Sally Clark - "Family Friend" , John Batt - the first of Job's comforters

Solicitor John Batt, author, family "friend" of Sally Clark could not wait to run to Rupe's Rag the News of the World to help Neville Thurlbeck write his EXCLUSIVE ......

TRAGIC cot death mum Sally Clark drank herself to death as she tried to drown out the pain of being wrongly jailed for murdering her two baby boys.

The 42-year-old solicitor was found dead at her home on Friday following a massive heart attack brought on by years of boozing to blot out the horror of losing both tots to cot death.

Her devoted husband Stephen was away on business.

Speaking exclusively to the News of the World, Sally's closest family friend John Batt revealed: "She was drinking to console herself and to ease the pain of her grief. It was no secret she had an alcohol problem."

You can read more of this unseemly guff peddled by Batt and Sue Stapely (Quiller Consultants T: 020 7233 9444 M: 07885 798833 ) and relentless charcater assassination of Professor Meqadow, if you wish ... pass the sick bag Alice.

May she find some peace, away from "close family friends".

In another of Rupe's Rags, the Sunday Times they report ...

“I am furious,” said Mike Mackey, Clark’s solicitor. “Eight years on from her conviction, people are still going to prison for murders they didn’t commit where infant deaths occur that can’t be explained by medical science.”

Perhaps if he and her brief Julian Bevan QC (who never met his client before thrial) had done a better job at the trial she would never have been found guilty, the jury split 10-2 so not everyone thought she was guilty.

Remember there were 2 appeals and at the first in which the services of the gilded Julian Bevan QC were retained and had ample opportunity to re-visit the evidence, the Appeal Court Judges said , "If there had been no error in relation to statistics at the trial, we are satisfied that the jury would still have convicted on each count." The Court of Appeal judge Lord Henry, said the point was of "minimal significance", adding that the combined weight of medical and circumstantial evidence against Mrs Clark made her conviction safe.

It was the evidence of the blood tests on Harry that Dr Williams concealed (plus his detremined absence to explain himself) that Sally Clark was finally acquitted - the principal argument - which formed the first paragarphs of the case brought at the 2nd (and successful) Appeal by Claire Montgomery.

Elsewhere in the same paper the columnist Minette Marrin says incorrectly, " Her trial turned on whether two such deaths could possibly be a coincidence. " it did not, it turned on what she calls

"incompetence, arrogance, inattention to detail, more than a whiff of cronyism, and above all a glaring lack of common sense. ".

.. not of medical witnesses, but the lawyers she paid to defend her , who made such a botch of the case.

This doesn't stop her stoking up the fires the fashionable feminists are stoking under Professor Meadow.

Geoffrey Wansell in the Independent spreads further myths.

"In the wake of her conviction, the jubilant Cheshire Police had suggested, privately, in media briefings, that Sally had a "small drinking problem" and "didn't want to sacrifice her glamorous lifestyle for children" - and the world believed that whispering campaign. What utter, felonious, irresponsible nonsense."

That is "felonious, irresponsible nonsense". Sally Clark's problems with alcohol had been deliberately suppressed in court, (and hence unknown to the jury) bya shabby agreement of both the prosecution and defence with the collusion of the Judge, the quid pro quo being that no character witnesses were allowed. (What did the jury make of a successful lawyer, educated, who didn't or maybe couldn't produce a single characater witness, friend, lawyer, employer, neighbour, healthcare worker, doctor ?) Her treatment for alcohol problems was exposed at the end of the trial by the Prosecution in open court and the Judge declared in passing sentence to have taken into accounts psychiatric reports and her problems with alcohol going back to 1996.

Speculation in the press was extensive and lurid both by police involved in the case and others, usually anonymously and it was not restricted to Sally Clark alone.

In the book of the trial by John Batt ,"Stolen Inoccence", he tells of Det. Insp. John Gardner, who led the investigation, who said he was pleased with the verdicts and hoped that Clark could finally come to accept responsibility for what she had done. It had been the most difficult of tasks, he said, to confront a parent and accuse her of killing her own children. “Most people believe it is an unbelievable act. It is harder to accept when you have a woman who has advantages in life.”

Mr Gardner said of Clark's husband:

“I don't know how much he knows, how much he suspects, or whether he has almost turned a blind eye to what has gone on.”

NB Curiously Marilyn Stowe, the Leeds solicitor who volunteered her services and obtained the medical notes from Macclesfield Hospital on both babies which eventually led to the acquittal of Sally Clark never rates a mention.

NB2 Catch Septic Isle in a necessary and very topical post about the treatment of women in prison and the happily hypocritical Dail Mail.

NB3 Monday mid -day "family friend" John Batt is still at it, revealing Sally Clark's alcoholism and the lonely circumstances of her death, whilst her husband Stepehn was away in France on business. .. this time in the Evening Standard