Ian MacKenzie, a former Police Inspector based at the National Assembly for Wales, once had the job of protecting the establishment from the press. Yet now Ian seems to be turning that spotlight around by shedding a light upon one of the United Kingdom’s most infamous criminal cases - the murder of Lynette White.
On Valentine’s Day in 1988, a 20-year-old Cardiff local named Lynette White was found dead in a blood-stained apartment in Butetown. She had been stabbed over 50 times.
After a hasty investigation, the police arrested five men: Stephen Miller, John Actie, Ronnie Actie, Tony Paris and Yusef Abdullahi. These men came to be known as ‘The Cardiff Five’.
Cousins John and Ronnie Actie were acquitted. Though this was only after they had spent two years in custody. As for the others, Miller, Paris and Abdullahi, who later became known as the ‘Cardiff Three’, they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder.
In 1992 however, the conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal. It was found that a grave miscarriage of justice had taken place; the police had in fact bullied and intimidated the men into providing false confessions. Yet this of course meant that the killer was still out there.
It was only in 1999, after Dr Angel Gallop, the then world-leading forensic scientist, was called upon to reexamine the case that the real murderer was found. In what was to be the first use of familial DNA profiling to catch a killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, an obscure security guard who had been overlooked during the initial investigation, was arrested and later confessed to Lynette’s murder. Gafoor was sentenced to life in prison in 2004, where he still remains.
Now, over 35 years later, Ian is bringing this brutal murder, and the miscarriages of justice that followed, back into the limelight. Through two striking artworks - so controversial that they appeared on the ITV News - ‘The Consequence’ and ‘Uproar’, Ian demonstrates how a whole community was impacted by a single heinous act.
To construct these pieces, Ian has spoken to many people who were involved and who have since written about the case. It is an emotional connection that has allowed him to add an even greater level of depth to these gripping works.
They are paintings however, which also provide us with a stark reminder. They inform us that evil acts can be exacerbated by miscarriages of justice, to such an extent that even the name of the person at the heart of it can fade into the background. When I studied the murder in my A-Level law class back in 2013 for instance, everyone knew the case as ‘The Cardiff Five’. Lynette White on the other hand, was barely mentioned.
Comments