again even though he knows it frightens me. I've told him I'll put the police on to him if it goes on.' Further on in the letter, and not quoted by the prosecution, she added, 'I said if only he could meet a nice girl he'd start to feel better about things but he told me to shut up. You should have had words with the police when they laughed at him about the bullying. That's what did it for him. He says it's a waste of time, but I got Arthur, didn't I?'
The defense failed to pick up on this, yet there are two reasons why they should have done so. First, Grace's meaning was surely this: Howard's been shouting again and it frightens me because I don't know how to help him. I've persuaded him to stop by threatening him with the police. We both know he's scared of them. They made fun of him when he told them he was being bullied, and he hasn't trusted them since. Second, if Stamp found the police intimidating, then nothing he said during his interrogation was reliable. Indeed his confession suggests that shocking them by admitting to a brutal murder was preferable to being jeered at for locking himself in his bedroom out of terror.
Stamp's case was never reopened because he hanged himself in 1973. However, even the most cursory comparison between Wynne Stamp's evidence and the prosecution case reveals alarming disparities. Wynne described her son as 'not interested in cash because he hated going to the shops.' The prosecution said, 'Every drawer in Grace's house had been pulled out, either in a search for money and valuables or suggesting that Grace had disturbed a burglar.' Wynne claimed she wasn't 'a good housekeeper' and her son was always 'tidying up' after her. The prosecution described Grace's house as 'thoroughly vandalized.' Wynne said her son was ashamed of his cut arms and wore long-sleeved jumpers and shirts to hide them from her. The prosecution said that 'a man who reveled in using a razor on himself would take
There's no question that Stamp was badly let down by his defense team, and the inescapable conclusion is that they were as convinced of his guilt as the police and prosecution were. It's hard to understand why. However inadequate his social skills, however unattractive his appearance, he was clearly a vulnerable young man of low self-esteem and serious emotional difficulties. One theory that would fit the prosecution case is that Stamp was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who erupted one day in a fit of delusional violence against a woman who loved him.
There is no evidence to support this. He was examined by two psychiatrists to establish if he was fit to plead, and neither diagnosed schizophrenia. The verdict or the prosecution psychiatrist was that Stamp was 'self-absorbed and introverted, but otherwise normal.' The defense psychiatrist found him 'depressed and suicidal.'
Howard is illiterate with a low IQ which means he has difficulty understanding simple instructions ... He is deeply reserved, particularly when speaking about himself, refuses to look his interlocutor in the eye and covers the lower half of his face with his hands. This self-consciousness, amounting to obsession, is attributable to a poorly reconstructed harelip ... Howard shows symptoms of agoraphobia and regularly betrays a sense of worthlessness ... These emotional difficulties are not helped by being on remand, as he is fearful of interacting with officers and other inmates ... these feelings of inadequacy are making him depressed and suicidal.
I am concerned by his lack of confidence both in himself and in his relations with others. He has no amour propre and seems to feel he deserves punishment. It is for this reason that he made a habit of cutting his arms during and postadolescence and is now refusing to eat in prison. I am confident that he is, and has been for some lime, suffering from anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder, which is rare in young men but not unknown. This disorder is triggered when an individual persuades himself he is unattractive ... In Howard's case, the deformity of his lip is clearly the major contributory cause.
...I consider him unfit to stand trial because he is incapable of taking a necessarily objective view if the charges are to be countered. In addition, he will be so distressed by his public display in court that he will be unable to function successfully. (Taken from
The defense psychiatrist's recommendations were ignored and Stamp was ruled competent to plead.
With the knowledge that we now have about eating disorders, it is more likely that the young man was suffering from body dysmorphic disorder. BDD is associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder and is not a variant of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, although self-harm and a refusal to eat are typical symptoms as the condition worsens. In most cases, an individual's obsession relates to facial features-defects can be real, imagined or exaggerated-and the sufferer comes to fear ridicule in social situations. The disorder usually begins in adolescence, becomes chronic and, if untreated, can lead to loneliness, isolation, severe depression and even suicide.
If this is indeed what Stamp was suffering from, then it becomes less probable that he killed his grandmother. She was the one person he could feel comfortable with, because she shared his disability. She may not have had a harelip, but her speech impediment was more severe than his, her friends as few and her dislike of going out as great. They were two of a kind, both preferring isolation to ridicule, and it stretches belief that Stamp's personality could alter so radically that he would move outside his self-harming, self-obsessive, self-hating introversion to slash and stab the one person who protected him.
Even if Grace had attempted to jolt him out of depression by suggesting he 'find a nice girl' because things had improved for her after she 'got Arthur,' and Stamp had become angry, it seems that shouting was the worst he did. Perhaps Wynne had tried making the same suggestion with the same result. She said at the trial, 'He liked ladies better than men, but they didn't like him. It made him angry.'
This was interpreted by the prosecution as 'anger against women-one woman, his grandmother, Grace Jefferies, who had become frightened of him,' but a more credible explanation is that Stamp voiced frustration when his mother and grandmother urged him to trawl for a date because he knew how painful and futile the exercise would be. Certainly, his suicide three years later is testimony that he found making friends of either sex difficult. A prison officer said at the inquest, 'He was very timid. The other inmates picked on him because of it. He wouldn't come out of his cell unless he was ordered.'
One can only imagine how lonely and desperate Stamp must have felt when even his mother believed in his guilt. 'I stopped visiting when they moved him to Dartmoor,' Wynne said at the inquest. 'We had nothing to say to each other and it was a long way to go.' The coroner, presumably wanting to rule out any suggestion of murder by other prisoners, asked Wynne if she thought Howard was the type to kill himself. She answered, 'He had a lot on his conscience.'
But Did He?
Police pay lip service to reopening cases, but the constraints of limited budgets and the time pressures of rising crime rates mean there is no realistic chance of anyone else facing charges. There is too little data on file, and precious little physical evidence, to indict a second individual a quarter of a century after the event. It's axiomatic- hence the reforms in PACE and CPIA-that if police believe a man to be guilty, they do not waste time looking for evidence that will exonerate him. In addition, and this is pertinent to a trial, the memories of witnesses who failed to come forward at the time or were never followed up will be deemed 'unreliable' twenty or thirty years later.
Nevertheless, since DNA fingerprinting was first introduced in evidence in England in 1987 (Robert Melias in the U.K. was the first man in history to be convicted on DNA evidence.), the balance has swung against murderers who've 'got away with it.' While, to date, no prominent miscarriage of justice has been satisfactorily rectified by
