The Krypteia and the “Golf Club Murder”: The elusive conviction of Rachel Manning’s killer
It took four trials to achieve a conviction of a suspect in the Rachel Manning murder case. From a perspective that accepts the possibility of State Crime (with always the same motive, as explained below), this has all the appearance of being an awful amount of Police Cover-up. It certainly attests to desperation to pin the crime on an innocent man when Barri White was re-tried, even after the quashing of a first miscarriage of justice and after he had already suffered maximum insult by being imprisoned for a number of years. In a development that must have been unsurprising except only to those determined to imprison him, White was found not guilty in the second effort to make him serve a life sentence.
When the crime could not be pinned on Barri White, a man by the name of Shahidul Ahmed took the rap for it. At his first trial, the jury could not return a verdict. Needless to say, the conviction, when it was finally achieved in what would be the fourth trial of the case, was not sound. Nevertheless, there was and is no journalistic interest in Ahmed’s plight as there was for White’s when investigators from the BBC organised forensic research that put a wrecking ball through the Crown’s case against their patsy. The same kind of demolition of the evidence by which Ahmed was convicted could be done again, except that it appears that everyone is willing to accept that he did it. Ahmed, you see, is held up as the ultimate proof that White did not kill Manning. There is, it seems, no appetite to now disturb the status quo, which is surprising in a case which has a history so replete from beginning to end with dishonest justice system officialdom. A thinking person cannot help but wonder what goes on.
Moreover, a person who can contemplate the reality of crimes of the Krypteia (committed, in theory, by UK military/military intelligence personnel in the first instance to acclimatise the operatives to, or keep them practised in killing, and then also used, after much publicity, to traumatise the public and make them fearful of the prospect of serious crime) will take note of the great struggle over the course of a whole decade, with its bull-headed, blinded-by-intent rejection of the clear innocence of White, and its determination not to be deterred by an unconvinced jury adjudicating on the guilt of Ahmed, to put someone – anyone – in jail, and see it as a monumental work of cover-up and effort to close the case so that there could be no chance, however infinitesimal it could ever be, that anyone would come looking for the real killer.
The case is very significant because it absolutely does demonstrate that the State really does try to pin crimes on people that it knows didn’t do them. So often at this site has it been concluded that the person found guilty of a murder or a terror attack, or merely accused of one and denied the opportunity of a trial by having been killed in the act of the crime, is a patsy, after the conviction of which investigators don’t have to deal with what remains an unsolved case. In this particular case, the man that was supposed to be made culprit, and who the authorities tried extremely hard against to do it, was revealed to be that fall guy. As such, what this case amounts to is a halfway demonstration that the hypothesis of murder by Krypteia is true, especially because of the trying extremely hard by obviously corrupted security, legal and “law enforcement” officials to pin the crime on a second individual which was equally as full of holes in the evidence as was the determined effort against the first.
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Rachel Manning was apparently waiting for a lift early on a December (2000) Sunday morning after a night out in Milton Keynes. She was expecting to be picked up by her boyfriend, Barri White, and his friend, Keith Hyatt, driving the latter’s van. When they arrived at the place they had arranged to meet her – on a Milton Keynes street outside a Blockbusters video rental shop – she wasn’t there.
What had happened, said the prosecution, is that Ahmed, from Bletchley, had turned up in a car posing as the driver of a taxi. After offering her his “services”, and after Manning had got in the car, Ahmed proceeded to attempt to molest her. His assault was resisted, and so this prompted Ahmed to strangle the 19-year-old. This was done with a “soft ligature”, although no further detail about this can be found (suggesting that this weapon was never recovered). Ahmed then drove the body to a stretch of road passing through the exclusive Woburn golf club course, and after removing her from his car, hit her with a steering wheel lock and dumped her in some deep undergrowth. Manning was described as having suffered “extensive injuries to the left side of her face” by being battered. The lock was discarded 500m away from the site of the body, and carried traces of Manning’s blood.
It should be said that some of this narrative might possibly be residual from when Barri White had been accused of Manning’s murder. We find so often that a feature of a wilfully incorrect conviction is a not-quite-up-to-scratch team of defence lawyers, and Ahmed’s showed signs of being such. They made the mistake on insisting, even after the quashing of his sentence and the not-guilty verdict of a second trial, that White had committed the murder. To this end they produced a prison inmate, “Witness 419”, still serving a sentence, who had once shared a cell with Manning’s boyfriend. He told Ahmed’s trial that White had confessed the crime, and his story presumably echoed that which by now was well rehearsed:
She was at a phone box making a call and he lost his temper with her… In the phone box there was an argument and he said he strangled her. When he realised she was dead, he propped her up to make it look as if she was drunk… When his mate turned up with the van [after a telephone call had been made], he put Rachel’s body in the back, with his flatmate helping. He said he drove round a bit looking for a place to dispose of it. He said he put the body on a golf course. There was a hand-print on Rachel’s face so he used a steering lock to take it off her face by hitting her with it.
Of course, there’s no good reason to put any worth in the testimony of a lifer who couldn’t get parole (which was the predicament at the time of “Witness 419”), and that’s not the point. What we can see here is a narrative that suits the order of the types of attack on Manning that presumably could be ascertained and established forensically; i.e. the garrotting before the battering.
Although the author cannot find a detailed coroner’s appraisal, there is reason to suppose that Manning was believed to be dead before being struck at the disposition site because of how there appears to be no loss of blood to have occurred there – at least, the author could find no mention of blood spillage at any location whatsoever.
White, of course, would not have been able to hit Manning first because the weapon of its execution would not have been available to him, and that’s why it can be supposed there is compatibility between the narrative of the accusation against him and the forensics. However, what the investigating and prosecuting authorities possibly should not have been allowed to do was merely translate the same narrative on to the accusation against Ahmed, or anyone else for that matter.
What if, for instance, an attack with a blunt instrument was actually carried out in the first instance, perhaps so as to render Manning insensible and manageable in order to be strangulated? What if, after she had then been moved, she was bludgeoned to disguise pre-death injury to her head? This has to be considered, especially without access to that coroner’s report that might otherwise impose definitiveness on our understanding, because of the mystery of Ahmed’s motivation: there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why he would bother to beat the dead woman around the head. Indeed, the leading barrister for the prosecution said that it “could only be guessed at” why Ahmed did it. And perhaps it is because corporate-media sensed that there should be a reason for this that its reportage suggested that Ahmed was trying to make her unrecognisable by bludgeoning her. But again, why would he? It might be argued that this would have interested White, but not Ahmed.
There was no connection between Ahmed and Manning so that investigators would automatically approach him on understanding who the victim was. Ahmed, it seems, would have picked Manning up randomly, and he appears not to have been connected with the vicinity of Manning’s disappearance. There’s none of that usual infamous CCTV footage (at least that the author can find). In actual fact, Ahmed didn’t appear to confirm any part of the story that supposed him guilty, and there is no sign of any explanation for why he was in the location, or any admission, in fact, that he even was. This is not to say that he had an alibi that it just wasn’t convenient to report.
Ultimately, the prosecution had no idea what Ahmed’s motive possibly could be, this admission being that of a Ben Gumpert, aforementioned prosecuting barrister:
There is no evidence which points to any particular motive, although it seems likely that the impulse to attack her would have been a sexual one… Whether he always intended to kill her or only did so because she was not willing to comply with his demands is unknown.
So much for motive. As for means and opportunity, and taking the former first, because it appears that the murder weapon is unqualified, there’s no knowing if Ahmed even had an example of one within the limits of the crime scene; i.e. in his car. As for opportunity, as stated, there appears to be no evidence putting him in the vicinity of the crime, and the biggest setback in these terms for the prosecution is the mystery as to why Manning would get into Ahmed’s vehicle if she was certain of an impending lift from White and Hyatt – as per the newly established official version of events?
It really is no wonder that the jury at his first trial could not convict him.
When the jury in the second trial adjudged Ahmed guilty, it perhaps still wasn’t on the strength of the evidence alone, but on how susceptible they were to being impressed about its significance. There were three pieces of evidence as not yet gone into here that perhaps could be called the decisive factors. The prosecution would no doubt term at least one of these proofs a direct piece of evidence, although one can argue that they are all circumstantial.
Firstly, there was the DNA of Ahmed that was found on the steering lock. Now, it should be noted that not only did Ahmed not testify at either of his trials, but he did not answer police questions at interview – if corporate-media reportage is to be understood correctly. He did, however, submit written statements: within these, of course, he denied killing Rachel Manning. He also said that he could not explain his DNA being on the steering lock, and he did not recognise the implement. He conceded that the thing might have crossed his path in the previous 10 years during which he had owned eight cars, and bought and sold vehicles at auctions. He explained that some cars he had bought had come with a lock, but these, he said, were handled to place them in the boot, evidently to stay there unwanted.
Now, the problem for the prosecution against Ahmed is that this is a feasible account of how his DNA could be found on an implement involved in a murder. Moreover, evidently it was one that was not disputed; indeed, the prosecution relied on the fact that Ahmed had sold a car eight days after Manning had been murdered (to imply he was ridding himself of incriminating evidence). If Ahmed was in the business of buying and selling cars – and whatever reason for his doing so was not under scrutiny (as dodgy as it all might sound) – it is entirely feasible that he could have passed a car on to someone in the market for a disposable vehicle for nefarious activity.
Furthermore, while the police and prosecution could understand that Ahmed had sold a car at the particular time of Manning’s murder, they evidently have no further appreciation of its history, or alternatively any appetite to present any knowledge about it. If they could present the previous owner of the car Ahmed was driving at the time, for instance, and have the steering lock matched with the car, this would be much stronger than the mere implication that Ahmed had something to hide because of the coincidence of a particular sale.
The reader is probably well aware that in these days there is a much more sophisticated treatment of DNA than there was twenty years ago – at least, professional people who deal in the subject profess to wanting a more nuanced approach to using DNA to solve crimes. To cut a long story short, interpreting DNA findings is by no means a cut and dried science: in fact, it’s a minefield of wrong conclusions. And the subject is huge – too big to go into now. For the time being, the reader is pointed towards a Guardian article entitled, DNA in the dock: how flawed techniques send innocent people to prison, and let us summarise by saying that Ahmed’s DNA being on the steering lock does not in itself make him the murderer.
The second part of the evidence that convicted Ahmed is also forensic in a way that is not just open to misinterpretation, but actually in a way that has been discredited in the years since the alleged murderer of Rachel Manning was brought to trial. A hair was discovered on Manning’s hotpants, and it was analysed and found to a be a match to Ahmed’s hair with a likelihood of 99.4%.
However, “in July 2013,” writes Ed Pilkington for The Guardian in a 2015 article, “the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called ‘hair comparison evidence’… were scientifically invalid”. Again, it is a complicated issue, but it boils down to this: “A review found that microscopic analysis of hair is virtually worthless as a method of identifying someone.” Again, the reader is asked to refer to the source material, this time a piece entitled, Thirty years in jail for a single hair: the FBI’s ‘mass disaster’ of false conviction.
Of course, besides everything that has come to light since about that which is condemned as a pseudo-science, when hair analysis was being presented as something that showed the certainty of Ahmed’s guilt – “totally improbable” that it did not belong to him, was the phrase used – the supposed 0.6% chance that the hair didn’t belong to Ahmed clearly represents doubt. As anyone who lives in the English system (as it is supposed to be) should know, doubt excludes guilt. Or as Michael Borrelli QC for the defence put it in his summing up, ““a deep sense of suspicion that Mr Ahmed may have been involved is simply not enough.” In fact, a tiny fragment of court reporting that the author was able to find revealed how “Michael Borrelli… questioned whether the hair belonged to Mr Ahmed”. He would have been battling against what Pilkington’s article appears to accuse of being a confidence trick.
Indeed, it has already been well established here that the prosecution relied on the jury’s sense of suspicion for want of real information. When it came to the hair, with Ahmed signalling he had no understanding of how any of his could have become attached to Manning’s clothing, the corporate-media court reportage indicated that the prosecution didn’t know either: “it was likely Ahmed gave the body a fireman’s lift, putting his head into contact with her hot pants, while he dumped her”. Naturally, this contradicted the supposed fact of “soil… trapped in the top of… [Manning’s] white boots indicating she had been dragged [to the place where she was deposited]”.
The third instalment of the evidence in totality that appears to have convicted Ahmed is how in May of 2010, he supposedly groped a young woman who had got into a car with him, and this led to his first arrest. For reasons that will become clear it is important to know that in a witness statement read to the court in the Manning murder trial, this female student, also 19 years of age, said:
She was walking home in Bletchley after a night out when Mr Ahmed pulled alongside her in a people carrier and beckoned her over. When she said she did not have any money he shrugged his shoulders and invited her in… He groped her, which made her get out of the car. She was walked home by a passerby, who called police.
The above passage, by the way, is surely a paraphrasing of the young women’s statement.
Now, in the court reporting of the Manning murder trial, it was said that Ahmed had been convicted in 2010 of assaulting this student, although it is actually not entirely clear that he had.
When Ahmed was first arrested then that act alone would have been enough for police to get hold of a sample of his DNA which, when it was submitted to the national database, matched that which had been gathered from the steering lock. He was then arrested in connection with the Manning case in September 2010, but he was not charged. Instead, he was placed on Police Bail.
Later, in December of 2011, Ahmed was re-arrested and charged with Manning’s murder, and after another year had passed, during which Ahmed was supposedly convicted for the relatively minor crime, the “passerby” who had actually also been witness to this alleged incident was contacted to give testimony in the murder trial to take place in January of 2013. As we have also heard, the student – the supposed victim of Ahmed’s groping – also provided witness testimony in this murder trial – at the very least in the retrial in August 2013, as appears to be the case. And altogether it is something that is puzzling.
As the reader probably knows, in the same way as the UK Government did away with double jeopardy in a grand act of meddling with English law in order to secure convictions that otherwise wouldn’t happen, it also did away with the principle of not prejudicing a jury by non disclosure of previous convictions. What is puzzling for the author is how, although the case of the groped student had already supposedly processed so that it could, under the new order established at the start of the “New American Century”, be presented as a matter of dry fact to the court, it was somehow re-tried during this murder trial. Reader, how does something like that work? Imagine the “passer-by”, a man by the name of David Rogers, on the stand, and the defence being told that he is now their witness. How is he supposed to be interrogated in terms of Rachel Manning’s murder? Can he be examined to discover that the groping story is a pack of lies, or something other than what it is suggested to be (i.e. the girl student mistaking Ahmed for a taxi driver), so that it can’t be used as was clearly the intention to imply Ahmed had a predilection for picking up 19-year-old girls in order to interfere with them? Obviously, the answer is no, because the 2010 case had supposedly already been adjudged. Or had it? Is it precisely because nothing of the sort had happened that the story needed to be attested to in evidence, not in the pursuit of a conviction for the crime in itself, but of Ahmed’s capability to get into a situation where the murder of a young girl could be an outcome?
The question must be asked because, while not being able to find any reporting of this 2010 incident, nor of the court case supposedly provoked by it, and while also not being able to find it in archived court listings (of the sort that are available on the internet), the author notes that this student has always remained anonymous, just as if she never existed.
Now consider the story of David Rogers’ involvement as presented in the one solitary corporate-media rendering that the author could find:
Mr Rogers had been driving in Bletchley in the early hours of a spring morning in 2010 when he saw a car pull up alongside a young teenager.
“She got into [the car] and then about a minute later she got out screaming and started to walk away,” he said.
“The car drove off, then came back and pulled up near her and kept watching her.”
Mr Rogers got out of his car to ask the girl if she was alright and she told him the man in the car had tried to attack her.
The girl did not want to report the incident so he walked her home but the car kept following them.
“I walked her to her front door and then walked back to my car and he kept following me,” he said.
“I took the registration number and went to the police.”
Now, returning to the fantastic notion that David Rogers could be tested on this story during the Manning murder trial, a defence lawyer would probably want to establish if he was driving or stationary when this “a minute later” passed as he watched this incident. Secondly, if he was parked, seated in his car, the same lawyer might want to know about Rogers’ own business that meant he was able to observe this happening. If he was still driving, how was he able to see all this going on at a location he might have been travelling beyond? Another question might involve why it was the girl needed a lift when she apparently lived within easy walking distance of her home (where else could she be going)? Yet another question, or rather a set of them – would try to establish why this young woman was getting a “lift home” in such easy distance from her residency, and if the man in the car wasn’t in fact under the impression – call it a misapprehension if you will – that he was conducting some other transaction that involved having young women get into his car?
This is important because it is related to this unnamed student’s ability to extract herself from the situation and Rachel Manning’s inability to extract herself from the one that she found herself in (according to the narrative). It’s about different intent reflecting two different outcomes.
If Ahmed (a Bangladeshi by birth who was accompanied in the dock by a translator, by the way) was a man whose perversion involved persuading women to get into his car so that he could molest them, how was he able to do this without any repercussion between 2000 and 2010, as is implied? Could it actually be that, having committed the murder, he waited for a whole decade for the coast to clear before daring to seek out his next victim so as to indulge his criminal tendency? More likely, he had never been caught in all that time because he had never caused it to be necessary. What we’re trying to ask is this: was he, in 2010, irrespective of how long he had been in the habit of doing it, a degenerate to the extent that he roamed the streets in his car looking to procure the services of a prostitute, with murder being the last thing on his mind, nor being of a type that would find it necessary to resort to murder when one of his dirty advances had gone awry? This supposes, of course, that the 2010 molestation episode is true fact.
Again – and this also supposes that he was doing the same thing in 2000 – why on earth would Rachel Manning ever have gotten into Ahmed’s car? Surely, she would not have.
In a follow-up article to come, a look at how the mystery of why Rachel Manning would get into an assailant’s car might be answered with the explanation of abduction, and how this might suggest a team at work in her disappearance, and how Ahmed might yet still be involved. Related to this is a contemplation of the minimum 17 years of his life sentence in contrast to the life with 15 year tariff given to White, and how odd this is given that the former supposedly planned his crime and had previous in a way that the latter never did or had.
