In the first 55 years of her life, Diana Lank’s most serious brush with the law involved an officer who stopped her for not wearing a seatbelt, and ended up asking her on a date.
Save for the occasional bobby who wandered past her fashionable boutique in Chelsea, west London, she had no reason to interact with the police.
That all changed on November 8, 2011, when her only son, Rupert Ross, was found guilty over a gangland murder that Ms Lank, 61, emphatically believes he did not commit.
What followed was an extraordinary quest to prove his innocence in which she risked breaking the law, thus jeopardising her own liberty, by unmasking a protected witness.
In her first interview since she was cleared at the Old Bailey this week, after facing two trials for conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office, Ms Lank told The Times that she would do it again: “100 per cent, I would. I felt I had no choice. I wasn’t scared. I felt that what I was doing was right. If the truth had come out in the beginning, I wouldn’t be here.”
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She admitted to the jury that she had been involved in a scheme to infiltrate the Metropolitan police to uncover the witness’s identity, but insisted it was necessary to remedy a miscarriage of justice. She rejected any suggestion that she is a naive mother, claiming she has uncovered a string of holes in the case.
Ross, 35, was jailed for life alongside Leon de St Aubin, 39, for the murder in 2009 of Darcy Austin-Bruce, a drug dealer who was shot five times outside Wandsworth prison. Ross, who attended Dulwich College for a short time before being expelled for dealing Class A drugs, had an addiction and a string of related convictions.
The jury was told that he was a gangster who turned to murder after an escalation in his rivalry with Austin-Bruce. The prosecution produced evidence that was mostly circumstantial.
Ms Lank said: “When he was convicted, I was so shocked. The lawyers had said, ‘There’s no evidence’. So I started looking into the case, I read all the papers. He’s my son, and I love him. But Rupert and Leon are innocent, that’s more to the point. It is clear to me that the police didn’t do their job properly.”
She continued to run her boutique, whose past clients include the actress Angelina Jolie, but devoted her time to the case. Ross was said to have been driven by St Aubin on a stolen moped to the scene, so Ms Lank visited every shop along the route to try to uncover CCTV. No shopkeepers, she said, had been approached by the police.
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The jury had seen an automatic numberplate recognition image purporting to show Ross and Austin-Bruce in a car together, indicating they were associated, but Ms Lank had seen only a blurred copy. The Crown Prosecution Service told her the original had been deleted, preventing it being examined by experts.
Ms Lank told the court that the barrister Courtenay Griffiths, QC, advised her that discrediting an anonymous female witness, who claimed to have seen Ross en route to the murder, was crucial to their case.
Lydia Lauro, St Aubin’s girlfriend, had got a job as a civilian detention officer at Scotland Yard two months after the men were convicted. She and another detention officer, who are facing jail after being found guilty of conspiracy to cause misconduct in public office, went into the police computer and identified the witness.
The witness, it emerged, had links to associates of the murder victim and was also said to have links to criminals in the drug trade. Ms Lank believes that it raises questions over her evidence.
She questions how else she could have uncovered “the truth”. When the police learnt of the leak, she was placed under surveillance for six months.
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Greg Stewart, her solicitor, of GT Stewart Solicitors, said: “They have thrown everything at Diana. I was shocked by the level of surveillance, usually used for serious violence and crime. It was disproportionate, to put it mildly.”
While the Court of Appeal rejected many arguments, the case will be sent to the Criminal Case Review Commission. Mr Griffiths, who declined to appear as a witness, said: “As far as I was concerned I acted above board and at no stage did I advise or condone any criminal act.” The court heard that he never knew how the information was obtained.