pride of fleet street (updated)

While the Guardian is entirely coy about the newspapers who pushed the hounding of Colin Stagg ("a lynch-mob mentality, encouraged enthusiastically by sections of the press") there's no confusion about who led the charge. The decade-long pursuit of Stagg by the Daily Mail (aided by the Mail on Sunday and The People) has proven why the title of the gutter press is well-deserved.

Of particular note is the attempt by that corner of the press to absolve themselves of any role in the relentless smear of Stagg, while still seeking to perpetuate it. Writing a 4000 word feature in 1994 for the Mail on Sunday not longer after the collapse of the case, Brian Masters spelt out the police's logic - never once admitting that the same logic had been accepted uncritically and pushed repeatedly by that very same paper.

Instead, there was an attempt to absolve the "naive" police for their actions:

But it was not the fault of the court that there was no evidence to connect Colin Stagg to the crime. It was the fault of naive and increasingly desperate police methods born of understandable frustration.

before shifting blame onto the Crown Prosecution service for listening to them:

What case did the Crown hope to present against Colin Stagg? There was no murder weapon, no motive, no evidence of previous personality disorder apart from one instance of indecent exposure, no forensic evidence to link him to the brutal murder of Rachel Nickell. The prosecution had three planks.

First, Stagg had been on Wimbledon Common at the time of the offence (along with 500 other people). Second, that he had described the position of Rachel's body (not accurately, as it turned out). Third, that his fantasies matched those to be expected according to the predictions of Paul Britton.

When this last plank was disallowed, the first two diminished to invisibility, and the Crown had to concede they had no evidence at all. Hence the formal verdict of not guilty.

..while still leaving open the possiblity of Stagg's guilt.

The People opted for a far less subtle strategy: upon the collapse of the case against Stagg, the paper opted to print the graphically sexual letters he had been inticed to write to an undercover policewoman - evidence barred from use in court:

Today The People prints exclusive extracts of the letters that damned Colin Stagg. Some letters have not been published because they are too offensive. Others have been censored. But we must warn: You may find some of the language offensive.

This is the evidence that never came before a jury.

Our world exclusive brings you the most detailed and fascinating insight yet into the complex psychological game played out between the police and Stagg as they attempted to force him into a confession. The letters, never previously published, give the only available in-depth insight into the mind of Colin Stagg. And they graphically reveal the emotional and psychological triggers behind the murder squad's belief that Stagg was guilty.

Once again, no mention is made of the fact that The People were utterly convinced that the police had their man, choosing to both criticise the poorly constructed case and suggest - with barely concealed delight - that the letters clearly showed Stagg's guilt.

It's also easy to forget the determination of the tabloids to insist that Stagg might still be guilty and that a case against him actually existed for many months afterwards. Lacking any actual evidence, the papers resorted to the favoured strategies of innuendo, speculation and assumption.

Writing a few months later in January 1995, for example, The People gave space for Carol Sarler to resume the smear and ponder " Am I alone in thinking there's something more than a bit ODD about Colin Stagg?" Sarler was, of course, responding to her own paper's version of the man rather than any personal encounter or knowledge - and thus helping to perpetuate the narrative of the dangerous outsider.

Without a trace of irony, the Mail printed a column by John Junor in the same month asking "Will they always stalk Colin Stagg?":

The judge who four months ago chucked out the charges against him of murdering Rachel Nickell spoke scathingly of the methods the police had used in an attempt to trap him into a confession. After the verdict had been given the police issued a statement saying they were no longer proceeding with their inquiries into the murder.

That was a statement which, as I said at the time, indicated the police belief that the not guilty verdict had been a wrong one. But was it?

Mr Stagg does not give the impression of being a particularly pleasant man. I would go a long way to avoid meeting him on Wimbledon Common.

It would be terrible, however, to think that he is going to be hounded for the rest of his life for having been found not guilty of murder when it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

How generous: not innocent until proven guilty, but potentially innocent until the Mail decides otherwise. Once again, the Mail's own role in hounding an innocent man was ignored.

The sudden appearance of impartiality after the fact is perhaps the most nauseating part of the entire episode - as hacks wrote stories about the "hate figure" that Stagg had become and recounted his lawyer's accurate claim that his client had been "depicted as a weirdo, pervert, Satanist, loner and a sad person" without ever recognising their own role.

Also see: The Hounding of Colin Stagg and The Stagg hunt is over.

Correction: The People is actually still in print, though given its circulation it wasn't difficult to accidentally assume otherwise. /snark

UPDATE: See the comments for more of the same - from today and yesterday, including the Mail's claim of a new "disturbing admission."