W
HEN THE POLICE
found Paula Gilfoyle hanging in the garage of the family home in the Wirral, Cheshire, they thought she had committed suicide. But when experts examined the crime scene, they concluded she had been murdered. Her husband Eddie was convicted of the offence in 1993, but the dispute about the interpretation of the evidence runs on. Even though he was released on licence after serving eighteen years of his life sentence, Gilfoyle is still determined to prove his innocence.
Eddie Gilfoyle was a veteran of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He left the army in 1986. In January 1991, he started work as a theatre technician at Murrayfield BUPA Hospital in the Wirral where his job was to sterilize and prepare surgical instruments before operations.
He had met Paula Carbert at the wedding of his sister Christine in June 1988. A year after they met, they married and moved into a modest terraced house in Sherlock Lane, Wallasey. But then things began to go wrong. In June 1991, the couple bought a substantial three-bedroom, semi-detached house in Grafton Drive, a quiet residential area, close to Upton Village. It became a bone of contention.
At the time, Paula worked on the assembly line at the local Champion Spark Plug factory and ran a mail-order business from home. Their new house needed a good deal of renovation, so the couple moved into the home of Paula’s parents while the work was being done. This did not suit Eddie and after two months he moved into Grafton Drive, even though the renovation was not complete. Although the remaining work was largely cosmetic, Paula refused to move into the house with him and made it clear that she would not move in at all until the house was completely finished.
While Eddie continued working on the house, Paula went on holiday to Turkey with her mother, Joan Carbert, and her best friend, Julie Poole, who was accompanied by her young child. Eddie was put out. He thought the money would be better spent on their new home.
When Paula returned, she went back to her parents’ home while Eddie continued to live at the new house in Grafton Drive. To speed up the work, Eddie paid his friend, David Mallion, to do various jobs in the house while his own father, Norman Gilfoyle, lent a hand decorating.
But the relationship had not broken down altogether. Paula would call in for an hour or so after she had finished work to see how the decorating was progressing. The couple would occasionally have a night out together and, very occasionally, Eddie would stay overnight with Paula at her parents’ home. Nevertheless, their relationship continued to deteriorate. Even though Eddie and his father managed to complete one bedroom, the living room, the kitchen and the bathroom, Paula still refused to move in. She remained at her parents’ for another three months.
During this time Eddie began a relationship with Sandra Davies, who worked in the canteen at Murrayfield Hospital. They both maintain that this was not a physical relationship. Sandra was having problems with her own marriage and it seems that, in each other, they found a shoulder to cry on. Eddie still did everything he could to get Paula to move into their new home – even, at one point, threatening to go to a solicitor to formalize their separation. It did no good.
Towards the end of October 1991, Eddie had given up all hope of Paula returning to the marriage, so he asked Sandra to move into the house at Grafton Drive with him. She agreed, so Eddie asked Paula to come to Grafton Drive and collect her belongings. When she arrived at Grafton Drive, she announced that she was pregnant. It seemed like a golden opportunity for a new beginning, so Eddie phoned Sandra and told her of his wife’s pregnancy. Sandra was understandably upset as she had been led to believe that Eddie’s relationship with his wife was at an end. But now, under the new circumstances, Eddie explained that he intended to try and make his marriage work. Paula also called Sandra and told her to keep away from her husband.
For a while it seemed that Eddie and Paula had patched up their differences and Paula moved into Grafton Drive. However, on 11 February 1992, Eddie sent Sandra a birthday card, followed by a Valentine’s Day card. More shocks were to come. In April, Paula wrote Eddie a letter saying that the baby she was carrying was not Eddie’s. She stated that she had been having an affair for the past fourteen months with a man called “Nigel”, who was the father of the child. Furthermore, she intended to leave Eddie to go and live abroad with Nigel. The letter also urged him “to try and pick up the pieces with Sandra”. However, there is no evidence that this man existed, or that she was having a relationship with anyone other than Eddie.
At work, Eddie showed the letter to Sandra, who read it and returned it to Eddie, saying she was not prepared to become involved in Eddie’s marital problems. With nobody else to turn to, Eddie asked his boss if he could go home. When asked what was wrong, Eddie broke down and explained that his wife had told him the baby she was having was not his.
However, Paula did not leave and go abroad with Nigel. On more than one occasion, she set a date, but when the day came she did not leave. Gradually, Eddie came to believe that Paula was not telling him the truth about Nigel. Strangely, Paula had not told anyone else of her plans to leave the country with Nigel, and asked Eddie to also keep quiet about her plans. He reluctantly agreed. In the meantime, he tried every way he could to make Paula happy in the hope that she would stay with him. The longer she stayed with him, the more he felt that his attempts to keep her were going to be successful. But on 2 June, Paula dropped another bombshell. She said that the father of the child was not the fictional Nigel, but her brother-in-law Peter Glover, who was married to her sister Margaret. Again, Paula swore Eddie to secrecy. Besides, she said, there was a chance that the baby was Eddie’s as they had slept together around Eddie’s birthday, which was when the baby was conceived. However, she thought it was more likely that the father was Peter Glover.
Naturally, Paula was in an emotional state when she revealed this. They talked late into the night. Eddie said that he loved Paula. He would stay with her and bring up the child as his own. However, under the circumstances, they would have to move further away from Paula’s family. In pursuance of this, Eddie rang his brother, David Gilfoyle, who was a hotel manager in Bournemouth. He asked David if he could arrange accommodation for a couple he knew who were moving into the Bournemouth area in a few weeks. They had a young baby and he also asked David if he could help find a job for his friend. David said he would do what he could to help, unaware that the accommodation was intended to be for Eddie, Paula and their child, and the job for Eddie himself.
When Paula told Eddie about her affair with Glover, she said that was why she had initially wanted to move from their previous home in Sherlock Lane, which was just a short walk from Glover’s house. Glover could not drive: Grafton Drive was further away and he would not be able to drop around. This made sense to Eddie. He recalled an occasion when, at the last minute, he had taken the day off work. About half an hour after Eddie would have normally left for work, Glover turned up. As it was, Glover helped Eddie paint the back gate. He asked Eddie not to mention this to his wife, who thought he was at work. Paula had also insisted that Glover should be the best man at their wedding, though the choice of best man was traditionally that of the groom. However, DNA testing subsequently showed that Paula’s child was Eddie’s and Glover denied any impropriety with his sister-in-law.
On 3 June, the day after Paula’s revelation about her affair with Glover, Eddie arrived home from work early and tried to get Paula to continue their discussion. But Paula said, before she would talk more about Glover, she had to speak to her other sister, Susan Dubost. That evening Eddie drove Paula to Susan’s house. But Susan had visitors and Paula was unable to speak to her sister privately, so they left after ten minutes.
At about 4.40 p.m. the following day, 4 June 1991, Eddie arrived home from work to find a letter from Paula in the kitchen. After reading the first few lines, Eddie said he thought Paula was finally leaving him. Without reading the rest of it, he jumped into his car and drove to his parents’ house. It transpires that the letter was, in fact, a suicide note.
When Eddie arrived at his parents’ house in Claughton Drive, Wallasey, his father was not there. But his mother, Jessie, read the letter. She understood its significance, but told Eddie that it was probably a cry for help and Paula had no real intention of committing suicide.
Eddie’s father, Norman, did not get home until 6.10 p.m. that day. After he read the letter, the three of them drove to Grafton Drive. They searched the house but there was no sign of Paula. Norman then began to call Paula’s family and friends. When this drew a blank, he rang his son-in-law, Paul Caddick, who was a sergeant at the local police station in Upton. He arrived at Grafton Drive at around 7.10 p.m. After reading the suicide note, he decided that they should make a formal call to the police. He rang Upton Police Station and spoke to his colleague, Constable Tosney.
When Constable Tosney arrived at Grafton Drive, they began searching the outbuildings and found that the garage was locked. Caddick asked Eddie for the keys. Eddie gave him a bunch of keys from the kitchen that belonged to Paula. None of them fitted the garage. Eddie then picked up the mat in the porch and gave Caddick two single keys, one of which he used to open the Yale lock of the garage. Caddick and Tosney said the two keys were identical. Later, Eddie said that there should have been a garage key on Paula’s key ring, but no other garage key was found inside the garage or elsewhere.
In the garage, they found Paula hanging by a rope from a roof beam. A set of small aluminium ladders was near her. It was clear that she was dead. The coroner’s officer, the CID, the police surgeon, the scene-of-crime officer and the local undertakers were all informed. At the time, it was assumed that the incident was a straightforward suicide by hanging. The suicide note made it plain that she intended to kill herself. Paula had left a diary and other written material showing that she was at a low ebb.
However, three of Paula’s friends – Diane Mallion, Julie Poole and Christine Jackson – had misgivings and made statements to the police. They said that Paula had told them that Eddie was doing a course on suicide at work. As part of it, he had asked her to write suicide notes. This had worried and frightened her. They said that Eddie had also taken Paula into the garage to show her how to put up a rope. These statements caused the police to reconsider their initial assumption that the death was a suicide and began to investigate the possibility of murder.
Key to their investigation was Paula’s state of mind. Three weeks before the baby was due, she had a leaving party at work where she was described as “radiant”. Seventeen witnesses described her as being happy and looking forward to the birth of the child, despite misgivings about the birth itself. Her gynaecologist and her GP, whom she visited regularly and who saw her last a week before her death, both described her as fit and positive about the birth. She had no history of depression. She had prepared a nursery and had bought two sets of baby equipment so that one could be left with her mother, who was going to look after the baby when she returned to work. She had talked about the christening with the local vicar. Two days before her death, she had been to the library and borrowed six books on childcare and names.
On the morning of 3 June, she appeared happy and normal. That afternoon she had a conversation with a friend about a man whom they both knew who had recently hanged himself. Paula had said: “How could someone hang themselves? How could you get so low? His wife will feel guilty for the rest of her life.”
That evening, again, she was her usual happy self. There was nothing in her personality or behaviour to suggest that she was about to take her own life.
The following morning, a market researcher doing a wine survey called at the house and spoke to Paula and Eddie. She was there for about fifteen to twenty minutes. She was unclear about the time, but thought the visit was between 11 a.m. and noon. According to Eddie, she had left by 11.15 a.m. He left for work about 11.25 a.m. Then, at 11.50 a.m., a courier for Freemans catalogue company called to deliver a package, but got no reply. Other people called at the house between 2 and 2.30 p.m. They, too, got no reply. At 2 p.m. Paula had an antenatal appointment, which she missed. She had not missed any appointments previously.
Eddie’s shift at work began at 12.30 p.m. and he was seen by Sandra Davies reading a paper in the canteen from about 11.30 a.m. to 12.20 p.m. His shift was due to end at 8.30 p.m., but he asked for time off and was allowed to leave at 4.30 p.m. There was no evidence that he had been absent from work between 11.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. Eddie said he got home at about 4.40 p.m., noticed his wife was missing and found a suicide note in the kitchen. As a result of reading it, he said he panicked and went straight to his parents’ house, arriving there at about 4.50 p.m. But this was not confirmed by his mother. The courier from Freemans said she returned at about 5.30 p.m. and found Eddie in the drive. He signed the delivery note and manifest in his wife’s name, though it has been suggested that the courier got the date wrong. However, a neighbour said she saw Eddie in his drive at about 5.30 p.m. She fixed the day and time by reference to her children’s music lessons. Another neighbour said he saw Eddie going into a shop in Upton at about 5.50 p.m.
The timeline was confused, so the crime scene evidence was crucial to deciding whether Paula had committed suicide or been murdered. Unfortunately, no photographs were taken of the body before it was cut down. And there were no pictures of the rope on the beam. As no foul play was suspected, the temperature of the body was not taken. When the police surgeon, Dr Roberts, arrived at 8.20 p.m., he took three photographs of the body on the floor of the garage. At that stage, he and Dr Burns, the pathologist who carried out a second post-mortem, estimated the time of death as having been between three and eight hours before Dr Roberts had examined the body. Both acknowledged that the margin of error could be considerable.