6. 4 Statement by Mr Thomas Caldwell
Statement by Mr Thomas Caldwell, student at Oriel College, taken by DC Monica Philipson
I was out running with my friend Mark Sanders. We like to run a figure of eight round the parks, which means that we go along the central path twice. We saw a man in dirty clothes sitting on the bench where the incident took place the first time we passed it. The second time round, we saw a woman in her twenties – we heard afterwards that she was a doctoral student from Wolfson called Joanne Rowland – walking along the path. We only saw her from behind. When she got to the bench, the man put out his foot and tripped her up and she fell over. Right away the man – Lambert – was on top of her and she was screaming for help. We ran as fast as we could to get to her. When he saw us coming, he got up and ran away, so we gave chase and brought him down in amongst the line trees at the back of Norham Gardens.
We held on to him between us and frogmarched him back to the bench. By the time we got there, the police had arrived. They arrested him and took him away to the police station. There were lots of people standing around, wanting to see that Ms Rowland was all right. Someone shouted out that they had found a purse. We all stood around talking for a while. We were going to go back to our run, but one of the police officers asked us to go to the police station with them and make a statement, which is what we did.