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Anthony Gerald Dickinson

The Mystery of the Reappearing Keys

Just after midnight on 19 July 1990 a fire engine rushed to put out a fire in a flat on the top floor of Spalding Tower, a block of flats in Leeds. First fireman on the scene was Michael Firth. On the balcony outside the burning flat he found PC Leighton, who had just arrived, a neighbour, Kenneth Weightman, and the unconscious bodies of two men, William Leckie and William Kelly. Weightman knew that three men had been living in the flat. It was he who was first on the scene, and he had forced open the door and found the two unconscious men in the hallway. He pulled the bodies out, and then tried to go in further to look for the third man, but was driven back by intense smoke and fumes.

Firth went further into the flat than Weightman had done, but was forced out again by flames. When the fire brigade had doused the fire, it became clear that no one else was in the flat. William Leckie and William Kelly were rushed to hospital, but later died from the injuries they received in the fire.

The third man

The third man was Tony Dickinson. On Wednesday 18 July 1990 Tony was out drinking all day with the other two. All were heavy drinkers. They finished up at the Granville Public House, Lincoln Green, Leeds, by which time Tony was drinking only soft drinks. He went home ahead of the others to the flat where he was currently staying with the other two, on the ninth floor of Spalding Tower. As a temporary resident, he did not have his own keys to the flat, so he borrowed a set of keys to let himself in. The two keys, one for the security entrance downstairs and one for the mortice lock on the door of the flat, were on a ring with a rigid plastic tag.

I entered the flat, unlocking the door with the mortice key and went to the living room. All the windows were open, due to the hot weather. After a short while I heard voices down in the street. I looked out and saw Mr Kelly and Mr Leckie. They were stumbling. I decided to go and help them. I took the lift downstairs. I got hold of Mr Kelly, putting my arm around him and helped him through the door and into the lift. The three of us entered the lift and pressed for the ninth floor. Mr Kelly kept falling down in the lift and I kept picking him up.

When we reached the ninth floor we walked along the open walkway to flat 60 and I opened the door with one of the two keys. The door was only pushed to behind us. I placed Mr Kelly on the settee and then placed the two keys on the sideboard. After a while Mr Kelly asked me if I could help him into the bedroom. I did this and placed him on the double bed next to the window. He asked me to get a drink of water which I got from the kitchen.

Mr Kelly then asked for a light for his cigarette. I could not find one, so I went into the kitchen, turned on the electric stove, and when the ring got red, I tore a piece of paper from an old newspaper, lit this and went back to the bedroom. As I entered the bedroom, on my left was a bed-settee made into a bed. I fell over the corner of this bed and as I fell the lighted piece of paper fell from my hand. It took me a while to gain my footing and when I eventually did get to my feet there was a lot of smoke about.

I got Mr Kelly out of bed and took him into the hallway. I then went into the kitchen, got a bowl of water, entered the bedroom and threw the water where the smoke seemed to be coming from.

I then went into the living room and informed Mr Leckie of the situation. He was on his feet and I said, ‘Get your uncle [Mr Kelly] on to the balcony.’ I told him I was going to phone 999 for the Fire Brigade. I left the flat door unlocked, and went down in the lift past the Granville to phone 999. I then returned to the tower block. Outside I had a few words with a man I knew. I never thought for a moment of any fatality.

I knew I was on warrants for my arrest, so I left the area. When I left I had nothing in my possession.

This account, which he wrote in 1992, is the same in every detail that he gave to the police when they arrested him on 25 July 1990, and it has remained the same ever since.

Was the door locked?

Tony Dickinson was charged with the murder of the two men. The police and the prosecution alleged that when he left the flat to call the emergency services, he locked the front door behind him, trapping the other two men inside. From this it was inferred that he started the fire deliberately, although there was no accelerant used, and he had no motive to harm his friends.

The idea that the door was locked came from the neighbour, Kenneth Weightman, who was the first person to reach the burning flat. He said the door seemed to be locked, and that he had to put his shoulder to it. ‘It immediately opened about four inches, but something stopped it opening further,’ Weightman told the police six days later. ‘I then pushed it hard and it opened about 18 inches and thick black smoke and heat billowed out. I then noticed I was pushing the door against someone who was laid behind the door.’ But a year later, Weightman had become certain the door was locked. ‘I had to use my weight to get in,’ he told the jury at Dickinson’s trial. Why had his evidence changed? Interviewed years later by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, he said he had been told by a police officer that this was a murder and ‘they thought they had the right man.’

Fireman Michael Firth told the court that when he opened the door: ‘I was in a crouched position. I ran my hand down the edge of the door and pushed it open… There were two pieces of metal at the edge of the door, one was the door handle latch, the other was the mortice bolt. This told me that the door had been locked.’ But he could not see the bolt, because of the smoke billowing from the flat, and he was wearing gardening gloves.

Clearly, if the door was not locked, then Tony Dickinson could not be considered guilty of murder. No motive was ever established – the three men were good friends. Tony’s own account of the accidental fire could not be contradicted. So the question of whether the door was locked became one of the two most important issues at the trial. The door itself was brought into court as an exhibit.

At 4 am on the morning after the fire, Ernest Smith, a Leeds City Council joiner, arrived to secure the door. ‘The shoot [another name for the bolt]of the mortice lock was out as if the door was locked,’ he told the court, adding: ‘as far as I can remember. The door casing was damaged and the plate of the lock was also damaged.’

So was the striker plate of the lock, and the wood of the door frame damaged, as they would have been had the door been locked when Weightman pushed it open? Unfortunately the police failed to produce a photograph of the area of the door and frame in question, so the prosecution relied on the evidence of a forensic scientist, Dr Reed. This seems to have been uncertain, and at the trial Judge Savill advised the jury: ‘You may think … that the evidence of those witnesses who were actually at the scene is a more substantial part of the prosecution’s case than the evidence of Dr Reed.’

After the trial, Tony Dickinson wrote to Leeds City Council and received a reply which said that council workman had been called on three previous occasions to repair damage to the doorframe of this flat, so it was already damaged at the time of the fire.

At 8.40 on the morning after the fire Michael Sissons, a Leeds City Council surveyor attended the scene with two other senior council officers. They inspected the door, but none remembered the bolt being out in the locked position. In 1999 Sissons made a further statement: ‘The wood showed no sign of major damage. The striking plate had obviously had some damage, but the wood behind it was fine… I have never seen a door that has been forced with so little damage to the wood… . Had the door been locked fro the outside, the bolt should have extruded into the wood and the wood should have been smashed when the door opened.’

Where were the keys?

Whatever the uncertainty about the door being locked, of equal importance was the question of whether Tony Dickinson could have locked the door.

There were just two sets of keys to the flat. One was the set of two keys, which was found on the sideboard on the day after the fire, exactly where Tony said he left them. The other set consisted of four keys with a leather fob. Tony said he had no keys on him when he left the flat, so he could not have locked the door. Where was the leather fob set?

This second set of keys reappeared on 31 July, when a police photographer returned to take pictures inside the flat. On the hallway floor was the set of four keys with a leather fob. It might be thought that since Tony Dickinson had said all along that the second set must be in the flat, and that is where they were found, that there was no longer a case against him. Neither he nor the police could explain why the keys were lying on the floor. So now the police suggested that the keys must have been put there between 26 and 31 July – presumably by a hypothetical accomplice of Tony, since Tony was in custody.

At the trial, no one seems to have noticed the significance of the fact that the council surveyor, Michael Sissons, used a key on the front door of the flat before the set of keys with the plastic fob had been found on the side board. In 1999 Mr Sisson’s made a statement in which he said that when he arrived at the flat, he was handed the keys by another council officer who was already there. These keys were on a leather fob and not a plastic fob. He had not given this information previously because he had not been asked for it, and did not know its significance.

When had the keys become an issue? During the first police interview, the police did not ask Tony about the keys. But in a later interview, he offered the statement: ‘I did not lock the door behind me when I came out of the flat , and I did not have a set of keys when I left the flat, because I left them inside the flat….’

Confession claims

It should be mentioned that there were three claims that Tony had made admissions that he had done something wrong, but this evidence was undermined by inconsistencies between what the witnesses said originally to the police, and what they said in court. Paul Elliott said that Tony had told him that he’d set fire to the flat because he was angry with the other men, although Elliott had not mentioned this in his original statement to the police. His mother said that Tony admitted doing ‘a bad one’ in the presence of her and Elliott, but the latter said that Tony had not said anything about the fire in the presence of his mother, because he didn’t trust her. In court she added that Tony had said he had used petrol to start the fire, although no one had ever suggested this and the fire service confirmed that no accelerant had been used, and the judge suggested she might be regarded as a ‘biased and unsatisfactory witness’.

Elliott later went on a car trip from York to Scarborough and back with Tony and Mr and Mrs Greenheld. Afterwards Mrs Greenheld said that Tony had told her that the fire was an accident; his friends had been winding him up and he had dropped the piece of paper after saying to them ‘I’ll burn you.’ This admission was supposedly made in the presence of Mr Greenheld, who heard none of it.

Certainly Tony expressed regret about what happened, and that he did not return to help his friends after phoning for the fire brigade. He did not go back because he knew he was wanted by the police, since he had failed to appear at York Crown Court to answer charges of using a stolen credit card two months previously. Assuming the two men could easily leave the flat, and knowing the fire brigade was on its way, he did not anticipate that they would be harmed. He says that he still does not find it easy to live with the decision he made that day.

Interests of justice?

Since he was convicted on 25 June 1991, Tony has never given up trying to overturn his conviction. He sent in his own appeal, which was rejected. He applied to the Home Office C3 department to have his case reviewed, and C3 handed the case on to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who refused to refer it to the appeal court. He had this decision judicially reviewed, without success. A second application to the CCRC was refused in 2000, and a third in 2003 (despite being supported by a submission from the well known miscarriage of justice expert counsel David Martin-Sperry, who was so convinced that the conviction is unsafe that he was willing to work on the case pro bono).

As Tony Dickinson, still in prison a year after his tariff (or earliest release date) has passed, continues to seek fresh evidence with which to challenge his conviction, we are forced to ask why the CCRC refuses to let the Court of Appeal review this case? The only reason the court that tried Tony Dickinson did not hear from Michael Sissons about the keys on a leather fob that he used in the flat, was because no one thought to ask him. Does Tony have to continue to waste his life in prison just because his counsel forgot to ask a key question at his trial? Would not the interests of justice be better served by letting the Court of Appeal hear what Mr Sissons has to say?

It seems that this is yet another case in which a tragic accident resulting in death has been misinterpreted by the police as murder (see Convicted for crimes that never happened, by Michael Naughton).

Text and research by Andrew Green

Some documents relating to this case:
High Court proceedings 04 09 1998 (rtf file)
High Court judgment 15 07 1999 (rtf file)
Submission to the CCRC by David Martin Sperry (rtf file)

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