Hearing at the Old Bailey

Tuesday 29th January

My sister and I both attended this first hearing at the Old Bailey to learn about possible outcomes following our cousin's death. The Family Liaison Officer met us outside the Old Bailey at about 9.45 and took us inside with her so that we would be able to sit in the court itself rather than in the public gallery. This meant that we only had to switch off our mobile phones; if you sit in the public gallery, you have to leave all your electronic gadgets outside somewhere - according to the Old Bailey web site, there is a shop nearby where you can deposit them for something like £3 each.

We sat on a sofa outside the court for some time, as the hearing didn't begin promptly at 10. I expect it would have done had we been late though! We met the woman from the CPS just before we went in.

We were challenged by the clerk of the court when we went in to the court, and had to explain that we were the family. We sat on the side of the court, along with three reporters. We were able to see the young man accused of Douglas' attack on a video screen at the other side of the courtroom; he was sitting at the end of a big table in the secure hospital where he is being held. There were two warders, one on either side of him, just slightly behind him, and there were other prison staff sitting at the side of the room - there must have been 6 other people in the room. The figures were really tiny though, we would have needed binoculars to see any of them clearly.

We all had to stand when the judge came in, wearing a short wig and red robes. My sister said she found all the formality - the wigs and robes, the standing, the bowing - quite daunting and very alien to her normal life.

The points under discussion seemed to be two - jurisdiction to try the case, whether here or in Germany, and the mental state of the assailant. I was hampered by the extremely quiet voice of the CPS barrister, who was inaudible to me for about 50% of the time; she had her back to me, which didn't help. At least I could hear the judge, though even this became difficult when some stupid person in the room at the secure hospital made a phone call, and there were some loud but muffled sounds of conversation over the video link; I was a bit surprised that the judge didn't call them to order, though he looked at the video screen very crossly from time to time.

The judge referred to the Terrorism Act when discussing jurisdiction, which surprised us; but I found it less surprising when I read his biography on Wikipedia - he has presided over a number of terrorism cases.

Anyway, the hearing about the jurisdiction is set for a date in March. The Detective Sergeant who is involved in the case later told us how officers from Germany had just been granted permission to come over here to pursue  their investigations into the  German murder; without this permission, the British police were not even allowed to give them fingerprints or DNA, and of course this person had been previously unknown to the German police, so none of his details were stored anywhere. As the Home Office is heavily involved, nobody seems clear how long it will take to resolve this jurisdiction question.

It also seems to take a long time to produce a report on a person's mental health; in our innocence, we did wonder why this had not been already started. They have had him for two months already, after all. Anyway, the CPS barrister asked the judge to make a court order to expedite this, and he did so, setting the date for this to be in May.

After this, we went outside to meet the CPS woman again, and the very nice Detective Sergeant. He gave us a great deal of information in response to my questions, assuring us that the alleged assailant would be kept in custody because in his opinion he was very dangerous. Apparently he does not present as somebody deranged; he is 19, very intelligent and highly educated; he speaks 4 languages, and his English is so fluent he needs no translator. 

I won't write all the details about the history of this young man, but it would appear that his mental health problems began very recently. When the police here caught him after he is said to have attacked my cousin, he apparently also confessed to killing a woman in her home in Germany, leaving the scene after killing her, so there was no indication who had done it when she was found. A few days after this, he bought himself a plane ticket to England. I am not sure how long he was here before he saw my cousin and apparently decided to attack him.

The Detective Sergeant also told us how extremely fortunate they were to catch him; this was down to the very prompt actions of the neighbours in calling the police, and the instincts of a policeman who was passing in a police car on the way to the incident, and had a feeling that he should first investigate a rather strange looking young man he could see pushing an empty pushchair (which it transpired he had taken from outside a house) along the pavement. He pointed out how unlikely it would have been that he would otherwise have been caught, as he had committed no known previous offences and was unknown in Britain. 

I can hardly imagine how awful it would have been for all of us had somebody not been caught and charged with this attack; there would have been horrible investigations, probably into all of us, to see if Douglas had any known enemies or if anybody had a grudge against him. Most people are killed by somebody known to them, so we would all have been left looking at one another and Douglas' friends and neighbours and wondering who had done it, perhaps for years. We really have to thank Douglas' vigilant neighbours and the unknown policeman with the instinct to stop the odd-looking young man.

It all took just over an hour to go through this, but my sister and I both felt exhausted after it all and had to go immediately to drink coffee and sit down to mull it over. We ended up in the Royal Festival Hall while we discussed the rest of our day. We ended up spending it in London but we kept having to go to into places to sit down and rest, we found the whole experience quite draining, and I had a bad attack of stress indigestion so we had to find a pharmacy. We didn't seem to get much done. After we had eaten an early supper, we went on to the theatre, but sadly it did not cheer us up at all.  We were on our way home by about 10.10 but it took me until 11.50 until I was back at home, by which time I was only fit to fall into bed.