”It was a tireless physical review of all the material against Jeff,” Ms Gatland said.
It was during this search that Jeff Needs Justice began to question a key piece of evidence which was used by the prosecution to disprove Mr Gilham’s claim that it was his brother, Christopher, and not he who was responsible for the killings.
Christopher Gilham was killed on the same morning as his parents, stabbed to death downstairs from the living room where his parents’ burned bodies were found. In 1995 Jeffrey pleaded guilty to manslaughter over Christopher’s death but said it was a response to what his brother had done.
The prosecution’s case had always been that Christopher was already dead when the fire was lit and so could not be responsible. This was based on evidence that the level of carbon monoxide in Christopher’s blood from the fire was only 6 per cent and so he must have died before the fire started.
Ms Gatland and her team tracked down the acclaimed US toxicologist David Penney who said that, far from being dead at the time the fire was lit, Christopher and his parents were almost certainly alive. So crucial was this evidence to the prosecution case when it collapsed during the appeal this week that Justice Peter Garling was moved to ask whether it was ”now right to say that the facts are closer to the appellant’s case than what the Crown put to the trial?” Jeffrey Gilham’s supporters also found flaws in the prosecution’s claim that strong similarities between the clusters of stab wounds on Christopher and those inflicted on his parents suggested Jeffrey was responsible for both killings.
During the appeal it emerged that it is virtually impossible to attribute a certain ”style” of stabbing to any one individual
As the research gathered momentum and word spread, Jeff Needs Justice had a miraculous find, a former teacher’s aide at the school where Christopher Gilham had been working as a trainee teacher.
For 17 years, Denise Armstrong had been stewing over the fact that one day Christopher had said within her earshot that ”the only way to cover up all the evidence is with fire”. While this might have been said in the context of a module of science that Christopher was teaching, it was, in Justice McClellan’s words, ”at the very least a remarkable coincidence”.
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