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Affable gent with devious intellect10/08/2001When police finally swooped on poison pen letter writer James Forster they found him to be a very strange man. Speaking to The Northern Echo before his conviction, discussing on his doorstep the benefits of living in a village, foot-and-mouth disease, and other issues of the day, he came across as a charming, affable and polite elderly gentleman. But underneath, officers discovered obsessive tendencies. The son of a Shildon shopkeeper, Forster believes he has come a long way. Married, with no children, to a schoolteacher, he was a respected college lecturer and church member - and, he believed, a pillar of local society. The former Open University lecturer told the jury he attended a council school before going on to Darlington Technical College. He worked for the National Coal Board before going on to gain a BSc in applied science, specialising in mining engineering and then a masters degree and PhD. Forster, the court heard, was a former parish council clerk of 11 years in Manfield and colleagues described him as friendly, reliable and hardworking. His smart cottage home, with its immaculate, well-tended gardens, provided no clue to the real man behind the polished veneer. When the police went into the house, which Forster shared with his wife, they found it was meticulously kept, with no television. But while searching they found there were hundreds of toilet rolls, massive stores of food and reams of paper. One officer said: "It looked like he was preparing for World War Three." Just yards from the cottage lies a larger detached house which the couple also own, and which, again, is perfectly painted and well cared for, with plants at the windows and not a leaf out of place. But this house has never been lived in by either Forster or his wife. He told police he would not move into it until "the spirit of the previous occupants has left it". It, too, was searched by officers trying to uncover the identity of the author of the Manfield poison pen letters. In both houses they found the tools of Forster's trade - word processing equipment, pens and stencils - all of which he used to inflict dread and horror on those living around him. Officers also found diaries, which included entries noting mundane tasks such as "turned the mattress today". When it came to interviews with police, officers said he seemed to treat it as a battle of wits, with him determined to outwit those trying to stop his evil campaign. One officer said: "We wanted some hand-writing samples from him and he would not provide those. "What he said he would do was that, if we showed him all the items, he would confirm whether they were his in interview. We sat him down. "As we started, I asked him if he wore glasses and did he need them to read. He said yes. So I asked him if he wanted to put them on. "He was really unhappy that we had noticed he didn't already have them on, but we had seen him wearing them when he signed in. "He would not have put them on if we hadn't asked, and then, later, he would have claimed that he could not see the samples we were showing to him. "He is a very, very strange man. He strikes us as a very intelligent, but devious man who appears to hold grudges against people. But he is mainly a coward who would not approach anyone he had a gripe with face to face." • Back
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