From David Jones
Tucked beneath Gibraltar’s imposing Rock, the Trafalgar cemetery is the site of the graves of two heroic english sailors who died from wounds incurred during the glorious battle after which it is named.
even in winter, this immaculately preserved memorial — overlooked by a statue of Admiral Lord Nelson, who led the British fleet to victory over Napoleon’s fleet in 1805 — usually attracts a sprinkling of tourists.
All last week, however, the tree- canopied graveyard — turned into a quagmire by torrential rain — was cordoned off by police tape.
Beneath blue tarpaulin tents, a team of forensics and scene-of-crime experts from Hampshire constabulary have been hammering at the historic tombs, and rummaging in the mud and rubble beneath their lids.
In conducting this grim operation, they have been careful not to disturb the remains of British servicemen, and yellow-fever victims, who were buried several feet below the stone vaults during the 18th and 19th centuries. For the young seaman whose body they are hunting — Simon Parkes — was not interred here during Britain’s great naval past. He is feared to have met a more recent end.
In 1986, the 18-year-old radio operator from Bristol was serving in the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. On december 12, when the ship docked in Gibraltar — its final stop after a long global tour — he was among hundreds of crewmen who flocked to its rowdy bars.
He never returned, and — despite repeated searches and investigations by the police and the Navy — has not been seen since that day 33 years ago.
down the decades, there have been several theories for his mysterious disappearance. But the most persuasive is that he fell victim to psychopath Allan Grimson, a homosexual firefighting instructor in Illustrious who preyed on the handsome young sailors he taught.
described by one psychiatrist as the most dangerous of the 250 killers he has examined, Grimson is serving a double life sentence for the horrific murders of two other young Navy men. Nicknamed ‘ Frank’ — short for Frankenstein — by shipmates (by dint of his elongated forehead and intense, close- set eyes) Grimson was branded ‘a serial killer by nature if not number’ by the judge who sentenced him. Yet he has always denied killing Simon. Now, however, an informant who was in HMS Illustrious in 1986 has furnished Hampshire Police with fresh information about this perplexing case. The force deemed his evidence so compelling that it dispatched a ninemember team to Gibraltar last week. The police decline to reveal details. Nor will they discuss the possibility that Grimson might be involved.
However, detective Inspector Roger Wood, who is leading the investigation on the Rock, told me there were ‘credible’ reasons to believe the source, who has evidently told them that Simon’s body was hidden in Trafalgar cemetery — a short distance from the Navy base where Illustrious was docked. To many local residents — among them the boss of a landscape gardening company that maintains the graveyard and a maintenance man who has worked there — this theory seems unlikely.
The cemetery is on a main road just yards from town, which was thronged with scores of boozy sailors on the night in question.
Since then, thousands of sightseers have wandered its paths, and on Trafalgar day, October 21, a big parade is staged there. Furthermore, from a distance, the solid tombs appear to be impenetrable.
Intriguingly, however, DI Wood says that some of the lids will ‘ slide straight off’ — so even a person acting alone could move them.
Simon’s parents, david and Margaret Parkes, who are in their 70s and have suffered many false dawns down the years, had been prepared for eventuality that the search might prove fruitless, he said.
Yet even if a body isn’t found in Gibraltar, the investigation will continue, with other new lines having emerged in recent days.
‘We really want to solve this mystery and give Mr and Mrs Parkes answers they deserve,’ said the detective, as the search team went about their task. ‘They would like to bring Simon home. They have waited a very long time.’
Indeed so, and as retired teacher Mrs Parkes (whose other son died of a brain haemorrhage, aged 37) told me stoically: ‘After a time, you just have to get on with life, but something like this never really goes away.’
Having experienced the painful failure of a previous body-hunt in Gibraltar 16 years ago, she and her husband say this new search is their final hope of finding ‘closure’ and giving Simon a dignified burial in the West country.
SO COULD he have been lying for more than 30 years beside those fallen Trafalgar heroes, Lieutenant William Foster, 20, fatally wounded when the French attacked HMS colossus, and captain Thomas Norman, 36, who died seven weeks after being injured on HMS Mars?
And if he is, what evidence is there to suggest he might have been murdered by Grimson?
This question could not arise at a more pressing moment. For, coincidentally or otherwise, the police informant has come forward just as the double-killer, now aged 60, is being considered for parole.
According to a Parole Board spokesman, Grimson, who was given a 22-year tariff at Winchester crown court in 2001, has passed the first stage of the process. The crucial second stage comes later this month, when he will plead his case for freedom before a panel of experts.
Born in Suffolk, in 1959, but raised on Tyneside, where he still has family, it emerged during his trial that Grimson had always loathed his ‘ugliness’ and suffered low selfesteem. When he became a firefighting instructor in the Navy, he told police after his arrest, he would run his gaze over young recruits lined up before him, single out the handsome ones, and set about luring them.
In a BBC documentary screened in 2005, detectives were said to have had information that he committed a string of murders annually over a ten-year period.
ALLEGEDLY, the murder spree had begun after his advances were humiliatingly rejected by a young sailor. It’s believed Grimson might have been referring to Simon, whose mother says — with ‘ 100 per cent’ certainty — that he was not gay; a fact confirmed to me by his former girlfriend Maria Storey, now a school dinner lady in her 50s.
In the TV documentary, it was said that, after a pause of some seconds, Grimson withdrew this bombshell ‘ confession’ to being a prolific serial killer.
He eventually admitted two murders. chillingly, both were carried out on, or around, december 12 — the date Simon vanished in Gibraltar.
His first victim was 18-year- old seaman Nicholas Wright, whom he enticed back to his Portsmouth flat in december 1997, and bludgeoned with a baseball bat before slitting his throat and slicing off his ear.
We only have Grimson’s version of what happened, but it seems the hapless young man spurned his attempted seduction.
He said the murder had given him ‘a tingling sensation’, and ‘was better than sex’. It had given him a sense of power and control.
Precisely 12 months later, he murdered Sion Jenkins, 20, who had left the Navy to become a barman, in a similarly horrific manner.
He hoped the killing would provide a similar thrill, but on that occasion, he said, he ‘felt nothing’.
The bodies of these two men were not found for two years. But then, in 1999, Hampshire police re-examined their disappearances and questioned Grimson. They had learned that Nicholas had complained to his parents, shortly before he went missing, that the fire instructor had been pestering him sexually.
Almost immediately Grimson admitted murdering Nicholas, and led detectives to his remains, which had lain undiscovered in the undergrowth near a busy road in Hampshire. ‘There is one more body,’ he then told the stunned officers. They were led to another lonely spot, a few miles away, where Sion’s body had been dumped.
detectives then began exploring the possibility that he might have killed many more young men, looking into the disappearances of some 20 sailors, visiting ports around the world where he had been ashore while teaching on the