His son is 14.When his ex-wife heard last year that Whiting was charged with Sarah’s murder, she said: “I’m in shock at this happening. I have not seen him since Christmas 1995, when he brought a present round for our son. I have absolutely no feelings for him now whatsoever.”She said that in 1995 she had thrown out all photographs of Whiting, including their wedding album.One of Whiting’s few interests was “banger” racing at the Smallfield raceway, north of Crawley, where he raced while working in a garage in Crawley.Nicknamed “The Flying Fish” – a pun on his surname – he raced with the Gatwick Flyers club and once came third in the club championship.Steve Beynon, a commentator at the track, recalls Whiting as “nondescript, scruffy but polite, not articulate”.He added: “The year he was third, he didn’t actually win a race He was the invisible man Roy was scruffy. He was what I call a street mechanic, the sort of bloke everyone knows who will service your car at the side of the road for £25.”A fellow mechanic said: “After a while he got into the habit of sloping off about 3.30 each afternoon, getting back at about 4.30. This was later called the school run by one of us because he was once seen parked near a school when the kids were coming out.”At the time he carried out the earlier kidnap, in 1995, he was working at a mechanic’s at the back of Hyders Farm House, in Crawley. Brian Jefferies, who lives at the house, said that Whiting worked there for five years, on and off “You could not meet a nicer person. He didn’t swear, never went to the pubs.”When he got out of prison he moved to 6 St Augustine Road, Littlehampton, a building of about eight flats He kept a low profile.

On the night he abducted Sarah, he was back at Oscar’s at 9pm, ordering the usual Two hours later he was arrested.. If there was a standard profile of a murderous paedophile, Roy Whiting fitted the bill. This was the view of the police and the probation service, which categorised him as a “high risk” predator. The tragedy was they appeared powerless to act beyond the occasional secret meeting to discuss his case progress. That was until he struck.Then it came as no great surprise, when, within 24 hours of Sarah Payne’s disappearance, he was named as the prime suspect for her abduction He was the obvious choice. Five years earlier he had abducted another young girl in the south of England and sexually assaulted her in similar circumstances.

The only difference in his first attack was that he released his victim – something the violent fantasist would later view as a mistake not to be repeated.In the first attack Whiting kidnapped a nine-year-old girl as she played on a street in Crawley, West Sussex, and sexually assaulted her. For his crimes he was given a four-year jail sentence and he served two years and five months.The girl, now aged 15, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was abducted on 4 March 1995 while playing with two eight-year-old girl friends at about 2pm. Whiting, then aged 36, drove up in his Ford Sierra and attempted to snatch all the children. Two managed to escape, the third was thrown into the back of the Sierra.Whiting claimed he had a knife and told the terrified girl to lie on the floor in the back while he drove her 30 miles along back roads and country lanes to a secluded location where he ordered her to take off her clothes. When she refused he pulled some lengths of rope out of his pocket and threatened to tie her up.