The Life and Times of Chadwick Dial

The Life and Times of Chadwick Dial by Chris Green

‘It’s him,’ screamed Eve. ‘It’s Chadwick Dial. Look!’

Eve Laszlo and I were aboard a coach on its way to Bath. We were going to see a new band called Oasis play at the Bath Pavilion. We had stopped off at Stroud to pick up more passengers. Through the window, wandering around the bus station, was the unmistakable figure of Chadwick Dial. Once you’ve seen him you would recognise him straight way if you saw him again, like you would recognise Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster. Dial reminded me somehow of the child snatcher from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. But with his Quasimodo stoop, his facial scar, his missing eye and random strands of matted hair coming out from all corners of his head, arguably a less attractive version.

For a moment it looked as if he was going to get on the coach. It was touch and go. Eve was freaking out.

‘That bastard held me prisoner,’ she was yelling. ‘He kidnapped Ross and Alex.’

Everyone on the coach was looking round. Although I had heard nothing but bad about Chadwick Dial, I wondered if she might be overreacting. I had seen him now and again in The Black Hole, a pub where I occasionally went for a drink, but I had always given him a wide berth. I had not known Eve long. The incidents she referred to had happened some time before, when her teenage children were younger. Eventually I managed to calm her.

Chadwick Dial did not get on the coach. He slunk off somewhere to sniff a drainpipe or whatever it is that one eyed hunchbacks do. As we pulled away, Eve apologised for her outburst. She went on to explain why she had been so angry. She told me that Dial was a friend of her ex husband’s. When they were going through divorce proceedings and she had custody of the children, Dial helped Jackson Laszlo to abduct them. He locked Eve in a room for three days while Jackson Laszlo took them out of the country. She did not get to see them again for months. Even then she and the children had to go to a women’s refuge for their safety. Dial was never brought to book for his part in the escapade.

Despite the episode on the coach, Eve and I were able to enjoy a pleasant couple of days in Bath. I did not normally go for loud rock bands, but Oasis were a revelation. They played I Am The Walrus, encouraging comparisons with The Beatles and a song called Wonderwall. It was clear that they were going to be very big. After Bath, we spent a few days on the North Devon coast, where Eve told me a little more about her experiences of Chadwick Dial. She was obviously very frightened of him. Getting it out in the open though seemed to help to ease the tension.

We went back to the home we were building in rural Gloucestershire and life moved on as life does. Eve was unpredictable from day to day but I became used to her mood sings and occasional outbursts. She clearly had her demons, but then don’t we all? We did not however have another conversation about Chadwick Dial. I had no reason to bring the subject up and Eve seemed to have let go. As we did not go to The Black Hole, I never came across Dial in the time Eve and I were together. Gradually he faded from my consciousness.

Eve and I parted a year or two later, but the anecdotes about Chadwick Dial do not end there. Since then I have heard a regular trickle of unpleasant stories about him. It appears that everyone who has ever met him has a tale to tell. He killed Kester Jaynes’s mynah bird. He stole Bryan Harrington’s classic Humber Super Snipe and managed to wreck it. He drugged and raped Denise Felch’s teenage daughter, Kylie.

‘Why was he never caught?’ I asked her. ‘It’s not like he’s hard to spot.’

‘You wouldn’t believe just how slippery he is,’ she said.

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if he were an honest to goodness criminal,’ said Lee Hale after Dial had conned him out of his winning lottery ticket. ‘It’s the contemptibility, the slyness, the deceit.’

These stories are repeated over and over. Dial has robbed, cheated, double crossed and generally taken advantage of everyone who has had the misfortune to have known him. I came across him one time in The Belted Galloway. He was trying to sell the drugs he had stolen off Glassy Eyed John. I told him that I didn’t do drugs. He glowered and skulked off muttering something unsavoury about Eve.

Did Dial’s ugliness have a bearing on the development of his character or had he moulded his character to match his unsightly demeanour. No one seems to know for certain how his disfigurements came about, but it’s easy to speculate as to how he have incurred them, It has been suggested the eye injury could have come from his being hit in the face with a cricket ball at school, but it could just as likely to have been someone giving him a good honest clout with a cricket bat. In fact a blow from a blunt instrument of some kind represents the more satisfying explanation. The facial scar might too have been retribution for something untoward. It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the random tufts of hair that sprout here and there from his head. There have been suggestions that the stoop is just an affectation to get sympathy. Who knows? Perhaps the truth is that no-one cares how the injuries happened.

With most villains you tend to hear something positive about them, however small, to balance out the bad. In his spare time, for instance, Charlie Manson supported a children’s charity. Adolf Eichmann was kind to dogs. Colonel Gadaffi was a keen landscape painter. That type of thing. Usually, nothing is black and white. But Chadwick Dial appears to have no saving graces. Condemnation of him is absolute. He may or may not be guilty of murder, but deaths are definitely attributable to his actions, my friend Dewi Davies’s for example. I was deeply saddened when I found this out unexpectedly one day from a colleague at work.

Dewi Davies, on a trip down from Wales, ran into Dial in The Black Hole or it may have been The Frog and Nightgown. After taking him for drinks all night, Dial got Dewi to give him a lift to a house party on the other side of town. Dewi had some coke and Dial helped him get through this. The two of them got into an argument over a girl Dewi was making a move on. By this time everyone at the party was well bashed and the argument quickly got out of control. Dewi went to leave, but Dial and some other revellers, who saw the Welshman as a stranger, stopped him in his tracks. At Dial’s instigation they began jumping up and down on the bonnet of his Sunbeam Alpine.

Dewi eventually managed to get them off. He put his foot down for a quick getaway. He was well wasted and angry. His erratic driving drew the attention of a police patrol. They gave chase, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. Dewi tried to shake them off. Unable to control the powerful car on a bend, Dewi ended up driving into a stone wall. He died on impact.

Bringing things up to date a little, I caught up with Jackson Laszlo a week or two back in The Black Hole. He asked me if I had seen Eve recently. Apparently she had disappeared. I said that I hadn’t but she was good at doing that, disappearing. He agreed, adding that she suffered from a borderline personality disorder and at times when she was down, he felt she might be considered to belong to that widely interpreted category vulnerable adult.

‘Anything might have happened to her,’ he said.

I recalled the times that she had run off for days without a word.

‘It’s probably nothing at all but all the same I am worried,’ he said.

I thought it best not to mention that the episode when he had abducted the children might have helped to bring about her condition, or at the very least not have been sympathetic to it. I judged that this was not the right time to attribute blame for Eve’s vulnerability.

‘Surely Ross or Alex would know where she is,’ I said, instead.

He said that he hadn’t seen Ross or Alex for several months.

I said that this was not unusual for grown up children. My own were the same. By and by we got on to the subject of Chadwick Dial.

‘Don’t even mention his name,’ Jackson said. ‘When I was away last year I let him house-sit, while I was in Portugal. When I returned the house was empty. Everything was gone. The bastard cleaned me out. After all I had done for him. The neighbours said they thought that I had just moved out without telling them. One morning two large furniture vans called and the removal men took everything. The police can’t even trace the removal vans.’

None of the tales about Chadwick Dial however compares to the shocking story that is unfolding on today’s news. Dial, the reporter is saying, is behind an evil cult based in a commune in the borderlands between England and Wales. He falsely imprisoned, tortured and raped a cadre of vulnerable women, telling them he had God-like powers and if they disobeyed him he would unleash a supernatural force, which would inflict painful and horrible deaths on their families. Dial is a master manipulator who used violence, fear and sexual degradation to control the women he held captive. They were imprisoned in the disused farm buildings on the site. They were completely isolated from the outside world, until last week one of them managed to escape from the compound. Dial, she said, had told his victims that if they followed him he would show them a better world, but if they had bad ideas then their souls would burn in Hell. The investigation into the human remains found in an outhouse at the site continues. Comparisons are already being made with the Fred and Rosemary West killings of two decades ago.

My mind goes back to the sad day that I heard about Dial’s role in Dewi Davies’s death. When Wayne told me about it, he had no idea that I even knew Dewi. He thought he was talking about a complete stranger. He did not know that Dewi and I had once been close. Why would he? As far as he knew, Dewi was someone who had come up from Wales and Dial had dragged along to a party that he was attending. He did not know that Dewi and I had once shared a house in Stoke Road. Dewi was a warm, generous guy, the kind that would do anything to help. He may have been down on his luck but he deserved better.

I think back to that trip to Bath twenty years ago when Eve Laszlo and I saw Dial through the window of the coach. I thought then that Eve was being over dramatic. How could someone who looked like Dial did be a threat. You would be able to spot him a mile off. You would steer clear of him. How wrong I was. I realise that Eve and I didn’t part on good terms back then, but I do hope that she is OK.

© Chris Green 2015: All rights reserved