The Radio and Telephone Logs
LATEST: Statements from Communications Officeralso read: The Wireless Message Log and The Editing of the Police Logs
Radio and telephone logs are documents which are written up by a communications officer in order to create an accurate contemporaneous account of all the information given over the police radio or the telephone to police headquarters during an incident.
On 7 August 1985 Malcolm Bonnett was on duty in the information room at police headquarters (Chelmsford) and it was his job to make accurate timed records of all the radio and telephone messages relayed to him regarding the incident at White House Farm. As an additional safeguard to ensure that he recorded information accurately, Essex Police made audio tape recordings of all his radio and telephone conversations.
Bonnett’s statement dated 8 November 1985 confirms that it was standard practice to make these audio tape recordings:
“As a matter of course all radio and telephone messages are recorded on audio tape as an accurate means of recording.”
In March 2004 Essex Police complied with a court order to hand over the complete radio and telephone logs to Jeremy Bamber’s defence lawyers, who were sent a document consisting of twenty-four pages. Prior to this disclosure the defence had only known about two pages of information, which had been disclosed to the defence in 2001, prior to the last appeal in 2002. Initially the police had given only a single page to the defence prior to the trial in 1986. This was exhibited at trial as item 29, the telephone call record of Jeremy Bamber reporting to the police the details of the call he had received from his father. But what was not known at trial was that on the back of this telephone log was the re-written, edited version of the first page of the radio log. Because the radio log did not form part of the prosecution case at trial, there was no reason for a photocopy of the reverse side to be made and given to the defence. Nor was there a reason for the defence to examine the original telephone log because there was no dispute over the content or clarity of the photocopy provided to them.
Documents exhibited at trial in bundles given to the defence, the prosecution and the judge are always photocopies. There are only two reasons why the defence may request sight of the original documents, when either the copies are illegible or if they suspect that there has been an addition or deletion to a document. So had the defence looked at the original telephone log in court and seen the hand-written radio messages on the back of it, they might have made further enquiries. However at trial, no one looked at the original radio message therefore no one considered why only a single page of radio messages seemed to exist, or why they were not written on the proper form.
Essex Police have so far refused to hand over the audio recordings which Malcolm Bonnett states were made of all the radio and telephone messages covering the White House Farm incident on 7 August 1985.
In January 2005, Andrew Hunter MP received a reply to a written parliamentary question to the Home Secretary regarding the failure of the police to hand over copies of these audio recordings. The Home Office Minister stated that the correct way to obtain these recordings would be by written application, under the Freedom of Information Act, to the police. Therefore on 7 February 2005 an official request was made to Essex Police to hand over all the relevant audio tape recordings. To date there has been no response.
Obtaining these audio recordings will serve two purposes:
Firstly, it is the simplest method of proving that the police re-wrote and edited the original radio message log to conceal Jeremy Bamber’s alibi evidence given by the police at the scene. But even without the audio tapes it can be proven absolutely that the first two pages were edited and re-written.
Secondly, Essex Police are now saying that entries which appear on the radio and telephone logs are a misrepresentation of the facts. They say that Malcolm Bonnett was professionally incompetent in his job and that most of what he wrote down was wrong. Of course Essex Police have to criticise Malcolm Bonnett because if his records are accurate, the case against Jeremy Bamber collapses. But even without the audio records the accuracy of Malcolm Bonnett’s log-keeping can be verified by cross-reference to numerous other documents, proving that Essex Police do not want the truth to be revealed.
There is clear evidence that the radio and telephone logs were not disclosed to the defence at trial, a fact confirmed by Jeremy Bamber’s trial defence lawyers, Judge Rivlin QC (as he now is) and Mr Lawson QC. Furthermore these logs were not shown to the prosecution’s trial lawyers, Mr Arlidge QC and his junior, Mr Munday, nor were they shown to the trial judge, Sir Maurice Drake. All of them have confirmed this in writing.
The result of this non-disclosure by the police was that Jeremy Bamber received an unfair trial. To establish the fairness of a trial, the Appeal Court states that the defence must meet four strict tests:
A. Whether the evidence appears to the court to be capable of belief.
This test has to do with the authenticity of the evidence; in this case, are the radio and telephone logs actual photocopies of genuine documents? Of course the answer is yes so the first test has been passed.
B. Whether it appears to the court that the evidence may afford any ground for allowing an appeal.
This test is about the impact of the new evidence on the safety of the conviction. The non-disclosure of the radio and telephone logs gives rise to two distinct grounds of appeal:
First of all, that key documentary evidence has been edited and re-written in order to hide alibi evidence from the court and the defence.
Secondly, that non-disclosure of the rest of the radio and telephone logs has led to the courts being wholly misled over the truthfulness of the prosecution’s case. For example, it is now known that at 5.25am Essex Police were in conversation with a person inside the house. It is also known that the police originally identified a second body in the kitchen. Furthermore, we know that DCI Harris used the kitchen telephone to call Dep. Chief Constable Simpson prior to the scenes of crime photos being taken and that in 2002 the Appeal Court was wholly misled about this issue.
The editing and re-writing of evidence to conceal an alibi would be grounds for allowing an appeal. The misrepresentation of scenes of crime evidence to the defence and prosecution by concealing documents from them would also be grounds for allowing an appeal.
So on two separate counts, test two is satisfied.
C. Whether the evidence which is the subject of the appeal would have been admissible in the proceedings from which the appeal ensues.
This simply means would it have been legal, had it been known about, to use the non-disclosed evidence at trial.
This test is met because clearly the radio and telephone logs could have been used had they been available to the defence or prosecution at trial.
D. Whether there is reasonable explanation for the failure to adduce the evidence in those proceedings.
This is what is known as the due diligence test. The Appeal Court requires the defence to establish that it made every reasonable effort prior to the original trial to discover the evidence now being relied on. Could this evidence have been uncovered during the usual enquiries that defence lawyers make prior to trial. Essex Police will maintain that they allowed Jeremy Bamber’s lawyers free access to all the evidence in this case. To establish this they state that Edmund Lawson QC was shown into an office and told that he could look at all the documents in the case stacked in boxes in that room. But there is no proof that any of those boxes contained the radio and telephone logs, because if they had been there, it is inconceivable that Edmund Lawson QC would not have spotted their significance and asked for copies to be made. Disclosure has not been met. Important documents such as these logs should have been sent to the defence lawyers by the police as a matter of course. We know that these logs were being concealed by the police because they did not even show them to their own lawyers. Nor were they disclosed to the City of London Police during their enquiry into the case, or to the Criminal Cases Review Committee, the defence or the Appeal Court in 2002. In fact, right up to the year 2004, Essex Police stated that the radio logs consisted of a single-page document written on both sides of the page. Then in March 2004, Essex Police were forced to admit that in fact, the radio and telephone logs consisted of twenty-four pages – thus they were finally disclosed after having been kept secret in the Chief Constable’s safe since 1985.
So the fourth test is met because neither the prosecution nor the defence lawyers or the trial judge knew these logs existed. No one apart from the police knew and no one was ever meant to know that the radio and telephone logs consisted of twenty-four pages, because once revealed, the prosecution’s case becomes unsustainable. There was no chance that Jeremy Bamber’s lawyers could have discovered the radio and telephone logs for use at his trial in 1986.
Since all four tests laid down by the Appeal Court for adducing fresh evidence have been met in full, it is now simply a matter of time waiting for this evidence to be heard in court and for the appeal judges to rule upon it.