Jason Moore has spent 14 years in prison for a murder he insists he did not commit. In the next month, he should hear whether new evidence uncovered by a Newsquest investigation will get him to the Court of Appeal. Crime & Investigations Reporter Charles Thomson visited him in prison...
Getting into Wolverhampton’s HMP Oakwood is more onerous than getting through an airport.
I’ve had my passport checked, my fingerprints taken, my face photographed. I’ve had to remove my belt, shoes, watch and shirt. My mouth and ears have been inspected for contraband. I’ve had to remove my socks and show the screws my bare feet. I’ve been patted down and then made to sit in a chair while a drugs dog jumps and sniffs around me.
I’m here to meet a murder convict – albeit one I don’t believe actually killed anybody.
I began researching north Essex man Jason Moore in 2021 and first wrote about him in 2022. Since then, I’ve written dozens of articles, uncovered new evidence in his case and appeared on the national news. Right now, the miscarriage of justice watchdog is deciding whether I’ve done enough to win Jason a hearing at the Court of Appeal.
But recently, I had a revelation: I knew everything about the ins and outs of this man’s legal predicament and his future freedom might rest on me and my dictaphone – yet we had never actually met.
So here I am, in the prison visiting room with Jason’s sister Kirstie. Eventually, I see him round a corner. I am seconds away from shaking hands with a man the state insists is a cold-blooded killer.
How did I get here?
The Conviction
In August 2005, an east London man called Robert Darby, on a bender and armed with a Stanley knife, picked a fight with another man outside the Valentine pub in Perth Road, Ilford. In brief: the government says that man was Jason Moore. Jason says it wasn’t.
Two independent eyewitnesses saw Darby in the street with two other men. The taller of those men, wearing a blue zip-up jacket, fought with Darby. The other stood off to the side. After, Darby ran a short distance up the road and fell over.
At some point during this brief incident, Darby sustained a single stab wound to the heart. While medics managed to patch it up, his brain had already been starved of oxygen. He died the following day.
Jason Moore, from Clacton, was there that day. Everybody agrees on that. But he maintains he was sat in the passenger seat of his friend’s parked car and witnessed the fight, as opposed to participating in it. He did get out to intervene, he says, but Darby ran off and fell over. He saw blood spreading across Darby’s white shirt, but never actually got anywhere near him.
Both eyewitnesses were shown Jason’s photo in line-ups. Neither recognised as a participant in the incident. Detectives told Darby’s family they’d ruled Jason out.
But seven years later, a new investigation team decided to put Jason in a photo line-up again – something experts say should never have happened. This time, one of the witnesses - a Somalian pedestrian called Abdul Ahmed - picked Jason. Experts say he could have recognised Jason not from the scene but from the prior line-up – precisely the reason repeat ID procedures are never supposed to happen.
Jason was charged with murder and put on trial at the Old Bailey, where the prosecution repeatedly put to him that he’d worn a blue zip-up jacket on the day of the stabbing. He said he didn’t remember but was prepared to stipulate to it. The Crown kept reiterating that both witnesses said the taller of the two men in the street with Darby had been the assailant and that Jason was a tall man.
Jason insisted he was sat in the car, not involved in the fight. His defence also contended that Darby’s death might not even be a murder: when he ran off and fell over, he might have landed on his Stanley knife. The prosecution said that couldn’t be true because Ahmed recalled seeing the blue-jacketed man wielding a kitchen knife, and the pathologist who did Darby’s post-mortem measured the wound a few millimetres too deep to have been caused by the Stanley.
Jason was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 18 years.
Revelations
Years later, Jason’s family inherited his case files from his lawyers. The contents left them aghast.
The prosecution had kept repeating that both witnesses said “the taller man” was the assailant, but that was only part of the story. Both said the blue-jacketed man was the same height as Darby or slightly shorter.
Darby was measured at 5’11 in his autopsy. Jason is 6’4 in bare feet.
If Jason was the man in the blue jacket, how could both witnesses have failed to notice that he was half a foot taller than Robert and identically misdescribed him as being around 5’10?
The Met Police’s own CCTV report stated that in all footage before and after the stabbing, Jason was wearing a grey, hooded pullover. Why had the prosecution badgered him into saying he’d worn a blue jacket when they knew he hadn’t?
CCTV also showed Jason’s hair in his usual long curtains. The blue-jacketed man was described as having his head shaved to a number two.
Abdul Ahmed had previously wrongly identified somebody else as the stabber. In a second 2005 photo line-up featuring a different suspect (on the same day he rejected Jason), he picked a thin-faced, shaven-headed man as the stabber. It was an innocent line-up volunteer.
In another glaring error, he’d told police the stabber emerged from a small, silver Ford Fiesta-type car, later attributed to an innocent female passer-by. Prosecutors skated over this at trial through selective presentation, akin to the ‘taller man’ rhetoric. They said Ahmed saw the stabber emerge from the passenger side of a silver car and Jason admitted sitting in the passenger seat of a silver car. But Jason was in his friend’s brand-new BMW convertible, which didn’t remotely resemble a Ford Fiesta.
These were just two errors from an account littered with them. How could Jason have been charged with murder based on this unreliable witness’s uncorroborated claims?
Finally, the family found an official report about the pathologist relied on to rule out the Stanley knife. Under investigation at the time over his fitness to practice, he’d since been struck off over two cases in which his poor work saw innocent people wrongly accused of homicides.
New Evidence
Perversely, none of this mattered. A convict needs compelling new evidence to appeal their conviction. Compelling though it was, none of it was new. It had been disclosed to the defence, who just hadn’t used it. Both defence counsel are now dead. We’ll never know whether it was strategy or oversight.
Retired Met Police detectives reviewed the files pro bono and wrote a report urging the miscarriage of justice watchdog – the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) – to reinterview Abdul Ahmed over his error-strewn story. It refused, incorrectly claiming Ahmed’s ID was corroborated by a second witness.
In despair, Jason’s supporters (who include Robert Darby’s family) contacted Newsquest. After months going over files, reading trial transcripts and interviewing witnesses, I formed the same view as the retired murder cops: Jason should never have been charged and would have been acquitted if his defence had used the wealth of exculpatory material at its fingertips.
As I prepared to publish, I had to find Ahmed and offer him the opportunity to comment. To my astonishment, just a few minutes into our conversation he suddenly exclaimed: “It was the blink of the eye! I was passing by! How could you remember things like that? And I was drunk!”
Asked if he had told police he was drunk, he said he had – which, if true, was withheld from the defence.
Meeting a ‘murderer’
Jason Moore is not a well man.
He is the last prisoner to enter the visiting hall and so large he fills the doorway, but his ailments are quickly evident. Suffering from a degenerative eye condition, he feels his way slowly through the room, limping and placing his hands on chairs. He seems not to see Kirstie and I until he is almost on top of us. In addition, he has a bladder stone that wakes him up with bad pain roughly once an hour at night and has been waiting months to hear when or if he will receive an operation. He also has a very large hernia.
These conditions rendering him largely immobile, he is now “medically retired”, exempting him from prison work, so spends almost all day in his cell. He doesn’t socialise much anyway, he tells me, as you never know who you’re talking to. He once found out a fellow inmate had buried his wife alive. Another had chopped up his girlfriend and hidden her in a suitcase.
Earlier this year, Jason collapsed and almost died. He was rushed into intensive care and put on life support with blood clots on his lungs, possibly caused by his sedentary lifestyle. He was lucky to survive – although waking up handcuffed to his hospital bed and then being transported back to prison, it didn’t really feel that way.
Despite this near-fatal incident, his underlying conditions are seemingly not being treated with any degree of urgency.
A man called Chopper arrives at our table and asks if we’d like any photos taken. In the corner of the room is an incongruous backdrop of bright flowers on a sunny day, against which visitors can have pictures taken with prisoners and then buy copies. I have been measured in the shoes I am wearing at just over 5’8 – around two inches shorter than the blue jacketed man both witnesses described fighting with Robert Darby. The difference in our heights is stark in our photo together.
The police and prosecutors who put him here were “very clever”, he says bitterly as he hoovers up a tray of crisps and chocolate. He doesn’t eat before visits, so he can enjoy these treats instead of the usual prison food. When the guilty verdict was returned, he recalls, he told one of the cops from the dock: “What you’ve done here is a disgrace.” The officer just laughed in his face, he says. He wanted to make a formal complaint but his solicitor said it was pointless. Jason had to get to grips with the fact that he was now a convicted killer, so nobody would care about a police officer goading him.
Fourteen years later, he remains completely consumed by the injustice of his situation. His exasperation is palpable. He refuses to participate in any courses requiring him to acknowledge guilt or demonstrate remorse. This means he may be refused parole even after his 18 years, but he says he’d rather stay inside than confess to a crime he didn’t commit.
Our meeting is dominated by Jason seemingly reliving the chain of events that brought him here, agonising over every detail – all the what-ifs and if-onlys. He speaks rapidly, perhaps because he knows our hour will pass quickly. He remembers Ahmed testifying to details he immediately pegged as wrong, and wondering why nobody was challenging them. He wishes his defence lawyers had asked everybody else at the scene whether they ever saw Ahmed, because Jason certainly didn’t and has wondered ever since where exactly this witness was and what he could actually see.
Jason is also preoccupied by whether to place his faith in the CCRC. It is almost three years since his lawyers submitted the audio of my interview with Ahmed, with still no decision. Jason asks me repeatedly for my opinion and it is a difficult tightrope to walk, neither wanting to get his hopes up nor depress him. I tell him I believe they should refer his case to the Court of Appeal. He replies that he has little faith in the body.
If he does get referred to the Court of Appeal and his conviction is quashed, he says he plans to spend as little time as possible in the United Kingdom, which he feels has betrayed him. You are raised to believe in institutions, he explains, and it is only when you find yourself at their mercy that you find out none of them work properly. At his failed High Court appeal in 2017, the bench tried to throw it out on a technicality without even hearing the arguments, saying it had been filed out of time.
“It didn’t seem to mean anything to them that we were talking about a miscarriage of justice in a murder case,” he seethes.
“I would have done anything for my country 20 years ago. I would have died for my country. Today, I wouldn’t even cross the road for it.”
Guilty
“He’s not well at all, is he?” Kirstie sighs on the journey back. “It’s just horrible. You just want to cry your eyes out… I wish I had the words to explain living this every day. You wake up thinking of it. The first thing I think of every morning shouldn’t be Jason, should it? My brother should be living a life.”
The hardest parts of these visits are the endings, she says – walking away and leaving him in there.
“I feel guilty all the time,” says Kirstie. “I feel guilty walking in a shop and getting some shopping, knowing he’s got nothing. I feel guilty if someone says, do you want to go for a drink, or guilty about even thinking of going on holiday.
“I feel guilty every time I’m around my parents because I look at them and think, ‘I’m not doing enough’ – because it’s their lives as well, and it’s written all over their faces.”
Their mother recently turned 80. They went out for lunch but couldn’t enjoy it properly because Jason’s absence and the associated guilt hung over them, as ever. The milestone seems to have spooked her mum, Kirstie says, who is now fretting that she will not live to see her son released.
“I feel guilty that I go up there all the time and I’ve never got any other news because we’re just waiting,” she says.
“When I look at the amount of time they take to review cases, it becomes quite apparent that the British justice system is forcing you to serve your sentence before you can get to the Court of Appeal or through the CCRC and prove your innocence.
“Jason has an 18-year recommended sentence. He’s already done 14 years. He’s nearly completed his sentence. The same thing happened with Andrew Malkinson, the same thing happened with Oliver Campbell, and the same thing happened with Peter Sullivan.”
“Anger,” she says, “is not a strong enough word”.
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