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on 19 January 1993, posing as a friend of Miss Pine and presenting herself as attractive and much more broadminded than the other woman. She said her favourite record was “Walk on the Wild Side”, a blatant come-on. Britton predicted that Stagg would respond and would gradually ease his way through confidence to confession. It should take at least two weeks, but no more than sixteen. Throughout, Britton would control the content of WPC James’s letters and monitor Stagg’s replies.
    The first reply came immediately, with an admission from Stagg that “I do sometimes get painfully lonely”. He said his only friend was his dog Brandy, whom he walked on the common every day. On instruction, “Lizzie” picked up the theme of loneliness and revealed: “I haven’t had a relationship with a man for a very long time, and I sometimes long for company, of the kind only a man can give.” She gave the impression, too, that she would not object to a sexual fantasy as Julie had. Stagg was being enticed from the very beginning by what amounted to an agent provocateur .
    He told her that he had never had a sex life, that women didn’t want to know, and included the fantasy letter she had asked for, telling of sex in the dark. She then put herself forward as a woman of experience, and encouraged him to fantasize further. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” she wrote, “I’m sure your fantasies know no bounds . . . you’re a brilliant story-teller . . . I’m working myself up.” She sent him a picture of herself. “You’ve certainly brightened up my life,” he told her. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It’s like a dream come true. I have never been attractive to women, that’s why I have so many fantasies.” She commiserated with a mixture of sympathy and seduction. “I understand exactly how you feel. Your honesty is so refreshing. I do hope we will always be honest with each other, as being betrayed and let down is so difficult to get over . . . Don’t worry, you won’t be lonely much longer. Each time you write, I know we get closer and closer. There are secrets about me that I long to share with someone. I’ve got things to tell that you won’t believe.”
    Colin Stagg was an obliging, enthusiastic correspondent, but annoyingly slow in fitting the profile Mr Britton had devised. He was supposed to be keen on anal sex, so Lizzie introduced the subject, archly rather than directly. “I hope I’m not sounding unnatural,” she wrote, using a word obviously planted, “but there’s so much more to explore than just straight sex.” He did not seem to realize what she meant. Again, the prediction was that he would want to dominate, so she offered herself to him. “You’ve taken charge, you’re so powerful. I want to feel you all-powerful and overwhelming. I want you to burst.” Throughout the correspondence, she urged him to write ever bolder fantasy letters, and responded immediately to these, withholding her reply if he failed to include a fantasy or came up with a tame one.
    There is no doubt that Stagg liked to write exciting sexual fiction, but the content of his letters was being dictated and shaped by Lizzie. As Mr Justice Ognall said last week, the fantasies he expressed during the first two weeks of the correspondence were such as might occur to any heterosexual and inexperienced young man. These were not good enough, so he had to be encouraged in the invention of more outrageous scenes. At one point, she sent him a tape-recording which Mr William Clegg, in his submission to the court for the defence, described as “the most hard-core pornography one could imagine . . . an extraordinary document for a working police officer to send to a suspect in a murder investigation . . . without precedent”. The paradox in this sorry tale seems to be that the more kinky prose came from Paul Britton, via the police officer.
    When Lizzie begged Stagg to reveal something terrible