The BBC has identified a new suspect in the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence 30 years ago: the now deceased Matthew White.
White died in 2021, aged 50. According to the BBC’s findings, he was a drug user at the time of Lawrence’s murder in 1993 and later became a heroin addict.
He is reported to have occasionally held the odd job as a scaffolder and gardener, but also had a record of theft offences and served time in prison.
One of the last offences for which White was convicted was an assault on a black shop worker just a few hundred metres from where Lawrence was murdered.
The assault took place in summer 2020 in a shop on Well Hall Road, Eltham. The BBC tracked down the victim, a man who had not previously known about White’s connection to the Lawrence case.
He told the BBC he confronted White – who was shoplifting – after he came into the store. White then attacked him, while making threatening comments loaded with references to Lawrence.
The victim told the BBC that White had said: “Remember you’re in Eltham. Remember where you are, remember what happened to Stephen Lawrence. I can call my boys, they can come down and they can deal with you.”
He reportedly threatened that the victim would be “Stephen Lawrenced” before launching his assault.
He reportedly pleaded guilty in court to assault, a month after which Scotland Yard stopped investigating Lawrence’s murder.
White died in a bedsit a year later, the BBC said.
The BBC said his inquest heard his body was not found for several days and the cause of death could not be established, but police said there were no suspicious circumstances. It reported that White had been suicidal, had overdosed by accident in the recent past, and had health problems linked to his drug use.
The BBC reports that a statement about his life written by a relative was read by the coroner and included an enigmatic line: “Matthew was a lovely lad that happened to go to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
His mother is said to have remarried twice after her relationship with White’s father ended. She married a man called Jack Severs who is said to have passed on information on White’s involvement in the Lawrence case. Severs died in 2020.
White was initially known publicly as Witness K and in 2011 was named publicly for the first time as a witness at the trial of David Norris and Gary Dobson, who were ultimately convicted of Lawrence’s murder.
There are 27 references to Witness K in the Macpherson report, the inquiry into Lawrence’s murder led by the late Sir William Macpherson, which uncovered major failings in the police investigation and called the Metropolitan police “institutionally racist”, a verdict they have been unable to shake.
The Met has confirmed it arrested White twice, in 2000 and 2013, in connection with Lawrence’s murder and that files were sent to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2005 and 2014. But on both occasions prosecutors said there was no realistic prospect of conviction.
