The conviction of Michael Stone, who has served 26 years in prison for the murders of Lin Russell and her daughter Megan, is being reviewed by the criminal cases review commission after a confession by the serial killer Levi Bellfield.
In a reversal of a decision made three months ago in which the CCRC had said there was no realistic prospect of Stone’s conviction being overturned at the court of appeal, the statutory body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice has said it will begin a fresh review.
The move came in response to a “pre-action” letter by Stone’s lawyers warning that they would take the CCRC to a judicial review over its disregard of Bellfield’s multiple confessions from his cell in recent years to the murders and the body’s failure to order new forensic tests on DNA strands found at the crime scene.
The CCRC has told Stone’s lawyers that it is “prepared to look at the points raised” and any “additional submissions” as part of a review of the killing in 1996 of Russell, 45, Megan, five, and the attempted murder of Russell’s eldest child, Josie, then nine, with a hammer.
Stone’s conviction had rested almost entirely on his alleged cell confession to Damien Daley, a criminal on remand who was in a segregation cell in Canterbury prison. He claimed that Stone told him through a heating pipe that went between their cells that he had attacked Russell and her children.
Stone, 63, has insisted throughout that he had made no such admissions and in 2017 and 2019 Bellfield, 55, confessed to, respectively, a fellow prisoner and Stone’s lawyers that he had been responsible for the murders.
Bellfield is serving three life sentences for the murder of Marsha McDonnell, 19, and Amélie Delagrange, 22, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy when she was 18. He has also admitted to the rape and murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler.
This year, Bellfield confessed to the murder of Elizabeth Chau, a 19-year-old Vietnamese national studying in London, who was abducted in April 1999 from Ealing, west London.
Mark McDonald, the barrister who has represented Stone for two decades, said: “Michael Stone has been in prison for 26 years for a crime he did not commit. I am really pleased that the CCRC have reconsidered their decision and decided to review this case again.
“I first put my application into the CCRC in 2017 after another man admitted he carried out the crime that Stone is in prison for. It took six years to make a decision. It is essential that this review is undertaken as a matter of urgency and Stone’s conviction is referred back to the court of appeal. The decision as to whether Bellfield is credible needs to be taken by the court of appeal not the CCRC.”
On 9 July 1996, Russell, Megan, Josie, and the family dog, Lucy, were returning home from Goodnestone school near Chillenden in Kent, when they were approached on a country lane by a man. He tied them up before attacking them with a hammer. Russell and Megan were killed and Josie was left critically injured.
There was no forensic evidence linking Stone to the murder, nor witnesses. His initial conviction was overturned in 2001 after another prisoner who had claimed during the trial to have heard Stone confess to the crimes subsequently admitted to the Daily Mirror that he had been telling the jury “a pack of lies”.
Stone was convicted at retrial after the jury believed Daley’s separate account of an incriminating conversation with Stone despite the prosecution’s admission that there was nothing that he had said that he could not have picked up from the newspapers.
In its decision in July this year not to refer Stone’s case to the court of appeal, the CCRC said there were discrepancies between Bellfield’s account of the murder and the facts of the case.
They had also declined to test DNA strands found at the scene that did not belong to Stone or the Russells on the basis that it would not provide “compelling evidence of an individual’s presence at the crime scene in the absence of other circumstantial evidence to support it”.
A CCRC spokesman said: “We have agreed to a request from Mr Stone’s representatives to carry out a further review. While we can’t comment on the specifics of an investigation, it is not unusual for different reviews to focus on different arguments or evidence.
“Our commitment to thoroughly investigate all eligible applications extends to undertaking additional work related to cases we have previously reviewed.”
