Kill zone

Mahmood Mattan, a British Somali and former seaman, was hanged in 1952 after he was convicted of killing shopkeeper Lily Volpert in her store in Cardiff, but his conviction was quashed at the Court of Appeal in 1998.

South Wales Police (SWP) have since apologised and admitted that the prosecution was “flawed”. “There is no doubt that Mahmood Mattan was the victim of a miscarriage of justice as a result of a flawed prosecution, of which policing was clearly a part”, said Chief Constable (CC), Jeremy Vaughan.

But this is not the only disturbing case with Wales at its heart. New information has come to light about Reg ‘John’ Christie. Two of the murders which he committed, but for which Timothy Evans (who was born near Merthyr Tydfil) was hanged in 1950, are covered in the book about this ghastly episode – The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place’ by Kate Summerscale.

Mr Evans was an inveterate liar (as well as being violent), making it difficult for his defence team, and he was hanged in March 1950 for the murders of his wife Beryl and baby daughter Geraldine. But in January 2003, the Home Office (HO) awarded his half-sister, Mary Westlake, and his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex gratia payments as compensation for this miscarriage of justice.

An independent legal assessor for the HO accepted that “the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his child was wrongful and a miscarriage of justice” and that “there is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife. She was most probably murdered by Christie”.

Perhaps endorsing the awfulness of the situation here, as well as now in America, is the information emerging where there have been terrible miscarriages of justice, but those convicted could not have been released from jail had the death penalty still have been on the statute books in the UK.

The Cardiff Three/Five case is one of the most high-profile, and worrying, in the UK. Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi, and Stephen Miller were falsely found guilty in 1990 of the murder of Lynette White, and spent more than two years serving prison sentences having endured the same time on remand, while cousins John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted after being in custody since their arrests. Inaccurate eyewitness statements, coerced confessions, and more were used in the police ‘investigation’. However on appeal in 1992 the taped interviews with Mr Miller, who had a mental age of 11, were deemed an example of inappropriate interrogation for reference in future cases, such was their intimidating and coercive nature.

Three BLACK men had been convicted of the murder (although FIVE, including the Acties, were put on trial), when one WHITE man (Jeffrey Gafoor) was finally caught years later through DNA analysis (there had been major advances). He confessed to carrying out the appalling 1988 murder, and even apologised, through his barrister, to the others who had been incorrectly jailed.

The five innocent men, were arrested in December 1988 after detectives had been on the case for 10 months, and were pursuing a suspect seen nearby (who looked EXACTLY like Gafoor), minutes following the murder. But when SWP changed the investigating team, and pressure mounted to make an arrest, attention turned to locals. Despite no forensic evidence connecting the five to Ms White’s murder they were taken in.

There are now growing demands for a full legal investigation into the number of high-profile miscarriages in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. Apart from The Cardiff Three (Five), they include: The Cardiff Newsagent Three, The Darvell Brothers, Jonathan Jones (The Tooze Murders), as well as Annette Hewins (The Gurnos Fire Case).

Of these, I was particularly involved in The Cardiff Newsagent Three case. In an episode of the BBC Cymru Wales Current Affairs programme Week In, Week Out (WIWO) called ‘A Night To Remember’, we showed how a supposed ‘confession’ by one of the innocent men, Darren Hall, was a complete nonsense and the events he described could NEVER have happened.

Not only had Mr Hall told the court that he had murdered Cardiff newsagent Phillip Saunders, but he said that the other two innocent men (Mike O’Brien and Ellis Sherwood) were involved as well!

However he had said that they had RUN from the scene after dividing up the spoils, yet we secured medical records that showed Mr Hall’s legs were bad so he could not have run at all.

Stressing the notion that he was mentally all over the place, I interviewed him in jail (for which permission is rarely granted now), and he said neither he nor the other two were murderers, but that he had been “chained to a hot radiator”.

This last bit may or may not have been the truth, but it does have echoes of Mr Evans saying he feared the police might start “knocking me about” if he didn’t sign a statement. We asked a psychiatrist to look into it, and she told us about the illness Mr Hall was suffering from.

All of this took a great deal of time, and was extremely hard, although it was worth doing because it meant that three innocent men could be released from their prison cells, but wouldn’t have happened, of course, if there had still been hanging then. This is, perhaps, the strongest argument against capital punishment – sometimes it is the WRONG person.

It seems that the whimpering Pike who is now fighting for her life after a botched execution, was the RIGHT person. But her lawyers had already warned the authorities that her conditions, including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins meant there was a risk she would experience “unnecessary” pain and suffering during a lethal injection. In the latest legal filings, they allege that “at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body”.

Surely this is a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ as the constitution in the USA prohibits?