Campaigners on behalf of a prisoner claiming to be wrongly convicted for the murder of his father have accused the police of ‘tunnel vision’ for failing to follow up on a list of ‘enemies’.  Mark Alexander, who has always protested his innocence, is hoping the new information will encourage Thames Valley Police to take another look at evidence they have.

Mark Alexander is serving life for the murder of his 70-year-old father, Samuel, found buried in concrete in 2010. He denies any involvement and believes his father fell foul of revenge. The journalist Robin Eveleigh has been investigating the case for a podcast – see here for his attempts to unveil fresh evidence on his secret life and possible involvement in fraud.

The journalist has now unearthed a contact list drawn up by Samuel including a list of ‘enemies’ featuring three names including that of Edward Putman, a conman who attempted to defraud the National Lottery and who also had a conviction for rape of a teenager. A decade before the murder, Putman had rented a flat owned by Samuel Alexander. There is no evidence to suggest that Putman was involved in Samuel’s murder; but Alexander’s campaign claim that Putman’s violent past was not raised at Mark Alexander’s trial and they are concerned that no effort was taken to investigate a suspect.

‘It seems astonishing to me that this information wasn’t put before the jury at Mark’s trial,’ Eveleigh told the Justice Gap. ‘We don’t know at this stage whether that was due to oversight or deliberate omission, but clearly it could have had a material impact on the jury’s view of the kind of people in Samuel’s circle. Whether you believe Mark killed his father or not, I think that if you ever found yourself in his position, you’d want a fair hearing. You’d want the jury to deliver a verdict based on all the evidence available, not a curated selection.’

The contact list was recovered from the father’s hard drive and included in a list of exhibits for Alexander’s trial – see here in yesterday’s Sun. According to The Sun, Putman pulled off his £2.5million fake lottery ticket scam just a week before the date police say Samuel was killed. Alexander told paper that it appeared ‘no effort was made to investigate this, which is extraordinary.’

‘It’s so obvious now that this should have been looked into at the time – it sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s symptomatic of the tunnel vision which characterises the entire police investigation.’
Mark Alexander

The other two ‘enemies’ were family members, one had since died, who had been involved in a property dispute with him. Records show police visited them twice in their enquiries.

Mark Alexander’s campaign said that they were ‘hoping this new information will encourage the Crown Prosecution Service and Thames Valley Police to re-examine the evidence they have in this case’. ‘One of the oddities of disclosure in digital forensics is that a defendant will never see all the material that is available on the devices that have been seized. They have to submit a list of ‘relevant’ keywords to the police and just hope that they haven’t missed anything. So in Mark’s case this significant development means that there will be new material to look at that was there all along, but which is only now “relevant”.’

Alexander has submitted a request for additional disclosure this week in relation to Putnam ‘so we will have to wait for the CPS to take a look at this and respond’. ‘We are all keen to understand why they did not approach Mr Putnam in 2010, and what they are able to do to develop this avenue of inquiry now. Clearly, Mr Putnam would have been an important person to call at Mark’s trial.’

Alexander was 22 – and in the final year of a law degree when he was charged with his father’s murder – completed his minimum 16 year tariff term last week. ‘That it has taken 16 years for this to come to light is lamentable,’ the campaign said. ‘There have been too many examples of this in recent years and work needs to be done to fix the fracture lines in our criminal justice system that have enabled bad convictions in otherwise weak cases. Justice may have been delayed, but we are confident that it will not be denied.’