PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the watchdog for miscarriages of justice, has instructed its own forensic expert to begin a round of testing. The evidence this yields could yet prove Stone’s guilt. But it could also answer a nagging doubt that has lingered for nearly three decades: was Lin and Megan’s true killer caught?"
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "In alleged confession by Levi Bellfield, the serial killer who murdered the schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002, has added to concerns the wrong man may be in prison. In 2017 Bellfield said he was responsible for the Russell murders but later retracted the claim. Since then, he is said to have made a further detailed written confession after talking to prison psychologists."
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The CCRC has insisted Bellfield’s claims are not credible and he has made false confessions to other crimes using information in the public domain.
STORY: "Who killed Lin and Megan Russell? DNA advances may end doubt," by Special Correspondent Emily Dugan, published by The Sunday Times, on January 17, 2026. "Emily Dugan is special correspondent at The Sunday Times, focused on in-depth investigative journalism. She won crime and legal affairs journalist of the year at the British Journalism Awards for her work on the case of Andrew Malkinson, who was imprisoned for 17 years for a rape he did not commit. She was previously the newspaper’s social affairs correspondent, investigating babies taken into care over a single bruise; the death and violence behind a large supplier of avocados to Britain; and sexual harassment by the police. She has worked at The Guardian, BuzzFeed News and The Independent. She won the Paul Foot award for her investigations into failings in the justice system and has twice been shortlisted for news reporter of the year at the British Press Awards."
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SUB-HEADING: "Michael Stone was twice convicted of the 1996 murders but maintains his innocence. Now methods which cleared Andrew Malkinson may be used to retest the evidence."
SUB-HEADING: "A footpath through golden fields in rural Kent was the bucolic site of a murder that shocked the nation 30 years ago."
Lin Russell, 45, and her daughters Megan, six, and Josie, nine, were walking home after a swimming gala with their white terrier Lucy when they were dragged into a copse, tied up, bludgeoned and left for dead. Only Josie survived.
It took a year and a national television appeal for police to pinpoint a suspect, a man with a history of violence and drug addiction. Michael Stone was convicted of Lin and Megan’s murders, and the attempted murder of Josie, at a trial and subsequent retrial. No forensic evidence linked him to the crime and Stone has always insisted on his innocence.
Now the original evidence is to be re-examined in the hope that a forensic breakthrough will provide a definitive link to the murderer. The Sunday Times has seen a new case review by a forensic scientist that shows how advances in DNA testing may lead to fresh clues. The report also highlights key evidence that may never have been tested.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the watchdog for miscarriages of justice, has instructed its own forensic expert to begin a round of testing. The evidence this yields could yet prove Stone’s guilt. But it could also answer a nagging doubt that has lingered for nearly three decades: was Lin and Megan’s true killer caught?
Hammer attack
It was a warm July afternoon in 1996 when Lin walked her daughters from their school up a remote dirt track near Chillinden towards their cottage in the next village. Carrying swimming bags and lunch boxes, they were accosted in Cherry Garden Lane by a man with a hammer who had parked his car across the track to block their way.
Lin and her daughters were found that night in a woodland clearing less than half a mile from their house. All had catastrophic head injuries and were pronounced dead. It was only later that a police officer noticed Josie moving and she was taken to hospital.
The crime scene was scattered with objects, offering potential clues to the killer’s identity, but after extensive forensic work no useful leads materialised.
New investigator
Almost 30 years on, an 18-page analysis of the case by Angela Gallop, a forensic scientist, highlights missed opportunities in the original investigation and promises the chance to find answers offered by advances in science.
Gallop, who is credited with helping to solve the Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence cases, was commissioned by the barrister Mark McDonald, Stone’s lawyer for the past 22 years. McDonald is also representing Lucy Letby, who is challenging her conviction for the murder of seven babies in her care as a nurse.
McDonald instructed Gallop to create a forensic strategy because the CCRC had failed to make its own, despite pledging to do so two years ago. The CCRC, the only body with the power to send cases back to the Court of Appeal, first rejected the case in 2010 but has kept open an application made in 2017.
The CCRC was sent Gallop’s report last year and has since appointed its own forensic investigator, at the laboratory Eurofins, who is understood to have begun work. Among the exhibits Gallop believes could offer clues are fingernail scrapings from Lin’s left hand, which she said the files showed were “apparently never tested”.
Confession claim withdrawn
In the original investigation the police had struggled to identify a suspect. The public resilience shown by Josie and her father Shaun Russell, a botanist, added to the pressure.
On the first anniversary of the murders, an e-fit of a suspect was broadcast as part of an appeal on BBC’s Crimewatch. It was put together with help from a witness who had seen the face of an angry-looking driver in the car’s wing mirror near the scene. The following day, a psychiatrist treating Stone said he thought there was a resemblance and put forward Stone’s name.
Stone, who was 37 at the time, was a heroin user who had once attacked a man with a hammer and had previous convictions for violence. When interviewed, Stone had no alibi and said he could not remember what he had been doing a year earlier. A receipt showed he was at a branch of Cash Converters in Chatham, more than 40 miles away, around four hours earlier. But the prosecution argued that he could have driven there in that time. Josie, who regained her ability to speak nine months after the attack, was not able to pick him out of an identity parade.
In the end, Stone’s fate was sealed when fellow inmates claimed he had confessed. However, within 24 hours of Stone’s first conviction, in 1998, a key witness gave an interview saying he had made it all up.
Stone’s case was sent for retrial in 2001. This time, only one prisoner testified. Damien Daley was on remand in a neighbouring cell in the segregation unit at HMP Canterbury and claimed to have heard a confession from Stone through a heating pipe. Stone had asked to be put in segregation to protect him from false reports of a confession from fellow prisoners. His defence said it was ludicrous to suggest he would then, only hours later, confess to the man in the next cell.
At both trials, the jury returned a majority verdict of guilty by ten to two. Daley was later convicted of murder but a further appeal by Stone on the basis of Daley’s “unreliable” evidence failed in 2005.
Stone’s sister, Barbara Stone, recalled that Kent police initially put “so much emphasis” on the possibility that DNA testing would solve the case. “Every day, the police told me they were waiting for this DNA to come back and that would prove whether he did it or whether he didn’t do it. They were so dead-set that that was going to be the case,” she said. “And then I started to think, ‘Well, where is it?’ Then the cell confession came and then we were told that the DNA didn’t match. I thought, ‘This is really getting dodgy’.”
The CCRC previously dismissed the possibility of further forensic work yielding results in the case but changed its position in 2023 after the exoneration of Andrew Malkinson. Retesting using DNA-17, an advanced technique that identifies 16 specific DNA regions plus a gender marker, led to Malkinson’s conviction being overturned after he had served 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. DNA-17 can isolate male and female DNA and obtain results when only trace amounts are present.
Hundreds of cases are being revisited by the CCRC because of Malkinson’s eventual exoneration. Gallop’s report identified a number of pieces of evidence that could be retested in the Russell murders.
Bootlace stained with blood
A bootlace found along the edge of Cherry Garden Lane, 45m from the entrance to the crime scene, appeared to offer the most hope of identifying the killer. It was stained with the victims’ blood and police believed it was used to strangle Megan. It was knotted and 99cm long, which led police to believe it was carried by the murderer as a tourniquet applied to find a vein for the injection of heroin.
Extensive testing of 75 areas originally found traces of male DNA. This did not match Stone and there was not enough to search police databases. There was also the possibility the bootlace had been contaminated by forensic staff.
Stone’s legal team has wanted it retested because it is likely to have been extensively handled by the killer. But when the CCRC tried to get hold of it in 2010, Kent police found only an empty envelope. They claimed the bootlace had been tested to destruction.
Yet in 2020 the lace reappeared and it can now be retested.
The missing lunchbox
One of the first people to examine the murder scene was Jim Fraser, a forensic scientist then working for Kent police. He and Gallop believe a fingerprint found on one of the girls’ lunchboxes could yield answers through modern testing.
The sisters had zipped lunchbags with plastic lunchboxes inside. Josie told police the attacker had asked her mother for money and described him going through their lunchboxes.
When Fraser arrived at the scene, the lunchbags were zipped up. A fingerprint in blood was found on one of the plastic lids inside. That led investigators to think the mark was probably left by the killer searching through them, but there was no match to Stone.
But there is a stumbling block to further testing: nobody is sure where the lunchbox is. It could not be found in preparations for the original trial and a report had to be made by the defence on the basis of a photograph.
Fraser thinks the conviction of Stone has many of the marks of a potential miscarriage of justice. “It’s a case that sits on a knife edge and it would be amazing if it could be resolved,” he said. “Whether Stone did it or not, he has been convicted on the slimmest evidence imaginable.”
Hair found on shoes
A pair of red plastic jelly shoes belonging to Josie may also offer clues. Crime-scene evidence suggests they could have been held by the killer and Gallop believes sampling the previously untested backs of the heels and retesting a swab may produce a DNA match.
There are other items the offender is also likely to have touched that can now be sampled, including the ankles of Lin’s trousers, where there are signs she may have been grabbed, and the handle of a string bag found in a hedge with blood-stained strips of torn-up swimming towel used to restrain the victims. Hairs were found at the scene, including on one of the jelly shoes. These could not have come from the victims and did not match Stone’s.
Gallop also proposed testing of items that were “dealt with in a very limited way initially”, such as areas on clothing where saliva was detected and upper parts of the victims’ clothing where they might have been held down.
Unlocking more clues
Samples taken from the body of Lucy, the family dog, do not appear to have been tested for human DNA. Gallop said the case files suggested swabs taken from the back of the dog and its teeth could offer clues.
Gallop is optimistic about the potential for modern forensic work to unlock more clues. She wrote: “[Reflecting on] everything we have learned from successful reinvestigations of past cases, and latest versions of new techniques now available … we believe [there is] scientific work that could reasonably be done in an attempt to reveal physical traces that had been left behind by the offender on the victims and/or at the crime scene, and which therefore could be used to definitively identify him.”
The hammer police believe was the key murder weapon was never found. But sticks and other objects used by the killer could have traces of his DNA on them. A shoelace used around Lin’s wrist and a pair of Josie’s tights used to tie the family to a tree would have been extensively handled. Gallop wrote in her report that a technique developed since the murders, called Y-STR and which identifies DNA in the Y chromosome, might be useful “because they can detect a male DNA profile even in the presence of excess female DNA”.
Sticks with bloodstain patterns suggesting they were used as weapons could also be tested, focusing on the areas where they were likely to have been held.
‘It wasn’t me, your honour!’
An alleged confession by Levi Bellfield, the serial killer who murdered the schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002, has added to concerns the wrong man may be in prison. In 2017 Bellfield said he was responsible for the Russell murders but later retracted the claim. Since then, he is said to have made a further detailed written confession after talking to prison psychologists.
The CCRC has insisted Bellfield’s claims are not credible and he has made false confessions to other crimes using information in the public domain.
For Josie, who now lives quietly in rural Wales working as a textile artist, and Shaun Russell, a new look at the case is likely to be unwelcome. They did not want to comment.
But for Fraser it brings a step closer the definitive answer. “It’s a hugely controversial case and if Stone didn’t do that and he’s been in prison all this time, it’s wrong, it’s really badly wrong,” he said. “So anything that can be done that can demonstrate that Stone was involved, or that Stone wasn’t involved, I support that.”
At the moment of his first conviction, Stone shouted: “It wasn’t me your honour! I didn’t do it!” Now in HMP Frankland, Co Durham, having served three life sentences, he has not wavered from this position, even though it means he will not be granted parole.
McDonald, his lawyer, said: “One of the reasons why I think Stone is innocent is he’s on the phone to me every day saying, ‘Try testing this, try testing that’. Someone who thinks their DNA might be there doesn’t keep banging on about testing things.”
A CCRC spokesperson said: “A review into this application is ongoing. We are exploring all of the possibilities the application raises to determine whether Mr Stone may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.
“Our test for referring a case is that there is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal would overturn his conviction, a test which was not met in any of the earlier applications.
“It would be inappropriate for us to discuss the case or make any further comment while the application is being reviewed.”
Kent police said: “We have supported the Criminal Cases Review Commission by providing all the relevant information required throughout its ongoing review of Stone’s conviction and will continue to do so.""
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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