Police ignored strap clue for 20 years

A POTENTIALLY vital piece of evidence which could have unlocked the Stephen Lawrence murder case was missed by police for 20 years, it emerged yesterday.

In the aftermath of the 1993 stabbing, police wrongly logged that a handbag strap – thought to have been used as an improvised weapon – was found nearly 300ft away from the crime scene.

But in 2014, during an extensive review of the case, it emerged that the ‘crime exhibit’ was in fact just 47ft from where Stephen was attacked by the gang. The strap has now taken on added significance after state-ofthe-art forensic tests uncovered the unidentified DNA of a woman, possibly a girlfriend of one of the prime suspects.

Detectives say the mystery woman could hold vital clues to the murder of 18-year-old Stephen and last night made an impassioned plea for her to come forward

The blunder is the latest in a string of mistakes to have dogged the Met’s £50million pursuit of the A-level student’s killers.

In his 1999 public inquiry report, Sir William Macpherson blamed racist attitudes for the police’s failings and said he and his inquiry team had been ‘astonished by the lack of direction and organisation during the vital hours after the murder’.

Chris Le Pere, the senior investigator leading the Met’s on-going murder inquiry, described the latest error as an ‘honest mistake’ but added he would refer the matter to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

When David Norris, one of two men convicted of Stephen’s murder in 2012, was first arrested, officers found a hammer head attached to a strap in his home. Detectives now believe the handbag strap could be linked to him or another of the suspects.