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Search forCHELMSFORD: Knifepoint rape mum - update
Thursday, November 20, 2008, 14:27
Francis Fitzgibbon, counsel for Michaela Britton, 40, asked the jury at Chelmsford Crown Court to consider whether it was a co-incidence that after being released because there was not enough evidence to charge her for wasting police time she was later re-arrested on a more serious charge.
Mother-of-one Britton claimed that a terrifying series of incidents were set in motion after her home was ransacked and a video, audio tapes and a police surveillance tape were stolen and used as blackmail, but police had not helped her in any way.
Mr Fitzgibbon said Britton had begun to make allegations over police corruption dating back to 1994 when investigations were going on into the triple gangland murders at Rettendon.
He asked: "Isn't it the case that she was just getting too hot for the police to handle?"
Mr Fitzgibbon posed another question to the jury: "Is that what got Detective Inspector Glenn Maleary (now a Chief Inspector) to put her back under suspicion?"
Unemployed Britton, a qualified loss adjuster, of Waterson Vale, Chelmsford, denies conspiring to pervert the course of justice together with Paul Hendle and others between February and August 2006.
Prosecutor Ramiz Gursoy said a six month police investigation concluded she had made it up to support a bogus six figure contents insurance claim against Norwich Union.
Mr Gursoy said that by prosecuting Britton the police were in effect giving her a platform on which to voice her allegations against them, when surely it would have been in their best interests to have quietly dropped proceedings?
But Mr Fitzgibbon said the police wanted them to believe that Britton was a "terrible fantasist and insurance fraudster with a personality complex rather than trying to deal something that could hurt people in high places".
If what she was alleged to have done was "weird, dark, baffling and disturbing" was it a crime at all, he questioned, and, how could a "crazy self harmer" have run a complicated fake burglary scam?
Mr Fitzgibbon said if what Briton told police had happened to her was the product of a fantasist and an attention seeker then her powers to ad lib during cross examination were in his opinion "world class and phenomenal."
He added: "Or was it because she was speaking about events that actually occurred?
"She gives an enormous amount of details, descriptions of people, places, what happened. Can you find any change in her stories?
"Police have gone over it again and again but what stands out is their detail, fluency and consistency."
Mr Fitzgibbon said Britton was charged with conspiring together with Paul Hendle and others, but nobody else had been named and he asked: "Why haven't they got anybody else?"
Mr Fitzgibbon said that the jury had seen the series of photographs taken after she was raped that she had been knocked about, with bruising to her face, arms, knees and inside both thighs and feet.
"How did she come by those injuries and when she broke down during questioning by police was it faked or real feelings, or what you saw her do was exactly what you would expect after they had been burgled, raped, kidnapped and cut with a knife?"
Mr Fitzgibbon said Hendle was a bit of a boastful fantasist who liked to tell tales about himself, but Britton had thought it was a good idea to turn for help to people "on the street" for entirely misguided reasons.
"You'd have to be pretty crazy to turn to somebody like that . . . he turned on her, abused her and ended up putting the frighteners on her."
Judge David Turner QC sent the jury out on yesterday afternoon (Nov 19) to consider its verdict.
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