Authors: Paul Britton
He began to ask me questions about the statements that I’d given, pressing me harder and harder on the detail and interpretation. I began to feel embarrassed at what felt like a cross-examination in front of the others. Then I realized that Nutting was testing me. He was assessing for himself how I’d bear up if faced by a very hard defending counsel in court.
As the meeting ended, the road ahead was clear - if the undercover evidence wasn’t admitted then the Crown would fold its tents and go home, dropping the case against Colin Stagg. As I left the meeting I said to Nutting, ‘I get the impression that you’re somewhat pessimistic about the case.’
‘Well, let’s just say I’m not optimistic,’ he said wryly.
‘I don’t want to put you on the spot, but do you have a view on the likelihood of the Crown being successful?’
There was a long pause. ‘I think it’s very finely balanced,’ he said.
For the next week I waited, with my diary rearranged so I could leave for London at short notice. Meanwhile, the legal heavyweights slugged it out, arguing before Mr Justice Ognall whether the case against Colin Stagg should proceed.
Eventually I learned that the judge didn’t need to hear from me and would rule on Lizzie James’s evidence ‘from paper’. The defence team, led by William Clegg QC and backed by Jim Sturman, submitted an outline of their objections to the judge and, as expected, used the Keith Hall case in Leeds as a legal precedent.
Before hearing the arguments about admissibility, the judge had to familiarize himself with the 700 pages of correspondence, telephone conversations and tape-recorded meetings between Colin Stagg and Lizzie James. Having done so, he invited Mr Clegg to make a submission.
The defence counsel claimed that the defendant had been the victim of a sophisticated ‘sting’ operation aimed at taking advantage of a lonely, vulnerable young man desperate to lose his virginity. It had been designed to entrap him into making a confession, yet Mr Stagg had always denied his involvement in the murder of Rachel Nickell.
Dipping in and out of Lizzie’s evidence to illustrate his points, Mr Clegg claimed that Lizzie James had shaped the relationship, holding out the offer of sex and that Mr Stagg’s replies were nothing more than you would expect from a painfully shy and sexually inexperienced young man. My evidence, he argued, should also be thrown out because it went hand in glove with the covert operation.
John Nutting countered that the possibility of sex had indeed been implicit in the relationship but Lizzie hadn’t told Stagg what to write in his fantasies - the ideas were all his own. He had been the first to mention the woodland setting, the trees, the stream, the knife, the extreme violence, the rape and the inflicting of pain.
He submitted that Stagg’s detailed description to Lizzie of how Rachel had been lying could not possibly have been derived from the only photograph shown to him by police during the investigation. In particular, how he had illustrated the position of her hands being palm to palm. Nutting submitted that such a detail could only have been known by the assailant and that this amounted to a confession.
Mr Clegg totally disagreed and pointed out that Rachel’s hands were crossed at the wrist and not palm to palm - hardly a minor discrepancy.
On 14 September Mr Justice Ognall delivered an eighty-minute judgment that tore the heart out of the case against Colin Stagg and shocked many observers with its extreme criticism of the police. Describing the covert operation as misconceived and doomed to failure, he said, ‘I would be the first to acknowledge the very great pressures on the police in their pursuit of this grave inquiry but I am afraid this behaviour betrays not merely an excessive zeal but a substantial attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.’
He accepted that Colin Stagg had made the first mention of a knife in his correspondence with Lizzie and that he had spoken of being sexually excited on learning of the circumstances of Rachel Nickell’s murder. However, he said, any attempt to edit and separate the material collected through the undercover operation was ‘bound to fail’.
‘The prosecution sought to persuade me that the object of the exercise was to afford the accused an opportunity either to eliminate himself from the inquiry or implicate himself in the murder. I am bound to say that I regard that description of the operation as highly disingenuous.’
Referring to Stagg’s description of Rachel’s body, the judge said that this was the only part of an otherwise undisputed record that could not be verified by anything other than Lizzie James’s memory. It had not been videoed during the Hyde Park meeting and only Lizzie had seen Stagg lie on the ground and demonstrate how Rachel had been lying.
The fact that Rachel’s hands were crossed at the wrist and not palm to palm, was not a minor difference but a major discrepancy. ‘I am not satisfied having heard submissions on both sides that this one very small piece of evidence does amount to, or is properly capable of, being viewed as incriminating material of the character of a confession…
I would add that even were I to be persuaded that this material could fairly and properly warrant the status of a confession I regard it as so flimsy in its nature as to demand the conclusion that its potential prejudice clearly exceeds any probative value. The best the prosecution could do here would be to persuade me that overall the material obtained in the undercover operation was not unfairly obtained. They have failed to do so.’
He ruled that the letters, telephone calls and taped conversations were inadmissible and the Crown immediately withdrew its case. After more than twelve months in custody, Colin Stagg was officially declared not guilty and walked from the Old Bailey a free man surrounded by television cameras and photographers.
At the mother and baby unit at West Bridgeford, in Nottingham, I had an urgent call from Diane. ‘The phones have gone mad. It’s chaos here,’ she said.
I rang Pedder and he told me of the judgement. He sounded empty inside. As he quoted the judge’s words, I tried to comprehend the ramifications. Right from the beginning, the undercover operation had been scrutinized and overseen by the most senior officers commanding the Metropolitan Police. They were advised by senior Treasury counsel and the operation sat at the top of the attorney general’s list of most sensitive cases. None of these people had ever cast any doubt over its legality, at least not in my presence.
‘He mentioned your evidence,’ said Pedder.
‘But he didn’t even hear legal arguments about my evidence,’ I said, surprised.
‘I know.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said the Crown would have had an “even higher mountain to climb” to persuade him to accept it. And that the notion of a psychological profile being admissible as proof of identity in any circumstances was “redolent with considerable danger”.’
This angered me more than anything else. I had never suggested that a psychological profile or sexual deviancy analysis were proof of guilt - quite the opposite. Colin Stagg chose to reveal his sexuality. Even though this matched exactly the analysis I drew up of the unidentified killer, it did not make Stagg the murderer. Only when he disclosed real-world information about the actual crime did he implicate himself in the eyes of the police. It also upset me that Mr Justice Ognall had decided to comment on my evidence without hearing arguments or hearing from me.
‘What happens now?’ I asked Pedder. ‘My phone is ringing off the hook at the office and apparently I’ve got journalists on the way.’
There was a hesitancy in his voice. ‘Please don’t make any comment. There’s the possibility of further legal proceedings. The Met [Metropolitan Police] and the CPS are getting together to make a concerted response.’
Throughout the afternoon and evening, I fielded dozens of calls from the media, referring them back to the Metropolitan Police. Some of them took this rather badly. A television producer on one late-night news programme presented me with the ultimatum, ‘Either you come on our programme tonight or we’re going to hang you out to dry.’ They did exactly as promised, portraying me as some sort of distasteful mastermind of an operation designed to frame an innocent man.
When I arrived home, I walked into the lounge and found Marilyn and the family watching the programme. How surreal it was to look at a group of people sitting in a TV studio in London all talking about me. Behind them, a huge photograph of me had been projected onto the wall. The basic thrust of the debate was to lay the blame for the undercover operation, the arrest of Colin Stagg and the collapse of the trial securely at my feet.
A storm had broken around my head and the daily headlines made harsh reading. RACHEL CASE COLLAPSES. FANTASY JUSTICE. WHO’S IN THE DOCK NOW?
I arrived at work just before 9.30 a.m. and the phones were already jammed. The switchboard at Arnold Lodge became gridlocked with no-one able to get through. Journalists were arriving at reception asking to see me and waiting outside the perimeter gates for my appearance.
Meanwhile, I waited for the media statement from the Metropolitan Police and the CPS which would set the record straight. I was being depicted as having ‘persuaded’ the police to launch the covert operation and then having convinced ‘sceptical CPS lawyers’ that they should charge Colin Stagg with murder. Of course, this is absurd and I expected that at any minute the Metropolitan Police commissioner would come out and say, ‘Hang on now, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Paul Britton did no such thing.’
I contemplated putting out my own press release, even jotting down a point by point rebuttal of the claims being made in the media, but chose not to issue it because I’d given my word to Keith Pedder that I wouldn’t make any comment. Eventually the commissioner and the director of public prosecutions did make a statement but it did nothing to remove the hounds from my door. I wasn’t consulted beforehand or invited to the media conference, even though I appeared to be the person copping most of the flak.
Of course, I realize now that different levels in the police service had different agendas. The detectives who worked on the ground, Keith Pedder, John Bassett and Mick Wickerson, concentrated on the job at hand but at a more senior level the policy-makers and managers were concerned for the image of the police service and if someone else seemed to bear the brunt of the criticism, then, pragmatically, that was easier to deal with.
When the trial collapsed having cost the taxpayer a considerable amount of money, the media went looking for someone to blame. The judge’s comments allowed them to look for a target and they were confronted with three possibilities - the monolithic Metropolitan Police force, the faceless Crown Prosecution Service and me, Paul Britton. I had a face and a name and was by far the easiest target to hit. When I refused to comment, I think it angered the media beyond measure.
The others seemed quite relieved when they saw how much heat and vitriol came my way. I’m sure they thought, Well, that’s not right, but I’m ever so glad it’s not me.
This was driven home to me a year or so later, when I was back at New Scotland Yard, having been asked to design another covert operation, this time to investigate the sabotaging of health care equipment. I said to a senior policeman from the covert operations team, ‘I’ve been here before, you know. And the last time we were all at this stage, everyone said how well things were going and what a good job was being done. Come the trial when things went badly, I was the only one standing there. No-one else was around.’
The policeman laughed, ‘Yes, you got a fucking raw deal there. But you’re a big lad, you’ve got broad shoulders, you can look after yourself.’
*
I’m not an apologist for a legal system that keeps a murder suspect in prison for more than a year awaiting trial. The police and the lawyers thought they had a case against Colin Stagg and a stipendiary magistrate agreed.
In any investigation some material will be admissible as evidence, other material will be inadmissible and some will require a judge to decide which is which. The stipendiary magistrate examined the evidence and sent a man to trial and then Mr Justice Ognall decided that the evidence gathered by Lizzie James should not be put before a jury. The Crown withdrew and, quite properly, Colin Stagg was released.
The people I felt most sorry for were Andre Hanscombe, young Alex and Rachel’s parents, Andrew and Monica Nickell. Mr and Mrs Nickell had sat through the entire proceedings and, that night on the television news, I watched Mr Nickell make a very dignified and heartfelt statement from the steps of the Old Bailey.
‘We have been here for the last week because in August 1993 Colin Stagg was charged after a long undercover operation organized by the police under the direction of an eminent psychologist. The police undertook this operation because they thought it was the only way to prove or disprove their suspicions that Colin Stagg was the murderer.
“There was no physical evidence, only strong circumstantial evidence. What were the police to do? Were they to let a man they suspected and believed was guilty of a hideous murder to roam free? What choice did they have? They have to keep the peace and protect society.’
On Thursday morning, as the storm broke over my head, one caller managed to get through to Arnold Lodge who made no reference to the day’s headlines. Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Port, the head of Warwickshire CID, had a murder to solve.
Three days earlier a building society manageress from Nuneaton had been found dead beside a busy local road. Her office had been burgled and when detectives arrived at her home they found her husband bound and gagged in the lounge.
‘It’s thrown up some interesting questions,’ said Port, without elaborating. ‘If you’re available I’ll get the SIO Tony Bayliss to call you.’
‘Have you seen the morning papers?’ I asked.
‘Why?’
‘Apparently I’m receiving some criticism as a consequence of the Rachel Nickell trial.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, I’m aware of that.’