What it’s like to cover a murder trial as a reporter

Reporting on the Russell Bishop trial, much of the time my whole focus was on getting a good shorthand note of what was said in court, trying to shape it into copy that made sense, trying to tease out the best ‘line’ from that day’s evidence

Russell Bishop was already passing into newsroom folklore by the time I first heard his name. It was 1995. I was a trainee on my first local newspaper, the Brighton Argus.

Bishop was spoken about as something awful that happened nearly a decade ago: two girls dead and the paedophile who killed them never locked up; grieving parents with not even a successful conviction to help numb the pain; a seven-year-old girl subjected to a horrific attack in 1990 because no one could nail him at trial in 1987; a police force battling to defend itself from all those who, the moment Bishop walked free from court, became very wise after the event.

In Brighton, Bishop was the bogeyman – the warning that parents gave to their children: “Don’t be late coming home, or Russell Bishop will get you.”

And then, in October 2018, the bogeyman became real: a flesh and blood man behind a glass screen in the dock of an Old Bailey courtroom.

Some bogeyman. Even after 32 years, you could still see what he had been when he killed Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in 1986. “The runt of the litter” was how he was described by one of the Old Bailey regulars, a reporter who had seen more trials and more defendants than I ever will.

Here was a man so pathetic he felt threatened by the mild cheekiness of children: an insult hurled at his girlfriend by Nicola in 1986; something he thought he heard the seven-year-old say as he tried and failed to fix his car in 1990.

I would like to say that my every waking thought was directed towards seeing justice for Karen and Nicola and for their surviving parents – Karen’s father Lee having died of what was fairly described as “a broken heart” in 1998. That, though, would be lying cant.

Much of the time, your whole focus was on the job: getting a good shorthand note of what was said in court, trying to shape it into copy that made sense, trying to tease out the best “line” from that day’s evidence.

For me, the trial was also a trip down memory lane. I was sharing a press bench with a man who had tried to train me at journalism college. And when I went down to Brighton, I found myself sharing a pint over an open notebook with the man who had mentored my old tutor when he was a mere strip of a work experience lad.

These were reporters of the old school: long accustomed to knocking on doors where a warm welcome was far from guaranteed, earning the trust of coppers to the point of being given the freedom to roam almost at will through Brighton nick (in the days before press officers ruled the world).

They were world-weary – brilliantly so – and wise. They gave you renewed hope that the very, very best reporters can be those who retain both their wit and their humanity. Not the shout-through-the-letterbox moron of TV drama stereotype; not the phone-hacking cheats of recent scandal; not the kind of bullshitting chancer whose craftily overspun stories infuriate when you have to follow them up.

Moulsecoomb, the estate where the girls had lived and played, was also trip down memory lane, but a confusing one.

Expecting the rusting cars and front gardens full of discarded washing machines of fond memory, the first resident I found was an impeccably polite university student speaking perfect private school English. The old-timers regarded the influx of middle-class students not as an improvement but as a dilution of “community spirit”.

The main stage, though, was of course the Old Bailey, a legendary venue where the greatest villains, and miscarriage of justice victims, have played starring roles.

The comparisons with the theatre are impossible to avoid. Critical opinions would be passed among the hacks.

Joel Bennathan QC, defending Bishop against overwhelming odds, won universally favourable reviews. At times you found yourself almost believing him. You certainly knew who you’d want defending you if you ever found yourself in the dock.

That may sound flippant, but if you take away Bennathan’s defending of “monsters”, and if you do away with the ritualised combat of trial by law, you might get the flip side of “community spirit”: the kind of trial by gossip that in 1986 led to Nicola’s father Barrie having his Moulsecoomb house daubed with graffiti accusing him (entirely wrongly) of having killed his own daughter.

Among the habitues of the Bailey, the journalists who knew all its corners, even how to find the fabled pool table that I’m told lies hidden somewhere in its subterranean bowels, there was a healthy respect for the more formal kind of law.

It found its expression in a written submission persuading the judge of the merits of avoiding formal reporting restrictions, in a quizzical eyebrow raised at the prosecution’s strange lack of desire for a Lucas ruling. (They did try to explain to me what it was.)

In the midst of all this critical examination and frantic copy filing, it was easy to overlook the figures waiting in the wings.

But they were there, Karen’s bereaved mother Michelle almost literally so, a constant presence sitting beside the edge of the dock housing Bishop – until he decided to sulk in his prison cell rather than face the fact he was losing.

And at last, in the final scene, they moved centre stage.

At sentencing, via their victim impact statements, we got the big reveal, the trail of horror and misery that Bishop had left in his wake: a father who died heartbroken before he could see his daughter’s killer brought to justice; Barrie Fellows forced both to identify his dead girl on a mortuary slab, and to face 32 years of unfounded accusations that he had killed her; Nicola’s big brother Jonathan, living in despair that he hadn’t been able to protect his little sister, dying aged 46 a month before Bishop’s trial began.

To those victims you have to add the seven-year-old girl he attacked and then, in order to reduce his jail time, sought to pester for a statement to the effect that he hadn’t tried to kill her.

There was the 13-year-old girl he tried to groom, in crude, innuendo-laden letters, written from prison, in 1987, as he waited to go on trial for murdering Karen and Nicola.

There was also his teenage lover Marion Stevenson, who was 16 when she became involved with Bishop in 1986. Her “first love” was a child murderer. It was impossible not to feel sympathy as she sobbed in the dock.

“Everyone used me,” she said. “Russell’s family, the police, everyone.”

The ripples of damage caused by Bishop killing Karen and Nicola probably spread much further than I will ever know.

I do, of course, like to think of myself as level-headed and liberal, not given to joining lynch mobs, rather deploring them actually.

I like to think I can rise above the barbarism of calls to bring back hanging.

I also like to think that Bishop will rot away the rest of his life in a prison cell. Partly that’s because his toxic mix of anger, inadequacy and sexual perversion make him a permanent danger to children.

Mainly, though, it’s because he deserves it.

Yours,

Adam Lusher

Reporter