Following an exhaustive investigation, the CCRC has decided to refer Mr Park’s murder conviction for a fresh hearing at the Court of Appeal.
The Commission is referring the case because it considers there is a real possibility that the Court will quash the conviction in light of new evidence. In the Commission’s view that real possibility arises from the cumulative effect of a number of matters including:
the non-disclosure of expert opinion undermining the consistent implication by the prosecution that Gordon Park’s climbing axe, Exhibit 1 at trial, could be the murder weapon.
the non-disclosure of information undermining the reliability of a prosecution witness who gave evidence of a prison confession.
new scientific evidence showing that Gordon Park was not a contributor to DNA preserved within knots of the rope used to bind Carol Park’s body.
renewed relevance of expert evidence, presented for the appellant at the first appeal, that a rock found in the lake near Mrs Park’s remains could not specifically be linked to rocks at Bluestones (the Parks’ home).
The Commission’s painstaking and detailed review has considered numerous issues and lines of enquiry and involved several visits to Cumbria, interviews with multiple witnesses old and new, the use of cutting edge DNA testing and the investigation of multiple potential alternative suspects.
During the review we have used our section 17[1] powers dozens of times to obtain material from the Forensic Archive, seven individual police forces, the courts, the Crown Prosecution Service, prison authorities, the Probation Service, and a number of other government agencies and public bodies. ...
"A PASTOR claims he has been barred from prison - for praying.
Evangelist minister George Harrison, from Swinton, says jail bosses have stopped his visits to friend and convicted murderer Gordon Park. He claims it is because they are angry over a prayer vigil he led for Park outside Strangeways prison, Manchester.
Park was found guilty of the 'lady in the lake' murder in 2005.
He was given a life sentence nearly 30 years after the body of his wife Carol was found in Coniston Water but many still protest his innocence.
Pastor Harrison, of Pendlebury Evangelical Church, is one of those. He made regular visits to Park while he was at Strangeways. On the first anniversary of his jailing he held a vigil outside the prison.
But since Park was transferred to Garth prison in Cumbria the pastor says he has been unable to gain access.
He claims bosses at the Cumbrian jail demand a visiting order which is unfair because it would rob Park of a visit from his present wife. He said: "Since Gordon was moved to Garth I've only been let in once and apparently that was by mistake.
"One of the officials there said it was because of the vigil but I don't understand that because they let me continue to see him at Strangeways after it had taken place.
"I've sent lots of letters to Garth's head of security but I get no response. He has told me verbally that I am 'not what I seem to be' and that me visiting specifically as a pastor 'will never happen here'. It might be more that he is upset with my criticism of Cumbria police's shameful conduct over their investigation into the murder."
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said that each prison retained ministers from various religions 'to ensure that prisoners have every opportunity to practise their religion'.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/prison-ban-on-pastor-for-praying-948512"
In October, campaigners in support of Park said "We have in our possession, a signed, witnessed, statement, made this week, by one of the main prosecution witnesses, stating, ‘police officers did put words in my mouth regarding Gordon Park’ and ‘the police told me what to say in court.’" Pastor George Harrison, acting as a spokesperson for the campaigners, also claimed that the appeals process was flawed and "rendered virtually impossible" due to costs.Other fronts for the campaign included an offer of £5,000 for anyone providing evidence that led to Gordon's freedom. Included in this were planned adverts in the North-West Evening Mail and leaflets to 20,000 homes in the Furness area. However, this was being organised by Harrison, with whom Gordon and his third wife Jennifer stayed during the trial. Jeremy Park wrote to the North-West Evening Mail to confirm that he wanted nothing to do with the reward, and that Harrison had no right to include his name, contact details or email address, or mention the freegordon website, in the adverts. Subsequently, Harrison claimed to have delivered 6,000 booklets and leaflets in the Furness area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_in_the_Lake_trialAn inquest has heard "Lady in the Lake" killer Gordon Park accessed an official report into the prison suicide of mass murderer Harold Shipman more than a year before he was found dead in his own cell.
His third wife, Jennie, told the hearing she sent the official Prisons and Probation Ombudsman report into Shipman's death to her husband in July 2008 at his request.
But he did not tell her why he wanted to read about Shipman's hanging at HMP Wakefield in January 2004.
The discovery of the report by prison authorities flagged up concerns for his welfare while he was serving a life sentence for the murder of his first wife, Carol.
https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2013-03-19/lady-in-the-lake-killer-inquest-hears-evidence/.
"FROM behind the thick brick walls of Manchester Prison, Gordon Park still hopes to persuade the world that he did not murder his wife.
In a letter to The Westmorland Gazette, the convicted Lady in the Lake' killer said his mind was "still in turmoil" about the ten-week trial that led a jury to find him unanimously guilty on January 28.
"I cannot believe it. I'm devastated," he wrote. "If I knew who killed my wife, how, where, why, then I would have said so. I did not know then. I do not know now."
In what has become an infamous case, Park - the cuckolded husband - is supposed to have smashed his wife's face to bits in a fit of jealousy in July 1976.
The prosecution version has it that he then coldly stuffed Carol Ann Park's trussed-up body into a makeshift sack made from her own pinafore dress before dumping her in Coniston Water. The Lady in the Lake', as she has since become known, then lay undiscovered for 21 years.
It is the stuff of sensational TV crime thrillers and the jury was convinced after hearing the evidence that it was the husband whodunnit'. Yet Park maintains he is innocent and remains incredulous that people can believe he - a school teacher with no record of violence - brutally murdered his wife with an ice axe.
He wrote: "I tried to give simple, direct answers to the questions I was asked in court and not to elaborate or justify and believed the truth would speak for itself. It seems that the jury did not like what they heard."
Nine months into his 15-year sentence, Park has declined any in-person interviews and refuses to answer detailed questions about his case. However, Prisoner NV5678 was happy with a written interview' yet the only matters he said he felt able to discuss freely were about his life on the inside.
These days the keen sailor who loved to ramble in the Lakes has to make do with scenes of Cumbria, Yorkshire, Walney and Dalton-in-Furness stuck to the noticeboard of his 13x6ft cell. They have been secured there with sticky tape Park peeled from the sandwich bags prisoners are occasionally given for lunch drawing pins and Sellotape are banned lest they be misused by violent or suicidal inmates.
He describes it as "legalised sensory deprivation" in a prison that looks just like the TV series Bad Girls or Porridge.
"I hate it. I've always been active, doing something for somebody somewhere. Now I can do nothing. Nothing," he wrote.
Park complained that they were sometimes "banged-up" all day if prison officers failed to show for work or on Bank Holidays. The "outrageous" 10p-a-minute phone calls limited his conversations to his third wife, Jenny, who, he said, "needs all the love and support I can give her." Where once he would enjoy days sailing with his son, Jeremy, on Coniston Water, Park fills his time writing daily letters to Jenny on his Formica desk and fretting about cell mates.
"They may smoke incessantly, play loud music, the TV or video games, rifle your drawers, steal, lie etc. There is not a lot you can do about it," he writes. "I watched a guy "chasing the dragon". It frightened me to death. I had never seen that before."
Now on his sixth cell with an agreeable cell-mate, he enthuses that it has the "luxury" of a plug although the window is fitted with a flap so the inmates cannot see outside. There is a TV and an adjacent room with a flushing toilet and hand basin.
A keen churchgoer, Park attends a Sunday morning Church of England Service and said the chaplaincy "are very good".
"There are often 30-odd burly guys, sniffling away and singing with very hoarse voices. Very poignant."
Park has plenty of time on his hands but declined to say if he was writing an autobiography, files from which were mentioned at the trial (in the jury's absence).
He is making use of his education, studying contemporary politics, and has worked in the prison library and IT workshop. He currently earns a prison salary of £5.45 a week.
On the outside, his son, Jeremy, and daughter, Rachel, refuse to believe their father killed their mother and are working on the Free Gordon campaign.
Jeremy hopes a documentary will be made detailing the ways in which he believes his father's conviction was a cruel miscarriage of justice.
ITV's Real Crime programme is also doing a film about the case although not on the basis that it was a wrongful conviction.
Within a month, supporters also hope to have fresh expert evidence to start the long process of trying to quash the conviction in the appeal courts.
But the police and plenty of other people believe the right man is serving time for the vicious murder of a 31-year-old woman. Whether Gordon Park will ever return to his beloved Lake District as a free man is a matter much in doubt.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170304200011/http://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/cumbria/647938.exclusive_convicted_lady_in_the_lake_killer_writes_from_prison/