Episode 2 The Chillenden Murders

In 1996,

the murders of Lin and Megan Russell

and attempted murder of Josie Russell

on a quiet country lane in Kent horrified a nation.

-TV:

-'..one of the most tragic events of the summer.

'A case unprecedented in British criminal history.'

The hunt for the killer was one of the biggest stories of the decade.

'Since the investigation began,

'more than 9,000 people have been interviewed

'and a thousand witness statements taken.'

A year-long manhunt led to Michael Stone being convicted...

..and sentenced to life in prison.

'The judge told him there can't be anyone in this country who does not

'understand the horror of these offences.

'At that point, Stone out shouted out, "It wasn't me, Your Honour.

' "I didn't do it." '

But since that verdict,

the case continues to make headlines, with doubts being raised

about Stone's guilt.

Michael Stone's conviction hung on a very delicate thread.

There's a considerable question mark about whether this kind of evidence

can safely be used at all.

And Stone himself has stuck to the same story.

'I never murdered them people and I had nothing to do with it.

'And that's why I'm innocent.'

But is he a liar and a killer?

Or could the wrong man be in prison?

Now, 20 years on,

a panel of independent experts with decades of experience in criminal

justice has agreed to review the original case files.

You're looking at a case from 1996 with 2016 eyes.

Together they're testing the evidence...

This one lace contained the key to who killed this family.

..searching for new clues...

This has left a lot of unanswered questions.

The DNA can't be Michael Stone's.

..and digging deep into one of Britain's most notorious crimes...

To me, it puts him as prime suspect.

..to see if justice has been done.

If it's not Michael Stone, then who is it,

and where's that individual been for the last 20 years?

The case review is reaching its halfway point.

For the last two days, the panel of leading experts from policing,

forensic science and the law,

have been examining the crime and investigation.

It's a crime of a psychopath.

All the victims have suffered blunt-force trauma to their heads.

They've analysed eyewitness accounts describing a white man...

That's the e-fit.

..driving a beige car.

He says, "I thought it was an old Escort in beige."

They've examined evidence, including a blood-covered lace...

..and towelling used to tie up the victims.

They found that none of it directly connected to Michael Stone.

Where does this put us?

It's not providing any forensic link to Michael Stone, still.

But they did discover that Stone was a known heroin addict

with a violent side...

He attacked a man he'd known from childhood,

stabbing him in the chest while he was sleeping.

..and that just days before the Chillenden murders

he'd been making threats to kill.

This makes the hairs on my arm come up.

It's so cold.

They heard that three prisoners

testified that he confessed to the crimes in jail.

It was like being told a horror story.

But two of them were discredited

and Stone's conviction was overturned...

..and a retrial was ordered.

The jury has begun hearing evidence

in the second trial of Michael Stone,

who's accused of attacking three members of the same family.

41-year-old Michael Stone was brought to court to face two charges

of murder and one of attempted murder.

He denies them all.

Stone's second trial started at Nottingham Crown Court

in September 2001.

But within days, it travelled 200 miles to rural Kent.

-REPORTER:

-Escorted by the police in a car with its windows blacked out,

Michael Stone was brought to the isolated country lane.

Without leaving the vehicle, he then watched as the trial judge,

lawyers and the jury of nine men and three women spent 45 minutes seeing

for themselves the scene of this horrific attack.

The prosecution case against Stone argued the location could explain

Michael Stone's motive for the murders.

And this is where the panel begins

the next stage of its review of the case.

There is Chillenden, Michael Stone lived the other direction,

not even on this map.

The prosecution case was that Stone was a known burglar and thief,

that he travelled from Chatham, one of the Medway Towns,

to the village of Chillenden -

it's about 40 miles -

to commit a burglary or a robbery.

This was to feed his drug habit.

'With every case that a barrister does,

'you have to think about what the motive'

might have been. You don't need a motive to prove a case,

but without a motive, you might not be able to prove a case

if you're prosecuting.

One thing that puzzles me is

it's believed that

this crime could be a robbery gone wrong.

But then you look at what items capable of being stolen of value

were still left at the scene and not taken.

Lin Russell had a necklace on that was left on her,

and in a pocket she had a watch

of which the strap had partially broken.

So that leads me to believe that potentially

the motive wasn't robbery.

It doesn't sit right.

This has taken time and effort.

The perpetrator has actually dragged three people into trees,

tied them up,

hit them repeatedly over the head with a hammer.

It wasn't a quick attack.

I mean, it's going to take us 45 minutes

to drive from Chatham to Chillenden.

And there isn't any other way to do it.

If he was looking to rob people, it's a bit out-of-the-way.

You're not going to find that many people.

Journalist Barry Keevins was based in Kent and covered the case.

If you've come here to rob,

there's nothing here.

You can look around, 360, and see one or two buildings,

but there's nothing else here.

If you've come down...

If you've driven 45 minutes from Chatham to try and find somebody

or something to rob, this is not the place.

'I didn't know the area.

'I've never been there. Like, I've never been there to go there.

'I have driven all around Kent and just been out in the car.

'I've just gone around roads and driven wherever the roads go,

'you know what I mean?

'But I don't specifically remember going there and

'if I've ever been down there, it was maybe once or twice.

'But not down there, down there, do you know what I mean?'

During the trial,

Stone's claim that he didn't know the Chillenden area well

became a focus for the prosecution's attack.

-REPORTER:

-Mr Sweeney explained that Michael Stone

had told a whopper during police interviews when he repeatedly denied

knowing the area where the murders

were committed. The QC called it utter nonsense,

and he invited the jury of nine men and three women

to ask themselves why he had lied.

Former senior detective Jane Antrobus is investigating

just how well Stone knew the area.

In the case files, she makes a discovery.

Michael Stone says he doesn't know Chillenden at all,

yet I've got a statement here from John Henry Porter,

who was a friend of his, and he goes back to 1991,

just four years before.

He said they were out and about looking for houses,

farm houses to burgle.

He even says, "He knew the area like the back of his hand."

The prosecution relied quite heavily on the issue of

the lies which were told in interview.

And one of the first that they relied on was that Stone said that

he had no knowledge of Chillenden and the surrounding areas.

What he said was, "I don't know this precise area."

Well, that's a lie, cos he does.

He doesn't know Chillenden.

He does, cos this statement...

-Yeah.

-..of John Henry Porter...

says, in 1991...

..it said they were driving about, going up farm tracks,

looking at farmhouses and obviously up to no good.

You know, the area, he knows within half a mile of the murder scene.

Yeah, yeah.

So, to me, that's the area.

I mean, his answer to that in interview

was that "Porter and I are enemies"

and Porter said in his statement, "He is my enemy,

"he stole my girlfriend.

"He's not a nice person," and so he may have been lying.

But there was other evidence used to link Stone to the area.

The jury heard that he'd lived in a children's home close by.

It's a four-mile drive from the scene of the crime, and his sister,

Barbara, remembers being there with him.

It wasn't one of the best times of my life and I kind of maybe would

have forgotten it anyway if, um...

You know, this has brought it back to my attention because it's

suddenly become part of the evidence in the murder trial.

So, Mick, I believe, might have been in this block here.

Cos all the time on the way here I thought I would be staying with him

and it came as quite a shock when they separated us.

I remember crying for him.

That's why I remember it at all, to be honest,

cos it upset me so much.

But the fact is, we were aged, what, six,

seven maximum for myself, and eight, nine for Mick.

We were only here for three weeks.

Can't remember once stepping out the door and playing or anything.

Everywhere we went we were supervised, we had staff with us.

And they certainly didn't take us out on long rambles.

So there's no way that Mick could have got to know the local area.

But then evidence was revealed which the prosecution claimed didn't just

link Stone to the area, but to the crime scene.

-REPORTER:

-The murder trial of Michael Stone has heard evidence

about a bootlace found near the place where Lin and Megan Russell

were battered to death. A forensic scientist has said

that marks on Megan's neck suggested

the lace had been used as a ligature during the attack.

But he said it could also have been used as a tourniquet by a drug user.

While the bloodstained bootlace had offered no forensic connection

to Michael Stone,

if the claim it was a drug's tourniquet was true,

then THAT use gave the prosecution its link.

-REPORTER:

-The jury heard uncontested statements from a number of witnesses saying,

as a tourniquet sometimes he used a bootlace, and that is the connection

which the prosecution is trying to make.

So we're trying to get to the bottom of why you would think it was

a tourniquet. In the second trial, Roger Ide, the expert,

originally said in his statement that there was stretching

that was more likely to be a result

of the lace being used as a ligature,

ie, some kind of restraint, and not just as a bootlace.

No mention of a tourniquet.

Then, during the trial, when he was actually giving evidence,

the Times reported that he changed his mind

when he considered how heroin addicts use laces to bring up veins

to help with injecting the drug.

But it was also argued that the presence of three knots in the lace

made it a more likely tourniquet.

I have the transcripts of the drugs counsellor.

"In terms of the knots themselves, the larger knot,

"the one knot that's placed over the centre,

"it shows with this type of material,

"that it's along the line of what somebody would use with somebody

"that IV injects."

If you conclude that it's a tourniquet,

then it narrows the field of who the offender may be,

ie, an intravenous drug user like Stone.

But if it's NOT a tourniquet,

then it's just any old bootlace that any white male with a beige car

could have had.

And so that means the pool of suspects is so much larger.

To establish if it's possible to prove the lace was a tourniquet,

the panel call their own independent expert.

You've obviously seen the e-mail of the alleged tourniquet?

'I've got the pictures of the boot lace, yes.'

What's your opinion of it, whether you think it is a tourniquet,

or you think it's not, or you can't tell either way?

But do the presence of the knots give you any indication one way or another?

Would you stand up in court and say this is probably a tourniquet?

And we asked him about what test we might be able to do to try and

verify whether it could have been used by a drug user

and he suggested you could test it for heroin.

He says, you don't really even need to know how much heroin was there,

you just need to know is it there or not?

He said that would be quite straightforward to do.

I think the main thing at the moment is,

if there is doubt over this being a tourniquet,

if it isn't a tourniquet,

then there's no link to Michael Stone.

By day four of the trial,

the jury had heard evidence about the tourniquet

and Stone's apparent lies.

But it was about to take a dramatic turn.

-REPORTER:

-Sheree Batt told the jury that she saw blood on

Michael Stone's white T-shirt from the neckline to the chest area.

When she asked him about the stains,

the defendant is alleged to have zipped up his hooded top

and explained that he'd been involved in a fight.

What's her relationship to Michael Stone?

So, she knew him via her boyfriend,

who she says would go out and spend a lot of time with Stone

and she does remember distinctly one morning,

it would have been around the 10th,

she saw blood on his top.

I think that was quite powerful evidence

in the sense that that would be a massive coincidence that this man,

who we have all these other potential links to -

this area, the offence,

the type of offence and things like that -

is a man that on that day had blood on his clothing.

Every piece of evidence has more than one side to it.

It is important to look as deeply into the detail as possible because

you will often find that the truth, or, um,

the lies, are revealed.

Although Sheree Batt couldn't be precise about when she saw Stone,

the prosecution estimated it was the 10th of July,

the day after the murders.

If you look at her statement...

So Stephen and Sheryl return to the case files to see if anyone else saw

Stone on that day.

So, looking at the time on the 10th

that Sheree Batt says she saw Michael Stone,

she said that he called around at the address around late morning

or early afternoon.

But Stone had an appointment with his psychiatric nurse at about

lunchtime on the 10th.

There was a policeman who also gave a statement in the case and he said

he saw Stone on that same day,

the 10th, at about 1.30pm, and he'd noted that he looked clean and tidy.

And none of them recounted seeing blood on his top.

And so, you have to balance that against somebody who's saying he IS

appearing with blood on his top, so has he changed his top?

Is there a mix-up as to dates

and that may undermine the whole value of Sheree Batt's evidence?

So we're back to the point of, I guess, maybe the pendulum

or the scales going one way and then the other.

But there was evidence the jury didn't get to hear

about Sheree Batt.

My involvement started through a conversation I had

with my then editor.

He said the case was something he'd like me to look at

because there were question marks over it.

I went down to Chatham and met with Harold and Jean Batt,

the parents of Sheree Batt.

They ushered me into an immaculate front room and began telling me how

they were disowning their daughter,

that they believed her testimony was false.

She alleged that bribes and threats were offered...

..to persuade her daughter,

Sheree, to go to court and support the prosecution.

Those allegations were never proved, but Jo-Ann Goodwin's article

questioning Sheree Batt's evidence and Michael Stone's guilt

was published.

In no way do I set myself up as a critic of the police, I'm not.

I just, you know,

went after this case cos I felt that there was something wrong with it.

As the trial entered its final days,

the prosecution called its star witness,

a former prisoner named Damien Daley.

-NEWSREADER:

-The jury in the trial of Michael Stone,

the man accused of murdering Lin and Megan Russell,

has been told that a former prison inmate heard him

confess to their murders.

Daley was an inmate at Canterbury Prison, who claimed Stone

confessed to him through a pipe in the wall of their adjoining cells.

None of the other pieces of evidence would have led to a case to bring to

a jury,

and the confession is the direct evidence of him saying, "I did it,"

which made their case.

But Daley was just one of many prisoners claiming Stone confessed.

At his first trial,

two others testified against him but were discredited.

And while on remand, several made claims he talked about the crimes.

So the panel dig deep into the prison files to find out more about

who Stone was talking to.

And criminologist Richard Hobbs makes a surprising discovery.

We've got some letters written by Stone, apparently with a woman

who's befriended him.

It's kind of interesting the way I think that people want to befriend

someone who may be a murderer.

This is an emotional connection that's been struck up between

him and this woman.

It's almost a promise of a domestic future,

the promise of something beyond prison for Michael Stone

that's being hung out in front of him.

This is Michael Stone.

"I like the idea of going somewhere where there is

"a lot of sun and sand with you when I get out,

"and sharing special moments. It sounds very interesting."

This woman is asking him very clear questions about the case, about him,

about how he's feeling.

But the author, Pat, isn't what she appears to be from her letters.

You have to be a bit chameleon-like, really.

You write to him as the person you think they'll respond to.

He's murdered a female

so he's clearly interested in females,

so you have to write to him as a female.

The girl's name is Patsy Scanlon.

In the 1990s,

Bernard O'Mahoney worked with the tabloid press

to elicit confessions from high-profile murder suspects

by writing to them as a potential pen-pal.

I wrote to Ian Huntley.

He wrote to me and said,

"Send me a photograph of yourself in a Manchester United shirt."

And if you remember,

the two girls he murdered were wearing Manchester United shirts.

Now, how sick is that?

-INTERVIEWER:

-So why do it?

-Why?

Because some people protest about the ozone layer,

some people protest about whales,

God knows what else, cats and dogs.

I don't like people who kill children

and I do something about it.

It's a difficult thing to do, to get them to confess.

The line always was, "It's not fair what they're doing to you.

"I feel sorry for you.

"It's awful for you."

You know, and it's like a ray of hope for him

and he grabs it with both hands.

O'Mahoney wrote to Stone as a single mother from Essex.

He started writing back.

But Michael Stone never confessed.

He found out my true identity via a journalist,

so he wrote back saying, like, your cover's been blown,

I know who you are. I said, "Well, I think you're guilty."

"No, I'm not." I said, "All right, I'll listen to you.

"I'll listen to what you got to say."

So he told about this guy, Damien Daley, and said, you know,

he stitched me up, blah, blah, blah.

So I said, right, benefit of the doubt, I'll write to Daley.

But I did and, you know, Daley stood by what he said.

I wasn't 100% sure Stone was guilty but then again,

the police don't convict you, the judges doesn't convict you,

your peers convict you.

On the whole, the system works.

By the time of Stone's retrial,

the only confession evidence that made it to court

was that of Damien Daley.

When Daley arrived at court,

he walked past the dock where Stone was obviously surrounded

by prison guards.

He gave him the most amazing glare

and he continued glaring at him throughout his entire evidence.

He was very believable.

Under cross-examination, he stuck to his guns.

He was accused in very robust terms by Stone's lawyer

of making it all up.

This evidence was crucial for the prosecution.

It was crucial for the police.

In fact, the judge said,

"If you don't believe this, then Michael Stone has to walk."

The panel make Daley's evidence the focus of the next stage of

their review.

This is what he said.

I'm going to summarise but, on Tuesday the 23rd of September 1997,

about 8pm, I was alone in my cell

when I became aware of a prisoner in a cell next to me.

He said Michael Stone said to him, "If it wasn't for that slag,

"I'd be OK."

"He said she'd picked him."

"I understand he may have been talking about an identity parade."

"I'd been given a copy of 23rd of September's Daily Mirror by a prisoner above me.

"I had begun to read the first two pages when Stone began to speak to me again.

"I stopped reading the newspaper and listened to him.

"He then said, 'I tied them up with the towels but I didn't need to

" 'because they were out of the game.' "

And then he got the impression that Stone was actually getting off on

telling this story.

He said the towels were wet and mentioned something about shoelaces.

Then he talked about the dog barking and, he says,

told Stone to shut up because he was sickened by what he was hearing,

and he said, "I told him I'll tell the screws what you've said."

And then he ends his statement by saying, "I've got nothing to gain by

"telling you this." So that is Daley's story.

And so the question is, how reliable is it and how did it come about?

The panel starts by investigating whether Daley's account of how Stone

spoke to him from the neighbouring cell was possible.

Jane has tracked down the former head of security at Canterbury Prison.

What's your experience of prisoners actually speaking to each other

through the walls, through heating vents, etc?

I've just had a conversation with a prison governor at the time.

He said, yes, it was quite possible to speak through the heating pipes.

In fact, a test was done and that was proved.

So I said,

"Well, what's your opinion about did the confession happen or not?"

He said, "Well, I was made aware that elements of information in that

"confession were not in the public domain."

-Is that what he said?

-Yes.

In that case, we'll examine that, compare it to Daley, his statement,

and see where it takes us.

Yeah.

The thing that may make a cell confession actually quite

a compelling piece of evidence is if, for instance,

there is information in that alleged confession that is not

in the public domain.

So, for instance, maybe a piece of information that ONLY the offender would know.

To test if there was anything that Daley claimed he heard that could

only have come from Stone,

Stephen and Sheryl cross-refer his statement

with what was already in the press.

So, in the confession, the thing about the towels,

it says, "I tied them up with towels."

"Josie has said the killer told them, 'I just want to tie you up while I drive away,'

"after binding her wrists with strips from one of the towels."

And that's in the Daily Mail.

There's a reference to a shoelace.

"Six-year-old Megan was partially throttled with a boot lace tied twice around her throat."

Which again matches what's out there in the media.

All the stuff about one getting away and being brought back...

Yeah, that's in this report.

"She was caught by the man and dragged back."

They find all of the details from Daley's account of the confession

could have been picked up from the press.

But with one important exception.

In his statement,

Daley said Stone complained about being picked out in an ID parade.

The prosecution claimed that this must refer to a line-up held the day

before, attended by Josie Russell

and a witness called Nicola Burchell,

whose sighting of the killer was the basis for the e-fit.

Although neither of them positively identified Stone,

Nicola Burchell did say he looked familiar.

This detail was kept secret from the press,

so, according to the prosecution, only Stone would have known it.

The Crown's best point was the ID pick-out, right?

In the so-called confession he said,

"It wasn't for that slag picking me out..." - right?

The fact that the ID parade had produced a result of sorts,

the police had deliberately kept out of the public domain,

so how did Daley know Stone had been picked out unless Stone had been

talking about it to him? And it's a good point.

But Stephen and Sheryl think there's another possibility.

23rd September.

On the day Stone allegedly confessed,

the press were running stories about Josie attending the ID parade.

Right, so the main news story both in this and other papers that day is

that there'd been an ID parade.

"The Crown Prosecution Service lawyers are now considering whether

"to charge a suspect with killing

"Josie's mum, Lin, and sister, Megan."

And then he turns up in your next-door cell.

Is it possible those stories led Daley to believe

that it was Josie Russell that picked out Stone?

By reading one of the articles that was printed on the day of

the confession, you will see the information was in the public domain.

Police released information to be printed on that day.

If you could just put up what the headlines were and what it says?

And it's from the Mirror,

so that's obviously the newspaper that Damien Daley says

he had in his cell, leads with Josie Russell facing an ID parade,

and all the newspapers at the time were running with that story.

And it says, "Schoolgirl Josie Russell

"has been brought face-to-face with

"the man police think murdered her mother and sister.

"The result was not revealed but Crown Prosecution lawyers

"are now considering

"whether to charge a suspect with

"killing Josie's mum, Lin, and sister, Megan, six..."

There's been an ID parade by the girl.

We're not telling you what the result was but the CPS are now considering charging a man.

What else would you think, other than that she picked him out?

The more you look into the detail,

the more you actually see everything in the statement

is in the public domain - most of it that day.

I've done no deals with the police at all.

People saying, oh, I done it for money or I done it to, you know,

get my face in the papers and whatnot,

it's, I didn't want none of that.

So there's no self-gain here at all.

But the review also turns up evidence about why Stone was in

the cell next to Daley in the first place.

When he was remanded in custody,

he told the prison officers that he wanted

to be put in the segregation unit

because people in the prison were saying that he was confessing

to them, and this is recorded in the prison documentation, that that was

my reason for wanting to be put in segregation.

It's called Rule 43.

'The police had already said that other prisoners had said that

'I'd confess to it.

'I said I want to go in the segregation and I want to be

'in a cell on my own and I don't want to be going near other prisoners.

'I don't want them to, to make statements to say that I confessed.

'And then the governor come round.

'I asked him to write the reason why on the GOAD form.

'And he wrote it on there.'

-STEPHEN:

-The man who's in custody

brought into segregation sees himself in

the papers as the suspect,

says I want to be here cos people are saying I'm confessing,

and then he gets into a cell and confesses through a wall to

an unknown person to being the man.

How does that work?

Given Stone's mental state...

..his mental illness, his addiction, maybe he WOULD have done it.

Maybe he WOULD have owned up.

Maybe he DID confess.

Maybe he did.

The judge summed up to the jury that

everything else in the case is circumstantial.

You can only convict this man if you accept as the truth

Damien Daley's evidence.

Michael Stone's conviction hung on a very delicate thread.

After a trial lasting nearly a month,

the jury retired to consider its verdict.

It was a very difficult case to call but I was quite close to

a very senior officer in the case

and he said to me, "If the jury believe Daley, he goes down.

"If they don't believe Daley, Stone walks."

-NEWSREADER:

-Michael Stone has been found guilty of the murders of Dr Lin Russell

and her daughter Megan, along with the attempted murder of Josie Russell.

In the public gallery, Michael Stone's sister Barbara shouted, "Oh, no, not again!"

Michael Stone convicted for a second time of a crime

which ripped a family apart.

People did come forward afterwards

to say that Daley told us that he lied

and had stitched Michael Stone up,

but then the difficulty was they have a particular background,

so they are also of that criminal world,

and so it raises the question about THEIR credibility.

I was friends with the Daley family.

You know, we're going back getting on for 50 years.

They came round and asked me to go and visit Damien while he was on remand

for petrol bombing a nightclub just along the road there.

I sat down and he said to me, "Do you know Michael Stone?"

I said, "No, I don't know Michael Stone.

"I've never heard of Michael Stone."

He said, "Well, he's a nonce case.

"He's been arrested for murder.

"Them children that were killed at Chillenden."

So I said, "What's that got to do with you?"

My advice to him was, it is your duty as a normal con to do him.

If you think he's done children,

it's your duty to attack him if you can.

But you do not give evidence against anybody else in this prison.

And that was the end of that conversation with Damien Daley.

About two weeks later,

and I see Damien Daley walking up the road

and I actually called across to him and asked him

how the hell he's out of prison

and he replied, "They call me the Teflon Dame now.

"They can't make nothing stick."

And I said, "More like you're giving evidence against that guy, isn't it?

"You've done a deal with the police."

I went, "You're fitting Stone up, aren't you?" And he said yes.

He admitted to me that he was fitting Stone up.

Looking at the criminal background of those people,

are they trustworthy?

Do they have any axes to grind?

And so it becomes really, really difficult to be able to unpick

where the truth actually lies.

Has anyone gone through the process of speaking to Damien Daley?

Where is he now?

He's now convicted of murder, and is serving a life sentence.

Just to clarify.

The evidence was provided by a man

-who is now serving a life sentence for murder?

-Yes.

The allegations that Daley had lied form part of two appeals

for Michael Stone.

Both failed.

But as part of those appeals, more sophisticated forensic tests were

carried out on key evidence.

And they reveal something unexpected.

With respect to the towel, the testing that was done in 2010,

they actually targeted the ends of the towel.

They swabbed these ends, all six, and combined them.

They got what they referred to as a complex mixed DNA profile.

It's likely that the Russell family members are present,

ie, the victims, but that there is some DNA components present

that they can't attribute to the victims.

They got indication of a Y chromosome,

ie, there was male DNA present.

But none of the DNA components observed

were in the profile of Michael Stone.

-Michael Stone, if he did it...

-Did not leave his DNA on it.

He manages never, ever to shed on different surfaces

through different activities at different times.

We know the perpetrator has torn it up and used it to tie

-people up.

-Significantly, yeah.

That is very significant.

Every area where they've got a positive, it's not him.

The questions that continue to surround Michael Stone's conviction

have led to speculation

about who else could have committed the murders.

And one name keeps cropping up.

Levi Bellfield.

It's nine years since 13-year-old Milly Dowler

vanished on her way home from school.

Today, a nightclub doorman, Levi Bellfield,

was found guilty of her abduction and murder.

Bellfield is currently serving multiple life sentences for three murders,

including that of 13-year-old Milly Dowler.

-NEWSREADER:

-He was described by the judge

as a cruel and pitiless killer.

He used a hammer as a weapon,

and there were recent claims that he'd admitted other crimes.

-NEWSREADER:

-Police suspect he could be involved in

as many as 20 other serious crimes.

One of the crimes he was linked to was the Chillenden murders.

That possible link is one that Stone's solicitor, Paul Bacon,

wants to see investigated.

But it's prompted a response from Bellfield himself.

This is a letter from Levi Bellfield. He writes,

"Dear Mr Baker, I feel compelled to write to you

"in reference to your client, Mr Stone. If he is innocent,

"then I truly sympathise with his current situation.

"However, to use me to gain publicity to favour Mr Stone is

"clearly unacceptable, especially as I am ALSO maintaining MY innocence.

"I had no connections to Kent area until 2002.

"I will provide your forensics experts with DNA,

"but please stop publicly linking me to your case.

"This is not helping my own fight.

"I have enough without your case further nonsing me off in the media.

"Yours sincerely, Levi Bellfield."

I wrote back to him and said, "Thank you very much, that's very kind.

"Could we arrange to have your DNA taken and also fingerprints would also be very useful.

"Give me details of your solicitor, and I'll make the arrangements through them."

But he never responded again.

'Whoever did a crime like that would do it again.

'The fact that we know that Levi Bellfield has done several more,

'the only chance is linking the forensics to Levi Bellfield.

'I've decided to put all my eggs in one basket.

'If it ain't him, we're fucked, basically.'

The panel now examine whether they can rule Levi Bellfield in or out.

-That's the e-fit.

-I mean,

it's no worse than the match between Michael Stone and him.

-No, no.

-I mean, he's somebody, who,

when you ask the question - shall we look at his DNA if we can? -

-you'd say yes.

-Yes.

-Yes.

And then they track down the detective who led the investigation into Bellfield's hammer killings.

-'Hello, Colin Sutton.'

-Hello, Colin.

We're calling you about your involvement with Levi Bellfield.

That he might have been involved in the Chillenden murders.

Do you want to just tell us whether you've done

or looked into anything on this angle?

'In 2008, after Levi Bellfield was convicted of the two murders

'and the attempted murder,

'we looked at other possible offences, and this was one of them.

'In terms of commonalities, the victims were female,

'that there was some kind of blunt-force trauma.'

Are you aware that he had any links to Kent at all?

'Yes, he did. His family had a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey

'that they would go to for holidays.

'But at that time,

'we had a statement from a former girlfriend which gave him

-'a pretty solid alibi.'

-It's quite rare, isn't it,

for a man to use a hammer on a woman or a child,

in your experience as a detective in murders?

'Yes, not just in my experience,

'but there was some research done at the time,

'and in the Greater London area,

'the only unsolved attack of that nature,

'there was only one of all of them that we couldn't actually

'realistically say was probably Levi Bellfield.

'Obviously, he wasn't convicted of them all.

'But, I mean, that's how rare they are.'

So, can we just sum that up, then?

Although you can't prove all of them,

the conclusion was that all of them had been done by Levi Bellfield,

-bar one.

-In the Greater London area.

-In the Greater London area.

'In the Greater London area, yeah.

'And that was going from, kind of, I think, 1990 to 2004,

'so a period of about 14, 15 years.'

Wow. That's...

I'm quite shocked by that.

Jane goes on to investigate any other possible connections

to the key evidence.

Particularly the killer's beige car,

thought to be a Ford.

There's no beige car ever found that the police can physically link to

Michael Stone.

We've still got an outstanding beige car from that murder investigation.

One person who might be able to help with that is Bellfield's girlfriend

from the time of the Chillenden murders.

When I look at that picture, I think he's already killed two girls.

Maybe the third.

-INTERVIEWER:

-Do you think there are more?

Yeah. Yeah, I do believe there's more.

So how many crimes do you think he might be responsible for?

Um... A lot.

Hundreds.

What car was he driving at the time?

I had my beige Sapphire Ford.

Do you remember the...

It was an E reg.

What happened to that car?

Levi used it one night,

and he rang me to say that the car had been stolen from the car park.

Was it ever found?

Apparently so, burnt out, in another part of Feltham,

but I don't fully know.

I've always said, yes, he's done this, yes, he's done that.

But I can, hand on my heart, say, at that time,

he did not do the crime that they are saying he did,

he didn't kill the mother and daughter and the dog.

The 9th of July 1996 is quite imprinted on me.

It was the first year I'd had my first child...

..but also, the 9th of July is my birthday.

So, I know from the moment we woke up in the morning,

to when we went to bed that night, he never left my side.

Levi and myself went for dinner that night,

and from there we went onto Rocky's nightclub, where he used to work.

And then we went home to bed.

Do you remember what day it was?

I want to say it was a Friday or Saturday.

But I'm not sure.

But it was definitely on my birthday,

and it was definitely the 9th of July.

So his partner says that they went out to the restaurant and the club,

on the weekend. Well, the 9th of July 1996 was a Tuesday.

The alibi is not quite as strong as it first appears.

The team turns to the science,

to see if it can help rule Bellfield out.

Although he's refused to give a DNA sample,

a number of his family members

have come forward to help the review by supplying THEIR DNA.

It's been analysed by Dr Georgina Meakin.

Members of Bellfield's family have provided DNA samples.

And from those I've been able to derive the profile

that is from Levi Bellfield,

and have been able to compare that to the profiles to the unknown DNA,

from the strip of blue towel that was examined, and of that,

there are three components that match components

in Levi Bellfield's profile.

That means he can't be excluded as having contributed to that mixture.

-But not Michael Stone.

-But not Michael Stone.

'When you determine the evidential weight

'of that potential contribution,'

it's a random match probability of just 1 in 30.

And this means that if you've got 30 people in a room,

one of them would be a potential contributor.

You can see that evidentially speaking,

it's not very strong evidence.

Georgina now moves on to the blood-covered lace,

used in the attacks,

and dropped at the scene by the offender.

She believes that an alternative forensic technique

could now reveal if the DNA of Stone, Bellfield,

or any other male was left on the exhibit.

If we were to retest it using a Y-STR profiling,

this is profiling that is aimed only at the Y chromosome,

ie, only examines male DNA, so that way we can...

straight away excluding all victim DNA that no longer clouds the issue.

We can just be straight away -

"What's the male DNA profile? It's this."

Only, the lace is missing.

-I beg your pardon.

-The lace is missing. It's gone.

So both the laboratory that did the examination on the lace,

and Kent Police have done an exhaustive search

of their exhibit store, and they have not found the lace.

The whole lace? Like, the lace, the bag and the exhibit label is gone?

No, they have the empty bag with the exhibit label in it, but no lace.

The Forensic Science Service are adamant that they returned an intact

length of lace to Kent Police on the 23rd of September 1998.

The Forensic Science Service say they sent an intact length of lace

in a bag to Kent Police.

But when Stone's legal team requested further tests,

what was sent back to the laboratory was an empty bag.

"With respect to the lace,

"we were expecting the remains of an almost complete lace.

"There is an empty exhibit bag

"bearing what appears to be the original CJA label for the lace,

"but no lace per se."

"In the absence of an intact length of lace,

"it was not possible for the commission to arrange for further tests."

Later, Kent Police said the lace hadn't been lost -

instead, exhaustive testing had left only strands.

Kent say the lab, it doesn't exist any more, and the lab says,

we gave it to a Kent Police officer.

And now the bag's empty.

You've got the worst crime in Kent,

and the principal exhibit goes missing.

And there are two different accounts of what happened.

This one lace could contain the key to who killed this family.

Michael Stone is now 20 years into a minimum 25-year sentence.

He could be eligible for parole in 2023.

He's still my boy, isn't he?

I used to go up and see him all the time,

but then he said it was too emotional for me to do it.

So I haven't seen him for...

..since he was in court that day.

-You haven't seen him since the convictions?

-No, I haven't.

You get choked up in here, don't you?

But if you dwell on it, then you're going to go down, you know?

I can't afford to do that.

I still have to live life.

The crime was horrible.

A mum and her two daughters.

Violence against a woman, violence against two young children...

..and the devastation felt by the Russell family

must have been immense.

-REPORTER:

-Michael Stone, a man with a violent personality disorder,

now a convicted killer.

Stone shouted out, "It wasn't me, Your Honour! I didn't do it."

Right, folks, well, we're reaching the end of our four days' considering...

The panel begins its summing up of the case review.

We've been incredibly privileged to have this amount of access

to this case.

Having all the evidence, having access to police reports,

scientific reports, scientific expertise, police expertise.

Because, of course, in the trial, as a jury, you won't get that much.

But that's why this process has been invaluable to me.

How do we feel about the evidence?

How do we feel about the case?

When I first started looking at the scientific evidence,

I guess I was shocked at the lack of it to Michael Stone.

And I thought that was because this was the mid-'90s, you know?

DNA technology was in its infancy.

But as we've gone through this case,

reviewing through the forensic science evidence that there is,

we end up not just with DNA evidence that DOESN'T point to Michael Stone,

but in some ways, points elsewhere.

There's no ID against Stone.

There is no forensic against Stone,

I'm not saying he's not a dangerous man,

and I'm not saying the best place for him ISN'T locked up,

but I'm just saying, to me,

I don't think there's enough evidence beyond reasonable doubt

to convict him.

This case was summed up to the jury on the basis that you had to accept

Daley's evidence.

Only then could you convict.

And for me, I don't accept Daley's evidence.

Is Stone innocent or guilty?

I can't talk in terms of innocence,

but I can talk in terms of,

if I was asked - am I sure? My answer would be no.

You know, your heart goes out to any victims of crime where, suddenly,

a conviction against the person

who is said to have killed their loved one unravels.

But the truth is, also,

they really want the right person to be in prison.

Ultimately, if you find a conviction is unsatisfactory 30 years on,

40 years on, you've got a right in law, and a moral right,

to put it before the authorities.

Michael Stone has had two trials, and he's had several failed appeals.

But then, I think it is worth, if there are proper grounds,

to go back, and relook at a case and a verdict.

That has to be right, if the ultimate aim is justice.

And on that note, we'll stop now. Thank you.

'I don't think we'll ever have

'a completely satisfactory conclusion to this.

'Unless that golden nugget comes forward of information

'or evidence'

to either support it being Michael Stone,

or to support it being someone else.