The Scapegoat: One Murder. Two Victims. 27 Years Lost.. Don Hale

asked her if she could be sure that Stephen had left the cemetery at around 1.10 p.m. She said she could because she had seen the bus at its scheduled stop at the same time. Once again, I had reason to thank Hulleys buses for helping to plot the course of the day’s events.

      Pat Shimwell asked if I’d spoken to any of the youngsters who were playing around the area that lunchtime. I recalled Ray saying something about children when we walked around the cemetery.

      She suggested I should track down Ian and Lucy Beebe. The story was that something ‘horrible’ had frightened them in the cemetery that day. Shimwell admitted that they were very young at the time, and told me they used to live along Burton Edge but had since moved away.

      I soon discovered that the Beebe family played a crucial but often maligned role in this murder inquiry. The eldest daughter was Jayne Atkins, a fifteen-year-old at the time, who was a half-sister to little Ian and Lucy, then aged four and seven. Jayne appeared as a major new witness at the Court of Appeal in October 1974 to give evidence in support of Stephen Downing.

      Jayne told three appeal court judges she had seen ‘a man and a woman with their arms round each other’ in the cemetery on the day Wendy Sewell was attacked. She confirmed the man was not Stephen Downing.

      She explained that only a few minutes before she saw the couple embrace, she had seen Stephen leaving the cemetery. She said the couple were standing on the lower path, behind one of the chapels, and not far from the very spot where Wendy was later found bleeding to death.

Jayne told the court she had been afraid at first to tell the police about what she had seen, for fear the man had recognised her – and that she might become a victim as well.

      At a pre-trial hearing, the three law lords decided she could not be believed. They maintained that, had she been a credible witness, she would have come forward much earlier with such vital information. They decided her evidence was therefore ‘not credible’ and rejected it, and Stephen’s appeal against his conviction was hastily dismissed.

      I wanted to meet Jayne Atkins, and to see if her story had changed over the years. I was also keen to track down and interview the younger children and find out what had frightened them.

      This proved no easy feat. Former neighbours told me the Beebes had moved to a new house because they had been so terrified of reprisals after Jayne had given her evidence to the Court of Appeal. They said the family had received several anonymous threats.

      Back at my office, after spending much of the morning on the estate, I received a telephone call on my direct line. ‘Been snooping around again, then?’ a man’s voice sneered.

      ‘Who is this?’ I asked. It was not the same voice as before. This man sounded much older.

      ‘Never you mind. That little sod got what he deserved. If I see your car on that estate again, you’re dead,’ he claimed, before slamming down the phone.

      My heart was pounding, and my thoughts turned to Kath and my two boys. What if this person knew where I lived? Not for the first time, I wondered just what I was getting myself into.

      * * *

Later that week, I finally tracked down the Beebes. They were living on the outskirts of Chesterfield, in a council house in Renishaw, on the road out towards Sheffield. Margaret Beebe opened the door. She was a very pleasant lady in her fifties with a strong local accent.

      She greeted me with a friendly smile. When I told her the purpose of my visit she appeared enthusiastic and ushered me inside. She told me that the children, by now in their twenties and thirties, had all left home. She and her husband Ken lived on their own.

      Once she started talking about past events, her mood changed. She told me that she and her family left Bakewell in 1977, moving first to Lichfield in Staffordshire before ending up here in Renishaw, about 15 miles from Bakewell. She confirmed what I had already been told – that they were forced to move because they believed their lives were in danger after Jayne gave evidence at the Court of Appeal.

      They had received anonymous threats for more than two years, and could take it no more.

      ‘The worst thing was,’ she said, ‘no one believed us. No one took us seriously, except for our immediate neighbours. We were just left to get on with it and deal with all this bother on our own. It was very upsetting. And it was terrible for the little ones.’

      ‘So, tell me what happened that day, Margaret,’ I said.

      ‘The children, that’s my Ian and Lucy, and their little friend Pam Sheldon, were all out playing on waste ground, then in the cemetery, when something frightened them. I think they told me at the time that somebody with blood on them jumped over the wall out of the cemetery and frightened the life out of them. They wouldn’t go into the cemetery for a long while after that.’

      ‘What time of day was this?’

‘Ian and Lucy had come home at lunchtime from infant school and were out playing on their bikes,’ she said. ‘Then Ian came in as white as a sheet. He’d left his bike somewhere. He couldn’t say anything at first. I sat him down on the couch. He was very scared and talked about a man with blood on him.

      ‘He had nightmares for a long time afterwards. He couldn’t go back to school and had to stay at home.’

      Margaret Beebe was sitting on the sofa next to me but was talking thirteen to the dozen, and flailing her arms around like a windmill, as she became more and more engrossed in her story.

      I had to duck several times.

      ‘I put my little one, Adrian, in the buggy,’ she continued, ‘and took Lucy back to school. As I passed the cemetery there were police there, and an ambulance. I remember seeing them putting a body into the ambulance.

      ‘When I went back home, Ian had messed himself with fright. I thought I’d fetch a doctor, then he calmed down a bit and said, “Mummy, that man got blood all over him!”’

      ‘Were the police told about all this?’ I asked.

      ‘They came around on the Friday night, two days after the attack, but didn’t take any statements. Ian was in bed asleep, so they said they’d come back to talk to him. They never did, though.’

      ‘And this was the first time the police came to your house? They didn’t come on the day itself?’

      ‘No, the Friday was the first time. They didn’t go to any of the houses on Burton Edge on the day it happened.’ Margaret added that some time after 1.10 on the day of the attack she popped her head round the perimeter hedge of the cemetery to look for the family’s pet dog.

      Her daughter Jayne had already gone out to look for it. Margaret said, ‘I didn’t see anyone.’ A few minutes later, though, she recalled hearing a shout, something like ‘Hey!’ or ‘Help!’

‘It must have been a shocking experience for your family,’ I said.

      ‘Well, later that day, when I went to work at Cintride at six o’clock, I heard all about this woman who had been battered in the cemetery. I kept Ian off school till the following Monday, but he continued to suffer with his nerves until 1977. It was four years of misery until we moved to Lichfield.

      ‘I had a breakdown after all this. Our family was called a pack of liars by the police. We only said what we saw. I used to work at Cintride on the 6 till 10 p.m. shift. One night, when I was walking there on my own up Bagshaw Hill, a car came alongside me and slowed down.

      ‘There were people in the front and back, and someone wound down the window and shouted, “You had better keep your mouth shut or else things will happen to you and your girl!” I think this was after the trial but before the appeal. When Jayne gave her evidence, the judges basically called her a liar.’

      Margaret Beebe added one other interesting fact to my ever-increasing portfolio of information. Her husband Ken, a quarry worker,