Lee Baker punched Caroline Good in the face and broke her nose. That was the end of their relationship. She was nineteen, he was the same age, and for a while they had been a couple, drinking together, going out together, but there were always warning signs. He had a temper.
He was controlling. He wanted her to spend less time with her best friend, Helen. And he had dark moments. He would cut his own wrists and arms to draw blood and sometimes talked about suicide.
Caroline’s family and friends told her to stay away from him. She listened. She ended things in April 1986. Baker did not disappear quietly.
He was raised in and out of care, a troubled boy with a strange fixation on death, especially decapitation. As a teenager, he drew graphic pen-and-ink pictures of mass murder at his school, of warriors slicing into people with swords and axes. He reveled in violence. It was not just thoughts or drawings.
He felt he wanted to act it out. On the evening of the 28th of July 1986, Lee Baker rode his bicycle to the home of Alita Good, Caroline’s mother. She let him in. She offered him tea.
He said he was waiting for Caroline. She was being kind to her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. She paid with her life. While her back was turned, Baker stabbed her.
She turned around, astonished, asking what he was doing, why he was doing it. He stabbed her again and again. Then he dragged her body up the stairs. He cut her head off, echoing those drawings from his youth, and placed her head in Caroline’s bed, pulling up the covers as if she were asleep.
He went back downstairs and shot the family’s Labrador with a crossbow. He set a small fire. The house filled with smoke but did not burn down. The crime scene remained nearly intact.
As he left, he ran into Caroline in the street. He taunted her. He told her her house was on fire. When she asked whose, he said, “Yours.
” Then he told her he had killed her mother and her dog, and that her mother’s head was in her bedroom. He was smirking. He was proud. He did not try to run or hide.
He wanted her to suffer, but he left her alive. Baker was not finished. He went after Helen, Caroline’s best friend, blaming her for the breakup. He stabbed her repeatedly on her own doorstep.
He later admitted he wanted her to die. Miraculously, she survived. No vital organ was hit. Then he went on a rampage through the streets of Southbourne.
He was now what investigators call a spree killer, moving from victim to victim with no cooling-off period, armed with a commando knife and a crossbow. He encountered Clive Ratu, a 53-year-old former oil worker walking home from a day’s work. Baker shot him in the back with the crossbow. Ratu turned around and asked, “Why did you do that?
” Baker stabbed him in the chest with his Fairbairn–Sykes commando knife, straight through the heart. He pulled the knife out and walked away. Ratu tried to seek help, knocking on doors along Iford Lane, leaving trails of blood. He collapsed and died in the driveway of another house.
His fingerprints were dragged down the front door as he fell. Baker kept going. He shot a 15-year-old German student with a crossbow. The student was not badly injured and managed to run away.
He was one of many foreign students in Bournemouth for the language schools. Baker also called the police control room, playing a cat-and-mouse game, saying he would be at certain places but never showing up. At a friend’s house, he filled two milk bottles with petrol and tore a shirt into strips, making Molotov cocktails. His plan was to bomb a petrol station at Pokesdown Hill, open the pumps so the petrol flowed down the hill, and light a match, taking as many people as possible with him in a blaze of glory.
He later said the area was swamped with police, so he did not go through with it. By the early hours of the 29th of July, his rage had burned out. A local police officer who happened to know him spotted him slumped in the street. Baker said, “I’m Lee Baker.
I think you’re looking for me. ” He gave no trouble. He was arrested by one uniformed officer. In interview, he showed no emotion.
He described stabbing Alita Good while she showed him family photographs. He admitted to shooting the dog and setting the fire. He did not want to explain why he cut off her head. That was the only time he became irritable.
He was charged with two murders, one attempted murder, and actual bodily harm. His defense was diminished responsibility. Psychiatrists disagreed about his state of mind, but the jury was unconvinced he was insane. On the 2nd of June 1987, Lee Baker was given two life sentences for the murders, plus additional sentences for the attempted murder, actual bodily harm, and arson.
He is one of the rarest of murderers, a spree killer who showed no remorse. Clive Ratu had done nothing to deserve his death. Alita Good had been nothing but hospitable.
Lee Baker’s only legacy was to blight two families forever and cause immeasurable pain to everyone involved.
