Iain henderson's interview with reporter Sian Griffiths is most illuminating;
"Iain Henderson, a slim, bearded former policeman, has one Christmas wish: that his wife will be released on bail to spend the day at home with her family," Griffith's story, dated 23 December, 2007, began.
""Clutching a mug of tea in the room that serves as the headquarters of the “campaign to free Keran Henderson”, Iain stares blankly for a moment at the photos of his smiling middle-aged wife pinned up on the wall. “That would be the greatest Christmas gift of all,” he says quietly, as friends and supporters bustle around," the story continued;
"It’s unlikely to happen, even though dozens of neighbours in the small Buckinghamshire village of Iver Heath have banded together to persuade the world that Keran’s conviction last month of the manslaughter of 11-month-old Maeve Sheppard is “a terrible miscarriage of justice”.
On this frosty morning, with yards of yellow ribbon fluttering from the telegraph poles, villagers sport T-shirts printed with “We care 4 Keran”, a slogan repeated on their website Carers 4 Carers, where thousands of pounds have been pledged to pay for a legal appeal. In and out they pop, hugging Iain, offering to talk to journalists, fielding phone calls.
Despite all these efforts, Keran, 43, is likely to spend Christmas Day in her cell at Bronzefield prison, west London. By a majority of 10-2, a jury at Reading crown court found that this devoted mother of two boys, a sought-after and experienced childminder, had shaken Maeve so violently one lunchtime that the baby died two days later of brain damage.
They rejected Keran’s own account - that, as she changed Maeve’s nappy, the baby had, without warning, gone floppy and stopped breathing. While the three other children she was looking after sat perched on the stairs, Keran gave the baby mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and phoned 999, a call recorded and later played in court.
In Reading last month Keran was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, and Iain will never forget his wife’s reaction as the jury's verdict was read to the court.
“I was so worried for her. I have never heard anyone make noises like that. I thought they’d have to call an ambulance. To be convicted of this most awful allegation, it rips your world apart,” says Iain, who resigned from his job as a police officer “in disgust” at what he insists is a case that should never have been brought.
Keran, villagers agree, was the last person you could imagine hurting a child. A pillar of the community and stay-at-home mother to Cameron, 14, and Jamie, 9, she ran the Beaver Scouts group and looked after elderly neighbours and young children alike. “The tsunami appeal, the poppy appeal, the earthquake appeal - you name it, Keran organised it,” Iain says.
“Our house was like the Waltons: there were always loads of children around. It was lovely.” Everyone agrees she was a natural with children, someone who never lost her temper.
In fact when the police came to arrest Keran in November 2005, months after Maeve’s death, Iain says it was him who got angry. “I was certainly not happy. She was calming me down,” he says. He lost it again at the trial: when the verdict came in, Iain yelled the names of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings at the jurors.
For Keran’s story is, her husband says, a tragedy on a par with the cases of Clark and Cannings, two mums wrongly imprisoned for killing their own children and freed on appeal. These two cases, which have been described as the worst miscarriages of British justice ever, swung, just like Keran’s, on the evidence of “expert” witnesses, doctors hired and paid to give their opinions in court.
In both Clark’s and Cannings’s cases the “expert” evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician whose testimony convicted both women, was later discredited. He told the jury in the Clark case that the chances of both Sally’s children dying naturally, of cot death, were 73m to one. The implication was that Sally must have murdered them. But the statistic turned out to be grotesquely wrong.
Meadow was a believer in SBS, or shaken baby syndrome. This controversial theory of abuse, one of several that pop up for unexplained injuries, was put forward for Maeve’s death too.
Doctors “have these three symptoms they look for”, says Iain, “and if they are there, they say it’s got to be SBS”. The telltale “markers” of the syndrome - which many medics dispute - include bleeding in the brain, haemorrhaging behind the eyes and a swollen brain.
When the markers are found, Iain argues, the task of the prosecution must be to come up with “a version of events to fit these three symptoms”. In this case the prosecution’s version was that Keran had lost her temper at Maeve for having a dirty nappy and shaken her violently.
“But there was no bruising, no scratches on her body at all, no grip marks, even,” Iain points out.
Anyway, he asks, whatever happened to common sense? “Some experts say SBS is caused by sustained shaking over 20 minutes. But you try picking up 11 bags of sugar and just holding that weight for 20 minutes, never mind shaking it vigorously,” Iain says. “My wife is a petite woman.”
And what about the other children present - none of whom was interviewed by the police? “You could hear them on the 999 tape; they were just sitting chatting. Wouldn’t they be shouting, more than a little scared, if the baby had been shaken so hard?”
Why, Iain asks, couldn’t Maeve’s death have been caused by a fit? After all, she was a sickly baby. In the five weeks Keran looked after her as a childminder - while her mother worked - Maeve was ill on three occasions.
On one, Iain, who now works as a fraud investigator, was upstairs when Maeve went floppy in Keran’s arms. Trained in first aid, he checked the baby’s airways and gave her a few drops of water. The couple called Maeve’s father and suggested he get the baby seen by a doctor. On another occasion the baby “projectile-vomited and was lying flat on the floor”.
Henderson thinks the jury were overwhelmed by having no fewer than a dozen experts wheeled in front of them by the prosecution, over seven long weeks. Keran’s lawyers fielded only one expert, Professor Philip Anslow, of the John Radcliffe hospital, in Oxford, where Maeve died. He said evidence pointed to Maeve dying after having a fit. Despite the fact that the experts disagreed and there was no external evidence of an assault, Keran was convicted.
As I wait in the campaign HQ, I am approached by parents who explain to me that children do get sick and die - and adults are not necessarily to blame. Alison, a friend of the Hendersons, tells me how she lost her own daughter at the age of two. “She had a virus - it attacked her brain. She woke in the middle of the night making noises; an hour later she was dead.”
As the campaign to free Keran gathers momentum there have been developments the villagers regard as encouraging. Two jurors - the foreman and a woman called Carol - have said publicly they have grave doubts about the verdict.
One of the experts who gave evidence for the prosecution, Waney Squier, a consultant neuropathologist, has told the newspapers there was “nothing to indicate” that Maeve died from SBS. Squier believes the baby had brain damage from a previous brain injury as well as more recent trauma. “I cannot say whether those injuries were accidental or inflicted . . . But there is nothing to indicate she was shaken,” she said.
In the face of mounting disquiet, it was reported last week that the attorney-general has promised to look at the case. An appeal is being mounted with the help of Bill Bache, the solicitor who organised Angela Cannings’s appeal.
Even if Keran is freed and her name cleared, Iain insists there are others whose cases need to be reinvestigated. As though he hasn’t got enough on his plate, he wants to start campaigning for Suzanne Holdsworth, of Hartlepool, sentenced to life in 2005 for murdering two-year-old Kyle Fisher by slamming his head into the banisters while minding him. Holdsworth, a mother of two, said Kyle suffered a fit. Her family want the case to be retried.
Critics of the justice system want expert witnesses - many of whom charge hundreds of pounds an hour for their services – to be regulated and cases never again to turn on their evidence alone, especially when the diagnoses of child abuse are controversial: as in cases of so-called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, salt poisoning, unexplained fractures and SBS.
Back in Iver Heath the fight to free Keran continues. But Henderson knows that it won’t end with her release. Sally Clark was freed but died soon afterward, of alcoholism and trauma. “I hope we have the strength to ensure the aftermath does not destroy our family,” he says.
The wife he fell in love with when they were both still at school is, he adds, “a star; she cared so much for the community. Now all the work has come back to her. The villagers have come back and said, we care for you too”.
But will it be enough to overturn what many believe is another scandalous legal injustice?""
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
