were made, normally on the anniversary of her death. This is how it remained until Friday 1 August, 1986, when I noticed the front page of the Leicester Mercury as I bought milk from a corner shop.
HUNT FOR MISSING SCHOOLGIRL
Senior detectives and uniformed police with tracker dogs have joined a huge search of the Narborough area for a 15-year-old girl who disappeared last night not far from a spot where another schoolgirl was found murdered three years ago.
Dawn Amanda Ashworth of Mill Lane, Enderby, has not been seen since she visited friends in Narborough yesterday afternoon. She left their house in Carlton Avenue, Narborough at 4.30 p.m. and disappeared.
At midday the following day, Dawn Ashworth’s body was found alongside a footpath, this one running to the east of Carlton Hayes Hospital and known locally as Ten Pound Lane. Like Lynda she had been a pupil of the local Lutterworth Grammar School.
For the next week this second murder dominated the local and national headlines. Being so busy, I caught only occasional snatches of radio bulletins or sightings of newspapers but I knew there was a real fear in the community.
This time the police quickly made an arrest, picking up a seventeen-year-old youth from Narborough. He was a kitchen porter at Carlton Hayes Hospital, working in the large canteen that provided meals for patients and staff. On 11 August he was charged with Dawn Ashworth’s murder and remanded in custody.
Within a few days a letter arrived on my doormat from the Local Health Authority - the formal contract confirming that I was to be the new head of the Regional Forensic Psychology Service. There was, however, a catch. The department didn’t feel that I could take on the added responsibility while doing a further university course. I’d been expecting to get financial support for my studies at Sheffield University but it was made clear that this wouldn’t be forthcoming. Perhaps if I deferred it for a year and concentrated on my new role the finance could be found in the future, they suggested.
I had a decision to make. Did I carry on as planned -now having to fund myself - and perhaps upsetting the powers that be? Or did I turn the university down and hope to win a place the following year? I began to doubt whether I wanted the new post, the office and forensic career after all.
Shortly before 9.00 a.m. on the first day of September, I pulled into the carpark at Arnold Lodge, Leicester, and surveyed my new domain. It was a rather squat two-storey brown-brick building surrounded by a sixteen-foot-high chain-link fence. Most of the windows were of reflective glass that couldn’t fully open.
This was a regional secure-unit housing about twenty-four patients but with plans to eventually have sixty beds. The fence and control room announced immediately that the residents were meant to stay inside, at least for the short term and normally a maximum of two years. All the same, the place didn’t look that secure. What am I getting myself into, I thought.
Inside, the overriding impression was one of darkness. The ceilings seemed oppressively low, dragged down by the dark stained wood that had been chosen to decorate the interiors. There were locks on every door and the central control room was wired up to respond to ‘incidents’ anywhere in the complex.
It was very different to the light airy corridors of Leicester General. People would now be watching my every movement. We often forget that the staff spend longer in closed institutions than most of the inmates.
The men and women at Arnold Lodge were mostly aged between eighteen and forty. Some of them had done dreadful things or had the potential to do so - arsonists, paedophiles, rapists, sadists, killers … They were young, physically fit people and I could sense an energy in the unit, but it wasn’t something exciting, rather it was something that had to be watched.
Among the patients I had to treat was a woman in her mid-twenties who
HUNT FOR MISSING SCHOOLGIRL
Senior detectives and uniformed police with tracker dogs have joined a huge search of the Narborough area for a 15-year-old girl who disappeared last night not far from a spot where another schoolgirl was found murdered three years ago.
Dawn Amanda Ashworth of Mill Lane, Enderby, has not been seen since she visited friends in Narborough yesterday afternoon. She left their house in Carlton Avenue, Narborough at 4.30 p.m. and disappeared.
At midday the following day, Dawn Ashworth’s body was found alongside a footpath, this one running to the east of Carlton Hayes Hospital and known locally as Ten Pound Lane. Like Lynda she had been a pupil of the local Lutterworth Grammar School.
For the next week this second murder dominated the local and national headlines. Being so busy, I caught only occasional snatches of radio bulletins or sightings of newspapers but I knew there was a real fear in the community.
This time the police quickly made an arrest, picking up a seventeen-year-old youth from Narborough. He was a kitchen porter at Carlton Hayes Hospital, working in the large canteen that provided meals for patients and staff. On 11 August he was charged with Dawn Ashworth’s murder and remanded in custody.
Within a few days a letter arrived on my doormat from the Local Health Authority - the formal contract confirming that I was to be the new head of the Regional Forensic Psychology Service. There was, however, a catch. The department didn’t feel that I could take on the added responsibility while doing a further university course. I’d been expecting to get financial support for my studies at Sheffield University but it was made clear that this wouldn’t be forthcoming. Perhaps if I deferred it for a year and concentrated on my new role the finance could be found in the future, they suggested.
I had a decision to make. Did I carry on as planned -now having to fund myself - and perhaps upsetting the powers that be? Or did I turn the university down and hope to win a place the following year? I began to doubt whether I wanted the new post, the office and forensic career after all.
Shortly before 9.00 a.m. on the first day of September, I pulled into the carpark at Arnold Lodge, Leicester, and surveyed my new domain. It was a rather squat two-storey brown-brick building surrounded by a sixteen-foot-high chain-link fence. Most of the windows were of reflective glass that couldn’t fully open.
This was a regional secure-unit housing about twenty-four patients but with plans to eventually have sixty beds. The fence and control room announced immediately that the residents were meant to stay inside, at least for the short term and normally a maximum of two years. All the same, the place didn’t look that secure. What am I getting myself into, I thought.
Inside, the overriding impression was one of darkness. The ceilings seemed oppressively low, dragged down by the dark stained wood that had been chosen to decorate the interiors. There were locks on every door and the central control room was wired up to respond to ‘incidents’ anywhere in the complex.
It was very different to the light airy corridors of Leicester General. People would now be watching my every movement. We often forget that the staff spend longer in closed institutions than most of the inmates.
The men and women at Arnold Lodge were mostly aged between eighteen and forty. Some of them had done dreadful things or had the potential to do so - arsonists, paedophiles, rapists, sadists, killers … They were young, physically fit people and I could sense an energy in the unit, but it wasn’t something exciting, rather it was something that had to be watched.
Among the patients I had to treat was a woman in her mid-twenties who
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