A Unique Photograph Competition

 

The website IsMichaelStoneGuilty? is offering a reward of £10,000 in an unusual photographic competition. This sum, in cash, will be paid by the site’s financial backer, a Sussex-based entrepreneur, to the person or persons who produce a photograph or photographs or video footage of Michael Stone in the Medway towns on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 9, 1996, at the time he was supposed to be murdering Dr Lin Russell and her daughter Megan some forty miles away.

The photographs below are of:

A) Michael Stone, taken apparently shortly before his first conviction.

B) A white Toyota Tercel similar to the one he was driving at the time.

C) Levi Bellfield: the man Stone’s principal supporters believe is the most likely perpetrator of the Chillenden Murders. This photograph appears to have been taken shortly before his arrest on unrelated charges. At the time of writing he is being held at Wakefield high security prison after being convicted of the murders of two young women.

D) Levi Bellfield aged 33.

E) An E-Fit of the man suspected of committing the Chillenden Murders.

Although it is nearly thirteen years since Dr Lin Russell and her daughter were battered to death, it is by no means impossible that someone: a journalist, a surveyor, a tourist...was in the area and captured Stone on film walking through the town centre. Or perhaps you were taking photographs of traffic for some reason. Who knows?

We are interested in any photograph or film taken that day even if it cannot be authenticated ‐ we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Please visit the site and dust off your old photo album.

Stone was arrested a year after the murders; unless there is a special reason, most people can’t remember what they were doing a year ago, however, we believe we have traced Stone’s movements on the day as accurately as possible. All we need is verification.

12.20pm: Stone is at Cash Converters in Gillingham with a fellow petty crook where they sell a tennis racket and a drill casing they had picked up from Rochester the previous Sunday. He is given a dated and timed till receipt.

15.30: Stone and his criminal associate arrive at 9 Martin Road, Strood.

Just after 16.00, Stone and two companions leave Martin Road on foot for the phone box outside the main Post Office where one of them sells some drugs to a customer.

Around 16.15, Stone walks to the Civic Centre calling into a baker’s shop en route. About this time, Dr Russell and her two young daughters are walking home.

Around 16.20, Stone’s companion books an appointment at the Civic Centre for Thursday, two days hence. The two of them then walk back towards the Post Office and meet up with the third man who gives Stone his share of the money from the drug sale. About this time, Dr Russell and her daughters are attacked.

Around 16.45, Stone and two others leave Martin Road in his white Tercel for Wiltshire Close, arriving there around 17.00.

Around 17.10, the Tercel arrives at Gillingham Station, Stone gets out, and his companion drives back to Stone’s Skinner Street flat. Stone makes a call from a phone box at the front of the station to a business contact.

Around 17.20, Stone catches a train from Gillingham to Rochester.

17.30: Stone arrives at Rochester.

He leave Rochester around 19.00 and spends the rest of the night selling the half ounce of heroin he and an associate had bought earlier from his supplier. He makes a handsome profit which he splits with his partner in crime; he also pays another associate for fixing and driving the Toyota Tercel.

Because of the nature of Stone’s activity at the time I have not published the names of his associates; they are though known to the police.

I stress that Stone’s movements on the afternoon of July 9, 1996 have been reconstructed some considerable time after the event, so they may not be accurate, but...

On February 14, 1999, an article in the Sunday Times reported that in urban areas the average citizen will be captured on three hundred CCTV cameras every day. An earlier article in the same newspaper, November 10, 1996, reported there were then some three thousand CCTV schemes in cities, towns and some villages in Britain. We are the most monitored nation on Earth. Only a tiny percentage of this footage is archived, but it is very likely Stone was caught on several CCTV cameras that afternoon: there was a building site opposite the Cash Converter shop that he visited; this was almost certainly monitored. He passed a fire station which was covered by a camera, the Civic Centre, even a petrol station, and the railway stations. Does any of this footage still exist? Has it perhaps suffered the same fate as the footage that cleared 18 year old Matthew Hilliard of a rape that never happened?

Again, if you were using a camera in the Medway towns on that day, or if you know or think you know where any relevant extant CCTV footage may be, please contact this website, Miles Trent at the Criminal Cases Review Commission, or both of us. Please do not contact Kent Police.

Finally, if you were in the Chillenden area at this time and took any photograph or film that could be relevant, please contact us as above. I have always said that if anyone can show me a simalucrum of real evidence linking Michael Stone to these terrible crimes I will drop him like a hot brick, but I think it is far more likely if any photographic or other evidence does emerge at this late date that it will implicate Levi Bellfield, because as the webmaster of the other Michael Stone site said: how many nutters can there have been driving around London and the Home Counties in the mid-90s attacking women with hammers?

Alexander Baron: Webmaster IsMichaelStoneGuilty?
Sydenham,
London

June 8, 2009


Back To Articles Index
Back To Site Index