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By: Bob Woffinden
Sally Clark was another Lindy Chamberlain, branded a monster mother and
sent to rot in jail for murdering her babies. But then her husband
uncovered the evidence that would bring her
It's almost impossible to imagine Sally Clark's pain. To imagine the utter
anguish of a mother who lost a son when he was just 11 weeks old to sudden
infant death syndrome. To imagine what it would then be like if the
nightmare happened to a second baby boy, this time found inexplicably
slumped dead in his bouncy chair eight weeks after his birth.
The sudden death of not one, but two babies is a tragedy almost beyond
comprehension. But for Sally, a 34-year-old British solicitor, it was only
the beginning of a horror story of unimaginable proportions in which she
was accused of murdering her babies, branded as a psychologically
disturbed and unloving mother, convicted of infanticide and, in November
1999, sentenced to life in jail. The case turned on complex medical
evidence and statistics
that, after the trial, were shown to be spurious - in particular, one
prosecution witness made headlines by claiming that the likelihood of two
such deaths occurring in one family was 73 million to one. It involved a
couple who, in their own eyes, were hardworking, decent young
professionals, making their way up in the world. But in the aftermath of
the conviction
Sally was portrayed as a selfish, grasping, depressive career-obsessed
woman who liked pretty clothes, and who first abused and then murdered her
children because they ruined her figure and stood in the way of her
lucrative future. According to which paper you read, for instance, on the
day she murdered Harry she had twice popped out to her local bottle shop
to
buy, in total, seven, eight - or was it nine? - bottles of wine.
It was a compellingly sordid tale that the British press, and to a lesser
extent Australian newspapers, covered with a mix of relish and horror. As
Australia's Lindy Chamberlain could attest, there is no figure more
reviled than a mother accused of the ultimate evil - murdering her baby.
But two weeks ago we learned that, just as with Lindy Chamberlain, it had
all been a
terrible, terrible mistake. On January 30, Sally was released after three
years in prison, when the British Court of Appeal found vital medical
evidence had been withheld during her trial. Sitting in the dock of the
packed courtroom, Sally, now 38, cried as the verdict was read. Her
husband, Steve, clasped his hands to his face as though in prayer.
Outside the court, looking pale and gaunt, with eyes haunted by pain,
Sally's voice faltered as she thanked her husband for his unswerving
support. "He has stood by me and supported me through the whole
nightmare, not through blind love or unthinking loyalty, but because he
knows me better than anyone else and knows how much I loved our
babies."
It was Steve, a fellow lawyer, who finally unearthed the vital medical
evidence that convinced the appeal court judges to overturn Sally's
conviction. Throughout the five-year ordeal he never wavered in his
insistence of his wife's innocence. He had to sell their $900,000 home to
pay legal fees and lost a lucrative partnership at his law firm when he
moved to be near the prison. And he campaigned for two years to get the
medical records of his second son, Harry, which revealed he probably died
due to lethal bacterial infection, not from being shaken by his mother, as
the jury had decided.
One British MP has described the case as "one of the biggest
miscarriages of justice in recent British history". The government
pathologist who carried out the post-mortem on both babies and was a
crucial expert witness for the prosecution is facing investigation by
Britain's General Medical Council and lawyers predict Sally will receive
hundreds of thousands of pounds in
compensation for loss of earnings, false imprisonment and the shattering
damage to her reputation. But nothing - no apology, no amount of money -
can ever return her life to what it was before.
Sally describes her childhood as "quite idyllic". She was born
in Wiltshire in 1964, the only child of a hairdresser, Jean, and a senior
policeman. Her father, Frank Lockyer, said of Sally: "She wasn't
naturally brilliant, but she was a very hard-working girl. She carried the
cross at school that all policemen's daughters carry: that they're
expected to be a little bit better than everybody else in their behaviour,
same as the parson's daughter."
After graduating from Southampton University, she joined Lloyds Bank and
then Citibank in London, where she met Steve, a financial lawyer. The
couple married in 1990, and three years later decided to move out of the
capital so they could buy a house large enough for a family. Both got jobs
with leading law firms in Manchester and in 1995 they moved into Hope
Cottage, a comfortable house in Cheshire. Their first son, Christopher,
was born on September 22, 1996. Apparently healthy, he was voted
"best-looking baby" in Sally's post-natal class. Pam Grieve, her
local visiting nurse, said Sally was an excellent mother.
On December 13, Steve went to his office Christmas dinner. His wife was
alone at home with Christopher. After feeding him at 7.30pm, she put him
down to sleep in the couple's bedroom. At about 9:15, she went to the
kitchen to make a cup of tea. When she returned, she saw that the baby -
who was, she says, in his Moses basket - had turned grey. She phoned
emergency
services at 9.35pm and an ambulance arrived within two minutes. Sally,
though, was hysterical, and unable to let the crew in; the front door was
deadlocked and she couldn't find the keys. Finally a neighbour who had a
key heard the commotion and let them in. Despite attempts at resuscitation
it was too late. Christopher was taken to hospital and pronounced dead at
10.40pm.
A post-mortem was conducted on December 16 by Dr Alan Williams, the local
government pathologist; photographs were taken by police. Williams' report
referred to "a small split and slight bruising in the inner lip and
some bruising on the legs", injuries which he decided were consistent
with the resuscitation attempts of hospital staff. Dr Jane Cowan, the
hospital
consultant pediatrician who had first seen Christopher, agreed. Dr
Williams certified that the child had died of a lower respiratory tract
infection.
Sally Clark had been distraught over her son's death - suspiciously so,
according to the prosecution; as distraught as might be expected,
according to Dr Cowan. The Clarks decided the best way to overcome their
grief was to have another child. Harry was born on November, 29 1997,
three weeks premature, but apparently healthy.
The Clarks participated in a support program offered to parents who have
lost a child through cot death. Like all children in the scheme, Harry had
a full medical examination at 12 days. The parents were given
resuscitation training, growth charts to record the baby's progress and a
thermometer to ensure correct room temperature. They were also given an
apnoea alarm to
monitor respiration, which would sound if the baby stopped breathing.
(Harry's alarm seems to have been faulty. Sally says it often sounded even
when there was no apparent problem.) Regular support was provided by
health visitor Elizabeth McDougall, who visited the home weekly. In her
statement to police, McDougall said she found Harry to be well and making
steady progress, and described Sally as "coping well with
breast-feeding (and)
happy and delighted with her new baby".
On the morning of January 26, 1998, Sally took Harry out to nearby shops.
At about 2pm she rang McDougall and told her the apnoea monitor had
repeatedly sounded; at 3.35 McDougall arrived with a new one. Later Sally
took the baby to the health centre, where he was vaccinated against
diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus and polio. Sally was given a post-natal
check by Dr Kathleen Case, who later told police there "were no
problems" and that Sally appeared
"cheerful".
Steve arrived home from work at about 8pm. Almost 90 minutes later, he was
in the kitchen preparing a bottle for the baby, when his wife screamed
from their upstairs bedroom. Harry was slumped forward in his bouncy chair
and had turned blue. An ambulance arrived nine minutes after Sally's
9.27pm emergency call and found Steve attempting resuscitation, following
advice being given over the phone by emergency services. Harry, though,
did not
respond; he was taken to hospital and pronounced dead at 10.41pm. That the
two children died at almost exactly the same time was something the
prosecution made much of.
In view of this second death, Dr Cowan told police it was essential the
post-mortem be conducted by a specialist pediatric pathologist. However,
it was again carried by the general pathologist, Dr Williams, in the
presence of police. He found tears in the brain, "severe
injuries" to the spine, one dislocated rib and what he described as a
"possible old fracture" of another. He concluded that "the
spinal injuries and lesions in the brain and eyes are those that would be
expected from non-accidental injury" and that Harry had been shaken
on several occasions over several days.
When police arrived at Hope Cottage on February 23, 1998, Sally Clark
assumed they had information about the cause of Harry's death and began
making them cups of tea. Instead they had come to arrest her and Steve on
suspicion of murder. Taken in for questioning, both were naive enough -
and shocked enough - to waive their rights to a solicitor. The answers
Sally
gave during three 40-minute sessions that day provided police, and later
the media, with material that was used against her - material the Clarks
say was wilfully misinterpreted.
For example, she told police she had been "a wee bit
apprehensive" about a business trip to Glasgow Steve had planned for
January 27, the day after Harry's death. The prosecution used this remark
to claim she was unable to cope with the prospect of her husband's absence
and had murdered Harry to prevent him going; in fact she was worried Harry
might suffer an adverse reaction to his vaccinations.
She also spoke to the police about her drinking. She told them she had
become depressed after the move to Hope Cottage, where she felt isolated.
She explained: "I got very low and cried an awful lot during that
period." She began drinking to alleviate her loneliness - she says
"two or three gin and tonics on a Saturday afternoon." In '96,
she admitted, she had "a couple
of binges" during the early stages of her pregnancy with Christopher
and her drinking frequently got out of control. Indeed, in April 1997,
four months after Christopher's death and two months into her next
pregnancy, she sought psychiatric help. But she was not, she told police,
drinking by the end of the pregnancy, nor in the weeks prior to Harry's
death.
This, though, was peripheral: Dr Williams' post-mortem report spoke of
"non-accidental injury" and on February 27, he took slides of
Harry's eyes to Michael Green, emeritus professor of forensic pathology at
Sheffield University. Williams believed he had detected retinal
haemorrhages in both eyes; Green confirmed this finding. Together with the
tears in the brain and the spinal injuries, these haemorrhages were
crucial evidence the baby had been shaken to death.
Green and Williams then re-examined preserved tissue taken during
Christopher's post-mortem. They found there was extensive fresh bleeding
and old bleeding in the lungs. This, combined with the damage to the lip,
led them to the new conclusion Christopher had been smothered, and these
findings were passed to police. On July 2, 1998, Sally Clark was charged
with the murders of both children. On November 29, while the case against
her was in preparation, she gave birth to a third son, now four. The boy,
who cannot be named for legal reasons, was taken from his parents at birth
and spent his first year in foster care before Steve successfully fought
to get him back.
At the committal hearing on May 24, 1999, a difference of opinion between
Dr Williams and Prof. Green, both of whom were appearing for the
prosecution, emerged. Although Williams maintained there had been fresh
blood in Christopher's lungs, Prof. Green now disagreed. If there was, as
he said, "no evidence of recent significant haemorrhage", then
smothering was an
unlikely cause of death.
However, the damage to the prosecution's case was soon repaired by another
expert witness, Sir Roy Meadow, emeritus professor of pediatrics at St
James University Hospital, Leeds. He said he knew of other proven cases of
smothering in which there had been no fresh blood in the lungs and agreed
to provide the defence with his research data on these cases. He also said
the chances of two deaths like those of Christopher and Harry occurring
naturally in a family were one in a million - he was later to produce the
even more damning statistic of 73 million to one. The magistrate decided
Sally Clark had a case to answer and committed her to trial on October 11,
1999.
Just three days before the trial, the defence team finally obtained the
vitally important slides that supposedly showed retinal haemorrhages of
Harry's eyes. The defence called on expert witness Prof. Philip Luthert,
consultant histo-pathologist at the Institute of Ophthalmology, and Prof.
Green to examine the slides. They could find no sign of haemorrhage. Green
rang the crown's QC, Robin Spencer, and told him this. By this stage
another prosecution expert, Dr Christine Smith, a consultant
neuropathologist, had also examined the slides and found no sign either of
tears in the brain or of damage to the spinal cord. The crown's crucial
evidence of the so-called "classic triangle" of injuries in baby
shaking cases: spinal damage, tearing in the brain and retinal
haemorrhages, had evaporated; shaking was not the cause of Harry's death.
Prof. Luthert expected - naively he told one journalist - the charges
would be dropped.
But Robin Spencer opened his case on the basis that Harry had been either
shaken or smothered. By the end of the trial he was asserting that both
boys had been smothered, and that both had also been the victims of
assaults prior to death. He may have been encouraged by some new evidence
from Prof. Meadow, who, a week before the case was due to start, had
ridden to the prosecution's rescue once again, making a statement to
police that, on the
basis of a new, then-unpublished government report on deaths in infancy,
the risk of these two deaths having occurred by chance was one in 73
million.
Amid the long, complicated evidence about intra-alveolar haemorrhages,
haemosiderin-laden macrophages and other abstruse medical arcana, Meadow's
one-in-73-million statistic seemed luminously clear, and the figure was
cited in every British newspaper. Meadow further told the court that, put
another way, this meant that a British family would suffer by chance an
unexplained double child death "about once every 100 years".
This was certainly easier to take in than the arguments about death by
smothering. The overriding problem with trying to ascertain death by
smothering is that both the presence and the absence of a variety of
physical signs can be consistent with smothering. Indeed, Meadow
maintained in his paper Unnatural Sudden Infant Death, that one of the
characteristics
of death by smothering is that "the corpse appears normal".
Certainly in Harry's case, no signs of smothering were discerned by
medical staff or at post-mortem.
Another difficulty arose from the fact that all medical evidence in both
cases was based on the post-mortems carried out by Dr Williams, and the
tissue sample and slides he had prepared. Much doubt was cast upon his
findings from both sides - for example that the tears in the brain, the
subdural haemorrhage in the spine and the retinal haemorrhages had never
existed. Defence witness Jem Berry, professor of paediatric pathology at
the University of Bristol, told the court: "I have never before been
involved in a case where so many of the original findings either failed to
exist or crumbled to dust upon critical examination."
Williams' post-mortem, on which the prosecution was basing its assertion
that Harry had suffered earlier episodes of abuse, also referred to one
"possible" fractured and one dislocated rib. However, other
expert witnesses noted the absence of damage to the surrounding tissue -
which would have been expected if previous abuse had taken place. One
eminent consultant
pediatrician said she "could not exclude the possibility" that
the rib damage was caused by the dissection of the body during
post-mortem. As well, there had been no visible sign of abuse to either
child during his short life. No one ever witnessed Sally harming or
ill-treating her children. No one who saw her with them suggested she was
anything other than an ordinary,
caring, devoted mother. When taken to hospital, both children were seen by
medical and nursing staff, ambulance men and police officers. None saw any
marks or bruising on either child. Photographs of supposed bruises on
Christopher's body were of poor quality and the lip tear could have
resulted from the use of a laryngoscope during attempts to resuscitate the
child at hospital; in fact that was the explanation originally given to
police by Dr Cowan, the hospital pediatrician.
With the medical evidence in such disarray, the prosecution put great
weight on more circumstantial evidence. An important part of their case
revolved around the similarities in the two deaths. Robin Spencer argued
that both children were found by Sally in the same room, in the same
bouncy chair, at approximately the same time of day, a time when,
statistically, babies are less likely to die natural deaths. (Most sudden
natural deaths of infants occur between midnight and 11am). Both were
about the same age. On each occasion she was alone with the child. On the
first her husband was away; in Harry's case he was about to go on a
business trip; the implication was that she was so fragile she murdered
the children to ensure Steve's presence. The defence countered that these
alleged coincidences were either meaningless or simply wrong -
Christopher, for instance, was in his Moses basket.
Yet the prosecution still had that towering piece of evidence: Prof.
Meadow's one-in-73-million statistic. Summing up, the judge, Mr Justice
Harrison, advised the jury that the statistics appeared
"compelling" and that they should "attach some
significance" to the figures. He reiterated Meadow's remark that
"there is a chance of two SIDS in the same family
happening every 100 years". To the jury, it must have seemed as if
innocence was a statistical impossibility. Sally Clark was convicted on
each count of murder.
Alas, Meadow's statements were not as solid as they seemed. He never did
provide the data on the absence of blood in the lungs in other proven
cases of smothering he had promised the defence; after some delay, he said
that his secretary had mistakenly shredded it. Nor did his famous
statistic survive. When the report on which he had based the 73 million
figure was
published, it stated that a family suffering one unexplained death was at
greater risk of a second, and that there had been five double
"unascertained" child deaths in Britain in the previous three
years.
Though the damning statistic had been discredited by the time of Sally's
first appeal in 2000, her lawyers could still offer no explanation for the
deaths and her convictions were upheld. It wasn't until November 2001 -
three years after Harry's death and two years after his wife's conviction
- that Steve finally obtained a copy of Harry's medical records. Within
the piles of notes he found a document which at last provided some support
to his conviction that his wife was innocent. "At first I didn't
understand the significance of them," he said. "But when I
showed them to the experts, they said 'Eureka'. We knew we had new
evidence which was crucial. But it took another 15 months in which my wife
stayed in prison before we were able to put it to the Appeal Court."
The results of blood tests on Harry, spelled out in the newly discovered
document, showed his body was riddled with potentially lethal
staphylococcus aureus bacteria, suggesting he had died from natural
causes. Dr Williams, who carried out both post-mortems, had seen the
report but it was never disclosed to the defence, even after he was asked
specifically about such
tests. As had happened with the spurious identification of foetal blood
samples in the Chamberlain case, the testimony of a key prosecution expert
witness had been thrown into doubt.
The Criminal Case Review Commission referred the matter back to the Court
of Appeals, which described the new evidence as "devastating".
Lord Justice Kay said the courts had reached conclusions "wholly
unaware of this aspect of the matter", adding that Dr Williams had
failed to share "information that a competent pathologist ought to
have appreciated needed to be assessed before any conclusion was
reached". Given that Dr Williams' evidence had been
discredited, Clark's lawyers argued the whole process of the police
inquiry and trial had gone awry. The judges agreed. Sally Clark could go
free.
More on Roy Meadows...
( 1, 2,
3 , 4, 5
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