On Tuesday 11 June 1996, Samuel Benefield, formerly known as ‘Scotch Sammy’, arrived at the Court of Appeal. The reformed gangster was taking no chances. He walked into the Royal Courts of Justice through the Carey Street entrance at the rear of the building, away from the press and well before court business started.

Benefield arrived with his minder from Scotland Yard’s Criminal Justice Protection Unit. It had been over a quarter of a century since the armed robber had turned supergrass, putting his old gang mates behind bars for long stretches. He was fearful that they might decide to settle old scores. Benefield cut a bizarre figure, wearing a headscarf, a poorly applied fake moustache and beard with heavy sunglasses. ‘He was dressed just like an Arab sheik,’ recalled one lawyer.

Samuel Benefield was to be the star witness in an appeal by Tony Stock against a 1970 conviction for an armed robbery in Leeds. He had come to say three things: he and his old gang mates committed the robbery; Tony Stock was not part of the gang; and, finally, he had no idea who Tony Stock was.

• • •

Leeds, West Yorkshire, early one Saturday night in January 1970. The manager of the Tesco store at the Merrion Shopping Centre was carrying the day’s takings across to the Lloyds Bank night safe. He was walking the short distance with the cashier’s boyfriend.

It was dark and raining heavily. A Russian adaptation of War and Peace was playing at the Odeon. Locals and students queued for the early-evening showing.

The two men were rushed by a gang of men and attacked with coshes. The manager fell to the ground. Bleeding from a head wound, he refused to let go of the takings. He was carrying almost £4,200. It was a lot of money. The average family house cost £4,975 that year.

His attacker stamped on the manager’s hand, breaking his fingers. The thieves grabbed the money and sped off in their getaway car. Only one witness was able to make an identification. The warehouse manager, Stewart Wilson, heard his colleagues’ screams, ran to help and locked eyes for a moment with one of the robbers. Wilson was later shown police photographs of local criminals. The next day, Wilson assisted in the making of an identikit picture.

It looked a lot like Tony Stock.

It was to take a few days for police officers from Leeds to arrive at the home of the thirty-year-old father of four. He lived in Stockton-on-Tees, 72 miles north of the city. He denied having anything to do with the robbery and refused to take part in an identity parade.

With nothing else to go on, DS John Mather, a young detective who had come across Stock in connection with another investigation, decided to do something highly unorthodox. He and another officer drove their witness up the A1 to Stock’s home. When Stock came to the door, the officers kept it open long enough for Wilson to snatch a look at him. There was a scuffle on the doorstep.

Wilson positively identified Stock and an arrest was made. Later, both officers wrote in their notebooks that, on seeing Wilson, Stock shouted: ‘Get that man out of here, he knows me.’

Then the police did something else that would have been considered unusual even by the standards of 1970s policing. The two officers piled into their two-door Mini Cooper, with their witness and their suspect, for the 72-mile drive back to Millgarth Police Station.

The case against Stock consisted mainly of Wilson’s identification and a series of apparently self-incriminating statements attributed to Stock, including an exchange with Mather in the cells when it is alleged that he said: ‘The wife will get my share if the worst happens.’

Stock’s defence was that the police were lying through their teeth. He claimed to have been at home on the night of the robbery with his family – his wife, Brenda, and their four children, all under the age of ten – celebrating his thirtieth birthday.

During a three-day trial in July 1970, Brenda and his nine-year-old daughter Charlene took to the witness stand to confirm that Stock had been at home that night. They were his only witnesses. Tony Stock was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison.

• • •

Some twenty-six years later, reformed gangster Samuel Benefield turned up to the Court of Appeal to tell the judges what happened on that night. He came to deliver on a promise he had made to someone called Tom Sargant in 1979.

Tom Sargant was the first secretary of JUSTICE and a towering figure in the world of miscarriages of justice from the 1950s through to the 1980s. Every week prisoners would write to Sargant at the group’s Chancery Lane office, claiming to have been wrongly convicted. Fiercely intelligent and driven by strong religious conviction, Tom Sargant took the then eccentric position of giving prisoners the benefit of the doubt. As a consequence, his name was well known on prison landings up and down the country.

When Tony Stock was sent to HMP Gartree, he did everything he could to protest his innocence. There were rooftop protests and a shattering 93-day hunger strike. Prison wardens force-fed Stock by wedging a wooden block at the back of his throat, with a circular hole through which a pipe is fed. Sometimes they used Vaseline to smooth the pipe’s passage, sometimes not.

Stock wrecked his own health. He wrecked the health of his elderly mother, Mary, distraught at the strange fate that had befallen her son. While he was in prison, his wife, Brenda, divorced him. He lost contact with his four children.

Telling anyone who would listen, Stock would repeatedly assert his innocence and explain that he had been ‘fitted up’ by corrupt police officers. He wrote a furious letter to Tom Sargant, railing against the two police officers who ‘invented the evidence’ that put him away.

Sargant immediately wrote to Stock’s lawyer, requesting all the documentation relating to the case. The veteran defence lawyer who acted for Stock was only too happy to offload a difficult client. ‘I feel that there really is nothing more which I can personally do,’ he wrote to Sargant. ‘I’m not at all happy about this case. I have considerable experience of criminal matters, but this is perhaps the first case in which I have been involved during many years of practice where I have felt that a man has been “framed”.’ The lawyer added that the lead officer on the Stock case, Mather, was well known in criminal circles as ‘Mr Verbal’.*

Shortly after Stock had been sent to prison, John Mather’s career came to an abrupt end. He was suspended and charged with corruption related to the taking of bribes. The judge at his trial at Leeds Crown Court in 1972 said that Mather and a fellow officer were ‘either corrupt or stupid’, and gave them the benefit of the doubt, dismissing the pair as ‘complete idiots’.

Mather was put on traffic duty. Later, the officer was presented with ninety charges relating to disciplinary matters and resigned from the force. His file went to the Director of Public Prosecutions, but no charges in relation to those allegations were ever brought.

Tom Sargant read Stock’s papers and wrote back to his lawyer, saying he was ‘sure that Mr Stock is innocent’. Up until his retirement in 1985, Sargant fought to clear Stock’s name. When Stock went on hunger strike, Sargant did everything he could to dissuade him from taking such a drastic course of action. Stock’s despairing mother could not cope. Not wanting to burden her son, she would write to Sargant, who did as much as he could to reassure her.

• • •

In November 1979, Tony Stock had been out of prison for three years and was putting his life back together. He was doing very well. He had moved to south Wales, started a new family and set up a business selling carpets in the Valleys.

Shortly after his release, Tony received a call from a reporter at the Yorkshire Post asking if he was he aware that someone had confessed to the Leeds robbery.

The Thursday Gang had become the Chainsaw Gang. It had apparently never occurred to the Leeds Police that the robbery in 1970 could have been the work of out-of-town thieves. This was a different era when, for example, armed robbers came equipped with coshes not guns. The M1 motorway only reached Leeds in 1968.

It was the building of a motorway network that inspired a new generation of armed robbers. The Chainsaw Gang, so-called because of their innovative approach to new-style Securicor vans, was pre-eminent. The police were desperate to bring to a close a crime wave that had lasted for almost a decade.

It ended with the arrest of Scotch Sammy. Samuel Benefield turned supergrass in 1979 and sang like the proverbial bird. He went on to testify in the cases of some ten defendants in connection with fifty robberies. Benefield was given a new identity and placed in the witness protection scheme. On the basis of his evidence, an entire East End crime gang was put behind bars. Benefield himself had a total of forty-one robberies taken into consideration, including the Leeds job.

• • •

‘SQUEALER CLEARS IDENTIKIT VICTIM’, screamed the headline in the Daily Mail. A World in Action special on the Tony Stock case on ITV told the dramatic story of his wrongful conviction at the end of 1979. The programme closed with Tony Stock’s happy expectation of a pardon.

But then something very peculiar happened.

Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw decided not to pardon Stock. Instead, the minister cited an internal and top-secret report by West Yorkshire Police into the alleged perjury of the two officers who had investigated the case.

Tom Sargant was furious at the double standards. The government was only too happy to accept the Benefield admission when it served the purpose of putting away a vicious gang of armed robbers, but not to help an innocent man.

From that point on, JUSTICE used the Stock case to highlight the crisis faced by the criminal justice system. The group’s 1980 annual report lambasted an indifferent Court of Appeal, which in its view had become ‘unresponsive to clear indications of innocence’ particularly in cases where the quashing of a conviction would involve an admission of ‘police malpractice’.

This was a different time. Tom Sargant had direct access to government ministers. Researching the Stock case, I was given the JUSTICE file, which included a private exchange between Sargant and Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw.

At the end of a heated correspondence, Whitelaw noted that the outcome ‘must be disappointing to Mr Stock – particularly if he had been led to believe that the uncorroborated statement made by Mr Benefield would be sufficient to secure the grant of a free pardon and compensation’.

Tom Sargant did not disguise his contempt for such a disingenuous line. Such a response was ‘unsatisfactory and Machiavellian’, he wrote back.

In 1981, Tom Sargant, described by the campaigning journalist Ludovic Kennedy as resembling ‘a shabby eagle … usually covered in cigarette ash’, sat down with East End gangster Samuel Benefield. The interview was recorded with an eye towards an appeal and a transcript was written up.

Sargant asked Benefield if there was any reason why the police would not believe him about the Leeds job. ‘There’s no way they could believe that I didn’t commit robbery, and there’s no way in my opinion they could believe that Stock was involved,’ Benefield replied.

‘One of my troubles is that the Home Secretary says that he has not got absolute proof that Stock didn’t do it, which the Home Secretary requires,’ continued Sargant. ‘Would you be ready to go back to court?’

Samuel Benefield, after a life of crime, was finally prepared to do the decent thing.

• • •

Samuel Benefield was as good as his word. More than a quarter of a century after the armed robbery, and eight years after Sargant died, the former East End gangster delivered on the promise. Tony Stock waited until his children from his second marriage were in their early teens and old enough to understand before renewing his fight to clear his name.

Unfortunately, something very odd happened – again.

Samuel Benefield gave his evidence to the court from behind a screen. ‘I take it you can see me,’ began Michael Mansfield QC. ‘I wonder if you can help us by answering a plain and blunt question: is there anything in all of this for you?’ Mansfield asked. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ Benefield replied. ‘I want to be here like I want a hole in my head at the moment.’

The Court of Appeal didn’t believe Benefield. In fact, it was seriously unimpressed that Home Secretary Michael Howard had troubled them with the case in the first place.

Lord Justice Igor Judge did not accept that the subsequent revelations amounted to much.† ‘In reality, there was very little additional material of any significance,’ he said. ‘We can only infer that the decision to refer the case simply represents a change of mind at the Home Office.’

Judge thought that the supergrass’s description of his gang’s return journey was ‘outside any possible contemplation’, so utterly illogical as to completely blow his credibility. The investigative journalist Paul Foot (father of Eddie Gilfoyle’s lawyer Matt Foot) later wrote an article in Private Eye headlined ‘Judge Dreadful’.

I met Tony Stock twelve years after his ill-fated appeal. He had with him a photocopy of the Paul Foot article. ‘If anyone seriously believes that the Court of Appeal has reformed itself since the dark days of the Birmingham 6 and the Bridgewater 4, they should study the amazing and unreported case of Tony Stock,’ it began.

If Samuel Benefield was not telling the truth, it followed, then he was lying. That was a proposition from which some obvious questions flowed, but it did not seem to bother the court.

As Foot explained:

Someone, their Lordships guessed, had told Benefield all about the robbery so he could pretend he took part in it with others and thus exculpate Tony Stock. The judges surmised that Stock or some (unknown) agents of his had contacted (unknown) members of the Thursday Gang in some (unknown) prison and gave them details of the robbery so that they could pretend to the police that he was not there. For this fantastic hypothesis the judges produced not a single shred of evidence.

Samuel Benefield was a heavy-duty gangster. When he turned supergrass, the media couldn’t get enough of the Chainsaw Gang’s alleged antics. ‘The gang led by a man they called the General, planned an armed, commando-style raid at Southampton to steal £3.5 million in foreign currency as it was being loaded onto the QE2 before a world cruise,’ ran one of many breathless reports.

One of the gang’s members was Jimmy Moody. A psychopathic hitman, he was employed as an enforcer for the infamous 1960s south London criminal outfit run by Charlie and Eddie Richardson, as well as working for the rival London gang operated by the Kray twins. Moody’s CV also included a stint as a freelance IRA hitman. The gangster was shot dead by an unknown assassin in a pub in Hackney in 1993.

And Tony Stock? At the time of the trial of Benefield and other Chainsaw Gang members, Stock was working as a sales representative, selling vending machines dispensing hot drinks in Stockton-on-Tees.

It made no sense for Samuel Benefield to admit to a crime that he did not commit – and for which a man had already done his time. Nor could a deal have been struck between the pair. Benefield was sentenced to five years because of his supergrass status. His former colleagues got over twenty years.

Supergrasses were separated from the rest of the prison population until trial. Any such deal would have to have been predicated on Benefield turning supergrass – not usually a turn of events criminals plan for.

If any of this occurred to the Court of Appeal, it didn’t seem to trouble them. There was another question that followed from their suggestion that Benefield lied about the Leeds robbery: where did it leave all those other convictions secured through his evidence?

‘We should add, in fairness, that we have seen no reason to believe that his evidence in the trials at which a number of juries convicted his associates is now open to question,’ said Lord Justice Judge.

Fairness had nothing to do with it. Judge made much of the apparent implausibility of Benefield’s description of the gang’s return, which, he said, comprised ‘a series of assumptions which make scant sense’.

His Lordship continued: ‘Setting our judgment of Benefield as a witness into the overall context of the remaining evidence on which we think it is proper to rely, we do not think this conviction was unsafe. Accordingly, this appeal is dismissed.’

This was all too much for Tony Stock. As Lord Justice Judge drew to a close, Stock shouted from his seat: ‘Rubbish!’ He stormed out of the courtroom, walking out of the Royal Courts of Justice and onto the Strand, leaving his wife and son James trailing behind him.

Tony Stock had succeeded in making a good life for himself after prison, but that, ironically, fell apart when Benefield made his confession. It was revealed that he was a convicted armed robber (albeit one identified as innocent in countless articles in the national and local media). His carpet stores, which relied on word of mouth in the Welsh Valleys, were dealt a fatal blow.‡ In 1979, Tony Stock had three carpet shops, but two years later he emigrated with his young family to South Africa. He was as good as bankrupt and left the country with a trail of debts behind him.

• • •

James Stock had been sitting at his father’s side in the Court of Appeal in 1996. He had only recently discovered that his father was a convicted armed robber and that he had half-brothers and half-sisters from his father’s first marriage. ‘My dad was pretty confident that he was going to be cleared,’ James told me. ‘He was just crushed, but he was down only for a few hours. It was amazing. That is something that I’m proud of my father for: his strength of character. Every time he was crushed he came back even more determined.’

Tony Stock crossed the Strand and walked into a pub. He had given up smoking, but bought himself a pack of cigarettes and lit up. ‘It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen him down,’ James recalled.

Before he finished his drink, Tony Stock decided to confront the other members of the Chainsaw Gang. He would persuade them to do the decent thing and tell the court that he had nothing to do with the Leeds robbery.

He downed his drink, jumped into a cab with his wife, Anne, and James and directed the driver to take them to the Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road in the East End. The pub is where Ronnie Kray shot and murdered George Cornell and, ever since, has occupied a special place in East End gangster folklore. If you wanted to find an East End gangster, then that seemed an obvious place to start looking.

A couple of hours after leaving the Royal Courts of Justice, Tony Stock found himself in the flat of Clive Bobrow, a former member of the Chainsaw Gang. James and his mother were left in the taxi outside.

According to James, Bobrow was not in good health. Bobrow had told Tony that he might be prepared to leave a signed statement to be released after his death. ‘That gave Dad enough of a glimmer of hope to carry on,’ James said, before adding: ‘That is when the case became an obsession.’

It was a bizarre end to a dismal day. What impression did it make on James, who was at this point studying for his A Levels? ‘It made me very cynical about the British justice system. I still am,’ he told me. ‘I used to get very upset whenever I talked about it to anybody. It would always make me very angry, make me cry. I have let it go now.’

• • •

It was not the first time that Tony Stock had been crushed by the justice system – and sadly it would not be the last. James was right to say the case became an obsession for his father. It overwhelmed Tony Stock’s life and cast a long shadow over the lives of his family and loved ones.

Following the Court of Appeal’s 1996 rejection, Stock thought about taking his own life. The despair passed. However, the raising and crushing of his hopes would eventually prove devastating.

His case would go to the Court of Appeal four times. There was also a visit to the European Court of Human Rights. I first interviewed Stock in 2008, ahead of his final visit to the Royal Courts of Justice. He then told me: ‘I would have been the first of the miscarriages of justice. Then there was a spate of cases: the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Four and the Cardiff Three. Each one was another nail in my coffin.’§

In the dispiriting litany of miscarriages of justice over the past forty years, there are many alleged crimes that are far more heinous than the 1970 Leeds robbery. No one died in Leeds.

But it was still a calamity, not just for Tony Stock, but also for his family. He lost contact for years with the four children of his first marriage and never managed to establish a proper relationship with them as a result. His heartbroken mother never recovered from the shock – and the case was to put a huge strain on his new family and, according to his brother, sent Stock to an early grave.

• • •

The year after Tony Stock stormed out of the Court of Appeal, the Criminal Cases Review Commission opened for business. The CCRC had unprecedented statutory powers, which allowed it to compel Yorkshire Police to release its report into the alleged perjury of Leeds detective John Mather and his police colleague. This was the top-secret report that Willie Whitelaw had cited when denying Stock a pardon.

West Yorkshire Police had accepted the truth of the supergrass, Samuel Benefield, the report revealed. Such was the detail provided by Benefield that it ‘inevitably casts doubt’ on the safety of the conviction. Specifically, the report’s authors had no problem with Benefield’s description of his gang’s return journey.

Unsurprisingly, Tony Stock’s lawyers had wanted to get hold of the report ahead of the 1996 appeal. They went to considerable effort to do so but the Crown Prosecution Service blocked them, arguing that the report’s release would damage the public interest. The lawyers challenged the CPS through the courts, only to be told by the Court of Appeal (before Lord Justice Taylor) that the report’s contents were ‘either not relevant or not worth fighting for’.

When the CCRC did open its doors in 1997, it was immediately overwhelmed. The Home Office deposited on the new body some 251 ‘old’ cases. ‘I don’t know if we can cope,’ its first chair, Sir Frederick Crawford, told journalists at its launch press conference. Amongst the first wave of new applications were the cases of Tony Stock and Eddie Gilfoyle.

In 2004, the CCRC sent the case of Tony Stock back to the Court of Appeal for the third time. Stock’s lawyers and the CCRC believed that they had found new evidence that completely undermined what remained of the original case: the identification.

The newly disclosed 1979 report revealed that the sole witness, Wilson, had been shown five photographs, and that it was highly probable that those photographs included a picture of the one suspect, Stock.

It was never suggested that the police were looking for anyone other than Tony Stock. What possible reason could there be for the police to show Wilson photographs? The significance of the showing of such a photo was not so much that it breached Home Office guidance – it did – but the fact that it raised questions about the integrity of the investigation. It was a revelation that blew away the last slender shred of credibility that the original investigation had possessed.

It might have seemed a narrow basis upon which to build an appeal in a case that had so dramatically unravelled. After all, someone had confessed to the robbery, and there was now no reason to think that he was not telling the truth.

But the CCRC correctly anticipated that the Court of Appeal would not allow them to replay old arguments about Samuel Benefield – despite the fact that it was the court’s own error that led to his testimony being rejected in the 1996 appeal.

The Court of Appeal did not hold back in its criticism of the upstarts at the CCRC for having the nerve to send a case back. It said: ‘We question the value of this exercise thirty years or more after the original trial and appeal, when there was no new material.’

Lord Justice May accepted that Lord Justice Judge’s court in 1996 failed to grasp Samuel Benefield’s account of the exit route. ‘There is little explanation of how the court in 1996 came to think as they did,’ he said.

The Court of Appeal does not do apologies.

Tony Stock’s guilt or innocence now hung on the narrow point about the five photographs. This became the focus of two appeals in 2004 and 2008.

In the first appeal, the court held that the photographs could feasibly have been shown prior to the police coming into possession of Stock’s photograph.

This was a misunderstanding of the CCRC’s submissions. In 2008, the watchdog sent the case straight back. In its statement of reasons, the CCRC respectfully pointed out that the appeal judges had now twice failed to get to grips with the case in 1996 and 2004. They wrote that ‘a number of matters were misunderstood’ in 1996, and that in 2004 ‘the appellant’s crucial submission was misunderstood’.

The CCRC confirmed that Detective Sergeant John Mather had indeed shown Wilson a selection of five photographs after they had shown him the Stock photo. This point was definitively clarified by the CCRC’s head of investigation, Ralph Barrington, who interviewed Wilson himself on the point in 2005.

What could possibly go wrong?

• • •

Back to the Court of Appeal they went. In 2008, Lord Justice Latham, rejecting the appeal, suggested that, if there was a photograph of Tony Stock which the witness saw but did not recognise as his attacker, that ‘seems to us to be capable of strengthening the reliability of his ultimate identification’ – insofar as he was not prepared to identify him from a photograph (‘which can often be an unrepresentative likeness’) but was able to identify him in person.

Another ‘difficulty’ for Stock, Latham suggested, was that he was making an argument ‘dependent upon an evaluation twenty-eight years after the statements in 1979 and 1980 were made, statements which themselves were made nine and ten years after the events in question’.

That was hardly Tony Stock’s fault.

This is how Lord Justice Latham closed the last judgment in the case of Tony Stock.

We accordingly dismiss this appeal. We do so recognising the tenacity with which this applicant has fought to overturn his conviction. It may be suggested in some way that this of itself should cause us to doubt the safety of the conviction. He has certainly persuaded the CCRC to expend considerable time and resources in support of this case. Whether or not the truth may be that he has been angered by the evidence of Detective Sergeant Mather, we will probably never know.

• • •

Ralph Barrington was a former head of Essex CID who went on to advise the Criminal Cases Review Commission as their first head of investigations. When I first spoke to Barrington in 2011, he was about to step down from the CCRC at the age of sixty-seven after thirteen years’ service.

He was furious at the Court of Appeal’s treatment of Tony Stock. Barrington has since devoted a fair amount of his retirement to reinvestigating the case and continues to do so. He has described the Court of Appeal’s logic in the 2008 judgment as ‘defying gravity’.

Barrington joined Essex Police in 1964, became a detective constable in 1967 and rose to the position of head of Essex CID in 1987 after having been promoted to the role of detective chief superintendent. A former commissioner credited his part in many of the commission’s early successes. He has called the Stock case ‘the most outrageous miscarriage I saw in my time at CCRC’. The outrage he felt towards the role of the Court of Appeal was widely shared at the CCRC.||

In 2011, when I met Tony Stock, he was a 73-year-old pensioner. He told me how he was spending his state pension on private investigators, looking for fresh evidence in a case that had first gone to court more than four decades ago.

He was living alone in a flat in Llandrindod Wells, Powys, having separated from his second wife. Some eleven months after I met him, his brother Alan was unable to contact Stock, and so he rang up his old friend Keith who lived nearby. When Stock didn’t come to the door, Keith rang the police. They broke down the door and discovered him fully clothed on his bed, dead.

His sister-in-law told me that when they cleared out his small flat they found two pictures on a wall. One was of the police officer who Stock believed had framed him. The other was a cartoon. Two mice fell into a bowl of cream. The first one gave up and drowned, the second one fought and swam so hard that it turned the cream into butter and then walked out. Stock had written underneath the second mouse: ‘That’s me’.

• • •

The hopes of many – including the families of Tony Stock, Danny Major, Omar Benguit and Eddie Gilfoyle – reside in the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).

The CCRC celebrated its twentieth anniversary on 31 March 2017. Shortly after this date, a new application from Tony Stock’s family was submitted to the watchdog. If the case is referred to the Court of Appeal, then it will be an unprecedented third referral. If not, it will inevitably raise questions about the point of a watchdog that refrains from referring a case back that is widely acknowledged to be (to quote its former head of investigations Ralph Barrington) ‘a self-evident miscarriage of justice’.

At the time of writing, Danny Major’s conviction has still not been overturned. The report by Greater Manchester Police (Operation Lamp) identifying the case as a likely miscarriage of justice came out at the end of the 2015. It was immediately referred to the CCRC.

The CCRC examined the Danny Major case but decided not to refer it back to the Court of Appeal. The commission has powers to instruct a body independent of the police force to examine the case. It declined to do so. It was the persistence of Danny Major and his parents, Eric and Bernadette, that persuaded West Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner to commission the review. Operation Lamp raises an obvious serious question about the competence of the CCRC’s work.**

As for Eddie Gilfoyle, it appears that the campaign to clear his name has hit another brick wall. In July 2016, the CCRC rejected the latest application, and the following year the High Court rejected the family’s attempt to challenge the decision.

Omar Benguit’s family expects an application to go back to the CCRC shortly.

• • •

The underfunded and understaffed organisation is the only route back to the courts for the victims of miscarriages of justice. In the bad old days before the Runciman Commission, a shadowy and discredited Home Office department known as C3 dealt with wrongful convictions – or, more accurately, failed to deal with them.

In 2016, the miscarriage of justice watchdog referred just twelve cases back to the Court of Appeal. The CCRC presently receives about 1,500 cases a year, mainly from prisoners claiming their innocence. That represents a referral rate of just 0.77 per cent, which marks a dramatic and unexplained fall from an already pretty meagre average of 3 per cent. In its last year, C3 received about 900 applications – it managed to refer nine cases to the Court of Appeal.

At the commission’s twentieth-anniversary conference, its chair Richard Foster said that, so far, the group had referred 634 cases. ‘Put another way, over the last twenty years we have referred on average two or three cases a month,’ he said. ‘About two-thirds of our referrals result in convictions being quashed or sentences changed. To date, 419 people have had their appeals allowed as a result of commission referrals.’††

It was Tom Sargant who made the case for reform of the criminal justice system most forcefully. ‘The present system for investigating possible miscarriages of justice is wholly inadequate,’ JUSTICE said in 1989, the same year the Guildford Four were released.

Tom Sargant wanted a different model than the one proposed by the Runciman Commission. Sargant’s commission would have been a ‘determinative’ body that would consider alleged miscarriages of justice independently of the courts. In other words, the cases would be taken out of the courts’ hands.

Only cases with a ‘real possibility’ of being overturned can now be referred to the Court of Appeal. David Jessel, who presented the Trial and Error episode on Eddie Gilfoyle and went on to become a CCRC commissioner, called the ‘real possibility’ test the commission’s ‘baptismal curse’. The commission’s critics argue that the watchdog was born into a subordinate relationship that forces it to ‘second guess’ appeal judges. In other words, the CCRC takes the pragmatic view that there is no point in referring cases back to the Court of Appeal if the court is just going to kick them into touch.

The CCRC will deny to the hilt that it has embodied the court’s inbuilt conservatism but, when the number of referrals is only just into double figures, the statistics speak for themselves.

Another revealing statistic is that, in its twenty years, the CRCC has only referred two cases back to the Court of Appeal for a second time. One of those two cases was Tony Stock’s. So will it send ‘a self-evident miscarriage of justice’ (to use Ralph Barrington’s phrase) back to the Court of Appeal for a third time? And what does it say about our justice system if it doesn’t?

Tom Sargant’s analysis of the Court of Appeal’s failings was scathing. He began writing his autobiography but never finished it. Towards the end of the unfinished manuscript, he listed the court’s ‘self-imposed fetters’ – for example, its ‘unreasoning respect’ for jury verdicts and its ‘unwillingness to let down the police’. He acknowledged that some might think he had painted ‘an unnecessarily black picture of the court’s unwillingness to remedy miscarriages’. However, he concluded that the fetters were ‘a necessary protective wall built by the judges against the flood that otherwise might overwhelm them; and, in part, inspired by the need to preserve public confidence in the jury system’.

The man himself gave a brilliant and uncompromising farewell interview to The Observer in 1982. ‘I have had absolute cooperation from judges and lawyers. Many of whom are my friends,’ he said. ‘Although some of them hate my guts, and think I’m a damn nuisance. They don’t believe juries make mistakes. I take a more jaundiced view. I take all the casualties.’

• • •

Over the past two decades the Criminal Cases Review Commission has often been criticised, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. But the problems anticipated by Tom Sargant’s JUSTICE, as well as concerns about independence, chronic underfunding and its statutory straitjacket have dogged the CCRC since the day it opened its doors.

Some might take heart from the small number of cases going back to the Court of Appeal, and cite that as positive evidence of the justice system’s effectiveness.

As reassuring as that might appear to be, it would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. Instead, it is a reflection of the sustained impoverishment of the criminal justice system. It is telling that the CCRC, the justice system’s safety net, has suffered more under austerity than any other part of the system it is meant to safeguard.

In 2015, the MPs on the House of Commons justice committee launched an inquiry into the CCRC. The MPs offered a lukewarm verdict, concluding that the CCRC was performing its functions ‘reasonably well’. That rather ambivalent endorsement did not reflect the concerns of practitioners and campaigners with first-hand experience of the body, who had appeared before the MPs to give evidence.

For years, critics have called upon the CCRC to abandon its adherence to a 70 per cent success rate (i.e. the proportion of referrals being overturned) to better reflect the ‘real possibility’ test – that call was echoed by the MPs. They urged the watchdog to be ‘less cautious’ and refer more cases back to the Court of Appeal. ‘If a bolder approach leads to five more failed appeals but one additional miscarriage being corrected, then that is of clear benefit,’ they said.

As it comes of age, the CCRC appears to be becoming increasingly timid.

The committee’s inquiry revealed the extent of funding problems. The CCRC chair, Richard Foster, told MPs that for every £10 that the group had to spend on a case a decade ago, he now had only £4. This, Foster said, amounted to ‘the biggest cut that has taken place anywhere in the criminal justice system’.

That funding crisis has been brewing for years. I interviewed Foster’s predecessor, Professor Graham Zellick, who spoke of staff who were ‘angry’ and ‘dispirited’ as a result of the funding crisis. ‘If you compare our £8 million budget with the amount of money spent on the other side by the police and Crown Prosecution Service, it is not even a crumb off the table,’ he told me.‡‡

While the justice committee’s remit was the CCRC, many of those who gave evidence expressed their frustration at the Court of Appeal. A submission from Cardiff University, backed by eighteen academics at other universities, urged MPs to take a look at the Tony Stock case. It quoted Stock’s solicitor, Glyn Maddocks, who claimed the case illustrated a problem at the heart of the justice system – ‘that is the Court of Appeal’s lack of willingness to engage with (or even recognise) the problem and its often intransigent, often arrogant and, dare I say, obdurate view that it knows best and is constrained by its own previous decisions, however wrong they may have been’.

That view was summed up by the veteran campaigner Paul May.§§ ‘Much of the criticism levelled at the CCRC would in my view be better directed at the Court of Appeal, which remains capable on occasions of quite breathtaking obduracy towards appellants claiming wrongful conviction.’

Professor Michael Zander QC, emeritus professor at the LSE, was on the original royal commission that led to the CCRC’s establishment. He explained to MPs that the problem dated back to the creation of the court. ‘The Court of Appeal is the crucial issue,’ Professor Zander said. ‘It is hopeless, completely hopeless. They won’t budge from their position which they have taken and held for more than one hundred years.’

The MPs seemed to take the point. Their final report called on the Law Commission to review the Court of Appeal’s grounds for allowing appeals, as well as to look specifically at whether there needs to be a change in the law to ‘allow and encourage’ the court to quash a conviction where it has a serious doubt about the verdict even without fresh evidence.

However, the then Lord Chancellor Michael Gove rejected the proposal. The MPs took evidence from a dozen experts and received some forty-seven written submissions, but Gove rejected their work on the basis of an assurance from the organisation that was being criticised (and authored by Tony Stock’s old adversary). ‘We note the views expressed by the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, and we do not believe that there is sufficient evidence that the Court of Appeal’s current approach has a deleterious effect on those who have suffered miscarriages of justice,’ Gove wrote.

• • •

At the end of 2017, the High Court killed off what might be Eddie Gilfoyle’s last chance to clear his name. His lawyers had been challenging a decision by the CCRC in 2016 to reject the case through the courts. They had judicially reviewed the decision in a procedure that allows a court to review the lawfulness of a decision.

The High Court considered three arguments made by Gilfoyle’s lawyers. At the heart of the prosecution case at the original trial was the notion that ‘bubbly’ Paula Gilfoyle had no history of depression. Merseyside Police has had Paula’s diaries since at least 1994, and the CCRC since 1998. But they were not made available to the Gilfoyle family until 2010. Gilfoyle’s lawyers argued that Paula had been subjected to ‘appalling mental trauma’ as a result of a formative relationship with the convicted murderer and rapist Mark Roberts. When the CCRC rejected the family’s application in 2017, they dismissed the diaries as not revealing ‘anything more than normal adolescent experiences’.

The second line of argument related to Eddie Gilfoyle’s decision not to give evidence at his own trial. His lawyers argued that he was incapable of doing so because he was suffering from an anxiety disorder as a result of being denied medication during his trial. Gilfoyle’s solicitor Matt Foot had obtained prison prescription charts indicating that Gilfoyle’s medication had been withheld and, it was argued by Eddie’s legal team, that withdrawal symptoms had compromised his ability to testify.

Finally, there were the arguments by Gilfoyle’s legal team about the knot in the rope on the beam from which Paula was found hanging unaided. In the appeal in the Gilfoyle case in 2000, the court maintained that it would have been ‘impossible for [Paula] to tie the knot where it was found’.

In the same way that the appeal judges had whittled away the Tony Stock case to a single argument (the five photographs) on which the entire case rested, they reduced the Gilfoyle case to a single detail: the tying of the knot in the rope.

Gilfoyle’s lawyers argued that the CCRC had failed to understand their contention that it would have been possible for Paula to have tied the knot in the rope on the beam from which she was found hanging unaided.

In an analysis of the Court of Appeal’s treatment of the Tony Stock case, a former CCRC commissioner, Laurie Elks, complained of the court’s ‘atomistic’ approach to these cases. The judges considered any fresh evidence only on the basis of whether it alone would provide sufficient justification to render the conviction unsafe.

‘It has been Mr Stock’s misfortune that the case against him has unravelled by degrees,’ wrote Elks. Using the analogy of an onion, the former CCRC commissioner observed that at each sitting the court weighed up ‘the onion peelings’ (i.e., the new evidence) and in effect ‘snorted: “That’s not much compared with the towering weight of the verdict of the jury who were certain of Mr Stock’s guilt.”’

Elks argued that, instead, the court should have adopted ‘a holistic approach’. The correct question would be: ‘Are we in doubt, looking at the case in its entirety, whether Mr Stock was rightly convicted?’ According to Laurie Elks, if they had asked that question, the court would have had to overturn the conviction.

In the Eddie Gilfoyle case, the Court of Appeal had reduced the entire case down to a question of whether his wife Paula could have tied the knot. In their latest application to the CCRC, Gilfoyle’s lawyers attacked that point. In October 2014, the CCRC commissioned Trial and Error’s knot expert to answer two questions: first, whether it would have been possible for Paula to have tied the knot under the beam; and second, whether, as a result of the force of a suspended body, the knot might have travelled upwards to the position in which police officers discovered it. The CCRC admitted that this was possible, but concluded it was unlikely.

Of course, the original rope, knot and all, had been thrown away at the post-mortem. How the knot was tied was based upon the recollection of the coroner’s officer, who blithely assumed that Paula had taken her own life. Merseyside Police suggested that the same officer’s judgement was questionable as a result of a migraine that meant he missed the post-mortem.

Matt Foot described the CCRC’s approach to the rope as ‘marbled through with incomprehension or illogical reasoning’.

• • •

Just before Christmas 2017, I visited Eddie Gilfoyle, his sister Sue Caddick and his brother-in-law Paul Caddick. The family’s fury was aimed at the miscarriage of justice watchdog that had considered Eddie’s application for six years before rejecting it. ‘It’s not independent,’ said Gilfoyle. ‘They are the same as the Court of Appeal. They have become the Court of Appeal. They are so scared of the Court of Appeal they might as well be the Court of Appeal.’

According to the family’s lawyer, the CCRC is ‘moribund, office-bound and file-based’. ‘In Eddie’s case, they haven’t seen a single witness,’ said Matt Foot. ‘They haven’t spoken to Eddie and they haven’t been to the garage. They haven’t been to the area. They aren’t fit for purpose. They should be reformed or removed.’

The family believes that their progress has been blocked, not because of a lack of evidence, but because the CCRC simply won’t stand up to the Court of Appeal. The group has become mired in its settled thinking that refuses to refer cases that have previously been refused by the Court of Appeal, argued Foot. ‘We have to conclude there is no hope – no hope of establishing the truth for an innocent, wronged man and no hope of having a courageous, serious organisation capable of righting terrible historic wrongs.’

Unsurprisingly, the CCRC does not accept Foot’s analysis (‘not generally and not in relation to Mr Gilfoyle’s case’). A spokesman pointed out that the watchdog visited No. 6 Grafton Drive and interviewed Gilfoyle for the first review, when the case was referred and, on its second, ‘visited the area’ and ‘carried out a number of inquiries there’. He added that it was ‘fatuous’ to suggest that investigations always needed ‘a boots on the ground approach’ and that anything else was ‘lazy or second best’.

‘We have reviewed the case again in enormous detail,’ the spokesman said. ‘In order to refer it again for appeal we will need to find some compelling new grounds that have not been before the court in either of the earlier appeals. Thus far at least, we have just not seen that.’

As years pass, myths harden into facts – at least, that’s how they are represented. For example, Paula Gilfoyle’s death turned from a suicide into a murder investigation because three women went to the police with a bizarre story that Eddie Gilfoyle had got his wife to write fake suicide notes as part of a course at work.

How could three people (the three hearsay witnesses) tell the same bizarre story? It appears that those statements were never made independently of each other. Detective Superintendent Graham Gooch from Lancashire Police interviewed one of the three women, who admitted that her recollection had been prompted by her friend. That second woman, in her original police statement, denied any such collusion.

The Gooch investigation established that the third of the three ‘hearsay’ women had attended Paula’s sister’s house, Margaret Glover, at a gathering to (as Glover put it) ‘clear Paula’s name’. That was confirmed by an interview with another witness who attended. The name of the third of the three ‘hearsay’ women did not appear in Glover’s statement.

In the wake of Paula’s death, rumours were flying in every direction. All her friends, most of whom worked together and gossiped together on the assembly line at the Champion Spark Plugs factory, were devastated.

Into this febrile atmosphere, Eddie’s father, Norman Gilfoyle, had told everyone that Paula had taken her own life because she was having an affair. The baby was not Eddie’s, he said, and she had not been able to live with the guilt. That shocked and upset Paula’s grieving friends. That is also the narrative as described in the police statements of the three hearsay witness. It is not the same story that the suicide notes tell.

Then there is the mystery of the keys. The prosecution argued that Eddie had removed Paula’s garage key to prevent her from going into the garage and discovering the noose he had rigged up. That explained why Paul Caddick could not open the garage door, because the key had been removed from the bunch. That was also the reason why there were two identical Yale keys under the doormat.

Caddick insists that there never was a mystery. There was no missing key. He just couldn’t open the garage door. He put in the correct key, the lock jammed and he asked Eddie for a spare. The two keys beneath the doormat were not identical. One was the spare garage door key and the other was a front door key. ‘Of course, we can’t prove it because the police never recorded it,’ Caddick says.

There are also the three witnesses who put Eddie Gilfoyle back at No. 6 at about 5.30 p.m. It was never argued that Gilfoyle murdered Paula later in the day. It was suggested that this showed that Gilfoyle had lied and that he might have returned to the scene of his earlier crime. One of the three witnesses, the man, actively disliked Gilfoyle, rendering his evidence unreliable and his account was not checked out properly by the police. Another witness was a woman from Paula’s courier company who came to deliver a parcel and claimed Eddie signed for it. Gilfoyle says that never happened and that she was mistaken. The paperwork did not prove it one way or another. The third witness was the neighbour who saw him leave noisily in his car. Gilfoyle argues that she is just wrong.

Finally, why would Merseyside Police go to such lengths to put the blame on Eddie Gilfoyle for the death of his wife? The family argues that its motivation comes from a desire to cover up a local practice on the Wirral, where the police control room were required to inform the coroner’s officer about all deaths, including suicides. This, they say, was a disaster waiting to happen.

‘What they couldn’t afford to happen was for this case to go to the coroner’s court,’ Caddick told me. The purpose of an inquest is to find out how a person died. ‘The first thing that they would ask is where is the police evidence, and, of course, all of that was destroyed,’ he said. ‘So they wanted to drive this case to trial. It was better for them to get a conviction. They wanted Eddie to be found guilty because that would exonerate them all. Nobody would care. Everybody would be fireproof.’

• • •

The devastation wrought upon the wrongly convicted is not just felt by that individual. The shockwaves spread wide. When Tony Stock was in HMP Gartree, he left his first wife, Brenda, and their four children to cope as best they could.

Ralph Barrington and I met with three of the children from Tony’s first marriage for the first time ahead of an event in the House of Commons in October 2014. When Tony Stock was sent down, Anthony was just two weeks old, his brother Stephen was two years old, Antoinette (known as Twinnie) was six and Charlene was nine.

Stock’s children from his first marriage didn’t know much about their father and almost nothing about the strange fate that had befallen him. It was odd to be the one to tell them about it. ‘We all knew Dad didn’t do it but what happened to him broke up our family anyway. My mum was left singlehandedly to bring up the four of us,’ Steve Stock told us.

‘I didn’t really know my dad,’ he said. ‘Life was hard for us growing up. Even now, just the other day, somebody came up to me and said: “You’re the bank robber’s son, I remember you.”’

Twinnie had a vague recollection of her father’s birthday party, which had taken place at the time he was supposed to have been committing an armed robbery in Leeds. When I asked how she felt about a book about her father’s story, she told me she thought it was a great idea. She said that she really wanted to know that he didn’t do it. ‘But you know your dad didn’t do it. You were there,’ I pointed out.

When I recounted that exchange to her later, she was embarrassed. She wanted to clarify what she meant:

Even though I have memories of the day – singing happy birthday and celebrating – I was only five years old. It is a blurred memory. People are cruel. Even though you tell them he didn’t do it, you would hear the cynical remarks: ‘They all say that.’ It begins to chip away at you; it’s years of people disbelieving you that wears you down. My father must have been a very strong character to continue his fight till he died.

When I last spoke to Tony’s children it was two years after their father died. ‘We feel we can’t scatter his ashes till he has justice,’ Anthony told me. ‘My mum was left to look after us all,’ Steve said, ‘but life didn’t move on for Dad. He never stopped trying to clear his name. Why should he? He was innocent.’

* ‘Verballing’ was the practice of falsely putting damaging remarks into the mouths of suspects during police interrogations. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 introduced the tape recorder into police interviews to stamp out the practice.

† Lord Judge, who went on to become Lord Chief Justice, had considerable experience when it came to miscarriages of justice. As Igor Judge QC, he was prosecuting counsel on the Carl Bridgewater case in 1979 and appeared again for the Crown at the Birmingham Six’s second unsuccessful appeal in 1987.

‡ Ironically, this was largely as a result of ITV broadcasting its World in Action special on the Tony Stock case in July 1980. This was one of the first investigations into a miscarriage of justice case broadcast on TV. The BBC launched its pioneering Rough Justice series two years later.

§ Michael Mansfield acted in each of those cases, as well as for Tony Stock.

‘Later this year, legal history will be made when a man convicted thirty-eight years ago of a robbery in Leeds gets a record fourth chance in the Court of Appeal to clear his name,’ began another article by Paul Foot in Private Eye. ‘But when the case of Tony Stock – first reported in the Eye twelve years ago – finally comes before m’learned friends, it will be the judges in the public spotlight. Can they finally admit their colleagues have previously got it wrong, not once but three times?’

|| I wrote a book about the case: The First Miscarriage of Justice: The Unreported and Amazing Case of Tony Stock (Hampshire: Waterside Press, 2014). It was written with the support of Ralph Barrington and Tony’s lawyer, Glyn Maddocks, who has championed his case for more than twenty years.

** In May 2014, BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 asked the CCRC’s chair, Richard Foster, why the body had not commissioned a police force to investigate the case. ‘I stand by that judgement and if that investigation turns up anything new and it’s put to us, we would of course look at it,’ Foster said.

†† The media was not invited to the CCRC’s twentieth-anniversary conference, despite the fact that journalists played a significant part in making the case for its establishment. My own request was refused. The issue was raised by one of the few journalists present, David Rose, who was invited because he had previously chaired a CCRC conference.

‡‡ ‘Proving the Innocent Not Guilty: The CCRC is under fire’, The Times, 21 January 2010.

§§ Paul May has run numerous campaigns on behalf of the victims of miscarriages of justice, from the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward and the Bridgewater Four through to Sam Hallam, Eddie Gilfoyle and Colin Norris.