Peter Sullivan has become a free man this Tuesday after 38 years and eight months in prison, sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. He entered prison at the age of 30 and now leaves at 68. Advances in forensic technology have proven his innocence, after the British Justice system had rejected his appeals in 2008 and 2019. The statement he issued through his lawyer upon setting foot on the street for the first time in nearly four decades is also remarkable for its lack of resentment and for remembering the person for whose rape, dismemberment, and death he was unjustly imprisoned.
"I swear to God that the truth will set you free. I am not angry. I am not bitter (...) What has happened to me is a terrible mistake, but it should not overshadow the fact that what happened was a heinous crime and a terrible loss of life," the statement says. Sullivan holds the sad record of being the person in the United Kingdom who has spent the most time in prison for a crime he did not commit.
The "heinous crime" Sullivan refers to is the rape, mutilation, and murder of Diane Sindall, a 21-year-old girl, in Bebington, a town of about 100,000 inhabitants in northern England. In the early hours of August 2, 1986, after leaving the pub where she worked to supplement her income as a shop assistant in a florist, Sindall ran out of gas in her car. It was then that she decided to walk to the neighboring city of Birkenhead, very close to Liverpool, where she lived. She never made it. Her body was discovered the next morning in an alley. She had been raped and dismembered.
A month and three weeks later, the Police arrested Sullivan, who was 30 years old at the time. For two days, he was in prison, subjected to interrogations, without legal assistance. On September 23, he broke down, crying, and admitted to killing Sindall. The next day, he did it again. From September 25, with a lawyer, he retracted his testimony. It was too late.
The reasons why Sullivan incriminated himself are not clear, but according to the psychological evaluations conducted on him in prison, he is highly suggestible. That may have been the reason. The false rapist and murderer had been arrested because he gave contradictory testimonies about what he had done on August 1 and 2.
The horror of the crime led the British tabloid press to refer to Sullivan as "the Mersey dismemberer", in reference to the river that separates Birkenhead from Liverpool. The case was firmly stacked against Sullivan due to his contradictory testimonies and a matter of chance: rain had deteriorated the rapist's sperm found in Sindall's body, making it impossible to identify his DNA and verify if it matched that of the alleged killer. That was Sullivan's downfall. In November 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Nowadays, with advances in forensic technology, the trial would not have taken place. This was stated by the Prosecutor's representative, Duncan Atkinson, during Sullivan's appeal. Because the DNA found on Sindall's body was not Sullivan's. This means that, 38 years later, the case remains open. And Sullivan is free. This was declared today in a court in Liverpool. The dark-haired man who terrified the UK decades ago is now a person with white beard and glasses, who covered his face with his hands to cry when he saw through closed-circuit television from prison how he became a free man. For the first time in four decades, he will not sleep in jail tonight, in a very different world from the one he left on September 23, 1986.