Serious miscarriage of justice

ON VALENTINE’S Day 1988, 23-yearold Jeffrey Gafoor – who at the time worked at his family’s shop in Splott – went to Cardiff docks to find a prostitute and paid £30 to Lynette White, aged 20.

But when they got back to her flat, which had no running water or electricity, he changed his mind and asked for his money back. A row ensued and Gafoor pulled out a knife.

He stabbed Ms White more than 50 times, cutting her throat, slashing both wrists, and cutting, stabbing and slashing her face, arm and torso.

Gafoor left the dying woman and escaped from the scene.

If he had been caught by the police shortly afterwards, he would surely have been convicted and the case would not have achieved the notoriety it subsequently did.

But despite several witnesses saying they had seen a white man wearing bloodstained clothing in a distressed state outside the victim’s flat shortly after the murder, Gafoor remained a free man for 15 years.

Ten months after the murder, an alternative narrative became dominant as the police investigation veered off in a different direction.

Although the white man had not been eliminated, eight other people, seven of them black, were arrested. Three were released and five were charged with murder. All of the defendants were known to the police.

The main evidence against them came from two prostitutes, friends of Ms White. After 42 hours in police custody, they claimed they had seen five men murder her.

In 1990, three men – Tony Paris, Yusuf Abdullahi and Steven Miller – were convicted of Ms White’s murder after a trial that lasted 117 days. Two of men were acquitted.

The trio insisted on their innocence and a campaign was launched to expose what supporters saw as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice ever to be seen in Wales and the UK. When the convictions were examined by the Court of Appeal, serious flaws were soon identified.

According to Lord Taylor of Gosforth, the Lord Chief Justice at the time, Mr Miller, then 26 but with a mental age of 11, had been “bullied and hectored” for 13 hours during a “travesty of an interview”, before giving a confession implicating the two other men. The judges ruled the convictions were unsafe and unsatisfactory because recorded police interviews of Mr Miller should not have been put before the jury.

Mr Miller – Ms White’s former boyfriend – had denied the offence more than 300 times. So far as the supporters of the Cardiff Three – as they became known – were concerned, policemen under pressure to resolve a horrific crime refused to accept the repeated and emphatic denials of a man who was psychologically vulnerable. They intimidated and threatened him until he confessed.

Other promising lines of inquiry were abandoned once the police were convinced they had got their men. Within South Wales Police, there was at first a reluctance to concede that mistakes had been made. No apology was offered to the defendants whose convictions had been quashed. It was as if officers had convinced themselves the men had got off on a technicality, and it was pointless to seek other culprits.

Given the wrongly convicted men were black, the sense they were victims of a serious miscarriage of justice fed into wider concerns about the perception of institutional racism in the police, particularly after the flawed investigation into the murder of black teenager