Justice Denied: The Greatest Scandal? Panorama

Innocent! You know that they're lying, you know police have told

them what to say. Last year, the case against eight officers accuse

of perverting the course of justice to secure those convictions

collapsed. Frankly people had written a work of fiction about

this. They wouldn't have believed it. But this is fact.

reputation of an entire police force has been shredded and tonight,

we reinvestigate what is becoming the biggest scandal in the history

of British justice. This is the largest scale of injustice in a

single case certainly in my working I'm returning to Cardiff on a cold

case review I first covered for Panorama over 20 years ago.

It's a journey into the past with purpose.

To reinvestigate a tale of murder and a major miscarriage of justice.

I wanted to know how it was that last year, eight police officers

involved in that miscarriage walked free from court when the case

against them collapsed in dramatic First stop in the City that's

changed almost beyond recognition is to meet a man I felt I knew only

too well but remains a stranger. At the age of 33, Tony Paris was

serving a life sentence for the murder of which he was innocent. He

was in Wormwood Scrubs when the television programme was

transmitted in February 1992. the Panorama programme, one prison

officer said to me, "what are you doing in this prison?" I said,

"Well I told you I shouldn't be here". That's when I realised,

people are now listening. The story begins at number 7 James

Street in the heart of the old docks area with the murder of 22-

year-old Lynette White, a well- known prostitute.

She was a very pleasant girl. I mean, she was only I think 20 then,

at the time. She was very pleasant and well-liked.

The killing was exceptionally unnecessarily brutal, some 49 stab

wounds and her head almost severed. I think she had her throat cut more

than once because it was very ragged and probably after that she

had multiple stab wounds. The senior duty officer that night

was Inspector Dick Powell who immediately became involved in the

investigation. He and the police team had an early

and powerful lead. Witnesses had seen an obvious murder suspect

right outside the house within hours of the killing.

An actor played the suspect, a lone white man, when BBC Crimewatch

featured the Lynette White case five weeks after her murder.

The man seen virtually outside the flat must be the prime suspect?

certainly is a person who we must spook to at this time. -- speak to.

He remained the major suspect for months as the investigation

continued with the South Wales Police drafting in their most

experienced officers. They included Inspector Tommy Page,

described to me as the CID's top detective, and in the vin act lar,

a renowned thief taker. Seven months after the murder in

September, the day-to-day investigation was taken over by

Inspector Graham Mouncher. Today, the case notes in the

Lynette White file run to over a million pages.

A review of the investigation shows that when Mouncher took over, he

was still focused on a single white male line of inquiry.

Now he was convinced he had a prime suspect christened Mr X. Two weeks

later, the investigation against the suspect ended abruptly when

forensic analysis on the blood in the flat ruled him out. The

detectives were right back to square one.

When the case against Mr X collapsed, the story took a turn

that almost defies belief. For nine months, police had been looking for

one white male suspect. That line of inquiry now became history.

Suddenly, in a series of dawn raids across the docks, a completely new

set of suspects was taken in for questioning.

There's a knock on the door at your home? Yes. Cops come in? Yes.

they say? John, can you come to the police station with me. I actually

said, are you taking the (BLEEP), you are looking for a white guy,

what are you troubling me for. Actie was known in Cardiff's

dockland as a hard man and not without reason. I'd met and filmed

him 20 years ago but now at last he agreed to talk openly to me for the

first time. Enyou are charged with the murder, I mean what's going

through your mind? I... I couldn't believe it. It was horrifying. It

was unbelievable. Also arrested we was Tony Paris,

again a man known to the police but only with minor convictions for

shoplifting. I was panicking because as far as I was concerned,

they're not listening to me. They're trying to convince me that

I was there. That's a chilling moment for you? It was. That was

really the start of the reality that there wasn't going to let me

And along with Tony Paris and John Actie, the three other men arrested

and charged were John's cousin Ronnie Actie, Yusuf Abdullahi and

Lynette's boyfriend, Stephen Miller. Based on the flimsy evidence from a

tip-off, the police had come up with a scenario in which all five

men had somehow come together on the night of the murder. They then

made their way to Lynette's flat and, without motive, had taken it

in turn to stab her to death. This bizarre story leaned heavily

on the testimony of four key witnesses. They included Leanne

Vilday, a Butetown prostitute and friend of Lynette White's and

another local prostitute, Angela Psaila. The police had interviewed

both women on a number of occasions and both women had insisted

consistently they knew nothing of the murder.

Then suddenly, after nine months, they changed their story. Now they

said they'd heard screams from the flat. They say they ran over to

find Lynette being attacked. The two other main witnesses were

Mark Grommek who lived above the murder flat and Paul Atkins who was

with him that night, both men are gay.

Like Vilday and Psaila, they too changed their story numerous times

and they settled for a final version that seemed to implicate

all five men in Lynette's murder. This version was then taken and

presented to Stephen Miller who, after 13 hours of denials in his

interviews, eventually agreed he Following the longest murder trial

in British criminal history, John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted

with unanimous not guilty verdicts. The remaining three defendants,

Stephen Miller, Yusuf Abdullahi and Tony Paris, were all sentenced to

life in prison. Innocent! You are a convicted murderer, you

get life, you phone your wife? I just told her that I don't know

when I'm going to get out. So the best thing to do was to divorce me.

There was too many people in prison getting letters and killing

themselves. I had enough on my plate worrying about me. I couldn't

worry about what was happening outside.

20 years ago, when I first visited Cardiff, I was puzzled at the

police adapting a new scenario quickly and suddenly accusing five

mixed race men with no forensic links to the crime without motive

and based on evidence from deeply unreliable witnesses.

These girls, these prostitutes, you know, they were vulnerable, they

were street girls, you don't get no more vulnerable than that. Five

people. You all had alibis? Yes. None of you had a motive? Motive,

no. We wasn't there. Back in 1992, I asked the former

Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, John Stalker, a veteran

of over 100 murder inquiries, to review the quality of those

prosecution witnesses. These frankly were awful witnesses,

terrible witnesses. I would have been very unhappy to be taking a

case and very unhappy to be taking a car parking case before the

magistrates or the courts with witnesses like this.

And Panorama exposed the scandal of how Stephen Miller had been

interviewed by the police. The officer in this extract is

During the ordeal of all the hostile police interviews, Miller

denied over 300 times being at the scene of the crime.

Finally, he cracked and implicated his co-defendants.

He has a low mental age and capacity, he was subjected to five

days of intensive and brutal police questioning in a police station. By

the end of that, he has told me that he would have almost said

anything to get out of it. Nine months after the television

programme, the case of the Cardiff Three was heard at the Court of

Appeal. In his ruling, the Lord Chief Justice highlighted the

treatment of Stephen Miller in his As a result of the way Miller was

interviewed... Justice, man... the unreliability of other elements

of the Crown's case, the Cardiff Three were freed.

They emerged furious at their treatment by the South Wales Police.

They weren't interested in what I had to say. They didn't care. They

just wanted somebody in jail. were just basically just used as

scapegoats for the police who couldn't find anything else or

anybody else to put this crime on. They say when you're in a police

station, you're supposed to have rights. They broke all the rules.

They lied to me, they put me through sheer hell.

Supporters of the innocent men, now joined by Lynette's family,

campaign ford the case to be re- opened.

But it would take another seven full years for the South Wales

Police to launch a fresh investigation in 1999.

Now, aided by the latest advances in DNA profiling, they were able to

reexamine blood found in Lynette's flat and on her clothes.

The blood was eventually matched to that of 38-year-old Jeffrey Gafoor,

a local security guard. 15 years after murdering Lynette in

a row over sex and money, he was finally caught, confessed to the

crime and sentenced to life. Catching Gafoor was a big relief

because now you can say "I told you", you know, the same old thing.

I felt great and I also felt someone's got to be held

responsible for this. It is the police.

No-one can deny that the hunt by a fresh South Wales Police team for

Jeffrey Gafoor had been an impressive feat of detection and

now, with the killer safely behind bars, pressure mounted for a

thorough inquiry into what had gone so wrong with the original murder

investigation and why. In 2004, the Independent Police

Complaints Commission was now responsible for taking one of the

most controversial decisions in the entire saga.

They allowed the South Wales Police to investigate themselves.

A move taken, I understand, for public relations reasons, and to

restore the morale of the battered force.

The investigation was led by detective Chief Superintendent

Chris Coutts, a senior officer in the South Wales Police.

We always took the view that it should have been a neighbouring

force, not South Wales Police, who investigated the horrendous

miscarriage of justice that commenced in 1988.

But lawyers are not the only ones astonished by the decision to let

the South Wales Police investigate itself.

I've spoken to a number of former police officers who share the

concerns and we've obtained some internal South Wales Police

They reveal that detective Chief Superintendent Coutts was actually

investigating, amongst others, his former immediate boss, Inspector

Dick Powell, the man who was originally involved in the murder

inquiry. The paper showed that a decade ago Powell and Coutts worked

together. The close personal relationship

between these two must have given rise to some real concern. Sources

involved in the inquiry have told me that the IPCC saw nothing wrong

with it. Despite this, over the next six years, Coutts and his team

would continue to investigate their former colleagues in the South

Wales Police thoroughly and efficiently. The first arrests were

not of police officers but of the original key witnesses, Mark

Grommek was charged with perjury. He initially fought the case saying

he was forced to lie under duress but later pleaded guilty. Leanne

Vilday and Angela Psaila said they too had been forced by the police

to give false evidence. Nevertheless they were also charged

with perjury and pleaded guilty. Alex Carlile represented Leanne

Vilday. He's one of the most eminent lawyers in the country.

process that the so-called eyewitnesses went through, in my

view, was shocking. Leanne Vilday for example was threatened that she

would be charged with the murder, with being a participant in the

murder. It's not too difficult to understand how she succumbed to the

pressure. In sentencing all three in December to prison in 2008, the

judge said: "You were seriously hounded, bullied, threatened and

abused and manipulated by the police during a period of several

months. As a result you felt compelled to agree to false

accounts suggested to you." The Crown had been told that the

South Wales Police officers behaved appallingly forcing witnesses to

tell lies that sent innocent men to prison for life. Now, all that

remained was for the officers themselves to stand trial. 13 South

Wales Police officers were charged in the case against the first eight

and two civilian defendants opened at Swansea Crown Court in July of

last year. They included former inspectors Dick Powell, Tommy page,

and Graham Mouncher and former Dective Constable Greenwood. Police

officers forced each of the four vulnerable witnesses into changing

their statements. The police were, they allege, fitting in evidence to

suit their view of what happened to Lynette and they used threats,

intimidation and fabrication to finally implicate all five of the

original defendants. The prosecution argued that the

officers first convinced themselves of the guilt of the defendants and

then imposed their theories on those who actually knew nothing

about the murder. The court heard of an example of this and of just

how the police treated potential witnesss in the case of Jack Ellis.

Back in 1988, Elis was a local Taxi Driver who knew Lynette White well.

He willingly helped police on a number of occasions and even

appeared in the Crimewatch appear. I'm more of a friend than a Taxi

Driver. She used to talk a lot, dream a lot, you know like any

other young girlment But the police attitude to him changed when one of

the witnesses falsely claimed she'd seen his taxi outside the murder

flat. Now the police wanted him as a witness to support their murder

theories. I was taking to the police station. Then they just laid

into me with questions. I was scared, like really scared. Jack

Ellis was held in that police station without break for over ten

hours, shouted and yelled at by detectives trying to get him to

change his true account to fit their version of events. They get

to the point that you just want to give in and tell them anything,

even if you don't know it. Were you beginning to reach that stage?

much so, yes. But Elis dogedly held firm. After ten hours of

questioning and buling -- bullying, the police didn't take a statement

from him but wrote him out of the scenario they came up with and

drove him home. The car pulled up and they practically drag him up

the path. He was in such a state. His legs wouldn't hold him up. He

was the most dreadful colour. I get a bit upset about this. When they

brought him in, they just dumped him in the chair and one said, "I

think you'd better get a doctor. I think he's having a heart attack.

"And they just left. They just slammed the door. But even this

kind of evidence was not enough to save the prosecution's case, as

something quite fundamental was happening to fatally undermine it.

As the trial continued, it became clear that the overarching

importance of what is called disclosure, the production and

sharing by the prosecution of all documents relevant to the case, was

failing. The disclosure process is fundamental to the trial. How did

it go so wrong? From my understanding of the investigation

it was done quite competently. They investigated, foun the evidence and

charged the officers. Now what we have found out about the officers'

conduct in the criminal trial is that it was wholey incompetent.

November the judge gave the prosecution one last chance. He

called it the litmus test to prove they'd handled the paper work

correctly. But a crucial set of four files required to prove the

prosecution's competence couldn't be found. Evidence from one South

Wales Police officer indicated that one of the files had been destroyed

on the orders of senior officer Chris Coutts. The court transcripts

record that the prosecution accepted what appeared to be the

deliberate destruction of the files was indeed fatal to the case. The

explanation for this catastrophe was a serious error rather than

deliberate misconduct, in other words, a multimillion pound cock-up,

rather than a malign conspiracy. The judge promptly gave up, stopped

the trial on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service and

formally declared all eight policemen not guilty. But that

acquittal, under those circumstances, merely deepened the

suspicion of the original murder defendants. I was gutted. I was at

home. My solicitor phoned me and told me the case was being

withdrawn bit Crown because they'd misplaced from papers. Misplaced

some papers, they had computers down there 400 grand to work this

out. It took them six years to get it to trial, then they lost some

papers? Then came the most extraordinary twist in the whole

saga. Incredibly, the documents that had apparently been destroyed

miss teersly turned up -- mysteriously turned up seven weeks

after the trial ended. The court's conclusion that Mr Coutts was

involved in their destruction simply couldn't be true. I blame

the police first, because it is absolutely clear, cannot be avoided

that the police had possession and control of those documents for a

long time. Within a very short time at the end of the trial the

documents had been found. Well, it's self-evident that something

went very badly wrong. And to put the entire farce into perspective,

nobody had elected to call Mr Coutts to give evidence about what

had really happened to the files. When the trial collapsed, the court

was told that Coutts had given orders and there was documentary

evidence of this for the files to be destroyed. It was imperative

that the lead officer, Coutts himself, to explain the position.

But he never did. Today, despite the multimillion pound series of

legal disasters, the authorities are still denying a full

independent public inquiry into everything that went wrong. Instead

the Director Of Public Prosecutions has ordered a review of the Crown

Prosecution Service' role in the trial. The Independent Police

Complaints Commission is investigating its own performance

and the -- and the saga of Chris Coutts, the South Wales Police and

the case of the miss serious lost and miraculously found documents.

Indeed, I understand the IPCC will probably conclude merely that there

have been some honest mistakes. Predictable and all rather cosy.

However, the fiasco has not gone quite unnoticed. This summer the

House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee has announced an

in-depth investigation into the IPCC. And they were very interested

in the dossier I'd gathered on the case. We've established that the

senior investigating officer in the South Wales Police had actually

worked under one of the chief defendants whom he was

investigating. That's ridiculous, isn't it? Conflicts of interest of

this kind need to be examined extremely carefully. Do you think

the investigation should have gone ahead given that these two people

knew each other as well as they did? This is a matter for a proper

investigation. I hope that when we get to look at this case, we will

be able to get to the truth. one official involved in this 25-

year-old saga of injustice and inefficiency has agreed to appear

in this programme. No-one from South Wales Police headquarters,

none of the detectives who were acquitted, no-one from the CPS or

IPCC. Everyone has ducked behind the endless ongoing inquiries and

investigations as their excuse for So, no closure in sight for those

who were inextricably lirvinged by fate to -- to 7 James Street.

dream about things I seen in jail. I dream about people hanging by

their neck, you know, I shouldn't be seeing this. Dianne and Jack

divorced a decade ago as a result of his profound mood changes. He's

old before his time, alone and ill. I wish I could say to the police

force, please apologise to him, at least, apologise for what you did

because you know you did it. Ronnie Actie died in 2007 aged 49. He had

been living in a garden shed. Yusuf Abdullah died last year, also aged

49. His family said he had been unable to adjust to life after

prison. John Actie remains obsessed with

the case. It's took over my life. It's taken

everything. I just want closure. I want to move on. Spephen Miller is

now the most damaged. Since the collapse of the trial, he's

suffered from acute depression and Accra phobia.

-- agoraphobia. Chris Coutts is retired and is writing a book. He's

hired a publicity agent who requests money for interviews. All

eight officers who faced trial are now considering suing the South

Wales Police. Lynette White would have been 45

this July. Next week, panorama joins the hunt