R v Sales
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | THE VICE PRESIDENT |
| Judgment Date | 18 May 2000 |
| Neutral Citation | [2000] EWCA Crim J0518-7 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [2000] EWCA Crim J0518-8 |
| Docket Number | No: 199802663/Y5 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Date | 18 May 2000 |
[2000] EWCA Crim J0518-7
The Vice President
(lord Justice Rose)
Mr Justice Ian Kennedy and
Mrs Justice Hallett
No: 199802663/Y5
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
The Strand London WC2
MR P O'CONNOR QC & MR D MARTIN-SPERRY appeared on behalf of the Appellant
MR B ESCOTT COX QC & MR D FARRELL appeared on behalf of the Crown
Crown Court
On 13th February 1985 at Northampton Crown Court, before Otton J, the appellant pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of provocation and, the prosecution not having accepted the plea, the following day the appellant was convicted by the jury of murder, and sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty's Pleasure.
He had been jointly indicted with Christopher Beals and Thomas Murphy. In May 1985 Beals pleaded guilty to receiving a stolen video recorder, belonging to the deceased, and he was convicted of perverting the course of justice, by assisting in the disposal of his own knife, the murder weapon. He was sentenced to a total of 15 months' imprisonment. Murphy also pleaded guilty to receiving the video recorder and was given a suspended sentence.
The appellant appeals by leave of the Single Judge. There are no transcripts still available but this Court has the witness statements, exhibits and unused material. Only one witness, Detective Constable Grocott gave oral evidence before the jury; all the other evidence for the prosecution was read. The appellant did not give evidence. The only issue for the jury was whether or not he was acting under provocation.
The facts, undisputed at the trial, were these. Brian Mehew, the deceased, was a 35 year old male homosexual who lived in a bungalow in Great Staunton, a village which is half-an-hour's drive northeast of Bedford. Some time after 6.30 pm on Monday 6th August 1984 he returned home from work, in his car, together with the appellant, who was then 16. They went inside. First the lounge curtains and then the bedroom curtains were closed by the deceased. At about 8.00 pm the appellant ran out of the front door to the deceased's Ford Fiesta, which was in the drive. He got into the driver's seat and, with great difficulty, much stalling, crashing of gears, colliding with the kerb and an obvious lack of control, reversed the car onto the main road, colliding, as he did so, with a gate post. This all took some 15 or 20 minutes. As he drove away, he kept the car in first gear.
At 11.36 pm police officers found the deceased's car abandoned on the grass verge of the A45, near its junction with a road to Covington. Police went to the deceased's home but were unable to get any reply and left. The deceased's family became anxious about his whereabouts. The following afternoon, 7th August, police officers again went to his home and forced entry.
Inside, the bedroom door was locked. The door was forced open. The deceased's naked body was found on the floor, partly concealed by a mattress and upturned bed and covered in blood. His wrists had been tightly tied with a tie across the lower part of his chest and the bedroom was in a state of considerable disorder, with droplets and smears of the deceased's blood all over the place. There were light smears of blood on the deceased's trousers, hanging in the bedroom, consistent with a bloodstained hand taking something from the pocket. No blood was found outside the bedroom, except for a smear on a buff folder near the TV in the living room. U bends in the premises were not tested for blood.
At postmortem the body was found to contain 42 stab wounds, in at least seven separate groups, at the front, back and side of the neck, both sides of the chest and on the back. One of the wounds was 12 centimetres deep, but the vast majority were superficial. The cause of death was shock and haemorrhage due to multiple stab wounds.
The appellant was arrested on 9th August 1984. He was interviewed initially in the presence of his father, who became upset and left and, thereafter, in the presence of a social worker. We have read the whole of his interviews and what he said to the police before he was formally interviewed. None of this material was or is challenged.
He admitted killing the deceased, whom he said he had met by arrangement following a sexual encounter between them, downtown by the river in Bedford, a fortnight or so before. They had driven to Mehew's bungalow and gone into the bedroom where Mehew undressed and started, as the appellant put it, 'sucking him off'. He then started getting a bit rough, wanting to stick his penis up his bum. He got scared and just turned round and stabbed. He stabbed him quite a few times with a knife which he had borrowed from Beals for rabbiting. He said "I didn't think it would kill him, as they didn't go in that much." He had then tied Mehew's arms with a tie and "put the sheets and that on top of him because he was making a lot of noise." He took money from Mehew's jeans and a video recorder. He wiped his fingerprints off everything he had touched, locked the bedroom, put the video in the car and drove off with difficulty. He put the bedroom key down a drain, stalled at some roadworks and could not restart, so he abandoned the car. He hid the video recorder in a field nearby. He wiped the car for fingerprints and, from a nearby farm house, telephoned to get Beals to pick him because he had broken down. He eventually thumbed a lift to Bedford and got Beals to give him a lift from there, with Tommy Murphy, to pick up the video recorder. When they heard a news report of the murder, they smashed up the video. The appellant had burned his clothing and shoes Beals had thrown the knife away. He had given Beals some of the money to buy a van. He was adamant that he had not gone to Mehew's intending to rob or kill him.
It was and is the prosecution case that the appellant, acting alone, intended, initially, to rob Mehew, as an adjunct to homosexual activity, believing that Mehew would not complain lest his homosexual conduct with a minor come to light.
Over 4 years after the trial, in May 1988, the appellant set in motion, through his father, the dissemination of an entirely different account. He wrote to solicitors, in his own handwriting, an eight page account, the essence of which founds this appeal, namely, that it was Beals, not the appellant, who had stabbed the deceased, in the course of an unsuccessful attempt to blackmail the deceased which the two of them had hatched. Thereafter Beals had said: "If you tell anyone I killed Brian Mehew, you will be sorry you did.""If we get caught you say you did it and I was nothing to do with it. You will not go down as you can say he was raping you and it was self-defence and you will get off with it. Anyway, if you say it was me, I have a lot of friends who will say I was with them."
In consequence, on 3rd August 1988 Detective Chief Inspector Negus saw the appellant in prison and he made a written statement to the officer saying that he did not kill Mehew but had confessed because Beals had threatened him. He said that Beals had organised a honey trap to blackmail Mehew and that photographs were taken on a Polaroid camera which the appellant stole from his parents. The appellant and Mehew engaged in homosexual activity in a quarry near Elstow, just south of Bedford, on 30th July 1984. Ten photographs were taken by Beals. Four showed the appellant's face, so he burned them, in Beals presence; the other six were kept by Beals. On the day of the murder, he had gone with Mehew to his house, followed by Beals, who was in a white car. He did not know how Beals got into the house. He assumed by the back door. Once in the bedroom, both he and Mehew undressed. Beals had come in, shown the photographs to Mehew, demanded money, produced a knife and told the appellant to get out. He went in the living room and got dressed. He heard Mehew refuse to pay, banging, shouting and arguing. He went back in the bedroom and Beals was stabbing Mehew. Beals told him to get the video and money and take Mehew's car. The appellant said "I can't drive". Beals said "it's time you learnt" and left via the back door. He, the appellant, had not tied the deceased's hands. Beals said "If they do catch us, say you done it and if you don't, you will be the next one". The appellant agreed to take the blame. The following day Beals had said "Don't say anything to anybody but if you get caught he tried to rape you and he was hitting you and so you turned round and stabbed him."
Subsequently, while both were on remand at the Magistrates' Court, Beals had told him to keep his mouth shut or he would do him over. The appellant said he was now telling the truth because he was no longer afraid of Beals and felt he should not be in prison for a murder Beals had committed. On 31st August 1988, he made a further statement in which he said he had tied the deceased's hands because Beals had told him and the white car belonged to David Dean. Also, after the murder, he saw Beals leave the bungalow by the back door.
Further witness statements were obtained at that time by the police. On 24th August 1990 Mr Negus interviewed Beals, who denied any involvement in the murder. The police enquiry and the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was, at that time, no new evidence to connect Beals with the murder.
In April 1992 Beals committed suicide while awaiting trial for robbery. In 1993, a local newspaper became involved in the case and employed an ex police officer to interview various witnesses, to see if any link could be made between Beals and the murder....
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Stephen Stubbs v R
...Peter Meadows v R SCCrApp. No. 132 of 2009 considered R v Beckford [2004] BHS J No 430 applied R v Blake (2017) 91 WIR 463 considered R v Davis [2008] 1 AC 1128 applied R v Galbraith [1981] 2 All ER 1060 mentioned R v Iqbal [2011] EWCA Crim 1348 considered R v Morris [1998] Crim LR 416 con......
-
Louis Campbell v Ambiance Resort Properties Inc.
...in considering fresh evidence applications in civil cases. 46 This court has also adopted the instructive pronouncements of Rose LJ in R v Sales [2000] 2 Cr App R 431 in considering the approach to an application for the court to admit fresh evidence where the issue of credibility arises. ......
-
R v Hampton; R v Brown
...in particular: R v Shields and Patrick [1977] Crim LR 281; R v Irwin [1987] 1 WLR 902; R v CCRC ex p Pearson [2000] 1 Cr App R 141 and R v Sales [2000] 2 Cr App R 431. 101 From the various cases which we have considered, we draw these conclusions that are relevant to the present case. (1......
-
Benedetto v The Queen (No 2)
...that the evidence would afford no ground for allowing the appeal even if accepted, the court would be very unlikely to admit it: see R v Sales [2000] 2 Cr App R 431at 438; R v Pendleton [2001] UKHL 66, [2002] 1 WLR 72, 78H-79A, paragraph 10. Although these decisions were based on section......