In the modest-sized court seven at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, the children of Saliah Mehmet and Basil Peterkin squeeze into the rows of benches alongside journalists, campaigners and friends. It is the morning of 18 January 2024, almost 47 years since their fathers were imprisoned for conspiracy to steal goods from the Bricklayers Arms depot in south London, where they worked. Three years later, in 1980, the officer who arrested them, along with two of his team, was convicted of the same crime, in the same depot, which they policed.
Mehmet and Peterkin – both now dead – always said they were framed. Even now, their families refuse to believe that their fathers will have their convictions quashed until they hear the judge say the words.
***
Things have come a long way since Mehmet’s wife received a letter out of the blue in September 2022. It had come from the Criminal Cases Review Commission. She was perplexed by it. “The CCRC is an independent body which investigates cases where people may have been wrongfully convicted,” it read. “If the CCRC finds important new evidence or legal argument, we can send the case back to the appeal court.”
The court of appeal, the letter read, “accepted that the new evidence, which related to DS Ridgewell’s own conviction in 1980 for conspiracy to steal from the Bricklayers Arms goods depot, which resulted in a significant prison sentence, meant that the evidence given by DS Ridgewell and his officers at the trials of the Oval Four and Stockwell Six could not be relied on as truthful”.
Gulser Saliah had not heard of the Stockwell Six or the Oval Four, nor DS Derek Ridgewell. But she did know that her husband had been arrested by the British Transport Police (BTP) in the 1970s while working as a porter for British Rail at the Bricklayers Arms. Mehmet and six colleagues were convicted of conspiracy to steal £30,000 worth of goods; the police estimated that, over 18 months, the gang stole goods worth £300,000. Mehmet, who died of Covid in 2021, was jailed for nine months.
He always insisted he was innocent. The conviction ruined his life. What happened to him and his colleagues has chilling echoes of the Post Office scandal, criminalised for something in the workplace that they did not do.
Gulser passed on the letter to her three adult sons – Regu, 52, and 44-year-old twins Arda and Onur. They explained that there was a possibility of clearing Mehmet’s name. But, like her husband, Gulser had lost faith in British justice when he was convicted. She didn’t want anything to do with the police. Nor did she want to dig up ghosts from the past. Eventually, her sons convinced her that this was an opportunity to restore their father’s reputation, albeit posthumously.
It took almost 50 years, but, on 18 January, Mehmet, alongside Peterkin, who died in 1991, were finally vindicated.
This is not simply a story about a horrifying miscarriage of justice. It is also a story about one of the most corrupt officers in British history and the police establishment that allowed him to thrive in his criminality and then protected him. It is about a justice system so indifferent to the fates of the men wrongfully convicted that it did nothing to clear their names for almost 47 years.
As soon as Ridgewell was convicted, the BTP should have examined his arrest record to see if he could have been responsible for innocent people going to jail – especially for the crimes he had committed. But that never happened. In the end, it was only a quirk of fate – one of his victims listening to a radio call-in about miscarriages of justice – that resulted in a series of convictions being overturned on appeal.
***
Mehmet was a family man. He was born in England, but, like Gulser, he was Turkish Cypriot and had grown up in Cyprus. After their marriage, they had moved to London. His sons say he would have worked 24 hours a day if he could to give his family a good life. He took as much overtime at the Bricklayers Arms as was on offer. It was a stable job and he had been there for eight years. He hoped to be made a manager one day and saw no reason why he couldn’t work for British Rail till he retired on a decent pension. Then, in November 1975, he was arrested by Ridgewell.
Mehmet stood trial at the Old Bailey in April 1977, one of 12 people accused of stealing by re-labelling parcels to direct them to other addresses and then selling on the goods. All but one were employed by British Rail at the Bricklayers Arms, a vast London depot that dealt with between 120,000 and 160,000 parcels a week, of which about two-thirds were mail-order goods.
After a trial lasting nine weeks and two days, Mehmet was convicted of conspiracy to steal, handling stolen goods and two counts of theft. Peterkin was convicted of conspiracy to steal and was also sentenced to nine months.
Regu remembers the night the police arrived at the family home. He was six years old. He discovered later that his father was already being held by the police. “I was asleep and I woke up because of the commotion,” he says. “There were two or three police officers rummaging through the house. Mum was upset and cuddling me, telling me there was nothing to worry about.” But there was. Ridgewell was planting stuff at the house while pretending to look for stolen property.
The next time Regu saw his father was in prison. By now, he says, Mehmet seemed very different from the father who took such pride in his appearance. “He looked dishevelled and as if he’d been physically manhandled. He would cry every time we saw him in prison. So yeah …” He trails off, tearful. “I’m still upset now, thinking about it.”
Without Mehmet’s salary, Gulser couldn’t afford to pay the rent. She and Regu found themselves homeless. Friends withdrew from them. “Word went out about what had happened to my father and all of a sudden people started to step back because they thought Dad was a criminal.” The Turkish Cypriot community was conservative and respectful of authority, Regu says. “People wouldn’t believe he was innocent, because nobody goes to prison for nothing, right?”
Over the next few months, he and his mother moved from hostel to hostel. They were hellish, Regu says, and many of the residents were racist. “There were occasions when we got to the bathroom door and they’d put faeces on the door handle, so Mum would have to open the door with a tissue.” Again, he becomes tearful.
The twins were born a year after Mehmet was released. Today, we are at Onur’s house in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire. All three brothers are now fathers and have done well for themselves. Regu works in IT. The twins achieved identical grades in identical subjects in their GCSEs, went on to become geography teachers and now run a gym franchise. We sit around a table laden with crisps, brownies, cheese and meats as they tell their story. It is all very different from the home they grew up in, where money was scarce and luxuries nonexistent.
Mehmet came out of prison unrecognisable. He had been a confident, sociable man who enjoyed his work, loved to dance and played in goal for a local football team. Now, he was sad, introverted and suspicious of everything – most of all the police. Their mother, a pieceworker who made skirts at home, was much the same. Mehmet struggled to find work after his conviction, so he drove minicabs at all hours.
Arda says his father was broken. He knew that most people believed he was a crook: “We’ve even had comments made by our own family.” One relative described them as being “dragged up, not brought up, because Dad had been to prison”. Mehmet believed he had failed his family. “He found it difficult to accept that he couldn’t give us everything he felt we deserved,” says Arda. “Because he couldn’t get a proper job, he never had enough money. He suffered from depression. He felt he’d let everybody down.” Their father rarely talked about what happened. “I remember asking him about it once and he refused flat out to have a conversation about it,” Onur says.
Bits of the story would emerge when he was upset. “It would come out in an angry way,” Regu says. “It wasn’t a therapeutic coming-out. It was more like: ‘This is what I’ve been through and you’re arguing with me about something trivial.’” Arda adds: “He used to say: ‘They made me out to be a liar, they made a mockery of me.’”
Regu continues: “He had complete mistrust of anybody who wasn’t in our close-knit family. His outlook on the world was just mistrust. Dad became quite reclusive. He didn’t want to speak to anybody or have any friends.”
Regu was not only an older brother to the twins; he was something of a father figure. “Do you boys remember when Dad got robbed and beaten up in his cab?” he asks them. “He got robbed for his takings and they beat him black and blue. Eyes shut, limping around. And he wouldn’t even go to hospital in case they called the police. I was saying to him: ‘Dad, I’m going to call the police, because you’ve been robbed,’ and he wouldn’t let me.” He lived in constant fear of being fitted up again. Or, even worse, his boys being fitted up.
“We had a police community officer who’d come to the school and there was an occasion when we were allowed to bring our bikes in, which was great fun,” Regu says. “They told us how to ride it safely and they said bring your bike at the weekend and PC Thomas will be there and we’ll be able to stamp your postcode on to the frame of your bike in case it gets nicked. I told Dad I wanted to take my bike to get it stamped and he refused. He said: ‘I don’t want you going anywhere near the police. Just look after your bike.’”
Did Mehmet ever recover his trust in people? Regu shakes his head. “No, not in Britain,” he says. “In summer, we’d go out to Cyprus for three or four weeks. He was a different person there – totally relaxed. I guess he felt safe and secure in the environment and the people.” But the anxiety returned as soon as he got back to London.
The boys say the conviction had a huge impact on their lives, too. There was the financial struggle, for starters. “We were poor, right?” Regu says, looking to the twins for confirmation. “Come Christmastime, the kids would be out playing with their new toys, walkie-talkies and all that, and we had none of that.”
There is another thing, Onur says: “We weren’t as confident as we should have been, because we lived in a little bubble that was hidden away from the world. We were overly protected. They didn’t want us to be exposed to the challenges of life.”
***
While Gulser was astonished to receive the letter from the CCRC suggesting the possibility of an appeal, the boys were less surprised. They hadn’t told her that they had heard of a case similar to Mehmet’s being overturned – that of Stephen Simmons, who had been convicted of stealing mailbags from the Bricklayers Arms in 1975. Simmons was cleared in 2018.
Five years earlier, in 2013, Simmons had called a legal phone-in on LBC radio to ask for advice about his case and was told to try Googling his arresting officer. When he searched for DS Ridgewell of the BTP, he was shocked to discover the officer had been jailed for the identical offence four years after his own conviction. If he hadn’t happened to hear that radio show, it is unlikely he would ever have been cleared – and nor would Ridgewell’s other victims.
After the convictions of three of the Oval Four were overturned in December 2019, thanks in part to Simmons’ case, Lord Burnett, then the head of the judiciary in England and Wales, said: “We would wish only to note our regret that it has taken so long for this injustice to be remedied.” Still, the BTP did not refer the cases of Mehmet and Peterkin to the CCRC.
Regu told his father about Simmons. “I said: ‘Do you remember who arrested you?’ Dad said: ‘Yeah, I remember the bastards.’ I showed him a picture of Ridgewell and said: ‘Is that him?’ He went white as a sheet and said: ‘I don’t want to look at it.’ I tried to say this is a good thing, we could get in touch with people and try to get them to clear your name. He said: ‘They’ll never do it; they’ll probably put me in prison again. I don’t want to talk about it,’ and that was it.”
They never talked about it again. In 2021, Mehmet died, at 77. Gulser received the letter from the CCRC the year after. “This sounds mean, but I remember thinking that the timing was good,” Arda says. “Because if my dad was alive, I don’t think he would have allowed us to go through with it.”
***
While Mehmet struggled silently with his conviction, Peterkin desperately tried to get his overturned. In January 1978, he told the appeal court why the case against him made no sense. “The railway police searched my house on 16 November 1975 and found nothing. They arrested seven of my workmates on my shift on the same night and charged them. Then, Wednesday night, they asked me to come into their office, searched me and alleged to have found two labels on me. I did not have those labels on me,” he said in his statement.
“The only explanation I can give is that either the police put [them] there or a member of staff put [them] in my jacket while it was hanging in the cloakroom. If I was guilty of conspiracy to steal with these men, why would I be walking around with incriminating evidence on me at work just three days after they had been arrested and my house searched?”
The judges ruled that, as there had been no error in the way that the evidence had been put to the jury, they could not reverse its decision. Peterkin’s appeal was refused.
In 1980, Ridgewell and two other police officers were convicted of the offences for which they had arrested Peterkin and Mehmet. Ridgewell, the more senior officer and the ringleader, was sentenced to seven years; DC Douglas Ellis, who had given four and a half days evidence at Mehmet and Peterkin’s trial, received six years. DC Alan Keeling was sentenced to two years. All three had investigated Mehmet and Peterkin’s case.
Perhaps even more staggering was the fact that Ridgewell was still in a position to fit up innocents while committing robbery. He should have been sacked from the police years before.
***
The first time Ridgewell came to the public’s attention was as a cocky 20-year-old who had returned from the briefest of stints in the British South Africa police in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to re-join the police. He told people that he had been working in Rhodesia for eight years. The reality was that he had deserted after three weeks when Rhodesia declared unilateral independence from Britain in November 1965. Desertion was a criminal offence and there was a warrant out for his arrest.
Ridgewell was a charismatic, highly plausible young man – a baby-faced cheeky chappy. He gave an interview to the Guardian in which he emerged as a heroic figure for quitting the Rhodesian police on principle because of its racism. In a letter to his commanding officer, he described the force as “a military organisation designed to suppress the Africans”. He came across as noble, brave and eloquent rather than a crook on the run. The arrest warrant was dropped and he got a job with the BTP.
In 1972, seven years after returning from Rhodesia, Ridgewell was put in charge of a new mugging squad in London. Mugging was on the rise on the underground – and a vastly disproportionate number of young black men were being prosecuted for it. Success for Ridgewell meant arrests. Lots of them. So he ensured this happened.
First, Ridgewell and his team pulled four young black men off a tube train at Waterloo station just before midnight, where other members of his team were waiting. The young men had been on their way to a reggae club. They were charged with loitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence. The men signed confessions, but one later said in court: “I just signed it because I was afraid I would get beaten up, too.” One of the men was with his white girlfriend. The police ignored her and she was left on the train. The girlfriend and the young men later said that the police’s story was fabricated.
A magistrate dismissed the case. Lambeth Community Relations Council lodged a complaint and the BTP promised an inquiry, but later said: “No evidence was forthcoming from any witness to support any allegation against any person.”
Next, six young black men were arrested while travelling from Stockwell station in south London. On this occasion, Ridgewell said he followed a group of young black men into a tube carriage, while placing members of his team in the carriages behind and in front. All the officers were plainclothes. Ridgewell claimed the men attempted to rob him before he fought back and arrested them. He claimed one man, Courtney Harriot, produced a knife, which Ridgewell knocked out of his hand with his truncheon.
All the defendants, who became known as the Stockwell Six, pleaded not guilty and testified that the alleged attempted robbery had never happened. They said that the officers had threatened them, been violent and put words in their mouths. Five of the six were convicted; Harriot was sentenced to three years in prison.
A month later, four young black men were arrested by Ridgewell and his team at Oval station on suspicion of stealing passengers’ handbags. The men were members of a Black Power organisation called Fasimbas and had been returning from a political meeting. The officers were plainclothes and didn’t declare initially that they were police, so the defendants thought they were being mugged. They were then taken to a police station where they signed confessions to a series of thefts. They later alleged that they had been beaten up and the confessions forced out of them.
At the Old Bailey, the men – who became known as the Oval Four – faced 17 charges of “robbing persons undetermined”. There were no witnesses for the prosecution, apart from the arresting officers, and no victims were named in any of the charges.
A white woman, Diana O’Connor, said she had seen the officers start the attacks and had attempted to break it up. She was charged with assault. At the trial, O’Connor gave evidence on behalf of Winston Trew, one of the four. “The boy’s eyes seemed to be coming out of his head and his mouth was open as if he was choking to death … That’s why I intervened to stop it,” she said.
After a five-week trial, all four were found guilty of assaulting the officers, as well as two pickpocketings the police claimed to have seen, although they were acquitted of the other charges to which they had confessed in their statements. They were sentenced to two years in prison, reduced to eight months on appeal.
The same year, two young black men were arrested by Ridgewell at Tottenham Court Road station. Again, the police were plainclothes and didn’t identify themselves. Again, the men were charged with assault of the officers, as well as trying to steal women’s handbags. The pair were Jesuit students from Rhodesia who were studying social work at Oxford. The judge, Gwyn Morris, was so appalled by the police witnesses that he threw out the case before hearing the defence.
“I find it terrifying that here in London people using public transport should be pounced upon by police officers without a word by anyone that they are police officers,” Morris said. “One of these men was set upon without a single word uttered about being arrested … How can any possible reliance be placed on these officers?”
At the trial, Ridgewell was asked by a defending counsel if he was “particularly on the lookout for coloured young men”. Ridgewell replied: “On the Northern line, I would agree with that.”
His notoriety was such that both a 1973 BBC Nationwide documentary and a Sunday Times article referred to a calypso song heard in the pubs around Brixton: “If the muggers don’t get you, Ridgewell will.” But despite the newspapers, the documentary and even a judge showing that Ridgewell was a racist with no qualms about framing innocents, the BTP did nothing. He was neither sacked nor disciplined. He was merely moved into another job.
Before long, he arrived at the Bricklayers Arms, where he stole from British Rail and set up innocent employees to take the blame. Again, there appeared to be a racial element to his fit-ups. Ridgewell said he had suspected the men because “the shift was a mixed one of Nigerians and Turks. Normally, the two minority groups operate a strict race barrier between themselves, but these worked closely together.” An article written for BTP Review in 1977, lauding the investigation, stated: “DS Ridgewell shrewdly reasoned that it was a common criminal purpose rather than the pious hope of the Race Relations Board that caused them to overcome their prejudices.” Peterkin, in fact, was African-Caribbean.
Over 11 months, Ridgewell and his colleagues stole 60 van loads of handpicked goods (although it may well have gone on longer). They were exposed after one of Ridgewell’s non-police accomplices was caught transferring parcels; another was found to be carrying a typewritten list of goods provided by Ridgewell.
When the governor of Ford prison in West Sussex asked Ridgewell why he had turned to crime, he is said to have replied: “I just went bent.” But, as we now know, he was bent from the start. Ridgewell died in prison in 1982, at 37, reportedly of a heart attack. But there are rumours that he was killed because he knew too much about corruption at the highest levels in the police.
In 2020, four months after the exoneration of three of the Oval Four, the final member successfully appealed against his conviction. Despite their ordeal, Trew had gone on to be a sociology lecturer at South Bank University in London. He co-wrote a book about Ridgewell (with Graham Satchwell, formerly Britain’s most senior railway detective) called Rot at the Core: The Serious Crimes of a Detective Sergeant. Still, Trew says today, Ridgewell did irreparable damage to his life. “When I came out of prison, I was a very angry man. I had nightmares; I had a stomach ulcer. I hated the world and felt helpless. I was released in July 1973 and I spent all that time till December 2019, when my sentence was overturned, trying to clear my name.”
***
In July 2021, after three members of the Stockwell Six had their convictions quashed, the deputy chief constable of the BTP, Adrian Hanstock, made a statement confirming that the force had examined all records where Ridgewell was the principal investigating officer and “have not identified any additional matters that we feel should be referred for external review”.
But they had not identified Mehmet or Peterkin – nor the five other men convicted alongside them who have still not had their convictions quashed.
We may never know exactly how many people Ridgewell fitted up in his 15 years as a police officer. What we do know is that there have never been so many convictions overturned – 11 so far – and as many lives torn apart as the result of one corrupt officer.
***
The hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice is done and dusted in little more than half an hour.
Henry Blaxland KC, representing Mehmet and Peterkin, tells the court a “systemic failure” by the BTP to investigate prosecutions linked to Ridgewell led to “lamentable delays” in clearing their names. The Crown Prosecution Service does not contest the appeal. Blaxland says the “perfectly respectable and entirely innocent” pair were “fitted up” by a “dishonest, corrupt and racist” police officer.
The three judges retire briefly. Mehmet’s sons sit in silence, their bodies rigid with tension. The judges return. Lord Justice Holroyde declares both men innocent. “We cannot turn back the clock,” he says. “But we can, and do, quash the convictions.” Holroyde acknowledges the “considerable force” in Blaxland’s criticism of the BTP that Ridgewell was not sacked before he had the opportunity to wreak havoc on Mehmet and Peterkin’s lives and that his cases were not reviewed in 1980 after Ridgewell’s conviction. He says it is “very unfortunate” that Peterkin and Mehmet “have not lived to learn of their vindication”.
Outside the court, the two families line up for photographs. They hold placards saying “Justice four decades late” and “Right bent cops’ wrongs”.
The Peterkin family tell me they are relieved, exhausted and upset. “Dad was so ashamed that he told my sister Janice and I that he didn’t want our younger brothers to know,” says his daughter Lil. “He didn’t even tell his best friends; he just told them that he was going away for a while.” Basil Jr, who is here today, found out about his father’s conviction only when the family received the letter from the CCRC in 2022.
After Peterkin’s failed appeal in 1978, he served his time and then moved to the US. Do they think that was related to his conviction? “Yes,” they say in chorus. “He wanted to start a new life,” Janice says. “I remember the day he went to prison. He said: ‘Don’t believe anything you read about me in the papers.’”
Matt Foot, the co-director of the miscarriages of justice organisation Appeal, says the law has to change to ensure that something similar can never happen again. “If a police officer is imprisoned, there should be an automatic independent review of their files for wrongful convictions, imposed at sentence,” he says.
Later, he adds: “This is not just about a corrupt, racist copper. It’s about how he was dealt with, how he was protected and harboured by the BTP and allowed to carry on.”
I email the BTP to ask if it would like to apologise for failing to flag the cases of Mehmet and Peterkin. The response, attributed to the BTP’s chief constable, Lucy D’Orsi, reads: “My colleagues and I are profoundly sorry to all those affected by DS Ridgewell’s atrocious actions and the trauma that victims and their families suffered as a result. I would like to reiterate my sincere apology for the trauma caused to the British African community by a corrupt BTP officer, whose misuse of his powers caused harm not only to the innocent young people criminalised, but also to their families and community.” The email mentions the British African community six times. Mehmet was Turkish-Cypriot. Peterkin was African-Caribbean.
Outside court, Regu tells me how dismayed he is that the BTP has not written to the family to offer an apology. I tell him about D’Orsi’s response to my email. Regu is flabbergasted: “Well, that’s telling, isn’t it? They don’t even know who’s involved in this case and who suffered. That’s shocking.”
Although he is pleased his father’s conviction has been quashed, he doesn’t attempt to hide his anger. “My father could have had a completely different life. Ridgewell was put in a position despite everything they knew about him. And less than three years later he was convicted. Somebody should have said: ‘Hold on, this guy has put a lot of people away for the same crime.’ Their actions, and then their inaction, led to a sequence of events that had a devastating impact on Dad, Mum and us. And all of it could have been prevented. I think that it led to Dad’s early death. They could have given Dad his life back.”
If you have had direct experience of issues with DS Ridgewell and wish to get in touch, please email Appeal’s Matt Foot. You can contact the Criminal Cases Review Commission here
