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Headline: The "Lady in the Lake" case and the conviction of Gordon Park

By Bob Woffinden

On Sunday 10 August 1997, a member of a four-man amateur diving team came across a strange and well-wrapped bundle about 24 metres down on the bed of Coniston Water in the Lake District.

Four days later, on Wednesday 13 August, he and a colleague returned to the spot with lifting equipment to bring it to the surface. The cords wrapping the bundle were very tight, however, and they had problems attaching an inflatable bag. It was only with considerable difficulty that they managed to drag the bundle behind them to the shore. They then cut open the outer canvas bag. Inside was another green bag and then, covered in black plastic bin-liners, a human body. They called the police.

The discovery of the body led to national publicity (it was the middle of August, the traditional silly season for the media, when genuine news stories are scarce) and enormous speculation. The fact that the woman had been clothed in a small night-dress only increased the sordid sensationalism of the story. Throughout the next week, there was intense interest about whose body it was. Finally, the police managed to identify it from dental records; the body was that of Carol Park, a teacher who had gone missing in July 1976, 21 years earlier. She was then a 30-year-old married woman with three young children. By this time, in 1997, her husband, Gordon Park, was on holiday in France with Jenny, his third wife. "Oh, dear", he said when his son Jeremy telephoned to break the news.

Park, who had retired in 1993, had also been a school teacher. He naturally understood that, in these circumstances, he was bound to be suspected. Indeed, when police conducted the original missing persons inquiry in 1976, they had bluntly told him that, should his wife ever be found dead, he would be the prime suspect.

Gordon and Jenny were coming to the end of their holiday anyway, so they cleaned the gite and packed and then embarked on the two-day journey back home, towing their trailer of luggage. On their overnight stop, they watched the television news with disbelief mixed with great anxiety; they saw pictures of the police searching their home and carrying away black bin-bags of their belongings.

They returned to England late on the evening of Saturday 24 August, and Park was arrested at 8.00am the following morning. He was charged with his wife’s murder and remanded to Preston prison. Why he was remanded in custody at public expense is something of a mystery. He was then a 53-year-old teacher who was well-known in his local community and who had never been convicted of anything in his life. Even if he had murdered his wife, he had obviously posed no danger to the public for the previous 21 years. At the time, the prosecution suggested that the sensational publicity had made him a target and so he was remanded for his own protection. It was two weeks before his legal team succeeded in getting him bail. As it turned out, the idea that he should have been remanded in prison for his own well-being was the cruellest distortion of reality.

In January 1998, the charges were dropped through lack of evidence. However, the charge was reinstated in January 2004. Park, who is now 61, went to trial for his wife’s murder at Manchester Crown Court in November 2004. He was found guilty in January 2005 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

There were several strands of evidence against him. Firstly, there was the family background. Gordon and Carol Park married in 1967 and moved into Bluestones, a house which Gordon himself had built in Lecce, Barrow-in-Furness. When Carol’s sister, Christine, who was then 18, was murdered soon after giving birth to a daughter, Gordon and Carol took in and adopted the child, Vanessa. They then had two children of their own, Jeremy, born in 1970, and Rachael, born in 1971.

From soon after Rachael’s birth, however, the marriage became increasingly fraught. Probably not until the transmission in 1998 of the popular BBC drama series The Lakes would anyone have considered that part of Cumbria a hotbed of sexual activity, but Carol had a string of affairs in the mid-’70s. On one week-long Open University course at Keele in 1974, she had liaisons with two fellow students. Afterwards, she wrote to one, who lived on the opposite side of the country near Middlesbrough, and then left Gordon to move in with him. She took his surname and got a job teaching children with learning difficulties at a local school. Jeremy and Rachael remember spending one holiday with their mother and her new partner.

In September 1974, she asked Gordon for a divorce. Although she didn’t go through with this, she did try to win custody of the children. The outcome of this custody battle, however, was exceptional. In March 1975, the court determined that it was Carol who had left the marital home and, as Gordon was looking after the children responsibly, in this case it was the father who was granted custody.

As a result, Carol became severely depressed and was prescribed anti-depressants by her doctor. On the last day of the summer term, she failed to arrive for work, and a missing person’s inquiry was set up. However, she turned up, although later that summer she left her partner and returned to Gordon.

When she again disappeared at almost exactly the same time the following year, on 17 July 1976, the day after the end of the summer term, friends thought that she would turn up – by then, she had disappeared on five occasions. When her absence became one of weeks, it was merely thought that she had left to start a new life elsewhere. It was only at the end of the long school holidays that Gordon, who assumed that she was "in bed with another man", reported her missing. A second missing person’s inquiry was then initiated. There was little to go on. She should have accompanied Gordon and the children on a day’s outing to Blackpool, but she had complained of a headache and didn’t go with them. Obviously, the children could not be disappointed, and so Gordon had taken them on his own. When they returned, she was gone. Her marriage and engagement rings were on the small dressing table in the bedroom. At trial, Jeremy gave evidence about that day. He remembered asking, "Where is Mummy?", and his father seeming upset. He asked his father whether he ever cried, and Gordon responded, "I am crying now".

Gordon divorced her on the grounds of desertion in November 1978, and re-married in 1981, although that was short-lived. He then married Jenny, whom he had known for 45 years, in 1993.

So that was the family background to the case. There was then the forensic science evidence provided by an analysis of the "body parcel". The body was tied in the foetal position, and wrapped in two bin-liners, a canvas bag and a large holdall. It was weighted down with lead piping, and all was bound together with rope which had been wound around the body at least three times. When Park was re-arrested, in January 2004, it was partly on the strength of evidence from a knot specialist, Mike Lucas, who concluded that Park had tied the knots on the "body parcel".

In these circumstances, it was obviously going to be difficult for any pathologist to arrive at precise conclusions. Because the body had clearly been trussed up prior to rigor mortis having set in, it was clear that the "body parcel" was assembled within 2-3 hours of death. It looked as though sticking-plaster had been taped across the eyes.

The condition of the body was described as adipocere, having a white, soapy appearance, due to its having been in the water for so long. There were defensive injuries to Carol’s left hand, consistent with her having been attacked. The pathologist, Dr Edmund Tapp, said he thought Carol had been beaten about the face – the upper part of the jaw was fractured – with a "heavy blunt object". More than that, almost no one could say. (Indeed, even that may have been stating more than could realistically be adduced.) Certainly, no one could give any indication at all of the time or period of death.

The police took an ice-axe from Park’s home and this was shown to the jury; Tapp said that it could have been the murder weapon. A slate and a rock, both supposedly found near the body, were presented as prosecution evidence. The rock was held to match those in the wall at Bluestones. Further, some items of clothing were found in the water, and the prosecution suggested that these could have been Carol’s clothes, which had been tied together and weighted down with the rock, but that this second package had disintegrated over the years. A woman came forward to say that she had seen a man on a yacht tipping a bundle over the side in July 1976. Park had his own boat and, the prosecution asserted, was used to sailing it on Coniston. Finally, two prisoners came forward to say that, while he was held in prison for those 14 days, Park told them he had committed the crime.

Essentially, that was the evidence on which Park was convicted. When it is all examined more carefully, however, a different picture begins to emerge. For example, an ice-axe is extremely light, designed to chip away at ice when mountain-climbing. It could not have inflicted some of the wounds that Dr Tapp thought he discerned. The defence pathologist, Dr William Lawler, emphasised that, in these circumstances, it was impossible to give any cause of death.

In preparation for the trial, a defence expert, Robert Chisnall, examined all the knots on the body. When he delivered his report, the prosecution expert, Lucas – to his credit – retracted his conclusions and withdrew from the case. The prosecution then appointed a different expert. However, the most that could be said from their point of view was that the knots of the body and the knots found in and around Park’s home each demonstrated some knot-tying skills; there was nothing to suggest that they had been tied by the same person. In an area like the Lake District where sailing and mountain-climbing were popular, almost everyone had those same skills. Moreover, the defence established that a man named John Rapson, who had worked as an apprentice fitter in the Barrow shipyards, may well have had those skills. Rapson was someone who particularly interested the defence; he was the man who had murdered Carol’s sister.

With regard to the knot-tying, however, the defence argued that the available evidence could not be described merely as inconclusive. It went much further than that. From Park’s house, garage and boat, the police had taken materials which in total contained 194 knots. Of these, there were more half-hitches (69, or 35%) than any other kind of knot; yet there wasn’t a single half-hitch on the body parcel. Conversely, the most-used knot on the body was a granny (34, or 26%) – yet there wasn’t a single granny knot found on Park’s property. This evidence alone, argued the defence, was strongly suggestive of Park’s innocence; a murderer who’s disposing of a body in one of the UK’s deepest lakes is hardly going to take the precaution of disguising his knot-tying habits in case it’s discovered 21 years later,

The lead piping around the body was also compared to lead taken from Park’s house. There was no match; they were produced by different manufacturers. They were not even visibly alike, as there was paint on the lead piping from Park’s home, but not on that around the body. Impressions on the piping could have been made by any widely-available hammer, such as those made by Stanley’s.

The piece of slate – which was not recovered from the bed of Coniston until 2004 – was evidentially redundant. Slate had been quarried in the Coniston area for hundreds of years, and this form of slate was common in south Cumbria.

The rock, however, was the subject of a great deal of courtroom attention; probably there has been no more contentious rock in the entire history of British criminal justice. Merely the first aspect of this controversy was: where had it actually come from?

The divers who found the body parcel on 10 August and recovered it on 13 August reported that there was nothing else of interest in the immediate vicinity. The police then arranged a series of further dives, specifically to search for items that might have been associated with the body. In dives on the 14th, 18th and 29th of August, and in further dives on the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 9th of September, nothing at all was found. In a dive on the 10th of September, two lady’s shoes, one blue and the other black, a lady’s leather boot and a small red dress were recovered. There was then a further dive on 30th of September in which more items of clothing, including two matching pairs of shoes and also some cosmetics, were discovered. It was during this dive – which was the 11th in all – that the rock was recovered.

That, at least, was the prosecution case. However, there was an unexpected reaction from the diver who had conducted this particular search – his name was Brookes – when he took the stand. "When he was shown the stone", the judge, Mr Justice McCombe, reminded the jury in his summing-up, "he fainted."

When he recovered, Brookes said that he had no recollection of the rock at all. "No recollection of recovering it", added the judge. "Indeed, he said that if he had noticed a rock at all, he probably would have discarded it."

Moreover, there was no record anywhere of a rock having been recovered during this dive. There was nothing on the diving logs or the exhibits labels that referred to a rock. The defence expert, Professor Kenneth Pye, asked for the statements relating to its recovery; there were none. There was no record anywhere of the recovery of a rock from Coniston water.

So it was first documented on the 4th of October, when it was seen on the floor of a cycle store, which was being used as a temporary exhibits room. At that point, a diver named Braddock was recorded as having recovered it. That, said the scene-of-crimes officer, was a mistake.

Having examined the rock, Professor Pye pointed out that diatoms were commonly found on rocks which had been immersed in water for some time. Apart from one broken fragment, there were none on this rock. He concluded that there was no meaningful evidence that the rock had ever been in the lake at all.

The prosecution expert who maintained that the rock matched four samples from the wall at Bluestones initially reached this conclusion because of the monazite that was common to all. However, Professor Pye examined the materials and concluded that monazite was not present. The prosecution expert then retracted this conclusion, and said instead that he could identify a substance called synchysite, although he acknowledged that no studies at all had been carried out in the area to establish the incidence of rock containing this material. In conclusion, there were sophisticated geological comparisons of the rock with the stones from the wall at Bluestones; all that could definitely be concluded from those was that they came from the same general source and had been deposited in this glacial valley sometime in the last two million years.

The suggestion that the rock could be associated with the items of clothing didn’t appear to fit the facts of the case. We know that the murderer had expertly trussed together the body so that it stayed completely sealed for 21 years until it was accidentally discovered. So why, having made such a good job of dealing with this more difficult package, would he have made such a poor one of tying the clothing together? Secondly, if Gordon were the murderer, what would have been the point of disposing of just a few items of Carol’s clothing? He’d got wardrobes full of her clothing at home. (Indeed, if the clothing were evidentially significant, then it would logically suggest that the murderer had needed to dispose of just a few items of her clothing, and therefore was someone other than Gordon.)

Thirdly, however, there was no evidence whatever that any of these items actually were Carol’s. (A fashion expert gave evidence that the majority of those that could be dated came from the early to the mid-’70s, although many items could not be dated.) There was nothing to contradict the propositions that these were just a few items of detritus that had collected on the bed of the lake over 30 years (perhaps having been thrown overboard from boats), and that any trawl of any similar stretch of water would yield a similar find.

Then there was the extraordinary evidence of Mrs Joan Young. She contacted the police in 2004 to say that she remembered having been on holiday in the Lake District in 1976. She and her husband had parked their car on the lakeside, on the eastern shore, and she recalled having seen a man on a yacht tip a bundle over the side, and remarking jokingly to her husband, "Perhaps that’s his wife".

Her evidence may be superficially attractive. It was confirmed, to some small degree, by both her husband and her sister, to whom she had related the incident at the time. Even so, it is riddled with difficulties. Firstly, although her husband John was sitting with her, he said he had only a vague recollection of a man on a yacht tipping something over the side. Secondly, Mrs Young said she remembered the holiday especially clearly because it was then that John had proposed to her; he, however, did not remember that.

Thirdly, the distance at which she saw the boat suggests that it would have been too far away for her to be sure about what exactly she had seen. (She said in court that she was unsure whether or not she had been using binoculars.) Fourthly, if she did see what she thought 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 in any event was out of line of sight because there was an island in the way.

Fifthly, her description of the boat (a large yacht, with a cabin and a motor) suggests that it was a sailing boat like a cruiser – and that raises the whole question of Gordon Park’s boats. When the body was found, it was widely reported that Gordon Park owned a large yacht, the "Mrs J". So, indeed, he did – in 1997. In 1976, he had a 505, a fast and powerful racing dinghy designed for two sailors. Mrs Young’s description of the boat was consistent with the boat that Park owned in 1997, but not the one he had in 1976.

Sixthly, at this time, John Young had injured his leg and was on crutches. There were hospital records showing that he had received treatment (at home, in Scotland) the very weekend that Carol disappeared. Mrs Young said the man-on-the-yacht incident occurred towards the end of their holidays, which would have been the end of the month.

This suggests that even if she did see Carol’s body being dumped into Coniston, it could not have been Gordon who was involved. If one were to accept this scenario, Gordon would have needed to murder Carol, to keep the body around the house for about two weeks, and then truss it up and dump it in Coniston Water in broad daylight – all without the children having been aware that anything was amiss.

So how was he supposed to keep all that secret from three lively children? One thing is certain: he did not take them elsewhere to be looked after. After all, there was a contemporaneous missing person’s inquiry. In those circumstances, one of the first things that police would have wanted to know was: had there been any periods when Gordon offloaded the children to family or friends? If there had been, then the missing person’s inquiry was bound to have taken a very different course. All the available evidence is that during this time the children were looked after continuously by Gordon and were not taken elsewhere.

There is another major area in which this area of evidence is, when examined in conjunction with other evidence, totally implausible. Gordon Park always maintained that he had sold his 505 by the time of Carol’s disappearance. In fact, he appears to have sold it sometime around July 1976, so it may have been either just before or just after the disappearance. Although the records in this respect are unhelpful, what is documented is that the boat had never been kept on Coniston at all and, from May that summer, was on a different lake, Windermere. During May and June, it was being used for a sailing course and, indeed, it was at that time that Park accepted an offer for it from one of the course instructors.

So, even if he had still owned the boat, it would have been locked in private premises. Park would have needed to get it out, unrig it, take it on a trailer to Coniston, to one of the only two places from which, at the time, it could have been launched – a boating club and a public jetty – reef the sails, launch it, sail it single-handedly across the lake for about five miles, dispose of the body, and then do everything in reverse and take the boat back to Windermere. He would have had to do all that in full public view at the height of summer, without anyone at all noticing.

If he had been disposing of a body, it is logical to assume that he would have done so either where the boat already was (Windermere); or, if he was going to the trouble of moving it, he’d have gone to a more remote lake like Wast Water and certainly not the ever-popular Coniston.

Indeed, this is exactly what happened in the case of Peter Hogg, an airline pilot who murdered his wife in Surrey in 1976 and disposed of her body in Wast Water. It was found unexpectedly in 1984 when divers were searching for a missing French student. Hogg, who was convicted of manslaughter and served 15 months in jail, didn’t own a boat; his case proved that anyone wishing to dispose of a body in the Lake District needed neither a boat nor particular local knowledge, but merely an ounce of common sense and a small inflatable dinghy.

Then there was the evidence of the two jailhouse snitches – that is, prisoners who allege that the defendant confessed to them while in custody. Such evidence is always highly controversial; prisoners are uniquely vulnerable, and may have any of a variety of reasons for wishing to ingratiate themselves with the authorities. In any event, the basic proposition underlying their evidence is that someone may vehemently maintain their innocence to family, friends and lawyers, but suddenly confess to someone he knows barely (if at all) and with whom he has no conceivable affinity; such a proposition should be beyond belief. In any case, defendants will normally be warned by lawyers not to discuss their case in prison with potentially untrustworthy inmates or prison officers – i.e. with anyone at all. Michael Graham, Park’s solicitor, testified that Park was well aware of this situation.

Park was only held in prison for two weeks in 1997. It was not until three years later that one prisoner, Michael Wainwright, contacted police to say that Park had confessed both to him and another inmate, Glen Banks. Park had shared a cell with Banks, but said he had never seen Wainwright in his life until he walked into the Manchester courtroom to give evidence.

Wainwright’s account was that Park said he needed to confide in him because he had something to get off his chest. Park then told him that he had come home one day and gone upstairs to find Carol in bed with another man. While the man had run out of the house, Park had strangled his wife and then started to dismember the body, before stopping and wrapping it all up instead. He had put the body in his car, driven to Coniston Water and gone out in his boat to dump the body in the lake.

Apart from the evidential difficulties already covered (Park’s boat was not moored on Coniston; where were the three children while all this was going on? – etc., etc), it was simply untrue that Park had gone home and climbed the stairs; there were none – the house was a bungalow.

Wainwright made three statements – one when he first reported his evidence; a second in July 2004, and the third in November 2004, in the morning before he gave his testimony in court. The thrust of his account – that Park had arrived home to find his wife in bed with another man – had not appeared in the first two accounts; Wainwright explained that he had remembered that part only a week before going to court. The part about initially starting to dismember the body had not appeared in any of his statements, not even the one given earlier the same day.

Apart from a history of violence, Wainwright had a long medical history, and had several times suffered mental problems. He had complained about hearing voices just before making his original statement. He admitted that he had smoked up to 15 cannabis joints a day for the last 14 years and that he had difficulty remembering things. He also acknowledged that in his many dealings with doctors and psychiatrists he had never once mentioned the supposed conversation with Gordon Park.

All of this, however, does not provide the main grounds for scepticism about Wainwright’s testimony. The main problem is whether Wainwright could ever have met Park at all. He was admitted to Preston prison on 28 August, and appeared to have spent the first two weeks of his imprisonment there in solitary confinement. Since Park was released on 9 September, 12 days after Wainwright’s admission, there would appear to have been scarcely any opportunity for them to have met at all. The defence QC described him bluntly as "a self-confessed attention-seeking liar".

Still, Wainwright’s evidence made more sense than Bank’s. Banks, who agreed that Park had helped him with reading and writing, gave his evidence by videolink from elsewhere in the court building. Astonishingly, this was because he was thought to be a vulnerable witness. He suffered learning disabilities, had a very low intellect and poor levels of comprehension. When it was put to him that he was in prison because he had been convicted of being equipped for theft, taking a car and burglary, Banks absolutely denied it. The judge was left to comment that Banks "probably was mistaken or confused about what he was in Preston prison for".

Banks, who had previous convictions for dishonesty and armed robbery, told police that Park told him he had taken his wife to Blackpool by boat to celebrate their fiftieth (that’s right: 50th) wedding anniversary and they had gone out on a boat and he had killed her and pushed her body overboard. He further said that Park told him that he had put white powder into his wife’s drink. It was plainly a very confused story.

That was the evidence against Park. A key part of the defence case was three sightings which cast doubt on the prosecution version of events (vague as that version was). Firstly, Carol herself was seen by the next-door neighbour at the bottom of the drive leading up to the house. They had a brief conversation. Carol said that she was relieved the term was over and was looking forward to the summer holidays. The neighbour thought that this happened on the Saturday morning. (Obviously, the gist of the conversation, slight as it was, means it could not have taken place any earlier as term had only finished the day before.)

Secondly, another neighbour saw a car drive up to the house. She did not recognise the man who was driving, although she could see that it was not Gordon Park. The car was a Volkswagen Beetle (it was the one car she could confidently identify) and she was surprised to see it there because she knew the family had arranged to go to Blackpool for the day. She was interviewed by police for the 1976 missing person’s inquiry. Asked to time her sighting, she said it would have been sometime during the Saturday morning, lunchtime at the latest.

Thirdly, and most remarkably, a woman who knew Carol saw her at the Charnock Richard southbound service station on the M6 at about six o’clock that evening. She said that as she walked towards Carol, the latter averted her eyes and did not acknowledge her. "Fancy her being stuck-up this far from Barrow", the witness thought to herself.

After seeing Carol’s disappearance reported in the local papers, the woman went to police at the time, in the summer of 1976, to make a statement. At the 2004-5 trial, the prosecution recognised that her sighting was fatal for its case, and attempted to introduce uncertainty into this area of evidence. The witness knew that the sighting occurred as her own family was heading off on holiday, but stated that her husband might have left work early and so they had started the holiday on the Friday, the day before. However, that cannot have been the case, because Carol’s whereabouts on the Friday had already been established; she was in Barrow.

Once all the evidence is carefully analysed, there are overwhelming grounds for doubting whether Park killed his wife. When Carol had turned to doctors for her depression in 1975, she was diagnosed as having a disordered personality, and described as a woman who was unstable in her relationships. The surviving medical reports showed that she specifically said that Gordon was never violent towards her – he used neither violence nor threats.

However, Carol did know one man who was violent towards women, and that was John Rapson who, on 10 April 1969, had killed her sister Christine and attacked their mother at the same time. Rapson, who had taped over the eyes on Christine’s body, was convicted of the murder, but – astonishingly – was not in prison by 1976. He had weekend liberty from March 1976 onwards, and sometimes went to Barrow.

The prosecution stated that his known interest in what they described as "strange sexual activities" ruled him out of consideration, because there was no suggestion of that in this case. There is no evidence that he killed Carol, but he ought to have been considered as a suspect.

It is extraordinary that a man like Gordon Park, whose entire life had been so innocuous – the judge referred to his "non-violent disposition" – should ever been have taken to trial, let alone convicted of murder. He would, however, have been facing a mountain of prejudice and hostility which had accumulated from the moment he was unfortunately abroad at the time of the discovery of the body; an impression that he had fled the country (however erroneous that was) may have taken root.

The Lakes, a very popular drama series of its time, memorably featured a husband murdering his wife, trussing up the body, and dumping it in one of the lakes. Both this and references in The Ladies in the Lake, a Channel 4 documentary, and elsewhere to the Peter Hogg case would have reinforced the popular assumption that it must be the husband who did it.

It is difficult for anyone to defend themselves against something they are meant to have done 28 years earlier. Potential witnesses have disappeared or died, or long since forgotten fleeting events that may in retrospect have been significant. Documentation, too, may have been lost; in this case, quite a lot had been. All the files of the 1975 and 1976 missing person inquiries had disappeared, as had relevant prison records for Wainwright and Banks.

The defendant may be further handicapped by the fact that police attentions are focused in one direction only; Rachael Garcia, Park’s daughter, who now lives in Beijing, told the court that her impression was that if she said anything positive about her father to the police, it was ignored; they only took notice of the negative points.

However, as he faces what must be an appalling ordeal, Park will at least be heartened by the knowledge that his family, friends and lawyers all have complete faith in his innocence and are working hard to ensure that when the case goes to appeal, the conviction will be quashed.

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