FRAMED! - part 20

We hope that by now you will be thinking: “Isn’t the issue of Disclosure covered by Archbold?” and it is. At 12-45 in the 2008 edition (the edition relevant to these trials) it states:

“…In relation to offences into which a criminal investigation was commenced on or after 4 April 2005, the duties and responsibilities of parties with regard to disclosure are now governed by Parts I and II of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, as amended by the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

Part I (ss1-21) has created a staged approach (initial prosecution disclosure, defence disclosure, continual review by the prosecution)…”

Put simply, the Prosecution show a defendant some of the material they have against him (or her). Then the defendant shows the prosecution some of what he/ she has by way of defence and then the Prosecution is supposed to provide all of the remaining evidence (or disclosure) they have against the defendant, even if this is fatal to the Crown’s case against the defendant.

(Authors’ note: we believe that this present system of disclosure needs to be reviewed so that all of the available evidence is produced at the initial stage and not at stage two of the process.)

Archbold provides the following on Part II of the disclosure process:

“…Part II (ss22-27) provides for a code of practice for regulating action the police must take in recording and retaining material obtained in the course of a criminal investigation and revealing it to the prosecution for a decision on disclosure. […] A protocol for the control and management of unused material in the Crown Court was published under the auspices of the Court of Appeal on 20 February 2006. In R. v K. (Note) [2006] it was said that the protocol clearly sets out the principles relating to disclosure, that those who act for the prosecution and the defence should familiarise themselves with it, and that it should be applied by trial judges…”

The rules with regard to disclosure of evidence are therefore very clear. It is also very clear that disclosure in this trial caused serious concerns for the judge – so the question has to be asked: why did he proceed with the trial when it was evident that the rules of disclosure had been breached?

Furthermore, the issue of disclosure forms part of the European Convention on Human Rights:

“…The Commission held that the ‘equality of arms’ principle imposes on prosecuting and investigating authorities an obligation to disclose any material in their possession, or to which they could gain access, which may assist the accused in exonerating himself or in obtaining a reduction in sentence. This principle extends to material which might undermine the credibility of a prosecution witness. Non-disclosure of evidence relevant to credibility may also raise an issue under Article 6(3)(d) – the right to a fair trial…”

The emphases are ours. It is evident that the prosecution has a duty to produce any material in its possession which might undermine the case against the defendant and even lead to the prosecution dropping its case against the defendant.

In what the authors feel was an attempt at ‘arse-covering’, Loraine-Smith mentioned the lack of disclosure but did nothing about addressing the problem. The authors believe that this one factor alone made Brian’s trial unlawful and a miscarriage of justice. But worse – much worse – was yet to come.

 At this point, Loraine-Smith asked in open court whether the Faceparty website was bankrupt, and he was told that it was by prosecutor Forster. Note that he was told and not shown any evidence to support the assertion.

This means that Forster lied to the judge. He did not merely mislead the Court – which can inadvertently occur – but he deceived the Court by lying. The consequence of this lie was that Brian could not receive a fair trial, since the trial was based on inaccurate information and lies.  It is, furthermore, a relatively easy function to establish whether the Faceparty website was currently in a state of liquidation (a search on the Companies House website would show this <http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/>).  Not only was the judge deceived, but he also failed to demand that the question be answered. 

Back in Court 4, Loraine-Smith said to Bell: “Tell your client to take his hands out of his pockets!”

It is clear that Loraine-Smith was attempting to disempower Brian, who was alive to the judge’s poor attempts at destructive psychology. The instruction from Loraine-Smith to Brian via his barrister was designed to unsettle the defendant.

Having commented on the lack of disclosure from the prosecution, Loraine-Smith then commented on Bell’s defence statements, calling them (in another arse-covering exercise) “...the worst I have ever seen in my entire career...”

Brian was in Court on two entirely separate criminal charges – (i) alleged exposure to three female students and (ii) allegedly inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

He was innocent of both charges and had produced two separate statements (one for each case). His defence against the charge of Exposure was some 50 pages in length. His defence against the charge of Incitement ran to some 64 pages. In total, Brian had written 114 pages in his defence. As an author and qualified therapist, it is likely that most of what he had written would have made sense. Given the fact that he is not a lawyer, if we allow for the fact that an experienced lawyer might reduce the 114 pages down to a mere 10% of the original (which would be rather severe), that would mean that Brian’s defence statement against two charges would be 11.4 pages. 

Brian’s defence statement in his two criminal trials was prepared by Bell. It was half a page in length. Bell had claimed in a rare conference on 26 November 2009, that he had deliberately made it short in order to “outwit the opposition”. The Criminal Procedure Rules do not permit this kind of ‘ambushing’. Under section 11 of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, if you:

“…(a) do not disclose what the Act requires;

(b) do not give a defence statement within the time allowed;

(c) at trial, rely on a defence, or facts, that you have not disclosed; or

(d) at trial, call an alibi witness whom you have not identified in advance,

then the court, the prosecutor or another defendant may comment on that, and the court may draw such inferences as it thinks proper in deciding whether you are guilty…”

Bell had (not for the first time) lied to his client and broken the rules of Court.  He also told his client that he would ensure that all his evidence would be entered into Court.  It was not.

All rise.

Outside Court 4, Bell told Brian, “We are in great shape.  Don’t try to influence the proceedings. Just let the process play itself out.”

As a counsellor, Brian knew this was not common sense.  He had read a sufficiently large number of legal books and crime books to know that influencing proceedings is precisely what barristers try to do.  To have your own barrister tell you to just sit back is not a good thing – it smacks of a distinct lack of common sense.

Several barristers entered court. The verdict in another case is to be heard before Brian’s trial commences proper.

Eventually Brian re-entered the Court and Loraine-Smith informed all parties that he would not, after all, be sitting this afternoon.

By 11:45, the trial had still not begun. Forster has two assistants, both solicitors. Bell has no-one. Brian’s solicitor, Angela Shaw, has gone on holiday!

A jury was brought in, but was not sworn in properly. The Criminal Procedure Rules provide specific criteria which must be met in order for a jury to be sworn in properly and for a fair trial to take place.

This did not occur in Brian’s trial. The jury was not selected by ballot in accordance with section 11 of the Juries Act 1974. At no point was Brian given the opportunity to remove (or ‘challenge’) any jurors from the jury under section 12 of the Juries Act 1974. No jurors’ names were read out in Court, yet at section 4-235 Archbold states that the clerk to the court first calls 12 jurors from the panel of 18 in the following manner: “Members of the jury in waiting, please answer to your names and step into the jury box as you are called.”

On the basis of this single incident, the trial was an abuse of process and null and void.  The verdict is also null and void.

With an improperly sworn-in jury sitting, Forster opened the Crown’s case against Brian.  He handed out documents to the jury and told them that they could keep the documents. These documents formed what is commonly known as the ‘Trial Bundle’. A defendant must also be provided with a copy of the very same bundle as provided to each juror (for obvious reasons), but Brian was not provided with the trial bundle. At the Harry Redknapp trial also at Southwark Crown Court in January and February 2012, both Harry Redknapp and Milan Mandaric were provided with a copy each as they sat in the dock watching the trial against them unfold.

In the John Terry trial at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court – which Brian also attended – Mr Terry was also provided with a copy of the trial bundle and he was seen occasionally leafing through it as his trial unfolded. Yet Brian Pead was not given a copy. His defence counsel did not ensure that he had a copy. This means that Brian has no knowledge whatsoever of what each juror was shown in the trial bundle – the police and CPS could have put any documents in the bundle. 

Forster then told the jury about the importance of Joinder. He claimed that the Crown was forced to join two separate indictments against Brian in the “interest of justice”.

What Forster failed to tell the jury is that the rules of Joinder do not allow for different indictments to be joined unless certain criteria apply. Archbold deals with Joinder at section 1-154:

“…Rule 14.2(3) of the Criminal Procedure Rules 2005 […] provides that an indictment may contain more than one count if all the offences charged

(a) are founded on the same facts, or

(b) form or are part of a series of offences of the same or a similar character…”

Although both cases against Brian were of a sexual nature, they were not capable of being joined because their execution was significantly different. Exposing one’s self to a group of three students is an entirely different act from going online and inciting a child to engage in sexual acts.  Indeed, the ages of the alleged victims were different – the students were in the 20-22 age-range and the alleged ‘girl’ was 14.

Thus these two separate Indictments should never have been heard in the same Court by the same jury. But the issue of mis-Joinder was a much larger issue because, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in February 2009, the CPS – with the same Timothy Forster representing them – applied for Joinder at Woolwich Crown Court before Judge Charles Byers. Quite rightly, Byers refused to join the two cases, stating that the two allegations did not contain a ‘common nexus’.

The CPS, however, would not relent. They ensured that the Exposure case collapsed at Woolwich Crown Court, and that it was transferred to Southwark Crown Court, a court with a higher record of convictions when compared with other Crown Courts in London.

In a case of mis-Joinder, any conviction is automatically overturned:

“In R. v Newland [1988], it was held that misjoinder of offences in contravention of rule 9 of the Indictment Rules 1971 cannot be cured by a direction for separate trials of the misjoined counts. If a court proceeds to try a misjoined indictment the proceedings will be a nullity and any resulting convictions […] will be quashed…”

Yet here was Forster telling the jury that the first case is for Exposure and the second for Incitement. The trial, because of mis-Joined indictments, is already void ab initio (from the beginning).

Legally, Exposure means exposing one’s genitals to another to cause them “alarm or distress”. Forster told the jury that Brian Pead lived opposite three female students in Days Lane, Sidcup in Kent. But he didn’t. He lived opposite a church. The three female drama students were actually four females who lived at 62 Days Lane. This house was rented out to the females, who were attending Rose Bruford drama college in Burnt Oak Lane in Sidcup which was about a twenty-minute walk from Days Lane.

The house at 62 Days Lane – where the four students lived – was almost 100 feet (33 metres) away and at an angle of approximately 22.5 degrees from the perpendicular. In other words, this would mean that it would be extremely difficult to look out of Brian’s bedroom window and into the house at 62. Or the other way round.

Just prior to the students moving into number 62 in September 2007, Brian Pead had had the entire front of his house clad in scaffolding. He had decided to embark upon a huge refurbishment of his tired-looking 1930s-built semi-detached house which meant knocking down some internal walls, pulling down all the ceilings and taking up all the floors. During this process he also installed an entirely new central heating system and re-wired the entire house. Much of this work he achieved on his own. On other occasions he sought extra help from David Cox, a firefighter friend with significant building skills and Geoffrey Bacon, a self-employed plumber and builder friend. Certain work took extra pairs of hands or some skills that Brian did not have or, if he had the skill, he sometimes preferred to buy in extra labour to ensure that he was undertaking the refurbishment properly.

Soon after the females moved in, he noticed one night that the female in the front room would often undress for bed in front of open curtains or, more accurately, in front of one open curtain. She would shut the curtains which were directly opposite Nell Stanley’s house at 85 Days Lane, yet keep the curtains open which allowed slight visual access into Brian’s house.

Brian is a man who notices such oddities. Yet what was particularly odd was that the female would almost dance as she stripped, as if she were working as a stripper in some Soho club. She would run her fingers through her hair and over her breasts and it appeared to Brian when he noticed this that she was, perhaps, dancing to some music in her room. After three occasions, he wrote what he regarded as a humorous note complimenting her on her dancing and informing her that she could be seen. For many years as a teacher, he had employed the use of humour when chastising pupils, believing this to be more effective in the longer-term than a straightforward admonishment. The inference, of course, was that she should close her curtains. He put the note through her door one evening in October 2007. The humorous, yet informative, note was intended by Brian to simply draw the female’s attention to the fact that she could be seen (if she were not aware of this fact). Initially he thought that she might be dancing seductively in order to draw attention to herself from the three young men (all aged around 20-24) who lived directly next door to Brian at 87 Days Lane. This house was owned by Glen Meeking, a van driver, and his wife, Jenny, a teacher. Brian hypothesised that the female might be dancing in order to attract the attention of one or another of the young men.

It occurred to Brian that a young woman – she looked to him to be around 23 – who received such a note would then start to ensure that she closed her curtains when she undressed for bed. Yet the note had the opposite effect. She continued to dance on a more regular basis – something around one or two occasions a week – and she maintained this for almost nine months.

This was not something that drew Brian’s attention much after the first two or three occasions. As a counsellor, he hypothesised that she must have some personality disorder that was driving her to display herself so often, perhaps some form of narcissistic disorder. Perhaps she had a lack of parental love or she needed the attention of men through displaying her body rather than seek love from a man for who she was and not for what she looked like. Several hypotheses floated through his mind and he carried out some initial research into Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Forster played to the gallery: “This note caused Elizabeth McIntyre great distress. She was very upset by the thought that she could be seen by others living across the road. And especially by a much older man.”

This was clearly a ridiculous line of reasoning from Forster. Had she really been so upset, she would have closed her curtains and that would have been the end of the matter. She didn’t do that. Instead, McIntyre kept the note, allegedly failed to mention it to anyone and continued to dance and display her body for the next eight months. Hardly the actions of a young woman who was distressed at the thought that others might see her.

Brian asked Ellen “Nellie” Stanley, an elderly neighbour in her seventies who lived directly opposite the females’ rented house, if she had seen anything odd about the house. She said that she had seen several strange things, not least that the girl whose bedroom was at the front of the house – Elizabeth McIntyre – would close her right hand-hand window curtains at night but not the left-hand curtains. Nellie Stanley also told Brian that she had seen a handgun being waved about in the front bedroom. She hadn’t been sure whether it was a real gun or merely a prop. Given that they were drama students, it was perhaps more likely to have been a prop. On the other hand, ‘drug-dealer types’ had been seen at the house, especially attending the late-night parties.

Brian then went to see Glen Meeking, a man of around fifty who drove a delivery van for Palmer and Harvey. Meeking was a football fan and a Sunday League referee and he and Brian shared this common interest. Meeking told Brian that the girls had lots of late night parties which sometimes didn’t finish until four or five in the morning.

The following is a copy of Glen Meeking’s statement:

“…7 June 2008

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Glen Meeking and I live with my family at 87 Days Lane.  I have lived there for approximately 5 years.

From around September 2007, I noticed that some students had moved into the house opposite my house, 62 Days Lane.

I had often seen lots of people in and out of that house.  I don’t know if it was a brothel or drug or vice den, but there were often late night parties till about 3 or 4am.

With regard to Brian Pead, my neighbour at 89 Days Lane, we have never fallen out or had a cross word.  I would describe him as a friend and a good neighbour.  I’ve got to know quite a bit about him from the chats we’ve had over the fence, or when he’s been doing up his house. 

I am prepared to go to court and say that in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen anything out of the ordinary at his house or with him.  I have never seen any schoolgirls at his house, or anyone under aged…”

On 4 November 2008, Ellen Stanley made the following statement:

“…To Whom It May Concern

My name is Mrs Ellen Stanley and I live at 85 Days Lane, Sidcup. I have lived here since 1994, making it just over 14 years.

In September 2007 a group of female students moved into 62 Days Lane, which is directly opposite my house.

I noticed a lot of comings and goings and there were lots of different men going in and out of the house.

There were also a lot of loud parties and noise late into the night, often until 3 or 4am.

For several months I noticed something really strange with the curtains in the upstairs bedroom which overlooks my house, directly opposite.

The curtains were nearly always left open on the left-hand window (as you look at it from my house) even though the curtains at the right-hand window were drawn.

The arrangement of the curtains seemed strange to me and I wondered why anyone would choose to draw the curtains on one window but not the other window which was obviously in the same room.

This strange pattern with the curtains carried on from about September 2007 through to May or June 2008.

The new lodger in that room always draws both sets of curtains.

I have known Brian for 14 years and believe him to be of good character…”

These two character references from neighbours who had known him for several years were obviously helpful to Brian. How strange, therefore, that the police did not interview either Ellen Stanley or Glen Meeking. How strange, too, that neither Angela Shaw nor Dominic Bell contacted either of the neighbours who had spoken highly of Brian.

Then Brian went to speak with Nicholas Kerr, the vicar of the Holy Redeemer Church in Days Lane, directly opposite his house. The vicar confirmed that “there had been several complaints about the tenants’ behaviour”.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that the females at 62 Days Lane were committing some form of criminal offence, whether it were prostitution, using or dealing drugs or even merely creating too much noise in the neighbourhood.

It is likely that, if they were committing criminal offences, then a ‘deal’ could be worked out whereby they would accuse Brian of masturbating at his bedroom window and charges against them would be dropped.

These were clearly not the sweet and innocent victims that Forster was attempting to portray to the Jury.

“These girls,” (notice his use of the word ‘girls’) Forster continued, “were frightened by the defendant. He was watching them at least twice a week and on 5 May 2008 he was seen at his bedroom window in the dark with his right hand down his trousers playing with himself.”

Forster was misleading the Jury. It was not ‘girls’ plural who had complained, it was ‘girl’ singular – Elizabeth McIntyre, the exhibitionist, who had allegedly called the police to say that she had seen Brian at his bedroom window masturbating over a period of some nine months before she complained.

On the night of 7 May 2008, Brian had a bad attack of gout. He had never suffered from this condition before and thought that he broken his toe but couldn’t understand how it had occurred. He went to bed early that night in an attempt to sleep off the pain. He was certainly not in a condition to stand at a window masturbating.

Forster mentioned that the females had claimed Brian had been seen in the dark. In front of the alleged window was a scaffold ladder and three scaffold poles blocking the view into and out of that window.

The windowsills in Brian’s house were somewhat high. In the bedroom in question, there was a particularly low ceiling. Brian Pead is a little over six feet tall. He could not have stood on a chair to expose himself. His genitals would have been below the height of the window sill had he stood at the window. The females’ house was some 100 feet away. In the dark, McIntyre claimed that she could see the Defendant’s eye colour: brown. His eyes are blue. She claimed she could see his hair colour: brown. He is mostly grey-haired. She claimed that she would often see him masturbating with his right hand. Over a period of nine months.

Yet Brian Pead is – and always has been - left-handed.

Then Forster further misled the jury when he stated that “...the Faceparty website is now defunct...”

It was not, in fact, defunct, at all. It had been liquidated in May 2008 and immediately started up again under a different company name but with the same domain name of <www.faceparty.com>. The director was the same. Forster thus committed perjury. He also perverted the course of justice because he knew that the website was not defunct.

It had been liquidated and then had risen, like a phoenix from the ashes. In the process of liquidation, however, evidence had been ‘lost’ and a considerable amount of money (some reports suggest a figure in the region of £25m) had also been siphoned out of the company.

Brian Pead had been carefully monitoring this website. He was not the only person in the country monitoring this website from a distance, but this book will focus only on his story.

From around September 2007 he had noticed a considerable moral decline on the website. He had joined it in around 2004 and had engaged in a number of intelligent – and not so intelligent – conversations. He had shared music files with people (before it was outlawed) and he had been sent books by people and had himself sent books to others. He had met several people from the website in the real world, but no under-age people. He had met people aged between 18 and 60, been abroad with some and generally made some good friends from the site. He had never seen it merely as a ‘virtual’ meeting place, but as a tool to meet a wide variety of people in the ‘real world’.

Consider what Forster had already achieved. He had sown a seed of doubt in the jury’s mind that Pead had exposed himself to three ‘innocent girls’ in a house across the road and that he waged a campaign of sexual harassment against them for a period of nine months.

He had also sowed a seed that Pead had been interacting on the internet with ‘more young women’. Forster’s prosecuting act was based on falsehoods and he knew it.

The Crown’s proposition was that Brian Pead had engaged in three conversations with an underage girl of 14 and that he had incited her to engage in sexual relations contrary to section 10 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

The charge in itself is interesting and was examined in chapter 29. Even a cursory glance at the precise wording of the legislation shows that – for the crime of incitement to have been committed, and therefore for someone to be guilty of the crime – that there has to have been another person involved. Clearly it is not possible to incite a machine or thin air.

The prosecution claimed that Brian had incited a police officer who had been posing as a 14-year-old girl.

Had that been true, then it follows that Brian had incited a police officer (and, therefore, not a 14-year-old girl). Had this been true, then the police officer is clearly not underage and it follows that Brian cannot, therefore, be guilty of inciting an underage girl.

There clearly was never a case against him. But what the Crown Prosecution Service did (acting on instructions from on high) was to change the indictment to one of attempting to incite. In any event, Brian could not be guilty of this crime either because there still has to have been a real person who is under aged. Yet it was a ploy created simply to deceive the jury.

During Brian’s investigation into what he believed – and later knew to be – illegal activities on Faceparty involving prostitution, child prostitution and child pornography, he had come upon a person entering a chat room claiming to be a 14-year-old girl who wanted money ‘desperately’ in exchange for sex.

At this time (January 2008), Brian was undertaking an Advanced Diploma in Humanistic Integrative Counselling. Much of the content of this course was of a psychosexual matter. He was counselling clients with significant sexual issues. He had been sexually abused between the ages of 5 and 11 which started in a children’s home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

He therefore knew more about the subject of child sexual abuse than the ‘average person in the street’. He had been deeply traumatised when it first occurred and had thereafter developed a lifelong interest in the subject from a psychological and counselling perspective.

He instinctively knew, therefore, that this person claiming to be a 14-year-old girl in the chatroom was not, in fact, a child at all. He knew it was an adult and it was his belief that it was a middle-aged male, or certainly someone with a deep interest in the subject of paedophilia.

He was, of course, right.

Several members of the chatroom – all adults – responded to this ‘girl’ by telling ‘her’ that if she really was only 14, then (a) how did she get access to the adult social website and (b) that ‘she’ should leave the room and forget about earning money that way.

Upon leaving the room (at least under that profile name), ‘she’ left her MSN messenger email address and asked people to add her.

Several people did this. Undoubtedly some would have added this email address in order to solicit sexual services. Brian added this email address, however, for entirely different reasons. He knew this was a completely odd situation and he wanted to learn more. He also believed that the person on the other end of the profile might be a paedophile, since his counselling training had taught him that a common modus operando of a sex offender is that they pose as teenagers in order to attract children to them. He thus added this person’s email address in order to ‘smoke out’ whoever it was pretending to be a teenager.

This was not the first time he had operated in this way. As a counsellor, he often worked in such a way whereby he would create a hypothesis about a client, listen patiently to whatever the client presented and observe over a long period of time to see if the client’s behaviour patterns and ‘story’ matched their original presenting issue. Often with the use of a judicious question or two, he would ‘smoke out’ the personality issue that the client was attempting to mask.

Unlike many counsellors who often try to interpret whatever a client tells them, Brian rarely operated in this way. His clients would often tell him that his greatest quality was that of being a listener without offering interpretations. This requires a specific frame of mind. It involves pushing one’s ego into the background – the willingness that we all have as human beings to interpret what others are telling us in relation to our own frame of reference.

Brian does not do that. He listens and stores that information without attempting to interpret. Interpretation, he believes, can come later in the work if it is necessary. He seeks to understand and to help clients understand their lives.

He views the counselling process as one entirely made up of ‘smoking out’ the truth in a person’s life, such as human beings can ever be sure of what is truth in their lives.

Brian Pead had been brought up by a father who often would say to him, “Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.” Being told that at the age of 10 did little for the young Brian’s education at that point, but, as he grew older, his father’s words began to gain credence in his life and he began to see the wisdom in the words.

At the age of 15, his brother Robert ran away from home and stayed away. He re-located to Lowestoft, then a thriving fishing town on the east coast of Suffolk. He commenced work as a deck-hand on board a trawler. Lowestoft trawlers at that time would often work the east coast of England and Scotland, move to the west coast of Scotland and sometimes even work off the coast of Iceland (until the famous ‘Cod Wars’.)

The general rule of thumb was that the boats – which were only around 90 feet in length – would be away for 12 days and in harbour at Lowestoft for two days (when wages were often spent in public houses on alcohol and prostitutes.)

Robert had worked his way from being a deckhand to a Third Hand. He was on his way to becoming a Mate (assistant skipper) and then finally a skipper with his own boat. At this period in history, being a skipper of a Lowestoft trawler meant a considerable income and several skippers owned significant properties on the coast in areas like Corton and Gorleston on the east coast.

Robert had gained employment with Boston Deep Sea Fisheries, and he signed on to the St. Kitts trawler. The St. Kitts was built in 1941 by Cochrane and Sons of Selby, Yorkshire.  It was 142½ feet long.  It was a steel side trawler and ran on oil, requiring between 14 and 16 men to operate it. The vessel had an interesting life and had several names. Starting out with the name of Le Royal (GY400) it was operated in December 1941 by Grimsby Motor Trawlers, of Grimsby.  On 30 December 1944 it was transferred to Milford Steam Trawlers, of Milford, managed by James Carpenter Ward and was re-named the Milford Marquis (M14).

The St.  Kitts was the first motor trawler designed for Arctic fishing.  On 1 October 1940 it was converted to a minesweeper (P.No.FY.1750). After the war, it was returned to its owners in July 1946. It landed fish at Milford between 2 July 1946 and 10 June 1951.  The trawler was skippered by Albert Saunders in 1946, Benny Riches in 1947, Jimmy Jobson in 1949 and Harry Rich in 1950. It transferred to Dutch owners, Ymuiden, and in 1964 it was purchased by Claridge Trawlers of Lowestoft, managed by Gordon David Claridge and it was renamed the St. Kitts (LT481). The boat was finally broken up on the River Humber in November 1976.

However, as we have seen, on Tuesday, April 11, 1972, Robert Pead suffered catastrophic head injuries on board the St. Kitts trawler working off the east coast of Scotland.  The knocking-out bar, which weighs around a hundredweight, had fractured his skull.

Despite being air-lifted off the trawler and taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Robert died in September 1972. Despite giving up his job in Surbiton, and despite enrolling as a deckhand on board a trawler with Boston Deep Sea Fisheries in Lowestoft, Brian Pead never found out what really happened to his brother.  However, seeds had been sown in his mind about investigative journalism, undercover work and seeking justice.

With this kind of mind and determination to seek justice, Brian first engaged in conversation with the ‘girl’ on 28 January 2008.