Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [84]
Acting on the theory that Wigginton was Baldock’s aggrieved mistress, the police picked her up. But under questioning, she began to change her story from the one that they had agreed upon. She began to elaborate on it, mentioning that they had seen a suspicious-looking couple in the park. Later, she said that she had gone to the park in the evening and had fallen over a dead body in the dark, but had been too frightened to report it.
Ptaschinski’s nerve had gone the night before. With Wigginton in custody, it went again. She could not stand the waiting. She left the flat and began walking about in a confused state. As she wandered about aimlessly, the guilt gradually ate into her. She turned herself in at a nearby police station. Jervis and Waugh were arrested the next day.
Under relentless questioning, Tracey Wigginton admitted that she was a ‘vampire’. She was sent for detailed psychological examination. The doctors discovered that Tracey had been abandoned by her father and mother when she was a baby and was brought up by her grandparents George and Avril Wigginton. George was a profligate womaniser and Avril took out her hatred of her unfaithful husband on the children in her care. She beat Tracey mercilessly and poisoned her mind against men. Tracey turned to her genial grandfather for affection, but claimed that he had demanded sex with her after she had turned eight. At Catholic school, she became a lesbian and was known for her strange and evil behaviour. When she left school in 1982, she began calling herself Bobby and she went round to beat her grandmother up. She had a sado-masochistic relationship with a woman called Jamie who beat her with a strap and demanded total submission. She later underwent a lesbian ‘wedding’ performed by a member of the Hare Krishna sect and became a bouncer at a gay night club.
After the ‘marriage’ broke up, she asked the club’s owner, a man named John O’Hara, to help her have a baby. They had sex in front of six close friends. Tracey fell pregnant, but later miscarried. She began a stormy relationship with a woman named Donna Staib and although they lived together, they were both enormously promiscuous with other women. Around that time, Tracey dyed her hair ‘midnight blue’ and had her body tattooed with mystical signs. She and Staib shared a taste for horror videos. The night before Baldock’s murder they had watched a sequence of a man being shot in the forehead and his skull exploding over and over again in slow motion.
The police feared that Wigginton’s warped upbringing might be used in an insanity plea. But 24-year-old Wigginton took responsibility for her acts and was aware of their consequences. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The other three women pleaded not guilty. They claimed that they had not thought that Wigginton was serious when she talked of killing and drinking people’s blood and that they had been forced to go along with her because of her overbearing personality. Under cross-examination though, Ptaschinski admitted that she had been fascinated by the ‘thrilling and chilling plan to murder a man to drink his blood’. In court, the three women claimed that Wigginton had occult powers. They said that she claimed to be the Devil’s wife and practised mind control. They also insisted that the cross around Kim Jervis’s neck had been broken by Wigginton’s diabolical power, and she could disappear leaving only the eyes of a cat.
Ptaschinski, 24, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life. Jervis, 23, got 18 years for manslaughter. Only Waugh, 23, walked free from the court. Although she was the brightest of the four