Chris Jefferies said himself that he had seen or heard people at the gate, while he was parking his car at around 9pm.Apparently he told the same to some of his neighbours. This has been well documented. He did not say who the people were, and, according to him, he didn't know. The media got hold of it, and this is why they were pestering him shortly before he was arrested. He denied (to the media) that he had seen Joanna with two other people, and said that what he had told the police was "much much vaguer than that."
Christopher Jefferies has never stated explicitly that the did not identify the people he saw. He implied it when he was doorstepped by journalists the day before his arrest, and made his much quoted remark about his sighting being "Very, very, very very, vague". He was angry, not least because he claimed that the press had a garbled version of what he had told the police.
You need to be clear that the landlord was deliberately set up by the police, and that both he and the police have always been economical with the truth. Both CJ and Chief Constable Colin Port testified to the Leveson Inquiry, and what they said was important.
Christopher Jefferies told Leveson that someone in the police had leaked parts of his 2nd witness statement to the press. Colin Port told Leveson that he knew of eight persons whom CJ had told about the persons he had seen on Joanna's front path, implying that the press could have got it from neighbour's gossip. Only the police, however, had a motive to "garble" the details of the landlord's sighting.
The leak took place during the late afternoon or evening of the day when DCI Phil Jones gave his first press conference. Therefore it can ONLY have come from the police, since the neighbours could have gossiped at any time. Christopher Jefferies was doorstepped the following morning, and by that time he was already aware of what the press was alleging he had seen.
The landlord was deliberately "groomed" to make him appear a suitable suspect. He was angry and he looked eccentric. The arrest of the landlord was certainly orchestrated so as to entrap Vincent Tabak, who fell for the bait because he and Tanja had heard the landlord's story from the horse's mouth, and it was a totally different story from the one the landlord admitted to when he was doorstepped. The young couple thought they were catching the landlord out incriminating himself. They could not know that CJ must have kept his other neighbours, who were still at home, abreast of what was going on, so they too did not at once reach for their telephones.
None of the "vilification" stories that the press published during CJ's arrest were attributed. The press would never have published these anonymously unless the ex-pupils, neighbours etc. had given their names to the journalist and the editor. Therefore these stories about CJ's eccentricities came from a trusted source - the police.
