Why a former detective is still campaigning for justice for Alfred Moore

FORMER policeman Steve Lawson has spent many hundreds of hours over the past 12 years trying to clear the name of Alfred Moore – and he’s not about to give up.

Sixty-seven years have passed since two Huddersfield policemen were shot dead in the vicinity of Alfred Moore’s farmhouse off Cockley Hill Lane at Kirkheaton.

The gun was never found and Moore – a poultry farmer and a known burglar – always denied shooting the officers, PC Arthur Jagger and Detective Inspector Duncan Fraser, who were part of a 10-man police cordon who had surrounded the farmhouse in July 1951 in a bid to catch Moore returning from a nighttime burgling expedition.

The stakeout went disastrously wrong. As the officers laid in wait, shots rang out and two officers were found to be hit. Moore was arrested later that morning from his farmhouse.

In recent years Mr Lawson has become increasingly convinced that Moore’s trial was not only unfair but that the state hanged the wrong man.

He has claimed that officers provided false or misleading statements about the stakeout.

Shortly before he was sent to the gallows at Leeds jail, Moore, 36, had accused officers of concocting evidence against him.

Mr Lawson, who worked as a detective in Huddersfield between 1968 and 1974, has studied the case in detail for over a decade and believes it is time for Moore’s name to be officially cleared.

He is now preparing a second application the Criminal Cases Review Commission, five years after the CCRC rejected his first request for the conviction to be referred to the Court of Appeal.

The application, due to be submitted early next year, will focus on evidence surrounding the identity parade in which a dying PC Jagger picked out Moore as the gunman.

Mr Lawson has commissioned a report from a university professor, Professor Philip Hopkins, who has previously said PC Jagger would have been in no fit state to give reliable evidence because he had been given etherbased anaesthetics, two doses or morphine and was bleeding to death.

Mr Lawson has also re-examined the statements of the officers in the police cordon which he says are “unreliable”.

“I think it is now doubtful that things happened as the police claimed including when the cordon was in position. New statements submitted by those officers in 1952 (for Moore’s failed appeal against his conviction), bring their whole conduct, reliability and truthfulness into question.”

Mr Lawson says Moore’s surviving children are all convinced of their father’s innocence and it is still not too late for the State to admit the mistake.

He says the case is still important despite the passage of time.

“I think it’s important because it’s an injustice. An injustice that should be put right and the Government should acknowledge this.

“Having met the surviving daughters (of Alfred Moore), they want their father’s name clearing.

“From what they have read they are quite happy in their own hearts that Alfred didn’t do it but they want a piece of paper from the Court of Appeal overturning the conviction. I think that should be done.”

His pending application to the CCRC is being assisted by retired crown court judge Patrick Robertshaw who retired from the bench in 2010 after presiding over criminal trials across Yorkshire.

Mr Robertshaw, whose 2012 book ‘No Smoking Gun’ concluded that the wrong man was hanged, told the Examiner that it wasn’t too late for the justice system to get the “right answer”.

He said: “If Alfred Moore was guilty and fled into his farmhouse as the prosecution alleged, the murder weapon would be available to be found within a defined and restricted area which was combed extensively over weeks by teams of police officers. It was never found.

“For me the inescapable inference is that the killer fled the scene taking the weapon with him.”

He added: “Further, Alfred Moore’s conviction was based on a fleeting glimpsed identification by one witness close to death (PC Jag-