WHEN Jersey’s police chief talks about a law enforcer’s desire to crack a case that has remained unsolved for decades, he’s not trotting out the party line… this is a man who’s been there, done that and has a couple of T-shirts to show for it.
Robin Smith was barely a year into his career, having joined Sussex Police in September 1985, when he was deployed alongside hundreds of other officers after two nine-year-old girls were sexually assaulted and killed near their homes on the Moulsecoomb council estate, north of Brighton.
The subsequent investigation led to charges against a 20-year-old local man, followed by a prosecution that was widely described as “bungled” and saw the man accused of the double-murder, Russell Bishop, acquitted.
“I still remember it – it absolutely kicked off,” said Mr Smith, who took up the top job in Jersey in January 2020. “There were mistakes made in the presentation of the evidence, and quite a lot of criticism of the prosecution – it was a very, very difficult time, seeing Bishop coming out of court smiling, despite the fact that two young girls were sexually assaulted and then murdered.”
Although he was subsequently convicted and jailed for the abduction, molestation, and attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl in 1990, there seemed little chance of justice for the families of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, the two victims in the 1986 case dubbed “Babes in the Wood”.
Mr Smith outlined changes to the UK law around double jeopardy – which had previously stopped an accused person from being tried again having been acquitted – and advances in DNA technology which offered a chance of delayed justice.
“Having first done house-to-house inquiries as a very junior probationer constable in 1986, 30 years later I was chairing a ‘gold group’ looking at the cold case into the original two murders, led by one of the best detectives I have ever worked with, Detective Superintendent Jeff Riley.
“It was a secret investigation – we didn’t want to alert anyone, bearing in mind there were surviving family members who had been through an awful, awful time, so it was well over a year until we got to the point where we were able to have the original acquittal quashed.
“Officers went to Durham Prison and arrested Bishop for the murders of Nicola and Karen – my only regret is I didn’t go with them – and he was hostile, sneering, and horrible.”
In December 2018 Bishop was convicted of the double murder and received twin life sentences.
Mr Smith said: “It was an enormous relief for the families, and indeed for a lot of the detectives who were invested in this in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen – child murders are always the ones that get the most emotion.”
The same change to the law on double jeopardy happened in Jersey in 2019, the year before Mr Smith took up his new job, opening up the possibility of revisiting one of the Island’s most notorious cases.
Barbara Griffin (59) was killed and her 85-year-old aunt Emma Anton stabbed at the Le Geyt estate in 1990, with 21-year-old Rickie Tregaskis charged with murder and attempted murder but subsequently acquitted by a jury.
Like Bishop, Tregaskis was jailed for a later offence after murdering a man in Cornwall in 1997, and his propensity to brag about his past “achievements” caught up with him as four separate witnesses said he had confessed to the 1990 killings.
“It is a very, very labour-intensive process, because effectively, what you’ve got to do is re-investigate it, which requires quite significant resources,” Mr Smith said of the challenges around getting a case quashed, and a retrial ordered, as happened with Tregaskis.
After 32 years – the exact same interval as between the Babes in the Wood deaths and the second Bishop trial – Tregaskis was convicted by a jury in 2022, with the resulting life sentence upheld by the Court of Appeal two years later.
The resolution of the previously unsolved murders at Le Geyt meant that Jersey’s tally of unsolved murder cases fell by 50% to just one.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the remaining case, the brutal and unexplained killing of 20-year-old Finnish woman Tuula Höök, whose battered body was found in a field in St Clement on the morning of 31 December 1966.
Miss Höök’s murder has been in the spotlight this year, with the publication last month of a book about the notorious case by true crime author Mark Bridgeman.
The States police worked with the writer over the two years in which he was researching the case, and Chief Inspector Craig Jackson, who joined the interview at the halfway point, emphasised how keen the force would be to see a similar resolution as happened with the Tregaskis case.
Chief Insp Jackson said: “Lee Turner [an ex-detective chief inspector who has worked as a civilian investigator since leaving the force] has picked this up, along with Operation Tailgate, which was the Tragaskis case, with a small team.
“They reviewed the Tuula Höök murder from beginning to end – it’s probably one of the most enduring and emotive crimes that hasn’t been solved for Jersey, so for us it was a real priority to review it again with fresh sets of eyes, looking at all the material that we have got.”
After an earlier cold case review in 2013, Mr Turner met Mr Bridgeman during the research phase of the book, which began in 2023.
Chief Insp Jackson added: “The case remains unsolved, it hasn’t been detected, and we’re not currently actively investigating.
“Lee has met with Mark Bridgeman to review if there are any further inquiries that we may not have looked at, but from our assessment, there’s no major substantive evidence or new lines of inquiry that have been identified.”
Mr Bridgeman’s book includes five suspects, including one man who he believes was responsible for the murder, although this individual, now dead, was not named by the author given that he has surviving relatives in Jersey. Does the fact that a suspect is dead change the police approach?
“If we identify a suspect in any case, and the suspect is deceased, it is important that we actually prove beyond all reasonable doubt that that individual is the offender to that crime, and that goes for any crime,” Chief Insp Jackson said.
“We’ve seen in the UK numerous cases where a suspect or offender has passed away, and all investigation teams still aim to go beyond all reasonable doubt to prove that they were the person involved in that in that crime.
“Solving a crime in this way is important, not only for the investigation but also for the family, giving them the closure that comes with knowing who was responsible.”
Mr Smith said that police officers would work alongside law officers from the early stages of an inquiry.
“There isn’t really much of a separation nowadays when you are on these very significant cases,” he said. “For cases like Tragaskis, and Tuula Höök, and the gold group [for the Bishop case] I was chairing , as we were going through the process, we were engaging with the Crown Prosecution Service very closely as part of a team going through it step by step with lawyers.”
The police chief added: “As we always say, the file is never closed – it is always left open in case we can review the evidence, and have a look at new technology to see if that can make a difference.
“Ultimately if the evidence doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t exist, particularly when the case goes back so many years, and memories fade, and people pass, and all the rest, inevitably, I think, every year that makes that chance less and less.”
Publication of the book though could mean new information comes to light, Mr Smith said as it “pricks people interest and memory”.
“Some of the information will be rumour and innuendo, but some of it may be of use – Lee [Turner], with his experience, will be best able to assess that.”
