Warning: this post discusses a murder case, and related themes such as
blood and violence.
It also discusses racism, institutional racism, miscarriages of justice,
wrongful conviction, borderline torture, and police corruption.
There are brief references to sex work and drugs.
The name Lynette White is one that’s known all over Wales. Because of what happened to her, and what happened to five
innocent men after her death.
Sadly her life is often brushed over,
eclipsed by the crimes of the police officers who were supposed to investigate
her murder – police officers who couldn’t even manage to spell ‘Lynette’
correctly when they told the press her name.
Lynette White, a 20 year old White woman who had been working as a sex
worker in the docklands area of Cardiff, was found dead on 14th February
1988.
She had been brutally and viciously murdered.
An
eye-witness had seen a White man, covered in blood, leaving the flat where
Lynette’s body was found on the night she was killed.
She
thought he was injured, so had asked if he was alright or if he needed help.
He told her he was fine, had just hurt his hand, and said someone was coming
to pick him up, so she left it there.
After Lynette was found,
the eye-witness told the police what she’d seen, and described the man.
This was almost certainly Jeffrey Gafoor – Lynette’s murderer.
Modern DNA evidence proves that his blood was present at the
murder scene, it was through a partial match on the DNA database that police
eventually tracked him down.
Jeffrey Gafoor plead guilty to the
murder of Lynette White in 2003.
...But the police arrested five men for the murder of Lynette White in
November 1988, with the trial starting in 1989.
The Cardiff Five were put on trial for the murder of Lynette
White, and the Cardiff Three were wrongfully convicted of her murder.
It
was one of the biggest miscarriages of justice the UK has ever seen.
