In his introduction to
Night Shift, Stephen King talks about writers having a brain
filter. It’s like, he says, the grille over a drain; depending on
size, some stuff falls through and is washed away, while some sticks,
and stays. In the case of a writer, the stuff that sticks and stays
becomes what you write about.
Some stuff sticks and
some doesn’t, and what gets caught in the filter sometimes seems to
be without rhyme or reason. In my case, it tends to be the weird and
the odd, peculiar little ‘what-ifs?’ or ‘what-happened-nexts?’
Sometimes it’s stuff out of history (and that can be a ballache,
given the need to research, although the internet makes it a lot
easier – to the point that you can get happily lost in the highways
and byways of it, forever clicking just one more hyperlink on
Wikipedia to learn about this or that.)
Disasters often catch
my attention, though not always the obvious ones: the Titanic fell
through my personal brain filter whole, but the R.101 airship stuck,
resulting in a book I can’t seem to sell and an ability to put
people into a light coma by telling them stuff about airships that
they never knew and never particularly wanted to.
Big things, little
things, without rhyme or reason. The latest among them is a young
woman who died thirty-one years before I was born. Her name was
Caroline Trayler.
You’ll read about
Caroline Ellen Trayler, nee Stapleton, in a number of true crime
books. One or two of them may even have a picture of her. But – at
least in Britain – you’ll be hard-pressed to find one on the
internet. There's one
here - which I was unable to copy - but it won't show up on Google Image searches. I'll have more to say about that shortly.
Caroline was eighteen
years old, with auburn hair. She was a very pretty, even beautiful,
young woman; she’d just married Sergeant Edgar Trayler, of the
Durham Light Infantry, who’d shortly after been posted to North
Africa. Lonely and bored, she was a popular girl in the dance halls
in Folkestone, rarely without a dancing partner. How much further it
went than that is debatable, but on Sunday 13th June,
1943, when she left the Mechanics Arms pub on the arm of a soldier on
leave, it went far enough. She was never seen alive again.
Caroline’s body was
found four days later in an abandoned shop. She’d been raped and
strangled, and her wedding and engagement rings taken. Gunner Dennis
Edmund Leckey, originally from Manchester, now of the Royal
Artillery, went AWOL the same day. He admitted leaving the pub with
Caroline, but claimed she’d been alive when they parted. He’d run
off because he was overcome with guilt at his infidelity and wanted
to get home and tell his wife. The claim might have been more
believable had Leckey not been in another woman’s bed two nights
after Caroline Trayler’s death. A friend testified Leckey had shown
him an engagement ring he claimed another woman had given him.
Leckey was convicted
and sentenced to hang, but the sentence was quashed on appeal. The
judge, in his summing-up, made much of the fact that when picked up,
Leckey had refused to speak until his solicitor was there. A guilty
man might well have more to fear from the truth than an innocent one,
but – at least in those days – the law was clear that no
inference of guilt could be drawn from a suspect exercising his
perfectly legal right to silence.
In the films, of
course, blatantly guilty men escape justice on some tiny technicality
all the time. Just as all a psychopathic killer needs to do is hire a
smart lawyer and the copper’s hands are tied, and there’s always
a ticking clock, somewhere, that means we’ve just got to throw the
Declaration of Human Rights out of the window and torture this
suspect. That’s in the films. In real life, it almost never
happens. Almost.
That one technicality –
an inexplicable error in an experienced, well-respected judge’s
summing-up – meant that Dennis Edmund Leckey walked free. No-one
else was ever charged with Caroline Trayler’s murder, for the
excellent reason that the killer had, almost certainly, been
caught already... and then got away with it.
But there’s very
little else. And if you type the names of either killer or victim
into Google and search for images of them, you’ll find none. You will find
a note at the bottom of the Google search page telling you that some
results may have been removed under European data protection law.
When you follow the link to learn more, you’ll see it refers to the
right to be forgotten.
Given just how much a
complete stranger can learn about you through those means, it’s no
bad thing that you can effectively make your personal data invisible
to web searches. It’s still out there, of course, but it’s a hell
of a lot harder to find. And of course, if you have had something
like a wrongful murder conviction hanging over you, you might well
want to exercise that right.
Maybe Caroline’s
family wanted her to be forgotten, rather than have her cruel and
ugly death dragged out into public view. Or maybe it was to protect
the man convicted of her murder. In which case – as her name would
invariably come up in connection with his – Dennis Leckey, or those
acting on his posthumous behalf, have largely erased Caroline
Trayler. You could almost say that for the second time, he killed her
and got away with it scot-free.
This is the kind of
thing that sticks in my personal ‘filter’, anyway. It’ll
probably become a story at some point.
The right to be
forgotten is one thing; being condemned to it is something else.
Caroline Trayler didn’t deserve to die that way, didn’t deserve
to have her killer escape justice. No-one can do anything about that
now – unless you believe in an afterlife – but she doesn’t
deserve to be forgotten either. Whatever I write will be a tiny act
of commemoration, like a candle lit in memory.
You might ask – quite
reasonably – why I feel that way about one of the millions of the
world’s dead – a woman I never knew, dead three decades before I
even popped out into the world. But I can’t give you an answer to
that. Any more than I can answer why her case, out of so many others
in a true crime book, stuck in my memory. Why I wrote a novel about
R.101 and not the Titanic. Why I write ghost stories instead
of Westerns, crime stories instead of romances.
It’s just the way I’m
built.
I can live with that.
