Life Means Life by Nick Appleyard

Author:Nick Appleyard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781843589624
Publisher: Faber Factory (Trade)

‘VIAGRA MAN’

‘They called him “The Viagra Man” as they said he took that drug before helping himself.’

Culshaw’s neighbour

Name: Paul Culshaw

Crime: Serial rape and murder

Date of Conviction: 10 February 2005

Age at Conviction: 37

Residents of Lancaster’s deprived Ryelands estate might have been forgiven for thinking Paul Culshaw was a decent, charitable man. Unlike many of his neighbours, who shunned and loathed the estate’s growing number of drug addicts, Culshaw, despite not being a user himself, gave them refuge at his rented flat. He kept an open house, where they could take heroin and crack cocaine in relative safety from the dangers that lurked for homeless people on the city’s streets. Often he would supply the drugs himself if the desperate addicts had none and he thought nothing of letting them sleep over.

But what the casual eye couldn’t see was that behind closed doors the vicious pervert would use the zombied girls – they were always female – to satisfy his insatiable lust for warped sex. One victim of this appetite was heroin user Clare Benson-Jowry. The 23-year-old mother-of-one was a regular visitor to Culshaw’s home, where she would take heroin with fellow addicts. She and her friends were wary of visiting his place alone, knowing of his tendency to ‘try it on’ and conscious of the stories they had heard of what he did to girls when they were too out of it to resist. Clare knew Culshaw’s flat was a dangerous place to visit alone, but that’s exactly what she did on 20 June 2004 – and she paid the price. Three-and-a-half weeks later neighbours complained of a ‘dreadful smell’ coming from the property and police found her badly decomposed, half-naked body in Culshaw’s bedroom the following day. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a shoelace, tightened with a fork.

One former addict who often visited Culshaw’s flat, a girl who asked not to be identified, knew Clare and remembers the first time that she accepted Culshaw’s offer of hospitality. She recalled: ‘Paul was always really nice when you arrived, but he would often change once you’d had your gear and you didn’t know – or care – what was going on. He made out that he was this really nice bloke who wanted to keep girls off the streets, but that was not why he let us stay there.’ The 27-year-old, who is now beating her addiction through Lancaster’s Inward House Projects rehabilitation initiative, added: ‘I first met him just after Christmas in 2003. I had only just moved from Preston to live with a mate, after leaving my boyfriend. I was on a come-down so I was drinking cider to make it easier. I was drunk, but wanted some brown [heroin]. Paul came over and offered me a rolly [a cigarette] and we started chatting. He was really down-to-earth and charming. I told him I was dying for a fix and he invited me round to his and said he would give me the money for a tenner’s worth as long as I paid him back.

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