It was 27 years ago, in October 1995, a young mother and her two young daughters died in an horrific arson attack that shocked the nation.
Diane Jones, 21, and her daughters Shauna, two, and Sarah Jane, 13 months, lost their lives when someone ignited a fire with petrol at their home on the Gurnos housing estate in Merthyr Tydfil. Their families recently marked the anniversary with an emotional vigil.
Diane Jones, 21, and her daughters Shauna, two, and Sarah Jane, 13 months, were killed when someone ignited a fire with petrol at their home on the Gurnos housing estate in Merthyr Tydfil.
What followed in the maelstrom of grief that gripped the community would see three people wrongly accused of involvement in the crime and their and their families lives forever changed. One of them has since died from the heroin addiction into which she sank in jail.
WalesOnline has spoken to one of them Denise O'Sullivan, who has never before given an interview to the media. In a powerful, wide-ranging interview she described the depths of drug addiction she sank into as she struggled to deal with being falsely implicated in the horrific crime and the devastating impact it had on her family.
Her son Jamie took his own life at 16, which she believes was affected by the abuse her family endured when the community believed she had been involved.
Following the arson attack, police quickly came to the conclusion that the fire was started by Donna Clarke, 27, who had an affair with Ms Jones’ partner Shaun Hibberd, who was in prison at the time.
Ms Jones had threatened to reveal the affair to Ms Clarke’s partner, Simon Owens, who was himself shortly to be released from prison after serving a two-year sentence for manslaughter. Having no forensic evidence to link Ms Clarke to the crime, the police built a circumstantial case against her.
It was alleged that her aunt Annette Hewins, 31 at the time and known as Nettie, had bought the petrol used to start the fatal fire from a nearby service station.
Ms Sullivan, then 24, who had been in Ms Clarke’s company on the night of the attack, was said to have given her a false alibi that she had not slipped away for some minutes at the time the fire was started. It is indisputably the case that Ms Sullivan changed her account as she was questioned intensively by detectives.
At their trial, they were all acquitted of murder, but Ms Clarke and Ms Hewins were convicted of arson with intent to endanger life and given prison sentences of 20 years and 13 years respectively.
Ms Sullivan was acquitted of both murder and arson with intent to endanger life, but convicted of perverting the course of justice, for which she received a four-year jail sentence that was reduced by six months on appeal.
In February 1999 the convictions of Ms Clarke and Ms Hewins were quashed after forensic tests proved that the petrol bought by Ms Hewins was of a different kind to that used in the arson attack. Ms Hewins never came to terms with being wrongly convicted, developed mental health problems and turned to drugs while in prison, becoming a heroin addict. She died in 2017 at the age of 51.
The conviction of Denise, now 51 herself, was never quashed because of the inconsistencies in her story as she had spoken to detectives, even though the person she had been accused of giving an alibi to had been cleared.
She has now spoken to us candidly about her life and hopes in her first ever media interview.
She told us: ”I was born and brought up in the Galon Uchaf estate in Merthyr. Then I moved on to the Gurnos estate, which is where I had my first flat, in 1990 when I was 21.
“Everybody was close on the Gurnos estate. It was all friends. Everybody bothered with everybody. The community looked after each other. It was a case of you always had a babysitter, and if you ran out of milk and sugar you could borrow it from a neighbour.
“But also we used to do cannabis and amphetamine - that was like everybody on the estate. Nobody was any different, nobody looked down on anybody. I had two kids at the time. I was 18 when I had Gemma and I was 21 when I had Jamie.
“I got friendly with Donna and I knew Nettie through Donna, although I was closer with Donna.”
At the time she’d already been in trouble with the police for shoplifting and assault. Speaking about the antagonism between Donna Clarke and Diane Jones, Ms Sullivan said: “They fell out over the affair Donna had with Shaun.
“Diane found out. She didn’t like it and when she and Donna seen each other they used to row at each other. Nine times out of 10 it was Diane screaming at Donna, which you can understand. But the affair wasn’t going on - it stopped in the February.”
On the October evening when the arson attack took place, Ms Sullivan had just been released from Eastwood Park women’s prison in Gloucestershire, where she’d been for three weeks after breaching a probation order.
She said: “I went up to the Iron Horse pub where my sister was working and took an acid trip. Donna phoned me and a number of us decided to go to a party. On the way we passed my auntie’s house. She’d been beaten up by her partner and I went to see that she was all right.
“I went up the steps to her door and it’s then that the police later said Donna had gone off to set fire to Diane’s house. But she didn’t - she was with us all the time.”
When they got to the party house, the host had cooked some magic mushrooms.
Ms Sullivan said: “Donna said she had to go and check on her kids. She opened the front door and said ‘Oh my God, there’s smoke!’
All of them left the party and ran to where the smoke was coming from. When they got closer, they could see that Ms Jones’ house was on fire.
Days later, when she was being questioned at Canton police station in Cardiff, Ms Sullivan gave contradictory statements about what had happened on the night.
She said: “We were taking drugs in the police station and taken back and forth [to be questioned]. The police said to me they knew Donna had done it, that she’d be put away for 45 years, having breakfast tea and dinner with Rose West and Myra Hindley, and she’d be taking me with her.
“They had me in there, writing statement after statement after statement. I was under the influence of drugs and it was in the early hours of the morning.
“I don’t know why they charged me with triple murder. They never said to me I went near Diane’s house, they never said I’d passed the petrol to her or anything to do with causing that fire.
“The trial was a farce. It was a serious case - a mother and two children murdered. But every prosecution witness they had was turned into a hostile witness because they weren’t saying what they wanted them to say.”
The jury’s verdicts seemed inconsistent. How could Ms Clarke and Ms Hewins be simultaneously not guilty of murder, but guilty of murder with intent to endanger life?
Ms Sullivan said: “We’ve been saying this since day one. We were told by our legal teams that we wouldn’t get found guilty, that we’d be coming home. We genuinely thought the jury would see it wasn’t us.
“The way the trial went was a joke. When we got sentenced, me and Donna went back to Eastwood Park and we went on heroin. From the day we were sentenced, I couldn’t tell you about my appeal. I was smoking heroin downstairs in the Appeal Court before I went into the courtroom.
“I can’t even remember coming out of there. I should be ashamed to say it, but I was an addict at that time. It was the only way I could cope with the thought they honestly believed we had done it.”
Asked how she felt about the fact that her two co-accused had been cleared, while she was the only one left with a conviction, Ms Sullivan said: “I’m appalled by it. I want my name cleared. And if possible I want justice for Diane and her kids. And for Donna and Nettie. None of us did anything wrong.
“Me and Donna started taking heroin before Nettie did. Then Donna got shipped out to Durham and I got shipped out to Cookham Wood in Kent. Nettie was left in Eastwood Park and couldn’t cope without us.
“She wrote me a letter one day saying ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been playing the game ‘chase the dragon’ [slang for taking heroin].’ “I was devastated. I didn’t expect her to get involved with it.”
Ms Sullivan said that ever since she was released from prison, she and members of her family had suffered abuse.
“They were outside my mother’s, smashing my mother’s windows, trying to attack me. They’ve never stopped with the abuse. It’s still ongoing. They call me ‘murderer’.
“I got jailed for supplying heroin. When I came out of prison, I was a really bad heroin addict. I couldn’t afford it, so I had to sell it. I was doing shoplifting just to survive and get my next fix.
“When we went to prison for the arson, there were some officers who really believed in us. One of them, when I went back to Eastwood Park for supplying heroin, was devastated for me.
“She said ‘Denise. I can’t believe you’re back. You know, every day you’re taking that heroin, Merthyr police will always have a hold of you.’
“So I went to my cell and shut the door and thought, she’s right. I only went on the heroin because of what they charged me with and what they put me through.
“I thought no, I’m not doing it. And I asked to go on the drug-free wing. She moved me to D wing - that’s the drug-free wing - and I never looked back. There’s more drugs in prisons than there is out on the street. You can get them for next to nothing in prisons. I can’t thank the prison officer enough for getting me off heroin.”
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But ever since her last stint in prison ended in 2004, Ms Sullivan says the abuse has continued.
She said: “I’ve had a lot of assaults and I’ve retaliated and been charged with assaulting people. Sometimes the police come to me and warn me not to go down the street.”
Asked if she’d thought about moving away, she said: “No. I’m not running away. I’ve done nothing wrong. My friends and my family are all around. Why move away? For what? I don’t go out unless I’ve got appointments to go to.”
She said her best friend Colleen Miles, who has supported her from the outset, had suffered abuse too: “She’s also been assaulted and had her cars burned out. She’s been to hell and back for being my friend. She’s even been accused of being a murderer too.”
Ms Sullivan has also had to suffer the agony of her son Jamie committing suicide at the age of 16.
She said: “When I was in prison he and my older daughter Gemma used to have people trying to attack them - trying to burn them. They were five and three at the time. Those involved in the attacks were congregating in a local pub which was shut down and pulled down.”
The death of Ms Hewins was a further blow: “I was devastated. We’d been through so much together - me and Donna and Nettie. It was like a piece of me went,” she said.
Asked whether all that had happened had made it difficult for her to make relationships, she said: “Yes. I don’t trust nobody at all. I’m just existing, day by day. I’m not living my life. I hope things can get better if I can get where I want to be at the Appeal Court and get my conviction quashed.
“It’s been proved that Nettie didn’t supply Donna with petrol and their convictions have been overturned. So there’s no reason left for why I was charged in the first place.
“There were differences [between her statements] but throughout the interviews I was taking cannabis. There is proof of that on the tapes [undercover surveillance tapes in the room at Canton police station where she was held between interviews that have since been disclosed].”
Evidence obtained from interviewing suspects when they are under the influence of alcohol or drugs is inadmissible.
Ms Sullivan is being helped by the miscarriage of justice campaigner Michael O’Brien, one of the Cardiff Newsagent Three who spent 11 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit.
He said: “There will be new evidence presented to the court. An application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on Denise’s behalf will be made with a view to getting the conviction quashed. We want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and leave everybody in no doubt that Denise and the other two defendants were 100% innocent.”
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