Today Cardiff Crown court finally heard 50-year-old Mark Grommek's explanation of why he lied over one of Britain's most notorious miscarriages of justice. Mr Grommek sat in the dock listening attentively as Nicholas Dean QC, prosecuting, detailed his contact with police during the course of the last twenty years. The jury was given a flavour of the interviewing methods used by South Wales Police during the inquiry into the brutal killing of 20-year-old Lynette White, which happened on Valentine's Day 1988. Extracts of the interviews with Stephen Miller, 42, were played to the court, consisting of parts of tapes seven, thirteen and eighteen. The jury heard Mr Miller's protestations of innocence shouted down by Detective Constable Peter Greenwood. “How you could sit there and say that after being in that room, seeing that girl there in the state that she was in, and you're supposed to have all this wonderful care for her, seen her damn head hang off and her arms cut and stabbed to death and you sit there and tell us you know nothing at all about it; nothing at all about it!” Mr Miller continued to deny presence. “You can lock me up for fifty billion years. I said I was not there.” Miller was shouted down and in later interviews he confessed to a crime he did not commit. The jury heard him break down.

A Court was told how bullying and persuasion by ‘dreadful police officers’ caused Stephen Miller, now 42, to confess to the brutal murder of his then girlfriend Lynette White – a crime he definitely did not commit. Mr Miller was giving evidence at the trial of Mark Grommek, 50, who faces three perjury charges over his evidence in that case. Ms White, 20, was a ‘working girl’ said Nicholas Dean QC, prosecuting, who was killed by a client, Jeffrey Gafoor, 43, acting on his own in the early hours of Valentines Day 1988. Police were originally looking for a white man with a cut hand. Ten months later five wholly innocent black men, Yusef Abdullahi, John and Ronnie Actie, Tony Paris and Mr Miller were arrested and charged with her brutal murder, partly because of statements given by Mr Grommek and others.

The court was told that Mr Grommek had made eight statements by May 1988, which said that he had seen or heard nothing of interest. In a few weeks in November and December 1988 he implicated Mr Abdullahi and Ronnie Actie in the murder. He was called as a defence witness at the committal hearing in February 1989 and again in the two trials in 1989 and 1990. He stuck to the incriminating account.

“The prosecution in this case fully accept that Mr Grommek was indeed persuaded to accept a version of events, that he was cajoled into signing statements he knew to be an absolute tissue of lies,” said Mr Dean. “To berate and browbeat witnesses is at best wholly improper and to suggest to the witness what to say is profoundly wrong – indeed it is itself criminal behaviour,”