Stephen Lawrence was murdered in April 1993 in Eltham, south-east London.
Earlier this week, the BBC publicly named one of the main suspects in the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In response, Stephen’s mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, said: “It shouldn’t have been a journalist to do the work that a huge and well-resourced institution should have done.” Correspondent Daniel De Simone began investigating the case after the Metropolitan Police pulled over.
Investigating the murder of Stephen Lawrence is a journey to the past and present.
Stephen was murdered 30 years ago in a racist attack by a gang of white youths.
Two years ago, I set out to pursue a lead that had the potential to uncover important new information.
The Met had stopped investigating Stephen’s murder in 2020. It wanted to do what it could to investigate the leading suspects and hold them to account.
I had no previous experience covering the case and was intimidated by it. Journalists had been covering the story since the 1990s, and there had been more than 15 police investigations or official investigations. Who was I to imagine that I could find something new?
Daniel De Simone with Dr. Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father
The lead I followed up related to a man who was said to have been there when Stephen was murdered. He wasn’t sure if this was as a witness or as a suspect. I didn’t know the identity of the man, and it took me months to get a name. In the meantime, I read everything I could about Stephen’s case.
When I got a name, I realized the man, Matthew White, was the person in the case known as Witness K.
He had read a lot about Witness K. His supposed role was not to be present during the attack, but to act as a central link in a chain of how information was passed on the night of the murder.
This chain was said to include a brief visit by K to the home of suspects Neil and Jamie Acourt.
White died in 2021, aged 50, when I started researching, which means I couldn’t get close to him.
A constant source of help and advice was Clive Driscoll, the retired Met detective who had brought two of Stephen’s killers to justice. He told me that after the two murder convictions he achieved in 2012, he had focused on the other murderers.
One of those he investigated was Matthew White, and Clive told an extraordinary story about how he discovered that one of White’s stepfathers had been disastrously mishandled by the Met in 1993.
Clive had arrested White in late 2013, after personally tracking down the correct stepfather, who said White admitted to being present during the murder. But Clive was unable to complete the investigation of him after Scotland Yard replaced him as Senior Investigation Officer and he was asked to step down.
I felt silly thinking about it, but I was trying to run my own murder investigation.
An artist’s impression of the “blonde shooter”, Matthew White photographed a fortnight after the murder, and a police e-fit.
The complexity of Stephen’s case has increased over time, and the amount of investigation and inquiry has only added to the already large volume of information.
I had to try to find three decades of evidence, much of it hidden in police files. I gained access to previously secret documents on the case and read every transcript of Macpherson’s 1998 public investigation into the murder. Several people helped me confidentially, providing crucial information during the verification and corroboration process.
It became clear that there was a gaping hole in the case.
On the night of the murder, Stephen’s friend, Duwayne Brooks, had said there were six attackers and gave a description of a blond attacker who did not fit the profile of the top five known suspects. Eyewitnesses to the murder had described the same person. Who was he? Why did everyone seem to have forgotten about this key point?
Furthermore, Matthew White had been referenced many times in the case. I found out that Kent police had told the Met in 1997 to get to the bottom of his paper and had raised the possibility that he was present during the attack. The issue was raised during the Macpherson inquiry hearings the following year.
In 2000, I found out that a witness had told the Met that White confessed to being present during the attack and playing a leading role in it. This witness had spoken to the police independently of White’s stepfather, whom Clive Driscoll tracked down. Compared with the evidence from Duwayne Brooks and eyewitnesses, White’s confession account was convincing.
It was clear that White was a suspect and that the police had finally treated him as such. How fair was this designation? Was he the sixth man?
I tried to cross-check everything else I was finding about White with other evidence, including witness accounts from 1993. White surely had an alibi for the night, given that he was known as Witness K and featured so prominently in narratives of the case. .
The failure of the first police investigation had tainted all subsequent attempts to gather evidence and get to the truth. I found the same.
It was therefore surprising that despite everyone accepting that the first investigation had been a disaster, many statements collected by it were still trusted. I was particularly wary of anything collected by a particular detective.
I didn’t want to take anything from 1993 at face value, so where possible I spoke to witnesses from the time. I spent weeks in Eltham, South East London, traveling across the country looking for people. Many witnesses remain reluctant to help, often telling me to get lost.
I built a timeline of the night of the murder and the days that followed. I also listed and researched all the possible case theories relating to White: these included various ways he might have played a role in the group that attacked Stephen, and various ways he might have been a witness instead.
The complexity of the scene on that night in April 1993 meant that he wanted to check in particular whether White had witnessed the attack or its aftermath, or whether he had spoken to an eyewitness or the attacker moments after the murder.
Uncounted people were seen near the crime scene in the minutes before the attack.
The sightings, at a roundabout within sight of where Stephen was stabbed, were witnesses passing through the area.
One of those seen in the area could have been White, so I did what I could to test this possibility.
The night of the attack, there was another group of young people near the scene. When the police spoke to them, this group agreed to be nearby, but generally denied entering the roundabout. When I spoke to members of the group, they denied seeing White that night.
When I spoke to another witness who had passed the scene just before the attack, that person also denied seeing White.
I found nothing to support a case theory that White had been a passerby at the roundabout.
In time, the least probable case theory of all came to be that of “Witness K” accepted by the police in 1993. When I checked White’s alibi, I found that it did not exist. He had lied.
I also found that a witness had given a false account relating to White, allowing him to claim that he first learned of the stabbing from a local girl who passed by the scene of the crime afterwards.
From my own investigation, it was apparent that the Met had not verified his alibi for at least 15 years, despite sending a file to prosecutors after Clive Driscoll was prevented from completing his investigation.
The fact that a false story was told was a crucial discovery. Who else wasn’t telling the whole truth?
New evidence about the murder of Stephen Lawrence, uncovered by BBC investigative reporter Daniel De Simone.
I tried to consider all the evidence that undermined the possibility that White was present during the attack. There were reasons to doubt that he would have behaved in any of the ways that he apparently did, had he been present, including visiting the scene after the attack and telling others who was responsible for the murder.
But his stepfather said he had behaved as if the murder had been “an everyday occurrence”.
I also kept finding that people sympathized with White, in a way not with the suspects Neil and Jamie Acourt, or with David Norris, who was convicted of murdering Stephen in 2012.
The same was true for Gary Dobson, the other man jailed in 2012, with several people questioning his conviction, saying he was a nice guy. If people kept saying that about racist drug-dealing murderer Gary Dobson, was it any surprise that there was sympathy for White?
I also kept getting false and malicious rumors about Stephen Lawrence.
I realized that what I was encountering was deep-seated racism that dehumanized Stephen. Some people clearly did not care about the victim. Racism had killed Stephen and was preventing the truth from being told.
White himself was clearly the source of some of the rumors. Two people with very close ties to him made the same false claims to me, independently of each other. I won’t repeat the lies, but they did show that White was telling lies about Stephen to justify what happened to him.
This was deeply ironic given that White was a violent drug-using thief, a complete contrast to Stephen.
In the end, it became clear to me that White was indeed one of the prime suspects in the murder. The BBC decided to identify him as such, and Scotland Yard’s highly unusual response was to name him a suspect and apologize for their handling of the case.
Evidence related to White points to the prominent suspects in the case, not them.