This three-part series takes an unsensationalist approach in recounting how police pursued five innocent men for the murder of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988
The year is 1988, and the mutilated body of a 20-year-old woman is found in a flat in Cardiff. Four witnesses come forward to say they saw a pale, brown-haired man with a bloodied hand, outside, soon after the murder, crying and muttering incoherently to himself. After a 10-month investigation the police arrest and charge five black and mixed-race men, all of whom have alibis. A Killing in Tiger Bay (BBC Two) tells the story – in three hour-long episodes and granular, unsensationlist detail – of what happened, along with the subsequent convictions of three of them and the international outcry that saw those convictions eventually overturned.
As with most miscarriages of justice, the case is both unbelievable and only too believable. Unbelievable because, well, see above. And only too believable because of the way we know systemic bias and individual prejudice work and how they produce results that have a perverted logic of their own.
