anything very bad had happened, I pulled over. You can imagine my surprise when two police officers accused me of speeding and failing to stop; I was handcuffed, arrested and taken to Willesden Green where to my greater horror I found myself being interviewed about a rape. A man ‘answering my description’ and driving my car – the victim remembered the marque and half the registration number – had picked a woman up at a service station on the A414 and then raped her at knifepoint in nearby Greenwood Park.
There was no doubt my car had been involved; some of the victim’s hairs were found on the headrest, her knickers were in the glove box, and there was other circumstantial evidence, too. Her blood and my fingerprints were on the knife, of course; and in the same glove box as the victim’s knickers the police found a packet of condoms I’d bought at a garage in Shenley. The receipt was still in the ashtray. The sales assistant at the garage remembered me buying them because he’d seen me on MOTD mouthing off about some stupid incident in a match against Tottenham. More of that in a moment. Anyway, there were two condoms missing from the packet. The rapist had used one on his victim; I’d put another in my wallet when I’d gone to visit Karen, but I wasn’t about to tell the police this because I was still hoping to spare her and, more importantly, her husband. I figured the last thing he needed was his wife providing me with an adulterous alibi while the poor bastard was having chemo. Mistake number five.
The victim – Helen Fehmiu, who was Turkish – wasn’t at all sure that it was me who’d raped her, however. Her attacker had punched her several times in the face, so hard she had a detached retina, but she thought he was perhaps black or ‘a bit foreign-looking’ which was good coming from her, quite frankly. She was darker than I am. Helpfully the police arranged for Mrs Fehmiu to see my picture on the back pages of the newspapers, where I’d been apologising for my conduct after the Tottenham match. One of their players took a dive when I tackled him and the ref awarded a very dubious penalty that resulted in me shouting in his face, which earned me a well-deserved red card. Arsenal versus Tottenham is always a highly emotional fixture, to put it mildly.
Anyway, Mrs Fehmiu thought it might have been me who’d raped her, and what with that and the forensics in my car the cops then interviewed me for sixteen hours, at the end of which they typed up a transcript that bore absolutely no relation to what I had said on the tape. In the typewritten transcript I admitted more or less everything; I even admitted ‘doing an O.J.’ and trying to shake off a police car that was in pursuit of my vehicle. In short they verballed me, confident that the quality of the recording made of the interview was so poor that the jury wouldn’t be able to make out what was said, which proved to be the case. Indeed, the jury was so persuaded by the police transcript that it managed to hear me saying things on the tape that were never even there to hear. Weird but true.
Meanwhile it transpired that the police had managed to ‘lose’ the only piece of evidence that was vital to my defence: a used condom that was found in Greenwood Park on the day of the rape and in the spot where the victim said she’d been attacked. That condom would easily have cleared me.
The newspapers were involved, of course, and before I came to trial the tabloids did their bit for English justice; having already concluded that I was ‘a monster’, and ‘revealing’ that my nickname at Highbury was Norman Bates on account of my psycho-like personality on the park (which was a blatant lie), they managed to rake up the fact that I was already technically a rapist. As usual it wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t say. They managed to find an ex-girlfriend in Northampton with whom I’d had sex a few days before her sixteenth
There was no doubt my car had been involved; some of the victim’s hairs were found on the headrest, her knickers were in the glove box, and there was other circumstantial evidence, too. Her blood and my fingerprints were on the knife, of course; and in the same glove box as the victim’s knickers the police found a packet of condoms I’d bought at a garage in Shenley. The receipt was still in the ashtray. The sales assistant at the garage remembered me buying them because he’d seen me on MOTD mouthing off about some stupid incident in a match against Tottenham. More of that in a moment. Anyway, there were two condoms missing from the packet. The rapist had used one on his victim; I’d put another in my wallet when I’d gone to visit Karen, but I wasn’t about to tell the police this because I was still hoping to spare her and, more importantly, her husband. I figured the last thing he needed was his wife providing me with an adulterous alibi while the poor bastard was having chemo. Mistake number five.
The victim – Helen Fehmiu, who was Turkish – wasn’t at all sure that it was me who’d raped her, however. Her attacker had punched her several times in the face, so hard she had a detached retina, but she thought he was perhaps black or ‘a bit foreign-looking’ which was good coming from her, quite frankly. She was darker than I am. Helpfully the police arranged for Mrs Fehmiu to see my picture on the back pages of the newspapers, where I’d been apologising for my conduct after the Tottenham match. One of their players took a dive when I tackled him and the ref awarded a very dubious penalty that resulted in me shouting in his face, which earned me a well-deserved red card. Arsenal versus Tottenham is always a highly emotional fixture, to put it mildly.
Anyway, Mrs Fehmiu thought it might have been me who’d raped her, and what with that and the forensics in my car the cops then interviewed me for sixteen hours, at the end of which they typed up a transcript that bore absolutely no relation to what I had said on the tape. In the typewritten transcript I admitted more or less everything; I even admitted ‘doing an O.J.’ and trying to shake off a police car that was in pursuit of my vehicle. In short they verballed me, confident that the quality of the recording made of the interview was so poor that the jury wouldn’t be able to make out what was said, which proved to be the case. Indeed, the jury was so persuaded by the police transcript that it managed to hear me saying things on the tape that were never even there to hear. Weird but true.
Meanwhile it transpired that the police had managed to ‘lose’ the only piece of evidence that was vital to my defence: a used condom that was found in Greenwood Park on the day of the rape and in the spot where the victim said she’d been attacked. That condom would easily have cleared me.
The newspapers were involved, of course, and before I came to trial the tabloids did their bit for English justice; having already concluded that I was ‘a monster’, and ‘revealing’ that my nickname at Highbury was Norman Bates on account of my psycho-like personality on the park (which was a blatant lie), they managed to rake up the fact that I was already technically a rapist. As usual it wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t say. They managed to find an ex-girlfriend in Northampton with whom I’d had sex a few days before her sixteenth
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