Murder convictions 'unsafe' court told

The Court of Appeal is to be shown a police file suggesting the victim of a murder for which two men were jailed for life was alive three years after his supposed death.

The evidence is part of a renewed appeal by the two men, Terry Pinfold and Harry Mackenney, who were jailed in 1980 for the murder of Terry Eve.

In the 1970s, Pinfold and Mackenney - both ex-prisoners - were in business together in Dagenham, Essex making underwater diving equipment.

In November 1974, Mr Eve, who shared their factory space, went missing.

A former employee of theirs, Bruce Childs, later pleaded guilty to six murders committed between 1974 and 1978.

Life sentences

He also turned Queen's Evidence and implicated Pinfold and Mackenney in the disappearance of Mr Eve.

The pair were convicted by an Old Bailey jury in November 1980 - Mackenney on four counts of murder and Pinfold on a charge of procuring Mackenney and Childs to murder Terry Eve.

But the case has been referred back to the court by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the watchdog which investigates possible miscarriages of justice.

Mackenney is still in jail serving a "whole life" tariff. Pinfold was bailed, pending appeal, in September 2001 having served almost all of his recommended minimum sentence.

Appeal judges headed by Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, were set to hear the appeal on Monday.

However, the hearing was adjourned until the end of October to give lawyers time to wade through a mass of recently-disclosed documents.