Vincent Tabak was a Dutch engineer in his early thirties, living quietly in Clifton, Bristol, when his neighbor Joanna Yeates died on the evening of December 17, 2010. He was not the first man the police held. Five weeks passed before Avon and Somerset Police arrested him, two more days before he was charged with murder, and more than nine months before a jury settled the one question his own admission had left open. Tabak never denied that he had caused her death. In May 2011 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. What he denied was that he had meant to kill her or to do her really serious harm, and the case he fought at Bristol Crown Court in October 2011 turned on that single question of intent. On October 28, 2011, the jury convicted him of murder by a majority of 10 to 2. The same afternoon he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years.
The path to that verdict ran through a murder inquiry that spent its first month looking elsewhere, a plea entered by video link in London, a High Court judgment on how the press had treated an innocent man, and a three-week trial in which the facts of the death were largely conceded and the whole contest lay in what one man had intended on a winter evening.
Tabak, a Dutch national born in 1978, was 32 years old when he was arrested in January 2011 and 33 by the time he entered his plea that May. He held a master's degree in science and a doctorate, and he spoke three languages. His field was a narrow and technical one: the flow of people through buildings, including sports venues. He worked as an engineer and consultant for Buro Happold, an engineering firm, at its offices in Bath.
He lived in Clifton, a district of Bristol, next door to the victim.
She had grown up in Hampshire and by 2010 was living in Clifton. She died in Clifton on December 17, 2010, a week before Christmas.
By the last days of December her death was the subject of a full murder inquiry by Avon and Somerset Police, led by a detective chief inspector who would stay with the case through arrest, charge, plea and trial. The force interviewed the people who lived around her, took statements and appealed for information. Tabak was among the neighbors, and he had gone to the Netherlands for the holiday. Friends later told the jury that, by his own account to them, officers had spoken to him there over the New Year.
On December 30, 2010, police arrested her landlord on suspicion of murder; he was released on police bail on the evening of January 1, 2011, and was never charged with any offense. The newspaper coverage of his arrest later became the subject of contempt proceedings in the High Court, and of libel claims that were settled there.
Through the first weeks of January the inquiry went on without public result. In mid-January the police made a televised appeal. More than 300 calls came in. On January 15, 2011, five days before his arrest, he went to a dinner party with friends in the city, and the guests who sat with him that evening would later be called to describe the conversation at the table.
In the early hours of Thursday, January 20, 2011, Avon and Somerset Police arrested a 32-year-old man in Bristol on suspicion of murder. Officers had uncovered fresh evidence, and the arrest was the second of the inquiry. Officers also called at the offices of the suspect's employer in Bath, which referred all inquiries to the police.
On January 21 they went before a court and obtained a warrant of further detention, which let them go on holding and questioning the man until late on January 22. By then he had been named as Vincent Tabak.
On the evening of Saturday, January 22, 2011, the detective chief inspector leading the inquiry announced that Tabak had been charged with murder.
Tabak appeared before Bristol Magistrates' Court on Monday, January 24, 2011. He spoke only to confirm his name, age and address. The magistrates sent the murder charge to Bristol Crown Court, remanded him in custody, and heard that a bail application might be made in the higher court.
None was. At Bristol Crown Court the next day no application for bail was made, and he was remanded to appear again the following Monday. On January 31 he appeared there by video link from a prison in England. Again there was no application for bail. From the morning of his arrest until the day of his sentence, Tabak remained in custody.
The next important hearing took place in London. On Thursday, May 5, 2011, Tabak appeared at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, by video link from a prison in England. He confirmed his name and said he was content for the proceedings to be conducted in English. Then he entered his pleas.
The count charged that he had "unlawfully killed" the victim between December 16 and 19, 2010. To manslaughter he pleaded guilty. To murder he pleaded not guilty. With that plea Tabak admitted in open court that he was responsible for her death.
The prosecution did not accept the plea. Had the Crown accepted a guilty plea to manslaughter, the case would have ended there, without a trial and with a sentence passed for the lesser offense. By refusing it, the Crown kept the murder count alive and left the question of intent for a jury. The trial was fixed for Bristol Crown Court, to begin on October 4, 2011, with an estimate of four weeks.
While Tabak waited for trial, the High Court turned to the way two national newspapers had covered the first arrest. The Attorney General brought proceedings for contempt of court against the publishers of the two papers over three issues published on December 31, 2010, and January 1, 2011, while the landlord was in custody or newly bailed. The case was heard on July 5, 2011, by a Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench Division made up of the Lord Chief Justice, a Lord Justice of Appeal and a High Court judge, and judgment was given on July 29.
The court held that all three publications were contempts under the strict liability rule of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. When they appeared, proceedings against the landlord were "active" within the meaning of the Act, because he had been arrested. The test was whether a publication created a substantial risk that the course of justice in those proceedings would be seriously impeded or prejudiced, judged at the date of publication; a risk that was remote or theoretical would not do. The Attorney General had to prove that to the criminal standard, publisher by publisher. That the landlord was in fact innocent, and was never prosecuted, made no difference, because the test looked forward from the day the words were printed.
The court added an observation that bore directly on the man who now stood charged. Publicity vilifying an innocent person, it said, might later be used by a different defendant who denied the crime to divert attention from himself. Because no proceedings against Tabak were active when the articles appeared, the Act did not reach that risk, and the court left to Parliament the question of whether it should.
Penalty was decided the same day. The court treated the two articles in one paper as the more extreme, with a greater combined effect on the risks to justice, and fined its publisher £50,000. The other publisher, which had run a single article and offered an apology only after judgment, was fined £18,000, with an allowance for that very late apology. Both were ordered to pay the Attorney General's costs, shared equally. The court found a significant aggravating feature in a warning the Attorney General had broadcast on December 31, 2010, about coverage of the arrest, holding that it was impossible to accept that no one at either paper had known of it. It also rejected the argument that the passage of time before a trial, and the independence of juries, allowed virtually anything to be published, calling that a serious misapprehension. That justice had not in the end been prejudiced was, in its words, "simply good fortune," and no mitigation for the papers. The damages and apology already agreed in the landlord's civil claim, the court said, had no bearing on the fine. It refused leave to appeal and extended the time for an application to the Supreme Court to September 16, 2011. In the same month the landlord's libel claims against the publishers of eight newspapers were settled in the High Court, for sums that were not disclosed. In March 2012 the Supreme Court refused one of the publishers permission to appeal the contempt finding, holding that it was a very clear case.
The trial opened at Bristol Crown Court in October 2011 before a High Court judge, and on October 10 the prosecution, led by Queen's Counsel, set out its case to the jury. Tabak faced a single count of murder, with his admission of manslaughter already before the court. The jury did not have to decide whether he had caused the death. It had to decide whether, when he did so, he intended to kill or to cause really serious bodily harm. If it was sure he had, the verdict was murder. If not, his own plea of manslaughter would stand.
The Crown's case was that he had acted deliberately and then set about hiding what he had done. It relied heavily on his conduct in the weeks between the death and the arrest, including the witness statements he had given, which it said were designed to mislead the police. On October 13 the jury heard from the friends who had hosted and attended the January dinner party, called to describe how Tabak had talked about the case in the days before he was arrested.
Before and during the trial, the judge also ruled on what the jury would not hear. The prosecution twice applied to put before the jury evidence of other conduct by Tabak, and twice the judge refused, holding that it would be inappropriate for the jury to hear it and that it could damage the prospects of a fair trial. The jury decided the case without that material, and it was made public only after the verdict.
The defense, also led by Queen's Counsel, opened its case on Wednesday, October 19, 2011. Its argument was that the death had been neither planned nor premeditated and that he had not intended to kill or to cause really serious harm. Counsel told the jury that the defense would make no attempt to justify what Tabak had done afterward, and asked it to keep its attention on the moments of the death itself.
Tabak then went into the witness box. He gave the jury his own account of how the victim had died and maintained that he had never intended to kill her. He was then cross-examined by the prosecution.
Expert evidence on the timing of the death was given for the Crown and disputed by the defense, and both sides drew opposite conclusions from what other witnesses had heard that evening. In closing speeches on October 25 and 26, 2011, the prosecution asked the jury to find that Tabak had been determined to kill, or at the very least to cause really serious bodily harm, and that his behavior afterward showed a man who understood exactly what he had done. The trial was adjourned so that the judge could begin his summing-up the next day, October 27.
On the afternoon of Friday, October 28, 2011, the jury returned its verdict. By a majority of 10 to 2, it found Vincent Tabak guilty of murder. It had rejected his claim that he did not mean to kill her.
The judge passed sentence the same afternoon: life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 20 years.
The trial had lasted about three weeks. Tabak had been in custody since his arrest on January 20, 2011, and had spent just over nine months on remand.
Tabak was the second man arrested in the inquiry and the only one charged. His conviction for murder, by a jury that had heard him admit the killing, closed the criminal case. The life sentence and its minimum term stand.
In July 2011, before the trial, the High Court's contempt judgment described Tabak as denying murder on the basis of diminished responsibility. At trial the defense case was put differently: that he had not intended to kill or to cause really serious harm. The verdict rested on intent.
The verdict was not unanimous. Two of the twelve jurors did not join the majority, and the conviction rests on the majority verdict of 10 to 2.
1978: Vincent Tabak is born; he is a Dutch national.
December 17, 2010: The victim dies in Clifton, Bristol.
December 30, 2010: Avon and Somerset Police arrest the victim's landlord on suspicion of murder; he is released on police bail on January 1, 2011, and is never charged.
Mid-January 2011: A televised police appeal brings more than 300 calls.
January 15, 2011: Tabak attends a dinner party in Bristol whose guests later give evidence at his trial.
January 20, 2011: Tabak is arrested in Bristol.
January 21, 2011: Police obtain a warrant of further detention.
January 22, 2011: Tabak is charged with murder.
January 24, 2011: First appearance at Bristol Magistrates' Court; remanded in custody and sent to the Crown Court.
January 25 and 31, 2011: Hearings at Bristol Crown Court; no bail application.
May 5, 2011: At the Central Criminal Court, Tabak pleads guilty to manslaughter and not guilty to murder; the prosecution refuses the plea.
July 5, 2011: The Divisional Court hears the Attorney General's contempt case against two newspaper publishers.
July 2011: The landlord's libel claims against eight newspaper publishers are settled in the High Court.
July 29, 2011: The Divisional Court finds both publishers in contempt and fines them.
October 10, 2011: The prosecution opens its case at Bristol Crown Court.
October 13, 2011: The jury hears from guests at the January dinner party.
October 19, 2011: The defense opens its case; Tabak later gives evidence.
October 25 and 26, 2011: Closing speeches.
October 27, 2011: The judge begins his summing-up.
October 28, 2011: Convicted of murder by a 10 to 2 majority verdict; sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years.
March 2012: The Supreme Court refuses one publisher permission to appeal the contempt finding.