So, I’ve spent the morning acquainting myself with Sussex villages for your sleuthing convenience.
I was interested in the idea that MW and LA might have been doing some climbing or exploring before MW met with his death. The area around Uckfield is being heavily developed for so-called affordable housing as it’s just outside the South Downs National Park, where there are enhanced planning restrictions, so I thought that there might be a nearby building site or similar.
First, I went to Fairwarp, where LA lives. Fairwarp is small and pretty. It’s a traditional Sussex village, a mixture of old and new buildings, a pub, a church, a village green, a telephone box that’s been turned into a teeny library, friendly people. It’s completely surrounded by forested areas. If LA has lived there for any length of time (I haven’t checked this), he’ll be very familiar with the forest paths, which are safe shortcuts for anyone on foot, compared with the risks of walking on country roads without pavements. There is one very narrow, very winding (but driveable) lane that leads to the deposition site at Heron’s Ghyll and on to the A26. It’s a very steep incline the closer you get to HG. The road on the other side of Fairwarp leads either to the A22 or into Maresfield, depending on which way you turn at the end, and is wider and faster, also without pavements until you come into Maresfield itself.
Maresfield is bigger but also very nice indeed, although dominated by the proximity of the A roads. The centre of the village is older housing, with new development on the outskirts. The recreation ground is central and is very large compared with anything urban dwellers are probably imagining. It has a private access road down one side with a gravelled parking area separated from the grass by sawn stumps of wood. Opposite the parking spaces are houses that look directly on to the rec.
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The grass is extensive and contains a decent size cricket pitch and two sight screens, plus a pavilion. On the far size of it is a bowling green surrounded by chainlink fence that looks as though it’s been climbed over and burrowed under by a million teenagers, and a children’s playground surrounded by a 5m metal fence. I wondered what on earth Maresfield’s children were being protected from (giraffes? pumas?) until I turned around and realised it was probably cricket balls. The playground is tidy and well maintained although one of the kiddie swings bears the signs of having taken more weight than it should recently.
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Next to the playground is another fenced-in area containing a small cricket net, a large shipping container, and some kind of mystery item covered with a weighted-down tarpaulin. From a distance, I thought this was a forensic tent but it isn’t. The cricket net and the shipping container look like they would be fun things to climb all over if you were young, fit and bored, but there’s no sign that any of the foliage around them has been disturbed either in the course of that or as part of an evidence gathering exercise. The shipping container doesn’t seem to be padlocked and may be accessible to anyone who has already scaled the fence. Beyond that fenced area is an extended area of grassland that looks as though it’s mainly used by dog walkers.
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Everything was very clean and tidy. No sign of bottles, cigarette butts, McDonalds wrappers, syringes, nitrous canisters, condoms or any of the detritus you’d find in town and city parks and recs. Also no sign of where the police have been looking or where the murder itself is supposed to have taken place, no decaying supermarket flowers, no votive candles. Maresfield seems like the kind of place where any mess the police might have left behind would be swept up instantly by the Rotary Club or something, but additionally the layout of the place makes it very hard to see where you’d start looking for any evidence of a struggle. It’s very open. There are no remote corners behind structures, sudden drops (except from fences), nothing derelict, not even any public loos. I’ve looked, and been unable to find, any press photos showing exactly where the police were searching on Maresfield rec. Everyone has just used library pics of the entrance where the cars park. All the published crime scene pics are from the Heron’s Ghyll site.
So, a few thoughts.
1. It seems to me that Maresfield was chosen as a rendezvous point because it was roughly equidistant for MW and LA. MW says in the YT livestream that he lives very close to Uckfield College. He could have cycled north from there, chip-chopped across the A22 at Ringles Cross and come into Maresfield from the south. LA could have cycled himself (though no one has mentioned that he did) or walked south from Fairwarp. Maresfield itself has nothing on offer for teenagers on a Saturday night except the rec, as far as I can see.
2. There’s nothing obvious nearby that would have attracted them from an urbex point of view. Nothing derelict, nothing being built, nothing very challenging to climb except in a larking about kind of way, nothing so high that I would expect a fall to be instantly fatal.
3. If the killing
did happen on Maresfield rec, I think it must have happened on the far (playground/bowling green) side, well away from the houses, given that everyone was searching for MW for days and no one seems to have reported a disturbance. That said, there are also houses behind the playground, albeit without a sightline, so perhaps it happened on the dogwalking land rather than the rec itself.
4. There is
no way you could get a dead body from Maresfield to Heron’s Ghyll without a vehicle, either in terms its weight and bulk, or in terms of moving unobserved. I think that’s true even if there was more than one of you. You would struggle even to get it from the rec to the parking area without being seen or heard or doing a lot of damage to the cricket pitch. I did notice that one of the wooden stumps blocking cars from getting on to the grass has been removed and there do seem to be some marks where tyres have flattened the grass, though tbh that could have been done by anyone in the last week, including the police. Provided the section of parking with the gap was free, though, it would just be possible to drive over the grass. I am very interested to know if LA had access to a car.
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5. Even if you had some kind of vehicle alternative, e.g. a shopping trolley, you would struggle round here to move a body without attracting a lot of attention and/or causing a road accident, because of the lack of pavements.
6. I don’t see how police could be aware of both a primary crime scene at Maresfield and the deposition site at Heron’s Ghyll without a confession, either to themselves or to a third party. They are far enough apart that a witness in one location could not also be a witness in the other.
7. In between the moving of the body and the amount the police seem to have learned quite quickly (including where to find LA), I am wondering whether a third person was either involved or aware in short order of what had happened.
I'm happy to try and answer any questions anyone has, and I have other photos if anyone wants me to try and look for something specific.
JMO
