The Gun In The Wall

Having read the depositions used at the trial , the uneasy feeling I had about this case , intensified , or was I just being Paranoid?. Because of my unease , I contacted a former colleague Colin van Bellen.





Colin had been in the CID at the same time as myself back in the early 1970's , he had stayed the course and retired after thirty years service with the rank of Detective Sergeant , he had been commended on several occasions and had investigated numerous murder cases. He was renown for his thoroughness when collating and studying evidence. Colin took the depositions and studied them carefully for a few days , at the end of his deliberations , Colin e-mailed me and the message I received from him was simply , " Is this a joke ?" From that moment on I realised that I was not being Paranoid and that my initial 'gut' reaction was justified , all was not well with the case of Alfred Moore.

Colin was soon 'hooked' on the Moore case and strongly believed , as did I , that Alfred Moore had been the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice . We visited the murder scene and although almost sixty years had passed , the landscape is very much as it was back in 1951 . We were quickly able to identify the positions of the Policemen on duty that fateful night .

What quickly became apparent to us , in our opinion , was that the events of that night could not have taken place as the Police and the prosecution would have people believe . Further visits and experiments would later confirm our suspicions.

In December of 2007 , Colin and myself approached our local newspaper , the Huddersfield Examiner , with our current findings and our concerns regarding the conviction of Alfred Moore.
The Examiner ran the story and in the published article , we appealed for people with any information on the subject to come forward . The response was amazing and we had some wonderful and interesting feedback.

One name that continually cropped up was that of Clifford Mead . This being the same man who had first connected himself to the shootings back in 1971 , when he had shown certain people a handgun which he claimed was the gun that had killed two coppers at Kirkheaton in 1951. Unfortuntely Mead had died in 1998. The following year his estranged wife Emma Joyce had also passed way , she died in the November. The very same month in 1999 John Mead , their son approached the Examiner and told of finding a handgun in a boudary wall near to the house in which they were living in 1958 . The family was at that time living in Stafford Hill , Kirkheaton which as he crow flies was less than half a mile from the scene of the murders. John Mead told the Examiner that he had found this gun whilst playing with his brother , Barry. It was said to be rusty and appeared to have been in the wall for a few years , in the opinion of John Mead , the weapon had been well concealed . The two boys took this gun to their father Clifford . According to John Mead when their father saw it , he turned white and began to shake slightly . Taking the gun from them he told them in no uncertain terms , never to tell anyone about this gun because it would cause a lot of trouble . John Mead never saw that gun again. In the newspaper article Mead junior , suggested that this may have been the murder weapon used in the killing of the Police officers back in 1951 and he outlined his thoughts on the matter.

In 2008 , John Mead was living in Lancashire , but we were able to trace him. He told us of the finding of the gun and he also told us that as his mother lay on her death bed she instructed him to fetch her a box from a storage cupboard , within that box were old press cuttings relating to the Police shootings and some old photopraphs. It was then that she told John that it was his father , Clifford , who had shot the two Policemen and the wrong man had been hanged.

John Mead gave us other information which seemed to concur with what we already knew. For example when we questioned him about the gun he had found in 1958 , when speaking to the Newspaper (1999) he was vague in his description , when we pressed him he gave information and detail of the weapon which fitted with the Forensic evidence given in court at Moore's trial . He also gave us details of matters which had been not made public and he would certainly not have been privy to this particular information. During the following months we met with John Mead on several occasions and no matter from which tangent we would slant the conversation it always came back to the same thing , ' It was my father who shot those two coppers in 1951'. Both Colin and myself believed that John Mead was telling the truth.