THIRTY-ONE
TRIAL AND RETRIBUTION
Just three short months passed before Jack Reid faced the judge and jury at house Crown Court in Brighton’s neighbouring town of Hove, in East Sussex. Security was tight on the opening day of the trial and the public gallery filled to overflowing with those who sought a glimpse of the man whom the denizens of the Press had already dubbed ‘The Brighton Ripper’. Official opinion of the young man’s state of mind had been divided in the run up to the trial. There appeared to have been a fifty-fifty split in the estimations of those learned members of the psychiatric profession, with half of those who’d examined Jack finding him to be a highly disturbed and potentially psychotic individual, the other half reporting that he was as sane as the next man, though w
