'I feel really blessed with the career I’ve had': Murder investigator's journey from hypnotism to Blackburn priest

57-year-old Claire McEnery said she had always gotten bored easily.

And when, at 18-years-old, her life revolved around going to the gym and working as a hypnotist’s assistant, it was little wonder that her mother was hopeful to push her further - though neither of them realised it would lead her to a 30 year career as a murder detective, or to becoming an ordained priest in Lancashire.

”People sometimes wonder how you go from being a murder detective to becoming a Church of England priest,” Claire said. “In some ways the jobs are very different, but at the heart of both is a desire to serve people, to listen, and to make a difference when people are going through some of the most difficult moments in their lives.”

Back in ‘90s, Claire would have been one of the very few female officers to work in Lancashire’s police force.

It was a place she described, back then, as being extremely misogynistic. Posters of bare-chested women littered the walls of several offices she worked in, barely concealed by the haze of smoke from overflowing indoor ashtrays.

“It took some tough women. You had to give back as good as you got,” Claire said.

“You couldn’t actually see anybody, because the smoke was down to [face level]. You could see the odd ridiculous moustache from somebody, usually the DS. I’ll always remember there was a load of cups with mould in. But a lot of women came in and went, ‘I’m not staying here’.”

It was a situation which Claire stressed had improved over the years, backed up by figures showing the number of female officers has increased over the years, including in Lancashire Constabulary. “[But] these these were some of the best people I ever worked with. They were loyal, and they’d do anything for you.”

Claire said she’d met dozens of men and women over the years she could speak similarly about. The early days of training they shared together had, after all, been brutal: the delicate art of hostage negotiation had seen her and 24 others forcibly sleep deprived and whisked away to remote rooftops, to argue overnight with actors threatening to kill their loved ones.

Another day of training might see an exhausted Claire drying her tears in a dark bus, before stumbling into Heathrow Airport to foil staged terrorist plots. “They throw you in a room, there’s one of these old-fashioned red phones. It’s flashing, so of course, you answer, ‘Hello, love!’. Then you hear this voice going, ‘Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah!’, and you need the language line and all these things.

“Then the blinds go up and there’s an aeroplane, and you can see someone at the top of the steps dragging some person about. You don’t want to imagine it. So anyway, eight hours later, finally, we get the ‘hostages’ safe. It wasn’t a real incident of course, but it was very well set up.

“It actually breaks you. You’re sat there, going ‘Waaah, no! I want to go home!’ And then they tell you you’ve passed.”

The following years would see Claire rush from one end of Lancashire to another, this time dealing with crimes often stranger - or crueller - than fiction. Sex offenders, slavers, and armed robbers became par for the course over the next three decades.

But for every moment that Claire spent handcuffing criminals, she could spend hours more dealing with vulnerable people. She said they could often be one and the same.

“People ask me if I’ve ever met evil, and I don’t think I have ever met evil - but I’ve met people who have a propensity to it. But nearly every time you look at their history, and quite often, a lot of the talks I do are about privilege.

“Years ago, I was in a fish market at Accrington, on the floor at four in the morning. You can imagine it wasn’t a nice place to be. I was fighting for my life with a drug dealer who I was trying to arrest.

“He had a knife at me. You can’t avoid knives, and it was getting a bit... Anyway. The two people who came to help me were two criminals I had arrested, two young boys I’d arrested the night before for having drugs on them.

“I’d taken them to the police station, but I’d treated them right. I’d said, ‘Look lads, you’ve been arrested for having drugs on you, and we’ve got a long process to go through to process you, so let’s just get on, alright?’

“And we had a good laugh as we went through, processing. And those two lads saved my life.

“Somebody said to me ‘dirty little urchin’ about a 14-year-old boy. [If you’ve got] a 14-year-old boy, and a gang leader says to him, ‘Can you run those drugs over there and I’ll give you £50?’, he’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah’.

“If the next day he says, ‘Do you want to do it again, and while you’re on the way, I want you to steal that bike’, he’s going to feel bad. He doesn’t want to steal it. Then it’s, ‘You little s***!’.

“Is he an exploited child, or is he a dirty little urchin? You’ve got to see beyond what you see.”

Even after years of arrests, raids, and death-defying fights, Claire said she had come away with her own bright memories of her career, even in moments where they might have seemed impossible.

Among them was the day she had been called in to negotiate with a vulnerable man on a farm, who was at risk of taking his own life. Hours had passed for Claire and her team, who were growing more exhausted as the night wore on, and so she called her friend Jenny to help.

“I said, ‘Jenny, Jenny, I need you to come on this job! We need you!’. She said, ‘I’m off duty, I’m busy’, but bless her, she comes out and negotiates all night with us, which gives us a bit of time off as well, so it’s not so intensive.

“In the morning, the sun comes up, and we’re sat outside the house. ‘What a bright sunrise it is this morning,’ I say, looking at Jenny’s face. She’s glowing. She’s really glowing, I’ve never see anybody look like a Tango Orange. I say, ‘Jenny, Jenny, I don’t think it’s the sun! What’s happened to you?’.

“She went, ‘I told you I was busy - I just put my fake tan on!’.”

After years in the force, Claire would finally get promoted to detective inspector at Blackburn CID, investigating murders across Lancashire - and eventually moving to lead child death investigation.

“Baroness Kennedy said, quite rightly, that every child who has a sudden, unexpected death has the right to have their death investigated thoroughly,” Claire said. “It’s the most tragic area of policing.

“You try passing that mantle on - I could not pass that mantle on. I took people to post-mortems with me. A friend of mine, Paul, came to a post-mortem, and he couldn’t pick his own child up for three months. He needed some real help to get over that.

“Nikki, my friend, did the same job for a while. And when she had her baby, she kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking it had had a sudden death. It never happened, of course, but that’s the tragedy of it.

“I went to see Nikki when she had the baby, and she and her husband handed me this baby. I had held about 30 or 40 deceased babies, but never held a live one.

“The next time I went to take a baby off the parents [for a post-mortem], I took it into this room. I felt it move.

“It didn’t move, it’s just your brain, it’s PTSD. It really affected me.

“That’s the tragedy of policing, but it’s not something I carry with me. One of the things my conversion experience showed me was how much protection I’d had all the way through my career.”

Claire hadn’t always been religious, though she admitted she would, where needed, refer to Christianity when negotiating with vulnerable adults who would find comfort in it. It had been a slow process for her, but shortly before she retired from Blackburn, the pieces fit together for her all at once while she was out walking the dog.

“Before I left the police, I had a conversion experience. I met Jesus. It was the most incredible spiritual experience I’ve ever had, I was shown the most amazing love. I was shown my life, and how protected I’d been all the way.

“The only thing that came out of it was [a desire] to turn it out into the world. For a few weeks, I was in a bit of a state. I felt compelled to go in a church, and the rest is history.”

It took Claire a whopping seven years to become a fully trained priest, during which time she worked at Blackburn Diocese and Chester Diocese. Those were roles which had come somewhat “out of the blue” for her, she said, when she received a random phone call asking her to use her policing skills to review their safeguarding paperwork, and help put measures in place to prevent abuse within the church.

In the next two years, she said she saw “several” clergy members prosecuted for historic offences as a result.

Her first milestone during her training was to conduct her first baptism - a tall order for one who had apparently never seen one before.

”When I was a newly-ordained curate - or a ‘vicar with L plates on’, as I like to say - my vicar hurt her back during a service and she couldn’t walk. Unfortunately, she had a baptism to conduct afterwards, and I had never even read the baptism liturgy, let alone seen a baptism service!

“The church was packed with family and friends, some of whom had travelled a long way, so there was no escaping it. I had to get on with it.

“I managed to get through the baptism, but afterwards I realised I’d missed out the blessing of the Holy Spirit. I’d just given the baby a bath rather than a baptism! After a practice run, I went back, and did it properly.”

Now, Reverend Claire McEnery works as a priest at Blackburn Diocese, and spends her days travelling across Lancashire telling her story, including to current officers at Lancashire Constabulary. Earlier this year, she presided over the Fallen Officers Service on Police Memorial Day, and most recently led a demonstration at Lancashire Police Museum.

”It’s been absolutely wonderful,” she said. “It’s been a really wonderful career, I’ve enjoyed 90 per cent of it. I do feel I’ve been very protected by God along the way on some really tough things that I’ve dealt with.

“I feel really blessed with the career I’ve had and the friends I’ve made, and I feel even more blessed that I’ve been given this opportunity to explore it all.”