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  No one knew where Jane was; she had vanished into thin air.

  The one person who realised straight away that something strange, possibly bad, had happened to Jane was her boyfriend, Malcolm Sentance. Very early on, Malcolm was extremely upset by her disappearance. The couple were extremely close and Malcolm had given her a warm hug and goodbye kiss as he left for work, at about 6.45 that morning, from their home in Shaftesbury Road, Brighton.

  This was a routine the two followed each day: they would wake up, complete their morning rituals and bid their goodbyes as they set off for the day. It is what many of us do each morning, comfortable in the knowledge that all is well and that we will be seeing our loved one as usual later that evening.

  Sometimes, though, terrible things occur, and they can happen to anyone. Often the first sign that something is wrong is that our calls are not returned and our texts not responded to. This is what Malcolm Sentance would experience as that gloomy March day wore on, with his calls to Jane unanswered and the voicemail messages that he had left on her mobile phone ignored.

  When Malcolm returned home at 3.40 that afternoon, there was no sign of Jane but he was not too worried. But as afternoon became evening his concern led him again to the phone. After fruitlessly calling friends and family, none of whom had heard from or seen Jane, he sat back in his armchair, by now deeply troubled. It was completely unlike Jane to have her phone switched off; even at the school where she taught, she would keep the mobile’s silent facility in operation – especially for him.

  Contact by phone during the day was a precious thing to them both. Now Malcolm just could not dispel the feeling that all was not well, that Jane was in some kind of trouble.

  When the clock struck midnight and there was still no sign of, or message from, Jane, he picked up the phone once again, this time to call the police. Though they were sympathetic, Jane’s disappearance was initially treated as a routine missing-person inquiry. But, as the weekend passed, with Malcolm in a state of near-panic, a disturbing realisation began to dawn on him.

  Five full days after Jane Longhurst vanished, a major police investigation was launched. Officers occupied eight rooms at the Sussex Police Headquarters, and 20 detectives were initially assigned to what had been labelled Operation Keen. Since Jane’s disappearance, it was ascertained that her bank account had not been touched, her mobile phone was switched off and it did not appear that she had taken any of her personal property, which would have suggested she was leaving Malcolm.

  The police had pondered over every possible reason why Jane might simply vanish as she had. The two obvious possibilities were that she had been abducted and killed or that she had willingly accompanied someone and then been murdered. It seemed more likely that she had gone with someone of her own accord because, police later surmised, her physical fitness and strength would have ensured she would not have been taken off without a struggle.

  Of course, a blow to the head or a threat from a weapon could equally have ensured her subjugation, but there was no indication that either had occurred. Therefore it seemed prudent to assume that someone had manipulated Jane Longhurst into a position where she could be physically controlled.

  As time went on and the circumstances surrounding Jane’s disappearance became more suspicious and the chances of her being dead increased, the missing-person inquiry became a murder investigation and about 20 more detectives were assigned to what was now dubbed Operation Mystic. Up to 70 officers were now involved in the search.

  Police helicopters clattered over areas throughout the county and fingertip searches were undertaken in parks, railway cuttings, woods and forests, but very few clues were unearthed.

  In order to assist the inquiry, the Argus newspaper in Brighton agreed to distribute hundreds of wanted posters featuring the missing woman.

  After four weeks in which nothing tangible had emerged, Sussex Police pledged £5,000 for information as they made a renewed appeal for help in finding Jane.

  The following Thursday, Detective Inspector Chris Standard, who was heading the investigation, said at the first of a number of televised press conferences, ‘We hope that, by putting up this reward, we will prompt someone’s memory and subsequently locate Jane – that is the main focus of our inquiry.’

  Malcolm, and Jane’s mother and sister, joined a news conference to appeal for help. When this achieved virtually nothing, to say the police were surprised would be an understatement. DI Standard admitted that in his 25-year-career as a police officer he had never known anything like it. Normally, appeals such as this produced a wealth of helpful leads. Here there was nothing. It began to seem as though the mystery of what had happened to Jane Longhurst would persist indefinitely.

  The officer also admitted that there was by now only a slim chance that Jane was still alive. When he talked about ‘finding Jane’, he was speaking about finding her body.

  Finally, on Saturday, 19 April 2003, everybody’s worst fears were confirmed. Jane was found and the circumstances were horrific. She had been discarded like an old mattress in a nature reserve 18 miles from her Brighton home. It seemed impossibly perverse that Jane’s lifeless corpse should end up in an RSPB bird sanctuary.

  She had been throttled to death and her charred, still smouldering corpse had very recently been set alight with the help of a fire accelerant. Firefighters had been called to Wiggonholt Common, near Pulborough, West Sussex, at 8.30pm after a motorist spotted a plume of smoke between some trees just off the main road.

  At first, the firefighters thought they were dealing with a mound of rubbish that had been ignited. When it became clear that the blackened remains were those of a human being, they were initially unable to confirm if the body was that of a man or a woman, but the police later confirmed that it was indeed a female.

  Jane had been missing for just over five weeks.

  As she had been completely stripped of her belongings, police made it clear that they wanted to hear from anyone who may have had knowledge of where her blue Nokia 3310 mobile phone, black Next wallet, shoes and blue denim jacket were.

  The following Monday, as tributes were paid to the popular teacher, the officer now leading the inquiry, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Dennis, announced, ‘Our job now is to find Jane’s killer.’ He explained at the press conference that the killer had attempted to dispose of the body as quickly as possible, just before dark. Was the killer afraid of the dark? Of what might be in it for him?

  DCI Dennis went on to reveal: ‘Jane’s been kept somewhere, she’s been dead for a long time and she probably died shortly after she disappeared. They have tried to get rid of her in a fit of panic, something spooked them to deposit her where they did, and then they’ve tried to burn the evidence.’

  Ominously, he added that the body had been ‘well preserved’ for the four or five weeks since the murder.

  What had Jane’s murderer been doing with her?

  DCI Dennis rounded off the conference with a message that police were keen to trace three cars seen in the area where the body was discovered.

  A statement from Jane’s family, read out at the press conference, said, ‘While we expected the worst, none of us could be prepared for how devastating this is. We’ve lost a devoted daughter, sister and partner. All who knew her loved Jane and she enjoyed life to the full. She will be missed terribly and her death has left a hole in our lives.’

  Colleagues of the murdered school teacher paid tribute to her, describing her as a ‘delightful, genuine and caring person’.

  Still hindered at this point by the lack of a viable suspect in Jane’s murder, the police started appealing again. ‘Now is the time for anyone with any information about Jane to come forward,’ said DCI Dennis. ‘As a matter of routine we have been speaking to people who are significant in Jane’s life. At this time, however, there are no suspects.’

  This is a procedure that occurs in most murder cases. Everybody needs to be eliminated from the inquiry. As police were q
uick to suggest, it was likely that Jane knew her killer, though they could not rule out the possibility of a stranger being responsible.

  In another statement read at a press conference, Jane’s mother and her sister, along with Malcolm Sentance, appealed for the person, or persons, who may be harbouring the killer to give him up: ‘We are slowly coming to terms with what has happened to Jane and pulling together as a family to support each other during such a difficult time. Our main aim now is to find the person who did this and to make sure justice is done. Recent publicity has prompted a lot of people to come forward and we would reiterate the appeals that the police have been making. Anyone who knows anything about what happened, we beg you to come forward. If you are protecting a loved one, or you think someone is hiding something, try to imagine how you would feel if this was your daughter or partner or sister who has been killed this way. You too would want to find the person who did it. If you know or suspect anything please contact the police.’

  When Jane’s horribly burned remains were removed from the desolate woodland where they had been dumped, the police undertook a meticulous search of the area. They found some items that were deemed to be part of a ‘significant breakthrough’. Among them were the match used to set light to Jane’s dead body, a box of matches – presumably where the match had come from – and Jane’s wristwatch. The items were rapidly sent for forensic testing. With these finds entered into evidence, DCI Dennis soon made it apparent that his team were ‘one step behind’ the killer.

  ‘[The items] were found around the area where Jane was set on fire – it may be that they have nothing to do with the inquiry but they could also provide vital clues as to who her killer is,’ he said, then, looking pointedly into the television cameras before him, he made a direct appeal to the murderer. ‘If you are Jane’s killer then please come forward now and speak to us. We want to hear from you and find out what has happened. This is the chance to tell us.’

  Following all these impassioned appeals from the police and the victim’s family, more than 100 calls were made to Sussex Police in relation to the murder hunt. At first, the information did not seem too encouraging. Then a name came up and the police zeroed in immediately. The name was Graham Coutts. Coutts was the boyfriend of one of Jane’s friends, Lisa Stephens, and it was learned that Jane had made a telephone call to the couple’s flat on the day she went missing.

  It was around this time that another name, Paul Kelly, surfaced, as a result of staff at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton becoming suspicious and alerting the police about an unpleasant smell emanating from the space Mr Kelly had rented. The call was prompted by the extensive coverage surrounding Jane’s disappearance.

  When officers were dispatched to check the storage unit on Monday, 28 April, they made some crucial discoveries. Mr Kelly had Jane Longhurst’s mobile phone there, along with her denim jacket, her purse and her swimming kit. Also found was a bloodstained shirt, later discovered to belong to Graham Coutts. The blood on the shirt turned out to be Jane Longhurst’s.

  In addition, there was a condom containing semen – Graham Coutts’s semen.

  A tarpaulin and a roll of adhesive tape were also present in the space, along with a plastic petrol can.

  Mr Coutts certainly had some explaining to do, the more so because he had been captured on CCTV purchasing a can of petrol, a toilet roll and bin liners from a Texaco garage next to the King Alfred Leisure Centre in Hove, adjacent to Brighton. Around 40 minutes after this recording was made, Coutts was seen by a motorist on the common leading to the bird reserve and Jane Longhurst’s burning body.

  When police initially interviewed 35-year-old Coutts, a former musician, originally from Leven in Scotland, and his girlfriend, Lisa Stephens, it became apparent that they had been friendly with Jane Longhurst and Malcolm Sentance for some five years.

  Subsequently, it was learned that it was Coutts who had answered the phone when Jane had called that day in March. On the pretext of joining her for a swim at the local baths, Coutts instead lured Jane to his flat. Unbeknownst to her, he had decided to play some of his favourite games with her and, unfortunately for her, his sexual pleasure was in the front of his twisted mind.

  It was in the sanctity of his lair that the pasty-faced deviant with a wolfish smile would enact his lifelong fantasy of strangling a woman to death for sexual pleasure. Against Coutts’s demented onslaught, poor Jane stood no chance. She was dragged into the bedroom, hurled down on to the bed and raped. During this ordeal, she was also strangled with a pair of tights.

  The savage indignities wreaked on Jane Longhurst would continue long after her death.

  Once the police had focused on Coutts as their prime suspect, it was only a short time before he was arrested. He professed to be in shock at the charges levelled at him. From the outset, he denied everything and proved to be a very stubborn interviewee. He was released but shortly afterwards rearrested, and this time the police came down a lot harder on him. They had spoken to a couple of his ex-girlfriends, who had had some very disquieting things to say about the man. He liked to tie them up and partly strangle them, for example. Some smothering during sex with Coutts was not unheard of either.

  When police obtained authorisation to search the suspect’s home, they discovered, along with more DNA evidence linking him to Jane Longhurst, two home computers. Stored on these were thousands of hardcore pornographic images, the vast majority of which depicted women being brutalised: hanging, suffocation, stabbing all being inflicted on bound, or in some way helpless, women, naked and raped. Some of the women appeared to be dead: covered in blood or with cyanotic hues discolouring their faces as a result of strangulation, their eyes staring glassily into the camera.

  These sickening images were discovered after a look at Coutts’s online history to trace his recent internet travels. Among the disgusting websites he visited, all of which showed extreme brutality and degradation of women, were pages devoted to rape, necrophilia, hanging and asphyxiation. It was also learned that these were among the sites viewed by Coutts the day before Jane went missing.

  Given his obvious interest in violent atrocities committed against young women, the police confronted Coutts with what they had gleaned from his PC. Armed also with the physical evidence they had gathered, they tried to persuade him to at least admit some culpability for Jane’s death.

  Under questioning, Coutts alternated between reeling off phrases such as ‘I really don’t want to talk about this with you’ and openly weeping. Mostly, though, the part-time salesman with the eerie stare and receding hairline just sat in silence, failing to answer any questions at all.

  In the end, he did acknowledge that he had been responsible for Jane’s death but insisted that it had come about as a direct result of an accident caused during what he described as ‘a mutual fantasy’.

  Jane, he said, had consented to being tied up and strangled with a pair of stockings during sex, but he had unfortunately taken it too far. The fact that the tights he used to garrotte the life out of Jane Longhurst had been so deeply embedded in her throat that they had almost disappeared seemed not to dissuade him from trotting out this ludicrous story.

  The police knew they were dealing with a sado-sexual homicidal psychopath – one of the most dangerous of all killer breeds. They had recently secured CCTV video footage of Coutts at the Big Yellow Storage Company in Brighton wheeling around a huge cardboard box. Inside this box was Jane Longhurst, naked, some 11 days after she had been murdered. Coutts, it transpired, had had to remove the decomposing body from his garden shed, where the body had originally been stored, because it had begun to smell.

  He later said that he had not wanted to upset his utterly unaware girlfriend, who was expecting twins, with the foul odour of putrefying flesh. Coutts had made the gruesome pilgrimage to the storage facility to abuse the corpse on at least ten occasions. In fact, he only disposed of his victim’s body when he feared he might be caught.

  His
clandestine trips to his garden shed were doubtless spent engaged in similar revolting necrophiliac acts. Despite the horror of what this man had done, he displayed absolutely no remorse in the presence of the police officers who questioned him. They resolved that Coutts, once found guilty, was going to prison for a very long time.

  The trial of Graham Coutts began on Monday, 14 January 2004, and emotions were running high in the Crown Court in Lewes, a few miles from Brighton; the sheer fiendishness of the alleged crimes was enough to guarantee the accused a hostile reception.

  Flanked by guards, Coutts sat in the dock, quite placid for the most part, dressed in a dark suit and tie. Occasionally, he would put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses which merely served to make him look like a more scholarly version of the sexual deviant the prosecution claimed he was. Though he could easily have passed for a chartered accountant or a respectable businessman, sitting there so smartly attired, no one was fooled – he seemed to exude an air of malevolence as his eyes swam behind the lenses of his spectacles.

  The first issue the Crown dismantled was Coutts’s categorical denial that he had murdered Jane Longhurst to satisfy a macabre fascination with strangled and dead women. He claimed instead, as he had earlier to the police, that Jane had consented to ‘asphyxial’ sex during which he tied a pair of tights around her neck. He did admit storing Jane’s body in his shed and, later, a box for 35 days after her death, before setting it alight with petrol and a match.

  Two of Jane’s former boyfriends were called. Lincoln Abbotts told the court that he had had a ‘normal’ sex life with her. At no point had they incorporated, or even discussed, asphyxia or strangulation in their lovemaking. And a written statement from Michael Downe confirmed the same thing. He and Jane had never spoken of bondage, or anything of that nature.

  It was starting to look as though Graham Coutts had made an error of judgement when it came to Jane Longhurst’s sexual proclivities. Either that or he had fabricated this whole disparaging assault on Jane’s memory in an attempt to conceal his own loathsome perversions.