Review of 60-year-old murder case nears completion

Poultry farmer Alfred Moore, a self-confessed burglar, was sentenced to death after Det Insp Duncan Fraser and Pc Arthur Jagger were shot dead in July 1951 near Huddersfield. The officers died following a police stake-out at Moore’s farm.

The case has been looked at again in recent years by two former West Yorkshire detectives who carried out an unofficial re-investigation.

They believe that Moore was wrongly hanged. Their investigation concluded that the identification parade which identified Moore was flawed and they claimed that there was no forensic evidence linking Moore to the shooting, which took place close to his farmhouse at Kirkheaton.

In 1952 Moore was found guilty of murder and hanged at Armley Prison, Leeds. He was 36 and left behind a wife and four young daughters.

He protested his innocence to the end, saying that one day he would be cleared.

Former policeman Steve Lawson, from Huddersfield, spent several years studying original documents from the case and the evidence presented at the trial.

He concluded that the evidence was flawed and presented a dossier to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body responsible for investigating suspected miscarriages of justice.

Mr Lawson said he had uncovered discrepancies between original police statements and what the jury had been told.

There was no evidence that Moore had carried or fired a gun that night, he says, and the prosecution had failed to disclose vital evidence to Moore’s lawyer.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has spent 10 months looking at the case and is expected to make a decision at the end of August whether or not to send it to the Court of Appeal, which has the power to overturn the conviction.

Mr Lawson told the Yorkshire Post that he was “cautiously optimistic” because he believed the case put forward to the CCRC was strong.

He said the CCRC had told him that a decision on whether to refer the case to the Court of Appeal would be made towards the end of August.

Mr Lawson said he would be informing Moore’s daughters, who have been following the case, that a decision was expected soon.

During three years re-investigating the case, Mr Lawson and the late Colin Van Bellen, also a former detective, uncovered fresh evidence which built a convincing picture that another man, Huddersfield car dealer Clifford Mead, was the real killer. He died in 1998.