Sound judgment?

Mark Corley disappeared from his home in Grantham in July 2000. Five months later his badly decomposed body was found in a remote spot near Darlington. Forensics experts concluded that he’d died from a wound to the back of the head. He had been executed at close range by a single blast from a sawn-off shotgun.

A month or so before the body was discovered, Lincolnshire detectives made a number of arrests in connection with Corley’s disappearance. Eventually six men - John Smith, Gary Self, Danny Gray, John Toseland, and two brothers, Robert and George Sutherland from Bathgate in West Lothian, faced charges. The police were quietly confident they’d gain successful convictions.

But before the case had even properly begun, an extraordinary legal development stopped proceedings in their tracks: evidence placed before the court revealed that the defendants’ conversations with their lawyers had been illegally bugged.

After spending almost two weeks considering the legal arguments this gave rise to, the judge, Mr Justice Newman, decided his only option was to throw the case out. All six men walked free.

Three policemen who’d led the investigation, DCI Tony White, DI Roger Bannister and DS Steve Thorn, were immediately suspended. When she heard what had happened, Eileen Corley’s life fell apart for the second time in 12 months.

Reaction from the legal profession was swift and ferocious. Julian Young, a criminal lawyer, explains: "It was unbelievably stupid for a policeman to bug an accused when meeting his solicitor. It’s contrary to all human rights law and should never occur… The whole principle is that when you talk to your client in a police station you are entitled to believe you’re talking to him in complete privacy. But this was entirely disregarded in this case. It was disgraceful."

No one could quite understand how the police had managed to mess up their investigation so spectacularly. If the usual route to a successful conviction involved tiptoeing through a legal minefield, it seemed the Grantham detectives had managed to stumble over every trip-wire in their path.

To make matters worse, it appears that the Crown’s case was so strong it didn’t actually need any of the illegal material. One of the men even intended to turn Queen’s evidence against his co-accused. "It looks like the police messed up what was already a very, very strong case with their own stupidity," one defence lawyer told me. "There are now possibly people guilty of murder walking the streets."

What had happened to bring about such a shocking possibility? The exercise yards and the passageway near the cells where the accused were held were bugged. Listeners were tuned in at all times. Recordings were made. When they failed to suppress the tapes, the police tried to explain them away, saying their application to engage in surveillance in a "communal cell area" covered the passageways and exercise yards - this was nonsense, it didn’t.

The whole case was turned on its head: the accused were free to go without a stain on their characters. Yet no jury had even been sworn in. No evidence had been presented publicly. No foreman had delivered a verdict. And the mystery of Mark Corley’s death remained.

The last time Grantham attracted so much attention was through its favourite daughter, Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady’s family had a grocer’s shop there, the essence of all things English and sensible. Her father had even been mayor. But after Thatcher’s fall from power in 1991, the town had developed the same social and economic woes as everywhere else. Saturday nights became rowdier. Heroin wasn’t hard to find. Crime was rising and the police found their resources increasingly stretched.

Mark Corley was a thief who may or may not - depending on who you talk to - have been involved in the local drugs trade. All that is certain is that he had enemies and friends in equal measure. His mother will concede only that he was a petty thief, stealing "videos and the like", she says. She denies he was a drug addict. At least one other local source I spoke to said otherwise. According to Mr Justice Newman, Corley "was a man known to the courts. He had served time in prison many times." Indeed, Corley had only been out of jail three months before he vanished.

According to his mother, that particular jail sentence is linked to his death. This is how she tells it. Her son had got into a fight with an older local man. Mark was admiring this man’s car when the owner misconstrued his intentions and a fight ensued in the street. Mark threw something - his mother claims it was a stone but other documents describe it as more like a brick - which caused the car owner serious injury. Corley was sentenced to three years in jail for the attack.

When he was released he picked up where he left off with his girlfriend, Julie Bateman, the mother of his daughter, Toni, aged two. But all was not well. The way Eileen Corley sees it, Mark’s new-found liberty was not universally welcomed in Grantham. Grudges from the brawl were still nursed. Tempers were still hot. So Corley became a marked man of sorts. Before long, rumours were circulating that his days were numbered. "The story was that he was going to get hurt," says Eileen.

Corley began spending time with some of the men who would eventually find themselves on remand facing charges connected to his murder. He himself was already facing some minor charges and was keen to get out of the Grantham area, giving local police the slip in the process.

These new associates, it is said, invited Corley to take part in a robbery. One of them claimed his rich wheelchair-bound uncle, who lived on a remote farm, was ripe for a hold-up and that an extra man was needed; Corley was in on the heist. Their target supposedly had shotguns for self-defence, so the group told their new friend they’d need to be armed.

Eileen says she saw her son shortly before he vanished. He called at her house asking for a change of clothes and some cash to buy a mobile phone card, telling her he was going away for a few days. He sounded more evasive than usual, thought Eileen, and she questioned him further. But he refused to say any more. When she learned his oldest and most trusted friend wasn’t going with him, "it hit me like a punch in the stomach - it didn’t seem right". But Mark promised to call his mother every day and assured her he’d be coming back.

It was the last time she ever saw her son.

The precise sequence of events that led to Mark Corley’s death may never be known. What the police and the prosecution believe happened is contained in a 47-page ruling by Mr Justice Newman. What follows is a summary of those allegations, which would have formed the basis of the Crown’s case.

According to that document, it’s alleged that one of the accused was heard to say, in the days leading up to Mark Corley’s disappearance, that: "He’s got 2,000 on his head." Added to this statement was: "There’s two blokes coming from Scotland for him." The Crown alleged that the "two blokes" were the Sutherland brothers, Robert and George.

On Friday 7 July, two days after he saw his mother, Corley spent the night with a friend. The police know he was still alive on the 8th, because he made a mobile phone call around midnight. He spent that night sleeping on a mattress at a friend’s house.

What happened next is open to conjecture. The Crown alleged that a meeting took place in the Grantham area between the Sutherland brothers and Corley and his friends. Eileen thinks it was at a roundabout close to the nearby A1. She believes her son was taken from there at gunpoint, although there’s no evidence to prove this. The Crown suggested Mark simply went with his accomplices, knowing they were carrying guns - they were, after all, supposedly on their way to commit armed robbery somewhere further north on the A1.

According to the judge’s ruling, George Sutherland claimed that when the men’s vehicle eventually reached its destination at a remote place near Darlington, he stayed in the car while his brother Robert took Corley on foot into the countryside. About 20 minutes later, Robert Sutherland returned to the car alone. For this reason he was singled out and charged with murder, while the other original five suspects faced the lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder.

By November of that year Grantham detectives had arrested a number of people in connection with Corley’s disappearance. Because no body had yet been found, it was not yet a murder inquiry. That would come only after farm workers near Darlington discovered the corpse. Extensive surveillance was carried out at several addresses in the Grantham area between August and November in the run-up to the arrests of the six men. By then, the police had made an additional application to use powers granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) to bug parts of Grantham and Sleaford police stations.

It is perfectly within the law for the police to bug their cells if they think they’ll glean useful information. But what is illegal - contravening standard practice as well as breaking everything from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) to the European Convention of Human Rights - is listening in to meetings between lawyers and their clients. Most police and prison officers would deny this ever happens. One prison officer told me that he’d been in the job for 19 years and had never heard of a single instance of it. But he did concede that his staff, within Home Office guidelines, routinely accessed outgoing calls made by inmates from his prison. He assured me this was done for monitoring purposes only and tended to focus on high-risk categories like sex offenders.

But many in the legal profession are convinced unlawful monitoring of prison and police cells occurs far more than is acknowledged. There have been reports of officers trying to gather information when lawyers are meeting their clients. Standard ploys can be as simple as ensuring interviews are held in rooms with thin walls so conversations can be overheard, and routing frantic late-night legal conference calls through monitored police switchboard systems.

The 700 hours of tape recordings made by detectives on the Corley case would eventually yield documents running into thousands of pages. This material should have been available to the defence lawyers soon after the arrests were made. But it wasn’t; disclosure took a long time. In the meantime, applications for gagging orders were made to keep the nature of the evidence and the means by which it had been obtained out of the public eye. Rather than comply with this request, however, Mr Justice Newman hit the roof.

He was furious about the late disclosure. It was clear detectives must have known that the evidence they were guarding contained the illegal recordings of privileged conversations between the accused and their lawyers. "A mere perusal of the documents which disclose such a claim… should have been seen by somebody at an earlier stage," the judge commented. "I can see sound basis for withholding the fact of, and the content of, covert surveillance of a defendant’s activities and conversation. Why they should be withheld from a defendant [and] his advisers puzzles me."

The police claimed they had been slow about coming forth with the material because they weren’t going to rely upon it in the final prosecution case, that it hadn’t been used in their inquiry and that by revealing it they’d open up the methods of their covert bugging to scrutiny by all and sundry. But this was rejected by the judge. Not all the recordings carried material which was subject to legal privilege - in fact only 14 out of 74 tapes were marked as such - but even if only one had been in question, he said, it would have "manifestly called for disclosure".

Mr Justice Newman’s ruling effectively castigated the police. "In my judgment, each of DCI Tony White, DI Roger Bannister and DS Steve Thorn acted with that intention [deliberately taping privileged conversations]. It follows that I have concluded that flagrant breaches of the law have occurred… I found their attempts to explain the documentation in this case wholly unconvincing… By covertly obtaining private conversations taking place between detainees in between interviews, in my judgment, the officers were making a mockery of the caution which has to be administered to each and every detainee and they undermined and infringed the obvious and stated rights of the detainees to confer privately with a solicitor, and… they undermined and infringed his right to silence."

Eileen Corley could hardly believe it. "The accused were all laughing in the dock."

The Police Complaints Authority is currently holding an inquiry into the conduct of the three detectives who led the murder hunt. A spokesman denied a recent report in a local Grantham newspaper that the inquiry has opened "a can of worms", saying only that the investigation was "continuing". But the events surrounding the collapse of the Corley case have raised public concerns over what the police can and cannot do - and just how far they are willing to go to secure convictions.

The solicitors who were bugged are still smarting. "I was, and remain, disgusted and appalled," said one. "Disgusted that the police did this and appalled to think that they would actually get away with it." It has since been suggested that at least two other local cases, one of which was a murder, might be reviewed because of illegal bugging.

Eileen Corley says that the freed suspects openly taunt her and her family about Mark’s death (although in a message to me, Robert Sutherland again protested his innocence and said he wished he could have the opportunity to clear his name). She misses her son and yearns for justice lost.

Mr Justice Newman’s ruling suggests it is extremely unlikely that a retrial will ever take place. Whoever killed Mark Corley will probably never be brought to justice. To date none of the suspects has been found guilty of anything. Robert Sutherland, the man who faced murder charges, sent me a message saying he wished he could have the opportunity to clear his name, insisting he was completely innocent.

The recent "double jeopardy" change in the law in England and Wales represents the slimmest of chances that anyone could be brought back before a court for the murder of Mark Corley, but it seems a very remote possibility.

A field near the isolated village of Bolam in the north-east of England is a desolate place for any life to end. Whoever chose it must have known the lie of the land. This was a cowardly despatch from behind; whoever pulled the trigger made sure Mark Corley was walking or kneeling in front of him in the dark. It was also amateurish, because the victim’s fully clothed body was left where it fell. If it hadn’t have been submerged in freak floods, chances are it would have been found and identified within days.

Eileen Corley often visits her son’s grave. She takes his daughter with her. They leave sweets for the son and father they miss. Birds take them but the little girl likes to think her dad eats them and Eileen lets her believe it. But one day she’ll be old enough to know the truth.