Travesty

Bakewell, Derbyshire is something of a family home on my father's side. He and my uncle grew up there, went to school there, and the Rowland family built the house on Upper Yeld Road in which we would stay for weeks at a time during my childhood. At the end of Upper Yeld Road stands Bakewell Cemetery. We used to pass it regularly on our walks to and from the town centre.

In September 1973, the town and its cemetery became notorious for what was soon disparagingly dubbed the Bakewell Tart Murder and the person charged with the offence went on to spend 27 years in prison - for a crime he did not commit. His conviction was eventually overturned in 2002 and stands as possibly the worst miscarriage of justice an innocent man has suffered at the hands of the British policing and judicial system - a travesty, in his case, if ever there was one.

You are probably not familiar with the details. Why would you be, unless you had some personal connection to the town that made the events register for you? Allow me to summarise. It is quite an extraordinary account of wrong-doing compounded by wrong-doing on wrong-doing.

Wendy Sewell was a secretary working for the Forestry Commission in a Bakewell office. Married and in her early thirties, she had something of a reputation locally for being promiscuous. She'd had several periods of separation from her husband, was known to be conducting 'love affairs' with local businessmen and often resorted to the extensive grounds of the cemetery as a place of rendezvous and al fresco liaison (outdoor sex).

Bakewell Cemetery - at the end of our road

On the fateful day in question, she was seen hastening up from town to the cemetery in her lunch hour for an assignation, presumably with one of her lovers. She was found less than an hour later, partially unclothed and badly bludgeoned around the head in a part of the cemetery near the groundsmen's toolshed.

The person who found her was the junior groundsman, a simple lad aged 17 but with a reading age of 12. He used to go home to his Mum for lunch every day and had just returned to work. He summoned help from the older workmen in the cemetery and they returned to see Wendy Sewell stumbling about, fall and hit her head on a gravestone and lose consciousness. She died in hospital two days later.

The lad, Stephen Downing, was arrested by police at the scene and they proceeded to interrogate him for several hours without a formal caution and without a solicitor present. They persuaded him to sign a confession, much of the substance of which he couldn't read or understand, admitting he had assaulted the woman. He did this because he was thoroughly frightened and thought it was best to do as he was told so he could go home. When Sewell subsequently died, Downing found himself in the frame for her murder. At his trial he protested his innocence and said he'd signed the assault confession under duress.  The only evidence against Stephen Downing - apart from the signed confession which he retracted - was that his clothes were spattered with Sewell's blood. Downing tried to explain that Sewell had shaken her head when he'd first gone to her assistance and that's how her blood came to be on his clothing. The forensic expert maintained the spattering was entirely consistent with Downing having been the assailant. The police never looked for anyone else in connection with the death and Downing was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to life imprisonment. Because Stephen always protested he was innocent of any crime, he was never considered for parole; and because he was labelled a 'sex-offender' he was regularly bullied, beaten up and even apparently raped by fellow inmates. He had to be relocated eight times before his eventual release in 2001 after a long campaign to discredit the case against him.

It is startling to read how he came to be convicted despite evidence to the contrary. Firstly, he was seen leaving the cemetery (to go home for lunch) and Sewell was subsequently seen loitering between the gravestones by a 15 year old girl, but her testimony was disregarded. Secondly, Sewell had been beaten on the head with a pick-axe handle, eight separate blows to the back of her skull, by a right-handed person and a blood-stained right hand print was clearly visible on the handle, but Stephen Downing was left- handed (shades of To Kill A Mockingbird) and wearing gardener's gloves at the time. Thirdly a blood-stained man was reportedly seen running from the scene by several witnesses that day but the police didn't follow up that line of enquiry.

It took the dedication of a campaigning journalist in the late 1990s to build sufficient doubt about the original conviction before the authorities agreed to re-examine the case. The police claimed all the original evidence, notes, files et cetera had been lost; even the transcript of the original trial had somehow been destroyed - and then the murder weapon, that pick-axe handle was found to be on show in Derby Museum.

In 2002 the Court of Appeal overturned Stephen Downing's conviction and awarded him £750,000 in compensation for the travesty he had suffered. He now works as a chef, a skill he learned while in prison.

The police conducted a fresh murder investigation at a cost of another £500,000, re-interviewed everyone they could trace and took fresh statements from people who had not come forward at the time. A list of 22 suspects was drawn up but nothing conclusive could be proved against any of them - not even the owner of the van that someone had observed parked outside the cemetery gates that lunchtime and noted the registration number of, because he and his two colleagues were acting strangely. The witness kept the note of that number for nearly thirty years. In tracing back its history, it turned out it had belonged to one of the men Wendy Sewell had been seeing at the time of her death. Finally in 2014 a pathology report from 1973 resurfaced, the contents of which - had it been submitted at Stephen's trial - would have contradicted his 'confession', completely exonerated him as a suspect and most certainly have saved an innocent and vulnerable young man from the travesty of a gross miscarriage of justice.

Wendy Sewell's killer is still at large and there must be people in the close-knit community of Bakewell who know who is responsible.

Follow that with a poem, I hear you challenge. Very well, I shall...

On Finding Wendy Sewell
Cemetery gothic,
tombstones, cypress and yew,
and you - the pretty lady.
I've seen you here before,
but you didn't see me.
I've seen you disappear into the trees
with your men friends
and get down on your knees,
but you never saw me.
Sometimes I think I'm invisible.

Are you hurt? Crawling in the dirt
and crying. Can I help?

I tried to rescue a fox once
that had been hit by a car,
fur all bloodied and it couldn't walk.
I went to pick it up.
It had the same look in its eyes
as you do. It tried to bite me.

Don't shake so. There's blood
everywhere. Your head.
Stay there pretty lady.
Don't you have a mother
who'll make everything all right?
Sometimes I think I'm incapable.

I'll get help. Lie down and rest.
Blood on the buttercups,
this is not good. Cemetery gothic,
tombstones, cypress and yew.
We all need a mother
who'll make everything all right.

I couldn't sign off on such a downbeat note, so I'll conclude with a little sweetener, still on topic. Here is a slice of original Bakewell pudding:

Note the puff-pastry case, layer of raspberry jam and then rich, buttery custard filling, baked to perfection. That's the real deal. No short pastry, frangipani, sickly icing and stupid cherry here. Those Kiplingesque confections marketing themselves as Bakewell Tarts are just another travesty!

Thanks for reading. Stay on the bright side, Steve ;-)