I FEAR SABOTEURS IN THE MET DIDN'T WANT ME TO CATCH STEPHEN’S KILLERS
After the Mail’s historic front page, he was the detective who finally nailed two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers. But in a devastating new book, he says he was driven out of the force for his pains
FOr Me, it was like being let loose in a sweet shop. An old police station was closing down and I’d volunteered to have a look at their old files. One room after another was filled with boxes full of ‘ongoing’ cases. But it was the final room that drew my attention, piled high with cartons labelled Operation Fishpool: 540 of them. In the recesses of Deptford Police Station in South London, I’d stumbled across the acres of paperwork generated by the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
It was then 13 years since the black teenager had been brutally stabbed to death at a bus stop. Despite a sizeable murder team, the initial investigation had failed to nail a single suspect — and his parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, had protested bitterly.
Since then, there’d been ten further police investigations into Stephen’s murder, all with increasing budgets — and all with exactly the same result. But what turned the case truly toxic for the Met was an inquiry, led by Sir William Macpherson, who not only tore into them for their slipshod work but accused the entire force of being ‘institutionally racist’.
At the time he released this thunderbolt, I was a detective sergeant working at Scotland Yard. As the news came through, I saw the Met’s Assistant Commissioner, Ian Johnston, bury his head in his hands. ‘It’s all gone horribly wrong,’ he said.
How had such a balls-up ever been allowed to happen? Why hadn’t anyone been charged? And why were the files just gathering dust?
I made an appointment to see Commander Cressida Dick, my boss, and told her I wanted to take on Operation Fishpool. ‘Seriously?’ she asked. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’d like to have a crack at solving the Stephen Lawrence murder.’
Commander Dick was delighted, but not everyone shared her view. The murder squad, SCD1, hated the case because it showed them in a bad light, and even my chief superintendent was dead against me taking it on.
Plenty of others tried to discourage me. ‘Why?’ I asked them all. ‘A young boy died in 1993, and we failed him.’
One person after another responded with the same question: ‘What makes you think you won’t fail him, too? There’s no point letting it ruin your career, like it has everyone else’s.’
One policeman warned me: ‘ The family are a nightmare. They won’t give you the time of day. Doreen Lawrence wouldn’t even let the original investigation have access to her son’s school records. So much for wanting the killers caught.’
Others criticised the Lawrences for ‘slagging us off’ in the media.
I began to wonder if I’d taken on more than I could chew, and my heart sank further after watching an old police presentation which confirmed that Doreen had indeed forbidden access to Stephen’s school records.
WHere to begin? My first port of call was Holmes, a computer system developed by the Met for big cases. In theory, every piece of evidence relating to Stephen’s murder, every action and every order, should have been logged in. But it hadn’t. Crucial information hadn’t been input correctly.
Just one small example: a lot of people interviewed after the murder had used the word ‘juck’ — which is slang for stabbing someone. There were probably 40 recorded statements containing ‘juck’, but the word didn’t appear once in Holmes.
Not only that, but a lot of rubbish had been added, presumably because somebody needed to look busy.
My team would need to start again at the beginning, inputting every single scrap in the 540 boxes. It would take at least two years. When I told Cressida Dick, she blew out her cheeks. ‘ Whatever it takes, Clive. But do me a favour: don’t let the Met look any worse.’
So I immersed myself in the files. Armed with a flask and a sandwich, I’d go every day to Well Hall road in eltham, the scene of the murder. Then I’d sit there reading the files on a bench across the road.
By chance, the third file I opened contained a startling revelation. right there, in black and white, was the fact that Mrs Doreen Lawrence had given permission for the Met to see Stephen’s school records.
The more I read, the more I despaired. Contrary to what I’d been told, it was crystal-clear that there was nothing she wouldn’t have done to help us in the pursuit of her son’s killers. every aspect of the original investigation, I concluded, would need to be re-checked. ON APrIL 22, 1993, Stephen and his friend Duwayne Brooks had been waiting for a bus home. It was just gone 10.30 pm when a gang of five or six white youths spotted them.
As Duwayne ran off, 18-year-old Stephen stood his ground and was stabbed twice. His last words before he died were: ‘What is wrong with me?’
When Inspector Steven Groves arrived in response to a 999 call, he jumped to the conclusion that Stephen’s injuries were the result of a fight with Duwayne. As the Macpherson report concluded in 1999: ‘[Groves] would not have been similarly dismissive if the two young men involved had been white.’
Groves didn’t even ask Duwayne in which direction the alleged killers had gone. rather than launch a manhunt, he went off to a nearby pub to look for witnesses.
It was midnight before 40 men and women, plus dogs, were let loose on the area. What potential evidence could have been lost, disposed of or washed away in that time?
Within 24 hours, the police had had numerous calls identifying the suspects. Five names kept cropping up: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, Luke Knight, Gary Dobson and David Norris, the son of an established local gang boss.
Not a bad steer. But the police decided not to pick them up, or even to search their homes. Why? Locals claimed it was because Norris’s father had police officers on his payroll.
As it was, the inspector in charge of the investigation was exonerated by Macpherson. But that still doesn’t explain why, instead of being interviewed, the suspects were simply placed under police surveillance — three whole days after the murder.
Now, in any murder case, there’s a review after six weeks to check the investigation is up to scratch. Stephen’s case was no different. Chief Superintendent roderick Barker was asked to check it — and he found everything top-notch.
The Met would stand by that review for years. Whenever there was criticism, from the Lawrences or anyone, they’d say: ‘No, we did everything we could have done. Look, it says so here.’
Detective Superintendent Brian Weeden took over the investigation into Stephen’s death on April 26. But he didn’t arrest the suspects until May 7, claiming new information had come to light. The truth? The only thing that had changed was that they’d had two weeks to dispose of any evidence and to work on alibis.
Sadly, none of the witnesses was able to identify the suspects in identity parades. By 1996, after yet another investigation, the Lawrences had lost all faith and launched a private prosecution against three of the men: Luke Knight, Neil Acourt and Gary Dobson. But Duwayne’s testimony was judged too weak, and the judge pulled the plug on the trial.
All three men were freed. In the eyes of the law, as it had stood for centuries, the double jeopardy rule meant they could never again be tried for the same crime.
ON February 14, 1997, the Daily Mail splashed photos of the five original suspects on the front page, naming them as Stephen’s killers and challenging them to sue. No one did.
Over the next decade, there were eight more investigations and an inquest into Stephen’s death.
The only positive was that David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, changed the law on double jeopardy, allowing a suspect to be retried for the same crime — provided there was ‘new and compelling evidence’.
As I sat there reading all this on my bench, I decided to go back to the start. So, co- opting two policemen, I painstakingly restaged the actual murder, timing every provable action. This took six hours and led to a revelation. It had not been — as everyone described it — a ‘ brief ’ attack. It had taken between 30 seconds and a minute, which is unusually long for a stabbing.
This was a massive breakthrough, because I now realised the attack had almost certainly left more forensic evidence than we’d discovered so far.
The Government’s independent forensic division, Forensic Science Services (FSS), had carried out hundreds of thousands of scans on the suspects’ clothing and belongings in the search for Stephen’s blood. Nothing was found.
They’d also scoured Stephen’s outer clothes for fibres from his attackers. Again, zilch. However, they hadn’t looked for fibres on the suspects from Stephen’s clothes.
I decided to hire a fresh pair of eyes — a different firm of forensic experts.
No one at the Met had ever done this before, and I had calls from all sorts of people telling me that I couldn’t do it. There was even a plea (more of an order, really) from the Home Office.
But, to their credit, the Met did eventually give the go-ahead to hire LGC Forensics, based in Oxford.
I’d like to say the handover from one forensics outfit to another went
smoothly, but human beings don’t like being snubbed. The old outfit, Fss, immediately made it clear that they had all the exhibits, and they weren’t letting them go.
‘If I have to,’ I wrote to them, ‘I’ll take out a warrant to retrieve them.’
eventually, they relented. But then they refused to send over their findings. All this to-ing and fro-ing took months, and I just had to wait.
It took LGC just three weeks to find red fibres on stephen’s jacket which had come from his red polo shirt. A few weeks later, they found the same red fibres on Dobson’s jacket and norris’s jeans.
As a police officer, you live for moments like that.
It was time to brief Mrs Lawrence. Unfortunately, a formal meeting had been arranged at scotland Yard, to which I knew she’d previously been summoned by the commissioner, sir Paul Condon.
His first words to her were: ‘What do you think of the brilliant view?’ ( Funnily enough, sir Paul, she was there to discuss the police’s failure to find justice for her murdered son, not coo at the vista.)
Doreen Lawrence turned up with her solicitor and barrister. As I looked at our guests, the word ‘frosty’ sprang to mind. And no wonder: Mrs Lawrence already had an opinion of the Met that was lower than a snake’s belly. even when I told her about the n new evidence, she just said: ‘I t think we’ve been down this path b before, haven’t we? I’ll believe it w when you show me a conviction.’ slightly deflated, I asked if she an and her family would agree to su supply a sample of their saliva to ge get a record of their DnA, in ca case we found samples on ste stephen’s clothes. Th That’s what I said. What she must hav have heard was: ‘Please can we get asa sample of your family’s DnA to che check them against outstanding crim crimes on the police computer.’
‘W ‘Why would I agree to this?’ she dem demanded. ‘Haven’t you demonised my family enough?’ I was shocked. WhatWha hell had the Met done to make this poor woman feel this way? still, she agreed in the end.
In February 2008, I turned up to see Mrs Lawrence informally, armed with doughnuts from a local baker.
‘Hello, Mrs L,’ I said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind sticking the kettle on, I’ve brought us some doughnuts.’
HeR face didn’t crack. But despite her obvious mistrust of the Met, she gradually seemed to warm to me. I can honestly say that, from then on, I never experienced anything other than the fullest support and friendship from Mrs L.
Meanwhile, to get Dobson re-tried under David Blunkett’s new law, I needed to find ‘new and compelling’ evidence. The red fibres didn’t qualify asa they were ‘old’ evidence that had beenb missed first time round.
There’d still been no breakthrough whenw I turned up for a ceremony at st Martin’s in the Fields, off Trafalgar square, for the 15th anniversary of stephen’s death. As I sat next to C Cressida Dick and behind Prime M Minister Gordon Brown, I gazed at a giant poster of stephen: young, beautiful, innocent and full of hope.
I was just leaving the church when my phone buzzed. I could scarcely believe the news. Using a new technique, the forensics team had just found stephen’s blood on Gary Dobson’s jacket!
Looking up at stephen’s picture, I told him: ‘not long now, son. not long, I promise.’
Finally, in 2010, we persuaded the Director of Public Prosecutions that we had a case against Dobson, and we arrested both him and norris.
By that stage, I had plausible cases against four names. We even had fibre evidence linking one other person to stephen’s red shirt. But the DPP had decided it was safest to prosecute just the two against whom we had the strongest evidence. Well, I could live with that. For now.
Then I started getting calls from colleagues. I was asked if I knew what I was doing. I was told that I’d fail. That I hadn’t done enough.
of course, what they really meant was: ‘The Met’s going to be shown up again.’ For certain people at the Met, their most fervent wish was to get through the rest of their lives without being stung by stephen’s case again. even if it meant not going for a prosecution.
At the same time, the investigation faced another setback. I was told the office where we were based was being shut down and our thousands of files would need to be moved elsewhere. This was a massive disruption — not least because the loss of just one piece of paper might jeopardise our case. surely the Met knew that? or was that the whole point? During my six-year investigation, I had to move offices five times. It was either the worst form of stupidity, or someone somewhere was trying to cause problems.
The top brass, I couldn’t help but notice, were now plucking people out from my team to work on other jobs.
I even wrote to a superior to say: ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to disrupt this case.’
We might have been on the verge of finally solving the most unsolvable murder since Jack the Ripper, but to some officers it just didn’t look good.
The 2011 trial of Gary Dobson and David norris — as the world knows now — ended in both of them being convicted. For me, it was a moment of pure happiness and relief.
Before we left the court, Mrs L called me over. ‘Thank you, Clive,’ she said, ‘for never losing faith … You’re a credit to the police.’
sentences were due to be handed down the next day. A phalanx from scotland Yard attended court: the great, the good and the highly decorated, all clamouring to get near the case that most of them had told me I had no chance of winning.
As they’d been juveniles at the time of the murder, Dobson was given 15 years and two months and norris got 14 years and three months.
To my surprise, Judge Treacy then congratulated my team and me for doing an excellent job, and added: ‘now, DCI Driscoll, I expect you to bring their associates to justice as well.’
Fine by me. Two days later, I attended a meeting at scotland Yard, where I thought we were going to discuss how best to pursue the case against the killers’ associates.
I had a rude awakening. For 45 minutes, the talk centred on a report written by the-powers-that-be. Its conclusion? That we’d exhausted every chance of getting further convictions. There were no copies of this report available, but I was left in no doubt that certain people around that table wanted the investigation shut down.
‘Didn’t Judge Treacy tell us to keep looking?’ I said. A compromise was agreed. If I could show promising leads to a murder review panel, then possibly I could continue.
A month later, I had a call from Cressida Dick. ‘What’s this report the murder review group is chasing me for?’ she asked.
‘The report we were told about after the trial, saying we’d exhausted all hopes of other convictions,’ I said.
Clearly, she had no idea what I was talking about.
That’s when the penny dropped: if I hadn’t dug in my heels, the investigation would have been closed — thanks to a report that didn’t exist.
so I carried on. In 2013, I found a ‘new’ witness who’d been lost due to initial poor record-keeping. With his testimony, there was a real chance that a third person could now be prosecuted.
Meanwhile, a BBC documentary had aired allegations that former Ds John Davidson, who’d played a major part in the initial investigation, had allegedly scuppered that inquiry for financial gain. (Davidson, who has retired to spain, denies this accusation.)
Mrs L said: ‘It’s what we suspected all along.’
But do you know what’s worse? That
the Met tried to cover it up. True, they’d conducted an investigation into corrupt officers, including Davidson, but then they’d decided not to share their findings with Sir William Macpherson’s inquiry.
Mrs L now persuaded the Home Secretary to set up a review, led by Mark Ellison QC, into police corruption involving her son’s case.
Unfortunately, Ellison told me, the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) were struggling to find one or two essential files that he needed. I located them for him within half an hour.
Scotland Yard absolutely came down on me for this. Everything, I was told in no uncertain terms, had to go through the DPS.
The following year, a former undercover officer, Peter Francis, went public with accusations that surveillance had been carried out on the Lawrence family in 1993. To Mrs L, this was a devastating blow.
She already knew her son’s death had been poorly investigated because of racist attitudes. She knew a corrupt officer had prevented anyone from being brought to justice for years. She’d learned that the Met knew about this corruption and had hidden it from Macpherson.
And now she was being told that she and her family had been investigated, in secret, because they were considered dangerous.
Mark Ellison’s report, published in 2014, firmly pointed the finger at the Met for their outrageous treatment of both the murder case and the Lawrences themselves. It also confirmed that there was evidence to suggest there had been corruption.
You would think that the Met would have then redoubled their efforts to nail Stephen’s other killers. But they didn’t. Instead, they got rid of me.
I was 62 but it was entirely in their power to ask me to stay on for a few years. I’d have done so with pleasure. Another DCI was appointed in my place. I offered to be on permanent standby in case he ever needed help. Seventeen months on, I’m still waiting for the phone to ring.
EXTRACTED from In Pursuit Of The Truth by Clive Driscoll, published by Ebury at £20. © Clive Driscoll 2015. To order a copy for the special price of £16 (valid until August 8 and p&p free), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808.