The subsequent trial wrestled with all sorts of issues such as the retracted admissions, the refusal of legal advice initially, and the status of John McKenna. Many trials collapse following a successful assault on police and prosecutor practices. Once George’s team had eliminated every possibility other than Paul being the killer, such an attack was the only tactic left if there was to be any hope of the defence winning him his liberty.
George had to front this for Sussex Police. It isn’t unusual for a senior officer to be set up to draw the venom of defending counsel. I have done it often, absorbing all the criticism personally, and, in most cases, it protects others.
Pummelled in the witness box, as Grace has been on many occasions, George had to bob and weave. He had to explain and re-explain every decision, every act, hoping that his honest accounts remained consistent in the eyes of the jury. This included the denial of access to the solicitor, which was a particular worry for him.
His meticulously written notebook and seventy-eight-page witness statement certainly helped, as did his conspicuous integrity and obsessive attention to detail. The arguments lasted for hours but George won every point.
His bosses’ scrutiny of their young DI’s performance during the trial reminded George that the outcome of this contest would determine his future career. Everything was on his shoulders. Resolute yet isolated, George knew who was going to be the fall guy if Teed walked free. Despite his unerring honesty and professionalism George felt angry, lonely and vulnerable. If the old triumphed over the new he, and many like him, would be finished.
Thankfully, despite all the grubby accusations thrown at the police by the defence, the jury saw sense. Three clear cries of ‘Guilty!’, one for each victim, rang out from the jury foreman across the hushed Lewes Crown Court. Justice delivered for George, Hilda and young David Teed.
A mandatory life term followed but, stunningly, no appeal. No desire to overturn verdict or sentence. Just a solemn acceptance of his fate and twenty-three years to dwell on his evil was how it ended for Paul Teed.
George felt he and his modern tactics had been vindicated. Two years later he worked with the Deputy Chief Constable to take charge of a major review of Sussex CID. Promotion came soon after and he became the first serving UK police officer with ‘special dispensation’ from the Home Secretary to operate as a full member of the Security Service (MI5). He operated as a member of K2 Branch (Counter-espionage), which also saw him work with MI6 and, in the USA, with the FBI and CIA. On his return he headed Brighton CID then moved on to work in other sensitive areas of policing. He was my boss when I was a DC and I held him in the highest regard. His sense of justice, fairness and respect were a huge influence on me as I matured in service. His bosses went on to embrace the new world, both achieving further promotions.
Paul is now free. I was fascinated by what becomes of a person who has wiped out his family once they have been released, so I tracked him down. Although I doubted that he would agree to meet, incredibly he was very keen to.
Peter James and I have, over the years through our different professions, met many killers, but not mass murderers and certainly not those who have had twenty-three years of incarceration to contemplate their act.
We met Paul in an austere roadside pub half way between Leeds and York. When we drove up in a black Mercedes it must have looked like we were carrying out a drugs deal. We didn’t know what to expect, we didn’t even know what Paul would look like now. As a thin, gaunt man in his fifties climbed out of a rackety Ford Fiesta that had lurched into the empty car park, blue smoke spewing from the exhaust, we guessed we hadn’t been stood up.
He was much cheerier than I had expected, but Paul’s prison pallor bore testament to the way years inside, with the stale air, drug culture and diet of cheap food sap the vitality from every pore.
Over the next three hours he laid bare his life before, during and after the slaying. He knows what he did that night was truly bad. He accepts that he meticulously planned the deaths yet, despite the evidence, maintains that neither his father, Hilda nor David had any idea what had happened to the others, such was their clinical yet brutal execution. He blames his actions on a slow build-up of tension, animosity and jealousy. The seed, he says, was sown months before with every cross word or fallout thereafter fuelling his determination to take their lives.
He is philosophical about his life in prison. He talks about inmates being broken machines and needing their software fixing (as opposed to those in psychiatric hospitals who he says have hardware problems). He is less convinced that jail is effective at the reprogramming prisoners so need.
Nowadays he is forever trapped, defined and scarred by that moment of evil madness. He struggles to find employment; he secured a job once in a garden centre but they got cold feet when they found out he had battered three people to death. He has turned to painting and tries to sell his abstract artwork online.
He has become deeply spiritual; he believes in signs and portents such as black dogs — like his father’s Great Dane and one he owned that was crushed by a train in 1984 at the site of the 1989 Purley rail crash — and the number twenty-three, his age at the time of the murders and the time he spent incarcerated.
He is a great believer in destiny but, above all, he is clear that he chose to do what he did; no-one forced him. He accepts that he had no right to do it and insists that he regrets it every day. Only he knows how much.
He wonders what life would be like if he had made different decisions. The true tragedy is however, whatever was going on in his head, he denied the others any choices; he took those for himself with every swing of the bat.
Unlike several killers I’ve met who are clearly psychopaths and have no conscience, enabling them to live guilt-free with the knowledge of what they have done, Peter and I both got the sense from Paul that he is, deep inside, consumed with remorse. His victims are long dead and buried, and Paul is now at liberty. But I don’t see him ever being a free man. He will be chained to his conscience forever.
3: Knockers and Noblemen
I recall in my childhood my dad insisting, in his usual no-nonsense way, that every Sunday evening we all sat down to watch BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. In my boyhood naivety I believed that the world of antiques was populated by quaint gentlefolk receiving honest windfalls. The one I later battled with in Brighton was riddled with deceit, extortion and violence.
In the years following the Second World War, rag and bone men, of the kind immortalized in Steptoe and Son, were a familiar sight. They would traipse Britain’s streets with a horse and cart, yelling ‘rag and bone!’, inviting people to throw junk such as broken vacuum cleaners out of their houses. But a group of low-lifes in Brighton decided they could enjoy a much more lucrative door-to-door trade by conning unsuspecting people out of their antiques. They became more proactive knocking on front doors, frequently targeting the frail and elderly, offering to buy their antiques and valuables for instant cash.
These ‘knocker boys’, as they became known, had only a rudimentary knowledge of antiques — enough to spot items of value — but their game was to cheat people. A particularly pernicious trick was to carry a bag of sawdust in their pockets. On entering the house of an elderly person, they would furtively pour the sawdust on the ground beneath the best piece of furniture, then warn the victim they had woodworm, and offer to take it off their hands before it spread to all the other furniture. If an owner refused to sell any high-value items the knocker boy would pass the details to a burglar, who would later steal them and give the knocker boy a cut.