In 1988, Stephen Miller was twenty-six years old, with a cocaine addiction and a 'mental age' of eleven. His girlfriend, twenty-year-old Lynette White, was engaged in sex work and used the majority of the money she earned to pay for Miller's addiction (some sources indicate that White earned around £100 a day and gave her boyfriend between £60 and £90). The couple lived together on Dorset Street, Cardiff. In early February 1988, as two criminal cases loomed in which White was expected to appear as a witness, it is believed that she decided to lay low to avoid giving evidence. The charges in both cases were serious - procurement of a thirteen-year-old girl for prostitution and, separately, attempted murder. The first trial was due to begin on 15th February, and a judge had issued a warrant for her arrest in order to ensure her appearance; by 14th February, White had not made contact with Miller or anybody else for five days.
A fellow sex worker, Leanne Vilday, had previously loaned White the keys to a flat on James Street. On the evening of the 14th, Vilday arrived at the flat and while she was able to access the building with the help of a fellow occupant, she was unable to gain entry to her own flat without the keys, which were still in White's possession. Three police officers were fetched to the scene, two of whom later testified that they had in fact been searching for White for a few days in relation to the upcoming trial. When the officers forced entry, they found Lynette White lying dead on the bedroom floor.
7 James Street, Cardiff
I am not going to give specific details of the nature of White's injuries because her story was so much more than its ending and our culture spends enough time revelling in the horror of violence committed against women. The attack on Lynette White was almost incomprehensible in its brutality. The cause of her death was determined to be injury to the neck, caused by a knife. A stopped watch led police to believe that she had been killed at around 1.45am. Sperm was found on her body and clothing, as well as blood on her sock, which was determined to belong to male with type AB blood.
Stephen Miller was questioned by the police on 15th February, but the dirty and unwashed clothes that he was wearing bore no traces of blood, his own blood type was not AB, and he had an alibi which was backed up by another witness. Miller was then released by the police who ruled him out as a suspect.
Stephen Miller
A number of witnesses reported seeing a dishevelled and distressed man near to 7 James Street on the night of the 13th/14th February. The man was described as white with dark hair, probably in his mid-thirties, and injured in some way, possibly a cut to the hand, and with blood-stained clothing. DCS John Williams, head of South Wales CID, led the investigation, and told Crimewatch in the March that "this man almost certainly had the blood of the deceased on him".
E-fit of the unidentified man seen outside 7 James Street
Two gay men, Paul Atkins and Mark Grommek, lived in the flat above the one in which White was murdered, and after a promising lead ground to a halt when DNA evidence ruled out the suspect, the police turned their attention to the two men. With convictions for petty crimes, as well as on account of their sexuality, the two were especially vulnerable, which was a theme among those who were questioned by police and later gave evidence in court. Although both men initially gave alibis and denied involvement in the crime, Atkins eventually crumbled under questioning by the police, and gave four different versions of the murder which either implicated himself, Mark Grommek, or both of them. Lianne Vilday, whose flat White had been killed in, was another vulnerable member of the Tiger Bay community. A single mother experiencing drug dependency, Vilday was harassed by the police to the extent that she was thrown out of her shared flat by her friend and fellow sex worker, Angela Psaila. One day in May, Vilday drunkenly alleged that Stephen Miller and a man named Yusef Abdullahi had killed Lynette White, a statement she later recanted but which was seized upon by the police.
Leanne Vilday's friend, Angela Psaila, had an IQ of just 55, and lived in a flat opposite 7 James Street. When questioned by police, Psaila stated that she had been visited by Stephen Miller, who was searching for his girlfriend, at around the time the murder was committed. Under further questioning, Psaila told the police that she had seen six men outside 7 James Street that night: Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi, Tony Paris, Tony Brace, and cousins John and Ronnie Actie. She also claimed to have heard screams coming from the flat. Angela Psaila had already made six previous statements to the police and would later tell the BBC that during police questioning she felt like a dog being beaten. "There was a lot of shouting and they kept telling me that I had been inside the flat when the murder took place," she recalled in 2011, "It was like someone was making a film, a story. They were not going to listen to me". Atkins and Grommek also gave new statements in which they claimed not only to have heard screams from the flat, but that they had seen Ronnie Actie and Yusef Abdullahi outside the flat, and let them into the building.
Angela Psaila in 2011
In early December new statements were given by Angela Psaila, Leanne Vilday, Paul Atkins, and Mark Grommek. Their statements all corroborated each other's, and placed Stephen Miller and his brother Tony Miller at the scene, along with Yusef Abdullahi and Ronnie Actie. The Millers were arrested the following day, as were Yusef Abdullahi, Ronnie Actie. John Actie and Tony Paris were arrested a day later, on 9th December.
On 10th December, the police reinterviewed Angela Psaila, whose blood type had been found to be AB. She gave yet another statement, one in which she had and Leanne Vilday had taken part in Lynette White's murder; at the same time, Vilday gave a statement confirming Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi, Tony Paris, and the Actie cousins as the killers, along with herself and Angela Psaila.
There was no forensic evidence linking any of them to the crime scene. But the police were not finished yet.
Stephen Miller denied his involvement in the crime 307 times in 19 interviews over four days; in total, Miller was question by the police for 13 hours.
When he finally confessed, he implicated the other men.
The first trial against the five men, Stephen Miller, Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi, Ronnie Actie, and John Actie, was interrupted when the trial judge died. The retrial opened at Swansea Crown Court on 14th May 1990. While the Actie cousins were found not guilty, they had by that point spent two years on remand. Miller, Paris, and Abdullahi were all found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Tony Paris
There are three types of false confession and those that are found in the Lynette White case are classic examples of coerced compliant confessions, in which the individual being questioned buckle under police questioning and give the answer they believe the police want to hear in the hope that it will get them out of the stressful situation. Techniques such as the Reid technique have been heavily criticised for potentially leading to false confessions and it is understood that young people and those with a low IQ or other vulnerability, are particularly at risk of coerced compliant confession. There are many famous examples of similar cases, with one of the most shocking being the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers who were convicted in the 1990s of an attack on a jogger. The 2019 Netflix documentary, When They See Us, does an excellent job of telling the story.
Almost immediately, doubts were raised about the safety of the conviction of the men who became known as the Cardiff Three. An appeal was heard in December 1992, in which the judge stated in his summing up that Stephen Miller had been 'bullied and hectored' in a 'travesty of an interview' and that 'short of physical violence, it is hard to conceive of a more hostile and intimidating approach'. The three men had their convictions quashed and were released.
Tony Paris' father died only a matter of months before his son, who attended his funeral in handcuffs, was granted his freedom. Yusef Abdullahi was treated for PTSD after his release from prison and died in 2011 at the age of just forty-nine.
Yusef Abdullahi
Most people believe that they would never admit to a crime that they had not committed, especially one as brutal as the murder of Lynette White. This underestimates the pressures of police interrogation techniques and the impact these can have on all of us, but especially on those who are already impressionable or vulnerable. Sometimes, false confessions occur even without police interference. Known as voluntary false confessions, they are far more prevalent than most people would assume and usually arise either from a desire to protect the true perpetrator of the crime, or else in search of attention or notoriety. For context, there were 500 individual false confessions in the 1947 Black Dahlia case, and another 250 in the Lindbergh Kidnapping of 1932.
In August 1660, a seventy-year-old man from Chipping Campden named William Harrison set off for a walk and did not return. His bloodied clothes were later found in the road. A servant of the Harrisons, John Perry, confessed that he knew his master was dead and that while he himself had not carried out the murder, he knew who had. Perry then went on to name his own mother and brother as the perpetrators and claimed that William Harrison's body had been dumped in a pond. The pond was duly dredged, but no Mr Harrison could be found. Nonetheless, all three (including John Perry, who later recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty) were found guilty and hanged.
Two years later, William Harrison arrived back in Chipping Campden, with an explanation for his disappearance that of course made perfect sense. On his walk, he claimed, he had been injured and then abducted, before having his pockets stuffed with money, taken to Deal Port in Kent, placed onto a Turkish ship, and sold into slavery. After some time, his trafficker had died and he had been able to make his return via Lisbon. Whatever the truth of William Harrison's disappearance, it became very obvious that he had not been murdered by John Perry and his mother and brother.
In 1666, a French watchmaker confessed to starting the Great Fire of London, an event which took place days before he even arrived in the city. The man, Robert Hubert, alleged that he had started the fire in Westminster, where the flames never reached, and then later that he had thrown a fire grenade through an open window of the Pudding Lane bakery where the blaze actually originated. These were windows which the bakery did not actually have. Nonetheless, he made a useful scapegoat, especially on account of being a foreigner, and he was executed on 27th October 1666. In my own research, I have come across people who falsely confessed to crimes seemingly just so that they could have a train journey to another place. Human psychology is a curious and indeed rather delicate thing.
The final type of false confession is perhaps the most alarming. Coerced internalised confessions involve suspects who actually come to believe that they have committed the alleged crime and simply do not remember having done so. In some extreme cases, they actually begin to have memories of the events, even when those events did not take place. This excellent article from the New Yorker is one that I have sent to as many people as possible over the years because it is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. It is long, but worth it. One of the researchers mentioned is psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and it is worth noting that she does tend to keep unsavoury company and she harassed and railroaded a survivor of CSA who was later bankrupted by her attempt to sue Loftus.
The case of Lynette White was reopened in 2000 and DNA was recovered from various parts of the crime scene, including on some wrapping from a cigarette packet. The police began seeking the identity of the 'cellophane man' as he was dubbed but there were no matches in their database. Familial searching was used which led the police to a fourteen year old boy with a similar profile to the Cellophane Man. This in turn led them to the boy's uncle, Jeffrey Gafoor, who was by that point in his fifties. Aware that the net was closing in on him, Gafoor attempted suicide while under police surveillance and confessed to the murder while being transported to the hospital. In 2003, Jeffrey Gafoor pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Jeffrey Gafoor
In 2008, Mark Grommek, Leanne Vilday, and Angela Psaila were all found guilty of perjury and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. At the trial, the presiding judge acknowledged the pressure that the three had been placed under by police questioning, but countered that perjury was 'an offence which strikes at the heart of the system of the administration of justice'. As, one would think, does police corruption.
In 2011, an IPCC investigation into the conduct of the police officers in the 1988 investigation culminated in the largest police corruption trial in British history, R v Mouncher and Others. Nineteen police officers, both serving and retired, were arrested as part of the investigation, and a great deal was made in court of documents that had supposedly been withheld from the defence during the original Cardiff Three trial. When the judge in the 2011 case ordered that these documents be produced it was found that they had been destroyed in 2010 on the instruction of DCS Christopher Coutts, which seems especially strange when one considers that the IPCC investigation had begun in 2009, at least a year before their alleged destruction. Without this evidence, the trial collapsed, and no new evidence was offered by the CPS. The decision to withdraw the case was made at the highest level, by the then-head of the CPS, Mr Keir Starmer.
In 2012, the missing documents were found in DCS Coutt's office, still in their original box.
In 2015, the prosecuted police officers launched a civil action against South Wales Police for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. The case was dismissed by Mr Justice Wyn Williams, who stated his own belief that South Wales Police had been entirely correct to pursue the officers, considering how unlikely it was, without police interference, that all the witnesses would change their testimony at the same time so that their statements corroborated one another. It was, he said, perfectly reasonable to suspect that the police in the original investigation had 'engaged in a conspiracy to mould and manipulate evidence'.
The accused police officers
The police officers who were involved in the 1988 investigation into the murder of Lynette White have all retired and begun drawing their pensions. Tom Mangold, a journalist who looked at the case in both 1992 and 2012, has suggested that 'if the 13 accused Cardiff detectives had been found guilty, presumably all their previous cases - hundreds - would have had to be reopened and re-examined'. Where police misconduct has led to one injustice, it is not difficult to imagine that more may lurk in their closed case files. For every miscarriage of justice, for every false confession that is believed by a jury, there is a guilty person who walks free. And in each of those cases, there is a victim and their family who have not seen justice served.
Lynette White, 1967-1988
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