Locked up for 38 years, now found innocent

Peter Sullivan spent more than 38 years in jail in what has been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history. He has finally been cleared after DNA evidence was finally tested that proved he had not been involved.

Mr Sullivan was convicted in 1986 for the murder of 21-year-old Diane Sindall. Ms Sindall had been a florist who took a part-time evening job in a local pub to help her make ends meet. She was attacked after her flower delivery van ran out of petrol in Birkenhead, Merseyside, as she drove home having finished an evening shift. Having left the pub at 11.45pm, her van stopped. She was seen walking down the road just after midnight, and was seen by a passing taxi driver with a man in what he said seemed to “be an argument between two people who knew each other”. Between 12.30am 2am screams were heard, and that was when she was killed.

Her half-naked body was found the next morning. She had been badly injured and her body mutilated, including with bite marks, and it is thought she remained alive for some time after the attack but died of a brain haemorrhage.  A pathologist who examined her body said her injuries were the worst he had seen, even after car accidents.

Popular TV programme Crimewatch featured the attack, calling for witnesses, and police interviewed many men from the area where the attack had taken place. After some people reported seeing clothes being burned amongst a clump of bushes, they said they thought it was a man named “Peter”.

Police then looked closely at Mr Sullivan, who had been one of many men interviewed earlier and who was known to have been out drinking on the night of the crime. He has learning difficulties and was described as “easily persuadable”. He was interviewed without a solicitor present as the police later said a lawyer would “interfere with their ability to question him”, and he confessed to the killing. Once represented he retracted the statement, but it was still given in evidence in court.

Ever since his conviction he and his legal team have said he was innocent. Now, following a referral from the CCRC, DNA has been analysed that was on Ms Sindall’s body at the time of her death, and it suggests Mr Sullivan was not the killer. The Court of Appeal has now ruled he was wrongly convicted.

The police DNA database has not identified the actual killer, and so not only has Mr Sullivan been wrongly locked up for nearly four decades, but the man who committed the crime has never been identified and held to account. Mr Sullivan’s family issued a statement after the Court of Appeal verdict saying that whilst they are delighted he has been freed, their thoughts are with the family of Diane Sindall, who have not had justice.

Mr Sullivan had originally applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in 2008, asking for the DNA evidence to be checked, but the body – the UK’s miscarriages of justice watchdog – turned him down. In a statement after the Court of Appeal decision, the CCRC suggested that it was only because of its decision to refuse Mr Sullivan’s application that he was eventually exonerated. It said that scientific techniques to check DNA had advanced in the intervening 17 years, and had it ordered the testing of forensic samples at the time, they might have been destroyed in the process and therefore unavailable for the more recent testing which established his innocence.

Merseyside Police said it reopened the investigation into the murder of Ms Sindall in 2023, at the time the CCRC stated that it was referring the case back to the Court of Appeal. The force said it regretted that DNA testing at the time of Mr Sullivan’s arrest was in its infancy and the “vital evidence” was not available to the original investigation team.