Crooked British police investigated over notes that could give "murderer" an alibi

Prosecutors have been called in to consider charges of perverting justice and official misconduct after The Times found notes that indicate a convicted wife murderer is innocent.

The records, which were undisclosed at Eddie Gilfoyle’s trial, show that a police doctor who examined his wife’s body estimated that she had hanged herself at a time when her husband was away at work.

A chief constable has disclosed that, after The Times published the notes that his force had said never existed, the Crown Prosecution Service was asked to examine criminal sanctions. “Merseyside Police did refer the matter to the CPS to consider the offences of ‘Doing an act that tends to pervert the course of public justice and/or misconduct in a public office’. The advice to date, on the facts known, [is that] there is insufficient evidence to support a prosecution at this time,” Bernard Hogan-Howe, Chief Constable of Merseyside, wrote.

Gilfoyle’s lawyers and a former Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside, Alison Halford, called on Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, last night to order an independent inquiry.

The CPS said it had been asked by police to provide “early advice” rather than a “full file” of evidence. It appointed as adviser a prosecutor from outside Merseyside to ensure that the process was seen to be objective and independent. By contrast, Merseyside Police has declined to call in any outside force.

Gilfoyle, 47, has been behind bars protesting his innocence since 1992, when his wife, Paula, who was 38 weeks pregnant, was discovered hanged in their garage in the Wirral village of Upton.

The handwritten notes have been repeatedly lost and found by Merseyside Police and were not disclosed to a Police Complaints Commission investigator. The documents come from an internal inquiry, conducted by the force soon after Mrs Gilfoyle died, to learn from mistakes made by officers at her death scene. The papers state that the police doctor who saw Mrs Gilfoyle’s body estimated she had died six hours earlier, when her husband was at work as a hospital auxiliary.

During Gilfoyle’s murder trial in 1993, where they might have given him an alibi, they stayed undisclosed. A jury convicted him of murdering his wife, 32, after tricking her into letting him dictate a suicide note.

When in 1994 the Police Complaints Authority asked Lancashire Superintendent Graham Gooch to review the murder investigation, he asked for the notes. Chief Superintendent Edward “Ted” Humphreys, who headed the internal inquiry, said that to the best of his recollection no notes had been taken. His assistant, a detective inspector, recalled taking notes but said that they had been destroyed.

Just before Gilfoyle’s appeal against conviction in 1995, partly on the ground that the notes were unavailable, the papers were located and disclosed to the defence. When The Times asked last year for the notes under the Freedom of Information Act, Merseyside Police said: “Information is held that indicates that no such notes ever existed.”After The Times discovered and published the notes in February, the Information Commissioner cleared the force of intentionally withholding the documents.

Mr Hogan-Howe said in a letter to Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat MP, that the mistake occurred because freedom of information staff had found the old statement suggesting there had never been any notes. The Times understands that the missing papers were found to have been in the possession of Mr Humphreys.

In 1995 the Police Complaints Authority asked Merseyside to investigate possible misconduct but, as he had retired, no further action was considered proportionate. The Independent Police Complaints Commission says it has seen no new evidence to justify a fresh misconduct investigation.

Original report here



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