Police delays and failings denied justice for Poppi, watchdog finds
POPPI WORTHINGTON has been denied justice by a litany of police failings, including a senior officer not wanting to spend £20,000 on forensics and others taking the weekend off, a damning report concludes today.
Poppi, who was 13 months old, died suddenly in Barrowin-Furness, Cumbria, in December 2012.
Despite her father, Paul Worthington, being a suspect “from day one”, the “unstructured and disorganised” investigation meant there was no resolution to the case, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) concluded.
The report found a blame culture in which the two senior officers, Det Supt Mike Forrester and Det Insp Amanda Sadler, tried to pass responsibility for a series of failings. Despite a 2014 fact- finding judgment concluding that Poppi’s father had probably sexually assaulted her, charges have never been brought as prosecutors said there was not enough evidence. Mr Worthington denies any wrongdoing.
Both Mr Forrester and Mrs Sadler were found to have a case to answer for gross misconduct, but Mr Forrester retired aged 48 on a full pension before disciplinary
action could be taken. Mrs Sadler, a former Miss Great Britain, was found guilty by her force and demoted to sergeant. She has also since retired.
Jerry Graham, the chief constable of Cumbria Constabulary, last night admitted that the watchdog’s report “makes for uncomfortable reading”. But he insisted changes had been made and officers and staff had been “properly trained and equipped” to conduct similar, complex investigations.
The IPCC concluded the report in March 2015 but it can only now be released as the Crown Prosecution Service has re-examined the evidence and concluded they have no “realistic pros- pect” of securing a conviction. The watchdog lays blames for the lack of evidence on Cumbria police, who on the first day let potentially crucial evidence be thrown in the bin.
Despite officers having alleged “intelligence” on Mr Worthington and despite a doctor raising concerns on the day Poppi died that she had been sexually abused, it took senior officers seven months to start a criminal investigation, risking the loss of evidence, and eight months to arrest her parents. Both were released without charge.
Mrs Sadler admitted she had suspected Mr Worthington from “day one”, but said she “didn’t feel that I had enough experience myself to make any of those decisions on my own”, whilst Mr Forrester denied he had failed to record it as a crime so that he did not have an unsolved crime on his record.
In the first explanation of the delays to be made public, Mrs Sadler gave evidence saying it was a “real shame” that nothing was done between Poppi’s death and the initial post mortem ex- amination five days later “because it was a weekend and we were off ”. It was the first in a long line of delays, and Mr Forrester claimed that he could not do anything until the full post mortem examination concluded in June 2013 that Poppi had been sexually assaulted.
He blamed staff cuts which meant they could not spend time taking statements which might not have been required, telling investigators in “an ideal world they would have obtained all the statements, but this is not an ideal world”. The report states: “D/Supt Forrester agreed that there were actions that could have been done quicker, he said he could have spent £20,000 sending everything off for forensic analysis, and they probably could have interviewed everybody in that period; however he also said to do that meant tying up resources when it was not known if there was any value in doing it.”
The IPCC concluded that there was “substantial evidence available to support the contention that the reason this case has still not reached a resolution more than two years on from the death of Poppi is because of the unstructured and disorganised approach taken by D/ Supt Forrester and DI Sadler.”
A second inquest, ordered by a High Court judge, will take place in May after the first took seven minutes to declare her death “unexplained”. Mr Forrester refused to comment yesterday.