Papers that paid the families of murder victims for their stories are rare in these cases, and the one clear example is not a payment for an interview at all: a newspaper group paid a family money after its reporters had hacked a missing schoolgirl’s phone. The money that runs through these cases is mostly somewhere else. Newspapers paid witnesses who then appeared for the prosecution. A publisher paid an offender for her part in a book, and the Prime Minister was asked in Parliament to condemn it. A defense lawyer took a killer’s story rights as his fee. A prosecutor collected royalties from a book about a case he had tried. A police commissioner took a fee from a New York newspaper for a report on a case he had solved. A woman freed from a life sentence sold interviews, or offered to, for a lunch.
Courts, legislatures and regulators handled most of it.
Rosemary West was convicted at Winchester Crown Court on November 22, 1995, of ten murders. The victims were young women and girls who died between 1971 and 1987; two were children of her own household, her stepdaughter Charmaine, who was eight, and her eldest daughter Heather, who was 16. Her husband Fred West, charged with 12 murders, died in custody before trial, and she was tried alone. Mr. Justice Mantell sentenced her to life imprisonment on each count. The trial lasted 31 days. Brian Leveson QC led the prosecution, and her solicitor was Leo Goatley.
Press money came into the case through the witnesses. Rose West contested every count and denied the allegations against her throughout, Goatley said. Several prosecution witnesses had been paid or promised payment by the press. The defense cross-examined them about their media contracts, and the judge went through the contracts in his summing-up, the European Commission of Human Rights later recorded. Goatley said he worried that the jury might have been influenced, since journalists were offering large sums and some witnesses stood to gain depending on the outcome, the Law Society Gazette reported. His public defense of his client drew criticism from the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, the same profile said.
The Court of Appeal refused her leave to appeal on March 19, 1996, and gave its reasons in open court on April 2. By the Commission’s account, the court held that the effect of the media coverage was essentially short-lived, that the defense had been able to cross-examine witnesses about their contracts with the press, that no substantial inconsistencies in their evidence had been shown, and that the judge had dealt with the contracts in his summing-up. On the argument that publicity had made a fair trial impossible, the court said that to accept it would mean that if allegations of murder were sufficiently horrendous as inevitably to shock the nation, the accused would be untriable; "That would be absurd," the court said, as openDemocracy quoted it in 2013.
She took the complaint to Strasbourg. Her application to the European Commission of Human Rights said that pretrial coverage, press payments to prosecution witnesses and weak contempt-of-court safeguards had denied her a fair trial. On October 20, 1997, the Commission declared it inadmissible because it had been lodged outside the six-month time limit, counted from April 2, 1996. It did not rule on the merits. So the question of what paid witnesses did to a verdict was raised, tested in the Court of Appeal on the trial record and never decided in Strasbourg. The committal hearing had already shown what the case did to the press: Andrew O’Hagan, reporting for the London Review of Books, described her arrival in a white van with a police motorcycle escort and a crowd outside that jeered and threw eggs, and reporting restrictions limited what could be published.
Mary Bell was 11 years old when she stood trial at Newcastle Assizes in December 1968 for the deaths of two small boys from Scotswood, in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne. On December 17, 1968, the jury acquitted her of murder and convicted her of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility. She was ordered detained for life, spent about 12 years in custody and was released on license in 1980, at 23, with a new identity. A 13-year-old girl charged with her was acquitted of everything.
The money came 30 years later. In 1995 Mary Bell began a series of long interviews with the writer Gitta Sereny, held in secret over several months, and the result was Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell, published by Macmillan in May 1998. The payment made the book a political issue as soon as it became known. Mary Bell had been paid for her contribution. On April 29, 1998, in the House of Commons, the Labour member John Heppell asked the Prime Minister to condemn it. Tony Blair answered that most people would find it repugnant that anyone should benefit from such crimes, that the existing law was not retrospective and would not deal with the case, and that the Home Secretary would look at how the law might be tightened. "Most people would consider it wrong that any money is received or paid over in respect of books written about such crimes," he said.
The next day in the House of Lords, Lord Hoyle, for the government, said that the Home Office minister Joyce Quin had written to Richard Charkin of Macmillan about the payments and that the Home Secretary had asked the Attorney General whether anything could be done. He said the Proceeds of Crime Act 1995 applied only within six years of a conviction and that it was not clear it could reach this case. Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, told the House that a complaint had been received and was being investigated. On May 5 a written answer from Geoff Hoon for the Lord Chancellor’s Department said that it was not for the government to act on media coverage of the person formerly known as Mary Bell; any party to a High Court injunction of July 30, 1984 could refer a suspected breach to the court.
Sereny’s case for the book was that children who kill are responding to harm done to them. "It isn’t that they’re motivated to kill by evil inside them," she told CBS News in 1999. The families of the two dead boys disagreed with the way the money had been handled. The mother of Martin Brown called the payment "blood money," and a petition was raised for a law to stop criminals profiting from memoirs, a cause that the former Home Secretary David Blunkett later took up, The Sunday Post reported in 2013. It did not succeed, and the family was angered by that. Her daughter told the paper the family’s anger was directed less at the release than at the new identity and the book.
Press money pursued the family of the offender as well. In 1988 the High Court recorded that the father of Mary Bell’s daughter sold an untrue story about her to a newspaper, and an injunction was obtained against him. In all, the court recorded, the family had to move five times because of press intrusion and harassment, and in May 2003 the High Court granted the mother and daughter anonymity for life, in an order that binds everyone. Orders of that kind, protecting a child by forbidding the press to identify the child or the parents, became known as "Mary Bell orders," the New Statesman explained in 2000.
Levi Bellfield is serving two whole life orders. In February 2008 an Old Bailey jury convicted him of murdering Marsha McDonnell, 19, and Amelie Delagrange, 22, and of attempting to murder Kate Sheedy, 18, who survived. In June 2011 a second jury convicted him of kidnapping and murdering Milly Dowler, 13, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002. Mr. Justice Wilkie imposed the second whole life order on June 24, 2011, reported as the first time anyone in Britain had received two. The Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal the Dowler conviction in February 2012.
Within weeks of the verdict, in July 2011, it was widely reported that the News of the World had hacked Milly’s mobile phone while she was missing. Messages from her family were intercepted, and some were deleted, which gave her parents false hope that she was alive. The Metropolitan Police inquiry into phone hacking, Operation Weeting, recorded evidence that her phone may have been hacked by a journalist from the paper in 2002. The revelations caused public outrage and contributed to the closure of the paper. This is the nearest thing in these cases to a newspaper paying a family. The Dowler family received 2 million pounds from News International and a further 1 million pounds from Rupert Murdoch, which they gave to six charities, ITV News reported. The payment was compensation for what the paper had done, and the family returned it to charity.
The question then turned to Surrey Police. The chief constable, Mark Rowley, set up Operation Baronet to establish what the force had been told about the hacking in 2002, why it had done nothing and who knew. The Independent Police Complaints Commission reported on April 24, 2013, that officers at all levels of the 2002 investigation knew an allegation had been made against the News of the World, and that none had acted on it. Deborah Glass, the commission’s deputy chair, said there was no doubt Surrey Police had known and failed to investigate. "Phone hacking was a crime and this should have been acted upon, if not in 2002, then later," she said, and she described senior officers as suffering from "collective amnesia" about the events of 2002. The commission saw no case to answer for misconduct against the two officers whose roles it examined, and Surrey Police said both had been given words of advice. The force had apologized to the Dowler family, and the commission said it was right to do so.
Bellfield himself later produced claims, and the papers printed them. A relative complained to the press regulator, on his behalf, that a newspaper had wrongly reported that he had confessed to other murders; the regulator did not uphold the complaint. In November 2023, after interviewing him over two days, the Metropolitan Police said that "a number of inconsistencies and discrepancies have been uncovered which lead us to believe the confession is false" in a claim he had made about another young woman.
Joseph Kallinger was a Philadelphia shoemaker. A Bergen County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of the murder of Maria Fasching, in Leonia, New Jersey, on January 8, 1975; the verdict came on October 12, 1976. He had already been convicted of armed robbery in Pennsylvania. Two killings of boys in Philadelphia in 1974, of his own son, 14, and of a boy from his neighborhood, Jose Collazo, 10, were officially unsolved until he described them in a book published in 1983. He was charged in July 1983 and received two life sentences, UPI reported in 1988.
The book was the product of a contract. On August 19, 1975, Kallinger signed with Flora Rheta Schreiber, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of Sybil, giving her the book, magazine and film rights to his life story. He and his wife were to receive 12.5 percent of what Schreiber earned. On July 6, 1976, to pay his defense lawyer, Giblin, Kallinger assigned to Giblin his rights under that contract. Simon and Schuster published The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic in hardcover in 1983, and New American Library brought out the paperback in 1984. Schreiber received advances of 475,000 dollars and about 75,000 dollars in royalties, and the publisher’s lawyer told the court the book had not been a commercial success. Kallinger himself received nothing from it.
The family of Maria Fasching sued Kallinger, his wife, Schreiber, Simon and Schuster, New American Library and Giblin in New Jersey, seeking to reach the money the book earned. They relied in part on New Jersey’s new law, in force from January 26, 1983, which was meant to hold the profits of criminals who sold their stories for the benefit of victims. On May 30, 1986, the Appellate Division ruled in Fasching v. Kallinger that the statute did not apply to authors and publishers, and it upheld the dismissal of the family’s claims for unjust enrichment, defamation and invasion of privacy. It noted that a Pennsylvania court had reached the same result in 1985 when Jose Collazo’s parents brought an unjust enrichment claim against Simon and Schuster.
A second suit came from survivors of the Leonia crime, who sued Schreiber and her publisher over a sentence in the Leonia chapter and over the retelling of what had been done to them. On February 18, 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against them. It held that the sentence they objected to was not defamatory, and that the book’s account of the crimes came from public court records and testimony that had been widely reported at the time, so its publication was protected. About half of the chapter set out Kallinger’s own recollections, taken from Schreiber’s interviews, and the rest re-created the events from testimony that survivors gave at his trial. One justice dissented on the defamation point. Kallinger was reported to have died in prison in 1996.
William Bonin was convicted of murdering fourteen boys and young men in Southern California between August 1979 and June 1980; they were between 12 and 19 years old. Juries in Los Angeles County and Orange County sentenced him to death twice, and he was executed at San Quentin on February 23, 1996. The Associated Press summarized a reporter’s account in 1996: Bonin "told a reporter he had killed 21 people." In the Los Angeles trial the reporter, Lopez, testified that Bonin had admitted all ten of the killings tried there, and others.
Money touched his defense before the trial began. The Los Angeles trial was set for May 4, 1981, and then put off twice, finally to September 14. On September 3 Bonin told the court he wanted to replace his lawyer, Hanson, with a private firm, Charvet and Stewart. The deputy district attorney, Sterling E. Norris, objected. The firm had talked with James Munro, the prosecution’s key witness, in the county jail in late 1980, when Munro was looking for a lawyer, and the prosecution also pointed to a possible arrangement under which the firm would be paid with the rights to Bonin’s story. William Charvet denied that he had ever represented Munro and said their talk had been minimal.
On September 14 the trial court refused the substitution. It held that a conflict had developed because Charvet had talked with Munro and that the request was a tactic to delay the trial. The Court of Appeal summarily denied Bonin’s petition on September 18. On October 19, 1981, the court allowed Charvet and his partner, Tracy L. Stewart, to substitute in, without obtaining a waiver of the conflict from Bonin. The trial began that day, and Charvet and Stewart represented him in Orange County as well. Justice Broussard dissented from the California Supreme Court’s affirmance. He argued that the trial court had a duty to refuse the substitution of a lawyer burdened with two possible conflicts, the contact with Munro and a possible literary-rights clause in the retainer, and he would have sent the case back for the trial court to decide whether a literary-rights agreement existed and whether it had hurt Charvet’s work.
The state’s own witnesses had arrangements of their own. Gregory Miley had pleaded guilty to the murders of two victims in exchange for his testimony, and Munro had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder; Munro was sentenced to 15 years to life, and he testified against Bonin in exchange for a lighter sentence, the Associated Press reported. Jailhouse informers testified to further admissions. The defense argued that the prosecution had not proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and challenged the credibility of the prosecution witnesses.
Gerald Gallego was convicted of four murders in two states and sentenced to death in both: Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers, in California in 1983, and Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, in Nevada in 1984. Six more deaths were attributed to him, largely on the account of Charlene Williams, the young woman who lived with him and called herself his wife. Those six were never tried against him.
Williams was the case’s central witness and its bargain. After first giving police an alibi and then a story that the California Supreme Court described as fabricated, she hired a new lawyer, Hamilton Hintz, withdrew the story and gave police another statement implicating Gallego. The plea agreement was made with prosecutors in California, Nevada and Oregon together, according to the Ninth Circuit. She agreed to tell what she knew about ten killings and to testify against Gallego in both the California and Nevada cases. She pleaded guilty to two murders and received a sentence of 16 years and 8 months, subject to approval by California’s Board of Prison Terms, and was granted transactional immunity for the other eight killings. The courts describe her pleas differently: the California Supreme Court wrote that she pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder, while the Nevada Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit wrote that they were second degree murder counts.
The press was part of the case before the story was a book. In 1981 Gallego moved for a change of venue, pointing to heavy coverage by the Sacramento press, and the trial was moved to Contra Costa County. The California Supreme Court later rejected nearly all of his claims. It saw no presumed or actual prejudice from the publicity. It also rejected a claim that the prosecutor had been compromised by a book deal: the court noted that the prosecutor had received about 5,000 dollars in royalties from a book about the case on which he had collaborated with two investigators and Williams, but it saw no prejudice. In a 2013 interview with CBS Sacramento, Williams said she never wanted to take part, that Gallego controlled her through fear and abuse, and that she did not kill any of the victims. Gallego died of colon cancer on July 18, 2002, at a Nevada prison medical center, after about 18 years on death row.
Betty Lou Beets was convicted by a Henderson County jury in October 1985 of the capital murder of her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, a Dallas Fire Department captain, and she was sentenced to death on October 14. The prosecution’s theory was that she killed him for money: his city life insurance, his firefighter’s pension and his property. She was charged in the death of her fourth husband as well, but that case never went to trial. After 15 years of appeals she was executed at Huntsville on February 24, 2000, after Governor George W. Bush declined to grant a 30-day reprieve.
The appeals turned in part on money of another kind. Her case went on to divide the full federal appeals court in New Orleans over her trial lawyer’s decision to take the media rights to her story as his fee. Human Rights Watch urged Governor Bush to stay the execution on February 23, 2000, citing attorney misconduct, and Amnesty International issued an urgent action on her case. Her supporters argued in her last years that she was a battered woman whose history of abuse no jury had heard; prosecutors, the victim’s son and the Texas parole board answered that she had never admitted the crime or shown remorse.
The dead man’s money figured in the trial. A Dallas Fire Department chaplain later testified that, after her husband was presumed dead, she asked whether she was covered by any city life insurance and whether she would receive his pension. In March 1985, at the request of her lawyer, E. Ray Andrews, a Henderson County judge declared Jimmy Don Beets dead and made her administrator of his estate, and through a Dallas law firm Andrews had brought in she applied for his pension and life insurance. The Dallas Police and Fire Pension Board voted to approve a settlement that was to be finalized on June 10, 1985. Her arrest, on June 8, 1985, came two days before.
Yiya Murano was a lawyer’s wife from the Monserrat district of Buenos Aires who took money from friends, neighbors and relatives in 1979 on the promise that she could make it grow. Three women who had given her money died within about six weeks. In June 1982 a trial judge acquitted her of everything for lack of proof. In 1985 an appeals chamber reversed the ruling and sentenced her to life imprisonment for three aggravated homicides and for fraud. The sentence was later reduced, and she left prison in the 1990s, in November 1995 in most reports.
The press dealt with her afterward as a commodity. Once free, Murano courted publicity. She gave interviews, appeared on television and, according to the Buenos Aires Herald, offered her story to newsrooms in person. Infobae reported that she was paid for some interviews and said she would sell "the truth of the case" for money or a lunch and would otherwise keep it to herself. The Herald recounted a story that she claimed to keep an envelope holding the whole truth, available for a fee, and that a journalist who glimpsed inside it while she signed an autograph saw that it was empty. A year after her release she became a fashion columnist on the television program La Hoguera, La Gaceta reported.
She was twice a guest at the lunch table of the television host Mirtha Legrand, Infobae reported; the Noticias Argentinas account dates one invitation to 1998. Murano’s son later criticized the studio audience for applauding when she was introduced, C5N reported. In all of this she maintained her innocence. "Murderers never tell the truth," she told the journalist Rodolfo Palacios in one of more than ten interviews, according to Infobae. In a 2006 interview on Radio 10 she said she had worked with money but killed no one, and that the only two people she had killed were her mother and her first husband, who, she said, had been unable to bear her unjust imprisonment.
Her only son, an actor and stunt double, has spoken about his mother for decades. In 1994 he published a book, Mi madre, Yiya Murano, in which, La Capital and Diario UNO reported, he wrote that she had calmly described the crimes to him. He has called her a perverse murderer and a psychopath, and C5N and the Buenos Aires Herald reported that a forensic psychiatric report described her as a compulsive liar. She died in a Buenos Aires care home in 2014.
Frederick Bailey Deeming was executed at Melbourne Gaol on May 23, 1892, for the murder of Emily Mather, a 26-year-old woman from the village of Rainhill near Liverpool who had married him in September 1891 believing him to be an army inspector named Albert Oliver Williams. A coroner’s jury at Rainhill returned a verdict of wilful murder against him in the deaths of his first wife and their four children; he was never tried for those deaths, because Victoria tried and executed him for Emily Mather’s murder first. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that Deeming was identified, arrested, tried and executed in less than three months, and the speed of it, together with a press campaign that treated him as guilty from the start, has drawn criticism from historians ever since.
The ADB describes the public mood as mass hysteria, which Melbourne called "Deemania." Newspapers declared him guilty before his trial and called him "the criminal of the century" and "a human tiger." A play based on the Windsor murder, Wilful Murder, staged by the actor-manager Alfred Dampier, ran in Melbourne in March and April 1892, before the trial. The State Library Victoria records that postcards linked him to Jack the Ripper, cheap pamphlets sold his story and copies of his portrait were traded like collector cards. The ADB’s author, Barry O. Jones, observes that contemporary photographs show nothing abnormal about him, and that in his judgment the uproar destroyed Deeming’s right to be tried by an unprejudiced jury.
Deeming was defended by William Forlonge and Alfred Deakin, then a 35-year-old barrister and member of the Victorian parliament who would later become prime minister of Australia. Deakin’s own ADB entry describes his defense of Deeming as the best known of his cases at the Bar, and records that he took it without a fee. Counsel asked for a month’s adjournment so that evidence of Deeming’s medical history could be gathered from England and elsewhere, and so that public feeling could cool. Mr. Justice Henry Hodges granted one week. When the Crown counsel told the jury there was no evidence of insanity, Deeming interrupted and addressed the court himself. It was the press, not the law, that was trying him, he said.
On May 2, 1892, the jury convicted him and added that he was not insane, and Hodges sentenced him to death. Deeming spent much of his time in prison writing an account of his life, which he said he would leave to a young woman he had met on a voyage to Sydney and become engaged to, so that any profit might make up to her for the trouble he had caused. The ADB records that the manuscript was destroyed. Pamphlets, a play and portrait cards sold his story while he lived; the one account he wrote himself was destroyed.
Cesare Serviatti was convicted in July 1933 of killing three women, in La Spezia in 1928, in Rome in 1930 and in La Spezia again in November 1932. The Corte d’Assise of La Spezia sentenced him to death for the killing of Paolina Gorietti and to life imprisonment for the other two, on July 8, 1933. He was executed at Sarzana on October 13, 1933. The Italian press of the time compared him with the French killer Henri Desire Landru, and he went into the papers as the Landru of the Tiber, the Italian Landru and Bluebeard, and in Rome as the butcher of Rome.
The story of money in the case belongs to the policeman. Commissario Dosi, born in Rome in 1891, the son of a carabinieri noncommissioned officer, had been an actor before joining the police in 1912 and had made his name in Rome in the 1920s on difficult investigations, according to Eurocomunicazione. In the 1932 case, it said, he coordinated the La Spezia inquiry, and the breakthrough came when he learned that an officer of the Rome squad was already watching one of the town’s apartments, having solved the case from the Rome end. Dosi received a fee of 1,000 lire for his work, and a New York newspaper paid him 350 dollars for a detailed report on the case. He was moved to Florence in 1933. A memoir he wrote was later seized; he was arrested in 1939 and dismissed from the police, and was freed in January 1941.
The sums are small beside the Dowler settlement, but the shape is the same: an officer’s account of a case, sold to a newspaper while the case was still news.
In 1997 a 14-year-old junior high school student in Kobe’s Suma Ward harmed five elementary school children, killing Ayaka Yamashita, 10, and Jun Hase, 11, and taunted police and the press in letters signed "Seito Sakakibara." Too young to be prosecuted under the law then in force, he was held responsible by the Kobe Family Court on October 17, 1997, and sent to a medical reformatory. He was provisionally released on March 10, 2004, aged 21, and formally discharged on January 1, 2005. Japan’s media called him Boy A, and Article 61 of the Juvenile Act forbids publication of a juvenile offender’s name, face or anything else that would identify him.
The press and the law collided early. In early 1998 the monthly Bungei Shunju printed statements he had given to prosecutors, and a member of the House of Representatives, Tomio Sakagami, put written questions to the cabinet about the publication on February 18, 1998.
In 2015, calling himself Former Boy A, he published a memoir, Zekka, with Ohta Publishing. J-CAST News reported on the publisher’s statement and on the bookstores' handling of the book and the demand of the Hase family that it be recalled; a Toyo Keizai Online column called it a dangerous book that tramples on the feelings of the bereaved. Gendai Business reported three months later on what the former Boy A had been doing since it appeared, and J-CAST reported in February 2016 that his website had stopped updating after Shukan Bunshun’s reporting. What the book earned him was not reported. The objection of the families was to the book as such.
Sorted by who paid and who was paid, the cases give a short ledger. Newspapers paid or promised to pay prosecution witnesses in one trial, and the Court of Appeal held that cross-examination about their contracts was enough. A publisher paid an offender, and Parliament could find no law that reached it. A lawyer took the rights to a client’s story as his fee, or was alleged to be about to, in three cases. A prosecutor took royalties. A policeman was paid by a New York newspaper. A woman freed from a life term sold, or offered to sell, her silence. A newspaper group paid a murdered girl’s family millions of pounds, and it was for what the paper had done to the family, not for the family’s story.
What the courts did with the money was, in the end, narrow. They looked at conflicts, at unjust enrichment, at the reach of a statute, and at the fairness of a jury. They did not treat a payment as proof of anything about the underlying crime. None of the payments changed what had been proved against anyone; they changed who was heard, and who was listened to afterward.
• 1892: Frederick Deeming executed on May 23 after a press campaign the ADB says destroyed his right to an unprejudiced jury.
• 1933: Cesare Serviatti sentenced July 8 and executed October 13; the commissioner who solved the case is paid by a New York newspaper.
• December 17, 1968: Mary Bell convicted of two counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility.
• August 19, 1975: Joseph Kallinger signs his story rights to Flora Rheta Schreiber.
• July 6, 1976: Kallinger assigns his rights under the contract to his lawyer, Giblin.
• October 12, 1976: Kallinger convicted of the murder of Maria Fasching.
• September 14 to October 19, 1981: Bonin’s trial court first refuses, then allows, the substitution of a firm that may have been paid with the rights to his story.
• 1982: Yiya Murano acquitted; reversed on appeal in 1985.
• January 26, 1983: New Jersey’s law on criminals' profits from their stories takes effect.
• 1983: The Shoemaker published; Kallinger charged with two earlier killings.
• October 1985: Betty Lou Beets convicted of capital murder.
• May 30, 1986: Fasching v. Kallinger decided against the victim’s family.
• February 18, 1988: New Jersey Supreme Court rules against the survivors' suit against the author and publisher.
• November 22, 1995: Rosemary West convicted of ten murders.
• April 2, 1996: Court of Appeal gives its reasons on press payments to prosecution witnesses.
• October 20, 1997: European Commission of Human Rights declares West’s application inadmissible.
• April 29 and 30, 1998: The Prime Minister and the House of Lords address the payment for Cries Unheard.
• May 21, 2003: High Court grants Mary Bell and her daughter lifelong anonymity.
• 2011: Levi Bellfield convicted of Milly Dowler’s murder (June); News of the World phone hacking revealed (July).
• April 24, 2013: Independent Police Complaints Commission reports on Surrey Police.
• 2015: Zekka published.
• November 2023: Metropolitan Police say Bellfield’s confession to another case is false.