Sheila spoke only once during the trial, when she made her Statement of Mitigation on the last day. In this, she said that in 1974, she’d ‘noticed that without any doubt Mr Stonehouse was suffering from considerable strain which had become more intense and his health, in my opinion, had greatly deteriorated. I saw him resting frequently which I had never seen him do before. Much of his zest and enthusiasm had left him – he gave the impression of being a very, very tired man. I felt he was suffering greatly as a result of the considerable pressures he was under at that time.’ She talked about his state of distress when he phoned her from Hawaii and when she met him in Copenhagen – speaking in the third person, and suicidal. She had no regrets about keeping quiet about him being alive when the family thought he was dead. She said: ‘Even though I find myself in this dock as a result of those actions, I cannot change my mind even now. If I had the same decisions to make all over again tomorrow, I feel certain that those decisions would remain the same. My long ordeal has been, to say the very least painful – but the safety of a man or a woman is of far greater importance than pain and humiliation. I have no regrets.’21
It was entirely because of my father that Sheila was in the dock at the Old Bailey. She said: ‘I had no real interest in business and had, I am afraid, never really understood it.’22 She did what so many admin people do within business organisations: sign cheques and forms without really knowing their significance. Sheila shared with my father five charges of theft, and conspiracy to defraud the creditors of EPACS – the company my father 98 per cent owned, and whose income relied totally on his efforts. Four of the charges related to cheques prepared by the accountant, Mr Le Fort, on the instruction of my father and signed by Sheila, in the amounts of £7,500, £6,981.25, £2,112.10, and £3,029.87 (totalling £19,623.22). In addition, there was a banker’s draft dated 15th August payable to EPACS for US$12,500 (£5,343.97) from the Garrett Corporation, in payment for a report my father wrote for them, which had been endorsed over to my father by Sheila’s signature on the reverse, as company secretary, three months before he disappeared. For the prosecution, Michael Corkery QC told the jury: ‘She knew perfectly well what she was doing, removing funds from the company to use jointly when she went to Stonehouse in Australia.’23 However, the DTI inspectors, after spending two years going through my father’s business affairs with a fine-tooth comb, had a different opinion of Sheila. They asked her why she resigned in August: ‘You were not, as it were, beginning to clear the decks with a view to eventual emigration?’ Sheila replied, ‘No, I certainly was not … I was not a very good secretary, in that I had no knowledge of what is really required of a company secretary and/or director.’ The inspectors asked again, ‘Are you sure that you were not laying the ground for a departure?’ Sheila said, ‘I am absolutely positive, but I don’t expect anybody to believe it.’ Significantly, a year after the trial ended, the inspectors declared ‘We do.’24 Although the jury found my father and Sheila not guilty of the conspiracy charge of ‘enabling Stonehouse unlawfully to receive payments from EPACS in the knowledge that the company would thereby become insolvent and unable to pay its lawful debts to its creditors’, they found them guilty on five charges of stealing the cheques themselves.
Judge Eveleigh thought Sheila was just my father’s puppet. He told her: ‘You will be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on each count concurrent suspended for a period of two years. That means if you commit no further offence punishable by imprisonment in this country during that period you will hear no more of it, and I have every reason to think you will not.’ With this conditional discharge, she’d walk out of the Old Bailey a relatively free person. Eveleigh told Sheila, ‘I have no doubt that you were fully aware of what was going on … I have no reason to believe that deviousness is in your nature. I think you were extremely unfortunate to meet this persuasive, deceitful man, and an ambitious man. I know you will not recognise it, women in your position so rarely do.’25 (About that statement, Sheila later wrote ‘He was so wrong.’26) Eveleigh continued, ‘Fortunately for you I recognise it, because were it not for that you would be sentenced to a term of imprisonment … but I do recognise that John Stonehouse’s influence must have been tremendous. One had only to see the manner in which he sought to mesmerise the jury in this court to know that he could have told you anything, and while it is clear, as I say, that you knew the situation, I have no doubt he persuaded you your duty was to go along with him, and while you regretted having to do it, you did it.’27 For the same charges Eveleigh sentenced my father to six years apiece, for which he’d serve prison time. In addition, he got six years for another EPACS cheque, for £3,118, which didn’t involve Sheila. The way my father saw it, he was sentenced to 36 years in prison for taking £28,085.19 out of his own company.
The law relating to the taking of money from a company that is, essentially, one’s own, was explained by the judge using this analogy: ‘A company in law is regarded as an individual in itself, and its property belongs to it, just as the council dustcart belongs to the council and not a particular rate payer, however big his rates may be.’ He elaborated: ‘People may feel morally right in doing a number of things. It is said that Robin Hood felt that way, but, members of the jury, a moral right is not the same as a legal right.’28
The lead prosecutor, Michael Corkery QC, accused Sheila of being ‘a shrewd and tough operator’ and the police and DDP spent a lot of time trying to nail her into ‘Plan B’ before my father carried it out. But, having read all the trial witness statements I see nothing to indicate Sheila had any idea what was going on inside my father’s head before he faked his death on the 20th November 1974. He phoned her two days later from Honolulu, that’s after the event, and she met him in Copenhagen, after the event. They might, at that point, have discussed Sheila joining him in Australia or New Zealand in the future but, if so, it’s still after the event. There’s actually no evidence to indicate Sheila knew of ‘Plan B’ before the event; all the evidence against her was circumstantial.
But the police and prosecution were determined to paint a picture of my father and his mistress engaged in criminal conspiracy, and this can be seen in the language they used and the facts they omitted, not only during the trial but in the paperwork they submitted to the appeal judges as well. On the 24th October 1974 my father accompanied Sheila to look at a hotel at 62 Fitzjohns Avenue, Hampstead, and this is recorded in the trial appeal notes as ‘Stonehouse (name?) found a room for Mrs Buckley at Highfield House Hotel, NW3’.29 There’s nothing in the receptionist’s statement to suggest he ‘found’ it for her, and as her sister lived a ten or fifteen-minute walk away in Howitt Road, it’s likely she ‘found’ it herself. Sheila paid £20 in advance for the room, starting on the 30th. The receptionist said the man with her said, ‘I would like my wife to stay somewhere while I am away,’ and the police found that very deep and telling, indicating Sheila knew he was going away. It doesn’t actually mean anything other than he wanted the receptionist to know there was a man in the picture, as a kind of protective move. Strange men are more likely to stay away from a single woman when they know there’s a ‘husband’ around. That’s a fact, although men might not be as aware of it as women are.
In the timeline of events that the prosecution put before the judges, for the 29th November, they say ‘“Markham” arrives in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen he is visited by Mrs Buckley who travelled under the name of Mrs Morgan.’30 What it leaves out is that my father arrived on the 29th, but didn’t phone Sheila until the 4th December. She then arrived on the evening of the 6th and left on the 8th. The appeal notes give the wrong impression, especially as the next timeline entry is 8th December: ‘Markham purchases air ticket to Melbourne.’ The prosecution made it all too easy for the appeal judges to assume that Sheila was in Copenhagen from the 29th November to the 8th December.
The prosecution made a big deal out of the fact that my father wanted Sheila to have the financial benefit of his personal stamp c
ollection. He’d started selling them in March 1972, when $14,516 from the sale of some of his personal collection was put directly into the EPACS account to support the company. But by 1974, he clearly wanted Sheila to have the funds from sales because on the 7th October, following a stamp sale, $1,000 had been sent to her via my father’s company in Liechtenstein called Victa. On the 23rd October, he wrote to stamp dealers Stanley Gibbons saying the stamps they held for him should be considered the property of Sheila Buckley, and the payments arising from three auction sales should be sent to her. As the auctions occurred over the first two weeks of November, and he disappeared in a blaze of publicity on the 20th, Stanley Gibbons never sent Sheila any payments, preferring to wait. Sheila was also sent $970 from America, again, from a sale of some of his personal collection. To the prosecution, this sounded like collusion; to me, it sounds like a man trying to be nice to his mistress; to Sheila, it was her lover giving her the proceeds of his own property so she could get some money together to put down as a deposit on a flat.
The police were desperate to link Sheila to ‘Plan B’ and their best hope related to ‘Markham’ phoning the Astoria Hotel sometime after the 16th October saying, according to the receptionist, thank you, he was going to Australia, and wasn’t expecting mail but if it came could it be forwarded to a hotel. The police hoped to make a link to Highfield House, and Sheila. The receptionist at the Astoria thought he mentioned the hotel was in the UK but she didn’t write it down. I wonder if Markham said anything of the sort, otherwise why didn’t the receptionist make a note of it? All she’d have to do is write the address on any received envelope and pop it back in the post; in the event the few letters that did arrive just cluttered up the reception area. Aside from this, Sheila’s association with Highfield House was well after the 16th October: she and my father first went there to make enquiries about a room on the 24th October, and Sheila first stayed there on the 30th. The police also made a lot of enquiries when trying to track down a mystery woman who phoned the Bank of New South Wales on the 29th October, saying she was Mr Markham’s secretary and that he’d gone to Australia on the 25th October. Try as they might, they eventually had to admit Sheila hadn’t made the call, and they never found out who did.
There were an additional fifteen charges against my father alone, including two for obtaining birth certificates in other people’s names which were dropped during the trial when it was shown that there was nothing illegal in doing that. Two charges related to credit card bills of £355.95 and £422.65, for which he was sentenced to twelve years. Both amounts related to business travel that was, in the normal course of events, routinely reimbursed by the company. £355.95 was a Diners Card payment due to National Airlines for the flights London–Miami–LA–London that my father took for business in early November – when he first tried to disappear, but freaked out and couldn’t. The witness for Diners Card told the court my father had that card ‘from July 1959, and it had been satisfactory until September of 1974’. The payment for £422.65 was on my father’s American Express card and was used to pay for the ticket Jim Charlton used to fly on that fateful 19th November, London–Miami–New York–London for £281 plus £1.15 tax, plus £140.50 for my father’s one-way ticket London–Miami. No credit card company brought charges against my father. It was only the DPP who wanted him to go down, and they didn’t seem to get the irony of charging him for paying for his business colleague, Jim Charlton, to fly. By the time the bills arrived my father was in the middle of a breakdown, and on the other side of the world. If someone had said ‘Look, John, you’ve got these two unpaid credit card bills that need paying’, he would have paid them, even if it was from his Markham bank account. Instead, Scotland Yard quietly put the bills in a file, waited three months, and then charged him for ‘falsely pretending’ he ‘intended to pay’, and watched as British justice slapped him with six years in prison for each.
He got another six years for buying £385.38 (US$870) worth of traveller’s cheques on his Barclaycard, which was unpaid at the time of his disappearance. The sentence for applying for an American Express card in the name of Markham was six months, and for the forged Markham passport he got one year. He also got five years apiece for taking out two company overdrafts, one for £7,500 and another for £10,000, which led to charges of obtaining ‘pecuniary advantage by deception’. He applied for the first one on 29th August, almost three months before he disappeared, at the Midland Bank, giving a personal guarantee. I was watching the committal proceedings when the manager of Lloyds Bank, who’d given EPACS the £10,000 overdraft on the basis of a personal guarantee, was called as a prosecution witness. He said he still believed that guarantee to be of value, ‘because I think Mr Stonehouse has a good life ahead of him, and is a potential force for good’. The prosecution took a double-take: his evidence sounded like it was part of the defence.
So far, the sentences amounted to 65-and-a-half years, but the DPP weren’t finished yet. They wanted to bring in charges relating to the five life insurance policies my mother had taken out in 1974, but never claimed. At the committal proceedings the magistrate, Mr Kenneth Harrington, had dismissed the life insurance charges on technicalities. The first was that the ‘attempt’ to defraud occurred outside the jurisdiction of the court – in Miami. The second reason is explained by my father’s lawyer in these proceedings, Geoffrey Robertson QC, in his book The Justice Game: ‘to be found guilty of “attempt” to commit crime you must have had a real go at pulling it off: the legal test is whether the act charged as an attempt (the disappearing act in Miami) was “sufficiently proximate” to the notional completed crime (the eventual payment of the insurance moneys to Barbara in England). Since Stonehouse, in order to achieve this objective, would have to remain hidden for years, and in Melbourne (then one of the world’s dullest cities), my argument was that what he had done by faking his death was not close enough to the anticipated insurance claim to be punished as an “attempt”.’31 Geoffrey won the argument and the charges were dropped, but the DPP reinstated them for the trial at the Old Bailey. My father put down a question in the House of Commons asking if this was usual practice. On the 20th July he got his answer, the last written answer of his political career. The question had referred to 33 other cases, and the reply was: ‘No charges were reinstated after being dismissed by the magistrates in any of the cases mentioned in the Questions for written answer on 10th May.’ My father had suspected that such reinstatement of charges was unprecedented and that his treatment by the judicial system was exceptional – exceptionally harsh – and this parliamentary answer appeared to prove that true.
The DPP probably felt they had to include the life insurance charges to justify all the hoo-ha the extradition had caused, plus the press hounds wanted blood – and not much of that could be squeezed out of £29,000. There were five insurance policies that, together, totalled £125,000 – a nice big, fat, number that made his crimes look dramatic and the police heroic for nabbing him. He would be sentenced to six years for each policy, 30 years, bringing his total sentence to 95-and-a-half years. We could never understand how my father could be charged on the insurances, yet alone convicted, because they were never claimed and were, in any case, short-term, which meant they would have run out of term before any claim could be made, because, obviously, there was no dead body.
In UK law, a person can’t be declared dead, or a claim made on any life insurance, until either a body has turned up, or a minimum of seven years has passed. These were the policies: Canada Life: five years – £25,000; Norwich Union: five years – £25,000; Phoenix Assurance: five years – £25,000; Royal ‘Temporary Assurance’: seven years – £30,000; and Yorkshire General: ten years – £20,000. The first four policies could never have been claimed; they would simply have run out of term before a court could be applied to, and a claim made. The ten-year Yorkshire General policy was taken out on the 17th July, two months after my father’s car was blown to smithereens in a Heathrow Airport car park
by an IRA bomb, and four months before he faked his death. This is the only policy that could have been claimed if, after seven years, a court accepted he was actually dead and there was no doubt in the form of ‘sightings’. Lord Lucan’s son had to wait 41 years before he was allowed to have a death certificate. There had been ‘sightings’ of his father, so that kept the missing file open. Given that everyone thought my father was a spy and there’d been speculation that a submarine had taken him from Miami to Cuba, they’d be looking for him in Moscow and keeping the file open. But, crucially, no claims were ever made by my mother.
The Old Bailey judge was fully aware of the short-term nature of the insurances because questions had been asked in court on that very point. In his summing up, the judge referred to what had been said: ‘Cases without a body are relatively rare, because usually in this world when someone dies there is a body. Absence of seven years can lead to a presumption of death, and that is the kind of evidence that would satisfy directors … A body is not absolutely essential. You may ask how would one proceed in the case of someone who is missing at sea. How would one proceed in the case of an air crash where perhaps bodies cannot be identified. The answer would be that same proof satisfactory to the directors should be given, and the nature of that proof you may think will vary depending on the circumstances of the death. So much for the insurance counts.’32
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 23
