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.

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar January 26^th 2009

Making History

“It’s not just the investigative process”, says Professor Dave Barclay, the former Head of Physical Evidence at the National Crime Faculty. “You need equality of arms between defence and prosecution as well. Otherwise the police know that nobody is going to challenge them adequately. We have moved on, but only in the last ten years, or maybe last five years. I think our investigative procedures in the UK are fantastic compared to other places now”.

Barclay lectures in forensic science at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and is an honorary lecturer at Hull University as well. He spent nine years at Crime Faculty and played an important role in making legal history in Britain when he reviewed the physical evidence in the Lynette White Inquiry as part of a cold case review by South Wales police’s pioneering unit to investigate unsolved and unresolved homicides that was established in June 1999.

He reconstructed the exit route of the murderer more than a decade afterwards by going through the flat blind-folded – the murder occurred at night in a flat that was unlit. Everywhere that he touched was observed and blood that yielded the DNA profile of the real murderer was recovered. He also identified where to look for blood that was discovered under paint in the murder room nearly fifteen years after Ms White was murdered.

In July 2003 Jeffrey Gafoor pleaded guilty to the horrific murder. Five innocent men had spent a total of sixteen years in prison for this crime. It was the first miscarriage of justice in Britain to be resolved by the conviction of the real perpetrator in a murder case in the DNA age. “All investigations need to be looked at in an integrated manner”, says Professor Barclay. “It isn’t just DNA. You need an overview of the whole case. Lynette’s case was a good example of this.”

All Special

All cases are important to him and he tends to remember the names of the victims, rather than perpetrators, or in some cases alleged perpetrators. “There is no difference at all between a high profile case and a lower profile one”, he says. “To those involved, cases have exactly the same profile”.

Nevertheless, there have been high profile cases that he was involved in. The controversial case of Michael Stone, convicted of the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell and attempted murder of Josie Russell in Chillenden, Kent, is one he remembers.

“We did a complete overview [at Crime Faculty]”, he says. “That was a really high profile case that was undetected after six months. We did a complete review. We had access to all the papers. Effectively, we try and think about how it can be investigated from scratch. We look for things from the area to see if they had missed a link. We deliberately ask not to be told who the suspects are. When we have done that we produce a list of recommendations and things that could be done. We make recommendations which we present to the force and they go away and think about it”.

Stone’s defence team was unaware of the involvement of Crime Faculty. “We had no idea about this review”, said Stone’s sister Barbara. “It should have been disclosed then, but wasn’t. It might have opened up new lines of inquiry. We want it disclosed immediately”.

International Prestige

Despite his retirement from Crime Faculty in 2005, he still gets asked to conduct reviews and not just in Britain. He helped to expose a notorious miscarriage of justice in Western Australia – the case of Andrew Mallard who was wrongfully convicted of the 1994 murder of Pamela Lawrence in her jewellery shop in Perth.

“I was asked to review the case in 2006 after Mallard was released on technical grounds”, says Barclay. “I started work on the weekend and by Monday evening I had come to the conclusion that a) Mallard wasn’t guilty and b) the evidence on which he was convicted was fatally flawed, both in logic and in its interpretation. I was very unhappy about this”.

He asked for a fingerprint review, which resulted in a hit to convicted murderer Simon Rochford, then serving life imprisonment for murdering his girlfriend Brigitta Dickens in July 1994, just one month after the murder of Pamela Lawrence. Further evidence resulted in Rochford being interviewed over the murder of Mrs Lawrence. He made no admissions, but within thirty-six hours Rochford committed suicide.

“The police and Attorney General [of Western Australia] have said that Andrew Mallard did not have anything to do with the murder and that the perpetrator was probably Simon Rochford, who would have been put before a court had he lived”, says Professor Barclay, who continues to provide an essential service in reviewing the importance of physical evidence in other cases in many jurisdictions.

Martin Shipton – Chief Reporter of the Western Mail and Echo

The Fitted-In Project is saddened that once again the BBC has chosen to marginalise our work on the Lynette White Inquiry, especially that of our founder and CEO, Satish Sekar. We are very disappointed that tonight’s Panorama programme has chosen to rewrite history. For an accurate record of that history-making case see Sekar’s books Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry and The Cardiff Five: Innocent Beyond Any Doubt, which was recently published by Waterside Press.

Michael Mansfield QC

• “Satish Sekar has been assiduous in following the events surrounding the murder of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988. From the beginning he questioned the techniques that were used and decisions of the authorities in regard to this case and many of his views – which appeared marginal at the time – turned out to be accurate or close to the truth in a way that has certainly helped the cause of justice and investigation. As the local MP I came to respect and admire his thoroughness and persistence … His contribution has been enormous. … Satish is right to continue to ask questions both in respect of the workings of the criminal justice system and the policies that are pursued in a society that seeks to be governed by the Rule of Law.”

The Rt. Hon. Alun Michael JP, MP

The Fitted-In Project is concerned that the impact of the work conducted by its members has been marginalised. Incredibly this includes Professor Dave Barclay, the former Head of Physical Evidence at the National Crime Faculty. Barclay’s role in correcting the miscarriage of justice that befell the Cardiff Five has never been properly acknowledged by media. Sekar’s latest book explains the pivotal role played by Barclay.

Professor Dave Barclay

Sekar was told immediately after the convictions of the Cardiff Three were quashed to move on to other cases. He refused, seeing the potential for change and understanding that the Cardiff Five had to be vindicated – proved innocent beyond doubt by the conviction of the real killer. Other media left him to fight alone. That included the BBC, which only began covering it again after his work had borne fruit. It ignored both him and the work of The Fitted-In Project in that coverage.

Duncan Campbell

• “The Lynette White murder case, with its long-drawn-out repercussions, has now become one of the most important in the entire history of British criminal justice. This is entirely because of the tireless work and extraordinary insight of Satish Sekar, who has fought for many years to achieve justice for all concerned.”

Bob Woffinden