The story of Andrew Mallard

Andrew Mallard has been languishing in Western Australia's highest security prison for almost ten years for a murder he didn't commit.

He was supposed to have bludgeoned a popular mother-of-two to death with a blunt object.

Yet there is compelling evidence to show that he did not commit this murder. There is not a strand of DNA or drop of blood linking Andrew to the scene and a key piece of evidence about the possible weapon was kept from the defence. There were other suspects the police chose to ignore.

42-year-old Andrew Mallard spends his days locked up in Casuarina Maximum Security Prison because of the events over ten years ago when on the stormy afternoon of 23 May, 1994, Pamela Lawrence was bludgeoned to death as she closed up her jewellery store in the leafy suburb of Mosman Park, a suburb in Perth, Western Australia. The attractive and creative businesswoman, who was popular in the area and appeared to have no enemies, was killed with a blunt object in a frenzied attack. Police and forensic experts were shocked by the extreme violence of the crime. Puzzled by an apparent robbery in which no cash or jewellery were taken, detectives were immediately under pressure to solve the case.

Andrew Mallard, the son of a British Army Staff Sergeant who'd recently returned to his adopted home in Perth from a trip to the UK, was one of 136 men around the area on the initial witness list. He bore a vague resemblance to an identikit picture and was staying in nearby council flats where many of the unemployed hung around and smoked dope. Something of a Walter Mitty, who lacked self-esteem and never felt he could live up to his father, Andrew would tell people his name was "Andre" and he was a rock star from London, or an undercover detective for MI5. He had no record of any violence but had become known to police for small-time and petty offences. Unlike most of the others on the suspect list, he had no prove-able alibi for the time of the murder.

As the police came under more and more pressure to solve the crime, with television news reporting every night on its apparently senseless and extremely violent nature, they interviewed each suspect without a solid alibi. They interviewed Andrew several times at Graylands psychiatric hospital where Andrew was receiving treatment for a bi-polar disorder. They were unsatisfied with his confused recollections of where he was on the day of the murder. As soon as he was released from the hospital, detectives convinced him to come alone to an interview room. There, with two detectives, Andrew kept telling them he knew nothing of the murder, had never met Pamela Lawrence, but they kept insisting he must know something. They showed him photographs of the wounds and helped him draw diagrams of the jewellery shop. They kept him for eight hours - sometimes cajolling, sometimes threatening and forcing him to strip naked - and then released him into the night. A full week later, after other leads dried up, they pulled him in again for another session.

Appealing to his Walter Mitty character, they encouraged him to tell them what he thought the killer did and help them solve the crime. The result was a video interview lasting 20 minutes, in which Andrew states that he wants to clear his name and then the police say he "confesses" in the third-person. "He would have done this" and "The killer must have done that". It's "my conjecture", he says at the end of the video.

More than a month later, with Andrew back in Graylands psychiatric hospital, the police arrest him for the willful murder of Pamela Lawrence. They claim that the hours and hours of unrecorded interviews - conducted in a room with video facilities that were conveniently switched off - were actually confessions. The detectives' notebooks - unsigned or witnessed - were filled with statements Andrew was supposed to have made, with information "only the killer could have known". (And the police, of course.) They found no weapon, they found no blood on Andrew, they found no DNA from Andrew at the scene. But the police said he had "confessed".

1994 When the murder was committed, in May 1994, it was legal for detectives to take down statements or “confessions” in their notepads and have their unsigned contents admitted into court. By the time of the trial, in 1995, a law had been passed in parliament stating that these confessions were unsafe and could not be relied on. However, as the legislation had not been ratified by the Governor, the so-called "confessions" were allowed in - virtually unchallenged. Andrew's legal aid lawyer struggled with the complex case and even conceded that he needed a senior counsel to help him - but the judge refused. The trial rolled on and the jury - who were not even given alternative theories by the defence - had little choice but to convict.

By the time another lawyer got hold of Andrew's case for an appeal, in 1996, the video confession legislation had become law - but it could not be backdated. Despite acknowledging that this case hinged on confession, and confession alone, the Supreme Court appeal judges could not see a reason for detectives to lie and dismissed the prospect that they may have. The High Court judges said that since the legislation about unrecorded confessions was now in effect, there was no point of law for them to examine. Andrew's legal avenues closed.

Once the appeals had failed, Andrew Mallard coped in the only way he could. As murderers and rapists around him rioted and attempted to burn down the prison, Andrew went "inside himself" and refused to even communicate with his family. He had always protested his innocence - reporters recorded his shouts of having "the wrong man" to the judge as the sentence of life imprisonment was passed - but now he had lost all faith and hope. The prison records show a quiet and withdrawn inmate. The only record in his disciplinary file illustrates his thoughts: Prisoner Mallard found cutting out the MOJ (Ministry of Justice) emblems from his towels. Prisoner says he will continue to do so until we believe he is innocent.

Outside the prison, Andrew's family refused to give up. His father, Roy, used his military discipline to go through every word of transcripts and statements to prove his son's innocence. His mother, Grace, and his only sister, Jacqui, watched as Roy blamed himself for Andrew's predicament and, after a couple of years, succumbed to cancer. Alone after Roy's death, with Andrew refusing to take their visits or to even believe that his father had died, the two women re-approached the barrister who had taken the appeal, Mark Ritter. Ritter said the only hope was to find fresh evidence and convince the State’s Attorney-General to send the case back to the courts. If they could do that, and he had a proper defence, Ritter was confident Andrew would not be convicted twice.

In 1998, Ritter sent the women to Colleen Egan, an experienced journalist who had heard claims many times of women who believe their sons could never have committed a crime. But after viewing the bizarre third-person "confession", and seeing the holes in the case as she worked through the transcript, Egan agreed to investigate further. Working full-time at television stations and newspapers, Egan gave up the case twice in frustration. But she kept taking it back, and spent her nights and weekends testing evidence and gathering new leads. Working alongside Ritter, Jacqui, and then two students and prison chaplain Rob Devenish, who eventually all came on board, evidence finally started to emerge.

The country's foremost polygraph expert, Bill Glare, tested Andrew and believes that he tells the truth when he says he did not commit the murder. Similarly, hypnotist Rick Collingwood who regressed Andrew back to the day of the crime is sure he is innocent. The state's most eminent QC, Malcolm McCusker, says the confessional evidence makes Andrew's a terribly unsafe conviction.

The team found fresh evidence about the murder weapon - a sample of paint taken from a nearby forklift that matches unexplained paint flakes in the wounds in Pamela Lawrence's head - that was never presented at trial. The sample, which was taken by police but never passed on to Andrew's lawyer, could not have come from the weapon Andrew supposedly used.

But that one extra clue was not quite enough, so the team approached Labor Government MP John Quigley, whose considerable legal skills and experience had been honed for more than two decades as the police union lawyer before he entered politics. The idea was for Quigley - a passionate and convincing advocate - to help argue to Attorney-General Jim McGinty that this case should go back before the courts. The team figured that if they could convince the policeman's friend, they could convince anyone.

Quigley read every word of the trial transcript and then took up the case with gusto, appalled by the conduct of the trial. Equipped with an abundance of energy and invaluable insider knowledge of police investigations, Quigley sought out more fresh evidence - and found it.

Drawing on Andrew's memories along with the investigation team's findings that a mystery police officer was somehow involved in the case, Quigley pieced together a whole section of evidence never known to the Mallards: during the week between the first police interview and the second, the police ran an extensive undercover operation. The operation gleaned nothing that could be used against Andrew but there was plenty that could have worked in his favour - so, against proper practice, the police and prosecutors simply withheld the fact from the court.

Quigley found that, incredibly, they also withheld the findings of the state's chief forensic pathologist, Clive Cooke, regarding the murder weapon. Cooke's findings did not fit with the theory advanced at trial that Andrew used a wrench to kill Mrs Lawrence - so, once again against proper practice, they kept the information from the jury.

This information - new to the Mallards but old news to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police - convinced the state's solicitor general and Mr. McGinty in July 2002 to send the case back to the Court of Criminal Appeal. The CCA finally sat in June 2003 - 5 days had been allowed for the hearing - but it soon became clear this was not enough time to hear all of the complex issues uncovered by Andrew's legal team.

Legal Aid was only able to provide very limited assistance, barely sufficient to pay the fees of some expert witnesses, Malcolm McCusker QC and Dr. James Edelman agreed to act as senior and junior counsel for Andrew, free of charge. Likewise, the firm of Clayton Utz provided, free, the services of a number of fine lawyers to assist.

All did so, not because of any personal or emotional involvement (Mr. McCusker and Dr. Edelman had never met Andrew) but because their objective view, arrived at independently, was that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice.

However the CCA denied Andrew's appeal. The Court of Appeal referred to the lawyers for Mallard as having gone on a "fishing expedition". They appear to have been referring to the success of the lawyers in uncovering the information kept from Andrew's lawyer and the jury at his trial: Mr McCusker QC was criticised by the Court of Appeal, for having said that there was "deliberate concealment" of evidence important to the defence of Andrew. But neither the police nor the DPP suggested that the non-disclosure was accidental. What the Court called a "fishing expedition" was the excellent work by Andrew's appeal lawyers in uncovering additional information and evidence which had been kept from his trial defence lawyer and the jury.

In the closing submissions at the appeal, Mr McCusker said that there had been deliberate concealment of information that would have been helpful and relevant to the trial defence.

This prompted a response by Mr Fianacca of the DPP. Mr Fiannaca did not explain why such information had not been disclosed.

The appeal judges ruled that lie detector tests were not admissible as evidence. This ruling seems highly inconsistent with police practice where polygraph testing is used and where the results of such tests are released to the media where persons of interest (suspects) fail the test - even in the absence of charges against these people. Examples are the Claremont serial killing suspect and a person suspected of involvement in a killing on a freeway bridge.

So if Andrew didn't do it, who did? The team has uncovered information about suspects who were on the list of 136 - and some who possibly weren't. There is clear evidence that once the detectives decided Andrew was their man, they did not look at other suspects who could have been the murderer.

Contact Andrew's support team at Support@AndrewMallard.com

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