R v Lake
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE |
| Judgment Date | 06 October 1976 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1976] EWCA Crim J1006-1 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 5684/A/75 |
| Date | 06 October 1976 |
[1976] EWCA Crim J1006-1
The Lord Chief Justice of England (Lord Widgery)
Mr. Justice Forbes
and
Mr. Justice Slynn
No. 5684/A/75
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
MR. C. McCULLOUGH Q.C. and MR. I. JUDGE appeared on behalf of the Appellant.
MR. B. SMEDLEY appeared on behalf of the Crown.
On the 20th November, 1975 at the Lincoln Crown Court this Apellant was convicted of one offence of conspiracy to commit burglary, which was count 1 and which was the only charge against him in that indictment. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
Co-accused with him were one Brookbanks and one Dry. Brookbanks was charged on both counts of the indictment and convicted on both counts. The first was the count alleging conspiracy to burgle and the second was of the substantive offence of burglary itself. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for the conspiracy and four years concurrent for the burglary. Dry was acouitted on the only count against him, which was the conspiracy count on which this present Appellant had been convicted.
The Appellant applied for leave to appeal against his conviction and sentence, and that application was rejected by the single Judge. It was renewed before the full Court and leave to appeal was granted by the full Court, but no record is retained of the grounds upon which that decision was reached. However it means that the Appellant is an Appellant before this Court at the present period.
The victims of the burglary were a Mr. and Mrs. Buschman. They lived in a large detached house somewhere near Spalding. The burglary took place in the evening, that is to say about 8 o'clock, of Monday, 27th January, 1975. At that time the Buschmans and, as will appear in a moment, the Appellant and others were eating a special meal of mussels which they had been invited to partake of by the owner of a local restaurant, the Cley Hall Restaurant. He had made the arrangement with Mrs. Buschman that when he got the appropriate mussels he would make this dish for her, and the evening of the 27th January was the occasion upon which this feast was to be enjoyed. As again will appear more fully later, very soon after the Buschmans and their guests left to go to the restaurant the burglars were in the Buschmans' house and the offence was committed.
The Appellant's wife is a sister of Mrs. Buschman. They are therefore closely connected and one gathers from the evidence that they were close together in their activities. The prosecution nevertheless alleged that the burglar responsible for breaking into Mr. and Mrs. Buschman's house was Brookbanks and that he had been advised of the possibility of burglary being successful on that occasion by the Appellant Lake. In other words, tne police approach to this problem was that Lake had informed, as it were, on his sister-in-law by telling Brookbanks that there would be a good opportunity for burglary here when the meal of mussels was being consumed, and that it was Brookbanks according to the prosecution who with others not before the Court had committed the offence.
To take the matter in a little more detail, the story really starts about 11.30 on the 22nd January, five days before the burglary. The police were keeping observation on Brookbanks for an entirely different reason and they saw that during the day the 22nd January the Appellant Lake's car was outside Brookbanks's house for something like three hours. It cannot have been at that moment that the burglary of Mr. Buschman's house on the night of the 27th January was being discussed because on the 22nd January nobody knew that the special meal at the Cley Hall Restaurant was to be consumed on that day, but it may have been thought evident from the time during which the Appellant was in Brookbanks's house that there was some close association between them, and indeed some considerable activity. But all that was ever disclosed by way of activity between Brookbanks and the Appellant was that the Appellant owned a greyhound called Lucky Pup and Brookbanks trained the dog, and when Brookbanks and the Appellant met, according to the Appellant, the only subject of conversation was either dogs in general or this dog in particular. One can comment by saying that in his early answers to the police enquiries the Appellant showed a considerable reticence to disclose his association with Brookbanks and seemed determined to play it down as much as he could.
Going back again to the 22nd January, the Appellant (as I say) was in Brookbanks's company for about three hours, and he then went and called on Mrs. Buschman, and quite by chance – because it can be nothing else – he was in Mrs. Buschman's house when Mrs. Buschman was talking to the proprietor of the restaurant and when the date of the special meal was being fixed. It was fixed on the afternoon of the 22nd, and at that time and not before the Appellant could have known – indeed did know – that some special arrangement of this kind was afoot. However at that time it was not even settled that he was going to be a member of the party, and that was only arranged later on on the 25th when the Buschmans rang up Mrs. Lake (the Appellant's wife) and said that they would like to entertain her and her husband to this special meal on the night of the 27th. They agreed to go, and from most of the relevant evidence we take it that Lake was really in possession of the essential information about this restaurant expedition by the evening of the 25th January, if not before.
The 27th January dawned, and in the evening the Buschmans came and collected the Lakes. The Lakes' son Mark Lake joined the party at some stage, the details of which we do not know, and of course the proprietor of the restaurant knew what was afoot that night. But some precautions had been taken to prevent general gossip about it because the Buschmans very sensibly, having a house full of valuable articles, were careful not to talk about their movements or to publish the fact that the house was going to be empty. On this occasion it was going to be empty for the reasons which I have already given.
The Lakes were picked up by the Buschmans at about 7.30 on the evening of the 27th January, and the burglars or some of them were seen in the Buschmans' premises between 8 and 9 o'clock. The fact that the burglary occurred at such a relatively short time after the house was vacated must have lent some colour to the theory that this was an inside job in...
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