Inseparable Bond (2 page)

Before he
slept, he ejaculated once more over the covers of the bed where the
victims had been taken before meeting their horrific death.

The police
were still searching the area around the estate for the missing boy
and making house-to-house enquiries at the surrounding houses. They
had twice visited John Bell without a hint of the gruesome
happenings in the basement below.

John took a
night out visiting many of the gay bars in Blackpool, his favourite
being ‘Pepes’ bar on Talbot Road, where he would always find a
young down and out prepared to give him some light relief in the
back toilets. The boys found him attractive with wide blue eyes,
wavy black hair off a fresh complexioned face along with his suave
charm he used around the clubs and bars of the town but John’s
handsome face hid a terrible secret. Possibly bored with the
conventional sex that was so readily available to him, he began
pandering to a more sadistic streak.

At the bar he
noticed a young attractive lad. ‘Looking for work, mate?’ he asked
in his friendly and plausible tone.

‘Yes, anything
mate, do you know of anything?’ he replied.

John
answered,’ I might just have the thing for you, the details are in
my hotel room, come with me, it’s just around the corner.’ John had
booked in to a nearby hotel for the night as when he left home the
police were still combing the park next to his house.

John and the
young lad strolled aimlessly to the Bedford Hotel on the North
Promenade and went up to his room on the first floor.

John went over
to the boy and loosened his belt before lowering his jeans, which
dropped to his ankles; he lifted his shirt to reveal the smooth
curved lines of his hairless torso.

He removed the
lad’s clothing and laid him on the bed, tying his wrists behind his
back, which he had been in agreement to oblige. John continued to
tie his ankles to the legs of the single bed, resulting in the boys
discomfort with his now young stretched legs at each side of the
mattress, being unable to widen any further.

John Bell
removed some tape from his shirt pocket and placed it over the
boy’s mouth, but the objections of the boy was to no avail and he
was now in a state of sheer submission, giving all control to John
Bell’s cruel and sadistic methods.

The boy
wriggled and perspired with muffled groans as John Bell performed
cruel acts on the young flesh by biting off the nipples of his
smooth chest and entrapping his genitals with a piece of string
whilst inserting a 10-inch wooden instrument in his rectum. Once
John had satisfied his deranged needs, he released the tape from
the boy’s mouth and untied the restraints from his lifeless body.
He walked out of the hotel to his car and drove the six miles to
his house at 3am.

At 10am the
next day, a chambermaid entered the room and drew back the
curtains. To her horror she saw the two single beds were bloodied
and disordered and on one of them lay the lifeless body of a naked
young boy. His face and chin were bruised as if someone had used
intense force to hold the mouth closed. There were seventeen
criss-cross slash marks on the front of his body, his nipples had
been badly bitten and he was bleeding profusely from his genital
area.

With this
latest find and a string of missing persons locally, the police
were now in search of a serial killer who restricted his gruesome
sadistic pleasures to local ground.

It was a few
days later when the police discovered human bones in a shallow
grave in the field next to the housing estate where John lived.
This sent shock waves through the community and their search
intensified for the killer or killers in their neighbourhood.

Over the
following weeks, detectives made little progress but they linked
the murder with the disappearance of two more girls which had been
found in similar shallow graves in Lytham, near to St Annes.

John Bell kept
a low profile from his house due to the amount of police activity
after the find as they intensified their search for further bodies
and constantly visited nearby houses, bombarding the owners with
more questions.

At his
construction site, he had designs on a lad who worked in the
carpentry sheds. John called him in to his shabby office to find
out more about the lad, asking him where he lived and where his
parents were, along with any other friends and relations.

He was
delighted to hear that he had not had contact with his parents for
the past four years and they had made no effort to contact him
since he walked out of the family house. He offered the lad a
salary increase, but he needed him to visit his house to complete
the necessary paperwork.

The lad, about
25-years-old, excitedly agreed and waited by John Bell’s car when
the factory closed. They drove through Thornton village and onto
the housing estate and into the garage of John’s house.

John offered
the lad a bath while he plated-up the Kentucky meal he had stopped
to buy on the way. The lad went upstairs to the bathroom and
stripped down while the water filled the bath. John Bell entered
the bathroom to see the lad naked with his fine firm muscled body
facing him. John went to grab the lad’s penis, which the lad
objected to and pushed John away, knocking his head on the
doorframe. Behind John’s back he held a baseball bat, which he
produced to the naked youth cowering in the corner. He raised the
bat and rained heavy blows on the top of his head. He went down
without a sound, lying limply as his attacker dragged him down the
stairs to the basement. He repeatedly raped the lad, who screamed
in agony after coming out of unconsciousness briefly before being
stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver which was hanging close by.
The final wound was the worst of all, a stab through the retina of
the eye.

The killing of
yet another respectable victim added to his list in this
strait-laced heart of middle-class Thornton, where his bloodstained
young body was dismembered and fed into the acid bath, like so many
other helpless victims,

The police at
this time had issued a nationwide alert for a man of between 35 and
40-years-old, about 6ft tall with a round face and black hair, the
description was similar to that of John Bell and he became
concerned after seeing sketched drawings in the local
newspaper.

The next day
John was on his way back from Liverpool when he stopped at Charnock
Richard service station for some tea. As he got out of his car, he
had parked in the lorry park, the driver of a lorry next to him
leaned out of the window and said, ‘Hey mate, you look just like
this guy in the paper,’ as the driver showed him the front
page.

John Bell
climbed the steps of the lorry and entered the cab, asking the
driver if he could have a closer look. ‘It is you, this guy is
you,’ he nervously said. As the lorry was parked away from the
building with no one in sight, John Bell could not allow this
driver to disclose his identity and reaching over to take a closer
look at the newspaper, he gripped the driver by the throat with his
right hand and pressed his head against the back of the seat. He
slid down, his hat falling off, revealing a bald patch on the crown
of his head. He just gurgled as John pressed his throat hard, the
driver did not realise what was happening. He pushed his face back
and after making a peculiar noise, the man was silent. He quickly
left the cab and re-entered his car and rejoined the traffic on the
M6 heading back north.

John Bell was
in a state of panic as he drove back to his home, this had been his
first killing in such a busy area and he was concerned he had been
seen.

On arrival at
his house, he was even more concerned to see a police car blocking
his driveway, with a hive of activity around the small
building.

He parked the
car and was approached by three detectives who wanted to know his
recent whereabouts. Keeping calm, he entered his house whilst being
bombarded with questions, looked at by the neighbours curiously at
either side.

The police
escorted him into the house and continued the grilling into his
movements but with little evidence against him, they reluctantly
left and the street cleared of everyone except the neighbours, who
were gathered en masse at this latest outcome on their
doorsteps.

It was time to
lay low; he closed his curtains to avoid the gathering outside his
house and went upstairs to his bedroom where he hid under the
covers of his bed.

The next day
the police returned and neighbours watched as they systematically
dug up the front garden of John Bell’s house, but gradually
admitted their search was fruitless and they cleared the area.

Detectives
returned to the house with a warrant for John Bell’s arrest and he
was escorted to the waiting police car, watched by horrified
neighbours.

A pure
coincidence led to his arrest, One of Bell’s employees was a close
friend of his latest victim to visit his house, he was the young
lad who had been offered a pay rise and a Kentucky meal which he
never lived to enjoy either.

The lad’s
friend had searched for him and went to report his disappearance to
the police, stating that he was last seen getting into Bell’s car
outside his factory.

This resulted
in a massive search for the missing youngster, due to the nature of
his disappearance being similar to the growing list of further
missing young kids.

The game was
up and Bell knew it, although he refused to admit to any crimes or
disappearance of his employee, even when they read out the names of
his victims.

Meanwhile,
more and more human remains were being discovered in the field by
Bell’s house, yet only he knew his victims were dissolved in
acid

The police
forensic team set about the interior of Bell’s house while he was
safely in custody and made their gruesome find in the basement. On
sifting through the sludgy remains of the acid bath, they found
human body parts which had not dissolved and the blocked sewer,
which contained a mass of human bones.

Upstairs they
found the bloodstained tiles in the bathroom of his latest victim
and human hair on the stair carpet leading to the basement.

This was the
evidence they needed to convict Bell, but could not identify any of
their findings or the amount of victims which had suffered at his
evil hands.

The trial was
held at Preston Crown Court, which attracted intense attention from
the media with the courtroom being packed every day, and outside
throngs of spectators blocked the pavements to watch the
protagonists arrive and leave.

On the arrival
of Bell, apparently amused by his fate, the police had trouble
controlling the mob as they surged forward to get a closer look at
the police van as it entered the court gates. The sensational
details of his sordid life had enthralled the nation, particularly
the residents of Thornton and the gay establishments of
Blackpool.

Newspaper
reporters in court could not disguise their disgust for the killer
or their sympathy for the relatives of his victims.

Fewer
murderers have rivalled John Bell for cold hearted, premeditated
callousness and cruelty of which the judge summed up on his guilty
verdict by saying, “I shall recommend to the Home Secretary the
sentence for your crimes will be life which is a long period but
you are an unusually dangerous man, I express the hope that where I
have said life imprisonment, it will mean precisely that.”

As he left the
court, he lowered his head flanked by four prison guards and was
taken down to await his immediate departure to Strangeways Prison
in Manchester, with only him knowing how his victims died through
the unimaginable terror they had experienced at the hands of John
Bell

The person or
persons responsible for the bodies found in the shallow graves
around the area is still at large, with Bell paying the price for
their freedom and continuation of brutality and murder.

Prison can
mean reality, something ultimately known, with special but familiar
sights, sounds and smells, Or it can be a fantasy, something that
one reads or hears about but never sees, terrifying, mysterious,
and perhaps exciting.

To the
architect, a neat solution to a complex housing problem, To the
psychologist, a career in the study of human behaviour; but to
thousands of people, an experience which slows up time, which
crowds them together, sets them apart and changes the course of
their lives.

In practice,
much of the ‘treatment and training’ in prison is designed to keep
people occupied at least some of the time. There is work, usually
of a simple kind, and a few leisure activities. But quite a lot of
informal learning does occur, though it may not exactly be of a
social kind. Criminal techniques are often discussed and passed
on.

John Bell was
to enter one of the countries oldest and severest prisons in the
system.

Strangeways,
in the city of Manchester, was a mere sixty miles from where he
committed his brutal and sadistic acts. It was an old Victorian
purpose built building with a reputation of housing some of the
countries most brutal killers.

Inmates have
to sleep two or three to a cell constructed over a century ago for
one; the overcrowding, the lack of space and the constant shortage
of staff combine to produce a daily routine with little work and in
which boredom is the main characteristic.

This was to be
home for John Bell for the next twenty years of his life. The white
van with its blacked-out windows pulls to a halt at the large
double entrance doors to the building. After a few moments, the
doors open and the van drives through with the doors quickly
closing behind it. Once in the yard, the doors of the van open and
Bell is escorted from the vehicle to the large metal single door,
flanked by prison officers.