Media response Rose writes that there was a racist media frenzy after the killing, placing intense external pressure on detectives to solve the case.
The Sun newspaper reportedly compared the Labour leader of Haringey Council and Labour's prospective candidate for
Tottenham,
Bernie Grant—who had immigrated from
Guyana in 1963—to an ape, writing that he had spoken to reporters while, in Rose's words, "peeling a banana and juggling an orange". Grant caused uproar with his comments after the killing. He was largely misquoted by hostile reporters that "the police got a bloody good hiding" – his actual words were "the youth think they gave the police a bloody good hiding". and "Maybe it was a policeman who stabbed another policeman." Censured by
Neil Kinnock, then Labour leader, Grant later described the violence as "inexcusable". The Metropolitan Police Commissioner,
Kenneth Newman, told reporters that groups of
Trotskyists and
anarchists had orchestrated the violence, a theme picked up by the
Daily Telegraph and others. Falling for a story from media hoaxer
Rocky Ryan, the
Daily Express reported on 8 October 1985 that a "Moscow-trained hit squad gave orders as mob hacked PC Blakelock to death", alleging that "crazed left-wing extremists" trained in Moscow and Libya had coordinated the riots. There was also internal pressure on detectives from the rank and file, who saw their superior officers as sharing the blame for Blakelock's death. The
Police Federation's journal,
Police, argued that senior officers had pursued a policy at Broadwater Farm of avoiding confrontation at all costs, and that "community policing" had led to compromises with criminals, rather than a focus on upholding the law. As a result, the journal wrote, officers had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation that had developed on the estate.
Det Ch Supt Graham Melvin Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin of the Serious Crime Squad was placed in charge of the investigation a few hours after the killing, at 2:00 am on 7 October. With 150 officers assigned full-time, the inquiry became the largest in the history of the Metropolitan Police. Born in Halifax in 1941, Melvin had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1960, then the
Criminal Investigation Department. He had studied at
Bramshill Police College, served with the
Flying Squad, and was known for having solved several notorious cases, including that of
Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler. He became a
detective chief superintendent in March 1985, when he joined the elite International and Organised Crime Squad (SO1).
Interviews Melvin's first problem was that there was no forensic evidence. Senior officers had not allowed the estate to be sealed off immediately after the attack, which meant that the crime scene had not been secured. Witnesses and those directly involved had been allowed to leave without giving their names, and objects that might have held fingerprints had not been collected. Police had not been allowed into the estate in great numbers until 4 am on 7 October, by which time much of the evidence had disappeared. Whatever remained was removed during
Haringey Council's clean-up operation. Melvin therefore resorted to arresting suspects—including juveniles, some of them regarded as vulnerable—and holding them for days without access to lawyers. Of the 359 people arrested in 1985 and 1986 in connection with the riot, 94 were interviewed in the presence of a lawyer. Many of the confessions that resulted, whether directly about the murder, or about having taken part in the rioting, were made before the lawyer was given access to the interviewee, according to Rose. When people did confess to even a minor role in the rioting, such as throwing a few stones, they were charged with
affray. One resident told the 1986 Gifford Inquiry into the rioting: "You would go to bed and you would just lie there and you would think, are they going to come and kick my door, what's going to happen to my children? ... It was that horrible fear that you lived with day by day, knowing they could come and kick down your door and hold you for hours." The inquiry heard that 9,165 police officers were either deployed on the estate or held in reserve between 10 and 14 October 1985. Thus, argues Rose, the police created, or at least intensified, a climate of fear in which witnesses were afraid to step forward. Melvin defended his decision to hold people without access to legal advice by arguing that lawyers, unwittingly or otherwise, might pass information they had gleaned during interviews to other suspects. He said under cross-examination during the 1987 murder trial that, in his view, "the integrity of some firms of solicitors left a lot to be desired"; he believed solicitors were being retained by people who had an interest in learning what other suspects had said.
(1985–1986) Murder charges Mark Pennant Mark Pennant, aged 15, was arrested on 9 October 1985 and charged with murder two days later, the first to be charged. Born in England to West-Indian parents, Pennant had been raised in the
West Indies until he was nine, after which he returned to the UK; he was diagnosed with learning difficulties and was attending a special school. Arrested and handcuffed at school, he was taken to Wood Green Police Station and interviewed six times over the course of two days, with a teacher in attendance. His mother was not told that he had been taken into custody, and the police reportedly told him that she had refused to help him. He told the police that he had cut Blakelock and kicked him twice, and he named Winston Silcott as the ringleader, and several others, including another juvenile, Mark Lambie. When charged with the murder, he asked the teacher who accompanied him: "Does that mean I have to go and live with you?" He described almost a ritualistic killing and said that Silcott—whom he called "Sticks"—had forced him to make his "mark" on Blakelock with a sword. According to David Rose, Hill described inflicting injuries to Blakelock's chest and leg that did not match the autopsy report.
Winston Silcott Background According to David Rose, a former detective inspector called the Blakelock investigation a "pre-scientific inquiry, it was all about how to get Winston Silcott convicted, not discovering who killed Keith Blakelock." By the time of the murder, local police saw Silcott as the "biggest mafioso in Tottenham ... running the mugging gangs, paying them with drugs", according to another former senior officer in Tottenham. Silcott was 26 years old when he was arrested, the oldest of the six charged with murder. He was born in Tottenham in 1959; his parents, both
Seventh-day Adventists, had arrived in England from
Montserrat two years earlier. He told Rose that he had experienced racism throughout his entire upbringing, particularly from the police. After leaving school at 15, he took a series of low-paying jobs and in 1976 began breaking into houses. The following year he was convicted of nine counts of burglary and sent to
borstal for a few months, and in 1979 he was sentenced to six months for wounding. In September 1980 he stood trial for the murder of 19-year-old Lennie McIntosh, a postal worker, who was stabbed and killed at a party in Muswell Hill in 1979. The first trial resulted in a hung jury; a second trial saw him acquitted. In December 1984 Silcott was arrested for the murder of a 22-year-old boxer, Anthony Smith, at a party in Hackney. Smith had been slashed more than once on his face, there were two wounds to his abdomen, a lung had been lacerated and his
aorta cut. Silcott was charged with the murder in May 1985 and was out on bail when Blakelock was killed in October of that year. At first, he told police he had not known Smith and had not been at the party, although at trial he acknowledged having been there. He said Smith had started punching him, and that he had pushed Smith back but had not been carrying a knife. Silcott was convicted of Smith's murder in February 1986, while awaiting trial for the Blakelock murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment; he was released in 2003 after serving 17 years. After the conviction he told his lawyer he had indeed known Smith, that there had been bad blood between them, and that he had stabbed the man in self-defence because one of Smith's friends had had a knife.
Disputed interview Known as "Sticks" locally, Silcott was living in the Martlesham block of Broadwater Farm at the time of the riots, He told Rose: "And look, I'm on bail for a murder. I know I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid. There's helicopters, police photographers everywhere. All I could think about was that I didn't want to lose my bail." Silcott was arrested for Blakelock's murder on 12 October 1985, six days after the riot; he was interviewed five times over 24 hours; Det Ch Supt Melvin asked the questions and Det Insp Maxwell Dingle took the notes. During the first four interviews, Silcott stayed mostly silent and refused to sign the detectives' notes, but during the fifth interview on 13 October, when Melvin said he knew Silcott had struck Blakelock with a machete or sword, his demeanour changed, according to the notes. It was this interview that led to Silcott's
conviction for murder being overturned. According to a scientist who conducted forensic tests on the original interview notes, the detectives' notes from the portion of the interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself
had been inserted after the other interview notes were written. At the time of Raghip's arrest, he had been drinking and smoking cannabis for several days, and his common-law wife had just left him, taking their son with her. He was held for two days without representation, first speaking to a solicitor on the third day, who said he had found Raghip distressed and disoriented. He was interviewed by Det Sgt van Thal and Det Insp John Kennedy ten times over a period of four days. He made several incriminating statements, first that he had thrown stones, then during the second interview that he had seen the attack on Blakelock. During the third, he said he had spoken to Silcott about the murder, and that Silcott owned a hammer with a hook on one side. After the fifth interview he was charged with affray, and during the sixth, he described the attack on Blakelock: "It was like you see in a film, a helpless man with dogs on him. It was just like that, it was really quick." He did not sign this interview, Rose writes, and after it, he vomited. During a seventh interview the next day, Raghip described noises he said Blakelock had made during the attack. During the eighth interview, he said he had armed himself that night with a broom handle and had tried to get close to what was happening to Blakelock, but there were too many people around him: "I had a weapon when I was running toward the policeman, a broom handle." He said he might have kicked or hit him had he been able to get close enough. Rose writes that Raghip also offered the order in which Blakelock's attackers had launched the assault. He was held for another two days, released on bail, and then charged with murder six weeks later, in December 1985, under the doctrine of
common purpose.
(1987) Trial: R v Silcott and others Of the 359 men and youths arrested, 159 were charged, including with affray and throwing petrol bombs, and 88 were convicted. According to
The Times, the accused were "divided almost equally between black and white". Five defendants were 29 or older; most were teenagers or in their early 20s. The youngest was aged 12. The trial of the six accused of murder—Silcott, Raghip and Braithwaite, the adults; and Pennant, Hill and Lambie, the youths—began in court number two of the
Old Bailey on 19 January 1987 in front of Mr Justice Hodgson. All were charged with murder, riot, and affray; Lambie was also charged with throwing petrol bombs. The jury consisted of eight white men, two black women and two white women. They were not told that it was Silcott's fourth murder trial, Silcott's barrister,
Barbara Mills, a future
Director of Public Prosecutions, decided that he should not take the stand to avoid exposing him to questions about his previous convictions. The press coverage of the trial included the publication on day two, by
The Sun, of a notorious close-up of a half-smiling Silcott, one that "created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England", as journalist
Kurt Barling put it. Silcott said he had been asleep in a police cell when it was taken; he said he was woken up, held in a corridor with his arms pinned against a wall and photographed, and that the expression on his face was one of fear. Its publication constituted "the most gross contempt", according to the trial judge speaking to David Rose in 1992. No action was taken against the newspaper. The judge dismissed the charges against the youths because they had been detained without access to parents or a lawyer; in the absence of the jury, the judge was highly critical of the police on that point. Four armoured police vehicles waited in Tottenham as the jury deliberated for three days. One black female juror fainted when the verdicts were read out. Rose writes that the tabloids knew no restraint, writing about the beasts of Broadwater Farm, hooded animals and packs of savages, with the old jail-cell image of Silcott published above captions such as "smile of evil". ==Campaign on behalf of the "Tottenham Three"==