• HOMEPAGE
• ABOUT
• ARCHIVE
• LINKS
• ROBERT BROWN
• CONTACT

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: TIME WON'T HEAL: AN INVESTIGATION
By Eamonn Oneill

The village of Mottram on the east side of Manchester is a perfect retirement location. Its streets are clear, its houses are well kept and its shops are quiet. There's even a tabby cat stretching in the sun. This is where former detective inspector Jack Butler, once of the Greater Manchester Police, calls home. He lives here with his wife Beryl in a tranquil section of the small town.

It's 11 o'clock on a weekday morning and I sit in a car with a photographer outside Butler's front door. Neighbours stare out of windows and slow-walk their dogs past our vehicle. Although for the last 13 years I've been investigating Butler's role in what is generally regarded as the longest ongoing miscarriage of justice case in British legal history, this is the first time I have attempted to confront Butler in the flesh. He knows who I am, however, from terse written and telephone exchanges we've had down the years. But key questions remain unanswered. Which is why I'm here.


Butler remains at the centre of the case of Robert Brown, the Glaswegian wrongfully convicted in January 1977 at Manchester Crown Court for the murder of 51-year-old, Annie Walsh. In November 2002, Brown was released from prison after serving more than 25 years for a crime the Appeal Court judges accepted he did not commit. He re-entered the life he had left behind in 1977 without a stain on his character. His QC, Ben Emmerson, told the court earlier that day that DI Jack Butler reigned over a corrupt culture in the CID HQ at Manchester's Platt Lane police station. Butler's name was vilified in the proceedings and the entire case collapsed when the judges stated: ''In our judgement, this verdict cannot be regarded as safe. We could not possibly be sure, on what we have heard, that the jury [in 1977], had they known what we know now, would have reached the same verdict. It is, to put it at its lowest, a possibility that they might have reached a quite different verdict.''

But the 1977 jury didn't know that Butler was already a crook when he testified before them. His crimes predated the Robert Brown murder trial. In 1983 he would be brought to justice for them and sentenced to four years' imprisonment on charges of corruption and perverting the course of justice.
For more than 25 years, Brown consistently maintained that Butler was central to his entire erroneous conviction, but his claims fell on deaf - or at least selectively deaf - ears. Two years ago he was finally heard. In 2002 the Appeal Court in London accepted Butler forced Brown to sign a confession which was cobbled together and was manifestly bogus. (Two top linguistic experts from separate British universities would completely agree on this point at Brown's successful appeal.) They also accepted that Butler had played a lead role in stripping and punching Brown in a continuous 32-hour interrogation during which the suspect had no solicitor present. ''Only guilty men ask for lawyers,'' Brown was told by Butler when he asked.

''He punched me in the abdomen in that first interview,'' says Brown, who now lives on the south side of Glasgow. ''Later, he hit me in the back and another officer told him to stop doing that because I was about to be taken in and placed on an ID parade. At that particular time they'd already stripped me naked and they had me doing step-ups on a police station chair while they laughed at the size of my genitals.''

Brown's girlfriend at the time, a 16-year-old named Cathy Shaw, told me in 1993 that she vividly recalled Butler in particular from the group of officers who arrested her 19-year-old boyfriend. She recollected being stuck in one room at a police station while her boyfriend was taken into another. ''Butler came in and told me Robert had confessed to murder,'' she said. ''I was 16. I didn't know what to do. We were kids. I knew he hadn't committed the murder because he was with me that night.'' Cathy Shaw died shortly after our interview from an alcohol-related illness. Her family said she never recovered from the trauma of losing her boyfriend when he was wrongfully convicted of murder.

For more than 25 years the figure of Jack Butler loomed large in the Robert Brown case. But for those of us involved in it he was both an enigmatic and a frustrating figure. While new incriminating information about Butler was unearthed and as case hearings came and went down the years, Butler himself never broke his silence. Neither has he ever taken legal action to counter the terrible allegations made against him about his conduct during the interrogation of Brown. The only image of him from the era when Brown's erroneous conviction occurred showed a bald-headed, fortysomething figure striding purposefully out of court wearing a cheap grey suit, shirt and tie and holding a ubiquitous cigarette in his hands. He looked like an extra out of The Sweeney, the top UK cop show of the time.

In 1992 when I was making a documentary for Scottish television about the case, I approached him over the phone for a comment on Robert Brown's claims of innocence. He answered the call and spoke clearly, slowly and with impressive control: he was obviously a man used to steering difficult exchanges. He told me: ''I can recall nothing which would make me consider it [Robert Brown's conviction] to be unsound. The interrogation was properly conducted and in line with police procedures.'' When I tried to press him further about Brown's claims of being force-stripped and beaten, he answered: ''I will regard any further approaches from you as harassment.''
But two subsequent pieces of evidence emerged which corroborated Brown's claims of beatings from Butler. The first, as mentioned, came from his old girlfriend Cathy Shaw, who also recalled meeting Brown in the cells and listening in horror as he whispered to her that Butler had attacked him and forced him to sign a bogus confession to Annie Walsh's murder. The second was a secret Home Office memo I was shown by a former prison psychiatrist who'd read Brown's files. There, buried in the text, was an oblique but telling reference to Brown's doctor having noted that he was showing tenderness in the abdominal region, which meant a beating couldn't be ruled out.

Armed with these new pieces of evidence, I contacted Butler again, this time in writing, in early 1993. He replied in a curt letter a few weeks later in April saying: ''I have no reason to believe that the conviction of Robert BROWN was unsound.'' The surname was printed in capital letters, in the style used by police officers who wrote official reports. Even in disgraced retirement, Butler still resorted to his old ways. He also informed me: ''I made it clear that I would only discuss the matter at a police station in the presence of a senior police officer '' He said he'd also need to see his old notes as well. Oddly, he also added at the end that any further correspondence on the issue should be sent to the chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police. It seemed that Jack Butler, the policeman jailed for corruption and lying and who'd brought terrible shame on the entire force, still regarded his former colleagues as a shield that he could hide behind. Later, their lack of help in the case lent credence to his instincts.

Almost a full decade on, as Brown's November 2002 Appeal Court date approached, BBC Scotland cameras found a very different Jack Butler in a Manchester car park. Gone was the bull-necked strident character that faced the cameras with an air of arrogance in 1983. Now the figure was diminished in more ways than one: shrunken, hesitant and worried-looking, he muttered something about wanting only ''justice for all '' before disappearing into his car and fleeing the lens.

Although he'd every reason to be worried at the time, Butler must have sought some comfort in the fact the records show that in no miscarriage of justice case in UK legal history has a police officer ever been jailed for his or her crimes. The litany of cases now reads like a ship's log: the Birmingham Six; the Guildford Four; the Bridgewater Three; Judith Ward; Stefan Kiszko and many others.

Yet, in none of these terrible cases - where police malpractice and outright fraud played significant roles in swaying justice - did the police involved ever find themselves facing the same justice their victims did. Reading the case histories produces a vision of a peculiarly British form of justice: erroneously convict someone; free them with great reluctance; leave them afterwards, in one victim's words, ''like bin bags of garbage'' on the street outside the Appeal Court with no help or treatment; refuse to apologise for the situation in any shape or form; then, in a twisted insult, charge board and lodgings for the time they spent behind bars for something they didn't do.

And, as an addendum, never be able to muster the legal wherewithal to arrest and charge the corrupt police who caused the wrongful convictions in the first place. And, in many cases, because no police are convicted and crucially no-one is caught when the case is reopened, a low-level whispering campaign attaching guilt to those freed by the Appeal Court remains.

Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six wrongfully convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, describes his feeling of utter frustration: ''We got the nearest to policemen ever being tried for what they did in our case. They were taken as far as their fifth and sixth court appearance, then suddenly the judge ruled that the proceedings against them all had to be stopped because of 'adverse media publicity'. That was a joke. I mean, the police were on TV talking about us, showing our photos before we even got into court to face charges.''

In the case of the Birmingham Six, the accused were told to their faces by the policemen interrogating and brutalising them that they knew they had the wrong men, as Paddy Hill recalls. ''They said, 'We know you didn't do the bombings, we don't care who did the bombings, our job is to get a confession and get a conviction because this keeps the public off our gaffer's backs and that keeps the gaffers off our backs.' To this day, those words are burned right into my brain.''

The same problem of potential ''adverse publicity'' stopped the detectives who violently obtained bogus confessions from the Guildford Four from ever facing a trial. Paddy Hill, whose campaigning group MOJO (Miscarriages of Justice Organisation) has been intimately involved in the Robert Brown case in recent years, is sceptical about Butler ever answering for this miscarriage of justice. ''I think the chances of Jack Butler ever being brought to trial are very remote,'' he says. ''I'm doubtful about it happening. The trend since the late 1990s has been for the Crown Prosecution Service to avoid bringing charges against ex-police officers even where there's been overwhelming evidence.

''In fact, to my knowledge, never has there been a case where a provably corrupt police officer from a miscarriage of justice case has ever been committed for trial.''
The tipping point in Brown's campaign for freedom and total exoneration probably came when a hidden document called the Topping Report suddenly surfaced in early 2002. This report was named after former detective chief superintendent Peter Topping, the then 40-year-old high-flying troubleshooter brought into the Greater Manchester Police in 1980 to nail the corruption which had been endemic in the force for years. For the best part of three years, he and his hand-picked team trawled the files and sifted through the evidence in an effort to weed out the bad cops from the good ones.

One of the names which kept popping up was DI Jack Butler who, at the time, ruled over the CID at Platt Lane police station on the city's tough south side. One high-ranking colleague of his from that era told me anonymously: ''Jack Butler was an effective operator in the old-fashioned sense of the term '' The clear inference was that he got plenty of convictions but at a cost to the rules and regulations.

When Brown made his 2001-2 appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have his case sent back to the Court of Appeal, neither he nor his legal team knew the Topping Report even existed. Nor did they know it contained the explosive evidence which would free him - material which stated that DI Jack Butler's 1983 conviction was linked to other crimes committed before Brown's 1977 murder conviction.

This meant the jury in the 1977 Annie Walsh murder trial had believed a policeman later proven to be a liar and a crook. Brown had told the court his confession was nonsense. Anyone reading it in detail would have arrived at the same conclusion - but that meant also believing the police had told lies.

What the bogus confession said was that on a cold January day in 1977 Brown was meant to have met Annie Walsh, in Hulme near Manchester, and walked her home. A witness claimed to have seen them together and identified an accent which might have been Irish or Scottish. Later, according to the confession, Brown battered Walsh to death in her own flat after a botched attempt to steal her purse. The confession was total nonsense: the eye-witness evidence was regarded as completely unreliable at the trial; almost half a dozen other local people saw Walsh alone in the hour before she died - no young man was to be seen accompanying her in the claustrophobic setting of the massive council flats where she lived; no evidence of a last meal of tea and biscuits described by Brown in his bogus confession was found during the postmortem; and finally, the alleged stolen handbag was - had the police bothered to look - clearly visible in the scene of crime photos their own forensic man had taken.

The jury had a choice who to believe: Brown or the police. It wasn't a difficult choice. The sight of the poorly dressed and patently immature Robert Brown, who kept repeating his claims of beatings and intimidation, paled in comparison to the cast of upright officers who took the stand and swore on the Bible that the interrogation had been above board and that Brown had spontaneously confessed to the murder of Walsh. They'd even suppressed forensic evidence which might have brought the real suspect to trial. Brown was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years for a crime he did not commit.
He emerged a quarter of a century later, a prematurely aged, thin 45-year-old who needed to - and still does - wear tinted glasses because harsh prison lights have permanently damaged his eyesight.

The wheel of fate was to turn on Butler, though. In 1983, six years after Brown's conviction and in the very same court room within Manchester's Crown Court, DI Jack Butler was finally imprisoned having been found guilty of the charges of corruption and perverting the course of justice.

No-one connected the two cases until 2002, when the Topping Report revealed the full extent of the corruption in the GMP during the 1970s, even before Brown's trial. It wasn't for want of trying. In 1992, I wrote to and visited the head of the CID in Manchester, asking about information the police force had linking the jailing of Butler with Brown's case. They denied they had any knowledge which would link the two. Inquiries to the then Home Secretary Michael Howard at the Home Office elicited the same reply. ''He was jailed in a separate matter,'' I was repeatedly told, over the phone and in writing.

Yet we now know that the Topping Report was sitting in a file in the offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for that entire time. Only when the Criminal Cases Review Commission accessed it did its explosive findings come to light and Brown was released. Astonishingly, even since Brown's release, that report has remained protected by a Public Interest Immunity Certificate - a so-called ''Gagging Order'' - which prevents its contents from ever becoming public.

In recent weeks however, I have been shown long excerpts from the Topping Report. It clearly indicates that, at the time, it was written the police had enough evidence to not only send Butler to trial - which they did - but to unpick many of the other cases he'd worked on and show he had caused miscarriages of justice. Yet no alarm bells ever rang. There was silence for 20 years, even though many of those involved with the report - its contributors, instigators, readers and political masters - probably knew Brown was asking about its central figure, Jack Butler, for two decades in letters and petitions.

The CCRC produced its own excerpt from the report which, unlike the sections I've read, can be legally produced for public consumption. Among various references it states that in 1980 Topping believed: ''Butler, from the onset, has been suspected of involvement in this corruption Butler is sharp and full of animal cunning.'' At Brown's appeal in November 2002 his QC Ben Emmerson stated quite clearly in open court that Jack Butler was ''a deeply corrupt'' officer.

The author of that secret report is former detective chief superintendent Peter Topping, now aged 64 and living in retirement in the north of Scotland. He has never before spoken about the contents of the report, but he is now willing to speak on the record about the Brown case and the role his report had in freeing the man at the centre of the miscarriage of justice case. During an hour-long conversation, he also speaks frankly about the other man central to this issue - the disgraced ex-DI Jack Butler.
''I knew nothing about the Robert Brown case until very recently,'' he says. ''But we did look at Jack Butler in great detail for my report. It was written against a very difficult backdrop. The report was also written after a very long investigation. Witnesses were difficult. It was difficult to get action taken. It was difficult to get the police into court as well. You get a hard time from the 'system'. When you go after people of power and wealth then it comes back at you. You can also understand that some people simply don't want to get involved in these kinds of inquiries. I dug hard and deep into Jack Butler. But I have to say, we were not looking at his past cases. The investigation I ran was angled in a separate way.''

In fact, from reading the Topping Report extracts, it's clear the author was concerned with the dodgy goings on at Platt Lane police station, from which Butler ran his CID scams. ''I never associated [this] with the Robert Brown case,'' says Topping, ''I can see how it [the report] has become important but I didn't think it'd become pivotal in the future.''
The former detective chief superintendent vehemently defends his report and denies categorically that, at the time of writing, anyone deliberately failed to spot the connection to Brown's case. ''I don't think they'd cover it up,'' he says. ''After Jack Butler was convicted they never thought retrospectively.''

He says that after he finished writing it, his report had a small confidential circulation before it was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, where it was - deliberately or carelessly - buried for years. He adds that when Brown was released in November 2002 by the Appeal Court, he called up an ex-colleague and asked him if he recalled anything from the investigation into Butler and the other issues in the Topping Report which connected the two. ''They said, 'No, nothing about the Robert Brown case came into our area.'''

Both men were mistaken.

I have discovered there was something of enormous significance about the Robert Brown case sitting right on Peter Topping's patch the entire time he was investigating Butler - something he never spotted.

One of former detective chief superintendent Topping's main investigating officers was a policeman named Christopher Baythorpe. He was a time-served CID man and Topping respected him. For three years he helped Topping investigate the terrible corruption perpetrated by Butler. Yet, not once during those 36 months did Baythorpe tell his boss that he had worked beside Butler during the Robert Brown murder inquiry.

Now, in 2004, it's an accepted fact of law that Brown was beaten up and forced into signing a bogus confession, a process Baythorpe played a full role in - either as a participant or witness. Within three years, he had the chance to tell Topping that this had happened and that an innocent young man had been convicted of a murder he hadn't committed - but he didn't. He stayed silent. So the Topping Report came and went.

No-one - it is claimed - linked Butler's known crimes which were charted in that report with the Annie Walsh case Robert Brown had been sent down for. Christopher Baythorpe is now dead. But if we safely assume he played a role in the wrongful conviction of Brown, we can understand he wasn't going to blow the whistle on his old mentor, Butler, when he found himself investigating him. That would have ended Baythorpe's career too. So he kept his mouth shut.

When I first speak to Topping, he is still under the illusion that nothing linked his report and the Robert Brown case. Then I tell him Baythorpe had been a full participant in the Annie Walsh case and witnessed Butler's violence and corruption. There is a sudden pause as Topping absorbs this news. ''Oh dear '' he says finally. ''I'm sorry, I never knew that.''

I ask if he is shocked at Butler's involvement in the Robert Brown miscarriage of justice case and he replies: ''Well, he was accused [in 1983] of handling evidence improperly, so it might follow that he could do it in another matter.''

Back in 2002, I was approached by William Brown, a Manchester taxi driver, who explained how Butler had physically attacked him in an interview room when he'd turned up voluntarily at a police station to give evidence. Butler tried to force him to confess to a crime he'd never committed. This is just one isolated incident. The Topping Report, and its author's own instincts, suggest there may be more.
And so there remains a fundamental question in 2004 that should have been addressed in 1983: why not examine all of Butler's old files in case more miscarriage of justice cases emerge?

Back in Mottram, the man at the centre of all these allegations seems to have undergone a character change since the days when he strode out of court to brazenly face the press while puffing on a cigarette. Now, he refuses to answer letters about the case or come to his front door. His wife, Beryl, answers when I come calling and shouts into my face: ''We've no comment, go away and I'm going to call the police.''

Despite sitting in a car for half an hour waiting on the officers Mrs Butler threatens to call, no police car shows up. Instead, my mobile phone rings and when I answer I hear the low, carefully polite tones of former DI Jack Butler.

In the wake of Robert Brown's release in 2002 the West Yorkshire Police were then asked by the Police Complaints Commission [now replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission] to examine the role of the Greater Manchester Police to see if anything illegal had been done during the 1977 case. To date, despite repeated requests, the West Yorkshire Police and the IPCC refuse to say whether they are going to charge Butler, or indeed whether they've even interviewed him.

When I answer my phone to Butler, I ask him immediately if he has been interviewed by the West Yorkshire Police. ''I will not comment on this case until I've had the benefit of the West Yorkshire Police notifying me whether or not they've completed their inquiries,'' he answers carefully.

I then ask him whether he still maintains the bogus 1977 confession he obtained from Robert Brown is still valid. ''I refer you to my early 1990s letter which I sent to you which still stands in its entirety,'' he replies. He does, then, believe the confession was accurate - that Brown was guilty of Annie Walsh's murder, despite having been freed by the highest appeal court in the land.

Only when I ask Butler how he felt being labelled a ''deeply corrupt individual'' in that very appeal court, does he suddenly fall silent. Listening to his hoarse breathing down the phone line it's clear that his own shame - if not that visited violently by him on Robert Brown - still clearly haunts him. He still regards himself as an ex-policeman with some respect and authority, not an ex-convict stripped bare by an extremely public form of justice. The lull is broken, however, when he suggests to me that his personal story ''goes a lot deeper'' than anyone knows.

It's surreal: the policeman judged to have caused one of the worst miscarriage of justice cases in British legal history is himself trying to claim he is a victim. He then says he's got nothing on his conscience he wants to discuss and that is as far as Brown goes, ''I wish the man no ill will whatsoever''.

The conversation ends when he asks me to leave his front door. ''What's paramount for me is to protect my wife and my family,'' he says plaintively.

I drive off minutes later and leave him and his family in a state of peace that his victims - dead and alive - have never had the luxury of knowing.

Back in Glasgow 24 hours later, Robert Brown, who lost most of his family while in prison and whose mother Margaret died of cancer within a year of his release, is appalled at, but wearily resigned to, Butler's remarks. ''It's taken the man a year and a half to come and say something,'' he says. ''He never gave me the chance to say 'No comment'. I'd have been punched by him if I'd said that to one of his questions. They don't want to take Jack Butler to court in case they have to disclose the Topping Report, which will mean more miscarriages of justice coming to light. There was a time I'd have liked to have killed Jack Butler, but not any more. I feel sorry for him. And nauseated when I hear his name.''

In February 2003, and in light of Brown's release, the Annie Walsh murder inquiry was reopened by the Greater Manchester Police. But it was recently quietly closed down because, as I was told by the force's official spokesperson, ''no significant new evidence was identified''.

When I asked if this could be taken to mean no new suspects figured in their inquiries, they didn't answer my question. It fits into the same pattern as all the other miscarriage of justice cases: no new suspect - which breeds the terrible gossip that maybe they got it right the first time.

So now we're left in a position where no-one in authority can explain why Brown served more than 25 years for something he didn't do; nor can they explain why it's excusable to charge him bed and board for that period; and they can't say why the reopened murder inquiry has also failed. Nor can they confirm whether Butler has even been questioned about his role in the whole affair.

They want us to forget it ever happened.

But there is one fact that Greater Manchester Police was only too happy to inform me of. Ex-DI Jack Butler - convicted, jailed, and named and shamed in the Appeal Court - is, in 2004, still in receipt of his full police pension. No wonder life seems good in leafy Mottram.



The Timeline
January 1977 Annie Walsh, a 51-year-old spinster, is found bludgeoned to death in her council flat in Hulme.

May 1977 CID detectives arrest Robert Brown, a
19-year-old Scot, in connection with the murder. Brown is then subjected to 32 hours of questioning. DI Jack Butler co-signs Brown's resulting ''confession''.

October 1977 Brown stands trial for the murder of Annie Walsh at Manchester's Crown Court and is sentenced to life imprisonment.

1980 Superintendent Peter Topping, pictured above, starts to investigate claims of endemic corruption within the Greater Manchester Police. The subsequent Topping Report is immediately protected by a Public Interest Immunity Certificate.

1983 Former DI Jack Butler is sentenced to four years at Manchester Crown Court for corruption and perverting the course of justice.

1992-3 Home Secretary Michael Howard claims that the Butler conviction has no link to the safety of the Brown conviction.

1993 Butler tells journalist Eamonn O'Neill in writing that the investigation of Brown followed standard police procedures.

2002 Brown's case is referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

November 2002 Brown is freed by the Court of Appeal in London.

Summer 2003 Brown is granted interim compensation of (pounds) 100,000.

Autumn 2003 Brown is told he will be charged around (pounds) 100,000 for ''board and lodgings'' for the years he spent in jail.

September 2004 The Herald discovers that one of the policemen who worked with the former Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping on his investigation of the Manchester Police was involved in the questioning of Brown. The Independent Police Complaints Commission refuses to state whether former DI Jack Butler has even been interviewed in the wake of the quashing of Brown's conviction despite being called ''deeply corrupt'' by the Appeal Court. Butler confirms to The Herald that he still believes Brown committed Annie Walsh's murder - an assertion he could be sued for.

The making of a false confession
The Robert Brown confession to the murder of Annie Walsh barely stretches to one and a half pages. It's unknown whose handwriting it's in - but it is not Brown's. He was barely able to sign his name. It is co-signed by Greater Manchester Police detectives including George Bethill (cited in the Appeal Court in 2002 for misrepresenting in writing key forensic evidence in the case) and former DI Jack Butler, later jailed on corruption charges. The evidence of top UK linguistics experts was given at Brown's successful appeal in November 2002. They concluded that the confession wasn't spontaneously given by Brown after a legitimate interrogation. Instead, it was stitched together from answers to disjointed questions gathered by the officers during a marathon question-and-answer session during which Brown was not allowed to have legal representation.

The statement: 19 May 1977
What follows below is Robert Brown's false confession

"I was coming back from the market centre and I met Annie. I was near the bingo hall. We walked up to Charles Barry Crescent together. I asked her if I could carry her bags and she said ''yes''. I knew Annie from the White Horse, and her bags looked heavy for her. That's why I offered to help her. I had no intention to do nothing bad. I had a cup of tea in her flat, about 45 minutes or maybe more, I can't remember. Annie went into the bedroom and I decided to steal her bag. She came out of the room and caught me with the bag. She got in front of me and I pushed her to get out. She went over a chair and I picked something up like an ornament or a candlestick, and hit her two or three times when she got up. Then [she] fell down and didn't move. I didn't know she was dead. I didn't mean to kill her. "

I went into the kitchen and I was frightened. I can't remember exactly wha t I did. I might have tried the meter, but I didn't get any money. I took her shopping bag. It was plastic. I had no money and I had decided to steal what I could, but I was so frightened by the mess and blood I just ran past Irene's (a neighbour) and down to the flat below. I put the bag and the ornament down the chute. I didn't even open the bag. I then left the flats down the stairs
I can't remember much after that. I was covered in blood, my jeans and a blue Parka coat and a shirt were full of blood. I don't remember how late it was, but I must have gone to Cathy Goodman (whom Brown lodged with) if she says so, because she wouldn't tell lies. I didn't hear about the murder until the electric man called at Trice's flat (Tricia Malone, a friend of Brown and his girlfriend Cathy Shaw). He told us about the murder in Charles Berry Crescent. I didn't think it was me because I didn't think Annie was dead.

© Eamonn O'Neill for The Herald Magazine

Robert Brown leaves the Court of Appeal, London on November 13th 2002. He is flanked on left by his lawyer Robert Lizar and myself, Eamonn O'Neill, on right.

Newspaper Links

SYSTEM WILL TRY TO KEEP ME CAGED UP

THERE WAS NO APOLOGY

FREEDOM FIGHTER

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: TIME WON'T HEAL: AN INVESTIGATION

Television Links

For links to BBC Scotland's Frontline Homepage – scroll down list and click on link for each programme: :

Frontline: ‘True Confessions' (April 2004)

Frontline: ‘The Case That Jack Built': (Sept 2002)

Frontline: ‘Free At Last': (Nov 2002)

Below is the link to BBC Scotland's main News page which carries the most recent revelations about this case which is still causing controversy to this day.
After reading this please click on the links on the right hand sidebar for previous coverage on the BBC:

Robert Brown (centre) and myself (left) and the legal team (inc. Robert Lizar, lawyer, back centre, and Ben Emmerson QC, front right) gather barely one-hour after his release. Despite the smiles, the reality was that Robert had no money; no apology; no pre-release aid; and apart from his 26 year-old prison number, no 'identity' in the normal sense. The UK government would later bill Robert for 'Bed and Breakfast' + domestic (toilet rolls; soap etc) expenses he allegedly 'incurred' whilst wrongfully locked up for a quarter of a century. He is refusing to pay this.

RECENT ARTICLES