Yorkshire Almanac After 19 years in prison, Anthony Steel’s conviction for the 1977 Bradford murder of Carol Wilkinson is quashed due to failings by West Yorkshire Police

28 February 2003: After 19 years in prison, Anthony Steel’s conviction for the 1977 Bradford murder of Carol Wilkinson is quashed due to failings by West Yorkshire Police

Court of Appeal (Criminal Division). 2003/06/10. Steel, R v [2003] EWCA Crim 1640. London: BAILII. Licensed under Crown Copyright. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

Discussion.

Mr Mansfield’s primary submission was that the new evidence made the appellant’s conviction unsafe, and that was irrespective of any breach of the Judges’ Rules or of the absence of any modern safeguards thought necessary for the protection of a suspect and the avoidance of a miscarriage of justice. His alternative submission was that the conviction was in any event unsafe once such breaches or the absence of such safeguards were taken into consideration.
In support of his primary submission, Mr Mansfield emphasised that the new evidence showed that the appellant, unknown to the jury or any other participant at his trial, was a far more vulnerable person in the context of his interviews than had been or could have been appreciated at the time and that, in a case which depended essentially on his confession, his conviction must therefore be regarded as unsafe. For the Crown, Mr Kelsey-Fry felt unable to proffer an argument to the contrary.
We agree. Although, as in King, the evidence of the appellant’s abnormally low IQ could have been established at trial, it is the combination of his borderline abnormality in terms of suggestibility and compliance and of his unforeseen abnormally low IQ which rendered him particularly vulnerable to interrogation; and this would be so irrespective of the appellant’s allegations concerning violence and the threats of violence, inducements, and the refusal of access to a solicitor. It is not possible to regard the conviction as safe when the essential issue, indeed the sole issue on which the jury were asked to judge the appellant’s case was whether his confession was voluntary and true or not. In so judging him, the jury would have to rely on the appellant’s own evidence from the witness box without the advantage of the new expert evidence as to his vulnerability when alone in the police station during lengthy interviews. If in those circumstances the jury might have found it difficult to believe how the appellant could confess to a crime he did not commit, they would not have found it any easier to accept, or to be rendered doubtful about, his more specific allegations as to how he was treated during his interrogation. If, however, they had had the advantage of hearing the new evidence, it cannot be postulated that they would not have looked at the whole of the appellant’s evidence in a new light.
The judge, whose summing up was a model of fairness, was at a similar disadvantage. So were counsel at trial. Without appreciating how potentially vulnerable the appellant was, any of them was entitled to present the conflict of evidence between the police witnesses and the appellant in stark terms, reflected in the judge’s summing up, between on the one side an entirely straightforward interview process and on the other side a sinister conspiracy. Presented, however, with the new evidence, it becomes apparent that a third alternative becomes possible, which is that, without any abuse of the process, a highly vulnerable suspect was not recognised for what he was.
It is precisely because of the dangers of such vulnerability that certain safeguards have been built into the process. Of course, it has never been permissible to use violence, threats or inducements to extract a confession. In other respects, however, the rules have changed to reflect an increasing appreciation of what is necessary for safeguards against the risk of a miscarriage of justice. At the time of the interviews and trial in this case, the test for the admissibility and relevance of a confession was that it was voluntary, defined in note (e) to the Judges’ Rules as not being obtained “by fear of prejudice or hope of advantage…or by oppression”, see R v. Prager (1972) 56 Cr App R 151. Nowadays a new test found in section 76(2)(b) of PACE is that of reliability. As the note in Archbold, 2003, at para 15-268 points out, a confession might be inadmissible under section 76(2)(b) without any impropriety. At the time of the interviews in this case, under paragraph (c) to the preamble to Judges’ Rules “every person at any stage of an investigation should be able to communicate and to consult privately with a solicitor”: at that time, however, it appears to have been the view that there would be no breach unless the suspect had requested the services of a solicitor, and even in case of breach it would seem that there was uncertainty as to its importance: see Archbold, 40^th ed, 1979, at para 1390. Nowadays, however, the right of access to legal advice and to being apprised of that right is dealt with in detail in PACE and its Codes and its importance underlined (R v. Samuel [1988] QB 615 at 630). Whether the appellant had in fact asked for a solicitor was of course a point in issue in this case: but it is not something on which the new evidence bears; and it is not possible to say that there had been a breach of paragraph (c), although Mr Mansfield urged us to infer that there had, for instance from the speed with which Mr Taylor appeared once the interrogation had been concluded with the sixth interview.
In this connection, however, the fact that the appellant was what used to be called mentally retarded or mentally handicapped is of particular importance. Its importance was recognised under the Judges’ Rules, for Rule 4A read (see para 1391a of the 1979 Archbold):

“If it appears to a police officer that a person (whether a witness or a suspect) whom he intends to interview has a mental handicap which raises a doubt as to whether the person can understand the questions put to him, or which makes the person likely to be especially open to suggestion, the officer should take particular care in putting questions and accepting the reliability of answers. As far as practicable, and where recognised as such by the police, a mentally handicapped adult (whether suspected of crime or not) should be interviewed only in the presence of a parent or other person in whose care, custody or control he is, or of some person who is not a police officer (for example a social worker).”
Nowadays, there is a straightforward prohibition in the Codes on the interview of a mentally handicapped person in the absence of an appropriate adult, which goes beyond the qualified language of Rule 4A (“If it appears to a police officer…where recognised as such by the police”), and in addition section 77 of PACE requires the judge to warn the jury of a special need for caution before convicting an accused in reliance on his confession where the case against him depends wholly or substantially on that confession and the court is satisfied that he is mentally handicapped and the confession was not made in the presence of an independent person.
On behalf of the Crown, Mr Kelsey-Fry was himself inclined to concede, indeed to volunteer, that an inference could be drawn that in this case the police had realised that the appellant was not a normal suspect, but was vulnerable, and that this inference was to be drawn from the circumstances of DCS Hobson’s desire for the sixth interview following the statement. In the judge’s summing up, this interview was spoken of as prompted by the superintendent’s caution about a confession being made 18 months after the murder when (subject to the key ring) there was nothing to connect the suspect with the crime. In the application to this court in 1981, however, Lord Lane spoke, as has been noted above (at para 52), in terms which suggest that there was also concern on the superintendent’s part about the vulnerability of the appellant. On this basis, a significant breach of the Judges’ Rules could be shown, if that were necessary, and one that related to the new evidence.
In our judgment, however, the need to show a breach of the rules then in force, although a factor in King and no doubt not one to be disregarded, was not a condition precedent to the success of that appeal, nor to the success of this. Rather, the background of the rules then in force and, as Lord Bingham put it, of “circumstances which denied the defendant important safeguards later thought necessary to avoid the risk of a miscarriage of justice” is what gives to the new evidence its power to affect the safety of the conviction in question. It is because of concern for the vulnerability of the mentally handicapped, underlined in more modern provisions but already well demonstrated in Rule 4A, that the new evidence links directly to the safety of the appellant’s conviction.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Times piece on the day after. The full decision wasn’t issued till June. Neil Wilby in 2013. Steel died soon afterwards, and the battle to get hold of his compensation between his family, his girlfriend and Peter Hill, the Rough Justice producer, is also gruesome. See also the BBC report. Are the Olive Tunstall reports public domain?

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14 April 1843: John Nicholson, “the Airedale Poet,” “the Bingley Baron,” dies after falling into the Aire while drunk

29 February 1824: Prophet John Wroe is baptised on the Leap Day in the Aire near Apperley Bridge before an audience of 30,000

2 May 1844: The Bradford Observer reports a 10% increase in the borough’s population in two years

20 April 1835: A teetotallers’ tea-party at the first, great, Wilsden Temperance Festival

28 April 1730: John Hobson meets a nematicide at Woodall (Rotherham)

14 August 1673: A retired coal miner, unable to live from carding wool, decides to go down a pit at Royds Hall (Bradford)

18 March 1650: Dorothy Rodes of Bowling (Bradford) blames witchcraft by Mary Sykes for the postpartum illness of her daughter

30 October 1744: Landowners form a partnership to pipe water from Little Horton to Bradford, facilitating urban growth

30 May 1835: Alfred Austin, future poet laureate, “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strum-strum,” is born into rural splendour at Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds

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Comment

Austin’s parents were married in 1829 in Barnsley, so Ashwood was built in the early 1830s. It is listed, and Historic England has some fine photos by Martin Pitt. Austin’s father died in the winter of 1857, the same year in which Austin was called to the London Bar, and it sounds like his mother and sister moved from Ashwood to Adel in 1858. Then, presumably, Ashwood Villas and Hilton Court were built on parts of the garden. Ashwood makes far more sense without them. Headingley Hill Congregational Church was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, architect of Leeds Town Hall, and built in the mid-1860s.

The first home of Alfred Austin: Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds, viewed from the forecourt of Hilton Court (Cobb 2018/01/26)

Eveleigh Bradford and Jane Bower have published profiles of Austin. A cosmopolitan Catholic Tory patriot, he clearly preferred Italy to his birthplace, which he doesn’t seem to have versified, and where the Leeds Civic Trust has demonstrated what some regard as embarrassing smallness of mind in denying him a blue plaque. However, there’s a lot to be said for this contemporary view:

Mr. Alfred Austin is another poet who takes himself very seriously, in six or seven volumes of verse (it does not matter counting precisely, for they are all very much alike), admirably printed, with Pegasus on the cover, and everything proper. Mr. Austin writes for the most part in smooth and polished metre, and he does not make any ostentatious attempt to mimic the style of greater poets, except in the portentous array of eight hundred and eighty-six stanzas, under the title ‘The Human Tragedy’ (why this particular story should be the human tragedy par excellence, Heaven only knows!), which was probably what provoked Browning’s reference to the author as

Banjo-Byron, that twangs the strum-strum there.

On the other hand, Mr. Austin is absolutely without ‘style’ of his own. He has never achieved style, never risen to it; and his volumes, considering that they are mostly fairly written verse and not without pleasing ideas of a simple and obvious kind, are the most absolutely colourless poetry, to have any pretence to be called poetry at all, that we have ever turned over. The matter is made worse by the author’s utter deficiency in the sense of humour – a deficiency which he shares with some great poets (Wordsworth, for example), but which is a peculiarly dangerous defect for a ‘minor poet.’ A sense of humour would have saved him at all events from such extraordinary bathos, for instance, as when the hero of ‘the human tragedy’ encounters his faithless fiancée:

The shop whence they that moment had emerged
Plainly bespoke their errand up to town (!!)

and would have saved him from making himself a laughing-stock in the conclusion of his poem ‘At Delphi,’ where he professes to have hesitated about crowning his head with the indigenous laurel, lest he should court the fate of Marsyas, but is emboldened by the voice of the god assuring him that there is no ill feeling:

Take it! wear it! ’tis for thee,
Singer from the Northern Sea.

(Edinburgh Review 1893)

I’ve only read vol. 1 of the autobiography, which is very good on mid-century Italy, but contains several delightful anecdotes of 1830s and 1840s Leeds. For example:

Wool-stapling, as followed by my Father, Grandfather, and Great-grandfather — the last two had passed away before I reached the age of memory — seemed to me at the time a singularly light occupation. We all had to be in the breakfast-room at nine o’clock; and Morning Prayers, read by my Father, always preceded the morning meal. When it was over, he lingered among the flowers, the poultry, and the pigeons, and not till about ten o’clock did he leave for Leeds, where, in Albion Street, his office and warehouses were. He invariably walked there and back, a distance of about two and a half miles each way; for, with the masculine habit of the time, he looked on driving in carriages, save for pleasure or very long distances, as suitable only to women. In those days, people dined at a much earlier hour than now; hence he was always home by five, frequently by four o’clock, and on Saturdays yet earlier. I mention these otherwise insignificant facts to show under what leisurely conditions business was then conducted. His remaining share in it consisted in periodical visits to London when the Wool-Sales took place, where he bought what his judgment told him the cloth manufacturers of the West Riding would be likely to require, warehousing what he bought, and selling to them the number of bales they needed. Such was the trade of Wool-stapling in those days. I am told it no longer exists; since the mill-owners, their manufactures being now on so large a scale, purchase for themselves in London and elsewhere what they require. Sometimes my Father would pay a visit to Germany, in connection with his interests at home; and for years I kept a letter from him, from Breslau, with a coloured picture of a Prussian Hussar in the corner of the first page. I remember that his judgment, in all matters of life and conduct, was regarded as a superior one, and he was frequently asked for advice, which they who sought it believed to be deliberately and impartially formed. More than once pressed to be Mayor of the Borough, all the more remarkable in those days, since he was a Roman Catholic, he thought it wiser to decline the office, though he accepted the duties of Magistrate. As the sequel of this narrative will show, he died when I was only twenty-two years of age, and within a few weeks after I had been called to the Bar. But I well remember the even cheerfulness of his temper, and on his face that philosophic smile which testifies to a knowledge of human nature, and a kindly indulgence towards it. No University education was then accessible in England to Roman Catholics, and, save for ecclesiastical purposes, hardly a collegiate one. But, on the other hand, the Grammar Schools of England still offered sound mental training of no narrow character, and his acquaintance with the best Literature was remarked by me from my earliest days. He was, in no filially conventional sense, the best of Fathers; solicitous for the education of his children, comprehensive as regards study, severe in respect of conduct, and reasonably strict as a mentor in morals. The most devoted and domestic of husbands, he was, I could not help observing, much liked and trusted by women of every condition; for his attitude towards them was essentially chivalrous, and he impressed on his sons its supreme importance. The phrases most frequent on his lips were “Fairplay” and “Honour bright.” His piety was simple and sincere, but never intolerant.

Re Catholic Emancipation:

Catholics at that time were on the side of the Whigs, who had long been advocates of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, which was passed a year after his marriage, which had been compulsorily celebrated in a Protestant Church before being sanctioned in the Roman Catholic one of Saint Anne’s. To me, when a child, differences of Party bias naturally signified nothing. But I took a keen interest in the hoisting of a large Orange Flag, the Whig-Colour in the Borough, on our house at election time. Many years later, my Father, as was and is still the case with most Roman Catholics, transferred his sympathies to the Conservative Cause ; and I recollect a Mr. Beecroft, who had been returned by a very small majority as Conservative member for Leeds, telling me in the lobby of the House of Commons he owed that majority entirely to the local influence of my Father.

Re his childhood at Ashwood, Headingley:

Reminiscences of early childhood, especially if told by oneself, are apt to be rather naif, and only raise a smile. If I say that I have a clear and loving recollection of my own special nurse, Mary Wilkinson, whose prattle was of the ordinary pattern of such; and for no other reason I can imagine, than that she had certain vague ideas concerning Alfred the Great, and my Christian name was the same as that of England’s Darling, she was fond of iterating and reiterating the misappropriate words, “He shall be King of all England, he shall.” I equally well remember our nursery governess, Ann Ingleson, who afterwards married the Manager of a prosperous cotton-mill. My earliest recollections are of a disposition to wander alone in meadows, gathering wild-flowers, and humming to myself songs I had heard others sing. At night I used to steal as quietly as I could out of my bed, and creep into the day nursery, from the window of which could be seen the rising of the moon, or the afterglow of sunset in summer. Anything of a more active character in which I took part arose from the suggestions of my elder brother and sister, the former of whom thought it the most natural because the most hazardous of sports, to wheel me along the top of the kitchen-garden wall, or to inter my sister’s doll with funeral honours, subject to its being dug up again; and the latter of whom displayed the girlish inclination towards mischief from the sheer enjoyment of doing what was forbidden. But my heart was in none of these. A little later I had a genuine pleasure in elementary cricket, flying my kite, and shooting arrows at a fixed target.

When about six, I was sent to a day-school in the village of Headingley, kept by two maiden ladies, the Misses Summers, staid and conscientious experts in teaching young children the rudiments of learn ing. My sister Winifred was my companion as far as their door, and then she went on to a Mrs. Gomoschinska, the English widow of a Pole, who educated one or two “young ladies” in what were then regarded as the necessary “accomplishments” for such. As an indication, possibly, of an inborn romantic tendency, I may recall an indefinable feeling which I cherished for a girl of my own age, who likewise was a pupil of the Misses Summers, and who, it would seem, in some degree shared the sentiment, since it was arranged between us that whichever of the two started schoolward first, placed a stone outside our garden gate as a token. I have always understood that what was there taught me was taught thoroughly.

Holidays in Ilkley:

Our summer holiday was generally passed by my sister and myself at Ilkley, now well known to Hydropathists, but then as primitive a little place as was to be found in the island, and about fourteen miles from Headingley, the road to it being up the lovely valley of the Wharfe through a small township of the name of Otley… But I already loved the [Wharfe], and used to lean for hours over its picturesque bridge at the end of the lane where the elder and the woodbine scented the air. There was what was called the village street, but it was paved roughly, if at all; and a beck, as small streams are called in Yorkshire, and never dry, zigzagged through it. With the exception of the Inn, from which the Daily Coach started for Leeds or Bradford to much blowing of horns, I do not think there was a tiled or slated roof in the place. All the other houses were thatched; and our lodgings were in the chief of these, kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Senior, along whose kitchen ceiling were stretched wires, over which home-made oatcake was dried. Immediately opposite was the equally primitive home of Betty Butterfield, much frequented by us, since she kept donkeys for hire, and had charge of the baths and wells up the hill on Ilkley Moor. It was altogether a place after my young heart; and though I do not think we ever took the baths, we used to walk up the hill every morning to where they were, to drink the cold pellucid water of an adjoining well that was supposed to have special health-giving virtues. I have a clear recollection of seeing an incorrigible drunkard in the Village Stocks, a revival of which I shall shock the sentimentalist by saying I should much like to see; and farmers and their wives who lived in the neighbourhood invariably riding into the village pillion fashion. Every Saturday, during the time we remained at Ilkley, our parents drove over from Headingley. On Sunday morning we all attended Mass in the private chapel in Middleton Park, belonging to the Middleton family, and in the afternoon we were driven to Bolton, six miles from Ilkley, whose ruined Abbey on the Wharfe, whose bounding and flashing waterfall, apparently endless woods, through which the Wharfe flowed and foamed, and well-known “Strid,” filled me with romantic glee. They have all been celebrated, as I discovered later on, by Wordsworth in his poem “Hart-Leap Well.” … I am told that Ilkley is now a model Hydropathic resort, whose once rocky fern-clad slopes are covered with the huge conventional hotels of to-day, spacious Clubs and Concert-Rooms, and all the other concomitants of our much-vaunted material Progress and Civilization. And so one visits it no more, but repairs for rustic refreshment of the spirit to places mayhap such as Garmisch in the Bavarian Highlands, or to Château d’OEx.

Meanwood Beck: