(C) Copyright 2005 Associated Newspapers Ltd. DAILY MAIL (London)

Headline: Dad DIDN'T kill Mum (the Lady in the Lake)

Written by Bob Woffinden

GORDON PARK was enjoying a cycle holiday in Gascony, southwest France, when he received a phone call reporting a particularly macabre piece of news.

Jeremy, his son from his first marriage, told him: 'It's Mum. They've found her body.' Gordon's first wife, Carol, had been missing for 21 years.

But now, her body had been found, trussed up and weighted down, at the bottom of Coniston Water in the Lake District - not far from the Park family home near Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The corpse was pulled from the water on August 13, 1997. At first there was huge speculation about the identity of the mystery victim, predictably dubbed 'The Lady In The Lake'.

Jeremy knew there was a possibility that it was his mother, but hadn't wanted to disturb his father's holiday because initially this was mere speculation. But finally he decided to break the news on August 20, after the body had been identified from dental records.

Gordon, who was on holiday with his third wife, Jenny (there was a short-lived second marriage in the 1980s), spent the next day cleaning up their holiday gite and packing before they embarked on the two-day journey home, towing their trailer of luggage.

Carol had disappeared in 1976. But because she had previously left Gordon and their two children, and had a history of serial infidelity and depression, returning to her family only sporadically, no one had thought her disappearance particularly strange.

Before leaving for England, Gordon and Jenny had seen details of the body's discovery being shown on French television news.

Jenny recalls: 'We could see our house being searched and the police carrying out black bin bags.' The Parks finally arrived home in the early hours of Sunday, August 24.

Gordon realised the police naturally wanted to question him, but it was nevertheless a shock when they arrived a few hours later, at 8am - not merely to question, but to arrest him.

Within 36 hours, he had been charged with Carol's murder. He was held for 14 days, then he was bailed and charges were dropped in January 1998.

Despite that, there were those who clearly felt there was still a case against him, and police continued to investigate.

And in November 2004 - more than seven years after the body had been found - Park was charged again and put on trial. To the profound shock of his supporters, he was convicted and told he would have to serve at least 15 years - which, for a 60-year-old, could mean the rest of his life.

Many believe Gordon Park got what he deserves. On the other hand, some believe he is an innocent man. Among those are both his children, Jeremy, now a 35-year-old IT technician, and Rachael, 34 and married with a family, who asked me to look at crucial aspects of the case that they felt had not been adequately addressed.

Now, Park's lawyers are hoping to prepare an appeal. 'Gordon was always there to help you if you needed help,' said family friend Sue Shaw.

'Like everyone, I was horrified at the verdict. People believe in him, not just in Barrow - there's a network of support building across the country.'

'He had to be a mum and dad rolled into one,' said his son, Jeremy. 'He's given us - his children - a lifetime of support and this is just the start of our support for him.

'We might never know the truth about what happened to Mum. But Dad's innocent, so there's no conflict between supporting him, and continuing to feel love for Mum.' It is for this reason they have told the Mail why they think their father was wrongly convicted. And we can reveal compelling evidence which suggests they could be right.

To understand this intriguing case, it is important to go back to Park's younger years.

In July 1967, then aged 23, he married Carol, a 21-year-old who had been adopted and raised by a family with two children of their own.

Two years later, Carol's adoptive sister, Christine, was murdered by her boyfriend, John Rapson, who was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.

Gordon and Carol adopted Christine's daughter, Vanessa, who was a year old when her mother died.

Over the next few years, the couple had two children of their own - Jeremy, born in 1970, and Rachael, born the following year.

From 1974, Gordon was working as a primary school teacher and Carol - who'd given up work when the children were born - had resumed her career, also as a teacher.

The area of Cumbria where they lived was not traditionally regarded as a hotbed of scandal, but Carol was different. One witness described her as 'what you'd call "a goer" '.

She had extramarital affairs, but Gordon would always take her back afterwards.

In 1974, Carol went on a weeklong course at Keele University, where she had a liaison with a former police officer. She left Gordon and set up home with her new lover near Middlesbrough.

She got a job at a school there but, in 1975, she faced a court battle with Gordon over custody of the children.

Gordon won; Carol took it badly and was prescribed antidepressants. At the end of 1975, she broke off her relationship to return to her husband.

On July 17, 1976, Gordon and Carol had arranged to take the children to Blackpool for the day; but when Carol cried off with a headache, Gordon took the children on his own.

When they returned home, she'd gone again - leaving her wedding and engagement rings behind.

Among Park's supporters are Alan and Sue Shaw - friends from childhood. Mr Shaw says: 'None of us was surprised. The general opinion was that Carol had found someone else and gone abroad. We had no suspicions that anything may have happened to her because of the pattern of what had gone before.' It was only when Carol didn't show up for work at the end of the school holidays that Gordon reported her missing.

Citing desertion, he divorced her in 1978 and continued to raise the children on his own.

In 1993, he married Jenny Marshall, whom he'd known from schooldays.

He gave up work in 1994, traded in his small yacht for a larger one and looked forward to retirement.

This period of his life was undisturbed until that August day in 1997 when his son called to say Carol's body had been found.

When Gordon and Jenny returned from France, it was to a hostile atmosphere.

The fact that he was out of the country at the time may have created an impression that he'd fled abroad.

The police had already searched Bluestones, the Cumbrian home he had built himself and where he had lived with Carol, and his current home, together with garage and boat.

It had been the perfect opportunity for them to look for evidence without Park (if he were the murderer) covering his tracks.

Most crucially, after he was arrested, Gordon spent 14 days in Preston prison. This was because the authorities had claimed that - owing to public hysteria - he needed to be locked up for his own safety.

Three years later, a prisoner suddenly came forward to say that Park had confessed while inside. ' Jailhouse snitch' evidence, as it is sometimes known, is the most disreputable of all; but now it was to play a major part in getting Park convicted.

Park's trial for Carol's murder began before Mr Justice McCombe at Manchester Crown Court in November 2004. In January this year, Park was convicted.

There were pieces of evidence that, the prosecution maintained, fitted together to prove he had murdered his wife. However, the only firsthand witness evidence came from a woman called Joan Young.

She had come forward last year to say that in July 1976, she and her husband, while on holiday in the Lake District, had parked on the east shore of Coniston and seen a boat out on the water.

She saw a man push a bundle over the side and had joked to her husband: 'Perhaps that's his wife.' There are problems with this evidence. First, of course, there is the extraordinary period of elapsed time, even though Mrs Young says she had mentioned the incident to her sister at the time (as her sister confirms).

Second, although her husband recalls her remark, he was reading his newspaper and did not see anything.

Third, the distance at which she saw the boat suggests that it would have been too far out for any kind of identification to be made. Fourth, if she did see someone pushing something overboard where she said she did, then it cannot have been Carol Park's body, because the body site was more than a mile south of where the Youngs' car was parked, and out of sight because there was an island in the way.

Fifth, her description of the boat suggests it was a sailing boat like a cruiser.

When Carol's body was found, it was widely reported that Gordon Park owned a large yacht, the 'Mrs J'. That was true - in 1997.

But in 1976, he had a 505, a powerful racing dinghy designed for two sailors.

He sold it in June or July that year.

Although records are not precise enough to say whether this was before or after Carol's disappearance, one point can be established: the boat had never been kept at Coniston and, from May that summer - two months before Carol's disappearance - was being used for a sailing course on a completely different lake, Windermere. Just supposing he had been disposing of a body, he'd have been likely to do it where the boat was (Windermere) or, if he was going to the trouble of moving it, he'd have gone to a more remote lake, certainly not Coniston in full public view at the height of summer.

One of the key exhibits was a rock. The prosecution argued that, along with the body, Park had dumped Carol's clothes in the lake, and weighed those down with this rock. One expert said its mineral features precisely matched those of rocks at Bluestones, the family home.

But how did this rock come to be in the case at all? The police diver who'd supposedly recovered it said he didn't remember doing so, and that if he had picked one up, he'd have placed it back on the lake bed.

Asked what evidence there was that the rock had ever been in the lake, Professor Kenneth Pye, a defence scientific witness, commented: 'None.' But it was the 'jailhouse snitch' evidence that was more crucial. In September 2000, a prisoner, Michael Wainwright, contacted police to say that Park, while in prison in 1997, had confessed to the crime before him and another inmate, Glen Banks.

During the 14 days Park had been held in custody, he had shared a cell with Banks, a prisoner with a severe learning disability. However, Park had no recollection of ever meeting Wainwright.

At the trial, Banks had some difficulty getting his story straight, and at one point stated: 'He said he killed his missus while on a boat in Blackpool.' Wainwright also presented a muddled story. He said Park had told him he'd gone upstairs, found his wife in bed with another man and killed her in a fit of rage. Leaving aside the question of what happened to the lover, Park is unlikely to have said that for one simple reason: his house was a bungalow.

But only one point really matters. Is it plausible that a retired schoolteacher such as Park, while vehemently maintaining his innocence to all his friends, family and lawyers, should suddenly confess to two unsavoury prisoners - one of whom (Wainwright) admitted to smoking 12 cannabis joints a day and hearing voices?

So if Gordon Park is innocent, what did happen to his wife? After Gordon had driven off to Blackpool that Saturday in 1976, there were three important sightings: one neighbour saw Carol at the bottom of the driveway; another saw a man drive a VW Beetle car up the drive and stay for about 20 minutes.

This neighbour saw the vehicle as it arrived and knew the driver wasn't Gordon, but didn't see who was in the car as it drove away. The presence of the VW has never been accounted for.

Added to this, a woman who knew Carol saw her at 6pm that evening at the Charnock Richard services on the M6. The woman said that Carol rushed past with her head down. The witness said to her husband: 'Fancy her being snobby this far away from Barrow.' Obviously, the prosecution pointed out that Park took several weeks to report that Carol was missing; but men do not readily broadcast the possibility that they've been cuckolded.

In Carol's psychiatric reports from 1975, it states that she made no complaint of violence by Gordon or suggested that she felt threatened by him.

In fact, there was no suggestion from anyone that Gordon could be violent.

A number of Carol's lovers, however, were known to be violent men. She knew one especially violent man: John Rapson, who had murdered her sister.

Was Rapson in prison when Carol was killed? No - he had been released to a hostel in December 1975 and conceded in a police interview that he had been in Barrow in July 1976.

There is no suggestion he murdered Carol; but he is just one of several men who knew her who would make far more plausible suspects than Park.

Now Gordon's children are determined to get him freed. 'We were distraught when we found out Mum was dead,' said her son Jeremy. 'We might never know the truth. But we have now lost both parents.' Their long campaign to get their father back has begun.

(C) Copyright 2005 Associated Newspapers Ltd. DAILY MAIL (London)