R v Wright
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE SCARMAN |
| Judgment Date | 15 January 1974 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1974] EWCA Crim J0115-1 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) |
| Docket Number | No. 2651/C/73 |
| Date | 15 January 1974 |
[1974] EWCA Crim J0115-1
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Lord Justice Scarman
Mr. Justice Thesiger
and
Mr. Justice Bristow
No. 2651/C/73
MR. A. De PIRO, Q.C. and MR. N. E. WALKER appeared as Counsel for the Appellant.
MR. D. FARQUHARSON, Q.C. and MR. P. G. ASHMORE appeared as Counsel for the Crown.
On the 24th May of last year at the Chelmsford Crown Court the Appellant, Ernest Leslie Alan Wright was convicted by a majority verdict (10 to 2) of the murder of Trevor Hale and sentenced to life imprisonment. The presiding Judge was Mr. Justice Melford Stevenson. The Appellant duly applied for leave to appeal against conviction and the full Court granted him leave on the 9th November of last year.
The case was in some ways a remarkable one in that so little was in issue, but what was in issue was of critical importance and by no means easy of solution. The Crown case was that Wright had on or about the 17th December, 1971 murdered Trevor Hale by striking him on the head with a heavy iron bar which was, in fact, a car track rod removed from a Cortina motor car.
The history before this alleged event and the history after was not really in dispute. Indeed, it was not in dispute that on or about the 17th December, 1971 Trevor Hale was murdered by being hit heavily over the head with this iron bar. The only dispute was whether the murderer was Leslie Wright, the Accused, or Ruth Hale, the wife of the murdered man, and the only issue for the jury was whether upon a consideration of all the facts they were satisfied at the end of the day that the Crown had established that it was Leslie Wright who murdered Trevor Hale.
Ruth Hale (I shall call her 'Ruth' for the rest of this Judgment) had married Trevor Hale in 1961 or thereabouts when she was in her late teenage. She was no more, I think, than sixteen or seventeen at the time. She bore Trevor Hale a number of children, including a boy who features in this case, their son Michael, who at the time of the murder was some eleven years old. It was an unhappy married life marked by incidents of violence in which Trevor and Ruth fought each other. Into this unhappy married life there came in the summer of 1971 the accused man, Leslie Wright. He got to know the two of them and he and Ruth fell in love, but nevertheless he remained on reasonably amicable terms, at any rate superficially, with the husband, Trevor Hale.
Matters reached a climax in December and it is unnecessary for the purposes of this judgment to go into the details of the relationship between these three people, save to say that Ruth and Leslie Wright were in love with each other and Ruth and Trevor were, literally to the point of violence, at loggerheads with each other.
The Crown case was that during this December night the Appellant and Trevor Hale left the house in Yardley Green, Aylesbury, which was the matrimonial home of Mr. and Mrs. Hale, and went to Leslie Wright's caravan, which was situated on the edge of a disused airfield some four or five miles away. According to the case put forward by the Crown in the course of that night Leslie Wright murdered Trevor Hale by taking the iron bar that I have described and hitting him over the head while he lay asleep in the caravan. So far the only matter in the history I have related/that was in any way in dispute was the events of the night and the murder alleged by the Crown in the caravan.
It was the Appellant's case that on this December night (I am not going into the detail of it) there had been a furious row between husband and wife. The lover, Leslie Wright, became involved in it, trying to separate them and to protect Ruth from the violence of her husband, that a fight developed between the two men and that in the course of that fight, when the husband had Leslie Wright's head in an arm lock, the husband's body suddenly went limp. The Appellant let him down on to the floor and the inference which was to be drawn from all the events of which I have spoken was that Ruth, who by now was standing nearby in a trance, or so it appeared to Leslie Wright, had picked up the iron bar and without actually being observed by the accused man had struck her husband in the course of the fight over the head a blow which proved to be mortal.
There are the conflicting stories described only in outline. There is the one conflict in the case. Thereafter the history once more moved out of the realms of dispute. By whomsoever this man was murdered that night, and murdered he certainly was, the subsequent events were these. The two of them, the lover and his mistress, disposed of the body by burning it in a shallow pit dug near the caravan on the edge of that disused airfield. Having disposed, apparently successfully, of the body of Trevor Hale the lover then moved into the matrimonial home and for a year or so lived there with Ruth, who bore him a child. There is not the slightest doubt that, with knowledge of the fate of Trevor Hale and the disposal of his body, these two set up home in the house vacated by Trevor because of his death. It is an evil tale and I apply that epithet for the moment solely to the facts not in dispute.
It is not surprising that the guilty secret, whatever its full nature was, laid a heavy burden upon the mental strength of Ruth. The burden in due course, perhaps together with other factors, led to a breakdown in Ruth's mental health about a year or so later, Christmas 1972, and it was clear that Ruth would have to go into hospital. This, of course, created an emergency for these two persons. I have no doubt that it occurred to the accused man that there was a risk that in the course of treatment in hospital for her mental health Ruth might be led into saying something about the facts associated with the death of her husband.
In those circumstances the accused man did say something about it to a friend of his mistress, a girl named Maureen. This information got back to the police and a police investigation began. I can take it quite shortly now. The police came to ask questions of Leslie Wright. He put on an act (it was admitted by him that it was an act) to give the impression that he was dazed and under the influence of drugs. Thanks to the act he gave the police the slip, but later he was caught. He was interrogated by Detective Chief Inspector Caro to whom he ultimately made a confession, first oral and then very lengthily in writing, of his murder of the husband Trevor Hale, striking him over the head with an iron bar in his caravan on the edge of the airfield. In due course he was brought to trial with the result that I have indicated; the matters associated with the trial I shall deal with in their appropriate place since they are of fundamental importance to the case made on behalf of the Appellant in this Court.
It must be obvious from that brief outline of the history that the case against this man was a very strong one. Indeed, his Counsel in this Court relied on its very strength as a clear indication of the importance for the Judge in summing-up to ensure that his defence was emphatically put before the jury - a submission which I think his Counsel was abundantly justified in making. It was a strong case, but its strength derived nothing from the evidence of his mistress, Ruth. She clearly was a witness whose evidence had to be examined with great caution and the trial Judge was careful in summing-up to indicate to the jury that they might find it very difficult to rely on her evidence. The strength of the case was, as I have said, not the evidence of Ruth, important though of course that evidence was, but the very full and detailed confession of guilt first made orally and then made in writing to Detective Chief Inspector Caro when he caught up with the Appellant in January of 1973. That confession was to some extent supported by a number of letters that the accused man wrote to friends and the mother of Ruth while he was in prison, letters which contained perfectly clear admissions of his responsibility for the death of Trevor Hale.
In order that the defence should make any headway at all in the face of the oral and written confessions made to Detective Chief Inspector Caro, some explanation had to be offered as to how those confessions came to be made and the explanation that was offered was this. It was the Appellant's case that, from the moment that he and Ruth realised that her husband was dead, he was promising to take all the blame to protect Ruth so as to ensure that she should not be subject to criminal proceedings or her life with her children put at risk. His case was that, consious of this promise and devoted as of course he was to Ruth, with whom he was in love, he made the statement to the police officer inculpating himself as the murderer - a statement which was wholly false and was false in order that Ruth might be protected.
How was it then that he came to plead not guilty at his trial? The explanation of that was in a word that Ruth had released him from his promise and it was said that she released him from his promise at an interview which she had with him in the prison when he was awaiting trial, an interview which was attended by the prison welfare officer, Mr. Barkby.
So there it was, the issue for the jury was an easily comprehensible, clear question; could the jury be sure that the confessions made to the police officer were true? Nobody would suggest that the jury, considering the turbulent and evil story to which I have alluded, could find that issue a simple one to resolve, but the nature of the issue was simple and within the grasp of any ordinary man or...
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