A marriage under strain
Sensational letter
The day Paula died
Eddie had me writing suicide notes
Police suspicions
Flawed investigation
The Police Complains Authority steps in
The second noose
Eddie's alibi
Severe misgivings
Money worries
Paula's letter of despair
Hearsay evidence
I'm beginning to hate being pregnant
Suicide in pregnancy
The shadow in Paula's past
Medical evidence ignored

Read through the whole article first. You can then use the links on the left to find individual paragraphs.

On 4 June 1992 the body of Paula Gilfoyle was found in the garage of the home she shared with her husband, Eddie, at Upton on the Wirral peninsula. Death was by hanging. There were no signs of a struggle. Paula was 33 and eight and a half months pregnant with their first child.

Her body was discovered by Police Sergeant Paul Caddick who was married to Eddie's sister, Sue. 'I got the shock of my life to be honest with you. As I opened the door and looked round I could see Paula hanging there,' he says. 'It was one of those situations, even though I've seen plenty of incidents in my career, when it becomes a member of your own family it's far, far different than it would be otherwise. I took basically what was a quick look and I shut the door again.'

Paul remembers Eddie's reaction to hearing the news that presumably he had been dreading. 'When the news was broken to Eddie, I was outside with the policeman and I could hear him crying. He was wailing at the top of his voice. It was dreadful.'

As ever, suicide left bewilderment in its wake. Why did Paula do it, a woman with so much to live for?

Her friend Anna Armbruster says she just can't imagine Paula taking her own life. 'I would say vivacious was the word. She was always on the go, she was always laughing, she wasn't like a quiet person. I mean I class myself as a bit quiet and Paula was totally the opposite. I'd say that you'd have to know Paula to know the type of person she was.'

A marriage under strain
Paula worshipped Eddie, but after three years the marriage was under strain. There was trouble with the in-laws. Eddie didn't always get on with Paula's father - and Paula didn't like Eddie's father, Norman, at all.

Norman Gilfoyle describes Paula as having fixed ideas. 'You either accepted Paula the way she was or you didn't. And if you didn't, it would be a waste of time. She was that type of person. It's like a package - you see what you get. If you like it, you buy it. If you don't, that's the end of it.'

The Wirral is a very particular part of England, a spit of land in two minds about its identity. It lies just across the Mersey from Liverpool, where the old industries may have died but where the city still lives on its wits.

Paula and Eddie started their life together in Wallasey, at the Wirral end of the Mersey Tunnel. But Paula wasn't the kind to live in the shadow of the chemical works for very long. The Wirral also looks south to the cushioned hills and comfortable prosperity of Cheshire. This was the Wirral Paula aspired to.

That ambition seemed fulfilled when the couple bought and began to do up a house at Grafton Drive in the pleasant village of Upton. And by the autumn of 1991 the couple had something else to plan for - Paula was pregnant. Eddie was doing the decorating with his father. Much to Paula's annoyance, he remained under the influence of the blunt and domineering Norman. Paula's standards were exacting, she was a perfectionist. Everything had to be just so. And she said she would live at her parents' home until it was.

Eddie's sister Sue Caddick says that anything Paula had in the house had to be matching. 'She was like that with the house and with her own appearance. If she wore a particular dress, the earrings, the beads around her neck, the shoes, handbags, coats - everything had to be colour co-ordinated. In my opinion she was obsessed with co-ordinating things in the house, the way the house looked.'

Sue's husband Paul also felt there was something odd. 'It struck you as if there was something not right. She bought tins of soup which were all together, all in rows in the cupboard. Next to them were peas and next to them carrots, all the labels facing the right way, just like they would in the supermarket.'

The couple were beginning to grow apart - in more ways than one. Eddie was spending more and more nights alone among the paint pots and Polycell. By day, he worked as a theatre assistant at a nearby private hospital. It was during this time, living apart from his wife, that he took up with Sandra Davies, a woman at work. He told Paula that if she wouldn't move in to the new house, then Sandra would.

Paula's reaction was immediate. She told Sandra to get out of Eddie's life, and moved into the unfinished house at Grafton Drive. If it was a strategy to get Paula to come home then it worked.

Sensational letter
But could Paula ever trust her husband again? For Eddie was apparently still keen on Sandra. He sent her a birthday card and a Valentine card. And two months before Paula's death, he showed her a sensational letter. It had been written by Paula and seemed to contain an admission that she had betrayed him.

'... I am having to write it down on paper as I can't tell you face to face. The baby I'm carrying is not yours. I have been having an affair for the last 14 months with a guy called Nigel. The baby is his. Hopefully by the weekend I'll be out of your life for good and I'll be starting my new life with Nigel ...'

There is no doubt Paula Gilfoyle wrote the letter. Whether it's true or not is another matter entirely. No-one knows of any Nigel in Paula's life - but Nigel might have been a false name, or a fantasy, or Paula's way of getting back at Eddie for his apparent infatuation with Sandra Davies - a desperate stratagem to get her husband's attention at a time of maximum vulnerability. Whatever the truth, the Nigel letter seems the outpouring of a troubled soul.

Because of their shift work, the couple communicated by leaving notes for each other in an exercise book. Although later DNA testing established the baby was Eddie's, he seemed to accept that it wasn't and that their marriage was over.

One of his entries in the exercise book reads: '...true there is no love left between us, but there again there is no hate. We are parting on good terms and that can only be good for us both as we start to re-build our lives, you with Nigel and the baby and me on my own.'

The day Paula died
However strained the marriage, the day Paula died seemed to begin normally enough. Eddie Gilfoyle set off to his work at the hospital some time just after eleven. Paula had an ante-natal appointment at two but she would not attend it.

Instead, she unlocked the garage, left the keys as usual tidily under the front doormat and returned to the garage to climb an aluminium stepladder and hang herself from the central beam of the roof.

Eddie came back at half past four, read the first few lines of a note she had left then went to his parents' house to wait for his father for advice. He didn't think to look in the garage where Paula's body was already growing cold.

It was a textbook suicide. No police photographs were taken. At the postmortem the part of the rope which had been round Paula's neck was thrown away. And there was the note.

'Dear Eddie, I've decided to put an end to everything, and in doing so ended a chapter in my life that I can't face up to any longer. I don't want to have this baby that I'm carrying...'

At first everyone seemed to agree it was just one of those tragic things. But within two or three days of Paula's death, the old animosities began to emerge from the sorrow that both families shared. And friends of Paula's went to the police and the coroner with strange stories that Paula had told them about a series of letters. Stories which, if true, added an element of the mysterious and the sinister.

Paula worked on the production line at Champions - the biggest local factory. The canteen was the opportunity for intimate gossip. The latest sexual shortcomings of husbands and lovers was a constant and reliable topic. But Paula was proud of her Eddie. And he'd told her he was doing a special project at work.

Eddie had me writing suicide notes
It was something Eddie had first mentioned at a dinner party several months earlier - where he'd talked about getting some extra qualifications to help him rise beyond his somewhat lowly job at the hospital. But she told friends one aspect of this project was worrying her. Eddie had asked her to write him out some disturbing letters - about suicide.

Friend Julie Poole remembers Paula saying, 'I got a bit worried last night. Eddie had me writing suicide notes out. He said it was for a project in work.' Yet there was no such project at the hospital.

Eddie's boss in the operating theatre, Joyce Preston, describes him as a Walter Mitty character, someone who tended to exaggerate what he had done in the past - like his exploits in the Falklands. 'From what I gathered he was a stretcher bearer, but you'd have thought he was a paramedic on some of the things,' she says.

'At the time Eddie was employed we didn't have a specific training course but the government had set up national vocational training - NVQs. But it wouldn't have involved Eddie because there was quite a number of staff who would have had the opportunity before him.'

Joyce Preston says a suicide project would have been out of the question because all courses that were taken at the hospital were relevant to the job you were doing. 'And I can't imagine that that would be relevant to working in an operating theatre.'

Police suspicions
For the police, a routine suicide had now become a suspicious death. When they tested some of the letters and paperwork at Grafton Drive, they looked at what seemed an ordinary set of household accounts which started in April. Using the ESDA technique, they found impressions of another suicide letter, the original of which has never been found. Expert evidence seemed to suggest that the impressions had been made before the April accounts were written.

As far as the police were concerned, this was suspicious. Because it meant that an additional suicide note must have been written two months before Paula died. But most damning of all, a police search of the garage two weeks later revealed an apparently vital piece of evidence.

There were no signs of a struggle. So Gilfoyle must have tricked Paula into colluding in her own death. He must have persuaded her to put her head through a noose - all in the name of helping him in his fictitious suicide course - and then yanked her feet out from under her.

In their search of the garage the police found another piece of rope - a tangled bundle with what they decided had to be a practice noose.

Because of a chance visitor on the day Paula died, the police must have known that Eddie had only minutes to murder his wife.

Mrs Brannan, who was carrying out door to door market research for a survey on wine, says she spoke to Eddie and Paula after 11 o'clock. Her survey took about a quarter of an hour and she is quite sure that she said goodbye to Paula after the interview ended at quarter past or twenty past 11. Yet Eddie was seen at work, an eight-minute drive away, by half past eleven.

Everyone agreed, from the state of Paula's body, that she was dead by early afternoon, before Eddie came back. She had failed to keep a number of afternoon appointments. And people who called at the house noticed that an upstairs window was open and that the porch door was left unlocked - something that Paula would never do if she was out.

But it was what happened after Eddie came back from work that stoked police suspicions. Paula had a sideline running a mail-order catalogue at work. That day the agent came by the house to deliver a parcel. She timed her visit at half past five. She says she bumped into Eddie in the drive and he signed for the parcel in Paula's name.

But Eddie had said this never happened. He'd gone off to his parents' in a panic at twenty to five, only coming back just after six - and he said he'd never met the woman with the parcel. Yet neighbour Penny Jones also said she'd seen Gilfoyle outside his house at about half past five and had recognised Eddie's red Rover car driving off down the road.

Was there some guilty reason that made Gilfoyle revisit his home? The relevant documents do not bear out the agent's story that he signed for a parcel. But does that mean he didn't know what had happened in the garage?

Eddie's parents insist that at half-past five he wasn't at Grafton Drive but in their front room, three miles away, in a desperate state. His mother Jessie describes how Eddie sat down and put his head in his hands.

'I said what's the matter? He said Paula's left me and I asked him what he meant. He said, she's left me a note, she's gone. He asked what time his dad was coming in and I said about half past five. So he said I'll wait for my dad and get some advice.'

When Norman Gilfoyle came home, he read the first couple of lines of Paula's note and suggested they go back to Grafton Drive to ring round Paula's friends and find out where she was. Jessie does not accept it is hard to believe that, having been told his wife was missing or had left him, Eddie should sit in his parents' house for an hour, doing nothing. 'Why should it be hard to believe that he comes to his mum?' she asks.

Eddie Gilfoyle has always maintained he is innocent of murdering the wife he said he loved. At his trial the judge would not allow the jury to hear Paula's friends who said she had told them Eddie was making her write suicide notes - on the grounds that it was hearsay and the truth could not be properly tested. But the jury still had enough to find him guilty of murder.

This is a plot which seems to come from the wilder shores of detective fiction. The perfect murder, even to the extent that the killer makes the victim his unwitting criminal accomplice. The alternative - that a troubled woman took her own life - seems prosaic in comparison.

But what is the fiction and what is the truth? And why, as Trial and Error showed, did the Merseyside police and the Appeal Court get the two things fatally muddled?

Flawed investigation
High on the moors where Lancashire and Yorkshire meet, lives a man with intimate experience of injustice and the struggle to put it right. Eddie Gilfoyle's solicitor, Campbell Malone, is the man who eventually triumphed over the unjust convictions of Stefan Kiszco and Kevin Callan for murders they did not commit.

Malone believes that what these two cases and the Gilfoyle case have in common is that they all start with a flawed police investigation where, for better or worse, the officers involved pick on an idea of what has happened and remain tunnel visioned about it, excluding anything that doesn't fit with their theory.

'I'm a lawyer. I work within the system that has let Eddie down at every stage and I feel that personally. I feel embarrassed that the system has worked so badly in this case,' he says. 'I think it has worked even worse in this case than the Kiszco and Callan cases. At every stage it's been defective.'

Eddie Gilfoyle is either one of the most wicked men in Britain - or he is one of the most wronged, having lost a wife, a baby and his own liberty. If Eddie Gilfoyle did kill his wife in the garage of their home, he'd have made a grim bit of criminal history.

Home Office pathologist Professor Bernard Knight believes the case would be unique. Although people are murdered by hanging, they have to be either incapacitated by drink or drugs or physically restrained.

'There should be bruises or scratches on the arms, maybe the hands would be tied together, there would be signs of a struggle,' Knight argues. 'I mean nobody wants to be voluntarily hanged, for God's sake. I've never seen a case, a proven case, in the 40 years I've been doing this job.'

The only comparable case is the mystery surrounding Roberto Calvi, the Italian banker found suspended beneath Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. His death is known to have involved international freemasonry, political corruption at the highest level, a banking scandal and the Vatican; resources that would be somewhat beyond Eddie Gilfoyle, a washer-up of surgical instruments from the Wirral.

The Police Complains Authority steps in
But once the police started investigating, they were single-minded in their conviction that Paula was murdered. We know this because the investigation by the Merseyside police was itself investigated by another police force, Lancashire. And the Lancashire report to the Police Complaints Authority uncovered a comedy of errors.

Former police sergeant Paul Caddick, Eddie's brother in law and the person who discovered Paula's body, argues that basic procedures were not being followed and basic inquiries were not done. 'I have seen the paperwork, and am well used to reading files on criminal cases. You know, I have seen how the Crown Prosecution work. In this case you read a statement which mentions something, so you look for the second statement to back it up and it's not there.'

The Merseyside team videoed a set of experiments to see if a woman the same size as Paula could have thrown the rope over the beam in the garage. The first experiment showed that she could. Next, they brought in a policewoman in the same stage of pregnancy as Paula, and she, too, was able to throw the rope over the beam. But they convinced themselves it would have been extremely difficult for Paula to have managed on her own.

There is a moment in the Mersey video of those experiments when the coroner's officer pulls too hard on a key exhibit and breaks the actual rope left behind when Paula was cut down. 'Whoops, I've bust your exhibit, sir,' he says.

And when the two officers who cut down the body demonstrate how Paula's legs were touching the ladder steps, attempts at verisimilitude seem to have been abandoned completely. The dummy they use is almost a foot shorter than Paula.

The police were trying to establish that Paula couldn't have reached far enough to knot the rope so high up on the garage beam. Yet expert advice would have told them that it would not have been a problem - whatever Paula's height. All they needed to do was ask the right questions.

Des Pawson of the International Guild of Knot Tyers has identified a number of faults in the police reconstruction. He says they used only part of the rope - the length of rope around her neck was cut down with Paula's body. Yet using more of the rope would have made the exercise much easier.

'Secondly most of the reconstruction was around trying to tuck the tail end through when, in fact, if you use the loop of the rope it gives you a bit more stiffness and you're able to do it that much easier,' Pawson points out. His third criticism is the assumption that the knot was tied high up in its final position, when it could have been tied low down and been moved to the side when the rope took the strain.

The second noose
But perhaps the most serious of all the shortcomings in this case was the matter of the so called 'practice noose'.

Imagine the impact on the jury when they heard that the Merseyside Police had found another noose in the fatal garage. Then imagine how they would have felt if they had been told that a later police enquiry would cast serious doubt over whether that second noose had ever been there at all.

The garage was searched four days after Paula's death, when doubts first arose. An officer from a specialist search team conducted a thorough examination. He is sure he saw no rope in any drawer.

Yet some two weeks later, on 23 June, an unnamed officer had a discussion with the forensic scientist, Philip Rydeard, about the possibility of finding other significant item such as other ropes. Later that same day police found the so-called noose in the drawer.

The drawer where the specialist searching it a fortnight earlier had found nothing suspicious.

Eddie's sister Sue Caddick describes how the rope was presented in court. 'One of the court officials sort of took it to the jury and was running the noose up and down the rope itself. And I think at that point I realised the jury were going to find him guilty.'

The copy of the Police Complaints Authority report which Trial and Error has seen is not a complete one. Any opinions the PCA investigators expressed have been removed. But it is known that the PCA team believes the belated discovery of the rope beggared belief. Beggaring belief still further is an error by the Merseyside murder squad which could have given their suspect a perfect alibi.

Eddie's alibi
Merseyside Police ignored a statement from Maureen Piper who said she saw Paula at twenty to one on the day she died. This would mean Paula was alive and apparently well an hour after the very last opportunity Eddie Gilfoyle would have had to kill her. Eddie was known to be at work from half past eleven onwards.

Piper knew Paula well. She says she bumped into her at the post office in Moreton, a short bus ride from Paula's home. The post office is next door to the ante-natal clinic where Paula was due at two - an appointment she never kept. It was a chance meeting Maureen Piper discussed with friends when she heard of Paula's death next day. Yet the murder squad decided to discount this evidence.

The court were kept in ignorance of this sighting of Paula because of a simple bungle. When the investigating officer followed up Maureen Piper's statement he went to the wrong post office. He went to Upton instead of Moreton, a mile and a half from where Piper says she saw Paula. With nothing to back up Piper's statement - the police decided to scrub it.

Severe misgivings
The scale of the bungle was made public in a local television programme when the Police Complaints Authority expressed severe misgivings over evidence which had convicted the hospital orderly.

Interviewed on BBC TV Northwest Tonight on 1 August 1994, Mark Chapman of the Police Complaints Authority said, 'Various facts emerged during the course of a meticulous re-examination of the facts which we considered if they had been presented to the jury might have led them to reach a different verdict.'

Trial and Error invited Merseyside Police to respond to criticisms but they said they could not assist us because of the further allegations now being made against them.

But what about the second suicide note that made the original police team so suspicious? It had been revealed through the marks it left on Paula's April accounts. So it seemed to have been written a full two months before her apparent suicide in June.

But just because a list starts in April, it doesn't mean it was written in April. The police should have read on. Paula wrote up the accounts up to and even beyond the date of her own death on 4 June. If the accounts were all written up at the same time then the lost suicide note need not have been written before April. It could simply have been written before Paula wrote her final set of accounts.

Audrey Giles is an internationally respected document analyst. She told Trial and Error that, as far as she could see, it was not safe to assume that the suicide letter must have been written on or before 27 March.

'From the papers I have looked at nobody actually seemed to have questioned whether the accounts were written commencing on 27 March,' she says. 'All you have is a list of entries. There is no reason to suppose that they weren't written up in retrospect in May or even June. I don't think that question was ever raised.'

Money worries
When someone writes up a set of accounts and is then found dead, it's reasonable to assume there are money worries. And in this case there were.

Paula was the main breadwinner and, when she had the baby, the drop in the family income was going to be major. Paula and Eddie had re mortgaged their house to pay for the refurbishments she had set her heart on. For all her moving up in the world, they owed £1,000 in poll tax and the gas meter had been fiddled to register a fraudulent consumption. What's more Paula acted as an agent for a catalogue company and when she died there was an outstanding balance owing of £2,500.

Jackie King of Southwark Consumer and Money Advice Centre deals with people facing this kind of financial pressure every day. She looked at Paula's accounts and concluded that this was a family barely hanging on by the skin of its teeth.

'There's not enough money for the normal, everyday things in this budget. And clearly when you lose an income - and of course babies are very expensive - I would think that somebody like her who obviously is very careful about her finances would know that she was going to be in big trouble in the next few months. That they simply weren't going to be able to afford probably even to pay the mortgage.

'I think she's very aware, because most people don't sit down in this very clear way and write down everything that's coming in and everything that is going out. If the clients we were dealing with did that - well, we wouldn't have any clients. Here is a person who very carefully budgets all the time and she would have known absolutely that she was heading into trouble. She hasn't quite lost control. But they're going to and she could see that.'

The case began as a routine suicide. There were suicide letters. Paula believed the husband she adored had betrayed her, that the new baby might tie her forever to a man she could never trust again. Common sense and the facts - even after the facts have been mangled by such an inept police investigation - all point to a suicide.

Home Office pathologist Professor Bernard Knight says, 'Medically speaking there is nothing about this case which prevents this from being a suicide by hanging.'

So it's a pity the jury never got a chance to hear what he had to say.

The case against Gilfoyle turns on the truth of the allegation that Paula's despairing letters were dictated by Eddie. Di Mallion, a former work colleague of Paula's, remembers her talking about writing the letters.

Paula told Di that she'd said, 'Oh, Ed, I don't know what to put' and he said, 'It's all right, I'll tell you. Just write that you are having an affair and that the baby's not mine and that you can't live with it any longer.'

Paula's letter of despair
Everyone accepts that one letter, written early in her pregnancy, is genuine - a reflection of a real despair. It includes the following statement.

'...unfortunately the baby has come when I am at the lowest ever in my life... I don't know whether to bring it up myself or pack my job in, move away and give someone the chance to adopt...'

The same sense of hopelessness appears in another letter, written two months before her death. But the prosecution says this letter was dictated.

'...I would like you to try and pick up the pieces with Sandra, as I know she really loves you. You deserve better than me...'

In this letter Paula confesses to having an affair, and wishes Eddie good luck with Sandra.

Would she dutifully have taken down such a damaging and false confession? Was Paula, already wounded and mistrustful, so loyal to her husband as to write him out a virtual licence for adultery? And the letter makes no mention of suicide which does not fit the supposed master-plan to get Paula to write suicide letters.

Eddie Gilfoyle's parents point out that the case against their son is based on a murder which had been planned over a period of months. Neither believes that Eddie was capable of that.

'He's not clever enough to do anything like that, says his mother Jessie. 'Don't get me wrong, he's quite all right. But he hasn't got the brains to do anything like that. You'd have to be a genius to work out how they've said he's killed her.'

Then there is the question of the messages he left for Paula in the exercise book. If he'd invented Paula's affair, what would she make of his notes expressing his feelings about it?

One entry read: 'Thank you for the letter you left me. At least I know the truth now. I'm not bitter and don't hate you...'

Another said: 'I don't think I will be able to cope in work today. I'm not looking forward to telling your Mum and Dad. So I'm going in. I will see Joyce and see if I can't come home...'

Eddie's boss Joyce Preston remembers him coming in to tell her his wife was going to leave him and that baby wasn't his. 'He really was very distressed that day, so I sent him off home again. I'm sure he believed it at the time, that what he was saying to me was right.'

Since Eddie's notes, written in response to Paula's letters, reflect things that actually happened how could the letters themselves be fantasy, written at his dictation?

'...I don't want to have this baby that I'm carrying...'
To accept the prosecution case we must imagine that Paula wrote these letters at Eddie's dictation. We can also imagine that she was genuinely concerned when she tells her friends at work about the letters. But if she was so concerned about the letters, how do we explain how she permitted herself to be murdered?

Would she have trusted Eddie to take her into the garage? Paula had told her friend in the canteen she was so worried about writing the notes to Eddie's dictation that she'd torn them up. So would she really have written out another one for him - the one which was found after her death?

If she was worried, could she have been so dazzled by a husband she distrusted that she let him put a rope round her neck? Because if you believe Eddie Gilfoyle killed his wife, that - or something just as unlikely - is what he must have contrived.

At the trial, the jury were not told about the worries Paula is said to have confided to her friends at work. With good reason - because there is no way, with Paula dead, that you can test the truth of what she was saying or the reasons she might have had for saying it.

But as Eddie's sister Sue Caddick points out, Paula's conversations with her friends at work are at odds with Eddie's notes in the exercise book at home.

'If Paula has gone into work at the beginning of April and said to the people in Champions, Eddie's got me writing letters, why doesn't Paula in the eight weeks after that go into work and say, these letters he's got me writing - this fictional letter about this baby not being his - Eddie really believes it. Because he's writing me notes every night when I get home from work saying why aren't you leaving, why haven't you left? He really believes this fictitious homework he's given me to do.'

Hearsay evidence
When the case went to appeal, the judges did not test this hearsay evidence, yet they included it in their judgment as a warning to those who might take up Gilfoyle's case, 'lest public credence of the appellant's insistence that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice based upon an insupportable and far-fetched theory conjured up by the crown gains unmerited support.'

Eddie's solicitor, Campbell Malone, argues it was not evidence that Eddie made Paula write those letters. 'The mischief that was done in this case in my view, is that having said yes, this evidence is capable of being admissible the court decided they were not going to admit it and therefore it was never tested. But they still treated it as though it was before the court, as though it had been admitted, and it was only capable of one interpretation.'

Paula Gilfoyle's family and close friends will never believe that she committed suicide. She seemed so happy, so bubbly, so utterly excited about the impending birth of her first baby. Paula was the last person you'd expect to be suicidal.

But Trial and Error found evidence that throughout her pregnancy Paula had been prone to morbid thoughts about her life and her future in Grafton Drive.

In October she wrote this to a friend:
'...at the moment we are very busy. His Dad is there every day as the money has run out to pay anyone so his dad is doing it. I'm not very happy but what can you say...'

'All I can tell you is that Paula was never right and was never the same person after they bought the house in Grafton Drive,' says Sue Caddick. 'She went back to live with her mum and dad, and the Paula that came back after that was never the same Paula as she'd been when she first got married to my brother.'

'I'm beginning to hate being pregnant'
By March she was writing to her husband: 'I just feel as if there's nothing down for us, we still argue... maybe you would be better with someone else. I try my hardest to be full of life at night but I can't. I'm beginning to hate being pregnant.'

The last occasion Sue saw Paula she found her extremely depressed. 'All she went on about was that she couldn't believe she was pregnant. At times she was totally cut off from the conversation we were having. She kept saying that she couldn't imagine herself with the baby, she couldn't bear the mess, she would have to make it eat in the garden, that she couldn't understand how people like us allowed children to walk around eating biscuits and things on the furniture. She just knew she was not going to be able to cope with that.'

There is also evidence that in the last days of her life Paula had spoken to friends about the terrible impact of suicide.

She is remembered as saying, 'It's terrible to do that, kill yourself and leave the people behind hurting... and that innocent people are left to pick up the pieces... the truth never comes out.'

The very day before she died, she talked about the brother in law of a friend of hers, who had committed suicide by hanging. Paula condemned the act - but did it strike some secret chord of her own despair?

Suicide in pregnancy
Suicide in pregnancy is rare - but it happens. Dr Jack Weir is a former consultant psychiatrist at St Mary's London. He has written a book devoted to the only major survey ever conducted on the subject. Dr Weir found that the second highest incidence of suicide in pregnant women occurred, as with Paula, in the last weeks of pregnancy.

'Physically it's uncomfortable, painful sometimes,' he says. 'The woman is overpowered by destructive forces, having been struggling to some extent with them throughout the pregnancy, which is about to become a birth.'

Dr Weir has seen a great many genuine suicide letters. When Trial and Error asked him to assess Paula's letters he said he thought they were genuine, rather than that Eddie had tricked her into believing he was on some sort of course. 'Well, I think he would have been a very clever man,' says Weir. 'You do get the feel of her, a woman who's pregnant and hating it.'

Other experts testify to the inner conflict many women feel as they approach childbirth. Anne Herreboudt is a midwife counsellor at St John and St Elizabeth's Hospital. She says, 'Unfortunately we are in a society which doesn't allow pregnant women to express their true feelings. Externally it can look as though the woman is absolutely fine, and is coping well with the pregnancy and is looking forward to the birth of the baby.

'Internally there's often a different picture. The woman may feel that she is physically out of control, because physically she is growing, the baby is growing, the baby begins to move with a life of its own. Her expectations of herself and her life to come begin to change.

'Somehow there is a shame attached to not matching up to the happiness of it, the expectation of a wonderful baby and a wonderful life to come. To feel gloomy or in fear of that is taboo and is very frequently not talked about.'

Jack Weir says a woman who had brought a baby so close to life would not necessarily have the baby first and then do away with herself. 'She wouldn't want to leave the baby to the cruel world she's wanting to leave.'

The shadow in Paula's past
There was another long shadow over Paula's life. Sixteen years ago, a young man raped and strangled a girl, and threatened suicide. Three days earlier, the young Paula had broken off her engagement to him.

None of this evidence was heard at Gilfoyle's trial or at his appeal. Nor was crucial medical evidence heard which could have shed a bright and dispassionate light into a case of shadows and prejudice.

Medical evidence ignored
At the trial, the Crown said that a second autopsy had revealed there were two small but significant scratches on Paula's neck.

Professor Bernard Knight is the most famous forensic pathologist in the world. Through his grim detective work in the cellars and burial pits of Cromwell Street, the case against Rosemary West was literally pieced together through the remains of her victims.

Knight says, 'My view is that those scratch marks on the right side of the neck are almost certainly fingernail marks, and almost certainly - but not absolutely certainly - caused by the deceased.'

Knight was perplexed by the vital evidence given about those two small scratches by Dr Jim Burns who went on to say that he had never seen such scratches in a genuine suicide.

'I just can't understand that because I have seen them,' says Knight. 'I have spoken since to many other colleagues who have seen them. Some colleagues have even had fingers trapped under suicide ropes. I mean, it just happens. I can't understand why you should say it doesn't happen. It's well known.'

Others say that these sort of scratches on the neck are quite common in suicides by hanging. Yet when questioned by Trial and Error, Dr Burns said, 'Well I don't know anybody who says they are common. I know colleagues of mine have had cases, and I accept it is well documented that you can get genuine fingernail scratches on the neck of somebody who has hanged themselves. All I'm saying is that I have no experience of that in 30 odd years. None of my many cases have shown what remotely look like fingernail marks on the neck.'

Bernard Knight says he has often seen similar marks in people who have undoubtedly committed suicide by hanging. 'It's a very common thing, suicide by hanging, and they almost reflexibly grab at the rope at the moment of suspension. It is recorded in text books. Or they could have been artefacts, in other words just produced postmortem. Bodies often get slight damage after first autopsy. There's a lot of movement to the body, repair of the first autopsy incisions, so they could have been artefacts.'

But Burns says, 'Never, ever, ever, in all the years, in all the many second autopsies I've done, allowing for, as you say, the knocks that bodies might take, I have never, ever seen marks resembling scratches on the neck.'

Trial and Error asked Dr Burns how many second autopsies he had done on a victim who died by hanging and he replied, 'I can't off hand in fact recall ever having done a second autopsy on a hanging victim.' He said it was possible but unlikely that the marks might have developed in the course of removing the noose.

According to Bernard Knight, the medical evidence overwhelmingly points to suicide rather than murder. 'The only possibility is that this lady voluntarily let herself be hanged. It seems extraordinary to me.'

Bernard Knight was not called to give his evidence before the jury at Liverpool Crown Court - neither was his evidence heard by the Appeal Court.

He says, 'I think the last four or five times that I have been to the Appeal Court the Appeal judges have refused to hear my evidence on the grounds that it could have been given at the original trial. So I go along there, sit around for a day and then go home. No-one takes the evidence.'

As Eddie's solicitor Campbell Malone points out, 'We went to court with one of the world's leading pathologists, who said it wasn't murder, and we weren't allowed to call him. And we had witnesses who said that at the time the Crown were saying he murdered her, Paula was still alive.

'So we had a very strong appeal, and I don't think that the court objectively considered the strength of the Appeal. I felt, two or three years ago, that things were changing for the better. I think in the early '90s - after the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Stefan Kiszko's case - that the Court of Appeal appeared to accept that they couldn't deal with appeals as they had done in the past. In other words, trying to sustain the unsustainable.

'I fear that the Gilfoyle case represents a very clear indication by the Court of Appeal that things have now swung back and that the court now has the view that the most effective way of maintaining public confidence in the criminal process is by sustaining convictions brought in by a jury.'

Published in 1996 by Channel 4 Television, 124 Horseferry Road, London SW1X 2DP to accompany Trial and Error: Gilfoyle, a Just Television production for Channel 4.

Editor: Paula Snyder. Design: Broadcasting Support Services. Broadcasting Support Services provides follow up services for viewers and listeners and runs long-term helplines.

 

 

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TRIAL AND ERROR

On 26 June 1996 Channel 4's TRIAL AND ERROR investigated the conviction for murder of Eddie Gilfoyle. In 1992 his eight and a half months pregnant wife Paula was found hanging in the garage of their home. This is an edited transcript of the programme which revealed new evidence demonstrating Gilfoyle's innocence.