I am glad to initiate this debate, which will be the first time that this distressing case has been fully discussed in the House.

The tragic and outrageous murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater, whose parents and family deserve our sympathy, has been shrouded in controversy since November 1979 when four men were convicted for the killing. Vincent Hickey and James Robinson went down for life for the murder and Michael Hickey was also convicted of murder and detained during Her Majesty's pleasure. Pat Molloy got 12 years for manslaughter.

Six weeks after the convictions, a man called Hubert Spencer shot his friend Hubert Wilks through the head in the farm next door to the one where the murder was committed. It emerged at once that Spencer had been an early police suspect for the Bridgewater murder, that he knew Yew Tree farm—where the murder had been committed—had coveted antiques there such as those that were stolen during the robbery and had access to shotguns. It also emerged that a blue Vauxhall Viva, driven by a man in uniform, was seen going into the farm an hour and a half before the murder. Intensive police inquiries throughout the midlands could establish only one owner of a blue Vauxhall Viva who wore a uniform—Hubert Spencer.

The convicted men consistently pleaded their innocence and a huge array of evidence has been uncovered to challenge the slender case that was made against them at their trial. Replying recently to questions in the House, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Kirkhope), who I am pleased to see in his seat, referred twice to the numerous police inquiries into the case since 1981. He said that the latest batches of new evidence have been thoroughly examined—extremely thoroughly examined". —[Official Report, 15 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 1126.] He asked my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) whether he recognised the thoroughness of the police investigations that had been carried out.

Hon. Members who are worried about the case recognise the thoroughness of the police investigations and the inordinate length of time that they have taken but, as we have discovered recently, thoroughness is not always the same as fairness. There is a great deal to suggest that the recent investigation into the case by Merseyside police, though intensely thorough, has not been fair to the convicted men and their families.

Most of the recent new evidence submitted to the Home Office by the men's lawyers has dealt with the confessions of Pat Molloy, which are the kernel of the case. He was arrested on 8 December 1978. He was held at Wombourne police station and refused access to friends, family and lawyers. On 10 December, he signed a confession that he was upstairs at Yew Tree farm when the murder was committed. The confession named the other three men as the boy's killers.

Molloy was refused access to a lawyer for another eight days, until 18 December. The moment that he saw a lawyer on that day, and ever since, he insisted that he had never been at the farm, that his confession was wholly false and that he had signed it out of fear of the police and for revenge against the Hickeys, who, he was led to believe, had implicated him in the crime. At his trial, however, acting on legal advice, he did not give evidence and did not deny his confession. Though he pleaded not guilty and denied that he was at the farm, his lawyers asked the jury to conclude that if it thought that he had been at the farm, he was guilty not of murder but only of being an accomplice.

That tortuous defence, and Molloy's failure to give evidence, was the turning point in the trial. He was convicted of manslaughter and the other three of murder. Almost immediately after his conviction, he submitted an appeal. He regretted his silence at the trial and insisted again that he had never been at the farm. He said that his confession had been beaten out of him by police officers, whom he identified. He set out the details of his beatings in a series of memoranda to the Court of Appeal and in conversations and letters to his sister, to his son, to Jimmy Robinson's then girlfriend Carol Bradbury and to Ann Whelan, the mother of Michael Hickey, who had visited him. In July 1981, before he could get to the Court of Appeal, he died of a heart attack in Gartree prison.

The new evidence submitted by Molloy's family lawyers in 1993 provides powerful—some would say overwhelming—evidence in support of Molloy's story. For instance, the lawyers had proved 14 separate visits to his cell at Wombourne by police officers connected with the inquiry. The records show no recorded interviews during any of those visits.

The Home Office asked Merseyside to interview the police officers concerned. Those officers do not dispute—they cannot really since it is on record—that they went to Molloy's cell on all the occasions alleged. They do not dispute that there were no recorded interviews. By way of explanation, they claim that they were inquiring after his welfare, checking that he was properly fed and so on. That is all accepted by the police investigators. Is it credible that the police at Wombourne should have shown such assiduous concern for a man who had just signed a confession to one of the worst murders ever known in the area?

A more credible explanation for the 14 missing interviews may be that the officers were searching desperately but unsuccessfully for a single shred of evidence to corroborate Molloy's confession. On 14 December, in desperation, officers from another force took Molloy to Yew Tree farm. It was plain to them that he did not recognise the place where only three months earlier he had allegedly taken part in the killing of the young boy.

The plain fact is that over 17 years not a single piece of evidence has been found to corroborate Molloy's confession. The likelihood that the 14 mystery visits were inspired by an anxious determination to authenticate what the officers rightly feared might be an entirely false confession is not even considered by the investigation's police officers, who simply took the word of the Wombourne police on trust.

Here is another example. The police investigation attempted to uncover a number of occasions on which Molloy is said to have confessed to police and prison officers after the trial. Each of those alleged confessions is highly dubious. One, provided by a prison officer at Winson Green, is flatly contradicted by prison records, but the Merseyside police blamed the records rather than the officer. Moreover, the list of alleged confessions has been submitted as hard evidence without the other side of the story ever being considered. Molloy's son Nick, Ann Whelan, and Molloy's sister Frances—all of whom can testify to Molloy's strenuous denials of his confession right up to the day before he died—were never interviewed by the Merseyside police. One side of the story is set out at great length; the other is not even investigated.

There are many other examples. When overwhelming linguistic evidence proved that Molloy's confession interviews could not have been taken down verbatim, as the trial was told, the police investigators promptly switched the goal posts and claimed that the confession had been taken down in response to "trigger notes".

A man called Mike Chamberlain stated on television in the summer of 1993 that his friend the late Detective Constable Perkins—the police officer who had taken Molloy's confession—told him clearly that he intended to extract a confession out of Molloy". Chamberlain is dismissed by the Merseyside investigation on the basis of a statement that he made a year earlier that he did not want to speak to the police.

At the appeal hearing, much was made of the fact that Spencer had not had access to a gun at the time of the murder; yet, when the police investigators discovered that he had been sold a shotgun in the summer before the murder, they dismissed it as irrelevant. There is powerful evidence that yet more misleading statements were made by the only substantial witness against Jimmy Robinson—Mervyn Ritter, a man already exposed in the courts as a pathological liar. That, too, seems to have been dismissed too easily by the investigation.

It is simply not good enough for the Home Secretary to take it on himself to dismiss all that new evidence solely on the basis of a private police inquiry. That is at the heart of the argument for reopening the case in public. The Home Secretary cannot and should not usurp the role of the courts by deciding himself about controversial evidence that has been tested only by police officers in secret, not by discovery of documents and cross-examination in open court. If, as many believe, a terrible injustice has been done to those men, each year that passes compounds that injustice. Each year brings new evidence, all of it exonerating the men and none of it implicating them.

In 1993, Tim O'Malley, who had been foreman of the jury at the 1979 trial, came forward. He had, he said, been convinced of the men's guilt at the trial, but was now even more convinced of their innocence. What plainer proof can there be that a verdict is unsafe than such a statement from the jury foreman, made at some risk to himself? Surely the honourable and open thing to do is to send the case back to the Court of Appeal.