Clive Driscoll - In Pursuit of the Truth: My life cracking the Mets most notorious cases (subject of the ITV series, Stephen)

Contents

Gripping, inspiring and at times shocking, In Pursuit of the Truth is a warts-and-all account of modern day policing seen through the eyes of a man who has dedicated his life to making a difference.

Former Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll made his reputation solving the unsolvable. Most famous for finally securing the convictions for the murderers of Stephen Lawrence in 2012, Clives prodigious rise through the ranks of the worlds most famous police force, the Met, saw him head up some of the most high profile units at Scotland Yard.

Clive has dedicated his 35-year career to unearthing the truth. This is his brutally honest story.

Born in Battersea in 1951, Clive Driscoll is a former Detective Chief Inspector for the Met police, retiring in May 2014 after an illustrious 35 year career. With a legacy of tackling cold and unsolvable cases, Clive is most famous for securing the convictions for the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. Now working as a police consultant for his own company, 1 is 2 many Ltd., the money he receives helps to fund the three charities he supports: The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, helping families who feel they have not received justice; True Honour, helping families who have been the victims of honour-based violence; and The Paracelsus Trust, helping traumatised victims in allegations of historic abuse. Clive lives in Surrey with his wife, and has five children and seven grandchildren.

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Epub ISBN: 9781473503922
Version 1.0

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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright Clive Driscoll 2015

Clive Driscoll has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Ebury Press in 2015

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN 9781785030062
TPB ISBN 9781785030079

For my mum, Christine Helen Rose Driscoll and my brother, Barry Leslie Driscoll. Without them, I would not be where I am today.

To Alfred and Doreen Laurence, I will never be able to repay you.

In Pursuit of the Truth gives its reader a snapshot of what it was like in the 80s and 90s for a police officer working in South London at the time, and Clive Driscolls no-holds-barred description of those who he had been in contact with.

I found it amazing that some officers would put so many obstacles in the way of someone who wanted to catch criminals, but this book outlines the fairness in the job that Clive was trying to do for individuals. This always came across to me too.

Clives book gives the reader in-depth knowledge into how he worked; his methodology of getting to the truth. For victims, they need an officer with integrity, someone who cares about them and what they are going through, and this is what you get with Clive.

Reading this book throws light on some of the problems that happened in my own case; that botched job has been well documented over the years. But it is not just my case that suffered from a lack of commitment from officers. How many families have suffered over the years from police incompetence and, in some cases, lack of commitment to the job? The public want to have the trust and confidence in the police force because, as we know, we need them to protect and uphold the law. There needs to be a continued root and branch into the history of police misdemeanour in order to turn the police force around, and to get public support and encourage young people to join the police.

Doreen Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE June 2015

In April 1993, my son Stephen Lawrence was stabbed and brutally murdered when he was on his way home in Eltham, London. This murder was to change my familys lives forever.

In the beginning, we spent a few years being frustrated and pushed around. A number of assumptions were made by police officers about my son and my family. Some told lies, possibly to cover for others who might have been complicit in protecting those who were suspected of my sons murder. Others were seen as corrupt, and allegedly in the pockets of known criminals and drug dealers. To this day, some of those suspicions have not gone away.

We were accused of using the murder of Stephen to promote a secondary agenda to seek publicity for ourselves and to create a state of distrust and a loss of confidence in the Metropolitan Police. There was so much concern about our quest for justice that the Home Office used a secret force, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to infiltrate the legitimate campaigns my family and other families had organised, in order to gather intelligence and possibly even distract and smear some campaigns to stop us from getting justice. This process was not limited to just the Met but across some police forces across the UK as well.

My family was, however, not deterred by the lack of support from the police service and their attempts to discourage us. We started to make inroads into what was a strongly resistant environment and we were against huge powerful authorities who were not willing to be defeated by a small unrelenting black family.

We worked hard with the support of lots of people, including very dedicated police officers who recognised the need to investigate what had then become seen as a racist murder and to tackle the endemic issues which existed in society as well as within the Met.

One such fine police officer was Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll. He took over what became the Stephen Lawrence Investigation and was very determined to tell my family the truth. He gave us a commitment that he would do everything in his power to secure a conviction for the murderers of my son.

It became patently clear right from the start that Clive had a great deal of integrity, a drive to put criminals behind bars and was determined to interrogate all the available evidence again and again. As a result, he identified new crucial evidence including photographs of the then suspects disposing of evidence and blood specks on a jacket which was eventually used to jail two men.

Clive Driscoll helped my family and I to regain some of the lost confidence in the Met, due to the way he treated us. He understood the need for us to have a proper investigation for the murder of our son. He did not hide behind the need to save the blushes of the Met and other police forces by managing the truth. He even sometimes put his own position at risk because he felt he needed to go to where the evidence and the investigation led him.