Fit Up

by Faith Clifford

  As we ploughed through the documents, however, another revelation came to light. There was a computer print-out entitled ‘Crime Information Systems Update Crime – Offence Details’. Again, it could quite easily have been glanced over as nothing of any particular interest but what caught the eye was the blocking out of certain bits of information. It appeared to be fairly innocuous, just a log of progress of Jeremy’s case, Hopkins’s name appeared as the investigating officer and other updates had been included by Crook and a DS Quinlivan from CID. Neither of us knew this name. However, on turning the page, I saw a name that I definitely recognised: Ian Siggery. Hopkins had been warned about talking about Jeremy’s case to him and here, under his entry on 30 June 2005, some two months after Jeremy’s acquittal, alongside Siggery’s name and under the heading ‘reason’ were the words ‘please see text’. It was unlikely to be any other officer called Siggery within Hertfordshire Constabulary and I could only conclude that Hopkins had probably thought this case was over and he could effectively put the boot in this way.

  As I finished leafing through the pages of the report I felt I could punch a hole in the wall.

  Chapter 31

  COMPLAINTS OF GRUNDY

  It appeared that the criticisms made by Mr Justice Tugendhat of Grundy and Challenger had been lost on them. This was enforced by Andre in several letters of the same date to Mr Afzal Chowdhury, the head of the Legal Services Department of Hertfordshire Constabulary, pointing out the shortcomings of their ability to comply with an order from the court. Chowdhury was very unhappy at the tone of Andre’s correspondence and viewed this as a personal attack on Grundy, which was not the case as he was confining his comments to her professional capacity and to the manner in which she had sought to conduct this litigation. This was of no surprise to us as we had already made complaints to Andre about her and the handling of our claim where she had repeatedly ignored our correspondence. In fact, Jeremy had already expressed making a formal complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority but was deferring this until after the court hearing.

  Leslie had also sent an email to Challenger seeking an explanation for misrepresentations that Grundy was making but he was obviously standing by her. Matters soon escalated after this and Chowdhury wrote to the senior partner at Tuckers complaining about Andre’s conduct, telling them that he expected an apology for comments made. This was not forthcoming as Brian Craig of Tuckers pointed out to Chowdhury that he had failed to provide any details of why he believed that Andre’s observations were inaccurate, and that until he could do so he would continue to support him. Craig’s letter ended with the threat of considering referring the whole matter to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority but gave the Hertfordshire Police Force one further opportunity to respond.

  Chowdhury’s response was swift and suggested that Craig’s letter was impolite and inappropriate. He was still standing by his opinion that there was no substance to Andre’s complaints and he also was going to pursue this matter with the Solicitors Regulation Authority because Tuckers had failed to apologise. This exchange of correspondence looked set to run and Andre needed to concentrate on Jeremy’s case preparation, but he was adamant that he would not allow the police to mislead the courts. To us it was a clear indication of how aggressive the police were being.

  As part of the litigation, psychiatric reports had to be prepared in order to assist with the assessment of damages should Jeremy win his case. He had already met a couple of times with Dr Stuart Turner, who had been recommended by Andre, and had recently seen a Dr Cleo van Velsen, who was acting for the police. The police had requested that Jeremy meet with her so that they had their own expert opinion. On that occasion he had requested that Cliff go with him to the interview, as he distrusted anyone who represented the police. Jeremy had said that the meeting went as well as it could but that she had found it hampered her assessment being unable to talk about the case. With that out of the way, it was now down to the two experts to get together to create a joint report.

  Meanwhile, Andre had asked me to attend the Tuckers offices in order to write up my witness statement. I thought I would have to put pen to paper myself but I was to meet with Andre who would go through this with me.

  Jeremy joined me for the visit to London but left the interview room when Andre arrived. As the door closed behind him Andre said, ‘Now that he’s gone, I want to ask you something.’ I knew exactly what he was going to say before he said it. ‘Do you believe Jeremy is innocent?’ My reply was immediate and to the point. ‘Yes, I have no doubts whatsoever. He would never have come this far.’ Andre nodded acceptingly and turned over the page of his notepad to start writing.

  I had already drafted out a statement of events way back at the beginning of it all and had thought about it every day since but sitting in this tiny room with no windows and Andre taking me through every step of the whole tortuous journey made me quite emotional. Andre was not just going through the motions of the case preparation, he was a solicitor who showed real empathy for his clients and wanted my story to be heard.

  We started at the beginning, with background information about our lives before the police raid when life had seemed so simple. It felt like I was making an observation of another couple. Then we moved on to my description of the incident and as I spoke, of my immediate fear, the panic, the turmoil, and the feeling of loneliness in spending nearly a whole day with eight strangers, it was as if I could see and feel every detail. Of course I did not reveal these emotions to Andre as the statement was to be paragraphs of facts but as I continued to talk I began to realise that perhaps I should have sought counselling, that it might help to have someone to talk to.

  Finally, we came to the last section, which was to be about the impact of the prosecution. Andre asked me how this had affected us and I confirmed to him that I had never doubted Jeremy’s innocence but the experience has changed him and me. He is an angry person, I told Andre, and needs to understand why the police charged him. He has been very hurt by the way he was treated and continues to be treated by the police force with no one seeing fit to apologise or to explain what went wrong. Jeremy is now both depressed and obsessed with clearing his name fully and is no longer the happy, optimistic man that I married. In fact, he is the opposite in that he is pessimistic and short-tempered. He wants his innocence fully vindicated and for the police to acknowledge what they did to his life. This is an important fight, not just for him but for others like him. The final words of my statement filled me with an overwhelming sadness. ‘The damage caused to Jeremy by this prosecution is incalculable. It has impacted on every aspect of his life.’ Mine too.

  We had covered a lot of ground and I hoped I would remember it all. Andre said that once it was written up and I was happy with it, I should keep reading it to let it sink in. However, as Mark Twain said: ‘If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.’ It was a good point to remember. ‘Just stick to what you know’ was good advice from Andre.

  The meeting had left me drained. On the train journey back home I rested my head against the seat and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the ache in my heart.

  Chapter 32

  THE FELLOWS REPORT

  Various items of disclosure had trickled in and now it appeared that Grundy and Challenger were introducing forensics into the equation by way of a report from a Geoffrey Fellows. As Leslie and Andre had maintained, Jeremy’s case was straightforward, with the four key issues in determining liability to be:

  What Fouhey knew and when

  What was communicated to DC Hopkins and when

  What DC Hopkins knew and when

  What DC Hopkins did with that information

  Hertfordshire Police had been eager to see the report from Duncan Campbell but this was denied to them under privileged information. However, it would not help them with the issues or defend their case as it was wholly supportive of Jeremy, but by us not allowing them to see this document it had made them all the more
curious and suspected it undermined ours. With that they had gone ahead and ordered their own detailed forensic inspection which had been delivered to Andre.

  Andre and Leslie had already seen it and had been disturbed by its contents. A phone call to Jeremy from Leslie told him it was ‘very damning’ and he now felt that our legal team were doubtful of his innocence, which could muddy the waters on our side. All our trust had been invested in Duncan’s report on the Tiny computer, of which a statement lifted from that had saved Jeremy from going to trial in the criminal case, which is why I found it hard to comprehend that the Fellows report could be at such odds with this. Instead of standing hard and fast by Duncan, whom we knew as one of the leading computer forensic experts in his field, we were now questioning his integrity on the back of this new report and we hadn’t even seen it yet. We had been frightened by Leslie’s comment, too, which seemed to indicate that the case was now undermined.

  Andre relayed the report to Jeremy almost straight away and we both sat down to read it. I skipped through most of the pages at first as I knew what I was looking for and settled on Fellows’s summary of conclusions in response to instructions given to him by Grundy and Challenger.

  Fellows had written that he had found a considerable body of evidence to indicate that prior to 11 February 2001 the computer JB/1 had been used to visit websites which are likely to have been concerned with or to have contained sexual material depicting or related to children. He added that he had also found evidence which supported the contention that in some cases this was likely to have been a consequence of deliberate actions by the user of JB/1. He did not mention it but it was clear that ‘the user’ was Jeremy.

  Furthermore, he said that he had found evidence which indicated that JB/1 had been used between June 2000 and early February 2001 to access child pornography on the internet.

  Fellows found that the seventeen images originally discovered by Fouhey were as a direct result of pop-up activity with the exception of one where there was no evidence to indicate whether or not a visit to this page was deliberate or as a result of pop-up activity.

  The last point was that, in his opinion, the two subscriptions made to two porn sites via Landslide were likely to have been genuine transactions and were unlikely to have been the result of fraudulent activity by another person.

  Fellows definitely had an astonishingly different opinion to that of Duncan’s findings.

  In the main body of the report he had provided certain examples of history files and added appendices that used inflammatory words that got everyone to lose sight of any objectivity or judgement and those were titles with ‘Lolita’ or ‘preteen’ listed within them. I could see why Leslie and Andre were rattled and I knew that the only person who could reassure everyone on our team was Duncan.

  Returning to the first two pages of the report I noted that Fellows was an independent investigator and lecturer in the field of forensic computing and network investigations. In the last couple of paragraphs I saw that he had been a police officer in the Northamptonshire Police for over twenty-five years. I did not need to read any more, I had already summed him up. He was hardly independent of the police – he was an ex-copper. The establishment seemed incapable of casting their net into real independent territory.

  Chapter 33

  HOPKINS’S STATEMENT

  Around the beginning of September 2008, Jeremy received a package from Tuckers enclosing police witness statements, which Andre had asked us to read carefully and to let him have any comments. We had been eagerly waiting this moment, especially to view the witness statement of Hopkins.

  We were surprised to see that he was currently an investigator with the IPCC in Manchester. I was wrestling with my mind to think how ‘independent’ he could be with any investigations after being in the police force for over thirty-one years and having only just ‘retired’ from it. Surely an organisation that you expect to police the police would have to be totally independent?

  Not surprisingly, he was supporting the flawed evidence of Landslide provided by Sharon Girling of the National Crime Squad. Hopkins had attached a schedule of Jeremy’s credit card transactions to his statement. Although he had given it a different reference number, this was the SAG/1 document that Duncan had said we would need and we had been requesting from the beginning from Grundy. The bank statements had shown some different dates to those that were on Hopkins’s document but there was one line that really stood out for me. Jeremy had missed it but, being a man, he had not remembered our wedding date, which was 21 April 1999. Supposedly at 2.46 p.m. Jeremy had been purchasing images from a website called Underage Girls. Impossible! We were getting married around that time. I was excited by this discovery, which would be of interest to Andre and good evidence to cast further doubt over all the other transactions. The six variations of the user ID name and passwords did not make sense either – it can be bad enough sometimes remembering one set of these details, let alone changing them every time to log on to one site. I was not sure why the information we had on some of our documents differed from Hopkins’s but as he was standing by this we would go with his evidence provided by Girling.

  At the time of charge he had ‘presumed’ that the Tiny computer had been utilised by Jeremy to download the images in question. Is that how the police conducted their investigations? By presumptions rather than hard evidence? Once we had started to question the paragraphs of Hopkins’s statement, even we could start to see their case unravelling.

  On the Halifax credit card Hopkins stated that it showed numerous purchases from Landslide in 1999. The ‘numerous purchases’ turned out to be four, and, in any case, Landslide provided thousands of other portals for porn, not just child porn.

  ‘He got quite agitated at the mention of child porn’ was another inflammatory sentence, which implied Jeremy was showing signs of guilt when this would be a normal response by any innocent person accused of such a vile crime.

  ‘We seized five computers in all,’ continued Hopkins, as if this was a major haul. He had not mentioned the many hundreds of other pieces of storage media that had revealed nothing. Hopkins had made a big deal of twelve deeply buried grainy thumbnail images found on one computer and tried to tie them to a date on which four fraudulent credit card transactions occurred in 1999.

  ‘The evidence of George Fouhey led me to believe that the images in the Tiny derived from downloads from Landslide or from similar sites.’ Fouhey does not say this at all! I thought angrily.

  Laughably, there was reference to Hopkins believing that Gerard’s statement was ‘truthful and accurate’, that Jeremy had taken the Tiny computer away for some weeks to ‘clean it’. How he could find Gerard believable when he knew he had a motive to lie was beyond us. His hatred for Jeremy was plainly visible. Even Burn admitted as much when she had visited him at Video Action. It also showed that Hopkins had not bothered to check out any of Gerard’s evidence either.

  In relation to charging Jeremy, he went on to say that he relied on George Fouhey’s statement of 21 July 2004 where it said nothing about images being contained in temporary internet files but relied on the statement as part of the evidence put forward to the CPS. That would not have helped anyone very much because all Fouhey had said in that statement was that he had ‘found 17 images of note. A picture of note is considered of interest to the investigating officer and is not necessarily an indecent photograph of a child under the age of sixteen years.’ Hardly conclusive evidence on which to charge for possession. He claimed that he could not have relied on Fouhey’s statement because it was not written up until after Jeremy was charged, so any passing of information was done verbally according to Fouhey and Hopkins failed to remember it.

  He then said he made the ‘presumption’ that the Tiny computer was utilised during the period covered by the Landslide information in 1999, that the receipt for the computer was only shown to him recently and that if he had had this information during the interviews in 2003 and 2004
he would have taken it into account. Well, he may not have had sight of the receipt at those interviews but it was disclosed well before the criminal trial because I spent a cold afternoon in the loft retrieving it. That was therefore another lie, that he had not seen it until 2008.

  There were two sentences of interest. ‘It has been alleged that I was told by George Fouhey that the images found on the Tiny hard disk were in temporary internet folders and that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr Clifford. I do not remember George Fouhey telling me that there was no evidence to support a charge of possessing indecent images.’

  How could Hopkins not remember being told that he had no case and yet looking at Fouhey’s statement he says, ‘I met with Brian Hopkins at the CCU (Computer Crime Unit) and told him the images had been found in temporary internet folders. I made my first statement on 21 July 2004 outlining my findings, however, I did not put the information about temporary internet folders into my statement but told Brian verbally. On the basis of what I had found in the Tiny computer alone I would have advised no charge.’

  Another comment Hopkins put in his statement was that ‘evidence that the user appeared to have deleted wholesale information from the computer hard drive might lend some weight to my existing suspicion’. Fouhey did not mention any ‘wholesale’ deletions and you cannot charge on mere suspicion. It was clear from some of the other paragraphs on the Tiny computer that Hopkins had been given more recent information on the nature of temporary internet folders which was not the point – he should have confined his statement to what he knew at the time of charge. It was becoming increasingly apparent that he knew there was no evidence to support the charges.