Ann Whelan, the mother of Michael Hickey, one of the four men convicted of Carl Bridgewater’s murder, wrote to Paul in early 1980, soon after he had arrived at the Daily Mirror, pleading with him that her son and those convicted with him were innocent. Paul was not convinced. What mother would not protest her son’s innocence?
Some months later, he went to Birmingham to meet Ann and her husband, Fred. He listened long and hard. Whatever they said, in October the following year the first of many articles about the case ran in his column. Over the next twelve years, he estimated that he wrote another thirty articles on it for the Mirror alone.
That first article told the story of another murder, at the next farm. Soon after the four were found guilty, Hubert Wilkes, a seventy-year-old farmer, was shot dead at point- blank range by Hubert Spencer. There was no doubt about what had happened here: Wilkes’s thirty-four-year-old daughter and Spencer’s wife Janet were in the house at the time, and they had been discussing the Bridgewater case. Paul also pointed out the ‘strange coincidences’ linking Hubert Spencer to Carl Bridgewater. [Paul Foot Reporting, ‘Points that link killer with Carl’, Daily Mirror, 12 November 1980.] Double check this is all the same article or is it two?
In the freezing cold of February 1983, Michael Hickey took matters into his own hands when he and his cousin Vincent climbed onto the roof of Long Lartin prison and, with the support of other prisoners, stayed there for twenty-one days, alongside huge lettering they had painted on the prison roof: ‘SPENCER KILLED CARL’.
It was this protest that convinced Paul to listen to Ann Whelan’s pleas for him to write a book about the ‘Bridgewater Four’, as the four convicted men would become known.
Paul wrote the main draft of Murder at the Farm during a hectic and sleepless month in January 1986 in the Whelan’s flat. Ann was the best researcher Paul could have had. She had copies of every document and was a walking encyclopaedia of every detail of the case.
The four’s first appeal ran for forty-six days, making it the longest-running criminal appeal in the English courts – but all to no avail. On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1989, the judges read out their findings: ‘We entertain no doubt whatever but that Hubert Spencer had nothing whatever to do with the killing of Carl Bridgewater.’
Everyone was dejected and exhausted. But back in the office at the Mirror Paul tried to cheer everyone up: ‘Something will turn up. It always does.’ And it did.
Murder at the Farm ran to five editions. The first was published in 1986, the fifth in 1998. For that fifth and final edition, Paul wrote a new chapter, looking back on what had happened over those long years: A courageous woman set out to overturn a unanimous jury verdict in a famous murder case. At the outset she had no support save that of her mother and her husband, she had no money, no property, no experience of public life and her office was her council flat. Her one resource was her indomitable determination.
For Paul, it had begun as an investigation, but it became a campaign that lasted for 18 years. Let him have the last word: ‘By the way, who killed Carl Bridgewater?
