent children have got to are more than likely to find them at the hostel. Everyone who has grown up in and around Pleine- Fougeres knows it.
Caroline's murderer knew that it was not locked at night. He knew that the warden on night duty slept in a room on the left, without a window in the door, and he knew his way up the stairs on the right to the dormitories. A man had been seen wander- ing in the hostel and trying several bed- room doors. He had a beard and thick Mick Jagger-type lips. He did not seem to worry whether he was seen opening doors or not, and made no attempt to hide or run away.
Then there are the clues, which I came across during a visit to the area, to which nobody has paid enough attention. At four o'clock on the morning of 18 July one of the teachers was woken up by the sound of a mobilette. She looked out of the window and saw a man driving off past the post office, but thought no more of it at the time. A mobilette is a motorised bicycle much loved by the French; it is not in any way as powerful as a motorbike and is only suitable for short distances. The man on the mobilette was not going very far.
The school party finished their dinner at 9.30 p.m. the night before, then stayed up talking until lights out. When Caroline Dickinson's body was examined at Rennes hospital, her stomach was found to be empty, which meant that she had had time to digest her meal. This would place her death at or after 3.30 a.m., half an hour before the sound of the mobilette.
It is likely that the murderer is known to more than a few people and is being shel- tered. Somebody would have noticed his late return home, at the very least. The area made by a triangle connecting Pleine- Fougeres, Dol de Bretagne and Corn- bourg, covering a few hundred square miles, is notorious for the fact that 90 per cent of crimes involving sexual aberration which come before the courts of St Malo are committed by people who live within it. This is colloquially called 'la France profonde', ancient and mysterious, inhab- ited by people of the same families for centuries, furtive, secretive, loyal to one another and deeply distrustful of all out- siders. They do not tell stories or give con- fidences. They stand at their front doors to stare at an unfamiliar face.
As if this tragedy were not awful enough, it is perfectly possible that Caro- line died by mistake. The murder bears all the marks of an opportunistic crime com- mitted by somebody overpowered by lust, not someone cold and calculating. He probably placed a pillow over Caroline's face to keep her quiet before he attacked her, and she was smothered as a result of this precaution. He may not have realised that he was killing her. The alternative — that he violated her first and then mur- dered her to protect himself from identifi- cation — is not plausible; the noise would have roused the other girls from the pro- foundest slumber.
Identification by DNA analysis has always been an option which should have been exercised immediately. The young boys in the school party, the two male teachers and the driver were all tested and cleared, but the inhabitants in and around the village were not subjected to this type of examination (although 350 people were interviewed). Now, at last, the test will be available, on the orders of Renaud van Ruymbeke, to every male between the ages of 15 and 35. It will, however, be voluntary; nobody is obliged to take it, nor can he be forced. It will be interesting to see how many refuse, and whether we shall be allowed to know they have refused.
DNA, the building blocks of the genes, is specific to each individual and cannot pos- sibly be replicated. The DNA profile is the most precise form of identification yet devised. If it were obligatory, the killer of Caroline Dickinson would be caught.
The authors books include studies of the seri- al killers Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer. His most recent is She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West.
`I'm sorry dear. After all, you do know it's quite out of character for me to come up with an apt retort.'
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