LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
Carol
Anne Davis
If
the truth is out there, it isn't always reflected in the news. Just look at
the way the media has treated the learning-disabled Stephen Downing and the
journalist who fought tirelessly to free him, Don
Hale.
I interviewed Don Hale for my true crime book Children
Who Kill as Stephen Downing features in the Children Who Are Wrongly Convicted
section. He'd been sent to prison at the age of seventeen, having 'confessed'
to the crime (as many vulnerable people do) after nine hours of relentless interrogation.
Within hours he withdrew this confession but he spent the next 27 years in jail
until Don Hale helped secure his release.
At the time of Stephen's release, Don was – rightly – the hero of the hour.
He received numerous journalistic awards and was made Man Of The Year and Journalist
Of The Year, later receiving an OBE for his endeavours. Stephen was also praised
by the press. After all, he'd refused to 'repent' in prison, telling
the authorities again and again that he didn't do it. In turn, they said that
he was In Denial Of Murder and punished him further by refusing him various
courses. He was also raped and scalded by other inmates but still refused to
say that he was guilty, words that would have secured his release. Instead he
served ten years more than the average murder sentence – and told everyone that
he'd rather die in prison than confess to a homicide that he did not commit.
But at last justice prevailed and in 2001 Stephen was freed. Unsurprisingly,
he remained a man with problems. After all, he'd gone to prison in 1973 as a
teenager with a reading age of eleven, yet was now expected to face the world
as a mature forty four year old man. He immediately began to train as a chef
but soon decided that he'd rather be a security guard. Those closest to him
speculated that wearing the uniform made him feel like one of the prison wardens
who had played such a central role in his life.
Towards the end of his sentence, a woman who claimed she could speak to the
dead also played a defining role in his life. On his release, he asked her to
marry him. They soon split up but he was desperate to get her back. Later, he
alleges, she phoned him to say that she was depressed and that the voices of
the dead told her that he had killed Wendy Sewell. They talked at length and
eventually he said: 'OK, Christine, if it makes you happy, I killed Wendy
Sewell. Good night.'
The ex-girlfriend had tape-recorded their conversation and went to the press.
She said that he'd told her 'Well, it was me. It was supposed to be an accident,
I didn't mean to kill her.'
Terrified of what this vulnerable man would say next, his lawyers advised him
not to speak to the police who had re-opened the investigation some months previously.
He has since repeated to TV cameras what he has been saying since 1973, that
he did not kill Wendy Sewell but the media continue to hint that – after spending
twenty eight years in jail - he 'got away with it'.
A similar injustice was meted out to Colin Stagg when he was the victim of a
police honeytrap. The judge looked at the complete lack of evidence against
Colin and at the way the policewoman pretending to be his girlfriend had urged
him to invent murderous sexual fantasies. He threw the case out of court and,
after many months languishing in jail awaiting trial, Mr Stagg was rightly free.
But the police and press continued to suggest that they'd had the right culprit
and he was befriended by various women who went to the newspapers and tried
to sell stories of how he'd allegedly 'confessed'.
A comparable pattern was set in late February 2003 when Derbyshire police released
their findings from the new 
investigation
into Wendy Sewell's murder. Senior officers said that 'Despite the lengthy
investigation, we have not been able to eliminate Stephen Downing from the inquiry.'
They did not – and could not – go so far as to say he was guilty, but this was
what many journalists inferred.
Some of the TV coverage was particularly elliptical. Several reports didn't
mention that he'd been seventeen when he went to prison, instead only mentioning
his current age of forty seven. The casual viewer therefore got the impression
that he'd been a grown man when he made his original short-lived confession.
Worse, they simply said that he'd originally confessed to the murder – and didn't
add that he'd done so after nine hours of intense interrogation during which
he was hungry, frightened and in pain. He wasn't given access to his parents
or to a solicitor and eventually signed a confession partly-phrased in words
he didn't even understand.
Don Hale understood that Stephen had been failed by the legal system, but when
he began to investigate he was met with an ugly mix of threats and fearful silence.
His must-read book about the murder, Town
Without Pity, would later show just how many people wanted to stop him investigating
the case.
Sadly, he and Stephen Downing are now facing a media without pity who seem to
have set themselves up as arbiters of justice. Yet the three judges in the Court
of Appeal who heard the case in 2001 said that Stephen's conviction was unsafe.
They agreed that this handicapped teenager's confession should never have gone
before a jury and as a result the conviction was quashed. He has since been
paid £250,000 in compensation from public funds, just over £9000 for every year
that he was brutalised in prison.
We supposedly have a free press – but in reality we increasingly have a media
which decides on a superficial slant and speaks with only one voice so that
readers and viewers are denied access to relevant information. We also have
a press which increasingly confuses arrest with guilt. But any of us can be
arrested, perhaps because we look like a genuine suspect, because someone makes
a false accusation or because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Arrest and conviction should be seen as very different - and if a conviction
is later found to be unsafe, as it has in the Stephen Downing case, then the
wronged man should be entitled to the presumption of innocence and should be
allowed to rebuild his shattered life.
Children Who Kill: Profiles Of Pre-Teen & Teenage Killers by Carol Anne Davis is published by Allison & Busby.
