(C) Private Eye, 2007 - www.private-eye.co.uk

Headline: A Criminal Piece of Television

Calling a documentary "Real Crime", might suggest it relies on real, incontrovertible facts. Sadly not. ITV's "Real Crime: The Lady in the Lake" purported to be an examination of the evidence that led to the conviction of Gordon Park (pictured) for the murder of his wife Carol, whose well-wrapped body was found at the bottom of Lake Coniston in August 1997 - 21 years after she disappeared.

Park was convicted in January 2005 on the most dubious of evidence (Eye 1150). The couple's two children are now at the forefront of a campaign to prove his innocence. Not that you would have learned that from this programme.

"One can only imagine the pain of being hit with an ice-axe", the narrator intoned. Except there was no evidence that Carol Park had been murdered with an ice axe. In fact, a pathologist told the trial, it was all but impossible to give any specific cause of death, let alone identify a murder weapon.

Friends of Carol’s intimated that Gordon had been violent towards her. Yet Carol had told her GP, not long before she disappeared, that her husband had never used nor threatened violence. The trial Judge, Mr Justice McCombe, also referred to Park's "non-violent disposition".

Another interviewee claimed that Carol "could do nothing socially on her own". Again, an odd conclusion about a woman who had a number of lovers and once walked out on her family to set up home with a former police officer on the other side of the country.

Then there was the clothing found, the programme told us, "close to the body". The senior investigating officer, DCI Keith Churchman, said, "For me, the clothing was Carol’s and it went down with her … perhaps it had become involved in the murder – maybe it got spattered with blood, or had been used to clean up the blood, who knows?"

Who knows, indeed? The clothing was discovered more than 70 metres away. There was nothing linking it to Carol; and no evidence of Carol’s blood in Park’s house. The prosecution attempted to link the clothing to Park by saying a rock found on the bottom of the lake, with the clothing, and possibly used to weigh it down, corresponded closely to the stones in Park's garden wall.

When shown the rock, the police diver said to have found it fainted. When he recovered he told the court he hadn't noticed a rock on the dive and he hadn't brought one up. A geologist called by the defence said that, far from being in the water 21 years, there was no evidence that it had ever been in water at all. Such curiosities did not trouble the documentary makers.

The programme’s most disingenuous section was the prison "grass" evidence. While steadfastly maintaining his innocence to everyone, Park was said to have made a "cell-confession" to his fellow inmate Glen Banks when he was held on remand for two weeks in 1997. Banks had severe learning difficulties and was said to be in the lowest two per cent of the population in terms of mental ability. Yet, claimed DCI Churchman in the programme, this " actually strengthened his evidence ... because the way his learning difficulties were, it meant he couldn’t make things up. You could give him a story to remember, and he could remember it, so the medical experts were saying, 'anything he tends to say is the truth'."

Except, as experts told the court at the time, Banks had an "elevated risk of suggestibility" -- borne out by the fact that Banks had told the court that Park had gone to Blackpool with his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and had killed her on a boat there and dumped her body - which didn't remotely fit the facts of the case.

Finally, what about the Parks' children? The programme said Carol had three children. In fact she had two children with Gordon. She had also adopted her sister Christine's child after her Christine was murdered by her boyfriend John Rapson. Rapson had been released from prison and was living in a hostel at the time Carol disappeared.

Meanwhile, the couple's children, Jeremy and Rachael, continue to fight to get their father’s conviction overturned.

(C) Private Eye, 2007 - www.private-eye.co.uk