Sally Clark: 'There are no winners here. We have all lost out'

Freed after being wrongfully convicted of killing her babies, she just wants to rebuild her family life.

This is a tragedy but it is also a love story. When Sally Clark was sentenced to life in jail for murdering her two baby sons she looked across the court room and saw her husband Stephen mouthing the words: "I love you." He never stopped believing in her innocence, and worked every spare hour to clear Sally's name while she suffered the "minute-by-minute torture" of wrongful imprisonment, deprived of the right to be a proper mother to her third child. Last week Sally and Stephen stood in a court room again. She burst into tears and he punched the air with joy when the Appeals Court announced her conviction was unsafe. Then she looked across to the gallery and mouthed those words back to the man who had stood by her through what she called a living hell: "I love you."

Following her conviction Sally Clark had been declared a baby killer, an alcoholic who smothered one child and shook the other to death. None of that was true. The idea that two brothers could suffer cot deaths had been dismissed by an expert as little short of a horrific fantasy. We now know it happens about once a year. If the Clarks now seem heroic, their story also shows that extraordinary, awful, unthinkable things can happen to ordinary people. And they might be endured on the strength of love, even if the full weight of the justice system, medical science and the media seem allied against you.

There was very little that was remarkable about Stephen and Sally Clark seven years ago. He was a 30-year-old partner in a legal practice in Manchester. Recently qualified as a solicitor, she had had her first child at 32. Christopher was born in the autumn of 1996 and brought home to Wilmslow, Cheshire.

On the night of 13 December Stephen went out to a Christmas party. Sally breast-fed her son, put him in his Moses basket to sleep and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. When she came back the baby was unconscious and had gone "a dusty grey colour". The paramedics who answered her 999 call heard hysterical screams from the house, and were let in by a neighbour with a spare key who had come to see what all the noise was about. Christopher's skin was blue. He was pronounced dead at 10.40pm. The pathologist, Dr Alan Williams, blamed a virus in the lower respiratory tract.

After the child's death Sally went back to work but she began drinking heavily. "It was to blot out the memories of that awful night," said Stephen, who went with her to see an alcohol counsellor. "She was on her own. Her baby died in her arms. I wasn't there."

He was in the house on 26 January 1998, downstairs preparing a bottle for the couple's second child, Harry, who was eight weeks old. Sally was upstairs, lying on the bed in her pyjamas while the baby sat in a bouncing chair. She looked over and noticed his head was slumped forward and he was not moving. Hearing screams, Stephen struggled to get up the stairs as quickly as he could with a leg in plaster from a hockey injury. "The memory of my attempts to resuscitate Harry will go with me to my grave," he said. Incredibly, the boy was pronounced dead at the same time of night as his brother, 10.40pm.

Distraught, the Clarks asked for a paediatric specialist to do the post mortem. Instead it was Dr Williams again. He was suspicious, and told the police there was evidence of bleeding that suggested the baby had been shaken to death.

When detectives knocked on the door early one morning in February 1998 Sally Clark put the kettle on, expecting to hear news of how Harry might have died. Instead she and Stephen were arrested on suspicion of murder. Her response? "You must be joking." In April they were both accused of killing Christopher too, after Dr Williams changed his mind about the cause of death.

Sally went on trial alone at Chester Crown Court in October 1999. By then she had given birth to a third son, after seeking reassurances that there was no genetic reason he might die in the same way. Advised to plead guilty and avoid a prison sentence she refused, saying she could not start telling lies. But witnesses accused her of doing exactly that. A doctor said her reaction to confirmation of Christopher's death had been "superficial and untypical". Fake, in other words.

Professor Sir Roy Meadow, an expert in sudden death syndrome, said the chance of two children from the same affluent non-smoking family suffering cot death was one in 73 million. After hearing complicated medical evidence, the jury of seven women and five men now had a single phrase to latch on to. It suggested she was guilty. "Whatever you say about Sally Clark," one was them was heard to comment, "you can't get round the one in 73 million statistic."

Sentencing Sally Clark to life, Mr Justice Harrington said: "The plain facts of the matter is that you have taken the lives of two vulnerable and defenceless babies."

Stephen Clark did not believe that. Neither did Sally's father, Frank Lockyer, a retired police divisional commander. Together the two men pored over the court papers and recruited expert support. Voices of dissent began to be raised early in 2000 when Dr Stephen Watkins, director of public health in Stockport, said Professor Meadow had been wrong: two cot deaths happened in the same family "about every 18 months". The jury had been swayed by a false estimation of the chances, he said. "The possibility that this young woman may have had to suffer the tragedy of two cot deaths, only to find herself imprisoned for life as a result of this mathematical error, is, quite literally, terrifying."

Stephen was interviewed by Channel 4 and spoke frankly. "I'd be lying if I said I've never doubted her for one moment. I mean, when I've been lying awake in the middle of the night, all sorts of horrible thoughts have gone through my mind, and, of course, that thought has flashed in there, but it's immediately flashed straight out again. Sally didn't hurt those little boys. She loved them."

Their ashes were still at the funeral parlour. "We've not been able to mourn properly for them because of the action that has been taken against us. Those lawyers and doctors who have done this to us should hang their heads in shame."

A first appeal failed. By last spring, however, the campaign to free Sally had gathered new momentum, backed by scientists who had found a gene linked to cot death which meant the odds of it happening to a brother or sister of a victim were closer to one in 60. The Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal met to consider whether Sally should be struck off. After watching an emotional nine-minute video testimony it decided to suspend her instead. Despite the "minute-by-minute torture of life imprisonment" she still had "absolute faith that our system of justice will work in the end and prove my innocence".

In the meantime she was allowed to see her third son for two hours a week. From a cell at Bullwood Hall Prison in Essex she designed his bedroom using colour charts and swatches, and chose clothes for the boy from catalogues. The three-year-old was too young to understand the situation but he liked to watch his mummy and daddy holding hands, and to hug them both together. "I don't know how Sally copes when we have to leave," said Stephen. "It crucifies me."

Sally wrote to him. "What I long for above all else is the chance to take our son to nursery, cook his tea, feed the ducks with him, play in the park, splash water with him in the bath, and read him a bedtime story." She also wrote, "Nothing will be able to compensate me or our little boy for the loss of these precious moments."

By now Stephen had sold their home in Cheshire and moved to Essex, closer to the jail. He kept a job in the City while using every spare moment to work on her case. It paid off when he discovered Dr Williams had carried out tissue tests during the post-mortem that showed a bacterial infection had spread to Harry's cerebral spinal fluid. That made a natural cause of death much more likely, but the tests had not been mentioned at the trial. Last week three more judges in the Court of Appeal agreed that vital evidence had been kept from the defence team, so the conviction was unsafe. The prosecution did not ask for a retrial.

Outside the Royal Courts of Justice, watched by reporters from the same newspapers that had once branded her an evil killer, Sally Clark hugged her father and her husband. She did not look like the woman who had been sent down, having lost two stone and, understandably, developed an steely gaze. Now, surely, was the time for her to rage against the gross injustice she had suffered. But she did not. "Today is not a victory," she said. "There are no winners here. We have all lost out. We simply feel relief that our nightmare is finally at an end."

Talk of compensation was left to her lawyers. Instead she thanked her father, the hundreds of people who had written to her, and the staff and inmates of the prison where she had made true friends. She promised to see justice done for one particular prisoner. Then, asking to be allowed the privacy to rebuild her family life, Sally spoke about "Steve, who together with our little boy is my life".

"He has stood by me and supported me throughout this whole nightmare, not through blind love or unthinking loyalty, but because he knows me better than anyone else and knows how much I loved our babies," she said. Somehow, in defiance of the odds, they had remained close. "My little boy knows that he has a mummy and a daddy who love him very much and love each other very much," she added. "And that's what counts."