What part have reporters played over the years in highlighting the cases of the wrongly convicted? And what role have they also sometimes played in targeting or demonising the innocent?
In April 1815, Eliza Fenning appeared at the Old Bailey charged with attempted murder. She was a servant whose employers, Robert and Charlotte Turner, had become ill after eating the beef stew and dumplings she had prepared. Mr Turner suggested that Fenning had deliberately spiked the food with the arsenic he kept to deal with mice and rats and Mrs Turner suggested that she could have done so in response to being scolded for consorting with a couple of young apprentices. Fenning protested her innocence but the jury was unmoved and she was sentenced to hang, although food poisoning was the likeliest cause of the Turners’ illness. William Hone, a radical writer, heard of her case, visited her in Newgate prison and launched a newspaper, The Traveller, specifically to fight for her release. It probably did no harm to her cause that she was young and beautiful and the artist Robert Cruikshank pictured her reading the Bible in her cell.
Others shared Hone’s doubts about her guilt and a week before she was hanged she wrote to a Sunday-paper editor thanking him for his ‘humane charitableness’ in taking up her cause and adding that ‘my dear parents and myself will feel in duty bound to pray for your kind interference in your paper as you have done’. The Newgate Calendar reported that ‘thousands of persons, after examining the evidence adduced at the trial, did not hesitate to express their opinions very strongly on the case; and many of the lower orders, apparently convinced of the innocence of the sufferer, assembled in front of Mr Turner’s house . . . hooting and hissing and otherwise expressing their indignation.’
Not all the newspapers were sympathetic. The Observer led the charge against Fenning, not least because she came from a Roman Catholic family. The campaign was to no avail and she was hanged. The well-meaning Traveller lasted only a year but Hone’s investigation, which argued persuasively that she was innocent, could be seen as an early example of investigative reporting on such cases and of the way in which press can influence – or try to – the public as to someone’s innocence or guilt.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote in the press on more than one occasion on behalf of convicted men in whose innocence he believed. He campaigned in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere on behalf of George Edalji, wrongly convicted on the bizarre charge of disembowelling a horse in Staffordshire in 1903. The Anglo-Indian lawyer served three years hard labour before being eventually pardoned, and concern about his conviction, contributed to the creation of the court of criminal appeal in 1907 and was the subject of a Julian Barnes novel, Arthur & George. Intriguingly, in 2015, it emerged that Staffordshire police fabricated evidence to try to discredit Conan Doyle’s investigation. The chief constable, G. A. Anson, later admitted sending him a bogus letter signed ‘A Nark, London’.
Conan Doyle was active, too, in the campaign to prove the innocence of Oscar Slater, a German Jew convicted of the 1908 murder of the elderly Marion Gilchrist, battered to death at her home in Glasgow, supposedly for her jewels. Miss Gilchrist’s maid later named a respectable relative of the dead woman as the man who had fled the flat at the time of the killing but Slater, who had various aliases and was already en route for New York, was suspected because he had a pawn ticket for a jewel, despite the fact that the ticket predated the murder by weeks. Class and anti-Jewish prejudice clearly played a part in the police investigation and the initial press coverage. Slater was pursued to the United States, brought back to Scotland, convicted and jailed for life after narrowly escaping the death penalty.
The Citizen, which incidentally carried a photo of Slater’s jury getting out of their omnibus on their way into court – unthinkable today – backed the verdict as ‘just’, as did the 7 May edition of the Glasgow News. Although disquiet was already being voiced about the case, by 18 May the Scotsman was dismissing it: ‘Efforts most harmful and ill-advised, are being made to work up popular feeling and to receive signatures with the object of obtaining a reprieve for the man Oscar Slater who now lies under sentence of death. However amiable may be the sentiments that may have prompted some of those who have taken part in the movement it is one that cannot be otherwise than mischievous and futile.’ Intriguingly, the Weekly Record has a quote from a juryman who disclosed that the verdict was reached by a show of hands without any debate as to innocence or guilt. ‘The time was occupied by discussions that the Press should not know who voted one way or the other.’ (Nine for guilty, five not proven, and one not guilty.)
William Roughead, the Scottish lawyer and chronicler of murder trials of the period, wrote first of the case in 1910 and was involved in it for many years. In The Trial of Oscar Slater, he described it as a ‘long legal tragedy’ and berated successive Scottish Secretaries for their failures to address it. He would later give evidence at the appeal. Roughead cooperated with Conan Doyle, and there is evidence of their correspondence on the subject in the Signet Library in Edinburgh: Conan Doyle even sent a telegram to Roughead as it looked as though their campaign would finally succeed and wrote that it was impossible to read the details of the case ‘without feeling deeply dissatisfied with the proceedings and morally certain that justice was not done’. But it took many years before justice was finally done, despite the involvement of the press. On 20 May 1923, the headline in the Sunday Mail read: ‘The Fate of Oscar Slater/Why He May Not Secure His Freedom/Sister’s Longing for His Return’ and the accompanying story recounted how ‘the grim spectral figure of Oscar Slater . . . is to come forth from his cell in Peterhead so that his case may be discussed again’.
On 15 February 1925 the same paper had a story of a fellow-prisoner who had smuggled out Slater’s appeal written in ‘tiny calligraphy’ and hidden under his tongue. A Glasgow journalist, William Park, investigated further and published his findings in 1927. The Daily News added their weight by dispatching a special commissioner, E. Clephan Palmer, writing under the pseudonym of The Pilgrim, who filed twenty-four stories on the case. Finally, Slater was released pending his appeal after Conan Doyle had sent details of the case to Ramsay MacDonald, then leader of the opposition, who was clearly troubled by it. On 27 March 1928, Slater wrote in the Daily Express: ‘I have seen and lived in hell . . . I am no longer the Oscar Slater of 1908, the swarthy foreigner who could hardly speak the English tongue and I am strong in body and purpose.’
When he finally appeared in court for his appeal, Conan Doyle described the scene in the Sunday Pictorial of 15 July 1928: ‘One terrible face stands out among all the others. It is not an ill-favoured nor is it a wicked one but it is terrible nonetheless for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and it might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is. A sculptor would choose for the very type of tragedy . . . It is Slater.’ Slater was given a ‘solatium’ of £6,000 as compensation for his eighteen-and-a-half years inside. Not everyone was generous-hearted about the case. Edgar Wallace, in the Morning Post of 1 August 1927, wrote: ‘He has served nineteen years for a crime of which anybody but a fool might know he is guiltless’ but he added that ‘there was nothing about Oscar Slater that was admirable. By the accident of birth he was a German Jew, by inclination he was a shady and immoral fellow.’ Roughead, Conan Doyle, Park and ‘The Pilgrim’ all played a part in Slater’s redemption. So what duty does a reporter have when he or she doubts a defendant’s guilt?
Some crime reporters have rued the fact in retrospect that they did not do more to save the innocent. Harry Procter, who, as the Sunday Pictorial’s crime man, had the task of making a deal to pay for the legal costs of the serial killer John Reginald Christie, as we saw in Chapter Thirteen, was regretful of his role in that case. In his 1958 memoir, The Street of Disillusion, Procter reflected that ‘it was unfortunate indeed that we, in Fleet Street – I was just as mistaken as the rest – regarded the Evans murder as what we professionally call “fish-and-chippy”.’ This was the expression given to run-of-the-mill domestic killings. ‘None of us realised then that we were literally on the doorstep of the most horrifying crime story of the century.’
Procter chastised himself for failing to investigate further, although in those days crime reporters were still very trustful of the authorities. What was to trouble him right up to his early death in 1965 was his failure to subject Christie to the sort of robust questioning for which he was justly famous. Procter had covered Evans’s trial but it attracted little attention at the time and the press box was empty for much of the case. The fact that capital punishment was still on the statute books obviously gave the issue greater weight and already some other crime reporters were demonstrating their concerns. Lindon Laing, of the Daily Express and later the Daily Mail, always left the press box before a death sentence was passed because he was so opposed to capital punishment.
Ludovic Kennedy, in his 1961 book Ten Rillington Place, investigated in greater detail how Evans came to be convicted. The book established a template for researching dubious convictions and played a major role in encouraging reporters to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice, a genre of journalism that would lead to many successful appeals in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
There remained for many years the feeling that such miscarriages of justice were still rare. Those who sought to question convictions in contentious cases were often reviled, as was the case some twenty years later in a very different type of crime. Journalist and author Chris Mullin was amongst those involved in campaigning against the conviction of the Birmingham Six, who had been jailed for the murder of 21 people in an IRA pub bombing in 1974. This persistence over the years by Mullin, who became a Labour MP in 1987, prompted the Sun to run the front page headline ‘Loony MP Backs Bomb Gang’ the day after the first appeal against the six men’s conviction was dismissed in 1988. It would be some years before the ‘loony’ was proved right and the ‘bomb gang’ shown to be innocent victims.
Prisoners protesting their innocence still often contact the media, although the coverage of miscarriages of justice has dwindled since the demise of two television programmes, the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error, both victims of austere times when reality television is cheaper than complex investigative documentaries.
Some inmates take drastic measures to highlight their cases. In 1993, Joe Steele escaped from prison in Scotland where he was serving a life sentence for the 1984 Glasgow ‘Ice Cream Wars’ murder of six members of the Doyle family. They had been killed in an arson attack between gangs controlling ice cream vans in the area. While he was on the run, I interviewed him in London and the story and his picture appeared in the Guardian under the headline ‘Fugitive “killer” protests his innocence.’ He assured me that he would give himself up once he had got publicity for his campaign: ‘If I wanted to get away I would have gone abroad by now.’
The police arrived at the Guardian shortly afterwards. They wanted to know how and where I had met Steele and who arranged the meeting. On the advice of the Guardian lawyer, I replied ‘no comment’ to every question asked. A report was sent to the procurator fiscal in Scotland as the initial offence of escaping had taken place there. Shortly afterwards, Steele gave himself up, as he had promised, by climbing a pylon and hanging a banner from it protesting his innocence. No charges were ever brought against the Guardian. Steele and his co-defendant, Tommy Campbell, had their convictions quashed in 2004.
The veteran miscarriages-of-justice campaigner Paul May, who has been involved in a number of successful campaigns, from those of the Birmingham Six to that of young Sam Hallam, wrongly jailed for murder in 2005 but freed on appeal in 2012, reckons that press coverage can prove essential. ‘Even cursory media attention can have a positive impact. In several cases with which I’ve been involved, new witnesses came forward after seeing media reports,’ he wrote in The Justice Gap. He noted that sympathetic coverage had been given to the campaign by many newspapers and magazines and there had even been coverage on mainstream television, although that had been conditional: ‘ITV made clear that, unless the actor Ray Winstone (whose nephew was a close friend of Sam) took part, it was unlikely the film would be made. In this celebrity-obsessed age, we were perhaps fortunate they didn’t also insist on Ant and Dec appearing as co-presenters.’
The very way that cases are covered can, suggest campaigners on the issue, lead to a wrong verdict. ‘My own view is that any miscarriage of justice is in part, at least, attributable to prejudicial reporting,’ said Bob Woffinden, author of Miscarriages of Justice, the most comprehensive review of such cases published in book form. ‘Generally, when people discuss matters of prejudicial reporting, they automatically but mistakenly begin talking about the national press whereas it is with the local press that the reporting may well be more dangerous.’ Woffinden cited the case of Emma Bates, whom he believes was wrongly jailed in Birmingham for the murder of her boyfriend. Her family told Woffinden of their experience of coming out of court and seeing the newspaper placards of the Birmingham Mail effectively summarising the prosecution case and realised that the jurors would have had the same experience. ‘You then need to consider that this never happens with the defence case, partly because there is not normally a defence opening as such, and partly because by the time it gets round to the defence, the papers have lost interest,’ said Woffinden.
But if the press can highlight a miscarriage of justice that might otherwise have never come to light, they can also point the finger of suspicion in the wrong direction with grim results. Such was the case in the murder of Rachel Nickell, who in 1992 was killed in front of her two-year-old son on Wimbledon Common. It was a crime with all too many victims: her partner and father of their child, André Hanscombe; the young son, her family and many friends. But there was an additional victim in the shape of Colin Stagg, the man wrongly accused of killing her.
As with the Birmingham and Guildford pub bomb cases, the pressure on the police to make an arrest is intense, much of it fed by press coverage in the immediate aftermath and indeed for months or years afterwards. If the victim, as in Rachel Nickell’s case, was an attractive young blonde woman, the chances of her case being heavily featured in the media were many times greater than if she had been less photogenic and from a different ethnic group. (Unsolved cases of winos beaten to death slip swiftly from public notice; they come under the heading of what some police forces and reporters used to call ‘slag on slag’ cases, where both victim and murderer were seen as of little social importance, whether they were junkies, dealers, winos, tramps or gang members. In Los Angeles, there is a vile equivalent, NHI, which was used informally by police to describe murders of young black men by young black men. It stands for ‘no humans involved’.)
In the Nickell case, the pressure could not have been more intense. The twenty-seventh person arrested was Colin Stagg, a single man described at the time as ‘the local weirdo’, who was known to walk his dog on the common and in whose home police found a sheath knife, books on the occult and the walls painted black, meaning that he fitted a constructed profile of the killer. In a now infamous series of events, an undercover policewoman was instructed to make contact with him, pretending to be attracted to him and to be excited by the possibility that he might be the murderer. When she told Stagg: ‘If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right,’ Stagg responded: ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t.’ But the prosecution proceeded and to a great extent the press, anxious to see someone convicted for such a horrendous crime, accepted the police’s version of events.
Stagg was held in jail for thirteen months while he awaited trial. He was fortunate in that Mr Justice Ognall, the judge in front of whom he eventually appeared, was robust enough to see the case against him for what it was – a mishmash of suppositions and mild coincidences, sprinkled with some fanciful psychological speculation. It was thrown out before it went to the jury. But even after Stagg was freed, the innuendos continued, with some members of the press still anxious to tar him with the brush of the ‘man who got away with murder’. The drip-drip of misinformation about Stagg continued. While the public made clear their views with the graffiti near his home, the press continued to court any ex-girlfriends willing to sell their story about any ‘weirdness’.
‘A few days after an incredulous judge threw out the case against Colin Stagg in 1994, I saw the police descend into denial,’ wrote the journalist Nick Cohen some years later. He had been working for the Independent on Sunday and with its then editor, Ian Jack, went for dinner with a senior officer at New Scotland Yard and the Stagg prosecution was raised. ‘The senior officer looked at us as if we were fools. He could assure us that Stagg was as guilty as Crippen.’ And many parts of the media continued to try their best to convict Stagg. The late television presenter and hoaxer, Jeremy Beadle, suggested that Stagg should face trial on television. Another high profile television character, the investigative reporter Roger Cook, got Stagg to take a lie detector test on television – which he passed. The News of the World ran a story about how the ‘weirdo’ demanded ‘bizarre sex’ with his ‘terrified’ girlfriend close to where Rachel Nickell was murdered. The Daily Mail quoted André Hanscombe as saying he was ‘99 per cent certain’ that Stagg was guilty and the government should remove the double jeopardy law so that he could be tried again. It also serialised the book by the officer in charge of the case, Detective Inspector Keith Pedder, headlined ‘How British Justice Betrayed Rachel’s Son.’
Then, dramatically, in 2008, through compelling DNA evidence, it emerged that Robert Napper, a man already convicted for a double murder, was the real killer. He pleaded guilty at his subsequent trial and was jailed for life. To his credit, Stagg has always said that the real victims in this whole sorry saga are Rachel, André and her family but that did not stop another press furore over his being awarded £250,000 compensation for his ordeal. ‘Anger as Colin Stagg’s payout dwarves that of Rachel Nickell’s son,’ was the Mail’s response.
Hanscombe wrote a very gracious letter of apology to Stagg for what he had gone through and described his own experience with the media. ‘I am sorry for the ordeal that you have endured during virtually the whole length of this very sad affair, and any part that I might have had personally to make it worse,’ wrote Hanscombe. ‘I had been led to believe by officers of the Metropolitan Police that they considered you responsible for my partner’s death. I know now that you were, and are, an innocent man who was mistakenly charged. I wish you a long, happy and productive life.’ Hanscombe, whose new home with his son in France had been discovered by the press, characterised the reporters he encountered as ‘callous, mercenary, unfeeling . . . cowardly, snivelling scum’.
Stephen Wright, who covered the case for the Daily Mail, was told in April 1996 by a very senior officer that he was 110 per cent certain that Colin Stagg did it. ‘The whole mindset of the Met was this man did it and that filtered through to the media. Even when he was acquitted in 1994, a senior officer came out of the Old Bailey and effectively said “We’re not looking for anyone else.” That taught me a lesson. I went on to do very well on the case and won an award for it . . . I wrote the story that there had been a DNA breakthrough that meant that Napper did it. Stagg was a victim of a smear campaign by the Met. I put my hands up, I fell for it initially. Mitigation would be that virtually everyone fell for it – except for Paul Foot, he was a lone, sceptical voice early on.’
A case with an even higher media profile was the murder of television presenter Jill Dando, shot dead outside her home in Fulham in April 1999. There was much speculation as to why she had been killed. The ‘golden hour’, which detectives see as the chance to get the first vital clues that lead to a killer, passed with no indications of who had carried out the attack or why. There was no shortage of theories: a disgruntled criminal who had been caught as a result of a Crimewatch appeal which Dando presented; a spurned ex-lover; a case of mistaken identity; or a Serbian hit-man angered at her very recent television appeal for Kosovo.
Once again, the person arrested was a ‘local weirdo’ or, as the News of the World described him, a ‘bug-eyed odd-ball’. Barry George, who had Asperger’s and lived locally, was eventually convicted on slender evidence at the Old Bailey and jailed for life. The coverage of the trial in the press gave little indication that George might well be the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He was, as the spread in the News of the World described him, ‘the imp who grew into the devil’. He spent more than seven years in jail before an appeal and a retrial in 2008 at which he was acquitted. The press had a particular if tangential role in the prosecution because of his obsessive collection of newspapers: part of the case against him was that he was obsessed with Dando, as evidenced by eight photos of her in newspapers found in his flat – but they were just a few of some 800 newspapers that he had collected, something that was given less prominence in the trial’s coverage.
As with Stagg, some of the media were reluctant to accept George’s innocence. After his acquittal, he agreed to be interviewed by News of the World reporters thinking, perhaps naively, that that might be the end of it. The article was headlined ‘I didn’t kill Jill Dando . . . I was stalking someone else at the time’, something that George had never said. He successfully sued News International for libel. Not long afterwards, he left London for Ireland.
In 2010, came the murder of Joanna Yeates, a twenty-five-year-old Bristol landscape architect who disappeared in December of that year and whose body was found on Christmas Day at the edge of a quarry. She had been strangled. Initial suspicion focussed on her landlord and neighbour, a retired schoolteacher, aged sixty-five, called Christopher Jefferies. Detectives interviewed him for three days and he was released on police bail – a coded indication to reporters if not to the general public that the person is still of interest to the police.
This led to an orgy of speculation, fuelled by gossip and innuendo and his case tells us much about the dangers of too close cooperation between police and reporters: of leading details being given, off the record, leaving the press to draw their own conclusions. Another key issue was that, by 2010, Britain was now deeply into the twenty-four-hour news cycle with the constant pressure from news desks to keep updating stories. Jefferies’ photo appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail with the headline: ‘Could This Man Hold the Key to Joanna’s murder?’ You did not need to be Hercule Poirot to work out that, as her landlord, Jefferies certainly held the key to her front door. He was, said the Mail, ‘the teacher they called Mr Strange’ and he supposedly admired the poet Christina Rossetti ‘who often wrote about death’. Later coverage noted that Jefferies had drawn his pupils’ attention to Wilkie Collins’s ‘Victorian murder novel’, The Moonstone.
The Sun’s front page featured a photo of Jefferies taken thirty years earlier, with blueish hair, and the headline, ‘The Strange Mr Jefferies – Kids’ nickname for ex-teacher suspect’. Inside, further heavy hints were dropped with the headings of ‘Weird’, ‘Posh’, ‘Lewd’ and ‘Creepy’ and references to his ‘strange walk’, the fact that he ‘loved poetry, culture’, had made ‘sexual remarks’ and was essentially a ‘loner with blue rinse hair’.
‘Jo suspect is Peeping Tom’ was the Daily Mirror’s front-page headline alongside an assertion that ‘arrest landlord spied on flat couple’ and that he had a ‘friend in jail for paedophile crimes’. He also became the ‘Nutty Professor’ – a minor change in itself as teachers accused of crimes are usually described as ‘sirs’. The paper added that ‘his eccentric manner and long-term bachelor status sparked unfounded school gossip that he was gay.’
In the Daily Star, Jefferies became an ‘angry weirdo’ with a ‘foul temper’ and ‘a creep who freaked out schoolgirls’. The Sundays joined the hunt with the Sunday Mirror pointing out that he had taught pupils Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which was ‘the story of a man hanged for cutting his wife’s throat’. The Mail on Sunday discovered that he had shown one class the 1961 Jack Clayton film, The Innocents, with its themes of murder and ghostliness.
Brian Cathcart is a professor of journalism at Kingston University, London and a founder of the Hacked Off campaign in 2011 which campaigned for greater press accountability. As he later noted in an article in the Financial Times, ‘This hostile evidence was founded almost entirely on unnamed witnesses, with some of the most contentious quotations reproduced in several papers’. The Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, eventually stepped in to remind editors of the Contempt of Court Act, which bans the publication of material relating to an arrested person that could prejudice a future trial. But by then the damage had been done.
Jo Yeates’s partner, Greg Reardon, was one of a growing number of people dismayed by the coverage and issued a statement. ‘Jo’s life was cut short tragically but the finger-pointing and character assassination by social and news media of as yet innocent men has been shameful. It has made me lose a lot of faith in the morality of the British press and those that spend their time fixed to the internet in this modern age.’
Three weeks later a young Dutchman, Vincent Tabak, also a neighbour of the victim, was arrested and charged with the murder. Tabak admitted the killing, was convicted and jailed for life. Jefferies sued the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, the Daily Record, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Star and the Scotsman and was awarded an estimated £500,000 in compensation. The Sun and the Mirror were found guilty of contempt of court on the basis that their reporting might well have derailed a future trial. It was also suggested that the coverage was damaging to the investigation in that potential witnesses might well have assumed from the coverage that the police already had their man. The Sun was fined £18,000 and the Mirror £50,000. Jefferies had never taught either Rossetti or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.