Disordered Minds Read online

  Timothy Evans, twenty-six at the time of his conviction, was retarded and illiterate; Derek Bentley, nineteen, was mentally handicapped; Downing, a physically immature seventeen-year-old, had a reading age of eleven; and Kiszko, twenty-four, who suffered from XYY syndrome, hypogonadism, had undeveloped testes and was described as "a child in a man's body." Three of these men were denied the services of a solicitor and made confessions that they later retracted, claiming the police had used coercion to obtain the statements or had written the statements themselves; the fourth, Derek Bentley, who was under arrest when his sixteen-year-old codefendant, Christopher Craig, shot PC Sidney Miles, accused the police of lying when they claimed he shouted an order at Craig to commit the murder and was therefore guilty of "joint enterprise."

  Police and prosecution confidence in each man's guilt resulted in botched investigations and the suppression of evidence. Although it was recognized at the time that all four men were emotionally immature with learning difficulties, these factors were not taken into account during their interrogations or at their trials. Indeed, many would argue the opposite: their vulnerability was exploited to secure a quick indictment. It has taken years to exonerate them-in Bentley's case nearly half a century-but they are now known to have been victims of four of the twentieth century's most notorious miscarriages of justice.

  Reforms of the System

  Two pieces of legislation, PACE (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act), 1984, and CPIA (the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act), 1996, belatedly addressed many of the issues raised by both the Downing and Kiszko interrogations, although neither man's case had been reviewed at the time of the 1984 Act. The mainspring for that reform was almost certainly "Operation Countryman," an internal police investigation during the 1970s, which revealed terrifying levels of corruption in the Metropolitan Police. In its wake, Chief Superintendent Ken Drury of the Flying Squad was jailed, along with twelve other Scotland Yard detectives, for accepting bribes to falsify evidence.

  Public confidence in the police was irreparably damaged and discontent with the whole criminal-justice system grew as doubts were raised about the safety of individual convictions. Prominent campaigns, claiming miscarriages of justice, centered around the Guildford Four-released in 1989; the Birmingham Six-released in 1991; and the Bridgwater Four-released in 1997. Other notable releases were the Cardiff Three and the M25 Three. In 1999 thirty convictions were quashed when it was revealed that the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad had fabricated evidence, tortured suspects and concocted false confessions. At the time of writing, dozens of appeals are still in the pipeline.

  Stephen Downing

  Stephen Downing served twenty-eight years before the Court of Appeal freed him in 2002. A small, shy seventeen-year-old with learning difficulties, he was interrogated by detectives for nine hours before, near to exhaustion, he agreed to sign a statement in which he admitted battering a young woman with a pickax handle in the cemetery in Bakewell, Derbyshire, where he worked. No solicitor was present to advise the teenager, nor was his father allowed to see him. At the time he signed the statement the victim, Wendy Sewell, was unconscious but still alive, and detectives assured the youngster that if he wasn't guilty Wendy would exonerate him when she came round. She died two days later and Downing was charged with her murder.

  He retracted his statement immediately but his confession became the mainstay of the prosecution's case at Nottingham Crown Court the following year. He was found guilty and sentenced to life, with a recommendation that he serve seventeen years. This would have made him eligible for release in 1989, but, because he consistently denied his guilt, his applications were refused. It is a cornerstone of the U.K. penal system that remorse is a precondition for parole, so an IDOM (in denial of murder) prisoner will not be considered. To innocent men and women who are prepared to put their good name above a lifetime in prison, this rule is a catch-22.

  Nearly three decades after Wendy Sewell's murder, the presiding appeal judge, Lord Justice Pill, acknowledged that errors had been made in Downing's interrogation. The court could not be sure, he said, that Mr. Downing's initial confessions to the police were reliable and it followed that his conviction was "unsafe." Downing's freedom and good name were returned to him but warning shots were fired across the Court of Appeal's bows. Don Hale, a crusading journalist who had worked for seven years to bring Downing's plight to public attention, said: "What worries me is how many similar cases lie buried in the prison system."

  Stefan Kiszko

  One such was Stefan Kiszko who was interrogated by police in 1975 for the murder of eleven-year-old Lesley Molseed in Rochdale. Convinced of Kiszko's guilt, police ignored the immaturity and social backwardness that had led to a lifetime's bullying, failed to tell him of his right to have a solicitor present, refused to allow him to see his mother (his only friend) and did not caution him until long after they had decided he was the prime suspect. When he finally confessed, he did so because police told him he would be allowed home as soon as he said what they wanted to hear.

  Like Downing, he retracted his confession immediately but, again, the confession became the main plank of the prosecution case. Part of Kiszko's statement was a false admission that he had exposed himself some weeks earlier to two teenage girls who had named and identified him. Sixteen years later, when Kiszko was released by the Court of Appeal, these two girls, now grown women, admitted they had invented the story after seeing a taxi driver urinating behind a bush. More criminally, police withheld semen evidence at the trial which they knew would exculpate Kiszko.

  As a sufferer of XYY syndrome, Kiszko was sterile. This was known to the police in 1975 because a sample of Kiszko's semen taken during the investigation contained no sperm. Yet the pathologist who examined Lesley Molseed's clothing had found sperm in the semen stains on her underwear. The police kept this evidence from the defense and the court, and it was only discovered when an inquiry into the case was ordered in 1990. Two years later, when an application on behalf of Kiszko was heard by the Court of Appeal, Lord Chief Justice Lane said, "It has been shown that this man cannot produce sperm. This man cannot have been responsible for ... [the semen found on] ... the girl's knickers and skirt, and consequently cannot have been her murderer."

  Kiszko was released immediately. However, his brutal treatment at the hands of other prisoners, who had frequently beaten him, had driven him into a world of delusion where conspiracies abounded. Convinced that his mother-a lonely and steadfast voice on the outside claiming his innocence-had been part of the conspiracy to condemn him, he needed nine months' rehabilitation before he could return home to her care. He died after eighteen months, his physical and mental health destroyed, followed six months later by Mrs. Kiszko herself.

  Public outrage at Kiszko's treatment was immense, although few recognized that by baying for blood in the wake of a child's murder they had added to the pressure on the police to find a culprit.

  Howard Stamp

  Bullied mercilessly at school for his harelip and defective speech, Stamp had a miserable attendance record. Described as "work-shy" at his trial, he had withdrawn into self-imposed isolation, too frightened to go out. "He was teased every time he left the house," said his mother in his defense. "He looked funny and he couldn't read or write."

  Today he would have been dubbed a self-abuser. Not only is it clear that he suffered from an eating disorder-he was painfully thin with an immature physique-he made a habit of cutting his arms with razors. His mother, unable to understand or cope with behavioral difficulties that were barely recognized in the 1960s, begged her GP to certify him before he "used the razor on somebody else."

  It was this request that convinced police he was guilty of the brutal murder of his fifty-seven-year-old grandmother, Grace Jefferies, on Wednesday, June 3, 1970. Found in a "bloodbath" at her home in Mullin Street, Highdown, on the border between Bournemouth and Poole, Grace had been stabbed and slashed thirty-three times. The press dubbed it
"murder by a thousand cuts" because most of the nonfatal injuries were to her arms and legs, suggesting she had been tortured for some time before her throat was slit. The inescapable conclusion, according to the pathologist, was that she had staggered upstairs to her bedroom while her tormentor slashed at her arms and legs with a carving knife.

  Suspicion focused on Stamp when witnesses came forward to say they'd seen him running from Grace's house on Wednesday, June 3, two days before her body was discovered on Friday, June 5. Bloodstains on his clothes seemed to confirm his guilt, and after thirty-six hours of interrogation he confessed to the murder. As with Downing and Kiszko, he had no solicitor present and retracted his confession shortly afterward. He admitted running from Grace's house, but claimed that his grandmother was already dead when he entered with his duplicate key. Horrified by what he had found, he fled home and locked himself in his bedroom, too shocked to tell anyone what he'd seen. It was another forty-eight hours before a postman reported that Grace's curtains had been drawn for several days.

  It seemed a straightforward case, yet there were many inconsistencies in the evidence. The pathologist's first estimate suggested Grace had been dead four days before her body was found. This was later amended to forty-eight hours to tie in with the witness statements. At the trial, the pathologist explained the mistake as a "slip of the pen" and the defense failed to press him. In a similar volte-face, the postman who alerted police to Grace's drawn curtains told the court that when he'd said "several days" he had meant "two at the most." Again, the defense did not press the issue.

  The flakes of dried blood on Stamp's trouser knees and shirt cuffs are consistent with his second statement: that ne knelt beside his grandmother's body (two days after the murder if the pathologist's initial estimate was correct) to see if she was dead. They are less consistent with police and prosecution claims that he took a bath to wash off Grace's blood, then, dressed in fresh clothes, brushed against a blood-spattered wall on his departure. If this were true, some of the blood would still have been viscous enough to be absorbed by the fibers, and Stamp's back, behind, shoulders or thighs would have been the contact points, not his knees and cuffs.

  The defense made some attempt to challenge the forensic evidence, most of which centered on hair and dried scum taken from the sides and plughole of the bathtub. The prosecution alleged that Stamp had immersed himself in water after the murder in order to clean himself. Both sides agreed that whoever killed Grace would have been covered in blood. The prosecution case was that Stamp had either committed the murder naked or removed bloodstained clothes from the property. This latter suggestion gained credibility after a witness said Stamp was carrying a black polythene bag when he ran from the house. (This bag was never recovered despite an intensive police search.)

  The scum showed traces of Grace's blood group, and the hairs were identified as Stamp's. In addition, Stamp's fingerprints were found on the bathroom door and lavatory seat. Adam Fanshaw, Queen Counsel, counsel for the defense, succeeded in striking out the fingerprint evidence by arguing that Stamp was a regular visitor to the house. However, he was hampered over the hair evidence by Stamp's own insistence that he had never taken a bath in Grace's house.

  The pathologist for the defense, Dr. John Foyle, put up a strong argument against the hairs being Stamp's by quoting Professor Keith Simpson, the noted Home Office pathologist, in a comment made during the 1943 Leckey trial. (Gunner Dennis Leckey was tried for the murder of Caroline Traylor in 1943. Although found guilty and sentenced to death, Leckey was acquitted by the Court of Criminal Appeal on a technicality and allowed to walk free. Although Professor Simpson's comments referred to a 1943 case, they were still true thirty-five years later when he repeated them in Professor Keith Simpson; An Autobiography, published by Harrap Limited in 1978.)

  The word "identical" does not mean the hairs necessarily came from the same person, only that they could have. That is the most one can ever say about hairs. Identical hairs are not compelling evidence like fingerprints, for they carry so much less detail.

  Unfortunately, Dr. Foyle crumpled under cross-examination when Fanshaw failed to protect him against prosecution jibes of inexperience and publicity seeking. In a damaging about-face which implied the hairs were Stamp's, he said it was just as probable that "the hairs had been deposited in the bath on a previous occasion."

  Stamp's mother, Wynne, made a poor witness for hei son and should never have been called. Timid and of low intelligence, she stammered through her evidence, misunderstanding many of the questions that were put to her She used her day in court to highlight her own problems-"I've had a terrible time because of Howard's physical and mental troubles ... no one knows what I've had to put up with ... there ought to be help for people like me..." She could give no explanation for why Howard had been at Grace's house on the Wednesday when he'd been due to start a job at Jannerway & Co. (a local dairy) that afternoon, except to say that he was "lazy." Nevertheless, she held firmly to her belief that Howard would never have hurt his grandmother. "He always went to her when he was depressed. She understood him because she had a cleft palate too. It runs in the family."

  Grace's disability (an untreated cleft palate had left her with a severe speech impediment) had made her as reclusive as her grandson. Sent into service in 1928 at the age of fifteen, she gave birth to Wynne a year later. Nothing was known about the father, although the fact that she continued to be employed by the same family, and was allowed to keep her child, suggests that she may have been raped by a member of the household. Ten years later, aged twenty-six, she married Arthur Jefferies, forty-three, a merchant seaman who adopted Wynne and provided the home in Highdown, Bournemouth, where Grace lived for the rest of her life.

  Tragically for Grace, Arthur was killed in 1942 during an attack on a North Sea convoy, and she became a widow before she was thirty. Three years later, aged just sixteen, Wynne met, and subsequently married, Fred Stamp, a farm worker from Bere Regis in Dorset. The marriage was of short duration-Wynne blamed their baby's "ugliness" for the break-up-and mother and son returned to Bournemouth to live in council accommodation in Colliton Way, half a mile from Grace's home in Mullin Street. While there is no evidence that Grace and Wynne did not get on, it seems there was little communication between the two women.

  Grace was variously described by neighbors as "odd," "eccentric," "a bit of a recluse," "shy," "not very friendly." She was probably all of these things because, like her grandson, she would have found social interaction difficult. Certainly she had few callers, although a more likely reason for Wynne's failure to visit was that she didn't have a car and worked full-time as a packer at Brackham & Wright's tool factory in Glazeborough Road.

  There is some evidence that Stamp went to his grandmother's house whenever he bunked off school. Neighbors mentioned seeing a child in the garden during the summers of the 1950s. If so, Grace never reported it to his mother or the truancy officer, and this would have persuaded Stamp that his grandmother was a safe refuge from bullies. Certainly, as he grew older he became a more frequent visitor, which is why he was identified so easily by the witnesses who saw him running away. "It was that skinny grandson," said one. "He used to hide with Grace instead of signing-on [for work]."

  The prosecution argued at trial that Stamp's instability and self-abuse had increased to such a point that Grace had become afraid of him. As proof they quoted a letter to Wynne in which she said, "Howard's started shouting again even though he knows it frightens me. I've told him I'll put the police on to him if it goes on." Further on in the letter, and not quoted by the prosecution, she added, "I said if only he could meet a nice girl he'd start to feel better about things but he told me to shut up. You should have had words with the police when they laughed at him about the bullying. That's what did it for him. He says it's a waste of time, but I got Arthur, didn't I?"

  The defense failed to pick up on this, yet there are two reasons why they should have done so. First, Grace's meani
ng was surely this: Howard's been shouting again and it frightens me because I don't know how to help him. I've persuaded him to stop by threatening him with the police. We both know he's scared of them. They made fun of him when he told them he was being bullied, and he hasn't trusted them since. Second, if Stamp found the police intimidating, then nothing he said during his interrogation was reliable. Indeed his confession suggests that shocking them by admitting to a brutal murder was preferable to being jeered at for locking himself in his bedroom out of terror.

  Stamp's case was never reopened because he hanged himself in 1973. However, even the most cursory comparison between Wynne Stamp's evidence and the prosecution case reveals alarming disparities. Wynne described her son as "not interested in cash because he hated going to the shops." The prosecution said, "Every drawer in Grace's house had been pulled out, either in a search for money and valuables or suggesting that Grace had disturbed a burglar." Wynne claimed she wasn't "a good housekeeper" and her son was always "tidying up" after her. The prosecution described Grace's house as "thoroughly vandalized." Wynne said her son was ashamed of his cut arms and wore long-sleeved jumpers and shirts to hide them from her. The prosecution said that "a man who reveled in using a razor on himself would take pleasure in slashing at a woman who was afraid of him."

  There's no question that Stamp was badly let down by his defense team, and the inescapable conclusion is that they were as convinced of his guilt as the police and prosecution were. It's hard to understand why. However inadequate his social skills, however unattractive his appearance, he was clearly a vulnerable young man of low self-esteem and serious emotional difficulties. One theory that would fit the prosecution case is that Stamp was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who erupted one day in a fit of delusional violence against a woman who loved him.