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FREEDOM FIGHTER
by Eamonn O'Neill

When Robert Brown walked free last week it marked the end of journalist
Eamonn O'Neill's 10-year battle to help expose one of the worst miscarriages
of justice in British legal history. Here he gives a unique insight into the
struggle

It started with a letter to STV from a man named Pat Farrell. He was an old shipyard friend of STV's then managing director Gus MacDonald. He said he was concerned about a possible miscarriage-of-justice case involving a man called Robert Brown, the son of a friend. MacDonald could have ignored the note - but he didn't. Instead, he replied in warm tones to his old pal. Then - via his head of news and current affairs, Blair Jenkins - he asked me to examine the case papers.

At that time I was simply a 24-year-old documentary producer, someone who enjoyed taking a run at tricky stories that were classed as no-hopers - often because they were. But even on first reading, it was clear that this case was very unusual. And ex-investigative journalist MacDonald's prescient words to me in an internal STV note sent in early 1992 more or less summed up everyone's feelings: ''Eamonn, this certainly looks like a stitch-up ''

The yellowing case papers told a deeply disturbing story. A murder had been committed in the Hulme area of Manchester in 1977. The victim was Annie Walsh, a 51-year-old factory worker, who'd lived alone in a flat on a huge council estate. Within four months Glaswegian Robert Brown, 19, was being charged with the murder. There was no evidence against him except a signed confession.

I visited Robert's mother, Margaret Brown, for the first time in mid-1992. We sat in her flat in the Drumchapel area of Glasgow and chatted about her memories of the case and trial. I found her a remarkable and strong woman. She recalled Robert crying in the cells, telling his father he was innocent. She sent him money from a meagre pension and regularly made the bus journey to visit him. Her belief in his innocence sustained her.

Then I met with Robert Brown's Manchester-based lawyer, Robert Lizar. ''You're going to be depressed,'' he told me when I asked to look at the case file.

He was right. There were massive gaps in the paperwork. The original transcript from the court case, for example, had ''disappeared''. Lizar, an enormously respected lawyer who specialises in human rights cases, was angry and frustrated. For the next decade we plodded side-by-side, investigating everything we could think of.

Initially there were several areas that seemed ripe for examination. For a start, the official version of the case - with Brown as the culprit - made no sense on paper. There were gaping holes everywhere. Three quick examples illustrate the point. First, on the day the murder occurred - January 28, 1977 - an eyewitness had allegedly placed Brown with the victim. But her description bore no resemblance to the 19-year-old Glaswegian. Second, an autopsy showed the victim had eaten a different meal from the one mentioned in the confession. Third, bloodstained jeans shown to Brown and in court were not his - they belonged to a woman who had miscarried while wearing them and should not even have been mentioned.

The alleged confession itself was a curiosity. It lacked detail and special knowledge. In all its one and a half pages it talked only vaguely about Brown supposedly meeting Annie Walsh, carrying her bags and having tea and biscuits before being caught robbing her handbag. Even the murder weapon, the very thing he supposedly swung repeatedly into her skull, was alluded to only as ''an ornament or candlestick''. It alleged he had hit Annie Walsh ''two or three times'' with that murder weapon - which was never found by the police on the disingenuous basis that ''they didn't know what they were looking for'' - yet I discovered the damage was substantial. Walsh had been hit a total of 16 times on her head and arms.

I met Robert Brown for the first time in the autumn of 1992 in Nottingham Prison. It was an undercover encounter arranged by a third party because journalists were not allowed official contact unless they agreed to sign a form saying their meeting was not being used in a journalistic enterprise - a nonsensical and blatantly illegal rule. On that first occasion Brown immediately impressed me with his lack of pretence and his focus. He was serious and sober, articulate and self-educated. Nobody then - or now - knew his case as well as he did. While leaving Lizar and I to do our jobs, he usually knew the answer to many of the riddles before we did. When he spoke about his case it was with precision and perspective. He knew, for example, that a troubled upbringing had led to him having a vulnerable air about him in 1977 - an uncertain bearing exploited by the detectives who had arrested him without any reading of rights; who had held him down to beat him across a table, avoiding his face so as not to mark him; who had stripped him naked, laughed at his genitals and forced him to do step-ups on a chair during the 32-hour questioning process.

Shortly afterwards, Blair Jenkins green-lighted me to undertake intensive research for a documentary film on Brown. Within a month some remarkable material had surfaced.

First, I managed to find Robert's old girlfriend, Cathy Shaw, via a newspaper ad. She wept bitterly when recalling how the police battered him on the morning of his 1977 arrest. When I met her in Liverpool, she was in poor health because of a serious drink problem. But she was a different person on the subject of Robert Brown. She maintained he had been with her on the night of the murder, watching television. And, crucially, she hammered home the point that, within minutes of ''confessing'', he had met her and retracted the statement. This chimed with academic research I had read which said that the faster a confession was retracted, the more likely it was to be bogus.

Not long after our meeting, Cathy Shaw died. Relatives told me the wrongful conviction of Brown had blighted her life terribly. She remains another of the victims in this terrible story.

The second breakthrough came when I traced one of the two women a bloodstained Brown had allegedly visited in the early hours of the morning after the murder. Her name was Cathy Goodman and now she was telling a very different story - both to me and to STV's chief crime reporter Geoff Brown in an on-camera interview. She claimed the visit had not happened, and that she had become mixed up with another time when Brown had burst his nose after a pub fight. I believe even this was unreliable - her secret reasons for wrongfully fingering Brown died with her in the mid-1990s. But the important thing was that her retraction proved she was unreliable in 1977. The third remarkable discovery was the fact that the scene-of-crime photos I had been given clearly indicated that the supposed attempted robbery which sparked the murder had never actually occurred. The money and handbag that were meant to have been robbed never left the crime scene.

Finally, I traced senior detective Jack Picton Butler, part of the Greater Manchester Police murder team whom Robert Brown maintained had been particularly brutal towards him. We knew Butler had been convicted (ironically enough in the same court as Brown) in 1983 for perverting the course of justice and for corruption, and I requested an interview. He declined, and claimed in writing to me that he was satisfied that Brown was guilty.

During the research process for the film I visited Greater Manchester Police's CID chiefs to ask for help. They listened in apparent sympathy. But within days they wrote to me declining assistance. They also urged me to reconsider what they called my ''informal investigation'' since it might ''set hares running''. This was bizarre: it was not an informal investigation and its mission was indeed to set hares running. Journalists had moved similar stalled cases forward in the past - but clearly nobody had told the Greater Manchester Police this. Worse still, I learned later that the force probably had intimate knowledge of the corruption in which Jack Butler had been involved in the 1970s yet had chosen not to divulge it or share it when I approached them.

All these areas of concern were sent in a new written petition from Robert Brown, Robert Lizard and myself to the then Home Secretary Michael Howard in 1993 asking for an appeal. Over the next year or so, the Home Office ''examined'' the case. In 1994 they refused point blank a new referral to the Court of Appeal on the basis that it lacked ''new'' evidence. The fact a senior Greater Manchester Police detective I had met in 1992 had admitted to my face that the original case would not have stood a chance of being heard - never mind securing a conviction - in the 1990s, meaning Brown should never have been put in jail in the first place, seemingly meant zero. The next few years were deeply frustrating for Brown and for his mother. She was his sole source of strength and affection. His father had died early in his sentence, and his only sister had died in Glasgow in 1992 from a neurological condition. I had witnessed the appalling scene of Brown trying in vain to hug her in hospital while wearing large metal chains that a prison escort would not remove.

But, more hopefully, the demise of the old Home Office appeals department and the establishment in 1997 of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) looked like having a significant impact on this entire case. Instead of trying to prove guilt in such cases, the CCRC actively examined and investigated the areas of doubt.

In between times a vital new piece of evidence appeared: a fibre of clothing linking another man, called Robert James Hill, to the victim. This was astonishing, since Hill had been picked from an identity parade by an eyewitness called Mrs Jones a full two months before Brown was paraded in front of her. (Another weird ID parade involving bearded men also occurred 10 minutes before the one with Robert Brown in it - this has never been explained). Surely Hill was the main suspect in this affair? Apparently not. His name inexplicably vanishes from the case a month or so before Brown's arrest in May 1977. I spent months making hundreds of calls to every RJ Hill in the UK directory trying to trace this man. To this day he eludes me.

Robert Lizar then discovered that Robert Brown's 1977 QC, Benet Hytner, had no recollection of the clothing fibre being used at trial. In other words, it had not been disclosed. This was very disturbing.

Once again, Blair Jenkins - who is now head of news and current affairs at BBC Scotland - stepped into the picture. He had constantly kept on top of the investigation via articles I had published in various sections of the Scottish broadsheet press during the 1990s. When I told him about the new fibre evidence, he urged me to speak to the BBC's Frontline Scotland programme editor, Dorothy Parker. She took one look at the fresh material and immediately agreed to a new examination of the case.

By this time I was passed a remarkable linguistic analysis study carried out by Professor Malcolm Coulthard of Birmingham University, which reached the conclusion that Brown's confession had not been written in the way the police always claimed - ie via dictation from Brown. Instead it had been stitched together after a dodgy question-and-answer session. Frontline Scotland put the professor in front of a camera and got him to explain all this in detail. His evidence would later prove vital in the Court of Appeal. But even more remarkable was some of the material that was not broadcast. Take the evidence of witness Alan Smith, for example. We found him through a newspaper advert. He backed up another part of Brown's alibi: that the pair had been drinking on the day of the murder of Annie Walsh. For more than two decades the authorities practically denied Smith's existence. Then there was Narcie Kelly, a prison psychologist who had repeatedly tried to alert her superiors to her professional belief that Brown was undoubtedly an innocent man. Another psychiatrist, Dr Dorothy Speed, said exactly the same thing during the 1980s. But reports penned by Kelly which stated Brown was an innocent man literally cost her her job.

Within a month of the Frontline documentary being broadcast in June 2002, Brown was told that the CCRC was referring his case to the Court of Appeal. Robert Lizar's hard work in the background had paid off. But there was a sting in the tale: much of the evidence now ''accepted'' by the CCRC had also existed in 1993 when Lizar and I had written to the Home Secretary seeking an appeal. Crucially, the CCRC had simply applied a different interpretation.

Additionally, ''new'' material just ''discovered'' was now being mentioned. This was the Topping Report into corruption in Greater Manchester Police during Butler's 1970s heyday - which was published in the early 1980s. So why did it only surface in 2002? The Greater Manchester CID hadn't mentioned it when we met in 1992. Why not? Who knew about it and when did they know it? These are answers I am still seeking.

And the CCRC report contained more disturbing evidence about that clothing fibre. A Manchester policeman called George Bethell had written a forensic report for the Director of Public Prosecutions. The CCRC said that details of the original forensic report on which Bethell's was based had been altered.

Bethell proclaimed that the fibre was ''of common use'' when in fact the original report stated the fibre agreed in ''microscopic detail'' with Robert Hill's sweater. To make matters worse, the CCRC found that all evidence relating to the existence of that fibre was never disclosed to the defence in 1977. This was an appalling finding.

New research for a second Frontline Scotland documentary indicated Jack Butler's culpability everywhere in this case. The Topping Report had mentioned him as being at the centre of a corrupt world of backhanders, vice and theft. One witness I traced told me Butler had swiped money from him, accepted cash in an envelope and then, for good measure, drained a bottle of whisky before driving off in a police car.

Another traced witness, William Brown, 63, told of a violent encounter with Butler in the early 1970s during which he had been assaulted by the detective and almost pressured into a false confession. It was eerily similar to Robert Brown's case.

After repeated unanswered letters, Butler was finally confronted on camera in a Manchester car park by BBC director Jonathan Elliot and reporter Ross McWilliams. He stated he was keen on ''justice for all'' in the matter, and said he still believed nothing was wrong with Robert Brown's conviction. In July of this year Brown was denied bail, even though his mother was in declining health. It was a cruel move. But the fact he was allowed in court at the hearing - and that an early appeal date was set - led observers to believe the system was frightened of his case.

As if to underline this point, I was told that his legal team were kicked in the shins at the 11th hour only last week. As part of the preparation for the appeal, the Crown had finally agreed to the release of the explosive Topping Report. The 1977 Annie Walsh trial jury did not know Butler was a liar when they heard his evidence. But when Brown's legal team finally caught sight of this document, which ran to 1000 pages, 13 pages were mysteriously missing. I was told they belonged to a section of the report called ''Disciplinary records relating to Butler''. Apparently they no longer exist.

The sullen presence of two silent Greater Manchester Police officers in court last week worried some that the system might try to keep Brown caged up despite the overwhelming evidence indicating his innocence. But it never happened. In the end Robert Brown knew he going home within 18 minutes of his appeal case starting, when Crown Counsel Mr Julian Bevan QC stood up and, using legal terminology, basically flung in the towel. Evidence we had been talking about for years - the non-disclosure of the fibre, the unreliability of the confession and, in particular, the corruption of Jack Butler and his colleagues - was more than enough. Robert himself was the coolest man in the court - he didn't need three of the highest judges in the land to tell him what he already knew.

The judge at the original trial stated the ''principal issue'' for the jury to consider was whether the police or Brown were telling the truth. The overturning of the verdict clearly indicates a conspiracy existed and that officers, including Butler, committed gross acts of perjury.

After almost 11 years, I confess reality only dawned on me when Miscarriage Of Justice Organisation leader and ex-Birmingham Six man Paddy Hill, whose wonderful organisation has been the single most important aid to Robert Brown recently, stuck his head around court Number Five's door and said simply: ''Eamonn, it's all over bar the shouting.''

Not first the first time in this appalling investigation did I find myself not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

In the end, I did both

Published in The Sunday Herald, 17th November 2002

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.

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