Solicitor is forced to resign... for helping to catch killer
He passed on confidential papers that nailed culprit
STEPHEN Chittenden was key to solving the murder of a teenage girl, stabbed to death by a canal as she walked home.
But the lawyer, 66, says he has now been forced out of his profession for helping to nail the killer and for preventing a miscarriage of justice.
he handed over crucial information which led to the conviction of michael Brooks for killing lynn Siddons, in Barrow-on-Trent, Derbyshire, in 1978.
But in doing so, mr Chittenden breached client confidentiality, prompting an inquiry by the Solicitors Regulation Authority – which has now accused him of ‘utterly unacceptable’ conduct.
he has agreed to remove his name from the official roll of solicitors to avoid being struck off – even though no one has made a complaint about what he did so many years ago.
lynn was killed on April 3, 1978. She was 16 and a week from starting her first job at Derby Co-operative Society. her strangled body was found six days later with 43 stab wounds in bushes beside the Trent and mersey Canal in Derby.
Fifteen- year- old Roy Brooks, her friend and neighbour, was charged with her murder after allegedly confessing.
mr Chittenden, who was working for a criminal law firm in Derby, represented Roy in court. The teenager was acquitted but before and during the court case, evidence emerged that his stepfather michael was involved.
mr Chittenden said he told police but claimed they ‘weren’t interested’.
michael Brooks was eventually arrested but nothing happened until lynn’s family – led by her grandmother Flo – began a civil case against him. In 1991, they won. The case judge mr Justice Rougier declared he was in ‘ no reasonable doubt’ that michael Brooks was the killer and awarded the dead girl’s estate damages.
It was only after this that Derbyshire Police charged Brooks with murder. he was found guilty and sentenced to life in 1996.
The prosecution claimed that he had ordered Roy to stab the girl but then had seized the weapon and continued to stab her before strangling her. Brooks, 51, at the time was obsessed with Jack the Ripper.
Derbyshire Police was accused of bungling the case, the chief constable later admitting it would not have come to court without the family’s campaign.
As part of the civil action, mr Chittenden said he released confidential papers to a law firm instructed by the Siddons family, containing evidence from Roy about his stepfather.
he was professionally bound not to disclose this information but handed it over in 1979 after he was approached by an MP and asked if he could help lynn’s devastated family.
Within the papers was, mr Chittenden said, evidence from Roy that he had been put up by his stepfather to take part in the killing. There was also information from a psychiatrist of how the boy was scared of his stepfather, who would cut out pictures of women from magazines and stab them with a knife.
mr Chittenden spoke out about his predicament for the first time last year. Disclosing publicly what he had done in his local paper, he said: ‘ my mind said to me, “you have to do this”, but I was risking being struck off as a lawyer if it ever came out that I had handed over my documents. my wife backed me. It could have lost me my career, but I’m proud of what I did.’
yesterday he added that being forced to remove himself from the solicitors’ roll after 40 years of otherwise unblemished service had been a sad way to go.
‘When it happened in 1979 I was a 26-year-old solicitor with a wife and three young children,
‘A wider sense of justice’
having a make a decision no one should really have to make.
‘no one ever made a complaint then, including my client. Of course, I accept it is a serious matter that I breached client confidentiality, but I thought everyone understood my concerns were with a wider sense of justice.’
Though no one has complained, the SRA still launched an investigation after mr Chit- tenden’s interview with his local paper was published. he admitted wrongdoing and was formally ‘rebuked’ by the SRA and ordered to pay costs of £650.
he said: ‘The SRA wanted to fine me £2,000. I pointed out that I was a young man under pressure from an MP – and I couldn’t have lived with myself if michael Brooks had done something to somebody else.’
had he not admitted breaching confidentiality and stood down, he could have been struck off.
The SRA declared: ‘mr Chittenden admits that these actions … constituted conduct that is completely unacceptable on the part of a solicitor.’
The SRA said that being struck off would ‘ properly reflect the gravity of his misconduct’. however, it did concede that he was not motivated by personal gain ‘ but in the greater interests of justice.’
A WOMAN duped into an affair with a high- flying lawyer has hit out after regulators yesterday ruled that he could keep his job.
Anna Rowe, 44, accused the married father of being dishonest when he lured her into bed under the false name ‘Antony Ray’ after using a picture of a Bollywood star on a dating site.
She was so incensed that she launched a national campaign calling for ‘ cat- fishing’ – deceiving people into a romance with a false persona – to be made illegal.
It prompted a national outcry and more than 41,000 people signed a petition for the problem to be debated as a matter of urgency in Parliament.
But the Solicitors Regulation Authority has ruled his astonishing web of deceit did not call into question his ‘fitness to practise’ so he can continue to work.
Miss Rowe, of Canterbury, Kent, who lost her job as a teaching assistant after speaking out, accused the watchdog of failing the public.
‘I have spoken to friends who are lawyers and they say the SRA is making a complete mockery of their profession,’ she said.
‘The first week of law school sees them all told about the code of conduct and at the heart of that is the need to act with integrity at all
‘Making a mockery of profession’
times. Would those in other regulated professions be able to act so dishonestly and keep their jobs? I very much doubt it.
‘I just do not understand how this does not raise serious questions about his honesty and his ability to practise.
‘It seems that he is exempt because although he is a lawyer he is not dealing directly with the public.’
In a letter, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said it agreed the lawyer ‘misled’ her over his real name on his Tinder profile.
Officials interviewed ‘Antony Ray’ – whose real name cannot be revealed for legal reasons – and he admitted using the false details.
But they wrote: ‘He has said that he used these details to protect himself and his family from having their details in the public domain.’
As a result, the regulator said the matter relates only to ‘personal and private lives’ and no steps are needed to ‘ protect consumers of legal services’.
An SRA official added: ‘He has not used his position as a solicitor to gain any advantage or act in a way which would damage the trust the public places in the provision of legal services.
‘Further, we do not consider his actions have impaired his ability to carry out his professional role and there is no evidence of any risk to legal consumers as a result of his actions.’ Miss Rowe exchanged thousands of messages with ‘Antony Ray’, supposedly a divorced father-of-three during a lengthy online courtship.
He sent her highly personal photographs and left dozens of voicemail messages before they began a 14-month romance.
But it soured as she became about suspicious about his erratic behaviour, supposed long work hours and secrecy about his family.
Miss Rowe turned detective and discovered that not only was her lover a serial cheat but married with a family in the North of England.
At this point, she realised he had also used a photo of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan, who looks similar to him, on his Tinder account.
Miss Rowe was so angry she asked police to investigate him for fraud but was told his actions were not illegal. Since she has spoken out publicly ten other women from London, the Home Counties and the Midlands came forward to say that they had relationships with ‘Antony Ray’.
These spanned nine years from 2007 and many of the victims had similar stories about their treatment at his hands. Miss Rowe said she has had ‘ hundreds of messages’ of support and is still being contacted by other women.
‘One got in touch after reading a magazine article about me in a hospital waiting room,’ she added. ‘She first got in touch with him in 2010 and realised immediately that we had both dated the same man.’
The SRA’s role is to investigate claims of professional misconduct and breaches of its code, which states lawyers must ‘act with integrity’.