Keith Blakelock
Encyclopedia
The death of PC Keith Blakelock, an officer with the London Metropolitan Police
, occurred on 6 October 1985 during rioting on the Broadwater Farm
housing estate in Tottenham
, north London. The violence broke out after a black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home, and took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of the relationship between the police and local black communities.
Blakelock, who had joined the police five years earlier, had been assigned on the night of his death to a unit of 10 constables and a sergeant, known as Serial 502, who were dispatched to protect firefighters. When the officers were forced back by rioters, Blakelock stumbled and fell, and was surrounded by a mob of around 50 people. He received over 40 stabbing and cutting injuries, inflicted by machetes or similar, and the penetration of a six-inch-long knife into his neck. He was the only police constable to have been killed in a riot in Britain since Robert Culley was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell
, central London, in 1833.
Three adults and three juveniles were charged with murder based on untaped confessions they were said to have given to detectives. The charges against the youths were dismissed by a judge because they had been detained without access to parents or a lawyer. The adults—Winston Silcott
, Mark Braithwaite and Engin Raghip—were convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment
. The men became known as the "Tottenham Three" during a campaign to secure their release, and in 1991 the Court of Appeal overturned their convictions, after an Electrostatic Document Apparatus (ESDA) test suggested that at least one page of detectives' notes from an interview—during which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself, though he said the remarks were a fabrication—may not have been transcribed contemporaneously, contrary to the detectives' testimony at trial. In 1994 a jury found the detectives not guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice. Police re-opened the inquiry in 2003, and 10 men in their 40s and 50s were arrested and questioned in 2010, but the murder remains unsolved.
Blakelock and the nine other constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal
for bravery in 1988, while Sergeant David Pengelly, the unit's supervisor—who fought to save Blakelock and PC Richard Coombes, another officer who came under attack—received the George Medal
, awarded for acts of great bravery.
before becoming a home beat officer
in Muswell Hill
. At the time of his death, he was married to Elizabeth Blakelock, with three sons, Mark, Kevin, and Lee. Lee Blakelock, eight years old when his father died, went on to become a police officer himself, joining Durham Police in 2000.
, and particularly since the 1981 Brixton riot in south London, a series of incidents had sparked violent confrontations across the country between black youths and largely white police officers.
On 9 September 1985, a month before Blakelock's murder, there was rioting in Handsworth
, Birmingham, after the arrest of a black man for a traffic offence. On 28 September, a black woman, Dorothy "Cherry" Groce (1948–2011), was accidentally shot by police while they searched her home in Brixton
looking for her son, Michael Groce
, wanted on suspicion of robbery and firearms offences. Believing she had died in the shooting—in fact, she survived but was left paralysed from the waist down—a group of protesters gathered outside Brixton police station, and rioting broke out that saw police lose control of the area for 48 hours. A journalist, David Hodge, was killed when a breeze bock was dropped on his head while he photographed the looting, and there was a gang rape. On 1 October there were further disturbances in Toxteth
, Liverpool. Rumors spread throughout several London communities that rioting was imminent in areas the police called "symbolic location
s," including Bermondsey
and the Wood Green shopping centre in Tottenham, near the Broadwater Farm housing estate, and on 2 October police found a petrol bomb at the Farm itself. British journalist David Rose wrote in 1992 that all was needed for rioting to begin there was a trigger.
Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, north London (N17
), emerged out of the British government's policy from the 1930s onwards of "slum clearance," where rows of over-crowded and poorly maintained terraced houses
were bulldozed to make way for high-rise social housing, known as council estates
. Completed in 1973, the Farm, as it is known locally, consists of 1,000 flats (apartments) in 12 blocks surrounded by high-level outdoor walkways. Commentators blamed these walkways for turning the estate into a "rabbit warren" for criminals, and residents complained that they were afraid to leave their homes. Rose writes that by 1976 it was already seen as a "sink estate
," and by 1980 a Department of the Environment report raised the possibility that it might have to be demolished in the next decade, though a regeneration project after the 1985 riots led to improvements. At the time of Blakelock's death it housed 3,400 people—49 percent whites and 43 percent Afro-Caribbeans.
According to Rose, the police let themselves into the house using Floyd's keys, without knocking or announcing themselves, while Mrs Jarrett and her family were watching television. The inquest heard that an officer accidentally pushed against Mrs. Jarrett, causing her to fall. When it became clear she had stopped breathing, the same officer tried to revive her using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to no avail.
Protesters began to gather outside Tottenham police station, just a few hundred yards from Broadwater Farm, around 1:30 am on Sunday morning. Four of the station's windows were smashed, but the Jarrett family asked the crowd to disperse. Later that day, two police officers were attacked with bricks and paving stones at the Farm, and a police inspector was attacked in his car. By early evening a crowd of 500 mostly young black men had gathered on the estate, throwing petrol bombs, bricks and stones, and dropping concrete blocks from the outdoor walkways that surrounded the apartment blocks. The subsequent rioting was regarded as one of the most violent incidents the country had seen. Apart from Blakelock's death, 250 police officers were injured, and two policemen and three journalists suffered gunshot wounds, the first time shots had been fired by rioters in Britain.
Blakelock was assigned on the night to Serial 502, a Metropolitan police unit consisting of a sergeant and 10 police constables. At 9:30 p.m. Sergeant David Pengelly led the unit—all in riot protection gear
, including shields, flame-proof overalls, and NATO-style hard hats—to protect local firefighters
who had been forced out of the estate's Tangmere block, where a fire had been started in a newsagent's shop on an upper deck. One of the firefighters, Trevor Stratford, said the men made their way up an enclosed staircase, with Serial 502 behind them. Suddenly rioters appeared at the top, blowing whistles and throwing bottles.
Pengelly ordered the fire fighters and police officers to retreat. They had to run backwards down the narrow staircase, fearful of tripping over the fire hoses, which had been flat before but were now full of water. Pengelly described it "as an extremely difficult position [in which] to defend yourself." As they ran down the stairwell, Statford saw there were rioters at the bottom too, wearing masks or crash helmets, and carrying knives, baseball bats, bricks and petrol bombs. He said it appeared the fire may have been set as an ambush. As the fire fighters and police exited the stairwell toward a car park and a patch of grass, Stratford became aware that Blakelock had tripped and fallen: "He just stumbled and went down and they were upon him. It was just mob hysteria. ... There were about 50 people on him.
The rioters removed his protective helmet, which was never found. Rose writes that the pathologist found 54 holes in his overalls, and 40 cutting or stabbing injuries, eight of them to his head, caused by a machete, sword, or axe-type instrument. A six-inch-long knife was buried in his neck up to the hilt. His hands and arms were cut to ribbons, and he had lost several of his fingers. There were 14 stabbing wounds on his back, six on his face, a six-inch gash across the right side of his head, and his jawbone had been smashed. The pathologist said the force of the blow that caused this injury had been "almost as if to sever his head."
A second group surrounded another constable, Richard Coombes, who sustained a five-inch-long cut to his face, a broken upper jaw, and a smashed lower jaw. In 2004 he said he was still suffering the effects of the attack, including poor hearing and eyesight, and epileptic fits. Police regard the attack on him as attempted murder. A third constable, Michael Shepherd, had his protective helmet pierced by an iron spike. Trevor Stratford told a reporter in 2010: "I remember running in with another fire officer to get Dick Coombes. I literally slid into the group, like a rugby player charging into a ruck. We dragged him out, but he was in a hell of a state":
Chief Superintendent Colin Couch, the highest-ranking officer at the scene, was one of the first officers to reach Blakelock. Crouch said he was still alive, and managed to take two or three steps before collapsing. He was taken by ambulance to the North Middlesex Hospital, but died on the way.
, to an ape, writing that he had given a press conference while peeling a banana and juggling an orange. Grant had caused uproar when he was reported as saying the police had been given a "bloody good hiding," though his statement was also reported as: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding." The Daily Express—falling for one of notorious British hoaxer Rocky Ryan
's stories—reported on October 8 that a "Moscow-trained hit squad gave orders as mob hacked PC Blakelock to death," alleging that "crazed left-wing extremists" trained in Moscow and Libya had coordinated the riots. The Met's commissioner, Kenneth Newman, told reporters that groups of Trotskyists and anarchists—black and white—had orchestrated the violence, a theme picked up by the Daily Telegraph and others.
There was internal pressure on detectives too from the rank and file, who saw their superior officers as sharing the blame for Blakelock's death. The journal Police, published by the Police Federation
, argued that senior officers had pursued a policy at Broadwater Farm of avoiding confrontation at all costs, and that "community policing" had led to compromises with criminals, rather than a focus on upholding the law. As a result, the journal wrote, officers had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation that had developed on the estate.
. He studied at Bramshill Police College, served with the Flying Squad
, and was known for having solved several notorious cases, including that of Kenneth Erskine
, the Stockwell Strangler. He became a Detective Chief Superintendent in March 1985 when he joined the International and Organised Crime Squad (SO1), which Peter Victor writes takes only the cream of detectives.
In addition to the intense media focus on the case, Melvin faced the problem of having no forensic evidence to go on, because senior officers had not allowed Broadwater Farm to be sealed off immediately after the attack. Police were not allowed into the estate until 4 am, by which time much of the evidence had disappeared. Whatever remained was removed during Haringey Council's clean-up operation.
Melvin therefore resorted to arresting suspects—including juveniles, some of them particularly vulnerable—and holding them incommunicado for days without access to lawyers. He defended this in court by arguing that lawyers might wittingly or unwittingly pass information they had gleaned during interviews to other suspects. He said under cross-examination that in his view "the integrity of some firms of solicitors left a lot to be desired," and that he believed they were being retained by people who had an interest in learning what other suspects were saying. The Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot QC, told the murder trial that the police had one effective weapon, namely that suspects did not know who else had spoken to police and what they had said, and that "the use of that weapon by the police was legitimate and effective."
Blakelock's murder took place before police interviews were recorded on tape, so one detective would conduct the interview, while a second took contemporaneous notes. Of the 359 people arrested in connection with the inquiry in 1985 and 1986, just 94 were interviewed in the presence of a lawyer, and many of the confessions—whether directly about the murder, or about having taken part in the rioting—were made before the lawyer was given access to the interviewee. When people did confess to even a minor role in the rioting, such as throwing a few stones, they were charged with affray
, a serious offence. One resident told the 1986 Gifford inquiry into the rioting: "You would go to bed and just lie there, and you would think, are they going to come and kick my door, what's going to happen to my children? It was the horrible fear that you lived with day by day, knowing they could come and kick down your door and hold you for hours." Thus, argues Rose, the police created, or at least intensified, a climate of fear in which witnesses were afraid to step forward.
Mark Pennant, aged 15, was arrested on 9 October, and became the first person to be charged with the murder. He was born in England to West Indian parents, and had been raised in the West Indies until he was nine, when he returned to the UK. He had learning difficulties, and was attending a special school. He was arrested at school, handcuffed, and taken to Wood Green Police Station, where he was interviewed over the course of two days with a teacher in attendance. The police reportedly told him his mother had refused to help him; in fact, Rose writes, she did not know where he was. He was interviewed six times, during which he said he had cut Blakelock and kicked him twice, and named Silcott (nicknamed "Sticks") as the ringleader. He named several others, including another juvenile, Mark Lambie. Pennant was charged with the murder on 11 October.
Jason Hill, a 13-year-old white boy who lived on Broadwater Farm, was seen looting from a store in the Tangmere block during the rioting, near where Blakelock was killed. He was arrested on 13 October and taken to Leyton Police Station, where he was held for three days without access to a lawyer. A social worker from Haringey Council arrived to sit in as an "appropriate adult," but the council had a policy of "non-cooperation" with the police, so the arrangement did not work out. Hyancinth Moody of the Haringey Community Relations Council police liaison committee sat in instead; she was later criticized by the judge for having failed to intervene. Hill's clothes and shoes were removed for forensic tests, and he was interviewed wearing only underpants and a blanket, the latter of which by the third day of detention was stained with his own vomit. Over the course of several interviews, he told police that he had witnessed the attack on Blakelock, and named Silcott (calling him "Sticks"), and two others, one of them Mark Lambie. Both Mark Pennant and Jason Hill named Mark Lambie, the third juvenile to be charged with the murder.
Hill said Silcott had forced him to make a mark on Blakelock with a heavy sword. In 1991 he told David Rose that, throughout the interview, the police were saying, "Go on, admit it, you had a stab," and "It was Sticks, wasn't it?" He said they threatened to keep him in the station for two weeks, and told him he would never see his family. He told Rose: "They could have told me it was Prince Charles and I would have said it was him."
David Rose writes that one former detective inspector who spoke to him called the Blakelock investigation a "pre-scientific inquiry, it was all about how to get Winston Silcott convicted, not discovering who killed Keith Blakelock." By the time of the murder, the local police saw Silcott as the "biggest mafioso in Tottenham," running gangs of muggers and paying them in drugs, according to Rose's source.
Silcott was born in Tottenham in 1959, after his parents, both Seventh Day Adventists, had arrived in England from Montserrat
two years earlier. He told reporters he was subjected to racism, particularly from the police, throughout his entire upbringing. He left school at 15 and took a series of low-paying jobs, began breaking into houses in 1976, and was sent to borstal
for a few months in 1977. In 1979 he was sentenced to six months for wounding, and in 1980 was acquitted—after two trials, the first of which saw a hung jury—of the murder of 19-year-old Lennie McIntosh, a postal worker, who was stabbed and killed at a party in 1979.
In 1980 Silcott and a friend began operating a mobile disco known as "Galaxy Soul Shuffle," playing at festivals and private parties. In October 1983 he was fined for possessing a flick knife, in March 1984 for obstructing police, and in 1985 made the news when he spoke to Princess Diana during an official visit to Broadwater Farm, reportedly telling her she should not have come without bringing jobs with her, which the Sun newspaper interpreted as a threat.
In December 1984 he was arrested for the murder of a 22-year-old boxer, Anthony Smith, at a party in Hackney. Smith was slashed more than once on his face, there were two wounds to his abdomen, a lung was lacerated, and his aorta
was cut. Silcott was charged with the murder in May 1985, and was out on bail awaiting trial when Blakelock was killed in October 1985. He at first told police he had not known Smith and had not been at the party, though at trial he said he had been confused and had indeed been there. He said Smith had started punching him, and he had pushed him back, but had not been carrying a knife. He was convicted of the murder in February 1986—while awaiting trial for the Blakelock murder—and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, he told his lawyer he had indeed known Smith, that there was bad blood between them, and that he had stabbed him in self-defence, because he could see that one of Smith's friends had a knife.
Silcott was arrested for the Blakelock murder on 12 October 1985, six days after the riot, after being named by several young men—most of them juveniles, and some of them vulnerable and attending special education schools—who were arrested by police and held without access to lawyers. During the interviews, most of the witnesses referred to Silcott as "Sticks." Silcott was interviewed five times over 24 hours, Melvin asking the questions and Detective Inspector Maxwell Dingle taking the notes. During the first four interviews, he stayed mostly silent and refused to sign them, but during the fifth interview on 13 October, when Melvin said he knew Silcott had struck Blakelock with a machete or sword, his demeanour apparently changed. The notes show him asking: "Who told you that?" When the detectives said they had witnesses, the notes say Silcott walked around the interview room with tears in his eyes, saying: "You cunts, you cunts," then "Jesus, Jesus," then: "You ain't got enough evidence. Those kids will never go to court. You wait and see. No one else will talk to you. You can't keep me away from them." The notes show he said of the murder weapons: "You're too slow, man, they gone."
He was at that point charged with the murder, to which he reportedly responded: "They won't give evidence against me." He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on 18 March 1987 along with Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite. That he had been out on bail for the murder of Anthony Smith when Blakelock was killed was withheld from the jury, as was his subsequent conviction. He chose not to take the stand because this would have left him open to questioning about his previous convictions.
The press coverage of the trial included the publication on day two by the Sun of a notoriously violent-looking image of Silcott, the publication of which constituted "the most gross contempt," according to Sir Derek Hodgson (1917–2002), the judge in the Blakelock trial, speaking to David Rose in 1992. The photograph contributed to the sense of him as a "big black man to be fearful of," as Silcott put it. He said he had been asleep in a cell at Paddington Green police station when it was taken. He was woken, held in a corridor with his arms pinned against a wall by three officers, and photographed. He said the expression on his face was one of fear, not violence. Journalist Kurt Barling wrote that the press, and not only the tabloids, "created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England ..."
The Court of Appeal
accepted in 1991 that the notes of Silcott's fifth interview with detectives may not have been contemporaneous, as the detectives said they were. In March 2004 Silcott told a BBC documentary, Who Killed PC Blakelock?—presented by Barling—that he had been asleep in a friend's home during the rioting. He told The Observer: "And look, I'm on bail for a murder. I know I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid. There's helicopters, police photographers everywhere. All I could think about was that I didn't want to lose my bail. I saw a young guy with a scaffolding pole and he made as if he was going to throw it through the window of my shop. I stopped him. Then I saw Pam, a friend of mine. She said, 'You'd better come up. You know the police don't like you.'" He said he first learned of Blakelock's death when he heard cheering in the apartment he was staying in, in response to a news report about it.
. He left school at 15, still illiterate, and by the time of the murder had two convictions, one for stealing cars and one for burglary. He had a common-law wife, Sharon Daly, with whom he had a two-year-old boy, and he worked occasionally as a mechanic. He had little connection with Broadwater Farm, though he lived nearby in Wood Green
, and had gone to the Farm with two friends on the day of the rioting to watch, he said. One of those friends, John Broomfield, gave an interview to the Daily Mirror on 23 October, apparently boasting about his involvement in the rioting. He was arrested, and he implicated Raghip.
At the time of Raghip's arrest, on 24 October, he had been drinking and smoking cannabis for several days, had not slept or eaten properly, and Sharon had just left him, taking their son with her. He was held for two days without representation, first speaking to a solicitor on the third day, who said he found Raghip distressed and disoriented. He was interviewed by Detective Sergeant van Thal and Detective Inspector John Kennedy ten times over a period of four days. He made several incriminating statements during the interviews, at first admitting he had thrown stones, then during the second interview saying he had seen the attack on Blakelock. During the third, he said he had spoken to Silcott about the murder, and that Silcott owned a hammer with a hook on one side. After the fifth interview, Rose writes, he was charged with affray, and during the sixth he described the attack on Blakelock: "It was like you see in a film, a helpless man with dogs on him. It was just like that, it was really quick." He did not sign this interview, Rose writes, and after it he vomited.
During a seventh interview the next day, he described noises he said Blakelock had made during the attack, and during the eighth said he had armed himself that night with a broom handle, and had tried to get close to what was happening to Blakelock, but there were too many people around him. He said: "I had a weapon when I was running toward the policeman, a broom handle." He said he might have kicked or hit him had he been able to "get in." Rose writes that he also offered the exact order in which Blakelock's attackers had launched the assault. He was held for another two days, released on bail, then charged six weeks later with the murder, under the doctrine of common purpose
.
. He had a girlfriend who lived on Broadwater Farm, with whom he had a child. On 16 January 1986—three months after the murder—his name was mentioned for the first time to detectives by a man they had arrested, Bernard Kinghorn, who told them he had seen Braithwaite, whom he said he knew by sight, stab Blakelock with a kitchen knife. Kinghorn told the BBC three years later that his allegations had been false.
Braithwaite was taken to Enfield Police Station and interviewed by Detective Sergeant Dermot McDermott and Detective Constable Colin Biggar. Rose writes that, on the instruction of Detective Chief Superintendent Melvin, he was at first denied access to a lawyer and held for three days; he was interviewed eight times over the first two days, and with a lawyer present four times on the third. He at first denied being anywhere near the Farm, then during interview four said he had been there and had thrown stones, and during interview five said he had been at the Tangmere block, but had played no role in the murder. During interview six, he said he had hit Blakelock with an iron bar in the chest and leg. Rose writes that there were no such injuries on Blakelock's body. In a seventh interview, he said he had hit a police officer, but it was not Blakelock. During the first 30 hours of his time in the police station he had nothing to eat, and said in court—as did several other suspects—that the heat in the cells was oppressive, making it difficult to breathe. On the basis of this confession evidence, he was charged with murder.
In December 1988 the men's solicitors requested leave to appeal. Raghip's solicitor, Gareth Peirce
—who also represented the Guildford Four
and Birmingham Six
, prominent cases of miscarriage of justice—argued that Raghip was suggestible, and that his confession could not be relied upon. She arranged for him to be examined by Dr. Gisli Gudjonsson
of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, a specialist in suggestibility; Gudjonsson concluded that he was unusually suggestible, with a mental age of between 10 and 11. Lord Lane
, the Lord Chief Justice of England, dismissed the application, arguing that the jury had had ample opportunity to form its own opinion of Raghip.
A campaign to free the men began to gather pace. Rose writes that the New Statesman and Time Out wrote sympathetic pieces, and MPs and trade unionists were lobbied. In 1989 Silcott was even briefly elected honorary president of the London School of Economics
, a decision that was quickly overturned, and later that year the BBC's Inside Story reconstructed parts of the trial. During a BBC Newsnight discussion of the case, Lord Scarman, a former Law Lord, said the convictions ought to be overturned. Gareth Peirce, Raghip's solicitor, asked the Home Secretary for a review, supported by Raghip's MP Michael Portillo
, and in December 1990 the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker
, referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.
In parallel to the efforts of Pierce, Silcott's lawyers requested access in November 1990 to his original interview notes, so that the seven pages from his crucial fifth interview—the notes he said were fabricated—could be submitted for an Electrostatic Document Apparatus (ESDA) test. The test reveals the indentations made on pages when the page above in a notebook is written on; in this way, the test's developers say the chronological integrity of interview notes can determined. In Silcott's case, the seventh and final page of the fifth interview, where the participants would normally sign, was missing. The ESDA test suggested that, on pages three to six of the interview, there were no impressions from earlier pages, though these earlier impressions appeared throughout the rest of the notes. A later test indicated that those pages had been written on a different type of paper from the other notes. As a result, the Home Secretary added Silcott and Braithwaite to Raghip's appeal.
The case was heard on 25 November 1991, during which the Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot, conceded that the apparent contamination of the evidence rendered all three convictions unsafe. The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions, and Braithwaite and Raghip were released that day. Silcott remained in jail for the 1984 murder of Smith. He received £17,000 compensation in 1991, and another £50,000 in 1999 for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. He was released on licence on 20 October 2003 after serving 17 years.
in 1994. The prosecution alleged that the notes of Silcott's fifth interview had been altered to include the self-incriminating remarks. The detectives' lawyers produced 14 undisclosed witness statements from the Blakelock inquiry, one of which said Silcott had been carrying a knife with a two-foot-long blade on the night of the murder, and that he had attacked Blakelock. The Independent wrote at the time that it seemed it was Silcott who was back on trial. The detectives were acquitted in July 1994 by a unanimous jury verdict. Both officers had been suspended during the case. Melvin returned to work afterwards, while Dingle retired.
gang leader Mark Lambie, one of the three juveniles initially charged with Blakelock's murder, was jailed for 12 years for kidnap and blackmail, after detaining and torturing two men.
In December 2003 the investigation was reopened, led by Detective Superintendent John Sweeney
. Detectives began re-examining 10,000 witness statements, and submitting items for forensic tests not available in 1985. In September 2004 the garden of a council house in Willan Road, Tottenham was excavated after a tip-off, and an item that could have been the murder weapon was sent for forensic tests. At the time of Blakelock's death, a friend of Cynthia Jarrett—the woman whose death sparked the rioting—lived at the house. Police also searched the garden for Blakelock's truncheon and helmet, both of which went missing during the attack. Archaeologists dug up the back garden, while surveyors used infra-red beams to create a three-dimensional map of the area. In October 2004 Blakelock's overalls were retrieved from Scotland Yard
's Crime Museum
for DNA tests.
On 5 February 2010, a 40-year-old man, originally from Tottenham, was arrested in Suffolk
in connection with the murder. He was held and questioned for four days at Bury St. Edmunds police station, before being released on bail. Two other men, aged 46 and 52, who lived in Tottenham in 1985, were arrested at separate north London addresses in May 2010, and released on bail after questioning. Overall 10 men between the ages of 42 and 52 were arrested and questioned in 2010. On 26 October 2010, marking the 25th anniversary of the murder, the BBC's Crimewatch
staged a reconstruction and appealed for information.
In 1988 the constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal, Blakelock posthumously, while Sergeant David Pengelly—who fought to hold the crowd away from Blakelock and PC Richard Coombes after they fell—received the George Medal, awarded for acts of great bravery. A memorial for Blakelock, commissioned by the Police Memorial Trust
, now stands by the roundabout at Muswell Hill, north London, where he was a homebeat officer.
Metropolitan Police Service
The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial police force responsible for Greater London, excluding the "square mile" of the City of London which is the responsibility of the City of London Police...
, occurred on 6 October 1985 during rioting on the Broadwater Farm
Broadwater Farm riot
The Broadwater Farm riot occurred around the Broadwater Farm area of Tottenham, North London, on 6 October 1985.The events of the day were dominated by two deaths. The first was that of Cynthia Jarrett, an African-Caribbean woman who died the previous day from a stroke during a police search of her...
housing estate in Tottenham
Tottenham
Tottenham is an area of the London Borough of Haringey, England, situated north north east of Charing Cross.-Toponymy:Tottenham is believed to have been named after Tota, a farmer, whose hamlet was mentioned in the Domesday Book; hence Tota's hamlet became Tottenham...
, north London. The violence broke out after a black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home, and took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of the relationship between the police and local black communities.
Blakelock, who had joined the police five years earlier, had been assigned on the night of his death to a unit of 10 constables and a sergeant, known as Serial 502, who were dispatched to protect firefighters. When the officers were forced back by rioters, Blakelock stumbled and fell, and was surrounded by a mob of around 50 people. He received over 40 stabbing and cutting injuries, inflicted by machetes or similar, and the penetration of a six-inch-long knife into his neck. He was the only police constable to have been killed in a riot in Britain since Robert Culley was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell is an area of central London in the London Borough of Islington. From 1900 to 1965 it was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. The well after which it was named was rediscovered in 1924. The watchmaking and watch repairing trades were once of great importance...
, central London, in 1833.
Three adults and three juveniles were charged with murder based on untaped confessions they were said to have given to detectives. The charges against the youths were dismissed by a judge because they had been detained without access to parents or a lawyer. The adults—Winston Silcott
Winston Silcott
Winston Silcott is a British man of Afro-Caribbean descent, who, as one of the "Tottenham Three", was convicted in March 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock on the night of 6 October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in north London...
, Mark Braithwaite and Engin Raghip—were convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...
. The men became known as the "Tottenham Three" during a campaign to secure their release, and in 1991 the Court of Appeal overturned their convictions, after an Electrostatic Document Apparatus (ESDA) test suggested that at least one page of detectives' notes from an interview—during which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself, though he said the remarks were a fabrication—may not have been transcribed contemporaneously, contrary to the detectives' testimony at trial. In 1994 a jury found the detectives not guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice. Police re-opened the inquiry in 2003, and 10 men in their 40s and 50s were arrested and questioned in 2010, but the murder remains unsolved.
Blakelock and the nine other constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal
Queen's Gallantry Medal
The Queen's Gallantry Medal is the third level civil decoration of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.It was instituted on 20 June 1974 to replace the Order of the British Empire for Gallantry, the British Empire Medal for Gallantry, and the Colonial Police Medal for Gallantry...
for bravery in 1988, while Sergeant David Pengelly, the unit's supervisor—who fought to save Blakelock and PC Richard Coombes, another officer who came under attack—received the George Medal
George Medal
The George Medal is the second level civil decoration of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.The GM was instituted on 24 September 1940 by King George VI. At this time, during the height of The Blitz, there was a strong desire to reward the many acts of civilian courage...
, awarded for acts of great bravery.
Biography
Keith Henry Blakelock (28 June 1945 – 6 October 1985) was born in Sunderland. He joined the Metropolitan Police Service on 14 November 1980, and was assigned to a response team in HornseyHornsey
Hornsey is a district in London Borough of Haringey in north London in England. Whilst Hornsey was formerly the name of a parish and later a municipal borough of Middlesex, today, the name refers only to the London district. It is an inner-suburban area located north of Charing Cross.-Locale:The ...
before becoming a home beat officer
Community Beat Manager
A Community Beat Manager is a police officer within the British Police's territorial police forces, such as the Metropolitan Police Service and Greater Manchester Police. The CBM is usually responsible for a particular neighbourhood or area of a town or city. Most commonly CBMs are Constables...
in Muswell Hill
Muswell Hill
Muswell Hill is a suburb of north London, mostly in the London Borough of Haringey. It is situated about north of Charing Cross and around from the City of London. Muswell Hill is in the N10 postal district and mostly in the Hornsey and Wood Green parliamentary constituency.- History :The...
. At the time of his death, he was married to Elizabeth Blakelock, with three sons, Mark, Kevin, and Lee. Lee Blakelock, eight years old when his father died, went on to become a police officer himself, joining Durham Police in 2000.
Social unrest
The rioting in Tottenham in 1985 during which Blakelock died took place within the context of social unrest elsewhere in England. Since the 1980 St. Pauls riot in BristolBristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
, and particularly since the 1981 Brixton riot in south London, a series of incidents had sparked violent confrontations across the country between black youths and largely white police officers.
On 9 September 1985, a month before Blakelock's murder, there was rioting in Handsworth
Handsworth, West Midlands
Handsworth is an inner city area of Birmingham in the West Midlands, England. The Local Government Act 1894 divided the ancient Staffordshire parish of Handsworth into two urban districts: Handsworth and Perry Barr. Handsworth was annexed to the county borough of Birmingham in Warwickshire in 1911...
, Birmingham, after the arrest of a black man for a traffic offence. On 28 September, a black woman, Dorothy "Cherry" Groce (1948–2011), was accidentally shot by police while they searched her home in Brixton
Brixton
Brixton is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in south London, England. It is south south-east of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London....
looking for her son, Michael Groce
Michael Groce
Michael Groce is a poet, community worker and former criminal. His name is remembered by many in connection with the Brixton riots of 1985 when his mother, Cherry Groce, was shot by police during a dawn raid on her home...
, wanted on suspicion of robbery and firearms offences. Believing she had died in the shooting—in fact, she survived but was left paralysed from the waist down—a group of protesters gathered outside Brixton police station, and rioting broke out that saw police lose control of the area for 48 hours. A journalist, David Hodge, was killed when a breeze bock was dropped on his head while he photographed the looting, and there was a gang rape. On 1 October there were further disturbances in Toxteth
Toxteth
Toxteth is an inner city area of Liverpool, England. Located to the south of the city, Toxteth is bordered by Liverpool City Centre, Dingle, Edge Hill, Wavertree and Aigburth.-Description:...
, Liverpool. Rumors spread throughout several London communities that rioting was imminent in areas the police called "symbolic location
Symbolic location
A symbolic location is an expression coined by Sir Kenneth Newman, when he was Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Service from 1982 to 1987. The term was used by the police in London in the 1980s to refer to a no-go area, one regarded by local youths as their territory, where police...
s," including Bermondsey
Bermondsey
Bermondsey is an area in London on the south bank of the river Thames, and is part of the London Borough of Southwark. To the west lies Southwark, to the east Rotherhithe, and to the south, Walworth and Peckham.-Toponomy:...
and the Wood Green shopping centre in Tottenham, near the Broadwater Farm housing estate, and on 2 October police found a petrol bomb at the Farm itself. British journalist David Rose wrote in 1992 that all was needed for rioting to begin there was a trigger.
Broadwater Farm
N postcode area
The N postcode area, also known as the London N postcode area, is the part of the London post town covering part of North London, England....
), emerged out of the British government's policy from the 1930s onwards of "slum clearance," where rows of over-crowded and poorly maintained terraced houses
Terraced house
In architecture and city planning, a terrace house, terrace, row house, linked house or townhouse is a style of medium-density housing that originated in Great Britain in the late 17th century, where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls...
were bulldozed to make way for high-rise social housing, known as council estates
Council house
A council house, otherwise known as a local authority house, is a form of public or social housing. The term is used primarily in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Council houses were built and operated by local councils to supply uncrowded, well-built homes on secure tenancies at...
. Completed in 1973, the Farm, as it is known locally, consists of 1,000 flats (apartments) in 12 blocks surrounded by high-level outdoor walkways. Commentators blamed these walkways for turning the estate into a "rabbit warren" for criminals, and residents complained that they were afraid to leave their homes. Rose writes that by 1976 it was already seen as a "sink estate
Sink estate
A sink estate is a British council housing estate characterised by high levels of economic and social deprivation. Such estates are not always high crime areas although there is a strong correlation between crime rates and sink estates in large urban areas...
," and by 1980 a Department of the Environment report raised the possibility that it might have to be demolished in the next decade, though a regeneration project after the 1985 riots led to improvements. At the time of Blakelock's death it housed 3,400 people—49 percent whites and 43 percent Afro-Caribbeans.
Death of Cynthia Jarrett
On Saturday, 5 October 1985, a week after the Brixton riot, police arrested Floyd Jarrett, a 24-year-old black man from Tottenham, on suspicion of being in a stolen car. It was a suspicion that turned out to be groundless, but a decision was made to search the home of his mother, Cynthia Jarrett, for stolen goods, and in the course of the search she collapsed and died of heart failure. Rose writes that the pathologist, Dr Walter Somerville, told the inquest she had a heart condition so severe she probably only had months to live.According to Rose, the police let themselves into the house using Floyd's keys, without knocking or announcing themselves, while Mrs Jarrett and her family were watching television. The inquest heard that an officer accidentally pushed against Mrs. Jarrett, causing her to fall. When it became clear she had stopped breathing, the same officer tried to revive her using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to no avail.
Protesters began to gather outside Tottenham police station, just a few hundred yards from Broadwater Farm, around 1:30 am on Sunday morning. Four of the station's windows were smashed, but the Jarrett family asked the crowd to disperse. Later that day, two police officers were attacked with bricks and paving stones at the Farm, and a police inspector was attacked in his car. By early evening a crowd of 500 mostly young black men had gathered on the estate, throwing petrol bombs, bricks and stones, and dropping concrete blocks from the outdoor walkways that surrounded the apartment blocks. The subsequent rioting was regarded as one of the most violent incidents the country had seen. Apart from Blakelock's death, 250 police officers were injured, and two policemen and three journalists suffered gunshot wounds, the first time shots had been fired by rioters in Britain.
Attack on Keith Blakelock
Riot control
Riot control refers to the measures used by police, military, or other security forces to control, disperse, and arrest civilians who are involved in a riot, demonstration, or protest. Law enforcement officers or soldiers have long used non-lethal weapons such as batons and whips to disperse crowds...
, including shields, flame-proof overalls, and NATO-style hard hats—to protect local firefighters
London Fire Brigade
The London Fire Brigade is the statutory fire and rescue service for London.Founded in 1865, it is the largest of the fire services in the United Kingdom and the fourth-largest in the world with nearly 7,000 staff, including 5,800 operational firefighters based in 112 fire...
who had been forced out of the estate's Tangmere block, where a fire had been started in a newsagent's shop on an upper deck. One of the firefighters, Trevor Stratford, said the men made their way up an enclosed staircase, with Serial 502 behind them. Suddenly rioters appeared at the top, blowing whistles and throwing bottles.
Pengelly ordered the fire fighters and police officers to retreat. They had to run backwards down the narrow staircase, fearful of tripping over the fire hoses, which had been flat before but were now full of water. Pengelly described it "as an extremely difficult position [in which] to defend yourself." As they ran down the stairwell, Statford saw there were rioters at the bottom too, wearing masks or crash helmets, and carrying knives, baseball bats, bricks and petrol bombs. He said it appeared the fire may have been set as an ambush. As the fire fighters and police exited the stairwell toward a car park and a patch of grass, Stratford became aware that Blakelock had tripped and fallen: "He just stumbled and went down and they were upon him. It was just mob hysteria. ... There were about 50 people on him.
The rioters removed his protective helmet, which was never found. Rose writes that the pathologist found 54 holes in his overalls, and 40 cutting or stabbing injuries, eight of them to his head, caused by a machete, sword, or axe-type instrument. A six-inch-long knife was buried in his neck up to the hilt. His hands and arms were cut to ribbons, and he had lost several of his fingers. There were 14 stabbing wounds on his back, six on his face, a six-inch gash across the right side of his head, and his jawbone had been smashed. The pathologist said the force of the blow that caused this injury had been "almost as if to sever his head."
A second group surrounded another constable, Richard Coombes, who sustained a five-inch-long cut to his face, a broken upper jaw, and a smashed lower jaw. In 2004 he said he was still suffering the effects of the attack, including poor hearing and eyesight, and epileptic fits. Police regard the attack on him as attempted murder. A third constable, Michael Shepherd, had his protective helmet pierced by an iron spike. Trevor Stratford told a reporter in 2010: "I remember running in with another fire officer to get Dick Coombes. I literally slid into the group, like a rugby player charging into a ruck. We dragged him out, but he was in a hell of a state":
Chief Superintendent Colin Couch, the highest-ranking officer at the scene, was one of the first officers to reach Blakelock. Crouch said he was still alive, and managed to take two or three steps before collapsing. He was taken by ambulance to the North Middlesex Hospital, but died on the way.
Media and police response
Rose writes that there was a racist media frenzy after the killing, placing intense external pressure on detectives to solve the case. According to Rose, the news coverage included the Sun newspaper comparing Labour's prospective candidate for Tottenham, Bernie GrantBernie Grant
Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant , known simply as Bernie Grant, was a politician in the United Kingdom, and was Labour member of Parliament for Tottenham at the time of his death....
, to an ape, writing that he had given a press conference while peeling a banana and juggling an orange. Grant had caused uproar when he was reported as saying the police had been given a "bloody good hiding," though his statement was also reported as: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding." The Daily Express—falling for one of notorious British hoaxer Rocky Ryan
Rocky Ryan
Michael "Rocky" Ryan was a British media hoaxer, who became well-known in the UK for providing newspapers with a number of stories that turned out to be completely false...
's stories—reported on October 8 that a "Moscow-trained hit squad gave orders as mob hacked PC Blakelock to death," alleging that "crazed left-wing extremists" trained in Moscow and Libya had coordinated the riots. The Met's commissioner, Kenneth Newman, told reporters that groups of Trotskyists and anarchists—black and white—had orchestrated the violence, a theme picked up by the Daily Telegraph and others.
There was internal pressure on detectives too from the rank and file, who saw their superior officers as sharing the blame for Blakelock's death. The journal Police, published by the Police Federation
Police Federation of England and Wales
The Police Federation of England and Wales is the representative body to which all police officers in England and Wales up to and including the rank of Chief Inspector belong. There are 141,000 members as of July 2009...
, argued that senior officers had pursued a policy at Broadwater Farm of avoiding confrontation at all costs, and that "community policing" had led to compromises with criminals, rather than a focus on upholding the law. As a result, the journal wrote, officers had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation that had developed on the estate.
Officer in charge: DCS Graham Melvin
Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin was placed in charge of the investigation, which became the largest in the history of the Metropolitan Police, with 150 officers assigned full time. Melvin was born in Halifax in 1941, joining the Metropolitan Police in 1960, then the Criminal Investigation DepartmentCriminal Investigation Department
The Crime Investigation Department is the branch of all Territorial police forces within the British Police and many other Commonwealth police forces, to which plain clothes detectives belong. It is thus distinct from the Uniformed Branch and the Special Branch.The Metropolitan Police Service CID,...
. He studied at Bramshill Police College, served with the Flying Squad
Flying Squad
The Flying Squad is a branch of the Specialist Crime Directorate, within London's Metropolitan Police Service. The Squad's purpose is to investigate commercial armed robberies, along with the prevention and investigation of other serious armed crime...
, and was known for having solved several notorious cases, including that of Kenneth Erskine
Kenneth Erskine
Kenneth Erskine is an English serial killer who became known as the Stockwell Strangler.-Early life:Erskine was born in July 1963 to an English mother and Antiguan father...
, the Stockwell Strangler. He became a Detective Chief Superintendent in March 1985 when he joined the International and Organised Crime Squad (SO1), which Peter Victor writes takes only the cream of detectives.
In addition to the intense media focus on the case, Melvin faced the problem of having no forensic evidence to go on, because senior officers had not allowed Broadwater Farm to be sealed off immediately after the attack. Police were not allowed into the estate until 4 am, by which time much of the evidence had disappeared. Whatever remained was removed during Haringey Council's clean-up operation.
Melvin therefore resorted to arresting suspects—including juveniles, some of them particularly vulnerable—and holding them incommunicado for days without access to lawyers. He defended this in court by arguing that lawyers might wittingly or unwittingly pass information they had gleaned during interviews to other suspects. He said under cross-examination that in his view "the integrity of some firms of solicitors left a lot to be desired," and that he believed they were being retained by people who had an interest in learning what other suspects were saying. The Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot QC, told the murder trial that the police had one effective weapon, namely that suspects did not know who else had spoken to police and what they had said, and that "the use of that weapon by the police was legitimate and effective."
Blakelock's murder took place before police interviews were recorded on tape, so one detective would conduct the interview, while a second took contemporaneous notes. Of the 359 people arrested in connection with the inquiry in 1985 and 1986, just 94 were interviewed in the presence of a lawyer, and many of the confessions—whether directly about the murder, or about having taken part in the rioting—were made before the lawyer was given access to the interviewee. When people did confess to even a minor role in the rioting, such as throwing a few stones, they were charged with affray
Affray
In many legal jurisdictions related to English common law, affray is a public order offence consisting of the fighting of two or more persons in a public place to the terror of ordinary people...
, a serious offence. One resident told the 1986 Gifford inquiry into the rioting: "You would go to bed and just lie there, and you would think, are they going to come and kick my door, what's going to happen to my children? It was the horrible fear that you lived with day by day, knowing they could come and kick down your door and hold you for hours." Thus, argues Rose, the police created, or at least intensified, a climate of fear in which witnesses were afraid to step forward.
Juveniles charged
Several juveniles were arrested and interviewed without access to lawyers or parents, including three who were charged with murder. They, in turn, implicated others.Mark Pennant, aged 15, was arrested on 9 October, and became the first person to be charged with the murder. He was born in England to West Indian parents, and had been raised in the West Indies until he was nine, when he returned to the UK. He had learning difficulties, and was attending a special school. He was arrested at school, handcuffed, and taken to Wood Green Police Station, where he was interviewed over the course of two days with a teacher in attendance. The police reportedly told him his mother had refused to help him; in fact, Rose writes, she did not know where he was. He was interviewed six times, during which he said he had cut Blakelock and kicked him twice, and named Silcott (nicknamed "Sticks") as the ringleader. He named several others, including another juvenile, Mark Lambie. Pennant was charged with the murder on 11 October.
Jason Hill, a 13-year-old white boy who lived on Broadwater Farm, was seen looting from a store in the Tangmere block during the rioting, near where Blakelock was killed. He was arrested on 13 October and taken to Leyton Police Station, where he was held for three days without access to a lawyer. A social worker from Haringey Council arrived to sit in as an "appropriate adult," but the council had a policy of "non-cooperation" with the police, so the arrangement did not work out. Hyancinth Moody of the Haringey Community Relations Council police liaison committee sat in instead; she was later criticized by the judge for having failed to intervene. Hill's clothes and shoes were removed for forensic tests, and he was interviewed wearing only underpants and a blanket, the latter of which by the third day of detention was stained with his own vomit. Over the course of several interviews, he told police that he had witnessed the attack on Blakelock, and named Silcott (calling him "Sticks"), and two others, one of them Mark Lambie. Both Mark Pennant and Jason Hill named Mark Lambie, the third juvenile to be charged with the murder.
Hill said Silcott had forced him to make a mark on Blakelock with a heavy sword. In 1991 he told David Rose that, throughout the interview, the police were saying, "Go on, admit it, you had a stab," and "It was Sticks, wasn't it?" He said they threatened to keep him in the station for two weeks, and told him he would never see his family. He told Rose: "They could have told me it was Prince Charles and I would have said it was him."
Winston Silcott
-
- Background
David Rose writes that one former detective inspector who spoke to him called the Blakelock investigation a "pre-scientific inquiry, it was all about how to get Winston Silcott convicted, not discovering who killed Keith Blakelock." By the time of the murder, the local police saw Silcott as the "biggest mafioso in Tottenham," running gangs of muggers and paying them in drugs, according to Rose's source.
Silcott was born in Tottenham in 1959, after his parents, both Seventh Day Adventists, had arrived in England from Montserrat
Montserrat
Montserrat is a British overseas territory located in the Leeward Islands, part of the chain of islands called the Lesser Antilles in the West Indies. This island measures approximately long and wide, giving of coastline...
two years earlier. He told reporters he was subjected to racism, particularly from the police, throughout his entire upbringing. He left school at 15 and took a series of low-paying jobs, began breaking into houses in 1976, and was sent to borstal
Borstal
A borstal was a type of youth prison in the United Kingdom, run by the Prison Service and intended to reform seriously delinquent young people. The word is sometimes used loosely to apply to other kinds of youth institution or reformatory, such as Approved Schools and Detention Centres. The court...
for a few months in 1977. In 1979 he was sentenced to six months for wounding, and in 1980 was acquitted—after two trials, the first of which saw a hung jury—of the murder of 19-year-old Lennie McIntosh, a postal worker, who was stabbed and killed at a party in 1979.
In 1980 Silcott and a friend began operating a mobile disco known as "Galaxy Soul Shuffle," playing at festivals and private parties. In October 1983 he was fined for possessing a flick knife, in March 1984 for obstructing police, and in 1985 made the news when he spoke to Princess Diana during an official visit to Broadwater Farm, reportedly telling her she should not have come without bringing jobs with her, which the Sun newspaper interpreted as a threat.
In December 1984 he was arrested for the murder of a 22-year-old boxer, Anthony Smith, at a party in Hackney. Smith was slashed more than once on his face, there were two wounds to his abdomen, a lung was lacerated, and his aorta
Aorta
The aorta is the largest artery in the body, originating from the left ventricle of the heart and extending down to the abdomen, where it branches off into two smaller arteries...
was cut. Silcott was charged with the murder in May 1985, and was out on bail awaiting trial when Blakelock was killed in October 1985. He at first told police he had not known Smith and had not been at the party, though at trial he said he had been confused and had indeed been there. He said Smith had started punching him, and he had pushed him back, but had not been carrying a knife. He was convicted of the murder in February 1986—while awaiting trial for the Blakelock murder—and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, he told his lawyer he had indeed known Smith, that there was bad blood between them, and that he had stabbed him in self-defence, because he could see that one of Smith's friends had a knife.
-
- Arrest and conviction for Blakelock murder
Silcott was arrested for the Blakelock murder on 12 October 1985, six days after the riot, after being named by several young men—most of them juveniles, and some of them vulnerable and attending special education schools—who were arrested by police and held without access to lawyers. During the interviews, most of the witnesses referred to Silcott as "Sticks." Silcott was interviewed five times over 24 hours, Melvin asking the questions and Detective Inspector Maxwell Dingle taking the notes. During the first four interviews, he stayed mostly silent and refused to sign them, but during the fifth interview on 13 October, when Melvin said he knew Silcott had struck Blakelock with a machete or sword, his demeanour apparently changed. The notes show him asking: "Who told you that?" When the detectives said they had witnesses, the notes say Silcott walked around the interview room with tears in his eyes, saying: "You cunts, you cunts," then "Jesus, Jesus," then: "You ain't got enough evidence. Those kids will never go to court. You wait and see. No one else will talk to you. You can't keep me away from them." The notes show he said of the murder weapons: "You're too slow, man, they gone."
He was at that point charged with the murder, to which he reportedly responded: "They won't give evidence against me." He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on 18 March 1987 along with Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite. That he had been out on bail for the murder of Anthony Smith when Blakelock was killed was withheld from the jury, as was his subsequent conviction. He chose not to take the stand because this would have left him open to questioning about his previous convictions.
The press coverage of the trial included the publication on day two by the Sun of a notoriously violent-looking image of Silcott, the publication of which constituted "the most gross contempt," according to Sir Derek Hodgson (1917–2002), the judge in the Blakelock trial, speaking to David Rose in 1992. The photograph contributed to the sense of him as a "big black man to be fearful of," as Silcott put it. He said he had been asleep in a cell at Paddington Green police station when it was taken. He was woken, held in a corridor with his arms pinned against a wall by three officers, and photographed. He said the expression on his face was one of fear, not violence. Journalist Kurt Barling wrote that the press, and not only the tabloids, "created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England ..."
The Court of Appeal
Court of Appeal of England and Wales
The Court of Appeal of England and Wales is the second most senior court in the English legal system, with only the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom above it...
accepted in 1991 that the notes of Silcott's fifth interview with detectives may not have been contemporaneous, as the detectives said they were. In March 2004 Silcott told a BBC documentary, Who Killed PC Blakelock?—presented by Barling—that he had been asleep in a friend's home during the rioting. He told The Observer: "And look, I'm on bail for a murder. I know I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid. There's helicopters, police photographers everywhere. All I could think about was that I didn't want to lose my bail. I saw a young guy with a scaffolding pole and he made as if he was going to throw it through the window of my shop. I stopped him. Then I saw Pam, a friend of mine. She said, 'You'd better come up. You know the police don't like you.'" He said he first learned of Blakelock's death when he heard cheering in the apartment he was staying in, in response to a news report about it.
Engin Raghip
Nineteen-year-old Engin Raghip, of Turkish-Cypriot descent, was arrested after a friend mentioned his name to police, the only time anyone linked him to the murder. Rose writes that Raghip was born in England in 1958, ten years after his parents had emigrated from CyprusCyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
. He left school at 15, still illiterate, and by the time of the murder had two convictions, one for stealing cars and one for burglary. He had a common-law wife, Sharon Daly, with whom he had a two-year-old boy, and he worked occasionally as a mechanic. He had little connection with Broadwater Farm, though he lived nearby in Wood Green
Wood Green
Wood Green is a district in north London, England, located in the London Borough of Haringey. It is situated north of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of the metropolitan centres in Greater London.-History:...
, and had gone to the Farm with two friends on the day of the rioting to watch, he said. One of those friends, John Broomfield, gave an interview to the Daily Mirror on 23 October, apparently boasting about his involvement in the rioting. He was arrested, and he implicated Raghip.
At the time of Raghip's arrest, on 24 October, he had been drinking and smoking cannabis for several days, had not slept or eaten properly, and Sharon had just left him, taking their son with her. He was held for two days without representation, first speaking to a solicitor on the third day, who said he found Raghip distressed and disoriented. He was interviewed by Detective Sergeant van Thal and Detective Inspector John Kennedy ten times over a period of four days. He made several incriminating statements during the interviews, at first admitting he had thrown stones, then during the second interview saying he had seen the attack on Blakelock. During the third, he said he had spoken to Silcott about the murder, and that Silcott owned a hammer with a hook on one side. After the fifth interview, Rose writes, he was charged with affray, and during the sixth he described the attack on Blakelock: "It was like you see in a film, a helpless man with dogs on him. It was just like that, it was really quick." He did not sign this interview, Rose writes, and after it he vomited.
During a seventh interview the next day, he described noises he said Blakelock had made during the attack, and during the eighth said he had armed himself that night with a broom handle, and had tried to get close to what was happening to Blakelock, but there were too many people around him. He said: "I had a weapon when I was running toward the policeman, a broom handle." He said he might have kicked or hit him had he been able to "get in." Rose writes that he also offered the exact order in which Blakelock's attackers had launched the assault. He was held for another two days, released on bail, then charged six weeks later with the murder, under the doctrine of common purpose
Common purpose
The doctrine of common purpose, common design or joint enterprise is a legal doctrine in some common law jurisdictions which imputes criminal liability on the participants to a criminal enterprise for all that results from that enterprise...
.
Mark Braithwaite
Mark Braithwaite was 18 when Blakelock was killed, a rapper and disc jockey living with his parents in IslingtonIslington
Islington is a neighbourhood in Greater London, England and forms the central district of the London Borough of Islington. It is a district of Inner London, spanning from Islington High Street to Highbury Fields, encompassing the area around the busy Upper Street...
. He had a girlfriend who lived on Broadwater Farm, with whom he had a child. On 16 January 1986—three months after the murder—his name was mentioned for the first time to detectives by a man they had arrested, Bernard Kinghorn, who told them he had seen Braithwaite, whom he said he knew by sight, stab Blakelock with a kitchen knife. Kinghorn told the BBC three years later that his allegations had been false.
Braithwaite was taken to Enfield Police Station and interviewed by Detective Sergeant Dermot McDermott and Detective Constable Colin Biggar. Rose writes that, on the instruction of Detective Chief Superintendent Melvin, he was at first denied access to a lawyer and held for three days; he was interviewed eight times over the first two days, and with a lawyer present four times on the third. He at first denied being anywhere near the Farm, then during interview four said he had been there and had thrown stones, and during interview five said he had been at the Tangmere block, but had played no role in the murder. During interview six, he said he had hit Blakelock with an iron bar in the chest and leg. Rose writes that there were no such injuries on Blakelock's body. In a seventh interview, he said he had hit a police officer, but it was not Blakelock. During the first 30 hours of his time in the police station he had nothing to eat, and said in court—as did several other suspects—that the heat in the cells was oppressive, making it difficult to breathe. On the basis of this confession evidence, he was charged with murder.
Convictions and appeal
The trial of the six began in court number two of the Old Bailey on 14 January 1987, and lasted two months. All were charged with murder, riot, and affray, and Lambie in addition was charged with throwing petrol bombs. The three adults—Silcott, Raghip, and Braithwaite—were convicted of murder on 19 March 1987. There was one black juror, a woman, who fainted when the verdicts were read out. Rose writes that the tabloids knew no restraint, writing about the beasts of Broadwater Farm, hooded animals, and packs of savages, with the old jail-cell image of Silcott published above captions such as "smile of evil."In December 1988 the men's solicitors requested leave to appeal. Raghip's solicitor, Gareth Peirce
Gareth Peirce
Gareth Peirce is an English solicitor, educated at the Cheltenham Ladies' College, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. She is known for her work in high profile cases representing people with Irish and Muslim backgrounds accused of terrorism.-Personal life:Born with the...
—who also represented the Guildford Four
Guildford Four
The Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven were two sets of people whose convictions in English courts for the Guildford pub bombings in the 1970s were eventually quashed...
and Birmingham Six
Birmingham Six
The Birmingham Six were six men—Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker—sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 in the United Kingdom for the Birmingham pub bombings. Their convictions were declared unsafe and quashed by the Court of...
, prominent cases of miscarriage of justice—argued that Raghip was suggestible, and that his confession could not be relied upon. She arranged for him to be examined by Dr. Gisli Gudjonsson
Gisli Gudjonsson
Gísli Hannes Guðjónsson, CBE is a Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London. He is an internationally renowned authority on suggestibility and false confessions whose expert testimony was the basis for the convictions of the Birmingham Six and...
of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, a specialist in suggestibility; Gudjonsson concluded that he was unusually suggestible, with a mental age of between 10 and 11. Lord Lane
Geoffrey Lane, Baron Lane
Geoffrey Dawson Lane, Baron Lane AFC PC QC was a British Judge who served as Lord Chief Justice of England from 1980 to 1992. The later part of his term was marred by a succession of disputed convictions...
, the Lord Chief Justice of England, dismissed the application, arguing that the jury had had ample opportunity to form its own opinion of Raghip.
A campaign to free the men began to gather pace. Rose writes that the New Statesman and Time Out wrote sympathetic pieces, and MPs and trade unionists were lobbied. In 1989 Silcott was even briefly elected honorary president of the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
, a decision that was quickly overturned, and later that year the BBC's Inside Story reconstructed parts of the trial. During a BBC Newsnight discussion of the case, Lord Scarman, a former Law Lord, said the convictions ought to be overturned. Gareth Peirce, Raghip's solicitor, asked the Home Secretary for a review, supported by Raghip's MP Michael Portillo
Michael Portillo
Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo is a British journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative Party politician and Cabinet Minister...
, and in December 1990 the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker
Kenneth Baker
Kenneth Wilfred Baker, Baron Baker of Dorking, CH, PC , is a British politician, a former Conservative MP and a Life Member of the Tory Reform Group.-Early life:...
, referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.
In parallel to the efforts of Pierce, Silcott's lawyers requested access in November 1990 to his original interview notes, so that the seven pages from his crucial fifth interview—the notes he said were fabricated—could be submitted for an Electrostatic Document Apparatus (ESDA) test. The test reveals the indentations made on pages when the page above in a notebook is written on; in this way, the test's developers say the chronological integrity of interview notes can determined. In Silcott's case, the seventh and final page of the fifth interview, where the participants would normally sign, was missing. The ESDA test suggested that, on pages three to six of the interview, there were no impressions from earlier pages, though these earlier impressions appeared throughout the rest of the notes. A later test indicated that those pages had been written on a different type of paper from the other notes. As a result, the Home Secretary added Silcott and Braithwaite to Raghip's appeal.
The case was heard on 25 November 1991, during which the Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot, conceded that the apparent contamination of the evidence rendered all three convictions unsafe. The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions, and Braithwaite and Raghip were released that day. Silcott remained in jail for the 1984 murder of Smith. He received £17,000 compensation in 1991, and another £50,000 in 1999 for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. He was released on licence on 20 October 2003 after serving 17 years.
Detectives tried and acquitted
In July 1992 Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice, and Detective Inspector Maxwell Dingle with conspiracy. None of the three people present during the disputed interview—Melvin, Dingle, and Silcott—gave evidence during the detectives' trial at the Old BaileyOld Bailey
The Central Criminal Court in England and Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey from the street in which it stands, is a court building in central London, one of a number of buildings housing the Crown Court...
in 1994. The prosecution alleged that the notes of Silcott's fifth interview had been altered to include the self-incriminating remarks. The detectives' lawyers produced 14 undisclosed witness statements from the Blakelock inquiry, one of which said Silcott had been carrying a knife with a two-foot-long blade on the night of the murder, and that he had attacked Blakelock. The Independent wrote at the time that it seemed it was Silcott who was back on trial. The detectives were acquitted in July 1994 by a unanimous jury verdict. Both officers had been suspended during the case. Melvin returned to work afterwards, while Dingle retired.
Investigation re-opened
In March 1999 the Metropolitan Police included Blakelock's killing in a review of 300 unsolved murders in London going back to 1984, when details were first recorded on computer. In May 2002 YardieYardie
Yardie is a term stemming from the slang name originally given to occupants of "government yards", social housing projects with very basic amenities, in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by...
gang leader Mark Lambie, one of the three juveniles initially charged with Blakelock's murder, was jailed for 12 years for kidnap and blackmail, after detaining and torturing two men.
In December 2003 the investigation was reopened, led by Detective Superintendent John Sweeney
John Sweeney (police officer)
John Sweeney is a Detective Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police Service. As of 2011, he is leading Operation Withern, the investigation into the 2011 London riots.He had previously led the reinvestigation of the murder of policeman Keith Blakelock....
. Detectives began re-examining 10,000 witness statements, and submitting items for forensic tests not available in 1985. In September 2004 the garden of a council house in Willan Road, Tottenham was excavated after a tip-off, and an item that could have been the murder weapon was sent for forensic tests. At the time of Blakelock's death, a friend of Cynthia Jarrett—the woman whose death sparked the rioting—lived at the house. Police also searched the garden for Blakelock's truncheon and helmet, both of which went missing during the attack. Archaeologists dug up the back garden, while surveyors used infra-red beams to create a three-dimensional map of the area. In October 2004 Blakelock's overalls were retrieved from Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
's Crime Museum
Black Museum
The Black Museum of Scotland Yard is a famed collection of criminal memorabilia kept at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London, England. The museum came into existence sometime in 1874, although unofficially. It was housed at Scotland Yard, and grew from the collection of prisoners'...
for DNA tests.
On 5 February 2010, a 40-year-old man, originally from Tottenham, was arrested in Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
in connection with the murder. He was held and questioned for four days at Bury St. Edmunds police station, before being released on bail. Two other men, aged 46 and 52, who lived in Tottenham in 1985, were arrested at separate north London addresses in May 2010, and released on bail after questioning. Overall 10 men between the ages of 42 and 52 were arrested and questioned in 2010. On 26 October 2010, marking the 25th anniversary of the murder, the BBC's Crimewatch
Crimewatch
Crimewatch is a long-running and high-profile British television programme produced by the BBC, that reconstructs major unsolved crimes with a view to gaining information from the members of the public. The programme is usually broadcast once a month on BBC One...
staged a reconstruction and appealed for information.
Awards and memorial
In 1985, as a direct result of the events surrounding the police operation on the night of Blakelock's death, a new "gold – silver – bronze command structure" was created that replaced ranks with roles. It is now used by all UK emergency services at every type of major incident.In 1988 the constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal, Blakelock posthumously, while Sergeant David Pengelly—who fought to hold the crowd away from Blakelock and PC Richard Coombes after they fell—received the George Medal, awarded for acts of great bravery. A memorial for Blakelock, commissioned by the Police Memorial Trust
Police Memorial Trust
The Police Memorial Trust is a charitable organisation founded in 1984 and based in London. The trust's objective is to erect memorials to British police officers killed in the line of duty, at or near the spot where they died, thereby acting as a permanent reminder to the public of the sacrifice...
, now stands by the roundabout at Muswell Hill, north London, where he was a homebeat officer.
See also
- List of British police officers killed in the line of duty
- Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 is an Act of Parliament which instituted a legislative framework for the powers of police officers in England and Wales to combat crime, as well as providing codes of practice for the exercise of those powers. Part VI of PACE required the Home Secretary...
- Scarman reportScarman reportThe Scarman report was commissioned by the UK Government following the 1981 Brixton riots. Lord Scarman was appointed by then Home Secretary William Whitelaw on 14 April 1981 to hold the enquiry into the riots...
- Tottenham OutrageTottenham OutrageThe Tottenham Outrage is the name given to an armed robbery and double murder which took place in Tottenham, North London and Walthamstow, Essex, on 23 January 1909, which was carried out by two anarchists, Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus .The "Outrage" became a cause célèbre in Edwardian London,...
- 2011 London riots
Further reading
- BBC News. "1985: Policeman killed in Tottenham riots", "On this day, 6 October," accessed 27 August 2011.
- Fennel, Philip W.H. "Mentally Disordered Suspects in the Criminal Justice System", Journal of Law and Society, Vol 21, issue 1, March 1994.
- Gifford, Anthony. The Broadwater Farm Inquiry, report of the independent inquiry, 1986.
- Gifford, Anthony. Broadwater Farm revisited, 1989.
- Prescott, Andrew. "Writing About Rebellion: Using the Records of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381", History Workshop Journal, vol 1998, issue 45, pp. 1–28.
- Stubbs, Paul. "Crime, community and the multi-agency approach: a critical reading of the Broadwater Farm Inquiry Report", Critical Social Policy, vol 7, issue 20, September 1987, pp. 30–45.
- The Daily Telegraph. "Tottenham riot reminds north London of Broadwater Farm riot in 1985", 7 August 2011.
- Vanstiphout, Wouter. Broadwater Farm, from "Blame the Architect," lectures on city planning and urban violence, Design as Politics, Delft University of Technology, courtesy of YouTube, accessed 9 August 2011.