Serious miscarriage of justice before true killer was caught
The murder of Lynette White 30 years ago cannot be forgotten, says Chief reporter Martin Shipton
ON Valentine’s Day in 1988, 23-year-old Jeffrey Gafoor – who at the time worked in 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 blacks were charged with murder.
All 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 the other men named as the killers were acquitted.
The men 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 or the UK as a whole.
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 that the men had got off on a technicality, and that it was pointless to seek other culprits.
Given that the wrongly convicted men were black, the sense that 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 Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993.
Investigative journalist Satish Sekar became interested in the case, and over a number of years campaigned for samples from the crime scene to be tested in line with the latest developments in DNA technology. The samples were tiny and the discussions highly technical and complex, with Sekar drawing on international expertise to press his argument.
Eventually South Wales Police commissioned the tests and were able to run the results through the DNA database of convicted criminals.
A relative of Gafoor’s provided an extremely close match, and it wasn’t long before the true murderer was identified. He pleaded guilty and – in an irony that was not lost on Sekar – was sentenced to life imprisonment, but with a tariff that was shorter than the original tariff given to two members of the Cardiff Three for the same murder.
Sekar wrote to the Law Commission – which reviews the basis of sentencing – arguing it was wrong that there was no specific penalty which could be imposed under existing arrangements on killers who stood by and allowed innocent people to be jailed for the crimes they had committed.
With the real offender at last in prison, South Wales Police decided there were now grounds to re-examine the original investigation to see if the officers involved in the case had been guilty of crimes. The force also took steps to liaise with the Cardiff Three and activists who had supported their cause.
Yet after years of re-investigation, it remains the case that the only people jailed have been the original three defendants who were later absolved of guilt and three witnesses in the original trial who claimed they had been bullied by the police into giving perjured evidence.
Twelve former police officers were charged with perverting the course of justice and eight of them went on trial at Swansea Crown Court in 2011.
The trial was halted by the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, after it transpired that documents which should have been served on the police defendants had not been, but had gone missing.
It was suggested that the boxes of evidence had been destroyed on the instructions of the officer overseeing the re-investigation, although the relevant material was later found in a police storage facility.
Further inquiries – this time into the collapse of the criminal case against the police officers – concluded that while there had been human error, there had been no misconduct.
Yusuf Abdullahi never came to terms with having been wrongly convicted of murder. He became a heavy user of hard drugs and died aged 49 in 2011.
While the true killer of Lynette White was caught, thanks largely to the dogged persistence of an awkward journalist, it can’t really be said that a terrible wrong has been remedied.
The Court of Appeal may have quashed the convictions of the Cardiff Three on the basis of police misconduct, but no blame has been attached to any particular officers.