‘Spare us the tears.’ So read a typical front page the morning after Michael Stone was found guilty of battering Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter Megan to death with a claw hammer, in broad daylight, on a country lane in Kent.

‘Josie’s day of justice,’ read another, referencing Lin’s apple-cheeked elder child, who had somehow survived the frenzied attack.

It was October 1998 and Stone, a 38-year-old heroin addict who sobbed in the dock upon learning his fate, had just become the most-hated man in Britain.

Kent Police summed up the public’s attitude towards the convicted double murderer as follows: ‘We were looking for a maniac, and we found one.’

Yet as dust began to settle on the high-profile trial, a very different narrative began to play out. One which has endured, on and off, to this day.

Stone, a dishonest and occasionally violent man, had at times made a convincing villain. In some ways, he did indeed fit the description of ‘maniac’.

But many of the more experienced observers who sat through three weeks of proceedings at Maidstone Crown Court had nonetheless been surprised by the guilty verdict.

Their scepticism hinged on that old legal chestnut: reasonable doubt. For, as the days went by, it emerged the case against him was almost entirely circumstantial.

Bizarrely, given the appalling violence of the ‘Chillenden Murders’, prosecutors had absolutely no forensic evidence linking Stone to the blood-spattered scene. Statements by witnesses seemed, at best, vague and contradictory. And despite being a hardened criminal with convictions for violence, his motive for carrying out the attack remained unclear.

Not every juror had been convinced of Michael Stone’s guilt, either. The panel reached a 10-2 majority decision. When the verdict was handed down, he turned to the public benches, stretched out his arms and pleaded: ‘It wasn’t me, I never done it! It wasn’t me, I haven’t done it!’

If you speak to him today, as the Daily Mail recently did, you would find him saying something similar. For Stone has steadfastly maintained his innocence ever since, during a legal odyssey that has now endured for almost 30 years.

It has certainly been a bumpy ride. Stone’s initial conviction was quashed in 2001 after one key witness retracted his evidence, only for a retrial to be held later that year. Then he was again found guilty by a 10-2 majority and sentenced to 25 years.

Stone filed a second appeal, which was thrown out in 2005, and his lawyer Mark McDonald has since made extensive submissions to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) which first rejected his case in 2010, then reopened it in 2017, before briefly closing it in 2023 only to reopen the whole thing a few weeks later. He is currently at HMP Frankland in Durham, a Category A prison nicknamed ‘monster mansion’ due to its roster of high-profile inmates such as Ian Huntley, Wayne Couzens and Levi Bellfield – a serial killer who has a walk-on role in Stone’s legal travails.

It’s a spartan and deeply unpleasant place to while away the years. But despite becoming eligible for parole in July 2022, Stone has refused to countenance such a move on the grounds that doing so would require him to admit guilt.

Stone, 65, instead insists he is innocent. If true, that would make him the victim of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British criminal history.

As we approach the 30th anniversary of a crime that shook Britain, the Daily Mail’s Crime Desk analyses the claims and counter-claims surrounding his case.

On the afternoon of July 9, 1996, Lin Russell was walking her two daughters, Josie and Megan, home from their school in the Kentish village of Goodnestone.

The girls, aged nine and six respectively, had spent part of the day at a swimming gala so were carrying towels and swimsuits. Lin, a 45-year-old geologist, was also accompanied by the family’s white terrier, Lucy.

At 4.25pm, the group turned into Cherry Garden Lane – described in later police reports as a ‘quiet, unmade track’ just outside Chillenden. The route offered a shortcut to Nonington, where the young family lived in a cottage with father Shaun, an ecologist who lectured at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

As they walked along the secluded road, the trio were accosted by a man wielding a claw hammer. Josie later recalled that he emerged from a car, asking for money. What happened next would shock and appal the nation.

The stranger forced Lin and her daughters into a copse. There, he subjected them to a frenzied attack lasting at least half an hour. The trio were tied up with ripped swimming towels and shoelaces, before being blindfolded and repeatedly struck with both a ‘blunt instrument’ (the hammer) and fallen tree branches.

No money or belongings were stolen. Nor did forensics teams find any evidence of a sexual motive. The assailant seems to have been motivated entirely by bloodlust. A pathologist’s report outlined their horrendous injuries. Lin, like her daughters, suffered ‘a sustained, severe, repeated and vicious assault about the head’.

Lucy, the terrier, was given similar treatment before the man disappeared – leaving Lin and Megan lying on their backs, a few feet apart, on ivy-covered ground. By this stage, they were both dead.

Lucy’s body was nearby, with her collar and lead still attached to Lin’s walking stick. Josie had been blindfolded and tied to a tree.

It took eight hours for the grisly scene to be discovered. And miraculously, Josie was still alive. Just before 2am, the nine-year-old was rushed to Kent and Canterbury Hospital, with severe cuts on her scalp and heavy bruising suggestive of skull fractures, plus brain tissue protruding from an injury behind her left ear. It would be nine months before she regained the ability to speak.

Fast forward a year and Kent Police was approaching its wits’ end. Although the ‘Chillenden Murders’ remained front-page news, the killer was still at large. Perhaps he would strike again. And despite huge pressure to crack the case, their investigation had stalled.

The crime scene had been strewn with evidence, from blood-stained shoelaces and shredded towels used to restrain the victims, to a lunchbox containing a bloody fingerprint. Yet despite intensive testing, using state-of-the art techniques, none had led to a suspect. Detectives interviewed 9,000 people and took 1,000 statements, to little avail.

A few people of interest were identified and one was even taken into custody, only to be released without charge.

It is against this backdrop that the man in charge of the inquiry, DCI Dave Stevens, agreed to roll the dice.

On the first anniversary of the murders, he let BBC Crimewatch screen a vivid reconstruction of the hammer attack on prime-time television. It included an e-fit of a suspect, which was put together by Josie and a witness who had seen the face of an angry-looking man in the wing-mirror of a car near the scene. The show resulted in 600 calls to both the TV studio and Kent Police’s incident room.

And it was one from a psychiatrist named Dr Philip Sugarman that provided an answer to the DCI’s prayers.

Dr Sugarman had a client named Michael Stone. He bore at least a passing resemblance to the e-fit. More importantly, Dr Sugarman described his patient as a violent and aggressive character, prone to flying into uncontrollable rages, who had confessed to fantasising over torturing people and killing children. He also had a conviction from 1981 for attacking someone with a hammer. And he had asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital around the time of the attack, only to be refused.

Soon after the Crimewatch screening, Stone was arrested. He has been behind bars ever since.

The more detectives looked into Stone, while he was held on remand, the more convinced they became that he was their man.

Born Michael John Goodban, in Tunbridge Wells, he was the product of a terrible childhood in which he suffered grotesque physical and sexual abuse, some of it in local authority care.

Stepfather Peter used to beat him with a hammer, according to relatives. In school, he allegedly tortured animals and forced a girl to strip at knifepoint in a playground, before coming to the police’s attention aged 12 for shoplifting and burglary.

Now resident in Gillingham, around 50 minutes from Chillenden, Stone had grown into a violent and mentally disturbed adult who exacerbated his condition via persistent heroin use.

He was jailed at least three times in the 1980s for robbery, burglary, grievous bodily harm and assault causing actual bodily harm. The 1981 hammer attack occurred during a robbery. Two years later, he stabbed a former schoolmate in the chest while they slept. He then gouged a policeman’s eye during the subsequent arrest.

In short, Stone was seriously bad news. Yet there was a problem: to charge him with the murders of Lin and Megan Russell, police needed proper evidence. And, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t find any.

Take the various hairs and clothing fibres found at the scene. They did not provide a forensic match. Nor did the bloody fingerprint on the lunchbox. Then there was a knotted black bootlace, covered with blood and saliva, which had been used to restrain the girls.

It looked like the sort of thing a heroin addict might tie around their arm, to expose veins to aid intravenous injection. That could in theory provide a link to Stone. But, although 64 areas of the lace were tested, none of his DNA could be found.

Placing their suspect at the scene was also proving tough. At lunchtime on the day of the attacks, detectives could place him in a pawn shop at Chatham, 40 miles away. But the trail went cold after that. Stone claimed to be unable to remember what he did that afternoon. And by the time of his arrest, the clothes he’d been wearing were gone.

The witnesses also offered little help. At an identity parade, Josie was unable to pick him out. She said the man who attacked them was blond, clean-shaven, 6ft and aged 25. Stone was 38 and 5ft 7in. His hair was brown and receding.

Then came the question of the assailant’s car. One local source, a gardener named Anthony Rayfield, had seen a beige vehicle parked near the scene, with its boot open, around the time of the attack. Another, Nicola Burchill, had also seen a beige Ford Escort in the area, at 4.45pm. A third, Pauline Wilkinson, spoke of coming across a rust-coloured Escort containing three young men, one of whom matched the e-fit, at some point that afternoon. Josie thought the attacker’s car had been either brown or red.

Such evidence could be very helpful in court. But not for the prosecution. Because Michael Stone’s car turned out to be a white Toyota.

To get murder charges over the line, police needed more witnesses. Ideally ones who could offer solid evidence.

In the end, they offered testimony from four men who claimed to have met Stone following the crime. All had extensive criminal convictions. First came Lawrence Calder, a drug addict who’d been a regular associate of the suspect in Gillingham.

He alleged that Stone had turned up at his house the morning after the murders in a state of extreme agitation.

There were, he recalled: ‘Spots of blood down the front [of his T-shirt] and a large area of blood on the groin.’

Calder’s claim was, in theory, significant. He was, after all, a contemporaneous witness offering compelling evidence of the suspect’s guilt. Yet it quickly disintegrated under cross-examination in court. First, he admitted lying to the police, having told them originally that he had been with Stone until about 5 or 6pm on the day of the murders. Then he became confused about details, at one point telling the jury the events he was recalling occurred in August (the murders happened in early July).

In the end, Calder conceded: ‘I’m no good with dates,’ an admission that fatally undermined testimony hinging on his ability to remember precise events on a particular morning two years earlier.

Next up were three fellow prisoners, who met Stone during his time on remand. Each alleged that, during their encounters, he made some form of ‘prison confession’.

The testimony of one, a murderer named Mark Jennings, was offered during the 1998 trial only to also collapse under cross-examination. It emerged that he had been paid £5,000 by The Sun, which was offering cash for evidence leading to the suspect’s conviction, plus £10,000 if he was found guilty.

But the other two, who also appeared in that case, proved crucial to Stone’s conviction. One, Barry Thompson, who was serving two years for dishonesty and intimidating a witness, recalled a hostile encounter in Elmley Prison in which Stone allegedly said: ‘I made a mistake with her; I won’t make the same mistake with you.’

Thompson insisted that the ‘mistake’ was a reference to leaving Josie Russell alive.

The final witness was Damien Daley, a 23-year-old gangster from Folkestone who’d been held next door to Stone at Canterbury Prison. Daley claimed that Stone, who had by this stage requested he be held in solitary confinement to prevent other inmates ‘making up confessions’, had spoken to him via a cracked drainpipe between their two cells.

He alleged that, during the ensuing conversation, Stone made what amounted to a full confession to the Chillenden Murders, explaining in vivid detail how he killed Lin and Megan Russell.

That, more or less, was the extent of the case against Michael Stone. And within months of the guilty verdict, it had spectacularly collapsed.

The catalyst was a high-profile investigation by the Daily Mail, which drew attention to several obvious flaws in the prosecution case. Published in March 1999, it crucially revealed that Barry Thompson had since signed a sworn statement retracting the evidence he had given.

‘None of what I said was true. Stone never said the words I attributed to him. I told the jury a pack of lies,’ confessed Thompson, who not only claimed to be a paid police informant but added he had never wanted to appear as a witness – thinking ‘the case against him was so thin that he would be acquitted anyway’.

In 2001, the original conviction was quashed. A retrial was held at Nottingham Crown Court later that year. And this time, Damien Daley was the only one of those four key witnesses to testify.

So crucial was his evidence to this second round of proceedings that jurors at one point travelled to Canterbury Prison’s solitary confinement wing, to see whether sound could indeed travel down a cracked pipe between the two cells.

They were also invited to consider whether the entire prison confession could have been fabricated. After all, almost every piece of information Stone was alleged to have told Daley, including details about how the Chillenden Murders were carried out, was already in the public domain.

Much was contained in a copy of the Daily Mirror, which Daley had in his cell. During cross-examination, the witness did admit to having lied at least once during the previous court case.

Specifically, Daley confessed that he had been wrong to claim, under oath, to having never taken drugs. In fact, he was regular user. ‘I am a crook,’ he admitted, by way of an explanation for such dishonesty.

Summing up, the judge carefully explained that the case hinged on this one witness. He therefore instructed jurors to find Stone innocent if they did not believe Daley’s evidence.

Extensive deliberations ensued. But once more, for reasons only the jury will ever really know, the murder charge stuck: on October 3, Stone was again convicted. Echoing the previous case, it was by a 10-2 majority. He was sentenced to 25 years.

Efforts to overturn the 2001 verdict have been ongoing ever since.

At the heart of many of them are significant concerns about Daley’s testimony. Acquaintances are adamant he has privately confessed to fabricating it.

Scepticism about his motives were initially raised by the Folkestone Herald newspaper, which in 1998 carried a front-page report headlined: ‘You Turned Stone Over’… family accuse witness in ‘sell out’ row.’ It told of a furore outside Daley’s home. Members of his family were reported to be shouting abuse and accusing him of telling lies about Stone.

Witnesses were too frightened to give their names, the newspaper added, but police officers had eventually attended.

The relatives appeared to have discovered that this career criminal was either a paid police informant, or a ‘nark’ who agreed to give evidence in the Chillenden case in exchange for soft treatment in his own ongoing legal difficulties.

Daley at the time publicly denied having any such ulterior motive. But in private he may have sometimes played a different tune.

In 2017, the BBC broadcast an interview with an anonymous ‘friend’ who insisted that he’d confessed to making up evidence against Stone.

Lawyer Mark McDonald now says he possesses statements signed by five different witnesses who have reason to believe something very similar.

Daley’s admission that he lied about his drug habit at the 2001 trial is also highly significant.

McDonald claims to have evidence that he was addicted to Class-A drugs, needed to escape the segregation unit at Canterbury Prison to access them, and agreed to give evidence against Stone to secure such a move.

Whether this will turn the wheels of justice remains to be seen. An initial appeal by Stone, on the basis that Daley’s testimony had been ‘unreliable’, failed in 2005.

Submissions to the CCRC alleging he lied in court were then again rejected in 2010.

Now, as the Daily Mail today reveals, the role of Daley – who was convicted of murder in 2014, and is currently serving a life sentence – is once more being looked at by the quango, following intensive lobbying by McDonald.

‘He [Daley] is the weakest link,’ McDonald says.

‘The whole case surrounding him and his credibility is shot. They [the CCRC] agreed to look at him.

‘I’ve been asking them to do it for over 15 years.’

A further surreal chapter in Stone’s case was written in December 2019 when his legal team received a letter from Levi Bellfield, the serial killer convicted of the murders of Milly Dowler, Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell.

He initially denied any involvement in the Chillenden Murders. But he claimed to have relevant information about the case, and before long began to open up. In a February 2020 prison meeting with McDonald and a second solicitor, Paul Bacon, Bellfield confided that while he didn’t commit the murders, he was in the area that day.

Two years later, Bellfield confessed to the murders via a statement to Bacon. After details appeared in a newspaper, he refused to sign a proper confession. But according to McDonald he has since signed such a document (it spans four pages) and also written to the CCRC expressing his guilt.

‘Something like this has never happened to me, in the sense I’ve committed a crime and another person has been arrested for it,’ the document reads. ‘I apologise to Stone and the Russell family for my heinous acts.’

The problem is that not everyone believes him.

While he bears a passing resemblance to the e-fit of the suspect, and is roughly the right height, Bellfield is a narcissistic psychopath who could be making the whole thing up to attract attention, promote himself up the league-table of serial killers and engage in power games with the criminal justice system.

In other words, his confession could well be a red herring.

One significant problem, to that end, is Bellfield’s then-girlfriend, Johanna Collings. She owned a beige car at the time of the murders, but is adamant that it couldn’t have been used because the murders took place on her birthday, when she and Bellfield visited a nightclub together.

Another is that Bellfield’s ‘confession’ is not believed to contain any details that weren’t already in the public domain. In other words, this inveterate liar could be taking everyone for a ride.

The Daily Mail’s extensive inquiries into the Michael Stone case first cast serious doubt on the safety of his convictions over 25 years ago.

Important doubts that we raised then still stand, and several of the significant holes in the prosecution’s case have grown wider over time.

Regrettably, his future now rests in the hands of the CCRC – a beleaguered and dysfunctional organisation which was widely criticised last year over its failure to deal competently with the case of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a rape he didn’t commit.

Malkinson’s legal team spent a decade pleading with the quango to order DNA tests they were sure would prove his innocence. Yet their requests met with obfuscation and refusal.

Had the CCRC done its job, he would have been out of jail a decade earlier. Stone’s interactions with the organisation have been similarly turgid. His lawyer has since 2017 been calling for evidence gathered from the original murder scene to be subjected to modern DNA tests which were not in existence at the time of the original murders.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, McDonald last year commissioned Angela Gallop, a forensic scientist, to produce an 18-page report on the case, explaining how a state-of-the-art technique called DNA-17 could help definitively establish whether Stone was the killer.

But no such tests have yet been carried out. The document concludes: ‘[Reflecting on] everything we have learnt from successful reinvestigations of past cases, and latest versions of new techniques now available we believe [there is] scientific work that could reasonably be done in an attempt to reveal physical traces that had been left behind by the offender on the victims and/or at the crime scene, and which therefore could be used to definitively identify him.’

‘Michael is calling me every day. He is pulling his hair out,’ is how McDonald puts it. ‘We’re screaming, “Please start the testing!”, but nothing is happening.’

In the meantime the CCRC has, after eight years of lobbying, belatedly greenlit a probe into the credentials of Damien Daley, the ‘prison confession’ witness central to the prosecution’s case at the 2001 retrial.

‘Michael Stone has spent over 28 years in prison for a crime he did not commit,’ adds McDonald.

‘I have now put before the CCRC evidence that Daley lied to the jury, evidence that Daley was addicted to Class-A drugs and needed to get off segregation to get access to more drugs, evidence that he has retracted his statement several times and most importantly a detailed and lengthy confession from another person who said he committed the murders.

‘I ask, what [more] do you need to prove innocence?’