‘Sometimes they murder you’: The chilling words of Christopher Laverack just days before he was killed
VICTIM: Christopher Laverack
Journalist Phil Ascough had unrivalled access to murdered schoolboy Christopher Laverack’s family and the investigation team. Forty years after his death he looks back on the case here with previously unpublished interviews
As the Yorkshire Post’s editorial team based in Hull we used our numbers and local knowledge to get a head start.
Two colleagues – a photographer and a reporter – attended the murder press conference at Tower Grange police station in east Hull.
They rang me at our office in Ferensway to confirm the name and address of the victim, and I drove to Woodlands Drive, Anlaby, and knocked on Christopher Laverack’s front door.
A police officer answered and said Christopher’s mum Pam Cawley wouldn’t be talking to reporters. I told them more would be on the way, and I would pass that message on once they arrived.
I think the first reporter was from the News of the World. I told them Christopher’s family weren’t talking, and then I left. I was told later it made no difference. One by one they trooped up the garden path.
In truth there’s no reason why they would have believed me. For all they knew I might have had a notebook bulging with dramatic quotes from Pam. I didn’t, but I did have the beginnings of a decent relationship with the investigation team, and that paid dividends over the years.
It helped that I’d already worked with Peter Baker, the senior investigating officer who would soon be promoted to Superintendent, on a variety of other crime stories. We got along well and respected each other. I’ll refer to him as Baker because that’s how he answered the phone. Still does.
As the investigation stretched into months and then years I got to know Baker and some of his team well. We began working on a book, because it was considered important to have an accurate record of the case rather than something which might become distorted by the ever-changing versions appearing in the media.
KILLER: Melvyn Read
We never published because we couldn’t get round the recognition that we didn’t have a conclusion, yet could suddenly be presented with one at any time. But I did get unrivalled access to Christopher’s family and to the investigation team and their documents. A collection of cuttings pasted into Mr Men scrapbooks is evidence that many of the detectives were parents of young children. They weren’t short on motivation.
The outline of the case is well known.
Christopher was abducted from the home of his half-sister, Kim Hines, her husband Steve and their baby son Martin on the night of Friday March 9, 1984. Steve nipped to the pub and while he was out someone took Christopher. His body was recovered from Beverley Beck on the Sunday.
A post-mortem examination showed Christopher had been subjected to serious sexual abuse over a period of several months or possibly longer. He died from a fractured skull and brain injuries.
Pam kept a low profile, granting only brief interviews, and very few of them. It wasn’t until 1994 that she really opened up. During a series of interviews she made it clear to me she was supportive of the police investigation, albeit with caveats around a lack of urgency on the Friday night and a call she received late on the Sunday morning.
INCENTIVE: A reward of £25,000 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer
“I was curled up on a chair by the window, near the phone. It rang, I immediately picked it up. I don’t remember what they said first but it was a young person’s voice and they said ‘We’ve found a body’… I remember collapsing. I thought later how outrageous it was. They obviously assumed it was the police who had picked up the phone.”
Baker was not contacted until early on the Saturday morning and the circumstances of the abduction immediately worried him. Plants had been knocked off a window sill, a TV set had been pulled out with such force that the cable had broken, with the plug still in the socket. A back door key was missing.
The scenario was similar to a staged burglary at a murder scene in Haworth Street, Hull, from March 1983 which had been reported extensively in the media when it went to trial only two months before this incident.
Frances McFaul was convicted of murdering her adoptive mother with an axe. She mocked up a burglary to try and cover her tracks. The attack was triggered by the pair arguing over Frances’s affair with a married man – Steve Hines, Kim’s husband. As the Laverack investigation became a murder inquiry, the similarity between the two crime scenes reinforced Baker’s view that the killer had regular access to Christopher.
The spotlight also fell on family and there are background aspects which show how things could have been so different if the various factions had been more united, less fragmented.
It also targeted sections of the homosexual community. A team which became known as “the Sweetie Squad” raided public toilets. Arrests were made for acts of indecency and other offences but the priority was to find out who, if anybody, was preying on young boys.
Melvyn Read, Pam’s brother, was named by police as the killer in 2012 but had never been a major suspect because he had no known links to homosexual activity. Any case against Steve Hines was weakened because, according to his wife, he was a serial womaniser and had no interest whatsoever in men.
Richard Bolton was a known homosexual. Brother of Kim, son of Pam and her first husband Brian Bolton, he often stayed at the house in Harpham Grove when Christopher was visiting. He later lived in Amsterdam and I interviewed him on a business trip there.
REPORTER: Phil Ascough, who covered the case as a young journalist
“The police asked if I was gay and I told them I was,” he revealed.
“I had nothing to hide from them but I didn’t know they were going to blurt it out to the whole world. They were trying to get me to say that I had been interfering with Christopher. The tactics were exactly as you see on TV.
“They went through everybody I knew. I lost all of my friends and I lost my job and everything. I tried to remember the police had a job to do but that didn’t always help when I was being hammered. It went on for three years.”
Homosexual activity was also seized upon by various individuals and organisations whose efforts to connect Christopher’s murder to other cases of suspected child abuse became distractions.
Jan Knos, a Hull vicar who died in prison in 1986 while awaiting trial on 28 charges of sex offences against children, was the subject of intense speculation by the public and in the media but had no contact with Christopher.
CUTTINGS: Newspaper coverage of the case
Attempts to link the murder to sex abuse allegations in another area of east Hull were found to be baseless, but not before South Yorkshire Police were brought in by the Police Complaints Authority for an investigation which took six years and cost around £3m.
More than ten years after the murder Pam made it clear she despised Steve Hines for leaving her son defenceless at home, but she also blamed herself for ignoring her own intuition, a sense that all was not well. She wondered if they should just take Christopher home again, but they left him at Harpham Grove.
There were certainly signs of unusual behaviour on Christopher’s part. He only decided that morning that he wanted to go to Kim’s house instead of his dad’s, and he insisted on wearing his smart school shirt and tie. But the biggest clue that things might be badly wrong came the previous weekend from a conversation with his dad which was never shared at the time.
Ray’s daughters told me: “Christopher asked dad why he was his dad and not Pam’s other husbands. Dad explained why he was his dad, and Christopher asked what men did. He [Christopher] said something like, ‘Men don’t just do things to your bum – sometimes they murder you’. It makes you wonder if someone had threatened him and if he had said anything they would have killed him.”
It’s possible that Ray was planning to discuss the matter with Christopher again on the following weekend but he was denied the opportunity by the late change of plans. Instead of telling his dad what had been going on, Christopher went to Harpham Grove and met his killer.
Read the first part of our coverage of the anniversary here
A mother’s grief: My Lost Son
by Pam Cawley
