The victim of a 38-year miscarriage of justice today claimed he was beaten by police and ‘bullied’ into falsely admitting to being a murderer.
Speaking for the first time after judges earlier this year quashed his conviction for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986, Peter Sullivan alleged that he had been ‘stitched up’.
Dubbed the Beast of Birkenhead after the brutal killing, the 68-year-old had long protested his innocence and is now in line for a £1.3million pay-out.
Following a special investigation by Stephen Wright in The Mail on Sunday, judges accepted that new scientific evidence recent advances in DNA analysis suggested an unknown male was responsible for the 21-year-old’s sexually-motivated murder.
Today Mr Sullivan accused police of ‘leathering’ him with their truncheons when he was held for questioning over Miss Sindall’s Merseyside murder.
He alleged that he was deprived of food and sleep and told that if he did not confess he would be charged with ’35 other rapes’.
After admitting to the killing, he later retracted his confession, but was convicted after a jury heard about allegedly incriminating bite marks – a now widely discredited field of forensic science – and circumstantial evidence.
The former labourer – who has learning difficulties – said he could never ‘forgive’ officers for how they allegedly treated him.
Innocent Peter Sullivan – whose conviction was quashed in May for a murder he did not commit – says he was ‘bullied’ into wrongly confessing and ‘stitched up’
Part-time barmaid Diane Sindall, 21, was savagely battered to death in August 1986, stripped half-naked, indecently assaulted, mutilated and bitten, and her body discarded in an alleyway
And he accused them of ‘putting stuff into my mind’.
Mr Sullivan said he had ‘lost everything’, including being denied permission to attend his mother’s funeral.
He told the BBC: ‘I can’t forgive them for what they’ve done to me, because it’s going to be there for the rest of my life.’
In response Merseyside Police expressed its ‘regret’, but maintained its officers had acted within the law at the time.
Chief Constable Rob Carden – who took on the job earlier this year – said: ‘It was a grave miscarriage of justice and obviously as chief constable of Merseyside it doesn’t matter how long I’ve been there, I deeply regret the detrimental impact on Mr Sullivan’s life.’
He will refer the original investigation into the murder to watchdog the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
The investigation into her murder continues, supported by the National Crime Agency, with hundreds of men screened and eliminated in the past two years.
Miss Sindall was brutally killed after she left work at a pub in Bebington, Birkenhead, just before midnight on Friday August 1, 1986.
Pictured on video link from Wakefield Prison when his conviction for murdering Diane Sindall was quashed in May, Peter Sullivan wrongly spent nearly 40 years behind bars
The Wirral pub where Diane Sindall worked to help pay for her forthcoming wedding
The bride-to-be, who was picking up barmaid shifts to earn extra money for her wedding, was walking to a garage to buy some fuel after her van broke down.
Her lifeless and brutally abused body was discovered 12 hours later in an alley.
At his trial, prosecutors said Mr Sullivan had spent the day drinking, and went out armed with a crowbar.
Evidence at the time suggested the petty thief had recently borrowed a crowbar from a neighbour.
He was placed near the scene by witnesses following a BBC Crimewatch appeal.
But he denied going anywhere near where the crime took place or having the crowbar in his possession, and said he had given different accounts to police because he could not remember his movements.
Mr Sullivan was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 16 years in 1987, but denied parole multiple times, largely due to his refusal to admit responsibility for the killing.
He applied to the High Court for permission to appeal against his conviction in 2019, but this was rejected by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
Police are now reinvestigating Miss Sindall’s murder in the hope of bringing her killer to justice
Then, in November last year, the Criminal Cases Review Commission said his case had been referred to the Court of Appeal on the basis of the DNA evidence.
Samples taken at the time of the murder were re-examined and a DNA profile that did not match Mr Sullivan was found.
This crucial evidence was revealed by a method that only came into use in 2015, and he was finally freed after the Court of Appeal in London quashed his conviction in May.
Speaking from a secret location, and with his face obscured and voice changed to hide his current appearance, Mr Sullivan said he wanted an apology from Merseyside Police.
Mr Sullivan said being denied legal representation at his initial police interviews had been ‘very daunting’.
He told the broadcaster he was beaten in his cell on two occasions.
‘They threw a blanket over the top of me and they were hitting me on top of the blanket with the truncheons to try and get me to co-operate with them,’ he said.
‘It really hurt, they were leathering me.’
A memorial tablet on a grass verge close to the scene of Ms Sindall’s murder
Asked why he would confess to a murder he did not commit, Mr Sullivan told the BBC: ‘All I can say, it was the bullying that forced me to throw my hands in, because I couldn’t take it anymore.’
He said he felt ‘sorry’ for Miss Sindall’s family who are ‘back at square one and not knowing who the person is that killed their daughter’.
Quashing his murder conviction in May, Lord Justice Holroyde said: ‘Strong though the circumstantial evidence undoubtedly seemed at the trial, it is now necessary to take into account the new scientific evidence pointing to someone else – the unknown man.‘
The new suspect identified by new DNA techniques does not appear on the national database, nor is he linked to any other unsolved offences.
Police have confirmed the DNA does not belong to any of Miss Sindall’s family or her then fiancé David Beattie, who has since moved to Australia.
Mr Sullivan is now entitled to £1.3million in compensation after ministers increased the cap for people wrongly jailed for 10 years or more.
In a lengthy response today, Merseyside Police accepted that Mr Sullivan was denied legal representation at his initial interviews.
It said this was due to the risk of the ‘destruction of evidence’ by the solicitor’s ‘inadvertent dissemination’ of information.
The force said it had been given no details about the officers who allegedly threatened and assaulted Mr Sullivan, and there was no information about this in the materials it had available.
Saying that the original investigation was conducted ‘nearly 40 years ago’, Merseyside Police added that it was ‘very difficult to comment on investigative practices at that time, when seen through the lens of today’.
The force said there had been huge changes in the ‘professionalisation’ of police investigations since 1986, as well as around technology and the law.
‘We understand the detrimental impact the conviction has had on the life of Mr Sullivan and do not underestimate the significance of being imprisoned for 38 years on his wellbeing.
‘We are doing everything we can to find out who the new DNA evidence, which formed the basis of his release, belongs to.’
