Having already been granted a weekend to hone his cross-examination and now another to finesse his closing speech, the scheduling gods were once again on Brian Altman’s side. The finale of any trial is when counsel can get to their feet to implore the jury to believe their arguments one last time. These are the words they hope will ring in the jurors’ ears as they weigh up guilt and innocence. Often, it’s also a time to elicit a subtle reaction from the defendant in the hope that the jury will see him wince as the pieces of the jigsaw are firmly put together.
That would not happen in this trial.
The word came through about an hour before court sat on 4 December that Bishop had refused to come out of his HMP Belmarsh cell. I had been surprised when he continued to turn up after flouncing from the witness box the previous week, but expected him to put on a last show for the jury in these closing stages. Perhaps he realized he had played all his cards and stood no chance of recovering their favour. It was disgraceful cowardice, but more than that, it would rob the families of watching him as the verdicts were delivered. But that was Bishop all over.
Once the jury were settled, the judge told them not to hold Bishop’s absence against him. The elegant Brian Altman QC rose to his feet, turned to the jury and delivered his well-prepared synopsis of the devastating prosecution case. He began by putting to bed the outlandish claims that Barrie Fellows was the killer. The apparent gap in Barrie’s timeline simply did not exist. People could be forgiven for not checking their watches every moment of the day, but that was not the point here. Barrie, and others, could account for every moment of that terrible last night of his daughter’s and Karen’s lives. The notion that Barrie had made more significant comments than Bishop and that he was the one person who could have lured Nicola to Wild Park to silence her was, Altman said, a smokescreen to ensure that Bishop would get away with the murders for a second time.
Returning to Barrie’s supposed ‘missing hour’ – 6.25 p.m. to 7.25 p.m. – Altman referred the jury to Dr Carey, the pathologist who had revisited his deceased colleague’s findings. In his view, the deaths were any time from 18.30 onwards. Dr West had said 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the original trial and the defence were clinging to this. That would only have left twenty-five minutes for Barrie to murder the girls and get home. ‘That’s just not feasible,’ said Altman.
Barrie said he had purchased some ham from George Street in Hove that afternoon to have for his tea. Based on the defence’s timings, he would have had to be carrying the ham under his arm when he sexually assaulted and murdered the girls. Then how would he have dumped the Pinto in the opposite direction to his house? To get home for 7.25 p.m., he would have needed to run, arriving sweating and panting. It simply did not stack up.
Altman drew attention to the fact the defence were relying on Barrie’s alleged violent past, based on one occasion when, they claimed, he assaulted his grandmother-in-law. That was six years previously, never reported at the time, and both Susan and Barrie Fellows said he struck her by accident.
Altman asked the jury to consider this instead. Barrie had no history of strangulation of little girls – Bishop did. Barrie had no history of sexual assault – Bishop did.
Next, he moved to the video. Dougie Judd had told the court it was absolute rubbish. Marion Stevenson, having been paid by the News of the World, said she would give some of her fee to charity. Bishop said the same about his supposed press payout, when he turned up at Barrie Fellows’ home while on bail. Was that a coincidence?
What about Marion saying she was put up to this by Bishop’s mother? What should the jury make of that? Why had she not told the police about what must have been a very distressing video? A video she waited until the first trial was all but over to recount. A video depicting acts that expert evidence, provided by the pathologist Dr Carey, proved highly unlikely to have occurred. No one else knew about this footage – it could have provided a strong line of defence for her then-boyfriend in 1987.
He finished debunking the defence by saying Barrie had been dragged through the mud in this case, accused of all manner of things from being a paedophile to a violent man. ‘It is,’ Altman said, ‘a defence born of desperation to deflect the case against Bishop.’ He made the point that ‘had Bishop not thrown in the towel halfway through his evidence he would have been asked about some of these issues’.
Turning to the scientific evidence, he told the jury, ‘It’s essential you are able to rely on the scrutiny of the exhibits. Ros Hammond has provided extensive evidence on the integrity of the exhibits.’ He pointed out that, despite how it might seem, the defence had not sought to challenge the scientific evidence in this case. Instead they made general suggestions about the continuity and integrity of the exhibits and evidence that, over the passage of time, they had been contaminated through loss of records and the unavailability of witnesses. It was open to the defence to call their own scientist but they had not.
He reminded the jury that all the forensic items the prosecution had relied on were locked in time, preventing any suggestion of inadvertent transfer. The exhibits were never in the same place at the same time, in particular the Pinto sweatshirt. Ros Hammond did not identify any time where any of the findings could have occurred from inadvertent transfer of DNA. The sheer volume of such transfers that would have been necessary to undermine the forensics made the possibility implausible.
He concluded by saying that ‘the science is so overwhelming that the Pinto was worn by the defendant, and he was wearing it when he killed the girls. If you’re sure about that then you should be sure he was responsible for the killings.’
Altman then directed the jury to the fact that Russell Bishop was forensically aware, which is why he discarded his Pinto. He threw away his clothes having partly undressed as he fled from scene – just as he did in 1990.
And did he wash his clothes?
Bishop had told the police in his interview he had put the washing on ‘because it needed doing and I had nothing else to do’. Five days later, he gave a different excuse for washing the clothes, claiming that he fell in dog mess and could not find any clean clothes.
Altman said, ‘Why did he suddenly realize this five days later? Because he had to wash clothing that could link him to the girls. He had to dispose of any evidence linking him to them, having already discarded the jumper.’
He then listed some of the inconsistencies in Bishop’s alibi.
He lied about the failed purchase of a newspaper in the shop because he had no money. He lied about buying cannabis. He lied about going to the university to steal cars. He lied to Marion about why he did not meet her at six o’clock that evening.
He then catalogued Bishop’s differing accounts for his movements on the night with variations that continued right up until him giving evidence a few days previously. Bishop’s timings had to change to fit in with the sightings of him. He said he became confused with road names but Altman countered that it was just that his original accounts did not hold water – because they were lies – and some witnesses were just too inconvenient. Brian Altman had been on his feet all day and, although he was close to finishing, courts run to strict schedules, so he left it at that until the morning.
The following day, we were all trying to predict the end of the trial. This is never easy. Although it was likely Mr Bennathan’s speech would be much shorter – perhaps pithier – than Altman’s, how long it would take the judge to sum up remained to be seen.
True to his word, Altman took just shy of an hour to wrap up. He picked up where he left off, overlaying sightings of the girls with those of Bishop’s movements, proving, in his words, that he had no alibi for when Karen and Nicola were killed – because he killed them.
Next Altman suggested that the reason Bishop remained around the search area was because, in his mind, he needed to keep an eye on what was happening. The illusion of wanting to be close to friends and family was just that. And what about nestling up to the police searchers? Then there was his knowledge of how the bodies lay. Unless the jury rejected Rowland and Marchant’s evidence, the only time he would have seen them lying as they were was when he killed them. That was also the only time he could have left the paint on Nicola’s neck and his DNA on Karen’s arm.
Maybe he was smarter than many had given him credit for as, when he said in evidence he took the pulse from Karen’s right arm, he knew to say her left would have presented a further problem. Her left arm was underneath Nicola and even he knew he could not have got to it.
In his 2016 interviews, Altman reminded the jury, Bishop made no comment to most of the questions – questions that provided him ample opportunity to correct or explain the evidence. But he did say, ‘I didn’t touch no one. I’ve got no comment to make.’
Finally, he listed the striking similarities between Claire’s attack and these murders, commenting that if Bishop was not the killer there must be two men in Brighton committing such specific offences. He rounded off by saying ‘The killer is this defendant to the exclusion of all others. Put right an injustice of thirty-two years.’ He sat down at 11.30 a.m., his job done.