Knew one of the CID at the time, now sadly gone himself in his 50s, after the conviction he was allowed to say a bit more, Bishop basically thought because of the Police mistakes in the first trial he was untouchable, had this little girl not survived and identified him, getting it to court could have proved extremely difficult, with cries of ‘fitting up’ from certain quarters.
Which quarters might they be?
The hundred or so locals, including Bishop, who went on a protest march, to ‘re open’ the original case after the Police had ‘failed’ to fit RB up the first time.
OK. I see. You always get a contingent of locals campaigning in favour of, or against, a suspect. Especially in such cases. Didn't a mob firebomb a paediatrician's in Portsmouth 20 odd years ago? I wouldn't have been inclined to bring this into the narrative, however. Foolish though these people may look now, there may well have been some sort of logic to their tomfoolery at the time, with a killer 'still at large'.
It was graffiti not a firebomb.
That’s true for any random attack though. Much easier to convict when you’ve got a victim picking someone out as the offender and you’ve got evidence in the inside of that persons car in the way of hammer marks she said she left.
It is easy to get these cases confused. There have been other episodes of the same thing:
If the Police hadn't made such a hash of the case when the two girls were murdered, Rachael wouldn't have suffered such an ordeal, some members of Sussex Police should be hanging their heads in shame.