Telford deaths: After a long fight, McGowan family is vindicated

Inquest shows that police investigation of 20-year-old's hanging might have missed vital evidence

When Jason McGowan was found hanging from roadside railings in Telford on New Year's Day, 2000, it took a senior detective 23 minutes to decide that he had taken his own life.

The decision was made with curious speed: six months earlier, the man's uncle had died in similar circumstances after being subjected to a sustained and vicious racist campaign.

Yesterday, after three years and two traumatic inquests, the family's campaign to discredit police assertions that a newly married man aged 20 had killed himself was vindicated by an open verdict from an inquest jury.

During their search for answers, their campaign prompted an intervention from a home secretary, changed the way the West Mercia force handles inquiries into racist crimes and forced the town to confront an underbelly of racism.

Yet the open verdict means that questions remain unanswered from a saga that began on 2 July 1999, when Errol McGowan, 34, was discovered dead, hanging from a doorknob in an empty house he was looking after for a friend.

Mr McGowan, a builder and part-time doorman in the Shropshire town, had been repeatedly told that thugs who made anonymous calls to his workplace would kill him. They followed him home and once tried to drag him from his car. After he was found dead, his family feared foul play as they were aware he had been in fear of his life in the days before his death. They criticised the police for failing to treat the death as a potential murder, and pressed them to investigate further. Jason, his nephew, who worked at a local newspaper, had carried out his own inquiries.

A few weeks after his last meeting with police, Jason was out celebrating Millennium Eve with his wife at the Elephant and Castle pub. Friends said he appeared his "usual smiley self" and declared that he did not need to make a new year's resolution because life was perfect.

Others said, however, that he had argued with his wife and at one point appeared tearful. Half an hour before midnight, the young man left the pub and said that he wanted to be alone. None of his friends saw him alive again. He was found the following morning hanging by his belt from low railings.

Detective Inspector Phil Pledger, who for months had listened to the McGowan family's concerns, took less than half an hour to decide that it was a case of suicide. Officers had been searching the area for little more than an hour when they were called off. It was an action that the former head of the Metropolitan Police's racial and violent crimes task force described as "inconceivable" during the first inquest into his death, which collapsed when the jury failed to reach a verdict.

The former deputy assistant commissioner John Grieve added: "If you look and the [evidence] is not there, then at least you have looked for it."

DI Pledger's decision was later overturned by the Chief Constable, Peter Hampson, and an "intensive search" of the area was ordered. But fingerprints were never taken from the railings; nearby bushes and trees were not checked for signs of breakage; no DNA was preserved from the young man's leather coat; and no samples of dusty deposits were taken from his body, clothes or the surrounding area. Officers could not recall whether they had checked the bins in the nearby car park.

Most of the text messages sent by Jason shortly before he died, as well as any he might have received, were lost because police did not try to retrieve them in time. The body was not wrapped sufficiently to preserve evidence and there were concerns about the way exhibits were packed, stored and documented. One bag was found to be ripped; others not sealed properly. Some personal items were even sent back to his family. The initial house-to-house inquiries had to be redone in a second investigation.

A Scotland Yard review criticised detectives for failing to gather CCTV footage from near the scene early enough, or to track down people who had been in the same pub on the night. They also said appeals for information were limited.

To this day – despite a thorough reinvestigation of the case after Jack Straw suggested when he was Home Secretary that the local force should take advice from the Metropolitan Police's race task force – it is not known what evidence was missed or whether it would have led to anything.

It was not until the family turned to the media and until the coincidence of two such unusual deaths within a short period made the front pages of The Independent and The Voice newspapers that matters turned around. The London force's experts were called in as advisers and a second investigation, headed by Det Supt Mel Shore, did "everything they possibly could" to find out the truth, in the words of Mr Grieve. More than 1,300 people were interviewed. The London force criticised a lack of communication between those gathering intelligence and investigators, and its review made 57 recommendations for improvements. But Mr Grieve did commend the team for "operating in the best possible traditions of the police force".

But by that point – a month after the second death and seven months after the first – there was little hope of retrieving evidence that might have been lost in the vital first hours.

Yesterday's verdict does not signal an end to the family's campaign. Two complaints against the police over their handling of the two inquiries are pending and they will consider suing the force. They want a full apology from the force and disciplinary action against officers found to have made mistakes.

However, relatives were celebrating a victory yesterday despite remaining angry about the suicide verdict returned at Errol McGowan's inquest in 2001. Jason's uncle, Clifton McGowan, said: "It's absolutely brilliant. It shows that the family was totally right to campaign over the way the police treated the investigations into their deaths."