More than twenty years ago Vilday's friend Lynette White was brutally murdered in Flat 1, 7 James Street in the Butetown district of Cardiff, the premises that Vilday allowed White to use to ply her trade, while she was hiding from Miller. It was an horrific crime committed solely by Jeffrey Gafoor. The crucial witnesses and Paul Atkins made several statements over many months, which police investigating the murder ultimately refused to accept. They were given little choice but to change their account to what the police wanted to hear. Psaila was told falsely that her blood had been found in the murder flat. In 2004 she reacted with shock when she was finally informed that it definitely was not her blood, but that of Jeffrey Gafoor (it was known from a very early stage that the blood discovered there contained the male chromosome. Psaila is not one of the comparatively few women whose blood contains the male chromosome. Consequently, it should have been obvious that it was not her blood, but instead of that, she believed completely and utterly that police had found her blood in that flat. It was a crucial deception that persuaded her that she must have been in that flat. She even helped to over-ride Vilday's will, telling her,”We were there.” Psaila was a very vulnerable person with a very low intelligence quotient, who was persuaded by police threats of prosecution and imprisonment to adopt the version that they wanted. Like Vilday and Grommek she had maintained a truthful account that she knew nothing significant for months before her will was overborne in November 1988.

Detective Constables Mike Daniels and Brian Gillard and even more so Detective Inspector Graham Mouncher were criticised by Psaila's Queen's Counsel Sasha Wass for the methods used to secure her compliance. Mouncher was also accused of threatening Vilday with prosecution and telling her that her young son would be an orphan if she maintained her truthful account that she knew nothing of importance. Vilday even underwent hypnosis to prove it, but that was later ignored. In November all three cracked and their claims helped to justify the false arrests of the Cardiff Five.

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They were in every sense of the word reluctant witnesses, who lived on the fringes of the law, but in the last twenty years they have put their pasts largely behind them. Last October Vilday and Psaila pleaded guilty to perjuring themselves at the second trial of the Cardiff Five. Prosecutor Nicholas Dean QC accepted that all of their accusations of police malpractice were true. After a brief trial of Grommek which gave an insight into the methods that South Wales police used in this inquiry despite the protections of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and legal representation, a thoroughly false and ludicrous confession was extracted from Miller, whose magnanimous nature touched those present in Cardiff Crown Court today. Despite having greater cause than any to hate them, Miller does not hold them responsible. “I blame the police for doing to them what they did to me,” he said in his statement for these proceedings. But Vilday, Psaila and Grommek had no legal protection at all. They were bullied, cajoled, browbeaten and more until they said what officers investigating the murder wanted to hear. Grommek was threatened with violence too, but this does not constitute duress, which must be a threat of imminent death or serious violence.

This case had the strongest mitigation possible – a prosecutor who took no issue with their claims of malpractice, but insisted that duress did not apply. Despite David Aubrey QC's efforts to expand the scope of duress, Mr Justice Maddison ruled against extending the law in October. Grommek then entered a guilty plea to all three counts, but he was sentenced on the same basis as Vilday and Psaila.

Police behaviour was “unacceptable in a civilised society,” said Maddison, but he concluded that they had opportunities to tell the truth to other police or to officials of the court. They even allowed three innocent men to begin life sentences that could have lasted longer than the four years the Cardiff Three actually served. Lord Alex Carlisle QC for Vilday accepted that the offence was serious enough to deserve custody, but called for justice to be tempered with mercy due to the thoroughly unusual circumstances of this case. It is a rare trial indeed when the prosecutor agrees that not only is there no dispute about the facts of the case, but that all the allegations of police malpractice they made are true. Nevertheless, Mr Justice Maddison told Vilday, Psaila and Grommek that “perjury strikes at the heart of the criminal justice system.” He sentenced them to eighteen months imprisonment, but was justice served?