sped past their eyes.
Searching the index for the Houghton name in relation to any crime or victimization, Jessica found several. She scrolled first to one and then to another. On the third scroll, they found the Houghton twins.
On the fiche a registration number told them where to look for the police report, but here, staring back at them, was a London Times article and pictures of the twins and their parents. Details of the case, while sketchy, came clearer and clearer for Jessica as she read on, as they did for Richard, who suddenly gasped, saying, “Of course! I now remember the case well. Tragic, horrifying really. A real curler.”
For Jessica, the veil had also been lifted, and she found it strangely coincidental that the shocked, traumatized twins as children were now hanging about St. Albans, getting spiritual advice from Father Strand and Father Luc Sante. While she scanned from photo to photo display, Jessica thought of how little play the case had gotten in America. At least in public America. But in police circles, the Houghton case had caused quite a ripple and wave, especially among forensics people. It had been a case in which the killers, mother and father to the twins, almost escaped a just execution over a botched forensics trail of evidence, not unlike the O. J. Simpson case in America in this regard.
Records clearly detailed the British case from 1954. Sharpe began paraphrasing and reading aloud in her ear, saying, “The father hailed from Gloucester, England… name of Frederick Houghton… finally caught while burying a thirteenth victim.”
“Literally caught in the act,” she replied.
“Fifty-two-year-old Houghton confessed to over twelve additional murders, all of which his wife knew of and nine of which she'd helped him to commit.”
“Look here,” she added, pointing at a buried paragraph and saying, “the last victim's remains were located in someplace called Finger Post Field.”
“Some ten miles outside Gloucester, near the remains of Houghton's first wife, his first victim,” Richard read on.
Now, her memory jogged, Jessica recalled having read the details in Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency. Asa Holcraft had received the British news that way for as long as she'd known him. “Rosemary Houghton, the second wife, forty years of age,” mused Jessica aloud now. “She had been charged with killing nine women, including her husband's own sixteen-year-old daughter, Heather.”
Richard shook his head as though the gesture might ease the words he read aloud. “Houghton, a construction trade builder, was charged with killing the same nine women- Heather, a daughter from his first marriage and Heather's mother, his first wife.”
Jessica read on in silence, Richard doing likewise over her shoulder, following her finger down the page.
Nine of the bodies were found below the Houghtons' house on Cromwell Street in Gloucester, some 110 miles west of London. Heather Houghton's body was discovered under the house of a former place of residence nearby. The eleventh body, that of the original Mrs. Houghton, Catherine Costello, had been located in a field in a place called Kempley, beside another victim, a former baby-sitter to the family who'd mysteriously disappeared some twenty years before.
“Amazing story, but where's the information on the twins?” she wondered aloud. “I remember twin little girls who lived in the house while all this was going on. There were other children in the house, too, but I particularly recall the twins for some reason.”
“Read on,” suggested Richard.
The thirteenth and final victim was yet another young baby-sitter, but in her case, the disappearance caused an uproar in the entire village. A search for her had gone on for weeks when Houghton, under pressure from his accomplice wife to rid the house of the “hot” body, found himself spodighted by authorities, who had begun to watch him on tips from neighbors about strange goings-on in the Gloucester home where the girl had baby-sat from time to time.
Something about the case which Jessica couldn't let go of: The total devotion the killers had instilled in their children to keeping the family secrets, as grisly and as gruesome as they were. It harkened back to what Luc Sante had said about the group mind, the power of authority figures and peer pressure, the sort of brainwashing and conditioning, which in her estimation, never completely left a person, whether the conditioning was to the lifestyle of a survivalist, a KKK member, a prisoner of war, a wrestling fan, or a child taught that murder, under the right circumstances, was all right; this mentality or some remnant of guilt stayed with a person forever. She pushed on with the article, reading:
There were five children living under the same roof with Mr. and Mrs. Houghton besides Heather. When Heather disappeared and next the baby-sitter, too many unanswered questions went wanting. The additional five children, two of them young twin girls, were all taken into custody and placed in the care of authorities.
Jessica assumed these Houghton children had all been placed in child welfare and protective agencies, and later found homes. The two Houghton twins she'd met earlier, according to Father Luc Sante, were nowadays devoted to helping others in the cause of Jesus Christ, but each of the sisters lived behind big, onyx glass eyes, glazed over at that. They appeared drugged, at least on a mild sedative, she believed. Perhaps, even now, they must continue on a regimen of psychoactive drugs to hold back the horrors of their childhood, in order to not live a life condemning their own parents who, out of a core evil that included abuse, murder, incest, and forced sodomy on their own children as final insult.
Once again, Jessica must face Luc Sante as a possible suspect in the crucifixion murders. Obviously, he had access to various drugs and would know how to use Brevital. Jessica could not help but wonder just how traumatized the two grown children of parental abuse must still be, and just how long Dr. Luc Sante, as a psychotherapist had had them under his care and treatment. She further wondered just how far the two bug-eyed creatures might go to further their cause in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
She shared these fears with Richard, somehow relaxing them by putting words to her fears and sharing with another person.
The name Gloucester, too, sounded familiar, and a quick check of the birthplace of Theodore “Burtie” Burton came up Gloucester. Another simple coincidence? Britain was, after all, an island nation, and life popped full with synchronicity and coincidence every day here. Still, Jessica could hardly help questioning these two hounds, coming as they did on one another's heels, yipping away at one another.
Good Inspector Sharpe, too, had difficulty simply swallowing these two examples of chance at play in the fields of murder in one generation so unkind and cruel, and the crucifixion murders in this generation.
“What do we do with this information?” she asked.
“It all remains relatively circumstantial.”
“Agreed. I've lost cases on more evidence.”
They fell silent, each locked in thought for some time before Jessica blurted out, “I think it's time we got a search warrant for St. Albans.”
“St. Albans? A church? You want a sanctuary for evil tooops! — sorry, a Freudian, I suppose. Do you really expect that a sanctuary for any and all in peril-such as the Houghton twins-to be served with a search warrant? In London?”
“I realize this isn't the South Bronx or West Queens, but we are dealing with a radical situation here, and the timetable on the body count has risen and will only continue to rise if we don't do something.”
“I tell you, getting a court order to raid a Catholic church in London, or anywhere in Great Britain, will not do. I'm afraid we've not progressed too far in that area since Henry the Eighth. But what we could do is approach from the bridgethe canal, the end of that labyrinthine tunnel we saw on the map. That's public domain.”
“Are you suggesting we go it alone?”
“Everyone else is concentrating efforts elsewhere, looking in the wrong place, I fear. Convinced by Boulte and company that surveillancing the waterways is our best effort. It appears Chief Inspector Boulte has everyone out in force doing so. So, I'm afraid we're on our own.”
“That could be damned risky. I don't have a desire to find myself spread-eagle on a resurrection cross, Richard.”
“Do not tempt me. It presents a fairly juicy picture to this person, love.”
“Stop that.”
“I will not,” he teased further.
“All right, as soon as we have the maps in hand, we go,” she agreed.
