Man’s second trial for 1986 schoolgirl killings

A man has gone on trial for the second time accused of molesting and strangling two schoolgirls in a woodland den 32 years ago.

Nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway went missing while playing near their home in Brighton, East Sussex, on October 9 1986.

A massive police search led to the “grim discovery” of the friends’ bodies the next day, in a clearing in Wild Park, on the South Downs about half a mile from their homes.

Local roofer Russell Bishop, then aged 20, was charged with their murders but was cleared after a trial at Lewes Crown Court in 1987.

Prosecutor Brian Altman QC told the Old Bailey that Bishop’s earlier acquittal was quashed at the Court of Appeal in light of new evidence following advances in DNA testing.

The girls’ families, including Karen’s mother Michelle Hadaway, sat in court for the start of Bishop’s second trial for the murders.

Mr Altman said: “Evidence of the re-evaluation of the science available at the time of the original trial and new science, we suggest, proves that Russell Bishop was, to the exclusion of anyone else, responsible for the murders of the two little girls.”

He said the motive for the murders was “sexual and paedophilic”.

As well as the DNA evidence, the case against Bishop rests on his movements, his actions and what he had to say to the police, including “significant lies” he told at the time, jurors heard.

Mr Altman said Bishop knew important details about the scene that “only the killer could have known”.

While some of the witnesses are now dead or too ill to give evidence, their accounts can be read to jurors.

Bishop, now 52, has denied two charges of murder.

Pictures: PA/Sussex Police. Russell Bishop is on trial at the Old Bailey, accused of the murders of Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in 1986.