Graeme Crowley - Who Killed Leanne Holland?. One Girls Murder And One Mans Injustice

First published in Australia in 2007 by
New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Sydney Auckland London Cape Town
Updated edition published 2010

www.newholland.com.au
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Copyright 2010 New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Copyright 2010 in text: Graeme Crowley, Paul Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

A record of this book is held at the National Library of Australia

ISBN 9781742570228
e-ISBN 9781921655616

Dedicated to Leanne Holland, Graham Stafford and the Stafford
Family: all of whom have suffered a grievous injustice.

Many people were instrumental in helping us produce this book.

We would particularly like to thank Robyn Lincoln and Sue Crowley, both of whom provided considerable support and encouragement during the many years of the investigation and the development of this book. This book would not have been possible without their ongoing support. Robyn also provided extensive and invaluable editorial input.

Many journalists assisted us in bringing the case to a wider public, but two in particular deserve special mention. Darrell Giles from Brisbanes Sunday Mail and Greg Carey from Radio 4BC provided a great deal of support as well as extensive coverage of the case itself. Their media reports resulted in a number of poeple coming forward with additional information surrounding the case.

Over a number of years, students in Professor Wilsons Miscarriage of Justice course at Bond University explored the case in great detail and provided valuable insights into some of the forensic and investigatory issues. Some of these students were police officers whose insights were invaluable, but who would prefer to remain anonymous.

Special thanks are due to former Victorian detective Gordon Davie and ex Scotland Yard police Superintendent Robin Napper, whose insights into crucial forensic material associated with the Stafford case helped us immeasurably.

Most of all, we would like to thank all those members of the public who showed us that they were vitally interested in miscarriages of justice by writing or phoning us with encouragement and support. We used to believe that few people in our society were interested in injustice, but we have been proven wrong.

Finally, thank you to the staff of New Holland, in particular Michael McGrath for his persistence and editorial suggestions.

Lindy Chamberlain, Kelvin Condren, Alexander McLeod-Lindsay, Edward Splatt and more recently Andrew Mallard, John Button and Frank Button are just some Australians who have suffered gross miscarriages of justice by being convicted of crimes they did not commit. In each of these cases, subsequent investigations have shown that police and forensic experts made major mistakes, resulting in the conviction of an innocent person.

Some forensic experts and police investigators are fond of saying that their techniques are now so sophisticated that it is all, but impossible for similar miscarriages of justice to occur. Forensic science developments and new investigation techniquesadvances in DNA profiling, new blood typing, crime scene reconstruction or sophisticated ballistics analysisare increasingly seen as a panacea to the mistakes of the past and appear to give police an edge in solving violent crime. Despite these advances, forensic mistakes continue and innocent people are convicted by a justice system that stacks the odds against them.

There are at least two reasons for the persistence of major miscarriages of justice in Australia.

The first relates to our adversarial legal system. Inherited from Britain, the system is designed, at least in theory, to seek out the truth. In the modern world, however, lawyers tend to fight each other and point-score. To this end, they use forensic science and forensic experts to gain ascendancy over the other side rather than to pursue truth and justice impartially. Sadly, trial processes, as they play out in front of juries in courts today, have become more a matter of salesmanship than a quest for the truth. It is often the case that the most eloquent lawyer wins.

The second reason revolves around how the police and prosecution mount a case against a suspect. Natural justice is supposed to ensure that a suspect receives a fair trial and that all evidence, for and against the suspect, is presented to the court. It is our view that the adversarial system gives police enormous discretion over what evidence is followed up or ignored and over which suspect is eventually interrogated, detained and charged.

Unlike the system of justice in most European nations, where a judge or non-police official independently oversees the process, Australias adversarial procedures allow the police to cull the evidence they collect. Unless the defence is able to pour substantial resources into their own investigation, the jury will have no idea that what is presented to them by police and prosecution is potentially distorted. In the worst-case scenario, evidence may have been illegally obtained or fabricated. However, the evidence does not have to fall into this category to give a misleading impression to a jury.

The Stafford case exemplifies both of these flaws in police and legal procedures, and this is one of the main reasons why this book was written. We believe that the conviction of Graham Stuart Stafford for the murder of Leanne Sarah Holland is a significant miscarriage of justice in the Australian judicial system. It is an even greater and unnecessary travesty of justice when it is obvious that the criminal justice system and forensic science appear to have learned very little from the mistakes made in the Chamberlain, and other cases, involving convictions of innocent people based almost entirely on forensic evidence.

Paul Wilson, a criminologist, has written a great deal on wrongful convictions in murder cases. He became involved in this case because he believes that, more than any other case in recent years, it shows how easily such travesties can come aboutand how difficult it is to correct such mistakes. Graeme Crowley, a former police officer who served in the Queensland force for twelve yearsspent many years investigating the facts surrounding the murder of Leanne Holland and the police case against Graham Stafford. He, too, is convinced that the criminal justice system has failed utterly in this case. So they are both drawn to the inescapable conclusion that not only has the life of an innocent man been destroyed, but a violent sexual killer has escaped justice.

The brief facts are that Leanne Sarah Holland, twelve years of age, went missing on Monday 23 September 1991 from her home at 70a Alice Street in Goodna, an outer western suburb of Brisbane. Her body was found three days later, ten kilometres away, dumped on a bush track at Redbank Plains. She had been viciously battered to death. It is possible that she was sexually interfered with and tortured. She had been apparently burned in a number of places, perhaps with a cigarette, and marks may have been carved into her skin after she died. It was a horrendous crime and all the more brutal given the childs age.