I spent five years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape
In May 2017, Brian Buckle was found guilty on 12 counts of indecent assault, three of indecency and one of attempted rape, against a girl alleged to have been between eight and 10 years old at the time of the abuse in the 1990s.
His wife, Elaine, was convinced of his innocence, however, and as Brian began a 33-year combined prison sentence, to be served over 15 years, she set out to prove it, with the help of the couple’s daughter, Georgia, 22, as well as Brian’s mother, Jackie, 68, and his aunt, Daphne, 66.
Their campaign cost almost £500,000, putting the once well-off family on the breadline, but it worked – last September, the Court of Appeal heard that Brian’s conviction was unsafe. Within an hour, Brian was released, after more than five years’ incarceration. At his retrial this May, Brian’s defence successfully argued that the DNA evidence that had convicted him had been planted, while the complainant, granted lifelong anonymity, revealed she had been abused two years before meeting Brian. It took a jury just one hour and 20 minutes to unanimously find him not guilty of all 16 charges. There is no suggestion that the case will be reopened, because of its sensitivity.
Here, Brian, 51, and Elaine, 58, share the horror of his wrongful conviction and their desperate battle to clear his name.
Brian: “My first reaction was shock when I was accused of abuse in May 2015. The complainant’s father had reported me, and when police approached his daughter, she said: ‘Whatever my father said is true’. I was alleged to have abused her three times a week for two years between 1993 and 1995, at a location I had proof I hadn’t set foot in for much of that period. But the police weren’t interested. I was released on police bail in tears. How was I going to tell Elaine?”
Elaine: “My head spun. I knew it wasn’t logistically possible for Brian to commit such awful crimes – we were already in a relationship and I would have noticed. Divorced with two children each from previous marriages, we’d dated since 1992 and married in 2006. Brian, a construction manager, was the breadwinner. He bought me flowers and made me laugh, his calm personality the foil to my fierier nature. Holding him as he cried, I said we’d fight the allegations. We told our daughter, then 14, together. Like me, she didn’t believe the doting dad who helped with her homework could be an abuser. But six weeks later, the police said Brian’s DNA was found, in semen, on the complainant’s diary.”
B: “I was accused of ejaculating over the diary and ripping pages out. The complainant said she’d been writing about me abusing her. ‘What would I do something like that for?’ I gasped to the police, as incredulous as I was horrified – the evidence looked damning and I felt like I was going crazy. ‘I’ve never seen this diary. I’m telling the truth,’ I sobbed to Elaine at our home in south Wales. Of course, she had doubts.”
E: “‘How can you say you haven’t done it – it’s your DNA!’ I told Brian before I stormed off to talk to a friend. Hours later, however, I calmed down. I wasn’t in denial – if I thought Brian was guilty for a second, I would have left him. Because the complainant can’t be identified and the context of the alleged abuse outlined, it’s hard to explain my trust, but I quickly realised he was right – he’d been set up.”
B: “I realised the most plausible explanation, bizarre as it sounds, was that my semen had been taken from a condom. I told the police, but forensic scientists found no trace of PDMS – the lubricant used in condoms – on the diary, and my hopes were dashed. Paranoid about rumours swirling, I was called a ‘paedo’ across the street and someone sent an anonymous text to my boss about the allegations (fortunately, I’d already told them, and they were supportive). I was respected locally and most stood by me, but I couldn’t shake the shame of being branded a paedophile. Nor could my father, who died of a heart attack that December, from stress, I’m convinced. ‘You’ve got nothing to hide,’ Elaine said, forcing me out for walks. But in June 2016, I was charged, lucky at least to have £15,000 in savings for our defence barrister for the first trial – to qualify for legal aid, households have to earn under £37,500 a year, and I earned more than £100,000.”
E: “Interrogated in the witness box about our sex life, and where we chose to dispose of our condoms, at Brian’s three-day trial at Swansea Crown Court, I felt violated. We knew the complainant’s witnesses – her father, friend and ex-boyfriend – were lying, and like Brian, I naively assumed the truth would come out. So, when the verdicts on all 16 counts came back – guilty, guilty, guilty – I felt sick to the stomach.”
B: “I looked at Elaine in despair as two security guards led me to a cell. As I was strip-searched, fingerprinted and bussed to HM Prison Parc, in Bridgend, I couldn’t stop crying, convinced my life was over. I was put in a cell with a rapist and wasn’t allowed to call Elaine for four weeks. She’d passed on a message via my lawyer to ‘stay strong’, and when I saw her in the gallery for my sentencing hearing two weeks later, I called out ‘I love you’ through the glass of the dock. I nearly passed out at my minimum 15-year sentence and as the unbearable prospect of missing Georgia’s milestone birthdays, of not taking her for driving lessons or celebrating Christmases as a family sank in, I was placed on suicide watch.”
E: “After crying every minute of that first night apart, I realised I had to be strong. I instantly lost six Facebook friends after the verdict, but if anyone doubted Brian, or me for standing by him, they didn’t say so to my face. I got a job as a carer – we had a mortgage and no salary from Brian – and found Stephen Vullo, a criminal defence lawyer. ‘Brian is innocent,’ I insisted, for weeks, until he agreed to lead our appeal. We found private investigators and forensic scientists to dismantle the prosecution’s case, all costing thousands, which frightened me, but I would have sold our house and lived in a tent if that’s what it took. Myself, Georgia, Brian’s mother and aunt pored over transcripts of the court case for hours. Our home turned into our campaign HQ. Georgia had started self-harming – while Brian was in prison, she tried to take her life four times – and I was given strong antidepressants, but the fight gave us focus.”
B: “As I kept my head down in prison, a new witness came forward to say the complainant had told her years ago that she had previously been abused. The semen was retested and this time PDMS was found. But the prosecution said that PDMS had also been found on other pages and could have come from something like hand cream. We needed more proof.”
E: “In autumn 2020, Mr Vullo asked Dr Candice Bridge, an American chemist with the technology to examine DNA in far greater detail than any British scientist, to re-examine the semen. I forced myself to stay upbeat during my weekly visits to Brian, by now in Stafford Prison, a five-hour journey away.”
B: “Covid closed labs down (and I almost died of the disease in prison myself) and it was almost a year before Dr Bridge’s results came back. They found that there was a 99.5 per cent chance the PDMS came from a condom, and were even able to specify the brand: Durex. Even then a judge rejected our first appeal, in December 2021, saying it was implausible that an eight-year-old girl would plant semen in the diary. But we never said it was put there by a child – the semen couldn’t be dated. Mr Vullo applied to the Court of Appeal, arguing the judge hadn’t read our documents properly, and another preliminary hearing was set for September 2022, this time with three judges at the Appeal Court in central London. I watched over a video link as, in under an hour, they cited the new DNA evidence, said they had no confidence the jury had considered each count separately and quashed all 16 guilty verdicts. ‘You’re going home,’ the clerk told me, the speed of my release apparently unprecedented. I thought I was dreaming as my family rushed from London to collect me.
E: “Brian seemed deflated. He cried constantly and cleaned obsessively. Having worked as a cleaner in prison, he was institutionalised – he went to bed at 10pm and didn’t want to share a bed with me – even now I sleep on the sofa.”
B: “I’d lost my sex drive and, unsurprisingly, our marriage changed. Everything in the outside world seemed different, from new plastic £5 notes to hot food. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and put on antidepressants, terrified of going back to prison as we prepared for the retrial, still at Swansea Court, but held over almost three weeks. A new key witness was the complainant’s hypnotherapist, who said the complainant had alleged abuse prior to the police investigation – but when she was aged five to seven, not eight to ten, as she originally alleged – at which stage she hadn’t even known me. When the complainant admitted this was true and that she hadn’t written anything about me in the diary, and Mr Vullo exposed a raft of other contradictions in her testimony, I dared hope for justice. I think the complainant has been abused and whoever abused her should be investigated. After the not-guilty verdicts were read out, and the judge said I could be with my family, we collapsed in each other’s arms.”
E: “Five months on, Brian and I are both changed – financially, physically, emotionally. We have no money – Brian is on Universal Credit. He’s lost 5st through stress; I’ve gained 3st from comfort eating. I’m tougher, Brian is quieter. I feel I have to protect him, and I will. I love him more than ever.”
B: “I still hear clanging prison doors in my sleep. The way the justice system has treated me is scandalous, and the money we’ve had to spend proving my innocence is disgusting – three months after applying to the Ministry of Justice for financial compensation, we’ve yet to hear anything back. My complainant posted press coverage on social media at the time of my conviction, thanking everyone for their support, but now I have been found not guilty, I can’t tell my story fully because she still has a right to anonymity. How is that fair?
“We’re petitioning for a new law, under which a jury, on finding a defendant not guilty, would be able to decide if their legal fees should be covered by the state. The only counselling the NHS offered was for ex-offenders, so I am seeing someone through the charity Mind. The scars remain, but so does my love for Elaine: if she hadn’t fought for me, I’d still be in prison. I owe her everything.
Elaine has started a petition to grant juries the right to award costs and compensation. For more details, visit change.org
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