Bob Woffinden
Journalist who was fearless in investigating and exposing convictions he was convinced were wrong
BOB WOFFINDEN, who has died aged 70, was a journalist and author who reported on and investigated alleged miscarriages of justice, from the conviction of James Hanratty to that of “the coughing major”, Charles Ingram, who won the £1 million jackpot of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in 2001 but was later convicted of cheating by getting a fellow participant to cough to alert him to the right answers.
In the years since 1962, when Hanratty was found guilty of murder and hanged at Bedford Jail, the A6 Murder Case, as it became known, generated a stream of books dedicated to examining what is one of the most controversial cases in postwar British criminal history.
On the night of August 22 1961, Michael Gregsten and Valerie Storie, were ambushed in their car by a lone gunman during an illicit tryst and forced to drive at gunpoint up the A6 to a lay-by in Bedfordshire. There, the gunman shot Gregsten dead and raped Valerie Storie before shooting her five times, leaving her for dead. Miraculously, she survived and identified Hanratty as her assailant.
But when Hanratty was convicted, misgivings were publicly voiced from the outset. The first suspect, Peter Alphon, a misfit with psychopathic tendencies, was questioned by detectives but later released, in spite of the fact that witnesses placed him close to the scene and he was to make a number of confessions over the years, claiming to have been hired as a hit-man. Hanratty, by contrast, a small-time thief with no previous history of violence, provided alibis that placed him 200 miles from the murder scene – the full details of which were not passed on to his defence. To the end, Hanratty protested his innocence.
Woffinden had become fascinated by the case when he made a documentary about it for Channel 4 in 1992 and in a subsequent book, Hanratty: The Final Verdict (1997), he came up with a new theory: that a “Central Figure” (unnamed for fear of libel action), who was in love with Gregsten’s wife, had employed Alphon to kill her husband.
In 1998 a police inquiry concluded that Hanratty had been wrongfully convicted and Woffinden collaborated with Geoffrey Bindman, the Hanratty family’s solicitor, on a submission to the Home Office requesting that the case be referred to appeal. In 2002, however, the Appeal Court ruled that a DNA test conclusively proved Hanratty’s guilt, though Woffinden continued to believe in his innocence, suggesting that the DNA might have become contaminated.
His book Bad Show (2015), written with James Plaskett, explored the case of Charles Ingram, the Army major who, with his wife, Diana, and Tecwen Whittock, a lecturer in the audience of ITV’S Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (who was accused of coughing over the right answers when the major listed the choices), was found guilty in 2003 of defrauding the television company. The conviction, Ingram claimed, had ruined his life.
Woffinden’s evidence for his innocence did not convince everyone, though his book was perhaps more interesting for the light it shed on the lengths to which some would-be contestants would go to appear on the programme. Fans were said to meet, share notes and swap tips on how to get selected; loopholes and vulnerabilities were spotted in the phone lines and the optimum times to call were decoded.
Woffinden was willing to investigate many highly contentious cases, and could claim several successes, including the overturning of the 1994 conviction of a 15-year-old boy, Philip English, for the murder of a policeman in Gateshead.
With a colleague, Richard Webster, he helped to find lawyers to work on a no-win, no-fee basis for Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, former Newcastle nursery nurses who, in 1993, were falsely accused of abusing children in their care, leading ultimately to their successfully clearing their names and winning libel damages. He also took on the case of Sion Jenkins, the deputy headmaster convicted of murdering his foster daughter, Billie-jo, and whose conviction was eventually quashed in 2004.
He befriended Jenkins and became his media adviser and campaigner, subsequently collaborating with him on an account of the murder and his treatment at the hands of the media and the criminal justice system, published in 2008.
Woffinden was good company, and always happy to share in the success of colleagues in overturning wrong convictions. In his books he took care to outline all the evidence against the convicted person, so that readers could see how the final judgment came about. It was also Woffinden who established, in a case taken to the House of Lords, that prisoners claiming to be innocent had the right to be visited by journalists.
The son of Ray Woffinden, a laboratory foreman in a plastics factory, and the former Joan Wright, a school head cook, Robert Woffinden was born on January 31 1948 and educated at King Edward VI school, Lichfield, and at Sheffield University where he read Politics.
He began in journalism at the New Musical Express, publishing two books, The Beatles Apart (1981), and The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Rock (1982, with Nick Logan). In the early 1980s he joined Yorkshire Television as a producer of its current affairs programme First Tuesday, specialising in cases involving the law and the environment.
In his first book on Britain’s criminal justice system, Miscarriages of Justice (1987), Woffinden examined cases including those of James Hanratty, Timothy Evans and the Birmingham pub bombings, claiming, among other things, that Britain’s legal authorities did not want the appeals system to work too well, in case they became inundated with appeals. “The shaming fact is,” he concluded, “that the continued incarceration of the innocent is nothing less than national policy.”
Though Woffinden wrote widely for newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, he was critical of the role of the media in criminal justice cases. In his last book, The Nicholas Cases: Casualties of Justice (2016) he explored 10 examples from the previous 20 years, all of which, in his opinion, exposed the legal system’s “implacable refusal to countenance error” and the indifference and cynicism of some parts of the media.
“It is not merely that the media fails to draw attention to wrongful convictions when they occur; it is not just that trials leading to these injustices are misleadingly reported,” he wrote, “it is that, in some instances, the media itself has played a key role in bringing about the wrongful conviction.”
Woffinden is survived by his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1980, and by their son and daughter.
Bob Woffinden, born January 31 1948, died May 1 2018