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FM: And the paedophile? The one you were trying to trace?
JC: He was a definite concern. We still didn’t have a location for him, but the DC who was on the
case reckoned his mum knew where he was and it was eating her up not telling us. She was going to
pay her another visit. We had the psychologist working on possible profiles for abductors and other
than that we were drawing up lists of people to interview, checking alibis and responding to all the
calls that had come in after our appeals.
FM: Did you have a large response?
JC: Huge, almost overwhelming. Fraser had pulled together as big a team as she could but it was still
going to be hard to follow up everything quickly. As a priority, we needed IDs on the cyclists Rachel
Jenner mentioned seeing in the woods and the lone male walker, so we were focusing on those.
FM: What was the atmosphere like amongst the team?
JC: Totally adrenalised. Everyone wanted to get on with it, find the kid.
FM: Had there been a public reaction to the press conference?
JC: That was an issue. Even that first night there was already a massive online backlash against
Rachel Jenner. People were saying, or insinuating, everything under the sun, online news sites
included. We were dreading the headlines the next morning.
FM: What kind of things were they saying?
JC: The straplines were ‘Mother’s angry outburst’ that kind of thing. Not too bad yet but it was the
comments that people were making that were worrying us. On Facebook hundreds of people were
discussing the case and they weren’t holding back. They thought she was guilty.
FM: And what did you think?
JC: Couldn’t rule it out. She certainly had the opportunity to do something to Ben, and we hadn’t
verified her story yet.
FM: What was your gut instinct?
JC: That she was volatile.
FM: Meaning?
JC: She could have done it.
FM: You weren’t convinced of her innocence after her display of grief at the press conference?
JC: Grief isn’t proof of innocence. If she’d done something to Ben she could still have been feeling
distress.
FM: True.
JC: I felt she could have murdered him, or killed him by mistake, and hidden the body and made up
the story about the woods. It’s a pretty unlikely scenario but by no means impossible. We asked the
forensic psychologist to look at the footage from the conference and give us his thoughts about Rachel
Jenner.