The Day the King Died

A Terrible Miscarriage of Justice

Morris, Jim, Maddocks, Glyn

• Publisher: Waterside Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781909976139
• eBook ISBN: 9781908162861

There was a quaint British convention under which executions were stopped and sentence commuted if scheduled to take place on the day the sovereign died. Alfred Moore was doubly unfortunate: still protesting his innocence he was on the scaffold an hour before the death of King George VI was announced. Here, the author re-assesses the evidence in this case of the double murder of two police officers and shows why the trial at Leeds Assizes was a travesty of justice—packed with mistakes, inaccuracies, dubious recollections and supposition. Set against the social backdrop of 1950s West Yorkshire, The Day the King Died stresses the need for caution where witness accounts may be driven by preconceptions or 'fit' too tidily and adds to the voices of those calling for justice in a case in which prosecutors almost certainly got the wrong man. 'A further example of why judicial homicide should never return... a readable and highly detailed account... should be compulsory reading for all law students and criminologists who become associated with our modern criminal justice processes': Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers. 'A fascinating case': Jon Robins, The Justice Gap. 'I read the book with a growing sense of disquiet and unease and was left with a feeling that a terrible miscarriage of justice might well have occurred': Campbell Malone.

Index

A

accident 51–52, 180

air pistol/rifle 89, 115, 147, 170, 177, 186

alibi 86, 127

Almondbury 27

ambulance 47, 152–154

ammunition 27, 89, 102, 169, 184, 194

anaesthetic 61, 117

antibiotics 59

armed police, etc. 54, 154, 164

Army 97, 107, 162, 168

arrest 19, 49, 116, 147, 162, 188, 194

arrogance 115, 157

ash-tip 10, 35, 43, 51, 122, 149, 218

assizes

Leeds Assizes 11, 149

B

ballistics 11, 97, 107, 111, 219

Barber, Sgt 72, 168

Barclay, PC 109, 169

Bark Hill Council School 15

Baxter, Joe 99, 111, 147, 170, 208, 211

Beard, Dr Jessie 57, 157

Beck, Adolph 128

Bentley, Derek 225

B & J Whitman’s 18

black market 23, 30

Black, Norman 70, 135, 193, 197

blood 11, 57, 73

blood transfusion 60, 213

blood pressure 58, 59, 117

blood transfusion 59–61, 117, 213

Bodkin Adams, Dr John 175

Bottoms Farm 18, 19

Bradley, Det Insp 65

Bradley, DI 167

break-ins 19, 21, 24

Bressler, Fenton 81

brickworks 10, 152, 178

brickworks raid 156

briefings 10

Brockholes 25

broken windows 130

Brown, Sgt 109, 169

bullets 72, 105, 107, 110, 155, 171, 205

bullet holes 130

burglary 9, 20, 23, 31, 162, 177

B...

Table of contents

• Copyright and publication details
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Beginning
• The Burglar
• Police
• Shooting
• Police Constable Jagger
• Arrest
• Hospital
• Identification
• Police Evidence
• Consistency
• Family
• Evidence
• The Farm
• Mistakes
• Misdeeds
• Doubt
• Saturday Night
• On Remand
• The Trial
• Defence Evidence
• The Prosecution
• The Defence
• Withheld or Ignored Evidence
• Some Thoughts on the Summing-up
• The Run Up to the Appeal and its Aftermath
• The Rest of February 1952 and On
• Index