I have never known a case where it is so hard to pin down established facts and to separate them from speculation and rumour. I'm sure most people have watched videos such as Murder in a Small Town and A Long Walk to Justice, and some may have ploughed through Sandra Lean's Innocents Betrayed, with the author looking these days as if she is carrying the weight of the whole world on her shoulders.
The Prosecution case rested on three pillars: Luke had led the search party directly to the body, thus indicating "guilty knowledge", that he had been identified at the Easthouses side of Roan Dyke's Path by a witness, Andrina Bryson, at a time when Jodi would be expected to be there had she left home immediately after the text she sent Luke at 4:38pm, and lastly that the appellant had no alibi for the claimed time of the murder, and that mother Corinne and brother Shane had initially lied to cover for him for that period.
Suffice to say, the Prosecution proved its case on a majority verdict eighteen months after the murder in January 2005. Faced with a hostile mass media ever since Jodi's murder on 30 June 2003, it wasn't until February 23 2012, when Corinne passed a lie detector test, and subsequently two months later Luke passed his, that the tide began slowly in a trickle in the defendant's favour.
In what is described in Ms. Lean's book as a "tangled mess" (and that must be the understatement of the year), the Prosecution case began to be re-examined. It was argued that Jodi might not have met her then boyfriend regularly on Roan's Dyke Path, but at Mayfield, that Jodi had been banned from using that route alone, yet the search party made directly for the path, that there was some doubt as to star witness Andrina Bryson's sighting evidence given a discrepancy between a bank statement and a supermarket till receipt, and that Luke's brother, Shane's evidence had been twisted to put in the minds of the jury that Luke had not entered the family home in the early evening.
Sandra Lean must have taken hours poring over documents, finding inconsistencies and bringing them to the general public's attention. She has faced the backlash of the Scottish establishment's legal system at every turn. She has drawn attention to other credible suspects in the case, none of whom were subject to the same scrutiny as Luke Mitchell. She has faced physical and verbal assault from members of the Jones family. Sandra deserves huge credit for writing the book.
