© Simon HulmeChapters from the past: Kate Lock in the Blakehead Bookshop, York. Writing her book has proved a huge release and relief
Kate Lock was a naive, 20-year-old undergraduate when she met the charismatic Tim Franklin. He was a mature student, 36 years her senior, recently released from prison on a life sentence.
They embarked on an intense and explosive relationship but it was not until Kate tried to leave Tim when her studies at Exeter University came to an end, that she began to realise how dangerous he was.
She had been living with a murderer and came very close to becoming another victim. Twenty years on she has written what started out as a memoir of their time together and turned into an investigation of the crime he committed and the realisation that the man she had loved was a psychopath.
Kate, now 43, is a former journalist and has written eight TV novelisations. Her own story is so incredible that as she says, you couldn't have made it up. Even after she had left Tim she still felt trapped by him and in the book she describes a chilling encounter when he wouldn't let her out of the house.
"He spotted me sidling towards the door and moved to block my escape. 'Kate. Don't make me commit a terrible sin.' His words made my blood run cold. I stared at him. I did not recognise Tim behind those hollow eyes. He had the look of a man who had played this scene before. Suddenly, everything made sense. The woman he had killed had wanted to leave him, too. I'd always believed it was an accident. Until now."
Timothy John Franklin was found guilty of the murder of his mistress, Tina Strauss, and was jailed for life at York Assizes in March 1971. He killed her at their home, The Garths, in the village of North Otterington, near Northallerton and buried her body in the garden. The "body in the garden case" received huge coverage in the newspapers at the time. Tina Strauss was described as a society hostess and her 16-year-old daughter Claire Louise was heiress to nearly £500,000. Gilbert Gray QC, who appeared for Franklin, said it had all the ingredients of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. When Kate began her own research into the trial she realised just how brutal the murder had been.
Coincidentally, Kate and her husband, Stephen, and their daughter, Isis, moved to live in York a few years ago. This seemed to be the catalyst that made Kate decide to write a book about Franklin, their relationship and her own role in it. Meeting her in a bookshop café in Micklegate it is hard to believe she is a woman with such a dramatic past.
This is a regular haunt but usually she is having coffee with other mums while they wait for their daughters to finish a dancing class nearby. This is another life completely and one where she feels like an entirely different person now she has finally be able to lay the ghost of Tim Franklin to rest.
Writing the book brought everything back to her in vivid detail - she had kept a diary at the time of their relationship - and it was a hard route to take, says Kate. "Sometimes I used to feel as if I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Writing the book wasn't intended to be therapy but it has been. It's helped me enormously."
Reading her description of how they met, of how he became not only her mentor but also a father figure and lover, about how controlling he was and about how soon she began to feel trapped, makes you immediately question why she didn't try to find out more about him earlier on.
But she was young and impressionable and not very confident. He helped her to blossom intellectually, he paid for her to see a private dermatologist about her skin problems. He bought her clothes and he took her away on holiday.
Had she taken more notice soon after they met of the books he read she might have picked up some clues. One of his favourite authors was John Fowles and one of the first books he gave her to read was The Collector. It's about an obsessive man, an amateur butterfly collector, who abducts a young woman and keeps her locked up in his basement. He gives her everything she wants, except her freedom.
Their relationship had been stormy but as Kate's finals drew closer and Tim could see the possible end of their affair, his behaviour became more and more erratic. He was drinking heavily and Kate found herself virtually under house arrest.
She was so frightened at this point that she phoned her parents and they took her home so that she could revise for her exams. Her parents knew about Tim's past but like Kate not in detail. "I'd portrayed him as a kind of victim of circumstance and they thought everyone deserves a second chance," said Kate. He charmed her mother and was equally friendly with Kate's father, a retired policeman.
The relationship limped along. Kate describes it as "like being in a sticky spider's web" and they moved to her home town of Oxford. Away from the cocooned atmosphere of university, things went from bad to worse. He sabotaged her job interviews and destroyed any relationships she tried to make. He became very unpredictable and paranoid and reflected everything back at Kate, as if she was the one with the problem. "I had to leave in the end. A kind of self preservation instinct kicked in." She moved back to live with her parents and soon Tim took to calling round there, joining them for meals and practically becoming one of the family.
"I felt so tied to him. It was my need originally. I had very low self-esteem and he was so worldly and experienced. In the end I learned to be the strong one. It was his need that was keeping us together in the end. He did everything from offering me money to holidays and a job. Then there was blackmail and threats of suicide. I felt that I was responsible for him. He wouldn't survive without me. I felt I was unable to escape - totally trapped."
Kate got a job on her local paper, the Oxford Star, which proved to be a lifeline. Then she discovered that Tim had trained his sights on another young girl, aged 20. He was 60 by then, they had met at a party and he virtually tried to abduct her one night. When Kate went round to confront him, afraid for the girl's safety, his reaction made her realise that he had been accused of doing this before, which had meant being recalled to prison. At that moment, had she put up a fight, she doesn't know what might have happened. "I did stay cool and I did get out."
Kate had nothing more to do with him after that. She moved out of her parents' house and got on with her own life. His health deteriorated and 15 months later he committed suicide. After he died Kate says she became obsessed with him all over again. "It was hard to find anyone who matched up to him till I met my husband Stephen in 1991. It's taken all this time to shake myself free."
Because of the influence he had over her it had never occurred to Kate to investigate his background while he was alive. Now she began to ask questions and looked up cuttings of his murder trial in newspaper archives. When she and her husband moved to York because his job was relocated, she came much closer to finding out about Tim Franklin's past. She visited York Crown Court on an open day and realised she knew how the drama of Tim's trial had ended but not how it had begun.
She started to dig into his past life. She talked to his sister and the detective who dealt with the case. She even employed a private detective to help her track people down.
Tim had met Tina Strauss when he was working out in the West Indies. He had become friendly with her and her husband Richard and enjoyed the expat life. He and Tina began an affair and she left her husband and went to live with Tim and her daughter in North Otterington. He was sales director for a lift manufacturing company in Stockton on Tees called Pickerings.
Tina became bored with life in North Yorkshire and wanted to move abroad but Tim was happy where he was.
Then in January 1970 Tina disappeared. Friends eventually became suspicious and the police investigated. Tim Franklin had kept up a carefully planned trail of deception for seven months and he finally agreed to tell the police his version of what had happened.
He claimed they had had a row and she had gone for him with an iron bar. He said that during their struggle she had hit her head and the next thing she was lying dead on the floor.
Forensic evidence showed she had been brutally beaten about the head and then a clothes line had been tied round her neck so tightly that her voice box had been broken. The damage was so severe that her identity had to be confirmed from dental records.
He had buried her in the garden in a screened off area that she had used for sunbathing. He continued to live in the house with Tina's daughter, who thought her mother had gone abroad house hunting, and had even taken her on holiday to the Canary Islands while keeping up his pretence that her mother had gone away.
Tim Franklin was an extremely intelligent man who lacked emotional intelligence, says Kate. Add up his other traits from pathological lying to violent temper, manipulation and his failure to accept responsibility for his own actions and you have the main characteristics of a psychopath.
Kate believes that he was seriously disturbed but not a madman. "Underneath it all he was an extremely vulnerable person, ultimately more vulnerable than me. I have survived. I was the strong one, after all."
Having completed the book Kate says she now feels a kind of release. "I feel I won't need to think about him any more. After a year or two I'll burn all the diaries and photos. You shouldn't hang on to the past. I feel a great sense of lightness."
Carrion Kisses by Kate Lock, Ebury Press, £10. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call freephone 0800 0153232. Postage and packing is £1.50.
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