Marvellous support

SALLY MURRER says she has had “marvellous” support from colleagues on the MK Citizen, though she says that most of the reporters were not there when she was arrested and the office ransacked by police 18 months ago, such is the turnover now on the big Johnston Press bi-weekly.

Among those who have left is Karen Jeffery who was Mother of the NUJ Chapel when it went on strike for six days in January in a fight over pay and staffing levels. The journalists won an extra 0.5 per cent on their pay in subsequent negotiations.

But such are pay levels that Karen Jeffery, a top-class feature writer, has left the job, the paper and journalism altogether, to work in marketing for a legal firm.

They want to jail me just for being a reporter

A local paper reporter is facing an extraordinary trial over allegations of leaking by a police officer. TIM GOPSILL listened to Sally Murrer’s account of her ordeal

SALLY MURRER thinks she’s going to prison, and she’s prepared for it. “Everyone tells me I won’t; that they don’t send journalists to prison in Britain, that the charges don’t stand up, but I can’t help it – I believe they will because that’s what they say they will do.

“I think I have got it sorted. I am really organised. I figure I will only serve a year or two. I have set up bank accounts to cover everything that can happen, for the clothes and childminders and carers for the children. I’m clearing my desk at work because I don’t believe I will be going back.”

Work is reporting at the Milton Keynes Citizen. The charges on which Sally Murrer will be standing trial in the new year are three counts of “aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office”.

This is a common law offence and its use against a journalist is unprecedented, as far as the union knows. But it might well alarm Sally Murrer, for it can lead, in theory, to indefinite imprisonment.

The charges related to information she is alleged to have received from recently retired Detective Sergeant Mark Kearney. The three counts cover three inconsequential stories that never even got into print. Much of the evidence comes from 20 hours of recordings police obtained by bugging both their mobile phones and Mark Kearney’s car.

You have to pinch yourself to believe this is happening.

She and Mark Kearney are close friends – she met him when he was a press officer for TVP in the early 1990s and she was news editing another local paper, the Milton Keynes Gazette, and they had a relationship.

Sally Murrer was arrested in May last year at her home, an old and, in her own word, “shabby” house on Dunstable Downs in Buckinghamshire.

She was strip-searched and held for 30 hours. Officers in forensic suits combed the house for a day. The Citizen office was also searched and police seized hundreds of documents.

“They took all my notebooks,” she says, “about 100 of them – I’ve kept them all since 1998, all dated, plus hundreds of bits of paper from my desk. They took my computer. In the house they went through boxes of documents, they took my laptop. They took all my personal and family documents – numbers for childminders and carers for James [her autistic son]. I was absolutely stuck. I couldn’t contact anyone and I haven’t had anything back.”

Sally Murrer is a single mother with three children. James is currently in residential care and two girls are at school. And there are two dogs and two cats. Almost every inch of wall in the rambling house is covered with pictures of them: huge collages of family snaps with everyone smiling.

As a local reporter she has worked with police for years. Sally Murrer is not an investigative journalist bent on exposing corruption. At the Gazette – which she and a group of colleagues bought for £1 after Home Counties Newspapers closed it in 1991; it lasted eight years before folding again – she and Mark Kearney pioneered the use of police CCTV footage for the “Do you know this man?” sort of spreads. “This was before Crimewatch,” she says proudly.

“I’m not anti-police. The police officers I know are decent hard-working guys who actually care. I have always trusted them to tell the truth. I believe 90 per cent of police are decent people. I have seen coppers in tears over the death of a baby.”

Two other men are also charged in the case, over further stories allegedly leaked by Mark Kearney. One is Mark Kearney’s son, a soldier, accused of passing a story to yet another local paper, the Milton Keynes News – and of possessing an ecstasy tablet that police say they found when they searched the family home. The fourth is another former TVP detective, Derek Webb, now a private investigator. All deny the charges.

Their trial, expected to last at least five weeks, will open at Kingston Crown Court in January. It had been due to open in November but was put back to allow the court to hear a submission from Sally Murrer’s legal team to have the case against her dropped on legal grounds. This was due to be heard as the Journalist went to press.

Sally Murrer’s defeatism about the outcome is not the NUJ’s view of her extraordinary case. The union has backed its member all the way through. It is unthinkable that a reporter should be imprisoned simply for receiving information from a police officer. If they jail this reporter, thousands more will be at risk, simply for doing their jobs.