The following morning, 8 February, the day before his twenty-fourth birthday, Bishop appeared at Brighton Magistrates’ Court. His journey through the underground tunnels that linked the police cells to the court avoided the baying crowds outside. Interestingly, Sylvia Bishop was not in court. She chose to honour her entry to Cruft’s Dog Show at Earl’s Court in London with Magic Sunday, her sheepdog, performing in the obedience category.
Dressed in a grey patterned sweater, light blue jeans and blue canvas shoes, and handcuffed to a police officer, Bishop stood silently in the dock while the clerk of the court read out the charges. Allowing him to finish, Bishop replied, ‘I’m innocent of all them charges.’ The Chief Prosecutor for Brighton, Geoffrey Clinton, then outlined the details of the attack. In response, Ralph Haeems made no application for bail or for reporting restrictions to be lifted but did, once again, assert Bishop’s innocence. He asked that the prosecution produce its evidence quickly which, of course, was in everyone’s interest.
At the end of the nine-minute hearing, Bishop was remanded in custody and led to a waiting prison van in which he was whisked away to London’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Lewes Prison would have meant a death warrant and there would have been no shortage of local inmates only too happy to carry it out.
Given the sub judice rule – which regulates what can and cannot be published once legal proceedings become active – the media were stymied in what they could print until the trial. Several news outlets carried interviews with psychologists hypothesizing how Claire would be supported through her trauma and how it might affect her. Others discussed the profile of offenders who could commit such crimes. All very interesting, but they did little more than fill column inches, while we were beavering away.
Our work rate never waned over the next nine months. Our drive and determination to bring justice for Claire drove the much-reduced team on. We knew we were in for the legal fight of our lives. Bishop’s previous defence team had been ruthless and given their success and the continued presence of Mr Haeems it was pretty certain they would adopt the same confrontational approach now.
Those of us left on the enquiry spent hundreds of hours taking statements, checking property and eliminating other possible suspects. We checked and rechecked that every forensic exhibit was meticulously accounted for and that every line of enquiry had been exhausted, every detail verified.
During this period, I took a statement from a young girl, strikingly similar to Claire, who had told her parents that a red car with a ‘For Sale’ sign had twice followed her home. Her description of the driver was Bishop to a tee and the registration number she remembered was just one digit out.
This could well have been him cruising for a victim a few days before he snatched Claire. Unfortunately, it was ruled out, on the grounds of it being prejudicial to the defence. The jury would never hear that testimony.
WPC Debbie Wood was tasked with receiving, recording and then presenting to Claire the hundreds of gifts and a small fortune in cash that poured in from the public desperate to show their sympathy and support. In an extraordinary gesture of solidarity, the entire inmate population of Lewes Prison donated their weekly chocolate allocation to this brave little girl.