WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?
It was an agonising dilemma: a young solicitor knew he could nail a murderer — if he broke the sacred rule of client confidentiality. Stephen made his choice — and, 40 years on, it’s come back to haunt him . . .
ALONE with his 15-year-old client in a prison cell, solicitor Stephen Chittenden realised with painful clarity that not only was the boy being unjustly framed for murder, but the real killer was close by. Like everyone else involved in the case, the fledgling lawyer was horrified by the brutal killing of 16-year-old Lynn Siddons, who was strangled and then stabbed 43 times on April 3, 1978, before being dumped in bushes beside the Trent and Mersey Canal in Barrow- onTrent, Derbyshire.
But as teenager Roy Brookes opened up about the sinister events that took place on the day she died, Chittenden, 26, was left in no doubt that it was the boy’s stepfather — who accompanied him during several interviews — who was actually responsible for the crime.
Ultimately, Chittenden found himself facing an impossible dilemma. Client confidentiality meant he was professionally bound not to disclose this information. Keeping quiet, however, would have allowed a dangerous, sadistic man to get away with murder and be free to strike again.
Torn between what he describes as ‘professional ethics and common sense’, he chose the latter, not realising that his decision would come back to haunt him nearly 40 years on.
For while the confidential file he handed over helped to convict the real killer, last week — a staggering four decades after the crime — Chittenden was formally rebuked by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for his ‘utterly unacceptable’ conduct in breaking client confidentiality.
Threatened with the prospect of being dragged in front of a disciplinary tribunal and risking a potential £2,000 fine, the 66-year-old father of three has agreed to remove himself voluntarily from the solicitors’ roll, meaning that he can never practise as a solicitor again.
It is an inglorious end to what has otherwise been a glowing career as a criminal defence lawyer and Lynn ’s family are understandably outraged. So is it fair? For, as Chittenden explained to me this week, he had nothing to gain personally by handing over his case file and, as we shall see, plenty to lose.
‘It was an impossible situation,’ says Chittenden, who now lives with his wife Jo and their two dogs in a small retirement flat in Aston- onTrent, Derbyshire.
‘Back then my mind said to me: “You have to do this.” Lynn’s family deserved justice. And people in Derby were terrified by what had happened. How could I live with myself knowing her killer got away with it and might strike again?’
Turn back the clock and the appalling paradox Chittenden found himself facing unfurls like the plot of a John Grisham thriller.
On the morning of Monday, April 3, 1978, teenager Lynn Siddons, who lived with her grandmother Florence in a council house in Sinfin, a working-class suburb of Derby, went out shopping and never returned. Her body was found six days later.
Within 48 hours, 15-year- old Roy Brookes, whom Lynn had planned to meet that day, had been arrested and charged with murder. By the time Chittenden got to see him, the ‘frail’ teenager, who had a low IQ, had confessed to murdering Lynn.
CHITTENDEN, now 66, likens the culture surrounding police interviews at the time to the TV drama Life On Mars. Roy was interviewed without a solicitor or a tape recorder.
‘It was the 1970s,’ he says. ‘Detectives could do what they wanted. Police were obsessed back then with getting “the confession” and that’s what they got from the lad after his stepfather, who was trying to set him up, had spoken to him.’
But right from the start, Chittenden, a newly qualified solicitor assigned to the first murder his small provincial law firm had dealt with, had doubts that Roy was the killer.
For a start, he was smaller than Lynn — barely 4ft 10in tall and 6 st in weight — and yet her killer had managed to drag her body through deep undergrowth before stabbing her over and over again in a frenzied attack.
Chittenden shared his concerns with the barrister assigned to the case. At one stage, the two lawyers returned to the murder scene with a female barrister to piece together the crime. ‘We even tried to drag the female barrister through the undergrowth to see if Roy could have done it,’ says Chittenden. ‘Lynn was bigger than Roy. We all looked at each other and said: “No way.” ’
Getting Roy to admit he had lied in his three- quarter-page confession was another matter.
‘I couldn’t get anything beyond “Yes Sir. No Sir,” ’ says Chittenden.
In desperation, he turned to the psychiatrist instructed to prepare Roy’s psychological reports — and when the teenager finally opened up on the eve of his trial, he confessed what had happened.
His stepfather Michael Brookes, a man obsessed with Jack the Ripper, had told Roy to get Lynn on her own down by the canal. Brookes followed them down there, said Roy, and grabbed Lynn from behind.
HE ORDERED Roy to stab the girl but after the teenager proved reluctant, he strangled her, stuffed her mouth with water and mud and, as she was dying, seized the knife and stabbed her again and again himself.
Brookes told Roy that if he told anyone what had happened, he would kill his mother, Dot. If he kept quiet and took the blame, however, he would have a new bike when it was all over.
Much of this was given as evidence at Roy’s trial in November 1978 where Michael Brookes appeared as a witness for the prosecution. While giving evidence, Brookes found himself accused of murder by Roy’s defence barrister but denied it.
Roy was acquitted by the jury but despite everything now pointing to Brookes, Derbyshire Police refused to reopen the case.
‘They were absolutely hopeless,’ says Chittenden.
This also seemed to be the view of detectives from Merseyside Police who later carried out an independent investigation into the Derbyshire force after complaints from the Siddons family. They called for an official inquiry into the case but this was rejected by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Behind the scenes, however, Lynn’s indomitable grandmother Flo, a former shoe factory worker, was relentlessly piecing together evidence, determined to get Michael Brookes put behind bars.
‘At the time there was a lot of anger and outrage about the murder,’ says Chittenden. ‘People were marching in the streets demanding justice. The family wanted answers.’
Derby North MP Phillip Whitehead begged Chittenden to help Lynn’s devastated family secure a civil conviction against Brookes.
He was lobbied by investigative journalist Paul Foot, who had taken a close interest in the case. Lynn’s family’s solicitor also requested Roy’s case file.
Chittenden thought long and hard about what to do. At the time, the railwayman’s son was just starting as a solicitor, having read law at Hull University before joining a firm in his home town, Derby, in 1973.
He consulted his wife, Jo, about the possible consequences if he was to hand the file over.
‘I told her that I might be struck off,’ he says. ‘ We had three young children at the time but we both agreed that I had to do something.
‘If he’d killed someone else, I would never have been able to live with it. Eventually I was persuaded to let the papers go and let someone have a look at them.’
While Roy’s claim that it was his
stepfather who had carried out the murder had come out in court, the family’s solicitors wanted Roy’s second statement — which had implicated Brookes — to strengthen their case in the civil court.
When he handed the file over in 1979, Chittenden thought it would only ever be used to bring a criminal prosecution against Brookes.
He had no idea that the Siddons family’s solicitors planned a civil prosecution for assault and battery against both Roy and Michael Brookes. In civil courts, cases are proved on a ‘ balance of probabilities’, whereas in criminal courts the standard of proof is ‘ beyond reasonable doubt’.
‘I thought they’d have the file for a while, have a read of it and try to persuade the police to prosecute Brookes,’ explains Chittenden.
‘I was naive. I had no idea what they were planning. If I’d thought I might have been putting my client at risk, I would never have done it. I didn’t get Roy’s permission.
‘They were his papers. But I did what I thought was right. I was a very young lawyer at the start of my career.’
The civil case finally came to court in 1991. Roy was found not liable while Brookes was ordered to pay damages of £10,000 to the Siddons family since, in the view of the judge, he had murdered Lynn. Brookes never paid the family the money.
That ruling paved the way for a criminal trial in 1996 at which Michael Brookes was finally found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. For years, nothing was said about what Chittenden had done, not even by the firm of solicitors who represented Roy during the civil case and who became aware that Chittenden had transgressed professional rules by handing over the confidential file.
Indeed, nobody ever complained or reported him to the Law Society. Nevertheless, Chittenden says he spent the rest of his career ‘looking around the corner’, wondering if he would ever be disciplined and grappling with his conscience as he tried to decide if he had done the right thing.
Last year, when he finally retired from his law firm, The Smith Partnership, he decided to explain the dilemma he had faced to his local paper, the Derby Evening Telegraph. ‘I wanted to get it off my chest after carrying it around for so many decades,’ he says. ‘It was just something that I felt I had to do.’
The soul-baring interview he gave came to the attention of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which ordered an investigation.
Last week, they announced that ‘ these actions . . . constituted conduct that is completely unacceptable on the part of a solicitor’. However, the organisation did concede that he was not motivated by personal gain ‘but in the greater interests of justice’.
Chittenden, who suffers from heart arrhythmia and was fitted with a pacemaker last year, believes the rules should be changed to allow for exceptional circumstances such as those in which he found himself.
‘Medics are allowed to breach confidentiality if they feel that there is a risk of harm to others,’ he says. ‘ Surely, a solicitor withholding evidence that points to a killer is harming the interests of justice.’
Despite the grave repercussions of giving that interview, he insists he has no regrets about speaking out. It was a way of drawing a line under a hideous murder and an extraordinary series of events which have left a shadow over everyone involved.
MICHAEL Brookes is still serving life in Wormwood Scrubs. Roy Brookes changed his name and married but Chittenden has no idea what became of him.
Lynn Siddons’s grandmother Flo worked until she was in her 80s to raise money to fight her legal campaign and died aged 92 in 2007, having seen her granddaughter’s killer brought to justice.
As for Chittenden’s verdict on his otherwise blemish-free career, he says: ‘I never imagined that it would end like this. It’s a sad way to bow out.’
Legal purists might argue that in breaking the sacred vow of client confidentiality, he has been the architect of his own downfall.
Richard Nelson, of the Lawyers Defence Group, which offers advice to other solicitors on professional matters, says: ‘Our rules are onerous but they are there for a reason. That reason is to protect our clients and the interest of justice.
‘ There are exceptions in extreme cases, for example those involving terrrorism or where there is a threat of serious harm to another person. We are not a profession that goes around keeping huge secrets that put other people in danger.
‘The interesting thing with this case is that Stephen Chittenden appears to be arguing that there was a risk and that someone else might have killed, but this is not an argument he put to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and he doesn’t appear to have had specific information about that risk.
‘He appears to have volunteered the files without taking advice. And above all he should have asked Roy Brookes’s permission.’
Others might take a kinder view and say that while Chittenden was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of legal regulations, ultimately his actions helped to put an evil killer behind bars.