Background to Gary Critchley’s case.
Gary Critchley was born in Birmingham on 13 August 1962. This year he will be 48. On 22 May 1981 Gary Critchley was convicted for the murder of Edward McNeill at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) in London and sentenced to be ‘detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence. The then Lord Chief Justice [Lord Lane] recommended that he should serve ‘no more than 8-9 years’. Gary has now spent 29 years in prison.
Edward McNeill was killed on 28 June 1980 in a fourth floor flat in Campbell Buildings (now demolished) near Waterloo in the London Borough of Lambeth. Gary Critchley was found lying severely injured on the street below and taken to hospital. It was originally assumed that Gary had been the victim of a violent crime, but when the police investigated the incident they found Edward McNeill’s body in the flat from which 17 year old Gary had fallen. The police questioned three suspects for the murder. Gary was the last to be questioned and had the least legal and family support.
Despite anomalies in the prosecution case (outlined below), the jury found Gary guilty of Edward McNeill’s murder. In 1982, the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction. In 2005 the Criminal Cases Review Commission also rejected an argument that new expert evidence should be sought to clarify the original pathologist’s report. This stated that the absence of any traces of Edward McNeill’s blood on Gary’s clothing was due to rain having washed any such blood away while Gary was lying injured on the street. Curiously, the rain had not washed Gary’s own blood away.
Ambiguous evidence at original trial. [Edited from Private Eye 24 July 2009]
In the early hours of Saturday 28 June 1980, Gary,, a young punk rocker who had only been in London for ten days of a two week stay, was found lying seriously injured on a pavement below his squat. He had a broken back, ankle and wrist, and was subsequently found to have suffered brain damage from a hammer blow to the front of his skull. Drug traces in his blood showed he had taken large quantities of sleeping pills as well as alcohol.
When the hospital called police to investigate the circumstances of Gary’s injuries, they found Mr McNeill dead in the squat above and the room covered in blood – most of it that of McNeill, who had been hit with a hammer 27 times, but some of it was Gary’s. Inside the flat a bloodstained hammer was found, but with no prints or any other links to Gary. Gary’s blood was also found on a car “crook lock.” Bloodstained clothing near the body included jeans which had traces of both men’s blood and a T-shirt with Gary’s blood only. Despite the fact that McNeill’s blood had been spattered all over the room, not one speck of his blood was found on Gary’s clothing
As for the hammer blow to Gary’s own head, the prosecution claimed he must have struck himself as he launched his frenzied attack on McNeill. For that to be correct, however, Gary’s injury, which caused him serious frontal lobe damage, would have been caused by the claw end of the hammer – but his injury was the same as McNeill’s, consistent with the round end of the hammer.
Prosecutors had relied on the fact that Critchley had told police he did not remember going home with McNeill, but then in a letter to friends written during his three months in hospital, he said he had taken him home and got drunk, and remembered opening the door and being struck. They said that Gary’s claims of amnesia were bogus.
The only forensic evidence linking Gary to the attack was an undone training shoe – two to three sizes too small for him – which Gary was found to be wearing on his left foot, after being thrown, pushed or having jumped from the fourth storey window. On his other foot was one of his own laced-up boots which witnesses said he had been wearing that day. Footprints “exactly similar” to the print on the sole of the trainer were found in the flat, which the prosecutor argued showed Critchley was in the room after McNeill was attacked and probably killed.
But if Gary was wearing one boot and one trainer as alleged, why was there no blood on the sole of the boot and no boot print in the flat? What happened to his other boot? It was not found in the flat. The prosecution’s argument was that punks wore odd clothes like that – even if it was far too small for his foot.
Despite these, and several other anomalies, the jury convicted Gary of Edward McNeill’s murder. Gary was sentenced to be ‘detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence, with a recommendation by the then Lord Chief Justice [Lord Lane] that he should serve ‘no more than 8-9 years’.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission findings [edited fromPrivate Eye 24 July 2009]
In 2005 the Criminal Cases Review Commission were asked to review Gary Critchley’s conviction by solicitor Glyn Maddocks. After an audit of the case, the CCRC decided that the conviction should stand on the following grounds:
They rejected Glyn Maddocks’ argument that new expert evidence should be brought to show the prosecution pathologist’s assertion that rain washed off McNeill’s blood from his clothes was scientifically incorrect. The commission stated that even if that were true, it was possible that having murdered McNeill he changed his clothes before leaving the flat. However, that contradicts the commission’s earlier statement that he was wearing the same clothes he had all day, which would mean this drunk and drugged-up teenager, himself with a serious head wound, would have to change clothes before carrying out a ‘frenzied murder’ and then change back again – and in any event the other T-shirt found had only Gary’s blood on it.
They also rejected his arguments surrounding the training shoe, saying it was known at trial that the shoes did not fit Critchley and that he had not been wearing it earlier in the day, so this was not new evidence to form the basis of an appeal: The commission had tried and failed to locate any exhibits in the case.
Concerning the hammer injury to Gary’s head, his defence team at trial had not called evidence to show that it was caused by the round end of the hammer, thus undermining the prosecution claim that he hit himself in the frenzy. So this was new evidence. But the commission rejected this, saying there was “no reasonable explanation” for the defence not arguing it at the time.
Two squatters from the same block of flats had initially told police that about two to three hours after they had seen Gary and McNeill enter the flat, a yellow car had arrived carrying three men, and that one had kept watch while two went up to the flat. But in later statements the squatters changed their accounts about how long the men stayed and even about whether their arrival was on the same night. The police maintained they were unable to trace the men and inferred that they did not exist.
The commission rejected a series of submissions relating to the changed evidence of one of these squatters. Lawyers for Gary had argued that criminal charges against one of them had been dropped on the direction of a senior police officer, on the very day he changed his statement to say he may have made a mistake over the day on which he saw men enter the flat and that in any event they had come straight down. At the trial the squatter – now dead – reverted to his original claim but this reversal had not been accepted by the court.
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