Something that will shock you

- What Vincent Tabak said he would tell the Salvation Army chaplain

What possible interest could you have in the spin-chilling fate that met a young, friendly, highly intelligent Dutch engineer with a Ph.D called Vincent Tabak? Just this –

-        He could equally well have been from your country, he could have been your child or my child

-        He was head-hunted to a £45,000-a-year job in England with the global architectural consulting firm of Buro Happold in Bath in 2007

-        His pretty neighbour Joanna Yeates, whom he did not know at all, even by sight, was murdered just before Christmas 2010 (probably after her boyfriend caught her déshabillé with her secret lover), whereupon the entire British nation and their voracious media demanded that her killer must be found IMMEDIATELY. The police responded by arresting the eccentric-looking landlord, releasing him under house-arrest (after the press had feasted on fabricated anecdotes about him) to keep him silent.

-       Owing to his vulnerability as a respectable foreigner without any family in England, Vincent Tabak was chosen by the panic-stricken police as a scapegoat, coerced (by deceit and manipulation plus various forms of torture) to stand trial for a killing he had not carried out, and sentenced to life in prison as the most hated man in England apart from the Prime Minister David Cameron

His pretty neighbour
Joanna Yeates
– her killing was personal, but police 
warned women to stay indoors

It was such a high-profile murder case that every school child in England could tell you the flavour of the pizza that the poor girl bought on her way home before she was killed. The case was also reported in Holland – but not in most other countries – but, out of consideration for the memory of this fragrant English rose who was cut down in all her beauty, it is actually illegal to question publicly the means used to obtain the unsound guilty plea and the soundness of the curious “show” trial that resulted in this conviction.

The landlord Chris Jefferies
– saw several persons
on her front path, but the
police appealed for the pizza

Have you ever heard of a psychologically stable person with a Ph.D totally devoid of violent tendencies who was convicted of murdering a stranger without any motive and without being under the influence of alcohol, drugs or mental illness? It sounds sensational doesn’t it? Well no actually, even the serious British media were totally indifferent to the fact that Vincent Tabak has a Ph.D and had never been inside a police station until his arrest – believe it not, the real sensation was that Counsel for the Prosecution claimed behind closed doors that the defendant had (legal) adult pornographic videos on his PC, and, without asking for the identity of the Crown’s witness to this evidence, the judge authorized the journalists to explain after the trial was over that it was these videoes that had inspired Vincent Tabak to rush round next-door and strangle the unfortunate Joanna.

The cursed house where they lived: 44 Canynge Rd.
Despite a massive show by technicians in overalls with
dangerous chemicals, no forensics were ever reported.
Was their task to obliterate embarassing evidence?

You will be shaken to the core when you realize that even the serious British and Dutch news media can no longer be trusted – and that an innocent, trustworthy and very sympathetic individual could be made the object of so much cruelty, humiliation and hatred – and by the deliberate actions of the very forces of law and order who ought to have protected him. The kidnapping and annihilation of a hapless foreign expert by the institutions of a national state is the worst imaginable treachery – and it implicates all of us. The research and analysis on this website draws heavily from a debating forum on Facebook that was shut down on 30th April 2012 and a small group of independent thinkers who include Noel O’Gara in Ireland, GW in Bristol, Debra Ann C. in the West Midlands and F. in Hackney. Our aim is to make this clever young engineer’s cruel fate and the authorities’ disgusting cover-up better known to the outside world.

Lord Denning: “It is better an
innocent man serves a life
sentence than the law is seen
to be making grave errors”

Lord Denning, the celebrated former Lord Chief Justice once declared: “It is better an innocent man serves a life sentence than the law is seen to be making grave errors”. Respect for the law must be secured at any price! What comfort do you think this is to the unhappy 71-year-old widowed Sonja Tabak, who weeps alone back in Arnhem – the mother who was always so proud of her youngest son’s achievements, and delighted with the equally gifted girlfriend he had at long last found for himself via The Guardian’s dating service?

The scapegoat's
girlfriend Tanja Morson
gave no evidence, nor
was she ever seen in court

Avon & Somerset Constabulary worked hard while Vincent Tabak was held on remand to persuade his English girlfriend, her family, his employer, and even his former university in Holland and the Dutch authorities that he is an evil man, and that they should not support him nor have anything to do with him. Even his own defence lawyers were under the thumb of the Bristol’s Chief Constable and conducted themselves openly on the side of the Crown Prosecution Service. His family dare not protest his innocence for fear that he will be beaten up.

You may possibly know me as an excitable activist, but also as somebody who is good at unravelling complicated technical or judicial problems. My heart, furthermore, is in the right place – and I believe passionately in fairness and justice. You can read my explanation of all the numerous twists and turns in this murder case on this unofficial web site that I have created – but ultimately I have to ask you to trust me, accept that I and my fellow campaigners have done our homework properly, and be assured that I am not trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

The jury and the public were deceived about
the hidden place where Joanna’s body was dumped.
Four pumping engines, a crane and 23 fire & rescue
officers were called out to recover the body.

You will be forced to open your eyes, as I was, to the unpalatable reality that the police are as different as they could be from those we see in TV series – that they are thinking only of their pay-cheques, the number of convictions they can secure, how to cover up for their colleagues’ nepotism, and lying to journalists. You will hear them coerce the press into deceiving the public and the jury about the hidden place where the body was dumped and the timing of its discovery. You will hear about a compromised Coroner who held the inquest that the press was not allowed to report and the public was not allowed to know about. You will hear about a forensic scientist in a private firm who was willing to leak unsound DNA evidence to the media to ensure her employer’s survival and profit. This case is about collusive lawyers who abused the immunity of the court, thinking only of their fees, and of the other briefs that they risk losing. You will be shocked by the judge who disregarded the law’s most fundamental bastions by changing the published date and venue of a supposedly public hearing to accept a phoney guilty plea given over video-link by a stand-in. You will read obvious lies written by journalists simply because it was unnamed police spokesmen and the Crown prosecutor who told them, and you will discover that ordinary people uncritically believe the most ludicrous allegations, simply because they read or hear them from the “mainstream” media. You will read the testimony of a trusted volunteer prison chaplain in the Salvation Army who compromised himself in league with Defence Counsel by inventing the accused’s confession. You will be amazed by a witness claiming to be an IT-expert who collaborated with prosecuting Counsel to deceive the jury about the defendant’s innocent internet researches. You will learn that the employer who had head-hunted this innocent highly educated professional employee from abroad nevertheless did nothing to help him when he really needed it, such as e.g., by getting him a good independent lawyer or creating a positive personal media profile, but instead kept a very low profile in order to avoid prejudicing the company’s reputation. You will hear of a press conference and news reports that were removed from the internet in the sinister spirit of George Orwell’s “1984” because these would have revealed the falseness of the boyfriend’s tears and the way in which the police and the CPS manipulated the public and the jury.

Bristol Magistrates’ Court rubber-stamped the custody
of two men of good character, to prevent the personal
circumstances that led to the victim’s death from
becoming known, and her assailant from being punished 

We have written politely and meticulously about this miscarriage of justice to several MPs – even Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg – two Members of the European Parliament, the IPCC, the CCRC, a minister of the church, a Crown Court judge, Bristol’s Public Prosecutor and its Police Commissioner, Bristol University, Buro Happold, two British ambassadors, several lawyers, the Forensic Science Regulator, and many, many journalists and editors. The few reactions we received contained very little that was reassuring.

I find it sinister that the conviction for murder of a man with so unlikely a profile has not caused alarm bells to ring at academic high tables throughout Europe. In practice, EU’s rules for the free mobility of labour are used predominantly by the highly educated, so it is a matter of deep concern that corrupt police forces should exploit the vulnerability caused by volatile national sentiment combined with the scapegoat’s lack of family and a well established social network in the jurisdiction in question. I cannot understand why the engineering institutions do not seem to be worried that the lessons learnt by the authorities from this case will be ruthlessly applied to future scapegoats. Murder is a violent crime, yet even well-educated Europeans did not suspect that anything was amiss when they heard the absurd “explanations” for why this mild-mannered law-abiding high achiever suddenly turned into a violent criminal without any motive.

The family and friends

Park Street, Bristol.
Joanna Yeates worked in an architects’ office nearby
and went drinking with her colleagues in their local pub.
She changed her clothes, but the jury was not told

The facts prove that Vincent Tabak is innocent, so why don’t his family, his employer, his girlfriend, and his landlord shout it from the rooftops and establish an “official” website on his behalf?

• It is illegal for them to do this, both via the news media, and even via the internet, as long as he has never protested his innocence in open court.
• The family and friends have probably been advised to distance themselves from Vincent to avoid prejudicing their own professional careers and those of their children. His girlfriend will have been urged, in her own interest, to hand over to the authorities any letters he wrote to her and any presents he gave her.
• Both the family and the news media would be charged with libel as long as no defence lawyer is willing to challenge the combined forces of the police, the CPS, the lawyers and the judges who worked for Vincent Tabak’s conviction.
• The court may have imposed an unreported condition of permanent censorship on the media in return for lifting reporting restrictions on the so-called “bad character evidence”. If they have done so, the order would itself be subject to a reporting restriction.
• Vincent Tabak has evidently been told to warn his family that his life in prison will be a lot worse if his family attempts to protest his innocence, beyond asserting that Joanna Yeates’s death was an accident. When he was first arrested, on 20th January 2011, his brother Marcel Tabak and his sister Dr. Cora Tabak told journalists in the Netherlands that they believed panic-stricken police were making him a scapegoat. Avon & Somerset Constabulary were quick to exact retribution for this slur on their authority. After Vincent Tabak’s appearance before the magistrate, he spent a sleepless night of terror cowering in a cell in Bristol prison, whose enraged inmates had watched the TV reports of his brief court appearance and assumed that he was guilty because the magistrate had not asked him how he pleaded. Horrified by this experience, his family hastened to issue a statement saying he was being well treated in prison. The unsubstantiated “bad character evidence” and the obviously false allegations of child pornography published after the trial were designed to demonstrate to the Tabak family the power of reprisal that the police and the lawyers were capable of exercising.
• The (toothless) Independent Police Complaints Commission accepts applications only from persons directly or indirectly affected by the abuse complained of – thus excluding anyone vulnerable to reprisals, i.e., the very persons most likely to have grounds to complain.
• The friends and family must be under colossal pressure from international commercial and academic interests not to expose the methods by which the conviction was rigged. The behaviour of the police, prosecutors, Vincent Tabak, his friends, his family, his defence lawyers, and the judge, have all been so peculiar, compared to what would normally be expected of them, that a secret amnesty and a secret new identity cannot be ruled out.
• Vincent Tabak’s lawyers have warned him not to let his family nor friends talk to the news media about the shortcomings of British justice. They will have told him that this will only inflame national sentiment against him. Both his lawyers and Avon & Somerset Constabulary appear to have learnt a lot from the murder of a British student called Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007. One of the defendants in the Italian case was an American exchange student, Amanda Knox. The media in Britain and the USA followed the case with great interest, and, initially at least, this backfired against her. The prosecutor in Perugia, Giuliani Mignini, carried out judicial reprisals against Amanda Knox’s parents as a result of American media involvement. Both the Italian prosecutor and the Vincent Tabak’s prosecuting QC in Bristol displayed an unfounded obsession with sex, and both discovered that there was no limit to the wild exaggeration of the claims they could make about the part played by sex in the defendants’ alleged actions. Four days before Kercher’s murder, the somewhat dysfunctional young African man who was separately convicted of wielding the knife that killed her had been held in police custody briefly after being apprehended somewhere where he probably shouldn’t have been. The bizarre and cruel campaign to scapegoat outsiders Knox, her sympathetic boyfriend and the African as fellow-conspirators was probably conducted in order to divert attention away from the real reason for Kercher’s staged execution. There are overwhelming indications that she was the victim of a brutal contract killer hired by the family of the unknown influential married Perugian who believed that he had made her pregnant soon after her arrival, and that Monica Napoleoni’s police were instructed to shield the identities of the instigators at all costs. Was it also an unborn baby that led to Joanna Yeates’s killing?

25th January 2011: After Vincent Tabak’s first appearance before a judge, his family told journalists that some of them planned to travel to the UK to visit him in prison. However, presumably as a malicious punishment for the independent post-mortem on Joanna’s body ordered by Vincent Tabak’s solicitor, the CPS got the Home Office to delay issuing visiting permits to any of his family or his girlfriend until the day of her funeral. In consequence, none of them was present for his third appearance in court on 31st January 2011 either.

The family spokesman Paul Vermeij
was lost for words when a person
on a video screen at the Old Bailey
who claimed to be Vincent Tabak
pleaded guilty of manslaughter

TABAKS’ TRIBUTE FOR JOANNA YEATES – Daily Star Sunday, 6th February 2011 (By Gareth Dorrian): MURDER suspect Vincent Tabak’s family want to send Joanna Yeates’ parents a sympathy letter, we can reveal. But the family, who believe Tabak is innocent, will not send it until after landscape architect Joanna’s funeral this Friday. Paul Vermeij, the family’s spokesman, told the Daily Star Sunday: “They would like to give their sympathy. But they are the family of the man suspected of murder so it makes it very complicated.”

Long Lartin Prison, Worcestershire, where an
under-cover officer pretending to be a chaplain
contrived a fake confession for Vincent Tabak

By making sure that Tanja Morson was visiting Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire on 11th January 2011, the CPS ensured that she could not attract public sympathy by attending her neighbour’s funeral in Hampshire the same day. After finally visiting his brother in prison (together with Tanja Morson) on the day of Joanna’s funeral, Marcel Tabak told a journalist from The Sun (14th February 2011) that he was convinced Vincent was innocent.

Joanna Yeates’s parents arriving at the Old Bailey on
5th May 2011 accompanied by a police officer believed to be
DC Emma Davies (frame captured from Channel 4 news video)

5th May 2011: Joanna’s parents had been warned in advance that Vincent Tabak was going to plead guilty to manslaughter, whereas it came as a complete shock to the Tabak family’s spokesman in the Netherlands, Paul Vermeij. This suggests that Vincent Tabak had in good faith entered his own Not Guilty video-link plea to a fake hearing on the date he expected, 4th May, and that he had no idea until it was too late that someone resembling him entered a Manslaughter video-link plea to the hearing attended by journalists at the Old Bailey the next day. The police went to great lengths to ensure that there was no one in Court Two, the high-security court where this hearing was held, which is normally used for terrorist trials, who would be able to recognise the defendant.

Ann Reddrop, DCI Phil Jones and DI Joseph Goff at a press conference held after the trial,
probably on 1st November 2011

After Vincent Tabak had been tricked by the imposter’s plea of manslaughter, no one would believe his family if they did declare him to be innocent. Because killing is such a powerful taboo, they would themselves be ostracized by everyone around them, including their colleagues at work and their employers. A court of law is an estate of the realm and has enormous authority. Once Vincent Tabak was reported to have admitted killing Joanna Yeates on a video-link to the Old Bailey in London, only a small handful of people in the know (including those of us with no connection to the persons involved in the case – and the real killer!) could have doubted that he did it.

That is why even Peter the Apostle denied Jesus before the crucifixion and was not present at His death. There is indeed a biblical element to this evil destruction of such an essentially good and brilliant man because of the death of a woman whose body was allegedly found on Christmas day.

The only exception is 70 year old Mrs. Tabak. Everyone will understand a mother’s right to go on believing in her son’s innocence. If she lived in England and could speak English, and her son were English, she would certainly be shouting it from the rooftops to anyone who would listen. But no one in England is going to believe the mother of a Dutch murderer if she tries to contradict what her own son admitted in an English court of law – especially if the media are subject to reporting restrictions imposed by the court.

That is why it is a terrible thing when a court of law misuses its authority to punish a man for a murder he did not commit – especially if the judge himself knows it. Vincent Tabak’s family said just after his trial that he is afraid of being beaten up by other prisoners – but they cannot speak publicly of “torture”, because he will have been told: “Make sure you say that you were properly treated” (to quote Gareth Peirce).

Head of the Complex Casework Unit Ann
Reddrop. The CPS defines a complex case as one
 with multiple defendants and multiple victims.
Who were the powerful interests behind Joanna
Yeates’s killing that the law dared not prosecute?

Crown Prosecutor Ann Reddrop was Head of the Complex Casework Unit when the police asked for her assistance and guidance late in December 2010. She reviewed the evidence and recommended charging Vincent Tabak with Joanna Yeates’s murder. No motive for murder, nor any forensic evidence placing him in her flat was ever produced in court, however, and the slender evidence that was produced would not have been remotely enough for a conviction unless it were supported by a confession. How did Ann Reddrop persuade his first team of lawyers from Crossman & Co and Albion Chambers to abandon his application for bail on 24th January 2011 and try to persuade their client to plead guilty of manslaughter?

Ian Kelcey

Did Vincent Tabak’s lawyers from Kelcey & Hall feel that their prospects of future briefs from his family and friends in Holland were negligible compared with the risks of upsetting local Bristol interests and of losing police station duty contracts if they defended him successfully? Vincent Tabak’s family has apparently not instigated libel proceedings for the slanderous and obviously false allegations about his sexual preferences that were made in the media after his conviction. Did the Attorney General or the Judge authorise the media to defame the prisoner without fear of the kind of prosecution instigated by the landlord?