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30/04/03 - "I Love You,
Now Confess"
Margaret Ambrose
The
Lounge
Laurna-Jane Stevens was a young, auburn-haired dance instructor
who, like most middle-class English at the time, followed
the case of Shaun Armstrong with interest. Armstrong was
in prison awaiting trial for the murder of his three year
old neighbour, Rosie, who was last seen alive running
out of her house when she heard the music from an ice-cream
van.
Rosie's body was found stuffed in a garbage bag in Armstrong's
flat. She had been raped and murdered, and forensic evidence
later revealed that she had also been attacked by a dog,
panicked by her screams during the rape. Whilst most people
were convinced of Armstrong's guilt, Laurna-Jane wasn't.
She began writing to Armstrong in prison, saying that
she believed he was innocent and felt his pain at his
incarceration. Soon, the pair were corresponding regularly,
and soon they fell in love. Eventually he proposed. If
conducting a relationship with a man on remand for murder
wasn't enough to contend with, there was something else
bothering Laurna-Jane.
Whilst she was desperately in love with Armstrong, she
wanted the relationship to be founded on trust and absolute
honesty. So she wrote to Armstrong expressing these feelings.
He responded that he felt the same way. You deserve a
straight answer, he wrote on January 11, 1995.
Yes, love, I am responsible for the crime I am accused
of…this is as honest as it gets…You are the
only woman I have trusted in years…As you said,
doll, if we were honest we would be OK… Unfortunately
for Armstrong, Laurna-Jane wasn't being honest at all.
Laurna-Jane wasn't a woman in love - she wasn't even a
woman.
Laurna-Jane was a man named Bernard O'Mahoney, a burly
labourer who's made it his life mission to dupe murderers
and child molesters into confessing their crimes. Blissfully
ignorant and in love, Armstrong went to great lengths
to reassure Laurna-Jane, that even though he was guilty,
they could still be together soon.
He wrote to her, explaining that he planned to plead diminished
responsibility by reason of insanity; all of which, he
admitted was a lie. But please, don't tell anyone, or
else I'm in deep shit, ok? Armstrong had no idea just
how much shit he was already in. When all parties gathered
in court five months later for the start of the trial,
the chief prosecutor was handed a bundle of letters.
A stony-faced, shattered Armstrong suddenly decided to
change his plea to guilty and is currently serving a life
sentence. O'Mahoney has been on a crusade of letter writing
for over a decade, nabbing some of Britain's most notorious
and highest profile paedophiles and murders.
Whilst he is described by the media in his country as
possessing a talent for adopting different personalities,
each individually designed to play on the weakness of
each target, part of his skills undoubtedly comes from
the fact that he started his own career as a criminal.
Born in the British midlands, O'Mahoney left school early
and entered adulthood as a petty criminal, specialising
in selling drugs and stolen goods, and hanging about with
the lads. It was due to his criminal connections that
O'Mahoney one day found himself in a pub with a journalist
working for News of the World who was writing a story
about gang turf wars.
Over a pint the conversation turned to paedophilia. "This
journalist had recently been criticised for the methods
he had used to infiltrate a paedophile gang," explains
O'Mahoney. "His attitude was that it doesn't matter
what his methods were as long as he achieved results."
O'Mahoney agreed that the criticism was "a bit off."
O'Mahoney mentioned that he was visiting a friend in Broadmoor
prison and the journalist's eyes lit up. He was in the
midst of writing a feature on Peter Sutcliff, the Yorkshire
Ripper, who was housed in the same prison, but the Ripper
wasn't talking and the article was at a standstill.
"He asked if I ever heard any stories, any gossip
about him, but I hadn't," recalls O'Mahoney. The
journalist expressed his frustration at being unable to
communicate with Sutcliff, and O'Mahoney had a brainwave.
"I started writing to the Yorkshire Ripper,"
he says.
Sutcliff had been inside for over a decade, serving multiple
sentences for murder. In the late 1970s, he held the country
in a state of fear, butchering thirteen women and attempting
to murder seven others. "I knew right away that Sutcliff
wouldn't respond to a hairy-assed builder," says
O'Mahoney.
"So I decided to write as a woman." O'Mahoney
invented Belinda Cannon, a coy office worker with low
self-esteem. A woman who could make Sutcliff feel like
a man. It was a matter of weeks before the Ripper and
Belinda were involved in a love affair of letters. O'Mahoney
couldn't believe his success.
When he'd gathered enough information for his mate's article,
O'Mahoney put down his pen and figured that would be the
end of it. But within the year, Britain was again is gripped
in fear. Seven-year old Paul Pearson's body had been found
naked and dumped in some bushes. He had been molested.
A 33-year-old man, Richard Blenkey, was arrested but was
insisting on his innocence.
Half-heartedly, O'Mahoney wondered if the trick he had
used on the Ripper would work on Blenkey. This time he
had a specific goal: to get Blenkey to confess. For this
target O'Mahoney wrote as a male. "It's horses for
courses really," he explains. "I mean, if you
target a man who's raped a young boy, obviously he's interested
in males.
If you target someone like the Yorkshire Ripper, he'd
be interested in vulnerable females, so you have to write
to him as a vulnerable female. Their crimes usually dictate
the personality." O'Mahoney offered Blenkey friendship.
It was just what Blenkey had been wishing for and in appalling
English, he wrote back immediately.
Then, on the eve of the trial, Blenkey confessed. O'Mahoney
was high on success. He decided to put his petty criminal
ways behind him and took a job as a construction worker.
And he immediately turned his attention to what he now
calls his greatest achievement: the London nail-bomber
David Copeland.
In 1999 David Copeland, a racist Nazi who wanted to start
a race war, set off four bombs, laden with nails around
London's ethnic communities. He killed four people, including
a pregnant woman, and severely maimed around 139 more,
before being arrested trying to set another bomb.
For this target, O'Mahoney adopted the personality of
feisty, strong-willed Patsy, a woman who shared Copeland's
racist ideology. Again, the target took the bait. Soon
Copeland was sending Patsy declarations of love and joking
about how he was going to get away with his crimes by
pleading insanity.
O'Mahoney's letters were offered as evidence at Copeland's
trial. The best the defence could come up with was that
Copeland was pretending to be sane to impress Patsy. The
jury wasn't buying it. Copeland was convicted and is currently
serving six life sentences. Victory was particularly sweet
in this case, says O'Mahoney.
"Here was this homophobic, Nazi who discovered he
was in love with a man!" he laughs. "They said
that when it was revealed to him at his trial, it was
the only time he showed any emotion - because he was so
embarrassed. Someone who thinks he's a macho Nazi!"
Despite the degree of betrayal and humiliation felt by
his targets, O'Mahoney is surprisingly unfazed by possible
retribution.
"I get death threats but they don't worry me in the
slightest," he shrugs. "We might be talking
about murderers, but, I mean, look at the people they've
killed - small children! No, they don't concern me at
all." "When I originally met that journalist
I had the same views on paedophiles as everyone else.
I thought they ought to be strung up and hung. But I've
learned that getting rid of the people doesn't solve the
problems.
"When you write someone for over a year, you get
to know them quite well. We're all very sorry for the
victims, but we tend to forget that at some stage the
perpetrators are nine times out of ten victims of childhood
abuse themselves." And who will be O'Mahoney's next
victim?
"I'm not interested in bank robbers or people who
don't pay their electric bill. I'm just interested in
people who prey on children, who commit despicable acts."
For these criminals, the most dangerous thing they might
do in prison is open a letter. |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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