However, shortly before Christmas that year, his landlady visited him on some trivial pretext, and she recalled in the witness box that “he wanted to get rid of me, I could tell. I thought there was a nasty smell about the place, but we’d had problems with next door’s drains before. He told me he couldn’t chat because he was waiting for a phone call.
“I know it was Christmastime when I went down there, because I remember asking him why he hadn’t put any cards up. I knew he didn’t have many friends but I thought someone must have remembered him and I thought it was a shame. The radio was playing ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool,’ and it was loud, I remember that, but that wasn’t anything unusual. Dennis liked music.”
Cooper’s surprise visit to the basement almost certainly sealed Wrightman’s death warrant. Creed later told a psychiatrist that he’d been toying with the idea of simply keeping Wrightman “as a pet” for the foreseeable future, to spare himself the risks that further abductions would entail, but that he reconsidered and decided to “put her out of her misery.”
Creed murdered Wrightman on the night of January 9th, 1973, a date chosen to coincide with a three-day absence of Vi Cooper to visit a sick relative. Creed cut off Wrightman’s head and hands in the bath before driving the rest of the corpse in his van to Epping Forest by night, wrapped in tarpaulin, and burying it in a shallow grave. Back at home, he boiled the flesh off Wrightman’s head and hands and smashed up the bones, as he’d done to the corpses of both Vera Kenny and Nora Sturrock, adding the powdered bone to the inlaid ebony box he kept under his bed.
On her return to Liverpool Road, Violet Cooper noted that the “bad smell” had gone from the basement flat and concluded that the drains had been sorted out.
Landlady and lodger resumed their convivial evenings, drinking and singing along to records. It’s likely that Creed experimented with drugging Vi at this time. She later testified that she often slept so soundly on nights that Dennis joined her for a nightcap that she found herself still groggy the next morning.
Wrightman’s grave remained undisturbed for nearly four months, until discovered by a dog walker whose terrier dug and retrieved a thigh bone. Decomposition, the absence of head and hands or any clothing rendered identification almost impossible given the difficulties of tissue typing in such circumstances. Only after Creed’s arrest, when Wrightman’s underwear, pantyhose and an opal ring her family identified as having belonged to her were found under the floorboards of Creed’s sitting room, were detectives able to add Wrightman’s murder to the list of charges against him.
Gail’s younger sister had never lost hope that Gail was still alive. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw the ring with my own eyes. Until that moment, I honestly thought there’d been a mistake. I kept telling Mum and Dad she’d come back. I couldn’t believe there was wickedness like that in the world, and that my sister could have met it.
“He isn’t human. He played with us, with the families, during the trial. Smiling and waving at us every morning. Looking at the parents or the brother or whoever, whenever their relative was mentioned. Then, afterward, after he was convicted, he keeps telling a bit more, and a bit more, and we’ve had to live with that hanging over us for years, what Gail said, or how she begged him. I’d murder him with my own bare hands if I could, but I could never make him suffer the way he made Gail suffer. He isn’t capable of human feeling, is he? It makes you—”
There was a loud bang from the hall and Robin jumped so severely that water slopped over the edge of the bath.
“Just me!” called Max, who sounded uncharacteristically cheerful, and she heard him greeting Wolfgang. “Hello, you. Yes, hello, hello…”
“Hi,” called Robin. “I took him out earlier!”
“Thanks very much,” said Max, “Come join me, I’m celebrating!”
She heard Max climbing the stairs. Pulling out the plug, she continued to sit in the bath as the water ebbed away, crisp bubbles still clinging to her as she finished the chapter.
“It makes you pray there’s a hell.”
In 1976, Creed told prison psychiatrist Richard Merridan that he tried to “lie low” following the discovery of Wrightman’s remains. Creed admitted to Merriman that he felt a simultaneous desire for notoriety and a fear of capture.
“I liked reading about the Butcher in the papers. I buried her in Epping Forest like the others because I wanted people to know that the same person had done them all, but I knew I was risking everything, not varying the pattern. After that, after Vi had seen me with her, and come in the flat with her there, I thought I’d better just do whores for a bit, lie low.”
But the choice to “do whores” would lead, just a few months later, to Creed’s closest brush with capture yet.
The chapter ended here. Robin got out of the bath, mopped up the spilled water, dressed in pajamas and dressing gown, then headed upstairs to the living area where Max sat watching television, looking positively beatific. Wolfgang seemed to have been infected by his owner’s good mood: he greeted Robin as though she’d been away on a long journey and set to work licking the bath oil off her ankles until she asked him kindly to desist.
“I’ve got a job,” Max told Robin, muting the TV. Two champagne glasses and a bottle were sitting on the coffee table in front of him. “Second lead, new drama, BBC One. Have
