Focus: Pure Evil
Robert Howard is serving a life sentence for murder, but how many unidentified victims did the "Wolf Man" leave behind, asks Enda Leahy - Minutes after he had discovered the woman, gagged, beaten and raped in her home, Willie Doyle, the sergeant in Youghal, pushed open a door in the house next door to find a mess of unpacked clothes: the belongings of the main suspect. The woman was being untied from her bonds and stretchered into an ambulance. It was 1972 and Doyle had never dreamed he would be pursuing a brutal sexual attacker in a little rural town like Youghal. He knew the woman's car had been taken, and he now knew Leslie Cahill, the man boarding next door, hadn’t appeared for breakfast.
The other boarders in the house said Cahill was such a nice fellow, he couldn’t possibly be responsible. But Doyle was satisfied that he was the man who had climbed over his neighbour’s back wall, broken in, and subjected the hairdresser, aged 58, to a night of beatings and rape, throwing her down the stairs and stuffing her mouth with cotton. Among Cahill’s belongings Doyle found a folded travel clock. Inside was scrawled what he later discovered was the man’s real name: Robert Howard.
More than 30 years later the name still fills Doyle with revulsion. "Why he picked Youghal, I’ll never know," the retired sergeant said last week. "The lady that he attacked could have died. She could easily have suffocated the way he left her." They found the car at Cork airport and Howard was arrested in Dublin. Doyle accompanied him on a silent journey back to Cork. "He accepted responsibility for [the attack] in the interview. He didn’t give any detail about the events, but he said he would plead guilty, nothing more."
Howard was 28. A few weeks earlier he had been released from prison having served six years for the attempted rape of a girl in England. It was clear that he had spent his time inside thinking about how not to get caught: upon release he began adopting false names and moved home regularly. After serving a 10-year sentence for the Youghal attack, it would be well over two decades before Howard was again put behind bars. The question remains, how many girls and women did he rape and kill in those 20 years?
As Howard serves a life sentence in an English cell for the murder of a 14-year-old girl, legal restrictions have been lifted, allowing the world to hear the chilling story of the so-called Irish Ripper from Wolfhill, Co Laois.
AFTER 26 hours’ deliberation a jury returned to their seats in the heat of Court 12 in Belfast courthouse last June. The jury foreman rose to announce the verdict. Robert Howard remained as emotionless in the dock as he had throughout the month-long trial. He was charged with the murder of Arlene Arkinson, 15, from Tyrone who disappeared without trace after accepting his offer of a lift home from a Bundoran disco in 1994. Fiddling with his glasses and scratching his thinning hair, Howard, now 61, avoided any eye contact with Arlene’s family. He sat with his back to them, not once looking around the court.
The foreman announced a verdict of not guilty, with 10 members in favour and two against. On three separate counts of perverting the course of justice, arising from Howard asking friends to lie for him, they had failed to reach a verdict. As the bailiffs moved to take Howard down to the cells, there to await another trial for sexual assault of another teenager from Castlederg in 1988, the Arkinson family stormed out in fury. Gathered in the Victim Support Office in the court buildings they prepared a statement, which Arlene’s sister Kathleen, 38, read to the press. But due to a court gagging order, imposed because of his forthcoming trial, the Arkinsons were prevented from revealing the 40-year history of rape and murder they believed included Arlene’s.
"We have waited 11 years for justice for Arlene and we will have to wait longer," read Kathleen, her older sister. "Arlene is still dead, we still have no body and somebody, and I believe I know who, murdered her and hid her away so we could never have peace or even a grave to visit." Almost a year earlier, in October 2003, they had been asked to testify against Howard in a trial for the murder in 2001 of another teenage schoolgirl, Hannah Williams, of Deptford, southeast London. Their testimony helped convict Howard. The English court, which sentenced him to life, was allowed to hear evidence, unlike in Northern Ireland, from outside the murder investigation, to show his "system" of grooming victims. Howard had befriended Arlene over a period of months before she disappeared.
The British police, unlike their counterparts in Tyrone, had physical evidence, following the chance discovery of Hannah’s body during the construction of the Channel tunnel. They also had 40 years’ worth of advice from the police forces in the multitude of places Howard had lived and offended. He was born in Wolfhill, Co Laois in 1944. His first offence, burglary, aged 12, led to him being sent to Saint Joseph’s Ferryhouse, an industrial school in Clonmel. Teachers working there have since been convicted of "appalling acts of human degradation against boys".
He left aged 16 and four years later in London, he tried to rape a six-year-old girl. He served just nine days for the crime. Five years later, in 1969, he was caught in northern England breaking into a house and attempting to rape a young woman. In the struggle he attempted to strangle her but unable to stifle her screams, was captured by neighbours. After serving six years for attempted rape and burglary, he was deported from Britain to Ireland in 1972 where he made his way to Youghal. After being caught by Doyle, and the Dublin airport police, he served 10 years in jail. Between his release in 1981 and his next recorded attack in 1993 Howard disappeared off the radar, spending three years in an allegedly abusive marriage to Patricia Peyton from Dublin, and moving between Ireland and England.
From then on it is clear the justice system failed almost entirely in its handling of Howard. He moved into an apartment on Main Street, Castlederg, Co Tyrone, in 1991. After forming a friendship with a local girl aged 16 he persuaded her to come back to his flat in 1993, apparently to meet another man she told him she liked. She later alleged to the police that he attacked and stripped her, tied her up, drugged her and repeatedly raped her for two days, a noose tied around her neck. He was charged with rape, but was released on bail until a hearing more than a year later in February 1995. In mid-1994, while awaiting the hearing, he offered Arlene Arkinson a lift home. She was never seen again.
When his case was finally heard he was given a three-year sentence suspended for five years, meaning he again walked free. Before he could be charged over Arlene’s disappearance, he had abducted and killed Hannah Williams in London. Police now intend to question him further about the disappearances of Elizabeth Chau, 19, and Lola Shenkoya, 27, who both vanished in Ealing, west London, between 1999 and 2000, when he lived nearby. Yet when he went on trial in Belfast in June, none of this history was available to the court. One of the jurors in Arlene’s murder case last week phoned a Belfast radio station to say he knew nothing of Howard’s horrific record and couldn’t have been expected to.
"I was just a Joe Bloggs off the street," he said. "We were told if there was any reasonable doubt then we had to find him not guilty . . . I do not feel guilty, why should I? We just had to go with what was presented in the courtroom." Paul Britton, a criminal psychologist who worked with detectives investigating Fred and Rosemary West, says that based on a brief examination of Howard’s history he would be "astounded" if these were the only attacks he committed. "This is a case that needs revisiting," said Britton. "I think there is much much more here to be shown to the world. This is someone for whom the sexual control and slaying of women is central to his life. He won’t say he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’ll pluck opportunities but he will plan his attacks too. "Here’s a man who has gone about his pleasure these 40 years. He’s been bottled up a half a dozen times in prison and he’s still gone on."
"Of [the women police suspect that he killed] many of them have disappeared, so you won’t know how quickly he takes them to their end, perhaps he confines them. He’s lived in many places and has moved on to avoid surveillance." The nature and sophistication of Howard’s attacks evolved over the years, from bungled break-in attacks to kidnappings and disappearances. Frustrated detectives point to the fact that only one example of Howard’s DNA has been recovered from a victim, when the Castlederg 16-year-old escaped from his apartment window after two days of imprisonment and rape. Williams’s body had been exposed to the elements for 11 months and any forensic evidence had deteriorated beyond use.
According to Britton, control of the victim is important to Howard so he will have prepared in increasing detail for his attacks. The charges dropped against Howard in Belfast last week were for multiple assaults on an unnamed third Castlederg teenage girl who came forward with her story after he was charged for Arlene's murder. She too had been groomed by Howard after he befriended the girl’s mother, just as he did with Williams in London years later. Britton says also that apart from such grooming, Howard will have developed ever more secure places in which to enact his fantasies. "There'll be a cellar, an attic, a van, a hide — a place where he will take his victim and where she can't make her presence heard. She'll be drugged, subdued," said Britton. "I would expect him to have progressed from one to the next, where he gets much more sadistic pleasure from the victim over the period of time. He comes to realise he can never quite get what he needs from them in terms of sadistic pleasure and so it has to escalate. It can be in time, but sadly it’s also in the intensity and the frequency of the terrible things that are done to them during that time. "It sounds like this man has a method of disposing of his victims that is moderately successful. He will have tucked away in his fantasies many other girls who were victims. It would be a shame if they stayed there."
THREE decades on, Willie Doyle says what he took from Howard's three-week sojourn in Youghal was the feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of him. "You never forget it once you’ve had dealings with a man like that," said Doyle. "He’s stuck in my mind over the years, and in the minds of many colleagues. He was very dangerous and I always suspected he’d be involved in something sinister wherever he was." Last week the Crown Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland dropped three charges of sexual assault against Howard, presumably, like so many of his cases, because of lack of evidence. Nevertheless, as he announced the state wasn’t proceeding with the case, Ciaran Murphy QC for the prosecution asked the judge to allow the charges "to remain on the books". Howard’s solicitor agreed to the move. Following the most recent failure by the judicial system to bring him to account, police in Britain and Northern Ireland are expected to step up analysis of Howard’s movements, cross-checking disappearances and rapes in places where he lived over the past 40 years. Criminal psychologists will craft questions in an effort to extract confessions fom Howard, or the possible locations of his victims. In Donegal, yet another search of the bog that Howard is known to have revisited after Arlene’s disappearance is being planned by the Arkinson family and locals.
The Wolf Man has carved his way onto the list of Ireland’s household names. Tragically the names of many of his victims may never be known.
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