Thursday 26 May 2022

UNKNOTTING THE MURDERS

 

UNKNOTTING THE MURDERS

A bootlace could be the key to finding out who really committed the notorious Chillenden murders. But only if it’s tested by the right people, hears Mark Metcalf

16 - 22 MAY BIG ISSUE NORTH

A journalist who helped reverse the murder convictions of three men is calling for a specialist forensic scientist to be allowed to examine a key piece of evidence in the Chillenden murders.

Michael Stone was convicted of murdering Lin Russell and her daughter, Megan, six, and the attempted murder of Josie Russell, aged nine, near their home in Chillenden, Kent, in July 1996.

Stone has always maintained he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and although he is now entitled to apply for parole he won’t be doing so because, according to his sister Barbara, “that would mean Mick would be admitting his guilt”.

 Stone’s claims have been boosted by a recent four-page confession by serial killer Levi Bellfield that he committed the Chillenden murders and that of Judith Gold, a mother of three, in Hampstead, north London, in 1990. Satish Sekar specialises in investigating miscarriage of justice cases.

On Valentine’s Day 1988, Lynette White was murdered in Cardiff. The police searched for one white person in a horrible sexually motivated crime but ten months later five non-white people were arrested, three of whom were wrongly convicted in 1990. None of the five had left so much as a single DNA cell at the scene or on the victim, or had any trace of her blood on them. In 1992 the convicted men were released after a successful appeal.

“I got to know all of the wrongly accused men and I worked with White’s natural mother, Peggy Pesticcio, to get the case reopened twice,” says Sekar. “I did a lot of research and helped pressurise South Wales Police (SWP) to go out and find the real perpetrator. Nothing proves innocence more than finding the real killer.”

 In 2003 SWP found the real murderer, Jeffrey Gafoor, at the second time of asking, and he was convicted. Thanks to Sekar and other campaigners, SWP was forced to try to explain what went wrong. Eight police officers and two witnesses were tried for fabricating evidence leading to the wrongful imprisonment of the so-called Cardiff Three, one of whom, Yusef Abdullahi, died in 2011 aged 49.

Stone was convicted of the Chillenden murders in 1998 based on an alleged confession while in jail but his conviction was later quashed after prisoners’ evidence against him was discredited. Sekar was at Stone’s 2001 retrial at Nottingham Crown Court. He has strong opinions about the way Stone was represented, particularly his legal team’s failure to fully understand the significance of evidence given by pathologist Dr Michael Heath.

Dr Heath’s testimony referred to a bootlace found at the site and used to commit the murder of Megan Russell. It did not contain Stone’s DNA, which was not present at the site, but his lawyers did not explore whether it contained other samples that would point to the murderer. “If the jury had heard this, I expect the verdict would have been different,” says Sekar.

For many years this bootlace went missing and when Stone’s legal team broached this subject the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) failed to locate it. The bootlace has now reappeared but its storage conditions are unclear.

 “However, there is general agreement that the fibres within the individual knots are likely to be undisturbed,” says Stone’s sister Barbara, who has campaigned relentlessly on his behalf.

“Our solicitor requested the CCRC to arrange for the knots to be untied and tested. They have refused. I feel this typifies the CCRC’s inability to thoroughly investigate potential miscarriages of justice.”

 Sekar wants the bootlace retested by forensic DNA and bloodstain expert Richard Eikelenboom, who helped resolve the Schiedammer Park murder that shocked the Netherlands in 2000, when 10-year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and killed and 11 year-old Maikel Willebrand left for dead after being strangled with a bootlace and repeatedly stabbed. Willebrand remarkably survived.

Kees Borsboom was initially convicted but Eikelenboom believed DNA samples on the bootlace and at other areas of the crime scene showed he was not the murderer. He was proved correct when Haalmeijer was eventually arrested for the rapes of two women and confessed to the Schiedammer Park crimes. Sekar, who covered the Dutch case, says: “It has strong parallels with Stone’s case. He deserves the same courtesy that was belatedly given to Borsboom. Eikelenboom should be asked to use his expertise to solve the Chillenden murders.”

Sekar also hopes to see the case of Neil Sayers re-opened. In 1999, Sayers, aged 19, was convicted of the horrific murder of his friend Russell Crookes in woods at Hadlow College, near Tonbridge, Kent, largely on the word of his co[1]accused Graham Wallis, who pleaded guilty. Kent Police ignored Police and Criminal Evidence guidelines as Wallis was asked to make a statement in the back of a police car. Wallis was just 17, had no solicitor’s advice prior to making a statement and no accompanying adult with him.

Sayers was given a life sentence and released over a decade and a half later on parole, but without having to admit guilt. He still maintains his innocence over 20 years later.

Sayers’ case was mangled by a failure to appreciate the importance of forensic sciences. Crookes’s partially burnt body was not found until two weeks after his death. Maggots were taken by the now disgraced forensic pathologist Heath, who was one of the Crown’s experts against Sayers.

The maggots represented the best possibility of establishing when the fire took place and death occurred – a vital issue. Heath was never asked what advice he gave to Kent Police about the maggots, so it remains unclear if he even advised police to consult an experienced forensic entomologist, and the maggots were left in a fridge by Kent Police for four years.

“This was outrageous,” says Sekar. “Imagine taking a bloodstained handkerchief from a murder scene and storing it badly for years so that the evidence degraded, losing the killer’s DNA. They have allowed the entomological evidence – the last opportunity to establish when a significant post-mortem event occurred – to degrade.”

Heath faced a tribunal in 2006 that cost him his reputation and his place on the Home Office’s register of forensic pathologists. The disciplinary panel found flaws in his post-mortems of Mary Anne Moore and Jacqueline Tindsley, two women whose deaths were followed by the wrongful convictions of their partners. He was also criticised for his inquiry into Stuart Lubbock’s death at a party at comedian Michael Barrymore’s home. The case against him was presented by Charles Miskin QC, who had relied on Heath to prosecute Sayers.

When Sayers’ legal team subsequently applied to have his case reviewed the CCRC told him that the review of Dr Heath’s cases concerned those where medical evidence was critical to the conviction and ruled out any challenge to his evidence in Sayers’ case.

Sekar says: “The CCRC was wrong. Dr Heath also implied that the partial burning of the body resulted in extensive fire damage. There is considerable evidence to suggest that this was not so and that Dr Heath’s conclusions led to errors in the interpretation of fire-related evidence, which was another issue of vital importance in this case.

“Dr Heath’s role in these aspects of Sayers’ case was never considered. Sayers’s case should be re-examined.”

Sayers says: “At 18 I had my life taken away. I feel I’ve never been given any effective avenue to prove my innocence. Justice seems a long way off, leaving me very down, frustrated and broken. I want the truth to be found. So on one hand I want publicity to tell the world about how wrong everything is. On the other I want to keep a low profile so as not to affect my work and to be able to live some kind of an ordinary life.”

Returning to the Chillenden murders, Barbara Stone believes advances in testing techniques could help identify the real culprit and Sekar agrees. Bellfield won’t give his DNA for testing but one of his children gave a sample that was tested leading to a partial match for the TV documentary The Chillenden Murders.

 “Bellfield’s confession helps but does not prove he’s the killer; he could be lying. This would enable you to check it. If you had a full DNA profile from the bootlace, does it match Bellfield’s?” says Sekar.

Guilds - history of

 

Guilds 

Trade unions differed significantly from ancient merchant guilds which predominated in the medieval period were the feudal order of society predominated.   These were first extensively documented in southern England by a royal inquiry of 1388/89.  This was at the height of the feudalism, the structure of society immediately preceding the growth of commercial capitalism.  

 

Where there were enough people in urban areas in a given trade there was also formed artisan /craft guilds that incorporated masters, journeymen (someone who is fully educated in their craft) and apprentices into the one organisation in their field of handicraft. According to Chase (1) these  "existed to advance the masters and to protect the consumer by regulating the quality of work, as well as to regulate waged labour". 

 

Guilds enjoyed from the monarch certain privileges, which were overseen by town and city corporations. This allowed them to exclude outsiders and establish a monopoly on product standards and prices and working conditions, including apprenticeship training, and wages. 

 

 As such guilds were not incipient trade unions although there were some occasions when the journeymen, often successfully, sought to exert pressure on their masters by independently pushing for increased pay. As early as 1299 there is a record of journeymen carpenters and smiths being accused of forming illegal associations reported as 'parliaments'. There are also some reports of a small number of unskilled waged workers — mainly working on a quayside — who combined to successfully seek privileged access to work and thus demonstrated a recognition of the positive impact of collective bargaining. 

 

However, as long as the guild could be relied upon to defend the interests of their journeymen and protect the interests of the craft as a whole then they did well. English guilds reached a renewed membership peak in the first 20 years of the eighteenth century. Thereafter they began a steady decline as free trade and technological innovation swept them aside as, armed with the revolutionary ideas of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, governments abandoned control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems. Many former handicraft workers had to seek work in the newly emerging manufacturing corporations where there was a clear workers-bosses divide and a wage system in place. 

Wednesday 11 May 2022

CAMPAIGN TO STOP BURNING WASTE

 

CAMPAIGN TO STOP BURNING WASTE

Claims incinerators are linked to infant deaths

Over 50 new ones planned or approved

 

BIG ISSUE NORTH 9 - 15 MAY

A father who suffered the loss of two infant grandchildren is fighting to prevent the rebuilding of a waste incinerator that he believes may have played a role in their deaths.

 The North London Waste Authority has permission to update the Edmonton EcoPark, which opened in 1969. Following reconstruction, the municipal facility will have the capacity to incinerate annually up to 700,000 tonnes of waste, a 40 per cent increase.

Trevor Calver’s youngest grandson, aged 15 months, died in 2004. He suffered a second tragedy in 2017 when another daughter lost an infant baby under a week old.

There are 625 wards in London. Between 2002 and 2013 the five wards with the highest infant percentage death rates included Chingford Green and Walley in Waltham Forest, where Calver’s two grandchildren were from.

Concerned and disturbed

“I became concerned about the incinerator many years ago when I listened to a speaker at a local community meeting. I attended a site visit designed to show how it protected the environment and I was disturbed when I witnessed a tyre being burnt,” said Calver, who lives in Chingford, adding that residents often have their cars covered in ash.

“If we can see such deposits then imagine what damage the smaller particles produced by the incinerator can do to people, especially infants.”

Calver has sought without success to get his GP practice to map out where their patients live alongside the ailments they are suffering. He would also like to see statistics released on children’s use of asthma pumps in schools.

Calver’s concerns were heightened when he found out last year about research by Michael Ryan suggesting that infant mortality rates downwind of incinerators are above average.

Above average child deaths

Ryan began researching municipal waste incinerators after he lost two children, one at 14 weeks in 1985, causing him to consider if their deaths could be related to pollution caused by living near to the Shrewsbury Hospital incinerator.

Ryan spent a substantial sum obtaining Office for National Statistics (ONS) infant death figures at ward levels across England and Wales. He found that infant mortality levels were above average where incinerators were sited but his attempts to get public authorities to take notice were not well received. They argued that smoking and maternal deprivation, caused by poverty, were to blame.

But when Ryan then analysed the figures for the Chingford Green area of wealthy Waltham Forest, close to Britain’s then largest incinerator in Edmonton, he discovered that it had the second highest child death rate in London.

Further analysis confirmed that infant mortality levels downwind of incinerators are above average whether they are in affluent areas or poorer areas.

 Ryan’s work, extensively reported in Big Issue North, was used by MPs to ask parliamentary questions. This pushed Public Health England (PHE) to conduct a study into the impact of waste incinerators on infant mortality levels. This was promised in 2003, began in 2011 and came out in 2020, six years behind schedule.

The research, which ignored Ryan’s work and was undertaken by the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College, London, agreed with PHE’s claim that “modern, well run and regulated municipal waste incinerators are not a significant risk to public health”.

PHE adjusted the data for deprivation, ethnicity and socioeconomic status before reaching its conclusions. Ryan believes the study was thus flawed and queries why the researchers did not examine statistics where waste incinerators have opened in the last decade.

New incinerators

Newhaven incinerator opened in 2012. Downwind of it is Lewes and Eastbourne, where infant mortality rates in 2013 were zero and 1.1 per 1,000 live births. In 2019, when infant mortality rates for England and Wales were 4 per 1,000 live births, the figures in Eastbourne and Lewes had risen to 8.7 and 7.9. This corresponds to six infant deaths.

Across the country there have been many local campaigns against the construction of new incinerators. In seeking to reduce landfill, councils are increasingly incinerating waste for energy generation, with 11.45 million tonnes burnt in 2019-20, compared with 4.9 million tonnes in 2011-12. There are more than 90 plants across the UK, with 22 constructed in the last decade. Another 50-plus are approved or proposed.

NLWA is under pressure to reconsider its plan and campaigners, which include London Against Incineration, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, have the backing of local MP Iain Duncan Smith. Considerable anger has been directed towards the Waltham Forest deputy council leader Clyde Loakes, who leads on environmental, climate and transport policies, including a multi award-winning scheme that improved the borough’s active travel infrastructure.

 Loakes has chaired the NLWA for over 13 years. He is a non-executive director at London Energy Ltd, which manages the site at Edmonton and is owned by NLWA, and draws an annual allowance of £13,285.

Neither he nor other Waltham Forest councillors Jemma Hemsted, Tim James and Emma Best replied to questions from Big Issue North.

An NLWA spokesperson said: “The new facility has been designed according to population forecasts and future waste volumes.”

They added that once operating “it will generate electricity to power 127,000 homes and support a district heating network that will provide heat and hot water for up to 50,000 homes. This will save the need for gas boilers and displace power plants that use virgin fossil fuels.” NLWA claimed that the new facility will use the world’s most advanced cleaning technology and that none of the 21 other energy-from waste facilities in the UK given planning permission since 2017 are investing in such advanced technology.

According to the spokesperson: “The technology is so effective that concentrations of pollutants at ground level are expected to be effectively zero for most of the year.” With regard to Ryan’s research, the authority claimed: “It is difficult to assess his claims as they are not published in full by a science-based organisation or in a peer-reviewed journal… We are following scientific evidence from health experts and academics from not just PHE and Imperial College but also the Air Quality Expert Group, the Institute of Occupational Medicine, and Birmingham University, all of whom have concluded that modern and well-run facilities do not pose a significant risk to public health.”

MARK METCALF

The spy who duped me

 The spy who duped me

Helen Steel was the publicity-shy activist who courageously and famously fought a burger giant through the courts as one of the McLibel Two. But the full story of how she and other women were deceived into relationships with undercover police spies is only now being told. By Mark Metcalf

BIG ISSUE NORTH 4 - 10 APRIL

When McLibel campaigner Helen Steel was finally able, in Sydney in 2016, to confront John Dines, the undercover police officer who tricked her into a long relationship in the early 1990s, she still retained remote hopes he might have had genuinely loving feelings for her during their time together. Perhaps he even shared some of her anti-capitalist beliefs.

“I said to him that he knew I was in a really bad state when he left and asked why did he still pretend to care for me rather than put me out of my misery and say he was never coming back,” says Steel.

“‘What did I have? All I had was a van,’ was his initial reply. When I pressed him further he responded dismissively by saying: ‘I’m sorry, I had a really shit time too. It – the whole thing – messed my head up and I just wanted to put it behind me and make a new start.’ I had this realisation that he was a completely selfish bastard and he had not cared one bit for me.”

Now the full story of this abusive relationship – and the cases of four other campaigners conned by officers of the highly secretive Metropolitan Police unit the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) into similar relationships, all sanctioned at the highest levels of the state – is being told in a new book.

The title Deep Deception was collectively chosen by the five women. “From amongst many possibilities it best conveys our experiences. The level of deception and the discovery of it really had a serious psychological impact on everyone,” explains Steel, who has though courageously fought back. The widespread use of the officers from the SDS, formed in 1968, to undermine movements of social justice, environmental campaigns, trade unions and political organisations continues to be exposed at the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).

When Steel first met Dines in late 1987 at London Greenpeace, he claimed he was John Barker and infiltrated the environmental group after the exit of SDS officer Bob Lambert, a Greenpeace member from 1983 to 1987.

“Lambert, or Robinson as we knew him, was involved in writing the 1986 anti-McDonald’s leaflet that me and Dave Morris were sued over,” says Steel. “John was involved in the anti-McDonald’s campaign, and in the McLibel Support Campaign and our legal defence.”

The leaflet alleged that McDonald’s exploited children through its advertising, promoted unhealthy food, paid low wages, was anti-union and was responsible for animal cruelty and environmental damage. The libel campaign was the longest such case in English history and lasted over a decade. At the conclusion some of the leaflet’s contested claims were found to be libellous and others, such as McDonald’s endangering the health of workers and exploiting children, were true. The company also paid its workers poorly and inflicted unnecessary cruelty on animals.

Deep Deception reveals that Dines waited two years before asking Steel to go out with him. He had slowly been building up a relationship with Steel, a gardener, by dropping her off last in his van when he drove fellow activists home from meetings. It was a common tactic by undercover officers, including Mark Jenner, who was to have a five-year relationship with Alison, a political activist at the Colin Roach Centre in Hackney. The case of Jenner, known as Cassidy at the time, has been explored in a series of Big Issue North articles dating back to January 2011.

 “John told me in Sydney that he was tasked with reporting on everything that was going on in the North London anti-capitalist, animal rights, poll tax and environmental movements – everything that was a bit alternative. I did not go out with him until 1990. If I had known he was using me to spy on groups of people whose politics I shared then I would never have had a relationship with him,” says Steel, who now lives in the North.

As the relationship became more intense, Barker told Steel he wanted to have children. It was a con. After a period when he would mysteriously disappear for short periods, citing his mental state, the undercover cop left permanently in late 1992. Steel was distraught.

In the book she describes how in early 1993 “I felt both physically and mentally spent. John’s disappearance still consumed my thoughts every day.” Her attempts to find him floundered.

When the McLibel trial began at the Royal Courts of Justice in Central London in 1994, Steel walked each day past St Catherine’s House, which at the time held the register for all the births, deaths and marriages in England. It was a place she had visited previously when she helped look up Dines’s family records to help in what he claimed was a search for his father.

She decided to search at St Catherine’s House again and was stunned to find a death record for someone called Barker who died in 1968, matching John’s name and place of birth. “In the County of Derby, Philip John Barker: male, aged 8 years. The cause of death was acute lymphatic leukaemia.”

Steel felt a chill down her spine.

“John had been using the identity of a dead child. John Barker – the man I’d loved, the man I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with – didn’t exist. He never had… my whole world had been pulled from beneath my feet and I didn’t know who I could and couldn’t trust.”

Steel was determined to find out the truth. She travelled to New Zealand to try to find Dines, who had claimed he had lived there as a teenager and had moved there after leaving the police in 1994. Following her visit the Metropolitan Police moved him to Australia to prevent her finding out the truth, according to a police source quoted in the Guardian.

Semi-official confirmation eventually arrived in 2011 when the former partner of an undercover officer told her Dines had been one too. Around this time, it emerged that another undercover officer, Mark Kennedy, had had several relationships with environmental activists he had spied on. Deep Deception includes the cases of two women, Lisa and Naomi, both tricked by Kennedy, who was known as Mark Stone during his time undercover and collected information on environmental groups such as Earth First. Gradually, activists, journalists and the whistleblower Peter Francis, one of Dines’s former colleagues, began revealing the real story about SDS, including the use of dead children’s identities. Dines, Lambert and Jenner (the latter employed to spy on me, among others, while working as an organiser at the Colin Roach Centre) suddenly found themselves in the newspapers.

 Seeking to prevent these human rights abuses, Steel and other deceived women took legal action against the Metropolitan Police. Some of them had even had children with officers who, after faking mental breakdowns, suddenly disappeared without explanation.

All the officers had occupied important positions, such as secretary or treasurer, in campaigns that covered anti-racism, miscarriages of justice, corruption and employment rights. Such roles allowed the police to assemble information on the political activists involved. By getting together and speaking out, the deceived women destroyed claims by the police that their experiences were the result of an isolated officer. Steel says: “We knew that between the eight of us who sued the Metropolitan Police that there were at least five different officers who deceived women and that the period of relationships was nearly 25 years. There was obviously a systematic pattern of abuse, either for the officers’ own purposes or undermining protest movements.” The civil action against the police proved successful. In November 2015, the Metropolitan Police gave a full apology, conceding, as part of a settlement, that they had abused the women’s human rights. This apology has since been extended to some but not all the other people affected by relationships with undercover policing. Many women are still fighting their cases.

The exposure of undercover officers deceiving women also helped push then home secretary Theresa May to set up the UCPI. Beginning in July 2015 it was earmarked to last three years but seems unlikely to conclude before 2026 “The police are obstructing justice and are going through documents from decades back and redacting them to hide the names of those responsible for these human rights abuses,” says Steel.

“The police want it to be delayed as when the results are announced they can say what happened is historic, that things have changed and there is nothing to see here. And yet as we know the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 makes provision for the use of undercover law enforcement agents and covert sources and the committing of crimes in the undertaking of their duty. The police are also still seeking to recruit informers, as shown in a recent Black Lives Matter campaign in Cardiff.”

In 2016 something made her Google John Dines. “To my surprise and, after years of finding nothing, a document popped up with his signature on the bottom. It was the first proof I’d had in over 20 years that he was still alive.” He was a course director at a police college in Sydney, training Indian police officers to tackle so-called left-wing extremism. Concerned he was using SDS tactics to abuse Indian women in a similar way, she went to track him down, confronting him at the airport where he was meeting his trainees. “You owe me an apology.”

Steel had to overcome her natural shyness to fight McDonald’s, find Dines and now fight the secret state. Why should people buy Deep Deception? “It is a good read and important for understanding the lengths the state is prepared to go to by organising a secret political policing unit in order to prevent change from happening and preserving the status quo on behalf of the rich and powerful.

“This should be deeply alarming to anybody. We could have got rid of racism, sexism and stopped the destruction of the planet long ago had there not been massive state interference by these sorts of organisations.” n Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network by the Women who Uncovered the Shocking Truth is published by Ebury. Helen Steel is speaking about the book at 2pm, 10 April at the Trades Club, Hebden Bridge (free, donations welcome)

Taj Salam (Unite branch secretary at First Bus Bradford) describes a number of strikes he’s been involved in since 1988.

 

Taj Salam (Unite branch secretary at First Bus Bradford) describes a number of strikes he’s been involved in since 1988.

 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kDnCW8dZLR3jTVNRfiOZf

The importance of public transport and a strategy to boost passenger numbers


Taj Salam (Unite branch secretary at First Bus Bradford) describes the importance of public transport and outlines a strategy to boost passenger numbers.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/55ULnNnKFTRbsex3YY2hSu

How the Unite branch at First Bus Bradford has successfully got some members involved in political activities

 

Taj Salam (branch secretary and a Labour councillor) describes how the First Bus Bradford Unite the union 302/7 branch, 100 years old in 2022, has successfully sought to get its members involved in political activities including by becoming local councillors.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3n78xUpIDsiKtRy0mzuWWH