The next day I went in search of an internet café, a dying breed in the era of smartphones and free WIFI. There was one on a side street not far from the train station, the hotel receptionist told me. I walked a long and twisting route to get there, checking behind myself frequently. I didn’t really know who I was looking for, or what. If I’d learned anything it was that evil didn’t come trailing obvious menace. Kind smiles could hide a lot.
In the café, I took out my notebook and worked my way through the list I’d made, with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t a long list, and it didn’t take much time. I felt like John Webster, prowling the internet, paying for information when I couldn’t find it any other way. It was surprisingly straightforward to track people. There were companies who made a fortune from gathering up personal information and sharing it, packaging us neatly as consumers with measurable value. For curiosity, I searched for my own name, and found every address I’d lived at in the last five years filling the screen. I sat back in dismay. Given that I was someone who had learned the hard way to be cautious about my security, I was far too easy to find.
Like Webster before me, I couldn’t find any trace of Ben Sampson that matched what I knew about him, but I found two of the other people I wanted to locate. Lisa Muller’s name prompted a thousand suggestions that were not her. But when I searched my own name and Lisa Muller’s name together, I got a very different result. The search engine gave me a website – Justice Is Blind UK – and an abstract quote from the relevant material.
… there can be no doubt that the other barrister Ingrid Lewis also has blood on her hands for how she handled her part in Lisa Muller’s trial, with ruthless disregard for … amounts to professional misconduct although we know that never gets …
I closed my eyes as a wave of dizziness swept over me. It was like overhearing someone criticising you, except on a global scale. Anyone in the world could click the link and find out about my alleged professional misconduct, and I had no right to reply or defend myself.
The Justice Is Blind UK website loaded quickly, probably because it had been designed with minimal attention to how it looked. A glaring yellow banner topped the page, promising ‘Attention for Every Miscarriage of Justice Until Our Voices Are Heard’. The rest of the page was a forum, the landing page for the discussion about Lisa Muller’s case.
Welcome guest, please log in or register.
You may browse the forums without logging in but you may not post material. Please see FAQs for more.
Media reports provided on this forum are provided for information only Anything posted on this forum is the responsibility of the individual member
Endorsement of such material is neither intended nor implied.
Posters are asked to keep to thread topics Libellous or defamatory material will be removed immediately Abuse will not be tolerated
Listen to the moderators and read the rules!
Justice Is Blind UK forum >> Alleged Miscarriages of Justice >> Guy Lanesbury, Lisa Muller and a Sex Crime that Went Unpunished
|
Subject/Started by |
Replies/Views |
Last Post |
|
Guy Lanesbury, Lisa Muller: An Overview of the Case Started by Durbs <<1 2>> |
48 replies 209 views |
March 03, 2019, 03:08:41 AM by IAmTheLaw |
|
Prejudice in Court: Judge Ron Canterville and his history of bias Started by Durbs <<1 2 3>> |
121 replies 1409 views |
September 30, 2019, 22:42:39 PM by Durbs |
|
Evidence against Guy Lanesbury Started by Durbs <<1 2 … 6>> |
98 replies 249 views |
January 14, 2019, 08:31:06 AM by Durbs |
|
Lisa Muller and what happened next Started by Durbs <<1 2 … 4>> |
66 replies 340 views |
February 22, 2019, 13:48:12 by Felicity Brumhill |
|
Lies, Bullying and Misconduct: the Defence of Guy Lanesbury Started by Durbs <<1 2 3>> |
51 replies 218 views |
January 14, 2019, 08:31:06 AM by Justice Moderator |
I hopped back a page to discover that this was not one of the more popular subject threads on the forum. Big, notorious cases such as Jeremy Bamber’s campaign for release attracted tens of thousands of posts and views. I went back to the Guy Lanesbury thread and started clicking through the sub-threads, skim-reading the first and last posts in most cases. The user ‘Durbs’ was the main poster, replying to themselves frequently to keep the conversation going. The forum was organised so that updated threads appeared on page one – if you wanted to attract attention from casual browsers, you needed to keep adding material.
Durbs clearly had close knowledge of the case and the individuals involved in it. I read through the posts with a feeling of foreboding that sharpened to actual fear. It was a powerful collection of accusations: that the witnesses had been intimidated and harangued, that key evidence had been ruled inadmissible by a biased judge, that the lawyers had laughed and joked among themselves even though they were on opposite sides, that Lisa had no lawyer to represent her … on and on it went, a cloud of doubt and anger that was shocking – appalling, even, if you didn’t understand how the criminal justice system worked. Lisa hadn’t had a lawyer because the case was the Crown’s prosecution. She was the alleged victim, but that made her a witness. She hadn’t needed legal representation because she wasn’t on trial.
But at times, she had effectively been on trial. She had been held up and examined, judged for her past behaviour, filleted for dishonesty and thrown away once she had no further use for the prosecution or the defence.
Most of the responses were from random users commenting to say they had had no idea how the system worked, and that it was very unfair, and that their hearts broke for Lisa and everyone who knew her. Trigger warnings abounded before people shared their own stories of unsympathetic police, brutal charging decisions and trials that had left them with PTSD. For those who hadn’t gone the legal route there was a litany of trauma too: schools or colleges that had taken the side of the accused rather than the accuser and led to interrupted education, or pressure from HR to drop suggestions of sexual harassment in the workplace. Job opportunities failed to materialise. References were tepid in their enthusiasm. Lives took different paths, while the alleged perpetrators sailed on to their destiny, unharmed. There was nothing to be done except bear witness. Something was fundamentally wrong in society, an imbalance of power so familiar that it was almost invisible. I felt outraged too, and I was part of the machinery that was chewing these women up instead of helping them. Adele was right: the law didn’t cover everything. Right and wrong weren’t just legal terms, subject to legal decisions. There were grey areas all over the place.
The sub-thread about Judge Canterville was popular with users who had their own stories to tell about him. It ended, to my shock, with a link to a brief obituary of him. Durbs had added a comment:
One down ha ha
No one had replied. Maybe that was too dark even for the users of Justice Is Blind UK.
In the thread about the defence, I found Belinda being eviscerated for internalised misogyny, anorexia and class privilege. Hugh Hardwick was there too, with a few choice quotes from the proceedings in his divorces. I found the discussion where I was mentioned, a series of posts that described in searing, furious detail how I had cross-examined one of Lisa’s friends. My demeanour was at fault (‘smirking, smug, playing to the jury, arrogant’) and my appearance (‘cheap mascara and bottle blonde highlights’) and the way I spoke (‘posh, snooty bitch’) and what I had said. In among the torrent of posts from Durbs was one from User4102, who simply replied:
Not surprised at all knowing what I know
Durbs had replied with a smiley face and
Check your DMs
So the discussion had continued, out of sight. I wished I knew what they had said to one another.
User4102 hadn’t posted anything else on the forum, and a search for the name across the internet brought me nothing but pages of junk. A throwaway username to raise a flag: I am here and I feel as you do. A connection had been made. Interested, I started to look at the dynamics of the discussion – the replies from other users. A long account of Lisa Muller’s life before and after the trial ended with a comment from a user who hadn’t tried to disguise her identity – Felicity Brumhill.
I found this forum by accident and I’ve been reading it for hours. I am really shocked by what I’ve read here. I was a friend of Lisa’s in school and I’m horrified by what happened to her but I’m also horrified that you’re sharing it like this! Doesn’t her family deserve some privacy? It’s their tragedy. You seem to mean well but I think you should take it down.
Durbs hadn’t replied. The forum had stayed up, but they hadn’t posted again in the thread about Lisa. An attack of conscience, maybe.
There was one other post that caught my attention, an old one from a user named IAmTheLaw. It was short and to the point.
Meet me in the other place
What was the other place, I wondered, and why had this person wanted to meet Durbs there? It was frustrating, only hearing part of the conversation. IAmTheLaw had posted in some other parts of the forum, I discovered, clicking through to their history. It amounted to twenty or thirty posts, most of them brief, many with links to other websites where photographs or legal documents were available to look at. The posts were made over three or four years; this wasn’t an obsessive, like Durbs. This was something else.
This was someone with a plan.
Luckily, I had one too.