41
28 January 2008
Having encountered the ‘girl’ in a chatroom on the Faceparty.com website, Brian Pead added
‘her’ to his MSN contact list in order to smoke this person
out. Claiming to be a girl aged fourteen, this person had entered an adult
social networking website and was asking for money in return for sex. This had
immediately not made sense to Brian.
It was even more obvious to him as the conversation progressed that it
was not a fourteen-year-old girl at all. He looked at ‘her’ profile again. It
contained just one photograph – of someone looking about fourteen and dressed
in hockey kit. Again, this did not make sense because it was clear that the
poor quality photograph (it looked like a copy of a copy) had been cropped from
a team photograph so that just this one girl was visible. Other girls’
shoulders and hair could just be seen. Brian felt that this was extremely odd.
He had taught pupils for some twenty years by this stage. He had a very good
understanding of fourteen year old girls and boys. In respect of girls, he knew
that they liked to put up photographs which showed all their friends or
team-mates. He also knew that they liked to put up photos which showed many
aspects of their lives. And that you usually couldn’t shut them up!
Yet this profile contained only the one poor quality photograph and no
information at all about the ‘girl’. Instinctively, Brian knew this was odd.
Odd things always draw his attention.
His initial hypothesis when he encountered this person was that this
was not a girl. He was clear about that.
As they moved to MSN to chat there, he was determined to use all of
his counselling skills in order to smoke out this person. Although he felt it
was an adult, possibly with paedophilic tendencies, in order to exploit
teenagers by posing as a teenager, he suspended this hypothesis just as he
would with a real client in his counselling room.
Within two or three opening sentences of their conversation it became
obvious to him – despite having suspended his hypothesis – that this was not a
teenaged girl at all but an adult posing as one. There were a number of reasons
for this. Firstly, the person’s use of language did not match that of the
average fourteen-year-old. Brian had taught literally thousands of teenagers in
his twenty-five year career and he had a very good idea of the language skills
of the average teen – both boys and girls. Should the reader be minded to
undertake even the most basic research on the internet, such research would show
that by the age of fourteen, girls in general have a wider vocabulary than
boys.
Secondly, this ‘teen’ was omitting the use of vowels in the
conversation. As an author of nine books and with a first class honours degree
in English, Brian has a good understanding of linguistics and linguistic
devices. When he received speech therapy as a five-year-old after suffering the
trauma of sexual abuse in a children’s home, he had learnt a great deal about
speech patterns and words. He knew that many people, when texting or ‘speaking’
online, will often use a form of short-hand and omit occasional vowels or
consonants. However, this person was omitting almost all of the vowels and hardly any of the consonants. It was a
particularly strange use of language.
Thus, he had already formed an opinion that this person’s vocabulary
was not that of a teenager and that the ‘teenager’ was not actually writing as
a teenager. As a teacher, he had encountered thousands of teenagers and it was
clear to him that this was not.
But Brian did not jump to conclusions. His first book took him twenty
years to research – he is not a man usually given to rash judgments or hasty
decisions. He resolved to continue to investigate this person.
Another counselling skill that he was able to bring to bear was that
of transference and counter-transference. These can be difficult concepts to
even experienced counsellors, but Brian was conscious of them. He had been
praised for his understanding and use of transference and counter-transference
in his counselling work.
There were two main themes on the Advanced Diploma course he was
completing in March 2008: transference and counter-transference and psychosexual issues. There was a great
deal of reading around these subjects. Brian was fascinated by both themes.
From an early age, he had been part of groups in a children’s home, as a
manager and within his dysfunctional family and marriage. He had been
particularly interested in the interaction between the different members of
whichever group he was involved in. He was acutely aware not only of his own
role within each group, but he also gained increasing awareness of the
transferential and counter-transferential issues between members of the group.
And having been abused between the ages of 5 and 11, he naturally had a deep
interest in psychosexual matters.
Brian was particularly adept at sorting out what was ‘his stuff’ or ‘the
other person’s stuff’ in encounters he had, both in and out of the therapy
room. He has a significant level of awareness of his own ‘stuff’ and, as a peer
was later to point out, was emotionally intelligent enough to differentiate
‘his stuff’ from the ‘other person’s stuff’ in most encounters. This ability
had been honed through years of management, years of reading about psychology
and years of attending psychology and philosophy talks at Inner Space in London. His counselling supervisor, Clare
Manifold, was impressed with the level of
awareness that Brian had around these concepts, writing in his end-of-year
report that he “...is able to perceive transferential issues...”
She also wrote that he “...is open to self-exploration, uses his journal
well and is happy to look at issues raised in our sessions. [...] he is open to
both give, which he does with sensitivity, and receive. [...] He is willing and
interested in examining the cultural heritage (of people he encounters). [...]
His strengths are good boundaries, evident intelligence and a serious
commitment to the work. He forms trusting relationships, gives insightful
feedback and is a generous contributor...”
Whilst engaging with this person online, Brian Pead was fully aware of
his own feelings in the process and did not merely focus on the conversation
itself.
He felt that this was an adult, and an adult male. He felt that this was
a middle-aged male. And he felt that this adult had an interest in paedophilia.
He had gleaned all this from the first conversation online on 28 January 2008.
As a result of these feelings – which he committed to his personal
learning journal which he had to complete as part of his Advanced Diploma
counselling course – he decided to make notes and keep a watching brief. If it
did, indeed, turn out to be a sex offender, he would report this person to the
management of Faceparty.com.
Thus, by the time the first online conversation had concluded, Brian had
gathered information that the ‘girl’ was using a particularly strange form of
shorthand when typing, that ‘she’ used a form of vocabulary not usually
associated with a fourteen-year-old and that he had intuited that the person
was a middle-aged adult with paedophilic tendencies.
He had also read a good deal about the work of Dr John Olsson, a linguist, and founder of a
world-renowned forensic linguistics consultancy. Olsson is a world-leading
expert in forensic linguistics, a science where linguistics techniques are
applied to legal processes to solve cases and provide new angles on evidence.
With kind permission from Dr Olsson, we have reproduced the introduction
from his book Word Crime (Continuum,
2009):
“...What
is forensic linguistics? If you have gotten this far, it is a question you may
have some answers to already. On the other hand, forensic linguistics might be
a subject that you have heard nothing on, but want to know more about.
My name is
John Olsson, and for the past 15 years I have been (and still am) the world’s
only full-time forensic linguist. This book concerns my work, and is designed
in part to illustrate how forensic linguistics can solve crime. Before I move
onto this though, I would like to go over some background information. Let me
detail in brief how the science of forensic linguistics came into being.
In 1968 a
Swedish linguist working at the University of London heard about a case which
had occurred a number of years previously. It concerned the murder of several
women and a baby at an infamous London address, 10 Rillington Place, Kensington. Rillington Place became
so notorious that the authorities were eventually forced to change its name to
Ruston Close at the request of the people who lived there. However, the bad
associations remained and eventually the local council demolished the entire
street and a new development of houses was constructed there in the 1970s.
The
ground-floor tenant of 10 Rillington Place was one John Christie, a quiet perhaps even shy man,
apparently contentedly married. Above him lived Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl and their baby daughter.
Evans disappeared from Rillington Place in 1949 and questions began to be asked
about the whereabouts of his wife and baby. In November of that year, Evans
handed himself into police in South Wales where he had been living with his
uncle at Merthyr Tydfil. Forensic linguistics comes into the story at this
point because Evans was supposed to have given several statements to the police
confessing to the crime. Evans was found guilty partly on the basis of the
statements and partly on the basis of evidence given by John Christie. Evans was hanged in 1950. Later
Christie’s wife disappeared and neighbours began asking questions about his odd
behaviour. After Christie moved out another tenant occupied his flat and, while
attempting to put up a shelf made a gruesome discovery: a partly clothed woman’s
body. When police arrived at the house they found evidence of several other
murders. Christie was eventually tracked down, charged, found guilty and later
hanged. Not long before he died he confessed to the murder of Evans’ wife and
‘probably’ of their baby. Despite urgent requests to investigate these claims
before Christie’s execution date the Home Secretary refused to halt the hanging
and Christie was put to death in July 1953. The crimes he had confessed to for
which Evans had been hanged continued to be attributed to Evans for over a
decade until journalist Ludovic Kennedy became interested in the case in the 1960s and
the statements also drew the attention of a Swedish professor working at the
University of London, Jan Svartvik examined the statements and concluded that
they contained not one but several styles of language, most of which were
written in what is known as ‘policeman’s register’. Svartvik’s analysis and the unwavering
campaign by Kennedy caused the Home Secretary to reverse the conviction and
Evans was posthumously pardoned. This was probably the first murder appeal in
the world in which linguistics played a prominent part. Because Svartvik used
the term ‘forensic linguistics’ in his report on the statements he is credited
with being the ‘father’ of the discipline.
In the
1990s the case of Derek Bentley drew the attention of linguists at Birmingham
University where I was doing postgraduate research in
linguistics. Several anomalies appeared in the statement Bentley is supposed to
have dictated to police officers after the shooting of Police Constable Sidney
Miles at a burglary in South London by Bentley’s
co-burglar, Chris Craig. A number of other previously
accepted confessions now fell under suspicion and one after another several
convictions were quashed, largely on the basis of evidence provided by ESDA
trace, an electrostatic procedure which has
certain elements in common with photocopying and reveals indentations from
other sheets if several sheets were placed on top of each other in the course
of writing.
In 1994 I
founded the Forensic Linguistics Institute in the United Kingdom which has since become
one of the leading linguistics laboratories in the world. Along with my
colleagues I examine texts of all types for authorship, authenticity,
interpretation of meaning, disputed language and other forensic processes. An
early case involved the analysis of an alleged terrorist’s statement to police
at Paddington Green Police Station in the mid-1980s. Since that time I have
handled nearly 300 forensic linguistics investigations. These have ranged from
examining the language of suicide letters for genuineness, assessing threat in
extortion demands, evaluating police interview tapes for alleged oppressive interviewing
(a rare occurrence these days), and the authorship identification of many
hundreds of letters, emails and mobile phone texts in a range of inquiries from
murder to extortion to witness intimidation, sexual assault and internet child
pornography. I get commissioned by police forces, solicitors, international
companies and organizations, and even private clients who have received hate
mail from someone who might live just down the road or even next door.
In an
early case I was asked by the president of a dog club in the mid-west of the
United States to see whether a spate of hate mail letters the club had received
came from one of their own members. The most likely author turned out to be an
elderly mild-mannered lady who had devotedly carried out the club’s
administrative affairs for many years, but who had been disappointed by the
failure of one of her pets to win a prize at the club’s annual dog show. It may
come as something of a surprise, but hate mail also occurs within families: in
one case a disgruntled woman had become infuriated at the success of her
younger brother in his hotel business and wrote a spate of poison letters to
the local chamber of commerce not only denigrating his efforts but insulting
his wife, accusing him of nazism and claiming that the hotel often hosted white
supremacist weekends. In another case a teenage girl grew jealous of her
sister’s impending marriage and tried to poison her against the bridegroom. On
the other hand, not all hate mail is from family members: I recently had to
attempt an identification in which a middle-aged male, having been sexually
rebuffed by a teenage boy, then wrote to the boy’s parents accusing their son
of being a child molester. The boy’s father - perhaps as a result of this
accusation against what he perceived to be his family’s honour - then committed
suicide.
However,
there is something you the reader should know, in case you are ever the victim
of hate mail, or in case you receive hate mail which denigrates a friend,
relative or colleague: in every hate mail case I have dealt with the accusation
has turned out to be pure malice - a complete invention. Yet these inventions
are capable of wrecking lives, as I have seen all too often. A businessman of
my acquaintance received several such letters and it nearly destroyed him, even
though he - and everyone around him - knew that the accusations contained in
those letters were completely false. It was only through strong family support
that he was eventually able to recover. The perpetrator of this terrible crime
- and you only have to see the effect on people’s lives to realize how serious
a crime it is - has never been found.
Nor should
anyone imagine, as per those dark 1940s and 1950s films, that all hate mail
writers are women. Far from it: rancour and spite know no gender boundaries, no
age limits and no social divisions. I have seen hate mail from young teenagers,
old aristocrats and middle-aged artisans, from highly successful executives,
doctors, and respectable grandparents. The internet has enabled the genre to
flourish: anybody can access a free email address under a pseudonym and post
the vilest slander about another person on public forums or communicate it
privately in emails. However, despite the advent of technology, the Royal Mail and
other postal services around the world still deliver thousands of traditionally
written paper missives every day, each designed to destroy a happy life, wreck
a worthy reputation or sow the seeds of hatred between formerly devoted couples
or other family members. The motive is not always hatred either: it is often a
combination of boredom and a failure to foresee the inevitable devastation
which can occur.
Fortunately,
forensic linguistics is not all hate mail cases. Every day brings a unique
inquiry: the father who wants to know if the letter he has received from his
daughter is really in her style, the mother who is concerned her teenager’s
writing is becoming influenced by ‘gang speak’, the insurance company trying to
identify a fraudster’s voice from among several possible clients, the police
detective trying to interpret a coded letter from a prisoner to an accomplice,
the prisoner who claims innocence, the solicitor working on an appeal for her
client, the employee who feels his bosses are trying to frame him by saying he
wrote an anonymous email - the list is seemingly endless.
In the 15
years I have been doing this work I have analysed literally thousands of texts
by hundreds of different writers implicated in scores of types of crime. In
that time forensic linguistics has grown from being a marginal discipline which
only a few people were passionate about to an internationally recognized
practice which can be of real service to law enforcement and the legal
profession.
In this
book I will show you the details of some of the many cases I have been
privileged to work on. Wherever possible I have avoided identifying victims,
where they live or what their occupations are or were. This has sometimes also
meant that I could not identify the perpetrators of some of these crimes
either. Unfortunately, some cases are well-known to the public and could not be
anonymized, and the reader who follows the daily news will recognize these
cases quite easily. Some cases are too recent to write about, but I hope to be
able to do so in years to come when memories of certain crimes and events are
no longer fresh in the public memory.
I hope
that this book, which tells the stories of many lives, mostly of ordinary
people often faced with extraordinary circumstances through no choice of their
own, will show you the power of language analysis in the solving of crime. In
telling you about these lives in a simple narrative format I have tried to do
so in a straightforward, down-to-earth way. My aim is not primarily to tell a ‘good
story’, but to illustrate how interesting and complex language is, and how
powerful a resource it can be when it enters the arena of the law. If the
stories are worth reading I hope this will not be seen as in any way lessening
the importance or the tragedy of the events they seek to describe. I am always
conscious of the fact that the work is about people above all, and not just
language, and I have found this to be both a privilege and a responsibility
over the years.
Forensic
linguistics began life as an instrument to correct miscarriages of justice. It
now plays an active day-to-day role in our courts. The common law system which
has evolved in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the last millennium
should be treasured by all who live in these islands, despite its undoubted
errors over the years. This is why forensic science is so important. In an age
when the erosion of civil rights and liberties has once again become a topic to
rouse the passions, and rightly so, forensic science stands as one of the
guardians of justice and liberty. From small beginnings just 40 years ago,
forensic linguistics is now an important, and I believe, permanent component in
this process...”
The eminent forensic scientist Dr John Olsson describes forensic linguistics as being one of
the guardians of justice and liberty. Since he was passionate about psychology
and linguistics and had been all his life, Brian Pead was aware of Olsson’s
work. For this reason, he instructed his barrister, Dominic Bell, then of Charter Chambers, 21 John Street, London, to call Dr Olsson as a witness for
the defence. Bell refused. There was no valid reason for such a
refusal. In fact, the refusal itself flouted several legal principles.
Firstly, if a client makes such a legitimate request, as Brian did here,
a barrister has to comply with that
request. Bell, therefore, is guilty of failing to
act upon his client’s clear and specific instructions.
Secondly, it is a defendant’s duty to put forward as cogent and as
powerful a defence to an allegation as possible. Under 22.4 of the Criminal
Procedure Rules it states that:
“...Under section 6A of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act
1996, you must:
(a) set out the nature of your defence, including any particular
defences on which you intend to rely;
(b) indicate the matters of fact on which you take issue with the
prosecutor, and in respect of each explain why;
(c) set out particulars of the matters of fact on which you intend to
rely for the purposes of your defence;
(d) indicate any point of law that you wish to take, including any point
about the admissibility of evidence or about abuse of process, and any
authority relied on;
and
(e) if your defence statement includes an alibi (i.e. an assertion that
you were in a place, at a time, inconsistent with you having committed the
offence), give particulars, including –
(i) the name, address and date of birth of any witness who you believe
can
give evidence in support of that alibi,
(ii) if you do not know all of those details, any information that might
help identify or find that witness...”
There was no legitimate reason for not calling the expert witness. In
his book The Art of Persuasion, Sir
David Napley writes:
“...In legal aid cases you [the barrister] may
be uncertain whether the expense of obtaining expert opinion or calling expert
witnesses will be allowed by the Taxing officer or the Legal Aid Area
Committee, and, if allowed, at the amount which the expert will require as his
fee. You can obtain guidance in advance from the Chief Clerk of the Crown Court
in respect of trials on indictment, or from the Area Secretary in magistrates’
court cases. It is important, however, not to allow these gentlemen, who are
uniformly helpful, to usurp your function. You are in control of your own case
and have the sole responsibility for conducting it, and even if, exceptionally,
they are unwilling to authorise an expert you may feel constrained to take the
risk, and hope to justify your decision later. In most cases, however, no
difficulty of this sort is likely to arise...”
It is evident that calling expert witnesses is a run-of-the-mill
exercise in most cases. Yet Bell refused to take instructions from his client.
Apart from being a breach of the code of conduct that barristers are required
to uphold, Bell’s refusal was also a breach
of the Criminal Procedure Rules, or CPR.
The CPR are, in effect, a handbook for conducting a criminal trial and
set down the procedure that all parties in a criminal trial are supposed to
adhere to. Each component part of a trial has a number of rules that must be
followed if a trial is to be fair. The elements of a trial include, for
example, disclosure, witness statements, evidence and expert witnesses. The
rules are numbered and consisted (in 2005) of some 211 pages.
The Criminal Procedure Rules 2005 were finalised on 18 February 2005, laid
before Parliament on 4 March 2005 and came into force on 4 April 2005. It was
this set of rules that was in effect at the time of Brian Pead’s trial in
December 2009.
Expert evidence is dealt with by Part 33 of the CPR. However, there
were no rules in this Part of the 2005 rules and the obligation to disclose
expert evidence was referred to in Part 24.
Rule 24.1 imposes an obligation upon either party in a criminal trial
– where the Defendant has issued a plea of ‘Not Guilty’ - to adduce expert
evidence (whether of fact or opinion) in the proceedings as soon as
practicable.
Brian had pleaded Not Guilty to the charge of Exposure and also to the
Charge of Incitement (amended to an
attempt to incite.) He was, therefore, entitled to call expert witnesses
and to ask them to produce their evidence before a jury. He had informed
Dominic Bell, his barrister, and Angela
Shaw, his solicitor, of AA Mirsons.
We pause here to provide a brief curriculum vitae for Dominic Bell. On the Charter Chambers website he was described thus:
“…Dominic Bell was called to the Bar in 1992 at Inner Temple. He has been practising
criminal defence exclusively for 17 years. His specialist areas include sexual
offences.
Dominic has a real
passion for fairness and has a
reputation for being a fighter who is not afraid to pursue his client’s case
utterly fearlessly, both in and out of Court. He has a particular interest in prosecution disclosure, or the lack of
it, always being determined to ensure that prosecutors properly comply with
their duty.
Dominic is a fearless cross-examiner…”
The emphases are ours: we ask you – when reading the rest of this book
– to bear in mind the reputation of Mr Bell and ask yourself whether you believe that he
lived up to his reputation when defending Brian.
Bell – a chain-smoker – had humoured Pead by
‘allowing’ him to call his friend, John Callow (featured in the book from Hillsborough to Lambeth) in the Exposure case, but not Dr John Olsson in the Incitement case. Brian knew this to be
bizarre and he voiced his concerns to both Shaw and Bell, but they failed to act. They
therefore contributed to a miscarriage of justice.
Where an expert witness is to be used, the party calling the witness is
supposed to provide a copy of that witness’s evidence to the other party as
soon as possible. Brian knew that if he called Dr Olsson, then he would sink
the Crown Prosecution Service’s allegations without trace. Was this the
reason that Bell failed to call Olsson? Did Bell need his client to be found guilty? This
‘trial’ was following the exact same process that had occurred at Lambeth
Council, where – as lawyer Alex Passman stated – Brian had been ‘set up’ and
unlawfully dismissed.
Rule 24.2 allows for the fact that a party using expert evidence may
withhold that evidence from the other side on the grounds that, for example, a
witness may be intimidated, or that the course of justice might be interfered
with. However, this would not have been the case here. Bell failed to act upon his client’s instructions,
as did Shaw.
It is necessary at this point to pause for reflection and to note
precisely what had occurred in Brian Pead’s case. Not only were two completely
separate indictments heard before the same jury (which is unlawful in itself),
not only was that jury improperly sworn in, not only were Criminal Procedure Rules
being breached at almost every opportunity, but also his own solicitor, Angela
Shaw of AA Mirsons, and his barrister, Dominic Bell then of Charter Chambers, were also failing to work in the
best interests of their client as described by Julian Young in Chapter 40.
Why would this be so? On the facts that existed at that time, it was
alleged that Brian had exposed himself to three 20-something females living
across the road from him and he had allegedly incited a 14-year-old female into
having sexual relations for money. Had these offences even been true they
hardly warranted such attention that Brian had been receiving and they hardly
warranted such perverse actions from those operating within the criminal
justice system.
Forster continued trying to persuade a jury that had
not been sworn in: “Faceparty is now defunct. The defendant was quick to ask
to meet the girl. He gave her a mobile number. Then a second mobile number.
Then a third number…”
It has been explained in a previous chapter that these were all false mobile phone numbers because
Brian had no wish to meet this person but he did have a wish to expose this
person during a process of ‘smoking him out’.
Forster continued
in his submission to the jury, saying “…On 8 May 2008 he sent a message
entitled Cash4U. This was one of a number of messages that he sent out that day
re money for sex.”
Brian Pead told this to the
police because he knew he was innocently smoking out a number of people who
appeared to be ‘dodgy’ on the website.
The question has to be
asked: “If Brian was up to no good, why would he have admitted to doing this?”
The police had no proof that it was Brian who sent those messages from the
computer at Geoffrey Bacon’s house on 8 May 2008 – indeed, it could have been
Geoffrey Bacon who
sent those messages. This alone would have provided the ‘reasonable doubt’
necessary for an acquittal by a jury. But Brian simply told the truth.
“He claims his laptop had been
thrown away. He put himself forward as a counsellor. He denied he had indulged
in any sexual relations with anyone under 16,” continued Forster.
These are facts – he had
disposed of his laptop and friends knew of this. He did put himself forward as a counsellor because he was a counsellor and this could have
been proven by calling Jennifer Sandelson or Lynne Kaye at
CPPD counselling
school in Hornsey, north London. And one of the CPS’s
witnesses was Nicola Noone, who was ready to concur that Brian had worked as a
counsellor at Off Centre.
He said that he had never
indulged in any sexual relations with anyone under 16 because this, too, was
the truth. Since no-one has ever come forward to challenge his statement, and
since there is a considerable body of work to prove that those who had known
Brian over many years had never had any doubts about him, we are forced to
accept it as the truth.
“He admitted sending these
messages on 8 May. The Crown’s case is that here is a man in a heightened state
of sexual interest in younger women.”
Brian, as we have seen, did admit to sending these messages from
the computer at the house of Geoffrey Bacon, a longstanding friend, and a man who had
been cleared by the Home Office to work in royal and governmental buildings – thus
he is a man of considerable integrity.
And, as we have seen, Brian
told his friend on 15 May 2008 – when he also sent similar messages – that he
had encountered sex offender types on Faceparty and
that what he had uncovered there had caused him some great discomfort.
But note that Timothy
Forster has
addressed the jury (albeit a jury not sworn in) and he knows that the date of 15 May 2008 is a critical date, but he does
nothing to bring this to the attention of the jury!
Forster has
omitted the crucial conversation of 15 May 2008 in which Brian told the ‘girl’
to “Fuck off! You are a fake!”
We need to be clear about
this: the CPS and the Police know that 15 May 2008 is a critical date
and they have conveniently omitted this date from the trial.
This means, of course, that
the entire trial has been based on a fabrication. On his own admission, Brian
told the police that he had engaged in five conversations with the person
claiming to be a ‘girl’ – the first of these was on 28 January 2008 and the
final conversation was on 15 May 2008 at Geoffrey Bacon’s house, where he explained his concerns
about Faceparty to
his friend.
Yet the prosecution – under
Timothy Forster’s guidance – had omitted the first and
fifth conversations and were relying entirely upon only three conversations.
Those who study language and
communication understand that the meaning
of a conversation is usually expressed in the opening words or minutes and
often confirmed in the final words or minutes. The middle part of a
conversation is what might be referred to as ‘filler’. The following
explanation of Interpersonal Communication from the Wikipedia website helps to
provide a basic insight into the dyad between Brian and the ‘girl’:
“...Communication scholars define interpersonal communication in numerous ways, usually describing
participants who are dependent upon one another. It can involve one on one conversations or individuals interacting with many people within a society. It helps us
understand how and why people behave and communicate in different ways to
construct and negotiate a social reality. While interpersonal
communication can be defined as its own area of study, it also occurs within
other contexts like groups and organizations. Interpersonal communication is
the process that we use to communicate our ideas, thoughts, and feelings to
another person. Our interpersonal communication skills are learned behaviours
that can be improved through knowledge, practice, feedback, and reflection.
Context refers to the conditions that precede or surround the communication.
It consists of present or past events from which the meaning of the message is
derived, though it may also, in the case of written communications, depend upon
the statements preceding and following the quotation in question...”
The emphasis is ours:
context is vitally important to meaning and intent. In order to understand the conversations Brian
had with this ‘girl’ – and his real motives for doing so – we would have to
read all five of the conversations,
because without one and five, the conversations numbered two, three and four
are merely ‘filler’ and thus are taken out of context.
The authors feel certain
that almost every reader of this book will have overheard snippets of
conversation and totally misunderstood the real intent behind the conversation.
What we think we have heard and what
we have really heard are often very
different, which is why books such as Men
are from Mars and Women are from Venus are read in such large numbers.
People the world over often seek better communication. Remove the parts of a
conversation in which the real meaning
and intent are omitted, then the
‘filler’ becomes almost meaningless.
Timothy Forster continued to misinform the jury: “The Crown’s
case is that this was an attempt at Incitement
because the girl did not exist.”
Note carefully the words “…the girl did not exist…”
These words carry great significance. Firstly, this is precisely what
Brian had told the police when he was interviewed under caution on 4 June 2008.
He had honestly spoken about his research into Faceparty and had told the police that he had known all
along that the ‘girl’ did not exist. Geoffrey Bacon corroborated this. Now even the Crown
Prosecutor has admitted it.
Secondly, if you look back to chapter 29, and the precise wording on the
Ministry of Justice’s own website, you will find that to be guilty of an
offence of Incitement (or an attempt at Incitement), Person A (let’s say Brian)
has to incite Person B (who, in this case, must be either under the age of 16
or 13).
But at this point in the trial, Timothy Forster has said in open court that “…the girl did not
exist…”
In reality, of course, if the girl did not exist, then there never was a Person B and so the trial ought to
have stopped at this point and everyone gone home. It was a trial based on
farce.
We suggest that you now ask yourself “Why would the CPS, the Police and the Court system be
going through this charade? Why would they go to such extraordinary lengths to
defame an innocent man – and a man, whom the Law itself says, cannot possibly be guilty of the crime
because ‘the girl does not exist’.
Cast your mind back to Marcia Weise, the astute legal representative who
attended Charing Cross police station on 4 June 2008 and who told her client “It is
obvious to me that you have out-stung their illegal sting operation and they will be out to get you.”
Brian had, as we have seen, uncovered an illegal police sting operation
and other misdemeanours on the Faceparty website. This has been widely corroborated by
bloggers and posters on the internet.
Yet, although the trial has already seen a number of breaches of the
Criminal Procedure Rules which mean that the trial was improper, the
number of breaches was to rise alarmingly fast.
Forster addressed the jury again: “The first witness
is Miss Natalie Ryan. Miss Ryan has difficulty in coming
back tomorrow.”
Natalie Ryan entered the Court room and took the oath to
tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. She was dressed in
black and looked as though she was going to a funeral. Brian felt that it was a
funeral for Justice, because he knew at this early stage of the trial that Justice
had died.
Forster added, “She says a letter from Pead came through the door three
minutes after a night out. Her friend Elizabeth found the letter first.”
Forster gave out Exhibit 1 (Brian’s note and envelope)
and Exhibit 2 (photograph catalogued as PET101). This photograph had been taken
by the police photographer Peter Thompson from Brian’s bedroom window in broad daylight
and using a zoom lens which made it appear that if Brian and Elizabeth McIntyre had leant out of their respective bedroom
windows, they could have shaken hands. The reality was that the two houses were
almost 100 feet (33 metres) apart. Furthermore, the female tenants at 62 Days Lane
had claimed that all the alleged incidents had occurred between 10pm and
midnight, so why would Thompson take a photograph in broad daylight unless he
was deliberately trying to mislead the Court?
Now we have the testimony of Natalie Ryan.
“…Brian Pead was mainly sitting in his room. The light was odd. I received the letter in
January. He was always at the same window – his bedroom window. The light in
the room was quite bright. The main light source was on. I could see everything
from thigh level up. I saw him masturbating. I can’t remember which hand. I
couldn’t see his penis because of the light and the shadows. The light source
was not clear enough to see his penis. He was not wearing anything. I couldn’t
see if he had shoes and socks on. I saw him for five minutes…”
Notice Ms Ryan’s differences of opinion about the light in Brian’s
bedroom. Notice, too, how she says that she could
not see Brian’s penis and remind yourself of the Law about exposure: that a
person exposes his genitalia in order to cause an observer alarm and distress.
Notice also that Brian put a letter through the door of 62 Days Lane in October
2007 addressed to Elizabeth McIntyre. And pay attention to the fact that
Ms Ryan claimed that she was unable to remember which hand Brian was allegedly
using to masturbate – but that in her witness statement to police she claimed
that she had seen him masturbating over a period of many months.
Natalie Ryan claimed that “…The light in the room was quite
bright. The main light source was on. I could see everything from thigh level
up...” then she claimed that “…the light source was not clear enough to see his
penis…”
We leave the reader to make your own mind up about these obvious
contradictions.
Forster: Was
the light on in Elizabeth McIntyre’s bedroom?
Ryan: Yes.
Forster: Were
the 5 minutes you watched the defendant masturbating uninterrupted minutes?
Ryan: Yes.
Forster: What
was he doing for 5 minutes?
Ryan: Masturbating.
Forster: Did
the other two girls have the same view?
Notice how Forster has fed the Court another lie – he knows that
the house contained four students, not
three. Brian’s defence counsel, Dominic Bell, ought to have called the fourth
tenant as a witness in order to cross-examine her about why she had not made a
statement and why she had not been called as a witness by the prosecution.
At this point in the trial, Angela Shaw, the solicitor from AA Mirson’s who
worked with Marcia Weise and
therefore knew the truth that Brian had uncovered an illegal sting operation
came into the Court and sat behind Dominic Bell. She did not even acknowledge her
client.
Forster: Did
any other incident happen?
Ryan: No. I stayed 4 months longer. I saw him at his computer but apart from that
nothing.
In reality this witness had been next to useless to the Crown and
extremely useful to Brian. She had informed the Court that she had not seen
Brian’s genitals. She lied about seeing Brian masturbate. Notice, too, the
dates. She claimed she had seen him masturbate in his bedroom in May 2008 and
that she ‘stayed four months longer’. If this were true, she would have left 62
Days Lane in September 2008, but by then the house was being redecorated in
readiness for sale. Consider how the house had been a family home for decades,
then it becomes a house for female students (possibly of dubious repute
according to the evidence of neighbours) and then it reverted to a family home
again, having served its purpose.
But notice something else, too. Natalie Ryan claimed to have seen Brian ‘at his computer’,
but he didn’t have a working computer in his house which was why he used the
computer at Geoffrey Bacon’s house in May.
Yet to most people, these little, almost insignificant details are not
worthy of much attention. The authors believe the opposite. As the fictional
Sherlock Holmes used to say, “To solve a crime, you must pay
attention to the smallest of details.” The famous QC, Michael Mansfield, has written in his autobiography that to
overturn a miscarriage of justice, you need to trawl through the trial
transcripts and also the paperwork, especially the unused documentation that
the CPS are meant to provide to all defendants but often hold back (unlawfully) in order to secure
convictions, fill the prisons and the coffers of the private corporations
running the prison service and the courts.
Dominic Bell, Brian’s defence counsel, began his
cross-examination of Natalie Ryan.
Bell: Why didn’t you turn up to trial in
February 2009?
Ryan: The police forgot to tell us the trial was on.
As we have explained in previous chapters, the police had not forgotten to tell the females that
the trial was on, but they had deliberately
caused the trial to collapse in order to seek Joinder for a second time (it having been previously
refused) of two cases against Brian.
But notice how Bell had made
an appearance of running a defence capable of acquitting Brian. Any
barrister worth the name would have continued to ask questions about the
statement that the police ‘forgot to tell us the trial was on’. Indeed, Pamela
Brain, Brian’s original defence barrister
in the Exposure case, entered on her notes that it was strange that the trial
collapsed because Forster had assured the Judge (Charles Byers) the
previous week that his witnesses (the female tenants) were “ready to go”. But
Bell failed his client. Whether he was corrupt or
merely inept and negligent is a question for the reader to consider. Whichever
side of the fence you come down on, consider how Bell failed to call Pamela Brain as a witness and how he failed to call Judge
Byers as a witness and how he failed to robustly
cross-examine Natalie Ryan. The trial was a pretence. It was
‘smoke and mirrors’ – Brian Pead knew too much and ‘they’ were out to get him,
just as Marcia Weise had predicted 18 months earlier.
Bell: You said you only saw mid-thigh up?
Ryan: Yes.
Bell: Never his penis?
Ryan: No.
This is clear testimony that Brian cannot be guilty of exposure – she
had not seen his penis. (Neither had she seen him masturbate, but from a legal
perspective, it does not actually matter whether he did or did not masturbate
because he had been charged with exposure and Ryan states that she had not seen
his penis, which means that he could not have exposed himself.
Bell: Look at photographs PET 102, 103,
104.
[Authors’ note: these were
photographs taken by DC Peter Thompson of
Bexley Police, all in broad daylight and all with a zoom
lens.]
Ryan: Elizabeth never got changed in her
bedroom after the letter. Elizabeth never kept a diary. I suggested that she keep the letter.
She used
to shut both curtains if she was in her bedroom.
Natalie Ryan is clearly lying here. Ellen ‘Nellie’ Stanley had made a statement in
which she said that she had seen the odd pattern of the curtains in Elizabeth
McIntyre’s bedroom and Maya Walker had also seen the same phenomenon and made a
statement about it. Furthermore, in her statement, Maya Walker said that she had seen Elizabeth McIntyre undressing in her bedroom in May 2008 (even after the females had allegedly called
the police about the alleged masturbation). Notice how Brian had been accused
of alleged masturbation in the White Bear Theatre in Kennington whilst working at Lambeth. The modus operando of the allegations
against him were far too similar to be mere coincidence.
At this point, Dominic Bell distributed a plan of Days Lane to the jury.
This had been created by John Callow, an experienced surveyor who produced
a professional document to the legal standard.
Bell: Would
you say that Elizabeth McIntyre – your friend – is something of an
exhibitionist?
Ryan: Yes, I agree that Elizabeth is an
exhibitionist from her personality. I
did not see his genitals.
Bell then completes his cross-examination because
Natalie Ryan had admitted again that she had not seen
Brian’s genitals.
Once cross-examination has taken place by defence counsel, the
prosecution is then allowed to question the witness for a second time based on
the replies given under cross-examination.
Forster merely read out sections of Natalie Ryan’s statement that she gave to the
police in which she claimed that she had
seen Brian’s genitals.
After she left the Court at 1.15pm, the session had finished and the
jury filed out.
In total, the ‘trial’ had lasted a little over two hours. The Court had
heard about two invented allegations against Brian and it had heard its first
witness – it was clear that the females were being ‘drip-fed’ to the Court to
make as much impact as possible.
It was also clear that Timothy Forster providing wrong information to the jury, and
that Brian’s barrister, Dominic Bell, was not ‘playing with a straight
bat’ when it came to seeking full disclosure and cross-examining witnesses.
What extraordinary lengths to go to for a man who had never spoken to a
14-year-old.
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