Ian Barker faces a situation not unlike Reggie’s, although he remains stoic throughout. It is only through his later drawings during sessions with a child psychiatrist that the extent of his participation in the crime will be revealed. While interviewed, he maintains his story that he knows “nothing about no baby” even when shown the CCTV film and read the statements of the witnesses who saw him in the company of the other boys and John Dresser. During all of this, his grandmother weeps. One can hear her on the tape, as her ululations rise periodically and the social worker’s murmurs of “Please, Mrs. Barker” fail to calm her. Her only remarks are, “I’ve a duty here,” but there is no indication that she sees communication with her grandson as part of that duty. While she understandably must have felt a tremendous sense of guilt for having abandoned Ian to his mother’s inadequate and often abusive care, she does not appear to connect this abandonment and the emotional and psychological abuse that followed to what happened to John Dresser. For his part, Ian never asks for his mother. It’s as if he knows in advance that he will stand alone throughout the investigation, supported mainly by a social worker who was unknown to him before the crime.

As for Michael Spargo, we have already seen that Sue Spargo’s abandonment of him occurred almost at once, during his first encounter with the police. This was also consistent with the rest of his life: His father’s departure from the home would have had a profound effect on all of the Spargo boys; his mother’s drinking and her other inadequacies would only have exacerbated Michael’s sense of desertion. Sue Spargo had already been incapable of putting a stop to the hand-me-down abuse that was going on among her nine sons. Michael likely had no expectation that his mother would be able to stop anything else that was going to happen to him.

Once they were arrested, Michael, Reggie, and Ian were interviewed repeatedly, up to seven times in a single day. As can be imagined, considering the enormity and the horror of the crime committed, each of them pointed a finger at the others. There were certain events that none of the boys would discuss at all-particularly those having to do with the hairbrush they had stolen from Items-for-a-Pound-but suffice it to say that both Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold were aware of the iniquitous nature of what they had done. Their initial protestations of innocence notwithstanding, the multitudinous references to “stuff what was done to that baby” along with their growing distress when certain topics were brought up (and, in the case of Reggie Arnold, the repeated hysterical begging of his parents not to hate him) tell us that they were fully cognizant of every line of propriety and humanity that was crossed during their time with John Dresser. To the end, on the other hand, Ian Barker remained unmoved, stoic, as if his life circumstances had bled from him not only conscience but also every feeling of empathy he might otherwise have had towards another human being.

“Do you understand what forensic evidence is, lad?” were the words that cracked open the door to confession, for a confession was what the police wanted from the boys, just as a confession is what police want from all criminals. Upon their arrests, the boys’ school uniforms, their shoes, and their outer-wear had all been gathered for examination, and the trace evidence from these articles would later not only place them at the Dawkins building site but also put them in the company of John Dresser in the final terrible moments of his life. Shoes belonging to all three boys were spattered with the toddler’s blood; fibres from their clothing were caught up not only in John’s snowsuit but also in his hair and on his body; their fingerprints were on the back of the hairbrush, on copper tubing from the building site, on the door of the Port-a-Loo, on the seat of the commode inside, and on John Dresser’s little white trainers. The case against them was open and shut, but in the earliest interviews the police, of course, would not have known that as the evidence had not yet been analysed.

As the police ultimately saw it and as the social workers agreed, a confession from the boys would serve a number of purposes: It would trigger the recently passed Contempt of Court Act, putting an end not only to the growing, hysterical press speculation about the case but also to any possibility of details prejudicial to the trial being leaked to the public; it would allow the police to focus their attention on building whatever sort of case against the boys that they intended to present to the Crown Prosecutors; it would give psychologists the necessary material for an evaluation of the boys. The police did not as a whole consider the value of a confession as it pertained to the boys’ own healing. That there was “something deeply wrong in all of the families” (the words of Detective Superintendent Mark Bernstein in an interview two years after the trial) was obvious to everyone, but the police did not see it as their duty to mitigate the psychological and emotional damage done to Michael Spargo, Ian Barker, and Reggie Arnold within their own homes. One can certainly not fault them for this, despite the fact that the frenzied nature of the ultimate crime speaks of deep psychopathology in all of them. For the brief of the police was to bring someone to justice for the murder of John Dresser and to give, through this, some small measure of relief to his suffering parents.

As might be suspected, the boys begin by accusing each other, once they are informed that John Dresser’s body has been located and that, in the vicinity of the Port-a-Loo, everything from footprints to faecal matter has been found and is going to be analysed by criminologists and, doubtless, connected to his abductors. “Was Ian’s idea to nick the kid,” comes from Reggie Arnold, who addresses this cry not to the police interviewer but rather to his mother, to whom he says, “Mum, I never. I never took that kid.” Michael Spargo accuses Reggie, and Ian Barker says nothing until he’s told of Reggie’s accusation, at which point he says, “I wanted that kitten, is all.” All of them begin with protestations that they did not “hurt no baby” and Michael is the first to admit that they “might’ve took him outside the Barriers for a walk or something but that was cause we didn’t know where he belonged.”

All of the boys are urged throughout to tell the truth. “The truth is better than lying, son,” Michael Spargo is told repeatedly by his interviewer. “You’ve got to say. Please, luv, you’ve got to say,” is what Ian Barker hears from the grandmother. Reggie is counseled by his parents to “spit it out, now, like something bad from your tummy that you’ve got to get rid of.” But the full truth is clearly a form of abomination that the boys are afraid to touch upon, and their reactions to the aforementioned injunctions illustrate the various degrees to which they raise their defences against having to speak it.