Published On: Sun, Aug 14th, 2022

Julia Ghost: A defence for Callum Wheeler, no bar qualification required (Part Two)

Evidently there are no witnesses who could place Callum Wheeler at or on an approach to Ackholt Wood on the day and before Julia James was murdered there. The sighting by dog walkers of “a person walking down footpath near the woods” at a time between 1.30pm and 1.55pm obviously can’t with certainty be called one of Callum Wheeler. In fact, Wheeler’s defence team should have leapt on it to show that there was another candidate in the area who could have been the murderer. It was not the only time that Wheeler’s pitiable legal representation would not do this, and in a moment, the author is going to express his utter disbelief that they did not seize another more substantial piece of the prosecution evidence and throw it on its back judo style.

The piece of evidence in question is centrally important because it is the only reliable proof that Wheeler was in the countryside around Aylesham and its nearby neighbour Snowdown – respectively, the places where he and James lived – on the day the crime took place, and in anticipation of the crime. CCTV footage (Fig. 4) shows Wheeler walking along Ratling Road, so called because it is the route to another settlement of name as indicated. The big surprise, however, is that Wheeler is seen to be heading towards Ratling and away from Aylesham, and therefore away from Ackholt Wood. This is clear to see using the map supplied below (Fig. 9). The camera shooting the footage is located on the walls of the Aylesham and District Social Club, which is on the south side of the road. Wheeler, with the wall and fence lining the railway bridge at his back, is travelling north and east.

The prosecution at Wheeler’s trial said police had walked the route from the location shown in the footage to scene of the crime, Ackholt Wood, and it took between half an hour and 40 minutes. In support of this, Google Maps shows that it takes 23-26 minutes to walk from the same location to Spinney Lane (which is the road that is separated from Ackholt Wood to the north by a field) and where a path appears to cut south to the wood. Estimating another 10 minutes to travel along this path and reach the southerly side of the trees (where the murder took place), this would indeed indicate that Callum Wheeler, setting off at 1.08pm could have walked for 30-40 minutes to arrive at 2pm (as the case against him reckons) in order to set an ambush for an unsuspecting victim. The problem is, of course, that Wheeler was travelling in the wrong direction to do this.

It is with great interest that we should note that there appears to be no footage of Wheeler returning back the other way past the said hostelry – this is assuming that he would be returning to his home that day. In fact, if one is to accept the prosecution’s evidence that there were sightings of him along Spinney Lane after 3pm (of which there will be further discussion in a moment), then this means that he must have returned from the vicinity of Ratling. There are three possible explanations for the apparent said absence of CCTV: i) someone gave Wheeler a lift in a car so that he couldn’t be seen walking past the Social Club; ii) Wheeler walked a different way back, perhaps using footpaths to cut to one of the roads to the south; iii) Wheeler walked back past the Social Club, but it was at a time too late to be at Ackholt Wood in order to ambush Julia James, and so this footage didn’t see the light of day.

Given that there’s no need to complicate this matter, the second option is the one that is going to be worked with. Besides which, it fits the best with the trial prosecution’s portrayal of Wheeler as a man without contacts and as a roamer of the countryside. It means, however, that there is extra time to add to the duration of Wheeler’s journey. Indeed, this would be an undetermined period that Wheeler would not have given detail about, given that he did not cooperate with the police investigation. Therefore, at the very least, it should not have been an agreed fact at Wheeler’s trial that he had been at Ackholt Wood at 2pm. Indeed, the prosecution should not have been able to assert that Wheeler was present in time to commit the murder.

Moreover, although the evidence aggregated in the following extract was used by the prosecution to suggest that Wheeler left Ackholt Wood to gain Spinney Road after the murder, it actually quite easily supports the defence of Wheeler’s looping back through the countryside to Aylesham:

Wheeler was captured on a Stagecoach bus [camera?] walking along Spinney Lane at 3.04pm and then seen at 3.15pm by motorist Janice Devereux as he walked along the same road carrying a bag.

A lorry driver also spotted Wheeler walking towards Adisham Road at 3.18pm, still with the bag and the protruding railway jack.

David Gillie, who was one of those who found the PCSO’s body, had been driving along Spinney Lane at 3.10pm when he saw Wheeler walking towards him.

He was later seen heading back to the road where he lived at 3.45pm.

According to the information, Wheeler was using Spinney Lane to get home, and travelling in a westerly direction (towards Adisham Road) – indicating that he had come to it from the east. Apparently, nobody, on what looks like a reasonably, relatively busy road, saw Wheeler cutting north across the field from Ackholt Wood – all saw him travelling the road. Google Maps suggests that it takes 21 minutes to walk the entire length of Spinney Lane, and evidently Wheeler was seen in such a way as to indicate he travelled it for at least 14 minutes (suggesting, as appears to be confirmed by other data, that his intention was to gain the Adisham Road for a homeward route). It begs the question, is this the behaviour of someone fleeing the scene of a crime? Because what is really strange about this whole story is how careful Wheeler must have been, according to the official narrative, to make sure that he was relatively undetected ahead of the murder, but then couldn’t give a toss about being glaringly obvious afterwards. The explanation by which the inconsistency can be dispelled is that Wheeler was wholly unconnected to the murder so as to be unaware that he should not incriminate himself. This is not to mention that he wouldn’t have been seen in the vicinity of Ackholt Wood before the murder precisely because he was, at that time, out east in the deep sticks of Kent countryside.

Of course, were Wheeler’s trial not one of the show variety, it would be extremely difficult to fathom why any of this cause for doubt did not feature in a defence. The very basic thing that could have been said in Wheeler’s defence is that the evidence does not support an argument that Wheeler was in the countryside that day to specifically target a dogwalker at Ackholt Wood – and this is exactly what the prosecution not only implied when it claimed that James and her husband had seen Wheeler, a “really weird dude”, in the same spot two months before the attack, but also explicitly stated as being his intention: “He waited for Julia James or another vulnerable female to be in those woods. Waited to ambush her.” If Wheeler was fixated with bringing an evil plan to culmination at Ackholt Wood, his being nearly a mile and a half distant, and travelling yet further away, was an incredibly odd way of showing it.

The complete raft of CCTV evidence included two very grainy, bad quality films (with the second being worse than the first) that showed a figure in the distance said to be Wheeler both leaving the proximity of his home, and then returning to it, on the day of the murder. The timings are given in Fig. 1 and Fig. 5, but this is as asserted by the people who brought the case against Wheeler, because there are no timestamps on the material. The location appears to be the hedged boundary of the estate that Wheeler lives on. Referring to the map (Fig. 9), this would be in the vicinity of the area annotated with “Arctic Freeze Refrigeration”. As the reader can see, a gap in a hedge at this location would put Wheeler on a path whereby he could continue on a route to obtain the Ratling Road. The timing, given as 12.37pm, is reasonable if  Wheeler is to be captured on film at 1.08pm at the Social Club.

While it is true that the figure looks to be wearing a complete outfit of black (as Wheeler did the day after the murder, see Figs. 7 and 8) and while it could be argued that this film doesn’t show Wheeler on the 27th April, the day of the murder, it is actually in the interest of a defence to accept that it does and that the loss of colour is down to bad quality. The reason for this is because this evidence presents a fact that the prosecution doesn’t account for, and can’t because it damages its case. Wheeler appears to be carrying a pole (possible entirely wrapped) that could be as long as he is tall to his shoulders. This puts the hypothesis that Wheeler went out strictly to commit murder further into a state of crisis, because it presents another reason for Wheeler’s being out of the house – to dispose of this elongated object. That it had been discarded by the time Wheeler reached the Social Club is the explanation for why it isn’t seen in the footage recorded there.

Furthermore, in the footage of Wheeler’s return (which indicates that he walked along Adisham Road to arrive again at the point of his departure), it is very hard to see the white protuberance from his holdall as seen in the Social Club footage. Fig. 5, actually shows the highlight on the bush behind the figure rather than anything being carried, and Fig. 6 shows the figure silhouetted against a stark white background with no indication of a stalk that might represent the unwrapped portion of a metal rod.

Perhaps, then, here is evidence of Wheeler also having discarded the object he had been carrying in his holdall. More certainty could be had about this if it could be clearly seen that this object was not the same as the one Wheeler was observed with on the day after the murder – or to come at it differently, if the prosecution couldn’t prove that this was the same object (and it didn’t even try to do this, instead merely relying on an assumption), then there was every possibility that it wasn’t. For it seems that Wheeler appears to have been interested in picking up bits of junk, and then growing tired of them so that he didn’t want them any longer – sometimes even after taking them home. The reader should note that there appears to be a scrap yard in the vicinity of Ratling, and it seems to the author that if the prosecution at the trial could direct the jury to suppose, rather than explain to it, how certain bits of evidence were generated (as it shall be shown), then the defence could equally direct the jury to suppose that Wheeler was out on the 27th April to serve his peculiar penchant for discovering rubbish (he is now in Broadmoor, after all).

More evidence, not in favour of Wheeler as murderer, but Wheeler as Stig of the Dump is the account that has him with a very different permutations of articles on the day prior to the murder:

At around 3.30pm on Apr 26 – a day before Julia James was killed – a witness called Neil McMahon saw a man walking along Spinney Lane near the woods.

Alison Morgan QC said: “He was walking on the narrow verge at the edge of the road.

“He appeared to be carrying a golf bag over his shoulder. It was noticeably long in its dimensions and there was a bright red object poking out of one end.”

Ultimately, of course, this scavenging would be how he came to find the murder weapon after it had been used to kill Julia James – and this is to be covered in the next part of this series.

Fig. 1

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Source

Fig. 9

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