Thirteen police officers conspired to send five innocent men to prison for a murder they did not commit, a court has heard.
Britain’s largest police corruption trial got underway today, with eight of the officers and two civilian witnesses who allegedly conspired with them in the dock at Swansea Crown Court.
The jury was told that the conspiracy began on Valentine’s Day 1988 with the brutal murder of 20 year old prostitute Lynette White in Cardiff’s Dock.
It ended with three of the five men being jailed for the killing and the acquittal of the other two. The lives of all the men were blighted by the case.
In 2003 another man was convicted of Miss White’s murder following a breakthrough in DNA fingerprinting and is now serving life in prison.
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Miss White was found dead in a room above a taxi office in the seedy docks area. Her throat and wrists had been cut and she had been stabbed more than 50 times. But after nine months of fruitless investigation the detectives involved in the hunt for her killer were running out of leads.
According to the prosecution, the officers then went on to invent a fictional scenario which was “almost entirely a fabrication and was largely the product of the imagination”.
All ten defendants are accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by agreeing to “mould, manipulate, influence and fabricate evidence”. The trial is expected to take seven months. Four other retired officers will stand trial on the same charges when this case concludes. A further officer was declared unfit to stand trial on health grounds.
The officers standing trial include a former superintendent, Thomas Page, and ex-chief inspectors Graham Mouncher and Richard Powell.
Five other retired police officers are Michael Daniels, Paul Jennings, Paul Stephen, Peter Greenwood, and John Seaford. Civilians Violet Perriam and Ian Massey, who gave evidence at the mens’ trial, are each accused of two counts of perjury. as is Mr Mouncher.
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Nicholas Dean QC, prosecuting, told the jury that Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris were convicted of Lynette White’s murder in 1990 in what became a notorious miscarriage of justice. Two other men were cleared.
In 1992, the convictions of the “Cardiff Three” were quashed by the Court of Appeal and they were released. Mr Abdullahi, 49, died earlier this year.
In 2003, Jeffrey Gafoor, a client of Lynette’s, pleaded guilty to her murder after being identified from blood found at the crime scene.
Mr Dean told the jury that in the days before DNA fingerprinting detectives faced a paucity of clues. He said: “Lynette White’s body was flat on its back, face up with the arms spread out.
“It was immediately obvious that Lynette White was dead and even by torchlight it must have been clear to the officers that Lynette had been horribly, savagely attacked by someone who had used a knife.
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“Faced as they were by the murder of a prostitute in an anonymous and squalid flat the police were confronted by real difficulties.
“Today the murder scene would present a goldmine of scientific clues. In 1988 DNA testing was not nearly so sophisticated.”
The supposed “breakthough” came nine months after the murder when Ms Perriam came forward and detectives began to concoct a case.
Mr Dean said: “The story - and it was a story, a fiction - that was to emerge was absolutely extraordinary. It involved no less than 5 men murdering Lynette White in that small and squalid flat.
“It did not begin to explain how Lynette White or any of the men in question came to be together in the flat - nor why any one of them should participate in a brutal and savage murder of a girl.”
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“What came to be alleged about the five men who were to be charged with Lynette White’s murder was almost entirely a fabrication.
“It was largely the product of the imagination, theories and beliefs of police officers.
“Those five men, all of those five men, were actually innocent of the murder - indeed they were more than just innocent, they simply had nothing at all to do with the killing.”
The trial continues.