A man who revelled in his own filth

12 April 2012

The first thing you noticed about Roy Whiting was his smell; a pungent stench of body odour, urine and unwashed clothes that hit you from several feet away. The second thing was his teeth. They were what Sarah's brother Lee noticed and it was not surprising: they were broken, dark and rotting. His hair hung in lank strands and in most of those he met he inspired revulsion. There was a natural human reaction against his presence that seemed to transcend self-neglect. Whiting understood this, but it did not disturb him. He revelled in it.

It was only when his trial began that he tried to change, bizarrely asking for two bars of soap to carry in the pockets of his jeans to mask the smell. It did not work and those sitting several rows away were still nauseated.

Those who knew Whiting before the trial knew him as a man who lived beyond society's boundaries. He operated in a netherworld of shady second-hand car transactions, living a primitive existence in his junk-littered workshop, or dossing in fields.

The message he sought to convey was this: you cannot make more of a monster of me than I can make of myself.

Ever since he was a child Whiting stood apart from his neighbours in the working-class Crawley suburb of Langley Green where he grew up. One of six children - only three of whom survived to adulthood - of sheet-metal worker George Whiting and his wife Pamela, Roy William Whiting was born in Horsham Hospital on 26 January, 1959. He had an older brother, Peter, and a younger sister, Gill, and like all the children on the estate attended Jordan's primary school at the end of the road and Ifield secondary school.

Neighbours of the cramped end-of-terrace family home in Martyrs Avenue remember Whiting as a grime-covered loner.

One, Jenny Jones, 69, said: "Peter and Gill were always very neatly dressed, with clean clothes and hair, but Roy was a scruffy urchin, always thick with grease. He seemed to have no friends - every time I saw him he was by himself - while all the other children on the estate played together."

Everyone said there was "something funny" about the Whitings - there were rumours about the father - but whatever the truth, the marriage fell apart and the mother ran off with the man from Kempton's fish shop, taking her daughter with her, but leaving the two boys behind.

New rumours emerged with neighbours suggesting Whiting had been interfered with, possibly fuelled years later after Whiting's arrest by the familiar tragedy that the abused so often grow up to become the abusers.

All Whiting ever seemed to care about was cars, and after leaving school he pursued his interest professionally, charging neighbours and friends of his parents for mechanical work. He also did odd jobs as a builder.

He married a local girl, Linda, with whom he had a son 13 years ago, but the marriage fell apart through a lack of cash and his complete lack of interest in sex and she went on to marry someone else.

Whiting was uninterested in new relationships and concentrated instead on cars. He found work in garages and hired workshops around Crawley, spending his spare time stock-car racing at local tracks including Smallfield and Baker Raceway.

From 1992 until he went to prison in 1995, Whiting rented a workshop from Brian Jefferies at the back of his sprawling Hyders Farm in Ifield, west of Crawley. Mr Jefferies, 62, described him as everyone else did - a foul-smelling loner who kept himself to himself. He said: "Roy would work very hard but strangely he was never in the workshop in the afternoons." His friend Rob Mills used to joke: "Roy's off on the school

run again," never realising that that was exactly what he was doing. "We had an idea he'd been married but he never talked about it; he never talked about women at all. It was as if he had no interest in them," Mr Jefferies added.

What Whiting was interested in was children.

Mr Jefferies said: "Thinking back, Roy did often volunteer to give lifts to my step-niece and nephew. If they were late for school, or needed picking up he would often do it in one of his cars. After the 1995 case we asked them if he had tried anything on but they said he never did anything untoward, which is an indescribable relief."

While in Elmley prison near Sheerness in Kent, Whiting wrote to his old landlord, although he never received a reply. Mr Jefferies said: "He said he was sorry for what had happened and told me to take any outstanding money for rent when his machinery was sold. I didn't write back. We were all sickened by what happened, and even his closest friends dropped him like a stone."

Charles Cripps, 67, lived in a caravan next to Whiting's workshop at Hyders Farm and, like Mr Jefferies, wondered what Whiting did on his afternoon absences before the 1995 abduction. He said: "We found out after the court case that Roy used to drive around local schools at going-home time, scouting up the schoolgirls from his car. He would then work all night, and sometimes my wife would take him something to eat."

Mr Cripps added: "Roy was always filthy dirty, his trousers shiny from grease. He would have a bath literally once a month - if that - and afterwards you would hardly recognise him. Then he'd go underneath a car and get filthy all over again."

Clive Graham, the mechanic who turned Whiting in to the police in 1995, runs his car repair business from an industrial unit close to where Whiting worked. He said: "Roy is the most objectionable person you could wish not to meet. It was unbelievable the way this guy lived. He was like some sort of caveman dossing in the back of his garage. He'd boxed off this little area where he'd set up a bed. It was filthy, but he didn't seem to care."

Whiting returned to his feral roots last year and was living rough by the time he was charged with Sarah's abduction in February. One night, three weeks after Sarah's murder, he took a car without permission and, following a high-speed police chase around Crawley, was jailed for 22 months. When police arrested him for the final time it was in prison.

People at the stock-car tracks where Whiting raced described him as an enthusiastic if talentless racer with few friends. One said: "We knew he had done time for molesting. But if a person has served his time, what can you do? I've got a granddaughter and I couldn't bear the sight of him, but whenever we saw him he seemed to behave normally."

No one who spoke about Whiting knew of any girlfriends although one acquaintance remembered him striking up a friendship with a divorcÈe. He said: "I think it ended when she became suspicious about all the attention he was paying to her daughter."

For years Whiting had dreamed of moving to Littlehampton which, as a child, he had heard adults speak of as an exotic holiday location. His mother had moved there after splitting up from his father.

Whiting told Brian Jefferies and a couple in Ifieldwood, who let him use their sheds to store his bangers, how he longed to move there and buy a dream cottage.

After leaving prison, he had the chance to start again. He stayed in a hostel before moving to a rented flat in St Augustine Road, Littlehampton, where he stayed for two years before moving into another in the same street. He quickly found work as a mechanic and jobbing labourer. The move might have been a new start for him, but less than a year after moving into his seafront flat, Whiting heard a banging on his door.

It was detectives from Sussex Constabulary, making inquiries into the disappearance of a little girl named Sarah Payne.

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