Russell Bishop trial: Predatory paedophile ‘scraping barrel’ by accusing girl’s father of child murder, court hears
Convicted sex attacker criticised for running a defence that suggested the father of Nicola Fellows killed and sexually assaulted her and her friend
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Predatory paedophile Russell Bishop is a coward who is trying to escape justice by dragging the name of the father of one the girls he killed “through the mud”, an Old Bailey jury has been told.
Bishop, prosecutor Brian Altman QC told the court, is a sex attacker “whose latent aggression lies just below the surface” and who lured nine-year-olds Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows to their deaths in an ivy-covered den in 1986, and has been “running away from it for 32 years”.
The Old Bailey has heard that Bishop, 52, was acquitted of the Babes in the Wood murders at a Lewes Crown Court trial in 1987.
But now, Mr Altman told the court, he has finally been caught in a “compelling and unassailable web” of evidence “consistent only with the defendant’s guilt”.
And his response, Mr Altman said, was to resort to a “defence born of desperation” and accuse Nicola’s father Barrie Fellows of killing his own daughter to cover up the “guilty secret” of having watched her in a child sex abuse video.
In his closing speech to the jury, Mr Altman poured scorn on this defence, referring to it as “the Barrie Fellows bandwagon”, “the scraping of the Barrie barrel”, and an attempt to get away with murder twice.
But the result, Mr Altman said, “has been to drag that man’s name through the mud, suggesting he is a paedophile, then compelling him to ask questions suggesting he killed his daughter and her friend, and sexually assaulted them both”.
“There is no denying those two families suffered unimaginable grief,” Mr Altman added. “Is Barrie Fellows to be cut no slack because of that?”
Bishop’s defence, Mr Altman said, was to suggest that Mr Fellows “is condemned for listening to police advice [to get some sleep rather than continuing to search for his daughter] and for not showing [the expected] emotion”.
When called to give evidence, Mr Fellows emphatically denied having watched his daughter in a child abuse video. He was close to tears when denying the defence suggestion he had something to do with Nicola’s death.
A pathologist’s evidence also suggested that Nicola had suffered no sexual abuse in the months leading up to her murder in the naturally formed den in Wild Park, Brighton.
“It is a defence born of desperation, designed to deflect and divert you from convicting him,” Mr Altman told the jurors. “What you are seeing unfolding before your eyes is the creation, by the defendant, of a smokescreen in the hope, quite literally, that he gets away with murder for the second time.”
Mr Altman invited the jurors to ask themselves how Mr Fellows could have killed the two girls on his way home from work, given on that journey he also went into a butcher’s in George Street, Hove, to buy some ham for his tea.
Could he really, Mr Altman asked, “have killed the girls in the den, all the while with the George Street butcher’s ham under his arm or in his hand? None of it works”.
The prosecutor added that Marion Stevenson, who told the News of the World about the video allegation in a story published three days after the 1987 trial, was a “wholly unreliable witness” who had been drinking and smoking pot and may have misremembered things.
Mr Altman said Ms Stevenson, who was 16 at the time, had been put up to speaking to the now defunct tabloid by Bishop’s “domineering” mother.
“You might think the Bishop family made themselves very busy after the acquittal,” Mr Altman said. “The common theme throughout was an effort to smear Barrie Fellows.”
In the immediate aftermath of Bishop being acquitted in 1987, Mr Altman said the aim may have been to highlight his innocence and, possibly, to claim compensation and damages for his arrest and prosecution.
But in 1990, the court has heard, Bishop abducted, strangled and sexually assaulted a seven-year-old girl.
Having been convicted of that sex attack, the court heard, Bishop has spent the last 28 years in jail as a high-risk Category A prisoner.
“All the evidence shows he is a predatory paedophile, and a violent one at that,” Mr Altman told the jury. “He is a cowardly paedophile who thinks nothing of attacking a seven-year-old child and, on the evidence we suggest, killing two nine-year-old girls purely for his own sexual gratification.”
Bishop’s true character, Mr Altman said, was revealed in his response to tough questions, and the way he “threw in the towel” and abandoned giving evidence halfway through the crossexamination.
“It demonstrated,” Mr Altman said, “a man whose latent aggression lies just below the surface at all times – an abusive, aggressive, controlling man.”
Bishop’s sexual interest in children, Mr Altman said, was exposed in the “grubby letters” he wrote to a 13-year-old, while in prison, on remand awaiting his 1987 trial over the murders of Karen and Nicola.
“They are a window into his sexual interest,” Mr Altman said, “showing interest more than once in whether she was a virgin, grooming her for sex on his eventual release.”
Bishop was not in court on Tuesday to hear Mr Altman’s closing speech. Mr Justice Sweeney told the jurors the defendant had “chosen not to attend” but warned them: “You must not treat that as providing any assistance to the prosecution. We shall simply continue in his absence.”
Bishop denies two counts of murder.
But, Mr Altman said, all the evidence, both circumstantial and forensic, pointed to Bishop being the killer who ensured that “those girls were blindly led to their deaths in a den from which they never emerged alive”.
There was, the prosecutor said, “a wholly compelling and powerful picture consistent only with this defendant’s guilt of Karen and Nicola’s murder, to the exclusion of anyone else in the world”.
The trial continues.