This website opened on Geocities, April 21, 2001. There were major updates in October of that year and March 2004. This will be the last major update and possibly the last update ever.

Many years ago I wrote to the Public Record Office (as it then was) to suggest they collect the papers relating to the murder of Clarke Pearce and the trial of Satpal Ram. I received an acknowledgment. Whether or not my missive was the reason, the papers were duly collected, and the relevant files were opened on January 5, 2016. During the 1990s and for a while after I did a lot of research at Kew, but at this time I had not been there for several years, and I did not check the catalogue until the following year. As at the time I had other priorities, I did not return to Kew to study and copy them until April 20, 2017.

My reader’s ticket had long since expired, but on renewing it, I had a pleasant surprise: a free scan to e-mail service had been introduced mirroring the one at the new British Library Newsroom.

Although there were two files in the catalogue, only one was open. The second file contains the autopsy photographs, and, I believe, at least a partial transcript of the murder trial. Anxious to scan documents from that too, I submitted a Freedom Of Information request, which turned out to be a big mistake, because not only was I told this file would remain closed, the file I had consulted was withdrawn for review, and at the time of writing remains withdrawn, almost certainly for my lifetime. [Compare with the original entry for J 190/310].

The reason for this? I can do no better than quote at length from an e-mail I received from foienquiry@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk on January 8, 2018. See separate file.

Although I had pointed out that as his now closest surviving next of kin, Nadine O’Neill had no objection to the autopsy photographs being displayed on-line, and indeed welcomed such a development, my pleas fell on deaf ears, hence all that guff about distress. I sent the FOI officer her number, but no one bothered to contact her. (I had spoken to her about the possibility of publishing these photographs on December 19, 2015).

I can understand this up to a point. Although Reeva Steenkamp was murdered in South Africa as recently as 2013, crime scene photos including of her corpse are available on-line. Typically, the American authorities release huge tranches of information in criminal cases, including crime scene photographs; I had no difficulty finding photographs of the 2003 Lana Clarkson crime scene, again including of her corpse. This would never be allowed in the UK, and rightly so, but I thought the fact that the current murder is now over thirty years old coupled with the consent of the next of kin would outweigh the usual reticence of the authorities to rightly protect bereaved families rather than pander to ghouls. Alas.

Although it does not affect this website, I had another big disappointment when I returned to Kew on January 30, 2018: the scan to e-mail service had been withdrawn in December. Be that as it may, on my previous visit I did some heavy scanning, the results of which are displayed below.

The notes for the judge run to eight pages, so are in two files. Putting them in one file took it over the size limit for this free host (unless I upgrade). I did upgrade once in the past for a very limited period, but cannot justify the expense for any of my websites. Having said that, some of the scans from Kew below were uploaded to the Internet Archive on February 25, the notes for the judge in one file.

When Ram turned up at Sandwell General Hospital with Schneider, he was very drunk, and was swearing. He was treated by Dr Roger David Smith – with some difficulty. At the hospital, he gave his name as Afzal Saleem. The police took a witness statement from the real Mohammed Afzal Saleem, a refrigeration engineer born October 3, 1965. He had been a schoolfriend of Ram. Ram gave Mr Saleem’s date of birth too.

Unfortunately, though I extracted the foregoing information from the file on my April 20, 2017 visit to Kew, I did not scan Mr Saleem’s witness statement. Had I realised I would be hit with a double whammy, I would have scanned every document I could have between my arrival and closing time – 7pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Sadly, the documents below are also incomplete as indicated; some of the scans are also of poor quality. This latter was beyond my control. During the scanning process it was not possible to keep most of them either absolutely flat or straight. I was of course about to rotate the images when preparing them for this site, but this led to loss of quality, so if some documents are less than perfectly aligned, you know why. One page documents are in JPG format; documents of two or more pages are in PDF. They are in chronological order after a fashion.

The documents on the supplementary list below (Other Documents) are things I have collected/written over the years. A few notes have been added at the bottom of that list, but for the most part they are self-explanatory.

Alexander Baron
Sydenham,
South London

March 10, 2018.

Documents Added To This Site From Kew, 2018