My latest book Trials and Tribulations – Innocence Matters is available to order through FIP. Our next publication will be Bad Form – How Tariffs Protect the Guilty and Punish the Innocent. It will detail the issues I discuss in the video in greater detail.

https://www.facebook.com/satish.sekar.3/videos/1376131822491496/

We will be publising Bad Form – How Tariffs Protect the Guilty and Punish the Innocent early next year. It will reveal important new facts on how the tariff on Gafoor is an even bigger travesty than had been previously thought.

Here’s a taster: https://www.facebook.com/satish.sekar.3/videos/1374091852695493/

Anniversary

Thirteen years ago today Jeffrey Gafoor made history. Gafoor pleaded guilty to the murder of Lynette White. She was the victim of what was then (February 14th 1988) the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history. Faced with overwhelming evidence Gafoor admitted that he had murdered Lynette. He had provided samples for DNA testing before attempting to take his own life in February 2003. Police officers from the Lynette White Inquiry Phase II saved his life.

Phase II was one of the best investigations ever. Led by Detective Chief Superintendent Kevin O’Neill, these officers and the forensic scientists, did a fantastic job. They knew that finding the real killer would come at a huge price to the force. No British police force had ever resolved a miscarriage of justice by convicting the real killer in the DNA age. Any force that did so knew that it would unleash a can of worms, the like of which British policing had never faced before. But still, they investigated doggedly and continued until they made history by bringing Gafoor to justice.

A Colossal Error

And then that storm was unleashed. Phase III investigated what went wrong – who was responsible for one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice ever. Thirty-four people were arrested and interviewed under caution on suspicion of offences including conspiring to pervert the course of justice and perjury. Twenty of them were police officers and 13 were told that they would face trial, along with two civilian witnesses.

But before they faced trial three of the alleged eye-witnesses were tried for perjury and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Mr Justice (Sir David) Maddison ruled that they could not claim duress, as the law demanded that they must retract immediately, but to whom – police officers, the courts? Who? How could they be expected the courts or police after what they had gone through?

Mark Grommek, Angela Psaila and Learnne Vilday (the New Cardiff Three) were convicted – rightly as the law said, but wrongly according to justice and conscience. The court accepted that they had told the lies they were forced to tell and then they were prosecuted for telling them. They were each sentenced to 18 months in prison. This was and remains a huge injustice – the law could not have acted more inappropriately, but worse would soon follow.

Travesty

With 13 police officers and two witnesses due to face trial it was decided that eight former officers, including Graham Mouncher and Richard Powell and the witnesses Ian Massey and Violet Perriam would face trial first. The trial began in 2011. I was due to be a witness against Massey. Nicholas Dean QC and his prosecution team ensured that I would miss virtually all the trial for no good reason – actually there was a very good reason.

We were not meant to see what was unfolding. It would take a very long time to unravel, but unravel it would. The trial collapsed on largely spurious grounds. Disclosure was not what it should have been – that is unarguable, but whose fault is that? The straw that broke the camel’s back was the failure to disclose some documents – copies actually. The originals had been retained, and copies were taken.

The copies were meaningless. It was believed that they had been destroyed – evidence to that effect was given, but it was not true. A month after the sensational collapse of the trial the supposedly destroyed documents were discovered in the very boxes that they had been sent to police by the IPCC.

Unlawful

I had been kept out of the trial until it was far too late – we believe that was their intention all along. South Wales Police chose to cooperate with HMCPSI and the IPCC, both of whom were investigating aspects of the collapse of the trial. The terms of reference established that neither process was worth cooperating with as they would not establish why a notorious miscarriage of justice had been allowed to occur.

I chose not to cooperate and demanded the return of my work product, which was mine alone, as was the copyright on it. The Professional Standards Department unlawfully seized my work and distributed to others against my wishes in flagrant disregard of my rights and copyright.

The justification supplied a year late did not apply to me. Naturally the IPCC – itself an interested party and therefore not an impartial arbiter upheld the ludicrous justification – one that applied to criminal suspects not cooperating witnesses. Both HMCPSI and the IPCC failed miserably to explain why this appalling miscarriage of justice had occurred – inevitable really – as neither was concerned with that and nor was the Home Secretary, Theresa May. Her concern was to avoid a public inquiry.

Squaring the Circle

As early as the first week of the 2011 Police Corruption Trial it became obvious that the prosecution was lacklustre – notwithstanding that the prosecution team could talk a good talk. The defence case was a tried and tested method in such cases – deny that there had ever been a miscarriage of justice. The Cardiff Five were guilty, they claimed. But what about the DNA? What about Gafoor’s guilty plea? What about his insistence that he had acted alone?

Simple. None of that mattered. All that counted were his inconsistent accounts. He could only remember inflicting ten or twelve stab wounds and not the throat ones. So what? Well that meant it was possible that there was more than one attack. “Technically”, Angela Gallup said – the scientific equivalent of ‘and I can’t rule out the possibility that pigs could fly either!’

There was forensic pathology evidence and blood distribution pattern evidence that had an important story to tell. Lynette’s murder was never consistent with five killers and two witnesses charging around the crime-scene in darkness without leaving any trace of themselves or interfering with any of the evidence in the flat.

It simply flew in the face of any notion of logic.

The Final Insults

It served well in 2011 – so well that it was trotted out again in the compensation case in 2015. And as in 2015 the witnesses that could demolish this outrageous hypothesis were never called. We will be publishing Trials and Tribulations – Innocence Matters? soon. The aim is to reassert the truth – the Cardiff Five are, as they always were, totally innocent of any involvement in the murder of Lynette White, even though it is too late to matter to Yusef Abdullahi and Ronnie Actie.

Meanwhile, Gafoor had received a very lenient tariff in 2005 – just 12 years and 8 months, 13 years in reality once remand was taken into account. Consequently, Gafoor is now eligible to apply for release on parole. We will be publishing Bad Form – How Tariffs Protect the Guilty and Punish the Innocent soon to illustrate the grave flaws with the tariff system – one that sees no problem with treating the truly guilty more leniently than the innocent for the same crime. As Lloyd Paris – Tony’s brother – said, “Things are back to front!”

Lessons

The criminal justice system has never listened to Lloyd Paris – its loss. Lloyd shows dignity and decency even though those qualities are sadly lacking in the treatment he has received from it. His brother Tony was one of the victims of a now notorious miscarriage of justice. On Saint Valentine’s Day 1988 20-year-old Lynette White was murdered. It was a knife crime of exceptional brutality – a sexually motivated homicide. The case against his brother and four co-accused depended on a case scenario that Professor Dave Barclay described as “scientifically ludicrous”.

There were dire consequences for the Cardiff Five and their wider families. John and the late Ronnie Actie were acquitted in November 1990. Two years later Stephen Miller, the late Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris were freed on appeal, but the whispering campaign against them and subsequent damage continued for years. It ended, or should have in July 2003 when the Cardiff Five were vindicated by the conviction of Lynette White’s real killer.

Bad Form

There were many victims of this terrible case and further insults would occur. The Cardiff Five had lost a total of sixteen years between them for a crime Gafoor admitted he had committed on his own. More importantly, the crime-scene evidence, forensic pathology, forensic psychology, blood distribution patterns and DNA proved that Lynette had indeed been murdered by one person acting on their own and that man was Jeffrey Gafoor. Despite the serious aggravating circumstances, Gafoor receives a tariff – the minimum that he must serve before he becomes eligible to apply for parole – of just thirteen years. Amazingly, both Tony Paris and Yusef Abdullahi had received harsher tariffs for the same crime.

“Well it’s bad form to tell you the truth”, Lloyd Paris said. “You know the type of thing that man done, he should have done a lot more jail. I don’t know what the system’s coming to. They say it takes time for things to go round that slow, but it’s too slow. Everything is going too slow. It took all this time to get the police in court. It took the police all that time to get Gafoor. It’s silly. It really is silly”.

Max Hilll QC, then Vice President of Bar Association agreed that it would look odd to the public. “[Y]ou identify a need for precision in sentencing in miscarriage cases”, Hill said. “I’m happy to discuss that because clearly from a distance if as you tell me in the Lynette White case there was a sentence that was applied to those wrongly convicted, which was heavier than the person ultimately rightly convicted, to many people that would appear wrong and the question behind that may be, do you need to do something about tariff sentencing to ensure that doesn’t happen?”

(We will be answering this question in our forthcoming report Just Tariffs, and highlighting the problem in further articles).

The Western Mail’s Chief Reporter, Martin Shipton, believes that changes are required. “Well it suggests that there is something seriously wrong with the way in which tariffs are arrived at”, he said. “Now whether that is because there is insufficient guidance available to judges, whether the policy has changed over the intervening years, I’m not sure”. But Shipton is clear that there can be no excuses for innocent people receiving harsher tariffs than the innocent for the same crime, differences in when legal proceedings occurred, notwithstanding.

“Well it seems ludicrous that the tariff for the real killer is actually – ultimately – even when we are told that the fact that he allowed innocent people to go jail is taken into account is actually lower than the total amount of time that was spent in prison by the innocent people” [my emphasis].

Significance

Today, the real and sole murderer of 20-year-old Lynette White, becomes eligible to apply for parole. Jeffrey Gafoor admits that he alone is responsible. In the early hours of Saint Valentine’s Day 1988, Lynette was stabbed over fifty times. Her throat was slit. Still Gafoor continued his vicious attack. He stabbed her breasts and chest repeatedly – at least half of the offensive injuries were to that area of her body. The attack continued after she was dead or dying. The brutality obviously went far beyond what was required to kill her. It was cruel and in my view torture. Gafoor has never explained why Lynette suffered this horrific fate. And he has not explained why he stayed silent while five innocent men stood trial for a crime he admits he committed on his own.

The Cardiff Five ((Yusef Abdullahi, John and Ronnie Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) were charged with Lynette’s murder in December 1988. Almost two years later the Actie cousins were acquitted and the Cardiff Three were wrongfully convicted. It is now acknowledged to be one of Britain’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. It was quite obviously a sexually motivated homicide, even if that was not the label in use in the 1980s and ’90s.

Professor Dave Barclay conducted a review of the scientific evidence, which led t the vindication of the Cardiff Five and a measure of actual justice for the memory of Lynette White. He explains the significance of the crime being a sexually motivated homicide. “All but a very few are on the breasts, but sheʼs had her neck cut as well and wrists and so on”, he said. “Thereʼs a slash across the face. Itʼs a sexually motivated homicide – full stop. [I]tʼs a sexually motivated homicide and donʼt forget those stab wounds are through the puffa jacket and clothing and yet theyʼre still, theyʼre all concentrated on the breasts. Itʼs a single male sexually motivated homicide” [my emphasis].

So why the emphasis? Sexually motivated homicides are almost always committed by one man acting on his own, like Gafoor. Sometimes two vicious people combine and encourage each other to commit such crimes. Barclay and others cannot provide a single example in all the annals of crime where a murder like this was committed by five men, who made accomplices of two other sex workers, but let them live after committing such an evil crime. And all of this was allegedly done without leaving any trace, tying them to the scene or victim in total darkness. Sadly, Barclay has never given evidence about all this and more. So what would he have said if he had been given the chance? “Interestingly I give evidence more in Holland and places like that where they seem quite happy to have people give an overview”, he said. “I would have said whereʼs the evidence for any of that bullshit? I might even have said that in court”.

Evidence-led

Barclay demonstrated that the crime-scene evidence, forensic pathology, forensic psychology and blood distribution pattern was only consistent with one explanation. Lynette was murdered by one person acting on his own. That person, by his own admission and guilty plea – and evidence – was Jeffrey Charles Gafoor. For at least nine months the investigation followed the credible evidence – the crime-scene and forensic science wasn’t lying, but the original investigation took a diversion. It derailed the inquiry.

“[I]f you have two possibilities, you need very persuasive evidence to go for the least likely, so youʼve got a single male arguing with a prostitute over a deal and thatʼs what the scientist thought for nine months, or youʼve got this thing where Angela Psaila, [Mark] Grommek, at least and maybe somebody else and the five accused are all tearing round this room, sawing at peopleʼs necks and trying to cut their hands – stuff like this”, Barclay says.

“Angela Psailaʼs supposed to be asked to cut the neck or hands, I canʼt remember, or the wrist, so thatʼs so inherently improbable on every possible level: psychologically, practically and just they couldnʼt do it in that dark room without leaving footwear and finger-marks in blood and if you actually consider something I did after I totalled up the number of people that were supposed to have held the bloody knife”, he continues. “Thatʼs four people, so there are four people with blood on their hands and theyʼre going out without leaving finger-marks in blood or whatever, so I think that was a major thing. Occamʼs Razor is a thing that we use a lot in forensic science, ʻin all probability, the simplest explanation is the correct oneʼ, and you have to be really sure that the simplest explanation isnʼt correct and that was something that was not done either”.

The Cost of Silence

The methods that Barclay used in his review and subsequent work on this case were available in the 1980s and ’90s. There was no reason for this miscarriage of justice to be allowed to occur. Jeffrey Gafoor was the one person who knew for certain that not only were the Cardiff Five innocent, but that they were suffering a grave injustice for his crime. He chose to stay silent and let their lives be destroyed Ronnie Actie and Yusef Abdullahi both died before reaching fifty. John Actie, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris still endure the unjustifiable whispering campaigns in a case that disgraces justice. Meanwhile, the real killer, becomes eligible to apply for parole today after completing a tariff that was incorrectly applied and failed miserably to reflect the crimes Gafoor committed.

There is no excuse for the lives of the Cardiff Five and their families to have been wrecked. There is no excuse for Lynette’s family to have been denied justice for so long. While Gafoor is not responsible for justice miscarrying, his cowardly decision to refuse to take any responsibility for his crime when it mattered destroyed several lives. Do the courses and rehabilitative exercises that he experiences in prison to prepare him for parole bear this in mind? If not, why not? The real and sole killer received an inappropriately lenient tariff that further insults all the victims of this tawdry injustice – one that simply won’t go away until justice is allowed to reign once and for all.

Scandalous

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. With a cruel irony – cruel because 20-year-old Lynette White was denied the chance of motherhood that she desired – her murderer becomes eligible to apply for parole after a serving a paltry thirteen years. Twenty-eight years ago on Saint Valentine’s Day Lynette was the victim of what was then the most brutal murder of its type in Welsh history. She was stabbed over fifty times. Her throat was slit more than once. Her murderer continued stabbing her as she lay dying, or even dead.

Tomorrow, of all days, Jeffrey Gafoor, her self-confessed sole killer, completes the excessively lenient tariff that was imposed on him by Mr Justice (Sir John) Royce almost ten years ago. It was a tariff strewn with error, but there’s none as blind as those who refuse to see.

Verging on the sadistic?

When giving his reasons for imposing the tariff, Royce said that Lynette’s murder, “verged on the sadistic”. Lloyd Paris – brother of Tony, who was one of three men wrongly convicted of Lynette’s murder in 1990 – disagrees. “I would say the man was wrong”, he said. “It is sadistic. Well, that was the most sadistic thing that ever happened around me”.

Is there any doubt that it was sadistic? Not for Lloyd Paris.

“Totally, you know. He [Gafoor] says something like, ‘I can remember stabbing her a few times, but I can’t remember the rest. It’s all a haze’. Well he should be able to. Someone should be showing him the facts of what he done, so it’s not a haze no more, so when he starts quoting things, he can say, ‘Yeah, it was a haze but I’ve been told that this was the damage’”.

And he’s not alone in thinking that Lynette’s murder was sadistic. There’s not much that surprises the Western Mail’s Chief Reporter, Martin Shipton, but this does. “Well I don’t know what his perception of the threshold of sadism is, but mine certainly, it would seem, isn’t lower than his” Shipton said with incredulity at the suggestion that it could be seen as anything other than sadistic.

Consequences

It had a considerable effect. If Lynette’s murder had been termed sadistic, the starting point could have been thirty years rather than the fifteen that Royce decided was appropriate.

“Well that’s obviously made a considerable difference, though I’m not clear why he has come to that conclusion, because obviously fifty stab wounds is much more than would be required to kill someone”, Shipton said. “Well that’s a considerable difference clearly. I suppose the prospect this man could be out after fifteen years is quite disturbing given the level of violence that was involved in the crime”.

Lloyd Paris goes further. “That’s where he should have started – simple as”, he said. “It is sadistic. It don’t verge on nothing, you know. The damage done to that poor girl was horrific, so how he could say it verges on sadistic is a joke”.

And there were other problems too. Lynette’s murder was exceptionally brutal. However, there was another serious aggravating circumstance – one that Royce viewed as the most important. Gafoor had allowed five innocent men to go to prison for a total of sixteen years for a crime that he knew he had committed on his own. The tariff should fit the crimes and in this case it plainly did not.

Having set his starting point at fifteen years Royce thought that he could only allow a third for aggravating circumstances. With that starting point he had to include both the brutality of Lynette’s murder and allowing the innocent to suffer in the aggravating circumstances. Five years for both of those aggravating circumstances? “No”, an outraged Lloyd Paris said. “No. Five years is not enough”. It is hard to disagree, especially as Royce only allowed four and a half for both.

Limits

Max Hill QC suggests that there was no limit on Royce regarding aggravating circumstances. “It [a document published by the Sentencing Council] makes it clear that the Coroners and Justice Act, which is the vehicle for this, expects courts to sentence according to the guidelines, but if the court is satisfied that it’s according to the interests of justice to do so, that court can do so and that to me is a clear signal that if there is an unusual feature in a case, which might be an unusual feature that mitigates downwards or an unusual feature that aggravates upwards, every judge has the ability to take that into account and to act on it”, Hill said.

“And so, just before we get into any detail, if you are sentencing someone whose been proven on scientific evidence to be guilty of a serious crime and you are told that there was an earlier prosecution, which led to conviction at a time when the real culprit was living in this jurisdiction and, as it were, did nothing to come forward or to assist, the sentencing judge on being told that, is entitled, using the interests of justice safety valve, to say, ‘Well that is a unique feature of this case and I don’t need anything in black and white in my guidelines to tell me that I can treat that as an aggravating feature’”, he continued, but that was not the issue – the amount was.

After he had taken mitigation into account, Royce decided that the very serious aggravating circumstances only outweighed mitigation by a year. “No, it don’t reflect the enormity”, Lloyd Paris says. “It don’t reflect anything. One year is nothing”.

Miscategorised

But these are far from the only errors of judgement to plague this case. Lynette had not been raped, or sexually assaulted and she was fully clothed, yet this was a sexually motivated homicide. “All but a very few are on the breasts, but sheʼs had her neck cut as well and wrists and so on”, Barclay explains. “Thereʼs a slash across the face. Itʼs a sexually motivated homicide – full stop”.

Could there be any doubt? Not according to Barclay and he should know. He has conducted several reviews of homicides, including Lynette’s. “No there cannot be and I use it in my lectures to forensic psychology students and as soon as I say, what sort of murder is this and as soon as I show the picture without the puffa jacket, itʼs a sexually motivated homicide and donʼt forget those stab wounds are through the puffa jacket and clothing and yet theyʼre still, theyʼre all concentrated on the breasts. Itʼs a single male sexually motivated homicide”.

So was it sadistic? “Well it is quite sadistic doing that sort of stuff”, he said. “No, itʼs a sexually motivated homicide. Sexually motivated homicides are not necessarily sadistic”. Although he would not necessarily use the term sadistic, this was the missing link – this showed that the violence suffered by Lynette was indeed sexually motivated and that should have been considered. The judge mentioned that twenty-five wounds were to her breasts, but tellingly he does not describe it as a sexually motivated homicide, which begs the question, why wasn’t he told that by the prosecution?

Further Error

Having set his starting point at fifteen years, Royce detailed how the policy at the relevant time was to start at twelve years. He felt bound to do the same, but was he? Two other murders that occurred in Cardiff – both sexually motivated and I would say sadistic suggest otherwise. Geraldine Palk was the victim of an even more brutal murder than Lynette in December 1990. Her murderer, Mark Hampson was brought to justice around the same time as Gafoor.

And in 1996 Karen Skipper was murdered. Her estranged husband Phillip was rightly acquitted in 1997. Her real murderer, John Pope, was convicted of her murder in 2009 and again at retrial in 2011. Lady Justice (Dame Heather) Hallett chose a starting point of fifteen years for Hampson. Mr Justices (Sir Nigel) Davis and (Sir Roderick) Evans selected a starting point of fifteen years for Pope. Davis, Evans and Hallett stuck to fifteen years. Either they are wrong or Royce was. There appear to be several grounds to appeal against the leniency of Gafoor’s tariff, but that was not done at the time.

Adding insult to injury, Gafoor appears to have received a very lenient tariff and even that was applied wrongly. At least two of the innocent Cardiff Three, the late Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris received harsher tariffs for the same crime. Gafoor could show remorse, do all the courses and progress towards parole in a system designed to help rehabilitate him, while the Cardiff Three could not without admitting a lie that would have prevented their eventual vindication. And now the real killer becomes eligible to apply for parole on Mother’s Day.

Important

“The science is important”, said Mark Evans QC in his closing argument on behalf of John Pope, in his retrial for the murder of a 34 year-old Karen Skipper. “That’s why you have the experts. It is important you understand the purpose of it and the limits of it. As far as science is concerned, you can take it from them. What deductions you make, is entirely for you. Where they and I part company is where they cease to talk about science and resort to amateur sleuthing”.

He criticised forensic scientist Michael Appleby in particular. Mr Evans said that Mr Appleby was emphatic that the blood-stain on Mrs Skipper’s knickers was wet and not dilute. “That’s important”, Mr Evans said, “as that is based on his observations. How could it not be diluted? We know that the clothes were damp from a heavy dew that night”.

Rehydrated

Mr Evans advised the jury to apply their common sense to all of the evidence. “When it comes to looking at dew and its effect on clothes, you know better than anyone”, he said. He pointed out that both the pocket of the jeans and the knickers which contained the blood-stains were exposed to the elements. “How could they not be dilute?” he asked before informing the court that the scientists said they were not.

Mr Evans conceded that the older the stains were the harder it is to rehydrate. He conceded that liquid would leach out. He questioned the size of both stains that had been reported. Every attempt to photograph the blood-stain on the knickers failed, but fluorescence would be obtained when exposed to different types of light. He suggested that there was fluorescence and that it was consistent with a smaller stain on the knickers that liquid (blood) had leached out from. This, he suggested, was evidence of rehydrated blood.

“The prosecution case is that it was deposited in attack, but in all probability it will be damp already”, Mr Evans said. He told the jury that the effects of leaching of fresh blood would have been noted and mentioned by the scientists. They did not. “Doesn’t it point to stain being much older?” Mr Evans asked. “Some diluting effect was inescapable [but] they will not accept it; did not see it”.

As Good as Any Other

Mr Evans told the jury that when Mr Pope was interviewed by police in 2007 he was told there was forensic evidence linking him to the murder of Karen Skipper, but nothing specific. That Mr Evans said, meant that Mr Pope, a man of limited intelligence, had to guess correctly that it was blood and concoct an explanation of it on the spot.

He told the jury that hands go into pockets at an angle and that the position that it landed in was consistent with Mr Pope’s account. [Nigel] Hodge and [Gillian] Leak had, said Mr Evans, accepted that the two spots will have coincided, but could only have done so when the jeans are being worn and done up and therefore, if the two spots had coincided at same time, the “only possibility is through the pocket and that is exactly what Mr Pope says”.

Mr Evans told the jury that if a blood-stained hand had been inserted in the pocket, then it would be elsewhere, but we are talking about tiny amount of blood. He invited the jury not to reject Mr Pope’s explanation of the earlier encounter with Mrs Skipper and how his blood could have got onto her clothing. “We can’t say, ʻthis is what happened’, all we can do is point out the possibilities”. He invited the jury to put their hands in their pocket. “Why can’t it be done?” he asked. He suggested that a tissue is like a sponge that could absorb blood and expunge it if pressure was applied and then soak it up again. When that process is finished, Mr Evans argued, more blood would be on the outside than the inside. Mr Pope’s account was he submitted, therefore, a perfectly credible explanation.

“Mr Murphy [Ian Murphy QC – the prosecutor] is quite wrong when he submitted that consensus of scientists is that you can consider this as incredible”, said Mr Evans. If something can happen, he suggested then, sometimes, invariably it will. “If the potential is there, the possibility is clearly there. They [the prosecution] have to prove that it did not happen in this case”.

Mr Evans insisted that the reconstruction conducted by Mrs Leak showed that it was possible for the jeans and knickers to have touched each other, thereby accounting for both stains. “Anything’s possible”, said Mr Evans, who insisted that it was for the prosecution to prove that it did not happen. “The point I made was for that to have happened by pure accident, both garments, both spots had to touch each other”. He told the jury that the opportunity existed. The jeans and knickers had been packaged together while damp with the belt. They had been taken out to retrieve the belt, which had been taken out before they were repacked. This, Mr Evans suggested, provided ample opportunity contact and therefore transfer. “The odds of it happening in that way are, I suggest, pretty high”, said Mr Evans.

He then highlighted what he contended was a real problem with the direct contact theory. He told the court that the jury had been assured that both blood-stains were direct contact stains from a pin-prick of blood, but while one was a smear the other was not. That, he suggested, was a real problem. The stain on the knickers had been produced by a wiping action that left no blood on the ridge, but on the pocket-lining it was a smear. “Ask yourselves how can it be that there is a wiping action with smearing on knickers, but with pocket, the same action, but no smear?” said Mr Evans. “There is a basic inconsistency”. He pointed out that anyone depositing the stains in the way the scientists and Mr Murphy had claimed would have had to remove the shoes, belt and trousers before getting access to the knickers. “Where’s the rest of the blood?” Mr Evans asked. “[It’s] extraordinary that there is no blood, you may think”.

Other Possibilities

“There are other possibilities in this case which you have to take on board and for this reason: if Phillip Skipper was the killer, then the blood-stains on the clothing doesn’t matter, does it?” said Mr Evans. “If you think Phillip Skipper could have been the killer, then that’s the end of it”.

Mr Evans detailed the circumstantial case against Mr Skipper that included the apparent lack of interest he had shown in the whereabouts of Mrs Skipper after she went out with the dogs that night. “So where does all this point you?” asked Mr Evans. “The prosecution tell you John Pope’s story is lie after after lie, but could a man like Pope really have made all of that up on the spur of the moment? We suggest, not in a million years. At the end of the day, you have to be sure that all of the other explanations fail and it must have been John Pope. Can you possibly do that in this case?”

Dog’s Breakfast

“You don’t get a pin prick of blood from a dog-bite”, Mr Evans told the jury. “If that dog [Samson] had attacked, you would not get a pin prick of blood”. Mr Evans reminded the jury that there was plenty of evidence that Samson in particular was fiercely protective of Karen Skipper. Mr Skipper, he reminded them, had suggested that the killer must have been known to her [he had mentioned Jimmy Turner and the man known as Steve in that context] or that there had been two killers.

While the prosecution dismissed Mr Pope’s explanation of the blood-stains as a “complete fantasy”, Mr Evans said that it had “the ring of truth about it”. Mr Pope did not know what forensic evidence the police had linking him to the murder when he was questioned. It could have been anything, Mr Evans said, but he gives them an account that explained bloodstains being found. Mr Murphy had previously told the jury that Mr Pope knew that it was blood because he had attacked Karen Skipper and been bitten by one of her dogs. He had then transposed that event to an invented incident three weeks earlier.

“Where does all the scientific evidence take you?” asked Mr Evans. “You can’t be sure of very much at all, save it (bloodstains) was there. The prosecution has to prove Mr Pope’s explanation has to be wrong. It’s as good as any other”.

Consequences

He had previously said that there were no consequences for Phillip Skipper if the jury thought it might be him and that there were none for Richard Mead either, but it was a different story for Mr Pope. “Remember, the consequences are serious”, said Mr Evans. “He has already been through one trial and an appeal process. It is so important that you get this right. If you think the forensic evidence was flawed, then convicting him on that basis would be wrong”.

The Honourable Mr Justice (Sir Roderick) Evans KT is summing-up. The jury is expected to be asked to begin considering their verdict on Friday. John Pope denies murdering 34 year-old Karen Skipper, whose body was discovered submerged in the River Ely in the morning of March 10^th 1996.

The Rules of the Game

The family of murder victim Karen Skipper took a long time to accept that her deceased husband Phillip was innocent, but they are now convinced and share the outrage of his family, which includes the mother of his daughter as well. They all believe that, rather than observing the trial of her murderer, John Pope, they were forced to endure yet another trial of Mr Skipper – a man who could not defend himself and whose rights and reputation were given no legal protections at all.

They are further aggrieved that this time Pope’s retrial occurred without any safeguard at all of Mr Skipper’s right to be presumed innocent. Mr Pope, through his counsel, Mark Evans QC, was given carte blanche to put Mr Skipper on trial yet again, only he could use so-called evidence that had been ruled inadmissible during Mr Skipper’s trial in 1997.

The families of Karen Skipper and Phillip Skipper are united in their disbelief that the criminal justice system tolerated this. They say that relying on old evidence that had failed to convince the jury first time round and incredible new evidence that should have been laughed out of court meant that there was no burden of proof on his accusers – Mr Popeʼs defence. Where, they ask was the respect for their human rights? Where, in fact, was respect for the law?

The roles appeared to have been somewhat reversed. Prosecuting QC, Ian Murphy, was bound by the rules of evidence and Mr Popeʼs right to be presumed innocent and he observed his burden scrupulously. Mr Evans effectively was prosecuting Mr Skipper, but there were no rules governing what he could say and do.

Scrupulously Unfair

The judge, Mr Justice (Sir Roderick) Evans, bent over backwards to accommodate Mr Pope – even giving a bad character direction on Mr Skipper despite the lack of convictions justifying it. Pope was allowed to sit back while his QC prosecuted Skipper with no constraints. Phillip Skipper could not defend himself from the character assassination and nobody represented his interests, even though it was in the interests of the prosecution of Pope to do so.

This was a shocking abuse of the law and raises the question of why the system did not provide lawyers to represent the rights of the families of Phillip Skipper and Karen too. It got far worse. Mr Evans had even suggested that if the jury thought that it could have been Mr Skipper, then they should acquit his client. That outraged miscarriage of justice survivor Michael O’Brien.

“I don’t know how they can get away with saying those words to the jury and why the judge didn’t step in because it’s already been established in a court of law that Mr Skipper was acquitted and under European law, it says once you’re acquitted, you’re entitled to the presumption of innocence, so how they’ve managed to get away with this defence”? said O’Brien.

Mr Murphy could have done so far more robustly. After all, it was in his interests to prove Mr Skipper innocent, as that would have cut the ground out from beneath the deplorable defence tactics. Sadly, this appears to be a trend in such prosecutions – nobody represents the rights of the wrongly accused.

“Well it more than beggars belief. It just makes you angry, you know, the fact that a man who can’t defend himself”, Mr O’Brien continued. “That’s like picking on a vulnerable person and this is picking on someone who can’t defend himself and it’s the same principle behind it and it shouldn’t have been allowed”.

Inadmissible evidence and also the quite frankly ludicrous evidence of Pauline Horton masqueraded as ʻproofʼ of Skipperʼs guilt. The Crown could never have prosecuted such a shoddy case, so why was a defence lawyer allowed to do so by the back door?

“Well I think we’ve got to define what significant new evidence is”, O’Brien says. “Let me put it clearly, unless there is DNA or something of that calibre, or somebody who can describe them to a tee who didn’t know the person who had done the crime, but if they’re too scared to come forward where you can actually prove there was no collusion, then you shouldn’t be allowed to produce this kind of evidence and blame other people as the defence, because that is just attacking somebody’s innocence again”.

O’Brien is outraged. “I think that goes against everything that the court says the innocent person is entitled to and which an acquitted person is entitled to – the presumption of innocence – and I think the only reason why Pope’s defence has got away with this is because they know they have legal privilege”, he says. “They know they are supposed to go on the facts. What evidence is there that Phillip Skipper has done this crime? It should never have arisen a second time, but they’ve done it. It has to be stopped”.

And there’s another issue. Why did the prosecution fail to demonstrate Mr Skipper’s innocence when the evidence to do so had been there all along?

Lax Procedures

The families of a murder victim and her late former husband – he was wrongly accused of that crime fifteen years ago – joined forces to slam what they believe are lax procedures at a recent trial. They claim that Phillip Skipper was wrongly accused all over again at the retrial of former labourer John Pope – that it was more like Mr Skipper that was on trial than Mr Pope.

Mr Skipper was not alive to defend his reputation. Mr Pope was found guilty of the murder of Karen Skipper for the second time last week. He had been convicted of the murder in February 2009, but the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction last year and ordered a retrial. Its judgement still has not been published.¹

The Presumption of Innocence?

Mrs Skipperʼs body was discovered in the River Ely in Cardiff on the morning of March 10th 1996. A year later her estranged husband Phillip who died of cancer in 2004 was acquitted of her murder. According to the criminal justice system, the presumption of innocence was never taken away from Phillip Skipper. The Fitted-In Project followed the case carefully. It was after all Walesʼ second vindication case in the DNA age.

To the disgust of the families of Mrs Skipper and Mr Skipper, Popeʼs defence QC Mark Evans turned it into Mr Skipperʼs third trial. Having attended this trial, we agree that it was hard if not impossible to spot any evidence of Mr Skipper being presumed innocent.

We are surprised that despite the European Convention of Human Rights being incorporated into UK law in 1998, the Article 8 Right to Family Life of Mr Skipper’s family was paid such scant regard. Similarly, Mrs Skipper’s family’s rights were not defended either. This is applied in the setting of the tariff too.

Lip Service

The families insist that there was no presumption of innocence for Mr Skipper despite his acquittal, but the coalition government says there is no problem.

“It has long been an important feature of our criminal justice system that a person charged with an offence is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty”, said the Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, Lord (Tom) McNally. “A person found not guilty is to be treated as innocent, as too is a person whose conviction has been quashed on appeal”.

Fine words, but the treatment of Mr Skipperʼs memory in this trial shows that the practice is vastly different. Mark Evans QC lost no opportunity to accuse Mr Skipper of his estranged wifeʼs murder, using evidence that had been rejected by the jury that tried and acquitted Mr Skipper and evidence that was inadmissible against him in that trial.

This was a thinly disguised prosecution of a man who could no longer defend himself – a prosecution that had no burden of proof and for whom there appeared to be no rules on the admissibility of evidence.

There was absolutely no presumption of innocence for Mr Skipper and no thought was spared for the feelings of his child – still a young teenager. The quality of the so-called evidence used in this back-door prosecution of Phillip Skipper was woeful. There ought to be rules governing such tactics and consequences for such conduct.

1 The judgement was published subsequently: The Editor.

Satish Sekar explains the case to Colombia’s finest forensic scientists.

Despicable

John Pope was a suspect originally in the murder of Karen Skipper, which occurred in Cardiff in March 1996. He was eliminated, incorrectly as it turned out. Sadly the late Phillip Skipper stood trial for a crime that he did not commit the following year. An inquiry by West Midlands Police concluded that the decision to prosecute Skipper was justified. It certainly was not. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) should not have allowed it to come to trial.

The scientific evidence was not allowed to speak as it could and should have. Blood-staining in an intimate area of the victim’s clothing established his innocence through forensic science techniques that were available at the time. DNA testing established that it was not his blood, nor that of his estranged wife Karen.

That should have eliminated Skipper from police enquiries, but desperate times called for desperate measures. A ludicrous explanation was advanced – one that hinged on Mrs Skipper never having washed resold jeans that she bought at a market several weeks previously. Phillip Skipper was rightly acquitted, but the damage had been done, despite the absence of both smoke and fire.

Remorseless

Nevertheless, his memory – he died of cancer aged just 48 – was put on trial again three times. It was Pope’s DNA and his explanation of the transfer of blood that he claimed caused that positive DNA identification stretched credibility. Was it possible? Yes. Was it likely? No.

Pope never took responsibility for Karen Skipper’s murder. That’s his right, but blaming an innocent man who could not defend himself three times was reprehensible to put it mildly. And after being found guilty again his QC Mark Evans put forward mitigation on his behalf – the closest that Pope ever came to accepting responsibility.

Shamefully, the tariff was exactly the same as before, but there was no recognition from the court of the ordeal of Phillip Skipper and his family, not even the acknowledgement of his innocence that the first trial judge Mr Justice (Sir Nigel) Davis had given. Why not? Instead, the second trial’s judge, Mr Justice (Sir Roderick) Evans had decided to give the jury a bad character warning about Skipper even though he had no relevant convictions.

After Jeffrey Gafoor was brought to justice for the murder of Lynette White, allowing the innocent to suffer for your crime was supposed to be taken into account. In fact, it has never happened – an appalling message to give to killers as it tells them that there are no consequences for allowing the innocent to go to jail for their crimes.

A Total Disgrace

The Fitted-In Journal covered Pope’s retrial last year (2011) – many other mainstream media did not – and at least some of those that did simply didn’t get it. Another miscarriage of justice was unfolding before our eyes, but few media were interested in it. They still aren’t even though this case bears all the hallmarks of a serious travesty of justice and wrecked lives – many of them.

Karen Skipper’s family had been cruelly deceived. They had originally thought that ‘Ginger’ (Skipper’s nickname), was guilty and after having let him into their family, they hated him with a passion. Skipper died young of stomach cancer, maintain his innocence to the end. They were wrong about him and accept that now, but where are they supposed to put their guilt now? How are they to come to terms with having hated an innocent man?

Neither Victim Support, nor the Miscarriages of Justice Support Service visited either Skipper family – Philip’s or Karen’s – to assist them through a very difficult process that they had to endure thrice with a fourth likely should Pope appeal. That included a girl who had been forced to hear about her deceased father being wrongly accused of murder three times while barely in her teens. Her mother could have painted a different picture of Mr Skipper than the one that emerged at trial, but the court never heard from the mother of his child.

Meanwhile, Pope’s defence could hurl any mud, however nonsensical, with no controls, while they effectively prosecuted Phillip Skipper once more, but without a burden of proof. There was no representation for Phillip Skipper’s estate, or his family, let alone redress. Why not? There was clear and unequivocal scientific evidence that he was innocent.

Outrage

Pope’s defence even demanded an acquittal for their client if the jury thought that Skipper might have done it. Had the Crown tried to prosecute Skipper on such evidence, it is inconceivable that the Court of Appeal would have given permission for double jeopardy to be set aside.

It was a rehash of the original Skipper trial, including evidence the original prosecutor thought not worthy to put before the jury, a ‘new’ witness whose account beggared belief and there was DNA against someone else – a suspect who had occurred in the original inquiry – Pope. Why was this allowed?

The CPS could not hope to bring such a prosecution to trial now, so why was Pope’s defence allowed to do so? There was outrage aplenty for Bob Dowler when convicted serial killer Levi Bellfield tried to point a finger at him and rightly so, but where is the outrage for Phillip Skipper, who had no opportunity to even defend himself and where is the outrage for his daughter?

Obligations

It was apparently a matter of pride for South Wales Police to put right what they got wrong in the Lynette White Inquiry. They failed to do so, but in the Karen Skipper Inquiry, they refused to even try. Why were they allowed to get away with that?

Where was the outrage for Karen Skipper and her family? Where was the outrage for Phillip Skipper and his family? And where is society’s outrage? Why do we tolerate millions of pounds of our resources being thrown away without consequences or even accountability in cases such as this?

Where is the investigation of the Karen Skipper Inquiry to establish how the wrong man originally stood trial and if any errors occurred that could have prevented repetition? In 2009 after Pope’s original conviction I asked South Wales Police to investigate what went wrong. They refused. The result was a colossal waste of public resources, time and unnecessary suffering imposed on a young girl who deserved far better. She still does.

Two trials and an appeal later, there is no excuse for failing to investigate this and other vindication cases thoroughly, but there is one vital lesson to emerge from the Lynette White Inquiry Police Corruption Trial. South Wales Police and the criminal justice system cannot be trusted to put right what they got wrong.

1 This article was originally published in the Fitted-In Journal, which was sadly destroyed by hackers and is no longer available. The content of this article is relevant to some of our projects – hence our republication of it. Satish Sekar is the author of Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry (The Fitted In Project, 1998).This article was uploaded onto this site after the publication of his second book on the Lynette White Inquiry. The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt was subsequently published by Waterside Press in 2012.

The Colombian scientists listening with disbelief at how the injustice suffered by the Skippers occurred.

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