Seeking a motive for the assassination of Kenneth Marston, an upright and much–admired English executive, investigators would explore every imaginable theory – from far–Left terrorism to corporate corruption on a vast scale, and even a secret love affair.          

However, as Friday, April 25, 1986, began there was no hint of the horrific scene Jo was about to witness. Indeed, having moved to Lyon from County Durham two years earlier, the Marston family were living the ex–pat dream.

In those days, the power–tools multinational Black&Decker was synonymous with DIY, with handymen the world over using its inventive equipment.

Having joined the US–owned company as a shop–floor engineer, Mr Marston, 42, had whizzed through the ranks. After a successful stint as boss of a plant in North–East England, in 1984 he had been tasked with turning round its puzzlingly underperforming French operation.

Two years into his posting, which came with a salary of £500,000 at today’s rates, the move appeared to be a roaring success. Apparently liked and respected by colleagues, he had installed his family in a stylish, single–storey villa in an affluent Lyon suburb, and built a pool in the grounds.

Though she was struggling to learn French, Mr Marston’s wife, Mary, 46, who shared his working–class Birmingham background, found her neighbours surprisingly welcoming.

Their older children, Neil, 16, and Andrea, 13, were weekday borders at a British school in Paris, while Jo had settled into a local primary and was already bilingual. Weekends and holidays were often spent skiing in the nearby Alps, they’d rented a yacht on the Med, and that Friday they were due to fly to Barcelona for a spring break. ‘Life was good,’ Jo tells me. ‘There were no plans to go back to the UK.’

Everything changed at 8.11am, according to a neighbour who checked his watch after two booming cracks from a sawn–off boar–hunting rifle echoed across the street.

Mr Marston had intended to drop Jo at school on his way to work, 15 minutes away in Dardilly. Dressed in a crimson jumper and jeans, she was following him as he walked towards the front door.

She remembers retreating down the hallway as he opened it and found himself face to face with a stranger, and how he left the door ajar as they spoke.

Moments later she heard a ‘big bang’ followed by the piercing cries of her mother, who had been watching the scene from a side window as she unfurled the blind.

‘Mum was screaming, so I started screaming, too,’ says Midlands–based Jo, now 50 and working in marketing for a ski company.

‘I didn’t know what she was screaming about, but I thought if she was screaming, I must be scared. So I hid behind the curtains, thinking we were in danger. When I came out, Dad was lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the front steps.’

The gunman had shot Mr Marston twice in the chest, leaving him to die as he sped off in a car parked near the side gate.

Hearing the shots, neighbour Jacqueline Martin dashed to the villa, where she found a heart–rending scene.

Mr Marston’s body was ‘lying across the doorstep and beside him was his little girl’, she recalled.

‘I was very surprised by her behaviour – very calm – and she said to me, in impeccable French: ‘I want to stay here so I can tell the police that I saw someone running away, in black, wearing a balaclava helmet’.’

Jo’s apparent composure may have been a reaction to shock. However, she drew on it commendably during the ensuing hours and days when – astonishing as it seems today – French police used the ten–year–old girl as their interpreter. ‘There was no counselling back then,’ she says. ‘I was back at school within a week.’

After 40 years, Kenneth Marston’s murder remains unsolved. Until now, Jo and her sister Andrea, 53, a London HR director, have never spoken about it publicly.

However, I first delved into it over 30 years ago, and this week they granted me this interview in the faint hope of stirring the memory – or conscience – of someone who might, even now, identify the hitman and his paymasters.

Under France’s statute of limitations law, the case was closed after 20 years. It can’t be reopened, even if the killer came forward and confessed.

Yet their mother, who moved to Gloucestershire after the older children finished their Paris education (living on a £21,000 annual pension), fought for the truth for the rest of her days.

She died without closure six years ago, aged 80, and her children have taken up the baton in her honour.

‘Dad was the love of her life, and she never gave up, though she was diagnosed with early–onset Parkinson’s disease a few months after the murder,’ says Jo, adding that doctors believed the illness might have been hastened by grief. Though the ruthless murder of a high–powered executive briefly made headlines in Britain, France and the US, it was soon forgotten, for the following day a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded.

As Jo and Andrea told me, the Lyon investigators also seemed frustratingly – and strangely – uninterested in the case, and when Mary Marston sought to discover what leads they were following she was stonewalled.

‘That seems to be true of a lot of French investigations,’ says Jo. ‘If you look at the number of unsolved foreign cases, it’s unbelievable. It wasn’t just the language or cultural barrier. It was the whole system.’

At first, police believed Mr Marston had been killed either by Arab or French far–Left terrorists. It was an understandable assumption. Then, as now, the US was embroiled in a conflict with an Arab nation, but the arch–enemy was Libya. On April 5, 1986, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by American servicemen, killing three and injuring 229. In retaliation, ten days later, the US rained missiles on Gaddafi’s desert compound.

Soon after Mr Marston’s murder, an anonymous caller with a Middle Eastern accent phoned news agencies in Paris and London, claiming responsibility for the killing and for blowing up the Amex building in Lyon 20 hours later.

The Amex bombers daubed a wall with the slogan ‘Black and Decker, American Express, Control Data – US Go Home.’

The militant far–Left cell Action Directe also fell under suspicion. In a raid on their Lyon lair, police found a list of prominent foreigners they intended to target, together with their movements.

It is unclear whether Mr Marston was named. However, the spectre of terrorism sparked chaos and pandemonium.

The US sent CIA agents to comb the villa for clues and mingle with the many mourners at Mr Marston’s funeral.

The family were hidden in a hotel, bodyguards escorted them wherever they went, and Jo was told to remove her name from her school bag to avoid being identified. ‘I remember walking around a shopping centre with these guys dressed all in black. It felt like we were in a bad movie,’ she says.

As time passed, however, the terrorism theory began to unravel. For one thing, they had never been known to kill with boar–hunting rifles. Also, there wasn’t a strand of evidence to back the anonymous caller’s claim of responsibility, which was dismissed as a publicity–seeking hoax.

When Georges Fenech, an ambitious young investigating judge in Lyon, took over the case, he explored other avenues, among them the possibility that Mr Marston had taken a lover, like many powerful men in France.

As the retired judge told the Mail this week, the Black&Decker chief travelled widely and had ample opportunity to stray.

Yet after examining his bank and phone records, and his hotel bills, Mr Fenech was sure ‘he had no mistress’, and was ‘very attached to his family, and to his wife, Mary, a truly distinguished and very classy English woman’. He was also ‘scrupulously honest’.

As theory after theory fell away, Mr Fenech delved deeper into Mr Marston’s business affairs. It was through these inquiries that he formed the shocking view he still holds today: that the murder was orchestrated by enemies within Black&Decker.

Many of the reasons are contained in a previously unseen dossier he received from a Lyon police chief in 1991. This highly revealing report is contained in the Marstons’ case file, which they allowed me to examine.

Fifteen months before the murder, two Lyonnaise men – notorious underworld boss Jean Schnaebele and scrap dealer Gilbert Zini – were jailed for fencing 15,800 items valued at £500,000, stolen from the Black&Decker factory.

Their vast stash – drills, lawnmowers, water pumps and power saws – was piled 20ft high in Zini’s scrapyard. He was so proud of the booty mountain he videoed it. But as these shady characters told me when I tracked them down in 1993 – and as the police dossier confirms – they were relatively minor players in a far greater scam whose ringleaders held senior posts inside the company.

Thousands of goods were being removed from the production line, certified as obsolete or ‘not up to French standards’, then sold off cheaply on the black market in France, Holland, Belgium and North Africa. Investigators also heard this story from many well–placed sources. And when police quizzed Schnaebele over the murder, he told them straight: ‘Mr Marston was assassinated because he discovered the ones who were responsible for the trafficking for many years.’

The gangster claimed he could identify those involved, the police report says, but refused to do so.

Further evidence of the fraud came from Mr Marston’s secretary, Maryvonne Corsin, who told police of suspicious occurrences preceding and following the murder. Just before Mr Marston arrived in Lyon, a senior former colleague had seized and destroyed confidential company documents. Then, after the Briton’s death, his diary went missing.

However, Maryvonne’s most disturbing claim was that the wife of a senior British former Black&Decker executive had told her – in a phone call in 1988 – that she, too, knew ‘the names of the people responsible’.

She had declined to repeat them over the phone. At Mr Fenech’s request, Berkshire police interviewed the wife – who is named in the police dossier – but she denied making the remark.

All this prompted Mr Fenech to launch a second investigation into corruption at Black&Decker. It resulted in three senior staff being charged with ‘abuse of company assets.’ Frustratingly, however, he was never able to link them, or anyone else involved, with the murder.

Mr Marston’s daughters also believe the answers lie within Black&Decker. Their file contains an email from its former chief executive, declining their mother’s request for funding for a private detective, and after a few years, they say, the company wanted to draw a veil over the affair.

‘It was just, please go away and stop rocking the boat,’ says Andrea. ‘It could have been because they didn’t want the stock price to go down, but we feel something was being hidden relating to the murder.’

If a private eye had been enlisted, the sisters say, he could have probed many mysteries.

Why, for example, did their father – a punctual man – go missing for 85 minutes on the day before his death? He left the office at 1.30pm but arrived late for a French language lesson at 2.55pm, vaguely explaining that he’d been ‘unavoidably delayed’.

Then there was the mysterious ‘special meeting’ of senior executives that Mr Marston had called on the day he was shot. What was its purpose? Was it true, as I was told all those years ago, that he intended to out the thieves?

In 1993, with Mr Fenech about to close the investigation, Mary Marston made a last roll of the dice, persuading Black&Decker to put up a reward of one million francs (£115,000) for information leading to a conviction.

Mr Fenech agreed to publicise this with one of France’s first Crimewatch–style TV appeals. The two–hour show, which included a reconstruction of the murder, attracted 10 million viewers – 223 of whom phoned in with supposed new leads.

The callers provided no crucial evidence. Five years later, though, a former French Foreign Legionnaire convicted of a car–bomb murder, claimed he could identify Mr Marston’s killers.

Mary Marston’s lawyer visited him in prison, and his knowledge of unpublished details, such as the type of weapon used, the layout of the villa, and the make of the suspected getaway car, were highly convincing. But he would not go on the record until the reward was paid into his foreign bank. Black&Decker declined. And when the Mail tracked him down, he claimed to have been acting for another prisoner who was lying to get the reward money.

Today, Mr Fenech remains certain of this story’s genesis. An Englishman of the highest integrity stumbles into a cesspool of corporate corruption, determines to blow the whistle, and pays the ultimate price.

The truth behind this perplexing crime ‘lies within the company’, he says, adding: ‘This case was a huge failure. I still think about it and how much suffering it must have caused his family.’

It has, but it hasn’t ‘destroyed’ them – the fear Mary Marston harboured when I met her in 1993. Her resilient daughters are successful career women and mothers with no time for self–pity, and their brother has also fared well.

Understandably, though, the family still wants the truth.

‘Life goes on but it comes back in fits and starts,’ Jo says.

When she least expects it, a memory will suddenly surface, and she is back on the doorstep. The little girl in the crimson jumper, waiting by her daddy’s body so she can tell the police about the man in the balaclava.

Anyone with information about Mr Marston’s murder should email david.jones@dailymail.co.uk in confidence

Double child killer Ian Huntley could get a taxpayer-funded funeral and memorial service, and the prison governor will be forced to write a letter of condolence to his family, after he was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate at HMP Frankland.

Huntley, who appalled the nation with the murders of ten-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, died yesterday morning after his life support was switched off on Friday.

So hated was Huntley that even his own daughter has called for his ashes to be ‘flushed down the toilet’ – yet the prison faces having to grant him the customary death rites, as dictated by government policy.

Firstly, the governor of the Durham prison, Darren Finley, will have to pen a letter of condolence to Huntley’s family and invite them to visit the prison.

He must also offer to contribute up to £3,000 towards funeral costs, which would be payable to funeral directors upon the receipt of invoices.

This is to cover reasonable costs of any service the family organises, which could include a hearse, a coffin, a faith leader and cremation fees. If the family chooses not to arrange a funeral, then this money would not be distributed.

It is expected that Huntley will be cremated at an undisclosed location.

On top of this, protocol says that a memorial service should be organised through the prison’s chaplaincy, which the family, other inmates and prison staff may attend.

Huntley was hit over the head repeatedly with a spiked metal bar taken from a waste metal basket, sources told the Daily Mail.

Triple murderer Anthony Russell, 43, is suspected of launching the brutal assault, which left Huntley ‘torn apart like a rat’ and lying in a pool of his own blood.

Prison sources this weekend suggested to The Mail on Sunday that the issue of Huntley’s next of kin had caused a family ‘disagreement’.

The decision to turn off his life support was supposed to fall to his daughter, Samantha Bryan.

Ms Bryan, however, had never met her father, and so it was left to his mother, Lynda Richards.

She had travelled to Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary from her home in Lincolnshire a few days after the attack.

Ms Bryan, 27, told The Sun on Sunday she does not believe that her father deserves a funeral. 

She said: ‘He shouldn’t have the dignity of a funeral and grave. I will not be going. A funeral is pointless for a man like him.

‘I don’t want there to ever be any possibility of freaks or weirdos going to a resting place or memorial, to show him some kind of twisted respect.’

Huntley was jailed for life with a minimum sentence of 40 years in December 2003. Judges told him that he had ‘little or no hope’ of ever being released.

In the end, he died without ever revealing the full truth about the girls’ deaths, only a sanitised version.

In court, he said both girls died accidentally, claiming Holly drowned in his bath and that he inadvertently suffocated Jessica while trying to stifle her screams.

But in 2018 he confessed to deliberately killing Jessica to stop her from raising the alarm. To her family’s distress, he always claimed Holly’s death was an accident.

Huntley initially claimed the pair had left his house alive, but eventually confessed to dumping their bodies in a remote ditch, cutting off their clothes and burning their bodies to cover his tracks.

During the 13-day search for the girls, Huntley was filmed saying he was likely to be the last person to have seen them on the day they disappeared and expressed sympathy to the families.

This was the latest in a string of violent attempts on Huntley’s life by other prisoners, who detested him for the nature of his unthinkable crimes and for his behaviour behind bars, which sources have said was repellent.

It was previously reported that Huntley wore a red Manchester United football shirt around prison, which infuriated other inmates.

Another inmate slashed Huntley’s throat in 2010, leaving him needing 21 stitches, and in 2005, a convicted murderer threw boiling water over him. 

In an image which became imprinted on the nation’s consciousness, his two victims wore Manchester United jerseys in a photograph taken shortly before they were killed.  

Huntley had apparently come to terms with the fact that he would die in prison, as revealed by leaked tape recordings of conversations he had behind bars.

In 2018, a recording of a phone call was leaked to The Sun, in which Huntley confessed to the murders and made a groveling apology.

He told a friend: ‘And I am sorry for what I have done, sorry for the pain I have caused to the families and friends of Holly and Jessica, for the pain I have caused my family and friends, and for the pain I have caused the community of Soham.

‘I am genuinely, genuinely sorry and it breaks my heart when it is reported I have no remorse; that I relish something. I do not.’

He said that he thought about the girls when they would have turned 18 and 21.

Huntley continued: ‘I know no matter what I say that people are not going to think any better of me. I know that, I don’t expect it to, but I would much rather people have the truth about how I feel.

‘I have nothing to gain by saying these things. I know I am never getting out. I have accepted that from day one.’  

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘The murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman remains one of the most shocking and devastating cases in our nation’s history, and our thoughts are with their families.’

Five years ago today, on March 3, 2021, Sarah Everard set out to walk home to her London flat after visiting a friend. She never made it. Instead, she encountered the man who would end her life.

A week later, the body of the 33-year-old marketing executive was found in woodland in Kent. She had been raped, strangled and burned. The brutality of what had unfolded transfixed and horrified the country.

And the shock only deepened when it emerged that Wayne Couzens, the man arrested in connection with Sarah’s murder, was not a stranger lurking in the shadows, but a serving Metropolitan Police firearms officer – a man entrusted with public safety.

In September 2021, he received a whole life sentence for what Lord Justice Fulford described as his ‘devastating, tragic and wholly brutal’ actions.

By then, Sarah’s desperate story had grown darker still. Revelations of allegations against Couzens that had been ignored, of missed warnings, exposed the way a serial sex offender had not only gone unchecked by three police forces but had continued to wear their uniform. 

Five years on, Sarah’s murder continues to generate grief and fury not just for a life stolen, but for the catastrophic lapses that allowed it to happen.

Here, laid out in full for the first time, is the haunting timeline of missed opportunities leading to a crime that shook Britain to its core.

1995: Couzens, aged 23 and working as a mechanic at his father’s garage, is alleged to have committed a ‘very serious sexual assault against a child barely into her teens’ in his home town of Dover.

The incident was reported to police but the perpetrator was never caught. Twenty-six years later, the complainant comes forward in the wake of Couzens’ arrest for Sarah’s murder. It later emerges that, also in 1995, Couzens allegedly also tried to kidnap a woman at knifepoint in north London. Again, she identified him in the wake of news of his arrest.

2002: Still working full-time at his father’s garage, Couzens enlists as a private in the Territorial Army. Over the following four years he unsuccessfully applies three times to become a police officer, failing the vetting each time.

2003: Couzens allegedly blocks a young woman’s path in a deserted corridor at a Territorial Army event and demands her telephone number. She does not report it to the police, but following his arrest comes forward, describing the encounter as ‘intimidating’.

2004: Couzens allegedly exposes himself to a teenage girl while driving past her in south London. She does not report it, but comes forward after recognising him in the wake of Sarah’s murder.

2006: Couzens is alleged to have raped a young woman during a singles event linked to a dating website at a bar in east London. Again, the woman comes forward in the wake of Sarah’s murder. 

That same year, Couzens joins Kent Police as a special constable. He also marries Olena Obukhova, a Ukrainian national ten years his junior, whom he met online. They settle in Deal, where Olena starts work as a laboratory manager.

February 2007: Couzens’ mounting debts lead him to enter into an individual voluntary arrangement (IVA) to pay back creditors.

April 2008: He is discharged from the Territorial Army for failing to meet training obligations. His failure to return equipment and kit leads to a £526 fine.

November 2008: He performs a sex act in front of a woman pushing a pram who had responded to his call of ‘hello’. She reports it to the Met Police, but no suspect is identified until Couzens’ arrest.

February 2011: Couzens joins the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), a specialist police force dedicated to protecting British civil nuclear sites and materials. He had been vetted the previous year by Thames Valley Police, which recommended against his recruitment after revealing he had tried to conceal the fact he had entered into an IVA. Its recommendation was ignored.

2am, June 2013: Couzens is reported missing by Olena after failing to return from a late-night visit to the gym. A missing person report is created, but closed around 3am when Couzens arrives home, claiming he had crashed a hire car.

June 2015: Kent Police receive a call reporting the sighting of a man naked from the waist down in the Dover area. The caller labels it ‘revolting’. The report is linked to a car registered to Couzens, who is still with the CNC, yet no action is taken by officers.

September 2018: Couzens, by now a father of two children, joins the Metropolitan Police, and is posted to a Safer Neighbourhood Team in Bromley. A check of the Police National Database prior to his move records ‘no trace’ of incidents, despite the 2013 missing person report and 2015 indecent exposure allegation.

October 2019: Couzens allegedly commits a second rape under a bridge in London. The accusation is made by a victim who comes forward in the wake of reports of Couzens’ arrest in 2021. 

Following news of Sarah’s murder, a man also comes forward to say he had been sexually assaulted by Couzens in a bar in Kent in the summer of 2019 while dressed in drag – the only allegation recorded by a male victim.

February 2020: Couzens is moved to the Met’s elite and prestigious Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command.

November 2020: A naked Couzens engages in a sex act in front of a passing female cyclist while standing on a bank overlooking a narrow country lane near his home in Deal. 

The victim reports him, describing a black car parked nearby and giving a partial description of the registration, but again nothing comes of it. She will later state she had always feared someone who could behave in such a way could go on to commit more serious acts.

December 2020: Couzens allegedly sends an unsolicited photograph of his erect penis to a woman selling clothing online. In the previous two months, he had made several sexual requests to other female online retailers.

February 2021: In the space of a fortnight – on the 14th and the 27th – Couzens twice exposes himself to female staff members at a McDonald’s drive-through in Swanley, Kent.

The branch’s manager, Sam Taylor, reports the incidents to police, but they are classed as ‘low risk’, and it is not until March 3 – the day of Sarah’s abduction – that PC Samantha Lee is dispatched to the restaurant to take statements. 

Later, Taylor will testify that he had shown PC Lee CCTV footage of Couzens’ black Seat Exeo, and provided receipts that clearly displayed his registration plate and credit card details, but no further action was taken.

In 2023, PC Lee will be found guilty of gross misconduct and fired from the force. She claims she has been ‘thrown under the bus’ to help the Met save face.

9.30pm, March 3: Nine and a half hours after PC Lee arrives at McDonald’s in Swanley, Sarah Everard is in the middle of a 50-minute walk home from a friend’s house near Clapham Common to Brixton Hill.

She calls her boyfriend Josh Lowth en route, ending the call at 9.28pm. Two minutes later she is stopped by Couzens, who identifies himself as a police officer and pretends to arrest her for breaching Covid guidelines.

Bus CCTV captures the moment Couzens stands speaking to Sarah on the side of the road.

Within four minutes she is handcuffed and placed in the rear of the white Vauxhall Crossland that Couzens had rented from a vehicle hire company in Dover three days earlier. She is then driven to Dover, where he transfers her to his own car and takes her to a remote rural area, where he rapes and strangles her.

2.31am, March 4: CCTV captures Couzens buying drinks at a service station, almost certainly in the aftermath of Sarah’s murder. 

It emerges he twice revisits the place where he has dumped Sarah’s body, before finally leaving the area. At 8.15am, he visits a Costa Coffee, where he calmly buys coffee and a bakewell slice.

8pm, March 4: Sarah is reported missing by Josh after she fails to answer her phone and cannot be raised at her flat. Her family – mum Susan, dad Jeremy and siblings Katie and Jamie – say her disappearance is ‘totally out of character’ and that she is always in regular contact. Sarah’s friends mount a passionate campaign to find her, retracing her steps and placing missing posters around Clapham.

March 5: As the search for Everard escalates, Couzens is sighted filling a jerry can at a petrol station, which he later uses to burn Sarah’s body, and buying two green rubble bags, which he uses to dump her remains in a woodland pond near Ashford. 

He then blithely returns to normal life, including taking his family on a trip to the same woods, where he allows his children to play close to where Sarah’s body has been dumped.

Olena subsequently tells the Daily Mail of her incomprehension that the husband, who had ‘never once’ shown any hint of violence, was capable of what he had unleashed. ‘I saw nothing wrong. He had a beautiful family, a good house… what else did he need? I’m constantly asking myself: where did I miss the signs?’

March 6: Couzens calls in sick and does not return to work.

March 9: He is arrested in Deal, initially on suspicion of Sarah’s kidnapping. He claims to have been threatened by an Eastern European gang into delivering ‘another girl’ after he had previously underpaid a prostitute, before subsequently changing his story, saying he had handed her – alive and uninjured – to three men in a van in a Kent layby.

Following his arrest, violent pornography is found across all his electronic devices, including a deleted file containing a film referencing a rape and murder by an impotent police officer. Forensic analysis also reveals 19 indecent images of children. Couzens denies having ever downloaded or viewed them.

March 10: Sarah’s remains are discovered. Two days later, Couzens is charged with her murder.

March 13: Across the country, a series of vigils are held for Sarah, with a large number gathering by the bandstand on Clapham Common, near where she had been kidnapped. The vigil ends in drama when a heavy police presence results in four arrests for breaches of Covid regulations.

Among them is Patsy Stevenson, then a 28-year-old physics student, whose arrest photo, showing her wrestled to the ground by police officers, causes nationwide outrage at what is seen as police heavy-handedness.

‘I went there to be part of a collective, for solidarity,’ Patsy recalls now. ‘It was a mournful event: people were really devastated, and they wanted to show it wasn’t just something to brush under the carpet. No one was shouting, no one was aggressive. It was all just very solemn, but it turned very quickly from a vigil into police manhandling women.’

The fallout from the arrest – which included death threats – led to Patsy failing her degree. She is now a full-time campaigner.

‘I’m just a person who became a picture – it is a difficult position to be thrown into overnight, but I have tried to do something positive with that because that level of public attention comes with responsibility,’ she adds.

July 9: Couzens appears by video link from Belmarsh high-security prison and pleads guilty to Sarah’s murder.

September 30: Couzens is given a whole life sentence for a crime Lord Justice Fulford stresses had been weeks in the planning.

‘What she [Sarah] had to endure for the final hours of her life were as bleak and agonising as it is possible to imagine,’ he tells him.

Couzens is currently serving his sentence at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham, nicknamed Monster Mansion due to the large number of murderers, rapists and terrorists who are imprisoned there, including Soham killer Ian Huntley – who was recently violently attacked by a fellow inmate – and the London nail bomber David Copeland.

July 2022: Couzens appeals against his whole-life sentence. His appeal is rejected.

February 2023: Couzens pleads guilty to three incidents of indecent exposure, among them the November 2020 flashing incident. A further three counts are ordered to lie on file.

February 2024: The Angiolini report is published as a result of an inquiry established to investigate how an off-duty police officer was able to abduct, rape and murder a member of the public.

Lady (Elish) Angiolini reveals that evidence of Couzens’ preference for extreme and violent pornography, and history of alleged sexual offending stretching back nearly 20 years, illuminates critical failures in vetting, and warns that ‘there may be more victims of his sexual offending who have not as yet come forward’.

She issues 16 recommendations focusing on officer recruitment, vetting and handling allegations of indecent exposure.

They all come too late for the Everard family, who are left to grieve the unfathomable loss of a precious daughter and sister who was just walking home.

‘The mornings and evenings are particularly painful,’ her mother Susan recalled in her victim impact statement.

‘At the time she was abducted, I let out a silent scream: ‘Don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’

‘I yearn for her. I remember all the lovely things about her.

‘She was caring, she was funny. She was clever, but she was good at practical things, too. She was a beautiful dancer.

‘She was a wonderful daughter.’

Five years ago today, on March 3, 2021, Sarah Everard set out to walk home to her London flat after visiting a friend. She never made it. Instead, she encountered the man who would end her life.

Savannah Guthrie was seen placing flowers outside her missing mother Nancy’s home as the search for her marks a month.

The Today show host looked visibly heartbroken as she united with her older sister Annie and her brother-in-law Tommaso Cioni on Monday, in a video obtained by NewsNation correspondent Brian Entin. 

The trio were seen locked arm in arm, laying flowers down as Annie wept and held onto her husband and famous sister for support. 

Savannah leaned on her family members as they joined for a group hug in front of the many flowers and messages left for their missing 84-year-old mother. 

The emotional moment came a month after Nancy was abducted from her home on the morning of February 1. 

The grandmother was last seen on January 31 when she was dropped off at home by Cioni following a dinner and game night at his and Annie’s home. She failed to show up for a church service the next day.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI have been on the case ever since, but the few leads they have received have been fruitless, as Nancy’s whereabouts still remain unknown. 

The FBI recently announced that the agency would be scaling back its search for Nancy, with agents moving to a new command post more than 100 miles away from Phoenix.

Some agents will also stay behind in Tucson, sources with knowledge of the investigation told ABC News. Agents in Phoenix, meanwhile, will work the case from there. 

The move does not indicate investigators are giving up on the search, sources claimed.

Savannah, Annie, and their brother Camron have shared several emotional videos online pleading for their mother’s captor to come forward and bring her home. 

Last Tuesday, Savannah acknowledged for the first time that Nancy might not be alive. 

‘We need to know where she is, we need her to come home,’ she said in a video posted to her Instagram account.

‘We also know that she may be lost, she may already be gone. She may have already gone home to the Lord that she loves,’ Savannah said through tears.

Savannah posted a series of videos on social media on Friday explaining how tipsters can collect the new $1 million reward her family is offering in exchange for information leading to her mother’s safe return. 

The 54-year-old reposted her original plea from Tuesday and shared a Today Show report explaining how to submit anonymous tips to the FBI, overseen by co-anchors Carson Daly, Hoda Kotb, and Craig Melvin.

‘Please – be the one that brings her home,’ she wrote in a caption. ‘Tips can be anonymous, reward can be paid in cash, as explained here.’ 

On Thursday night, a man, later identified as Antonio De Jesus Pena-Campos, was arrested on DUI charges after he was allegedly caught driving past Nancy’s home ‘100 times.’

The 34-year-old was nabbed by officers with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department after reporters spotted him driving a blue Chevy SUV ‘very slowly’ near her Tucson home, police said.

After officers arrived at the scene, they conducted a sobriety test on Pena-Campos, which he failed.

He was then handcuffed and placed into a sheriff’s cruiser. His arrest is not related to Nancy’s disappearance, authorities stated.

Before police confirmed Pena-Campos’s arrest and identity, Entin reported that the driver ‘just kept stopping’ outside the property, passing between ’50 and 100 times.’

A media photographer who approached the individual reportedly also noticed he had a photo of Nancy on his phone.

FBI agents were seen outside the residence on Wednesday, combing through portions of the home and lawn that had already been searched.

The flurry of activity was related to an FBI effort to turn the home back over to the Guthrie family, officials told NBC News. 

It comes as the Daily Mail revealed that Savannah is gearing up to return home to New York City soon.

The TV host, who shares two young kids with former Democratic political adviser Michael Feldman, has decided she must get her work life back on track as the search for her mother continues. 

‘She can’t stay in Arizona forever,’ a source told the Daily Mail. ‘Her kids and her life are in New York City.

‘It’s what her mom would want her to do. Nancy was Savannah’s biggest cheerleader.’

Ominously, the source added: ‘The family is coming to terms with the fact that this might take years. Savannah is craving normalcy.’

Convicted child murderer Ian Huntley remains in a critical condition in hospital today after being smashed in the head three times with a metal pole, the Daily Mail can reveal. 

The 52-year-old, who is serving life in prison for the murder of two 10-year-old girls in 2002, was attacked while working in the waste management workshop at HMP Frankland. 

At around 9.30am on Thursday, a fellow inmate from his wing grabbed a metal bar from a nearby crate and launched the attack, leaving Huntley in a pool of his own blood with catastrophic head injuries. 

Multiple prison sources suspect that Anthony Russell, a 43-year-old triple murderer, was the one who launched the assault. 

Inmates said to be cheering as he was led away in handcuffs shouting: ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it. I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him.’ 

A prison source told the Daily Mail: ‘Huntley was working in waste management with other prisoners from Wing A, the segregated wing for prisoners who can’t be in the normal jail population for their own protection.

‘The other prisoner got a metal bar from the waste metal crates and smashed Huntley three times in the head with it. It was a very, very serious injury, having been struck on the skull like that.’

It is believed a fight broke out between the two prisoners, before Russell swung at Huntley with the metal pole, hitting him with such force that part of the bar was lodged inside of him. 

Despite officers fearing that Huntley had died at the scene due to the extent of his injuries and concerns he was ‘not breathing’, paramedics managed to put him in a medically induced coma and transport him to hospital. 

He is said to remain there in a critical condition. 

The source said Wing A is made up of inmates at risk of attack from other prisoners, such as sex offenders or jailed police officers, so to protect them they move around the prison as a group, and remain segregated from the others. 

One woman, who visited an inmate housed alongside Huntley, told the Daily Mail it looked like he had been ‘ripped apart like a rat’.

She added: ‘He’s in a bad, bad way. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s what he deserves.’

Another source said the double killer’s condition was ‘touch and go’ and described the scene on the wing as ‘absolute chaos’. 

Suspected attacker Russell was charged with the murder of Julie Williams and her son David Williams, as well as the rape and murder of pregnant Nicole McGregor near Leamington Spa in 2022. 

At the time West Midlands Police believed Mr Williams was strangled with a lanyard due to Russell’s ‘mistaken belief that he was in a relationship with his girlfriend’. 

He then went on to kill Mr Williams’ 58-year-old mother in an attack that inflicted 113 separate injuries. 

Before later assaulting Ms McGregor, who was five months pregnant, just hours after she showed him a picture of her baby scan and then pretending to help Ms McGregor’s partner look for her.  

The Sun reported his celebratory cheers, and fellow lags’ too, in the wake of the attack. 

This is the third time Huntley has been attacked in jail. In 2010, his throat was slashed with a homemade weapon and, in 2005, another inmate threw boiling water over him.

Last year, he was said to have been strutting around the jail wearing a No 10 Manchester United-style shirt in an apparent vile taunt about his victims.

A photo of the schoolgirls wearing matching football shirts – tragically taken on the day Huntley lured them into his house – became synonymous with the desperate search which gripped the country.

A spokesperson for Durham Constabulary said: ‘The 52-year-old prisoner who was injured during this morning’s assault in the workshop at HMP Frankland remains in a serious condition in hospital following treatment for head injuries.

‘Police forensic teams have examined the scene of the attack throughout the day to gather evidence.

‘A suspect, a male prisoner in his mid-40s, has been identified by officers investigating the incident. He has not been arrested at this stage, but remains in detention within the prison.’

School caretaker Huntley lured both schoolgirls into his home and murdered them, before dumping their bodies in a ditch some 12 miles away.

He would later return and attempt to set fire to them.

They were not discovered until more than a week after they went missing, by which time some 400 police officers had joined with local residents to search for the missing youngsters.

Holly and Jessica, who were best friends, had gone out to buy sweets on the afternoon of August 4, 2002, when he lured them into his three-bedroom cottage.

Their disappearance after a family barbecue sent shockwaves through the close-knit community and became one of the most sickening child murders the country has ever seen.

Suspicions about Huntley were raised after he appeared to tell one journalist in morbid detail how the girls might react to being taken by a stranger.

He was convicted in 2003 of both murders, having pleaded not guilty. Huntley was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 40 years.

His then-fiancée Maxine Carr, who was a teaching assistant at the girls’ school, would also be jailed for three-and-a-half years after giving her partner a false alibi in a bid to help him evade justice.

She famously turned on her partner at court and Huntley was convicted, having tried to claim he had killed both girls accidentally.

He lied that Holly had drowned in his bath and that he had accidentally suffocated Jessica while attempting to stop her from screaming.

The case prompted an inquiry into how Huntley slipped through police vetting procedures despite a string of sex allegations made against him in his hometown, Grimsby, in the late 1990s.

The report from the inquiry revealed a ‘deeply shocking’ catalogue of errors across all organisations that had contact with Huntley before he murdered Holly and Jessica.

It made 31 recommendations to improve intelligence sharing, police information systems and employment vetting nationwide.

Huntley has previously been attacked in prison, most notably by armed robber Damien Fowkes in 2010, who slashed his throat.

Using a home-made weapon, Fowkes slashed him causing a ‘severe gaping cut to the left side of his neck’. The wound was 7in (18cm) long and required 21 stitches.

At the time Fowkes asked a prison officer: ‘Is he dead? I hope so.’

A fellow prisoner also attempted to shank Huntley in an ambush in 2018.

In 2005, fellow murderer Mark Hobson also threw boiling water over him in Wakefield Prison.

His crimes continue to cause outrage behind bars, as has Huntley’s brazen behaviour while on remand.

In 2018 Huntley appeared to confess to deliberately killing Jessica to stop her from raising the alarm. He continued to insist that Holly’s death was an accident.

After Carr had served her prison sentence, she was released in 2004 with a brand new identity.

‘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?’