In December 1963, Keeler pleaded guilty to the crime of perjury in the Metropolitan Police’s case against Gordon. At the time, receiving a fair trial would have been difficult for Keeler, because after the Profumo Affair hit the headlines and Ward had been convicted and died by suicide, she was a pariah in the minds of the press and public. Keeler had been advised to take a deal to avoid a longer prison sentence. Once convicted of perjury, however, which is considered a crime of dishonesty, any of her further accounts of any of the events that took place were dismissed as being unreliable. While pleading guilty meant a simpler court process, after her conviction, fewer details of the actual assault Keeler suffered, and the harassment she was facing at the time from Gordon, were reported.
On 14 June 2021, an application for Keeler to receive a pardon for perjury was sent to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Four months later, the MoJ replied, directing the campaign instead to the Criminal Case Review Commission (CCRC) an independent body that investigates possible miscarriages of justice. Keeler’s son Seymour Platt spearheaded the campaign to clear his mother’s name. He is supported in the action by solicitor James Harbridge and barrister Felicity Gerry, and more recently by Dr Rebecca Helm, a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter, who helped answer some questions that the CCRC asked.
In March 2022, case notes and an application were sent to the CCRC, which has confirmed the case is now under review. If the CCRC decides that Keeler suffered a miscarriage of justice, it would be much more significant than a ruling by the MoJ, it would mean Keeler’s conviction could be expunged.
While Keeler did lie about who was there at the time of her assault, she didn’t lie about being attacked. For her son, the fact that as victim of an assault she was put in prison is intrinsically wrong. While, in her statement to the police, Keeler excluded the names of two men present at the attack, there were other witnesses that could corroborate her story whose details were supplied. Gordon had a history of violence against women, much of it directed at Keeler herself, and admitted to his crime in court. The two men Keeler did not name had specially asked her to keep them out of any dealings with the police. When they did come forward, however, they also stated that Keeler had been assaulted by Gordon as she had claimed. There was never any doubt that Gordon attacked Keeler, and yet, as Platt says, history ‘painted her as the villain’.
Gordon was Christine’s stalker, rapist and attacker, not her boyfriend as has so frequently been said, Platt argues. ‘History has taken the word of the rapist over the victim,’ he says. And when you look back at their shared history, it is littered with violence. Not long after Keeler met Gordon in 1961, he raped her at knifepoint in his flat, and he raped her again in early 1962. When Keeler told Ward that Gordon had raped her in 1961, Ward discouraged her from going to the police. Later, in spring 1962, after an axe-wielding Gordon held Christine and a friend hostage, Keeler dropped the charges because his family put pressure on her to do so. There’s no doubt that Keeler was young and easily influenced, but that is not a crime. She needed protection from Gordon.
Gordon stalked Keeler for many years, when she was dating, living with and even engaged to other men. He attacked Keeler in the street several times and turned up at her mother’s house too. There was no escaping him and his obsession with her. By 1962, Keeler was so frightened of Gordon that she had bought a gun for her own protection. Even today, only 1 in 100 rapes that are recorded by the police result in a charge that same year – let alone a conviction.1 The chance that in the 1960s Keeler would have been able to get the authorities to stop Gordon from actively pursuing and hurting her was very small. She was right to be terrified. And desperate.
Taking matters into her own hands and having lived in fear of Gordon for many years, in January 1963, Keeler agreed to meet Gordon for a final time at the Flamingo Club. On the understanding that he would then leave her alone, Keeler agreed to spend two nights with Gordon at his brother’s flat in Leytonstone. But breaking this agreement afterwards, Gordon went on to turn up at the Edgeware Road flat Keeler shared with Rice-Davies. Keeler was there with Kim Proctor, and when Paul Mann arrived, Keeler, Proctor and Mann escaped by car and immediately fled to France and then on to Spain. The timing of this incident coincided with the Edgecombe trial and was when Keeler became the ‘missing model’. It has been suggested that Keeler’s disappearance may have been pre-planned, either by her, or more likely by one of the many men manipulating her, to raise her ‘market value’ in the press. But Keeler’s life was often very complex, and this seems like another instance where events overtook her.
To understand how Keeler came to commit perjury, it’s necessary to understand the events leading up to her attack, her state of mind at the time and her motivation for lying about the attack Gordon was on trial for.
In April 1963, Gordon was still harassing Keeler, who was by this time living with Paula Hamilton-Marshall and her brother John in Devonshire Street. Gordon came to the property on 12 April and assaulted John Hamilton-Marshall, for which he was arrested. Gordon was bailed this time by Ward, however, and according to court records Platt has found, Gordon was told by Ward that ‘Christine wanted to see me’. Keeler clearly did not want to see Gordon and had not wanted to for a very long time, if ever. Why would Ward have encouraged Gordon to seek out Keeler?
Just days later, Gordon returned to the Devonshire Street flat to find Keeler. She had already had a physical fight with John Hamilton-Marshall at the flat after he became aggressive with his sister. Keeler maintained only two blows were exchanged, although John Hamilton-Marshall was later quoted in the press as saying that he was ‘responsible for all her injuries’ that were later attributed to Gordon’s assault on her. After the altercation, John Hamilton-Marshall left the flat and Clarence Camacchio and Rudolph Fenton, friends of Paula Hamilton-Marshall, arrived. One of the men was on probation, but they were both married and of West Indian descent, with a distrust of the police.
Planning to head out to a club in the early hours of 18 April, Keeler left the flat followed by Fenton then Camacchio. Hamilton-Marshall was left at the top of the stairs. Gordon had been waiting outside the address and attacked Keeler. When Hamilton-Marshall saw that Gordon had struck Keeler, she called the police as Keeler ran back to the safety of the flat. The men prevented Gordon from entering the flat and he left.
Believing their involvement to be incidental, and not wanting them to be in trouble with the authorities or their wives, when the police arrived, as asked, Keeler didn’t mention Camacchio and Fenton. The two men hid inside the flat while the police were there. In the version of events Keeler gave the police, she says that she and Hamilton-Marshall shut the door on Gordon to keep him out. A doctor examined Keeler and said that her injuries were consistent with the use of deliberate force she’d described Gordon using.
The day after, when Gordon was arrested for the assault, Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert also questioned him about the Ward case, despite the fact the two were separate.
Despite Gordon admitting that he hit Keeler at the trial itself, Knightley and Kennedy have a very different account of the assault. They say that the entire event was cooked up by the police after Keeler had told Herbert and Burrows she’d had a fight with a friend, getting a black eye and bruises (it was the truth that Hamilton-Marshall had inflicted the injuries, however). It was the police that suggested Keeler then call Gordon over to her flat, where he could be apprehended and have Keeler’s injuries pinned on him. For Keeler, this was an opportunity to be rid of Gordon, and for the police? It gave them a chance to convince Gordon to say certain things about Ward in return for his freedom. Unfortunately, Gordon refused to cooperate.2
However, Platt points out that Keeler was a valuable witness for the prosecution in Ward’s case. Without Keeler’s evidence against Ward, he may have not been convicted, just as Edgecombe had escaped some of his charges when Keeler disappeared to Spain. If Gordon’s attack on Keeler had happened and had been successful, and she had been injured or worse, Keeler may not have been able to be a witness in the Ward trial. Was it a coincidence that Ward had paid Gordon’s bail for his earlier attack on John Hamilton-Marshall, and, it seems, told Gordon that Keeler wanted to speak to him, even though Ward knew of the anguish the violent Gordon had caused Keeler for years beforehand? According to Platt, Gordon also thought Keeler was pregnant. Who had told him that?
In 1989, Keeler herself spoke of receiving a warning message via Paul Mann, that suggested Ward would ‘get her’ for the Gordon case if she didn’t put the blame on the police. Later both John Hamilton-Marshall and Robin Drury gave statements to the police and press, discrediting Keeler. What were their motivations? Was it financial or were they helping a friend? Hamilton-Marshall told the police he was responsible for all of Keeler’s injuries, and Robin Drury, who had failed to extort money from Keeler, instead handed over to the police the interview tapes he had made with her. A discredited Keeler would have been very helpful for Ward’s defence.
When Fenton and Camacchio were finally forced to give witness accounts, they supported Keeler’s claim she had been assaulted by Gordon. However, Keeler, Paula Hamilton-Marshall and their housekeeper, Olive Brooker, were all charged with perjury for failing to mention that the two men witnessed the attack. At the time, Paula Hamilton-Marshall had a nine-month-old baby, which Platt says made the sending of her to prison seem particularly cruel and unnecessary to his mother.
Keeler’s perjury conviction is one of the main legal arguments in the appeal to have Ward’s conviction to be overturned. It’s ironic that even now, the use of something that happened to Keeler is seen as key to Ward’s redemption. Some of the argument rests on the fact that the judge in Gordon’s appeal did not send a strong enough message about Keeler’s perjury to the Ward trial, which was ongoing at the time. Platt says that the original court transcripts show that the judge did understand that the essence of Keeler’s testimony was true. There’s little doubt that, like so many times before, Gordon assaulted Keeler in some way that day, but because she was labelled a perjurer by this case, was she a less reliable witness against Ward? The case against Ward was flawed in many ways and Keeler, like others, was not a willing witness. Much of her ‘evidence’ was coerced out of her. Perhaps her perjury was not as important as it was made to appear.
Platt has used court records, memoirs, newspapers and parliamentary speeches to understand his mother’s story. He feels that at the time of the Profumo Affair, judges and the courts seemed to punish people not because they were found to be guilty of a crime, but because the authorities believed it was important that people, and particularly those who were considered immoral or promiscuous, were seen by the larger public to be punished. His campaign argues that the criminal justice system let Keeler down and shows how the men around her destroyed her reputation for their own ends, be that to save their own skin or to exploit her for financial gain.
Since Ward died before being sentenced, Keeler was the only one imprisoned from the sequence of events that became known as the ‘Profumo Affair’. In 1993, Platt was in the studio audience at the Clive Anderson show featuring his mother. Keeler told the audience that she was the first person to go to prison for not stating who was at the scene of a crime when a crime occurred, but Platt recalls that the host moved on to the next question, because her point was too complex to discuss.
Over 250 pages of evidence and legal documents were sent to the CCRC and at the time of going to print, Keeler’s case was still being examined. If it can’t help, then the case will be referred back to the Justice Secretary for a pardon.
Sixty years on, her story isn’t over.