Downing 'is still a suspect in Bakewell murder case'

Stephen Downing, whose 27-year jail sentence for the murder of a woman in a Bakewell cemetery was overturned by the Court of Appeal has said he is angry and disappointed that the police cannot rule him out as a suspect.

Derbyshire Police Deputy Chief Constable, Bob Wood, said that – despite a lengthy reinvestigation – they had not been able to eliminate Mr Downing, 46, from the inquiry into the 1973 murder of legal secretary Wendy Sewell - which became known as the "Bakewell Tart" murder.

Police said Mr Downing – released in January last year – refused to be interviewed during the six-month reinvestigation. Officers wanted to question him about three confessions he is alleged to have made since his release from prison, including one recorded on audio tape.

Mr Downing protested his innocence yesterday. "I am disappointed but not surprised really at the outcome because I was never really sure what could materialise after 30 years," he said. I'm a innocent man, no matter who says what – my only crime was being aged 17 and being in the wrong place at the wrong time," he added.

His supporters insist that the three alleged confessions were as unreliable as his original admission to the sexual assault and murder of Mrs Sewell, made when he had a mental age of 11.

But Derbyshire Police held more store by it in their reinvestigation report, which also questioned the methods of Don Hale, the campaigning former editor of the Matlock Mercury who was awarded the OBE for his work to secure Mr Downing's release.

At the time of the murder, Mr Downing was a groundsman at the cemetery and claimed he found Mrs Sewell's part-naked body covered in blood. She had been bludgeoned to death with a pickaxe. He was arrested and interviewed for eight hours before he admitted attacking and sexually assaulting her.

From the beginning of the reinvestigation, launched in April 2002 after the Court of Appeal quashed Mr Downing's conviction, Derbyshire Police's Chief Constable had insisted there was no evidence to implicate any new suspects.

The inquiry, overseen by an independent advisory committee, including a retired senior detective and barrister, eliminated 22 suspects but, according to Mr Wood yesterday, they had "not been able to eliminate'' Mr Downing.

New claims levelled against him include the alleged detection of further traces of Mrs Sewell's blood on his clothes.

Examination of the pattern of blood by Kent Police's forensics team: "Supports the assertions that Stephen Downing battered Mrs Sewell prior to handling and kneeling by her body,'' the report found. Mr Downing has always claimed the victim bloodstained his clothes as he knelt to help her.

Derbyshire police delivered a thinly-veiled attack on Mr Hale after their report was published. The reinvestigation team asserted a number of witnesses quoted by Mr Hale claimed never to have spoken to him and that their version of events did not tally with the one he delivered in his book on the Downing case, A Town without Pity.

Mrs Sewell's widower David called on Derbyshire police to prosecute Mr Hale for perverting the course of justice – although that is unlikely.

Mr Hale hit back claiming he was being "shot, here, as the messenger.'' Speaking outside his his home in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, Mr Hale said: "I have interviewed over 100 people during the course of this work and I can't remember now who said what when, or where. The biggest barrier here is the passage of time.''

Mr Hale must have found little succour from his old newspaper, though. The front page of yesterday's Mercury declared there were: "Anomalies found in the book " and "gaping holes in Don Hale's case''.