A relative of the man named as the sixth attacker in the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence has told how police failed to turn up to a meeting with the suspect, in a potentially vital failure in the battle to bring the killers to justice.
Carol Severs said her late husband Jack, the stepfather of Matthew White, who the Met confirmed yesterday was a suspect in the case, had told her about the planned meeting before his death in 2020. She said it had been arranged after White told her husband about what had happened on the night in April 1993 that Stephen was killed.
But she said the meeting, which her husband arranged with a police officer he knew, failed to take place when the policeman did not turn up. A second meeting was organised but White did not appear.
An error in entering the information about the tip-off on a Met database meant that it was only in 2013, two decades after Stephen’s murder, that Mr Severs was finally asked by police to tell them what he knew.
White, who had already been arrested in 2000 in connection with the murder on the basis of information from another witness, was arrested again soon after.
But the Crown Prosecution Service, which had previously ruled out charges after White’s first arrest, decided that there was still insufficient evidence to charge him.
Mrs Severs, who now lives in Eastbourne, said White, who died in 2021 at the age of 50, was “thick, vulnerable and easily led” as she told MailOnline about the failed meetings.
“Jack told me that Matthew had spoken to him about what happened that night,” she said. “He said he had arranged for a policeman that he knew to come to the house to speak to Matthew because Matthew was too scared to go to the police station. But the policeman never turned up. So Jack arranged for him to come another time. But that time Matthew didn’t turn up. No further meetings were ever arranged as far as I know.”
The decision by prosecutors not to charge White after his two arrests, and his subsequent death, meant that he would never face justice over Stephen’s murder.
Three other previously named suspects, Luke Knight and brothers Jamie and Neil Acourt, have also escaped conviction although two men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were finally jailed for life for the murder in 2012.
The Old Bailey judge at their trial, Mr Justice Treacy, said at the time that on the evidence before the court there were “still three or four other killers of Stephen Lawrence at large”. White was named as the sixth suspect in Stephen’s murder at a bus stop in Eltham in a BBC investigation.
The Met confirmed he had been arrested twice over the killing and admitted many mistakes had been made during the investigation into one of the capital’s most notorious crimes. Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, have expressed their dismay at the new revelations about police failings. As well as the testimony from Mr Severs, White also matched the description of a sixth fair-haired attacker given by Stephen’s friend and eye-witness Duwayne Brooks.
