Peter Heron: 'Police banged on my door to accuse me of murder - and my life was destroyed yet again'

Mr Heron, the man whose life had been devastated by the savage murder of his wife, Ann, 15 years before, reacted by simply getting on with eating his breakfast.

“The first thing I said to them was, ‘why am I not surprised?’,” he recalls.

• 'It was a normal, working day...until I went home and found my wife dead on the living room floor'
• 'I'm not the man who got away with it,' says husband of unsolved murder victim Ann Heron

“I was living at Motherwell and they wanted to be off, take me down to Spennymoor Police Station. I said to them, ‘don’t you think you should take my computer? What about looking round the garage and my car?’

“They said, ‘oh yeah,’ but they weren’t in the garage for more than two minutes. They never even looked in the car.”

Mr Heron stresses he didn’t have a problem with being interrogated, his finances checked, his life history checked, his personal life raked over and made public. That had all happened 15 years before and, an intelligent man, he understood why Durham Constabulary had to do it.

But, even at 80 years old, there is a real, strong anger in him about the fact that he was charged that November in 2005 with the murder of Ann.

“They destroyed my life. People don’t believe me, but I was furious when the case collapsed. I wanted it all to come out, for me to be found ‘not guilty’ by my peers and everyone know for sure that I was an innocent man. Instead people think; ‘I’m the man who got away with it.”

In fact, the way Mr Heron found out he was not going to be charged was far from the classic, conventional way he was arrested that morning in Scotland. “There were two reporters from The Northern Echo who knocked on the door. It was, ‘Mr Heron, what do you think about the charges against you being dropped?’ The police didn’t even tell me.”

But that was to come. First Mr Heron, arrested for murder, had to sit in silence and drive to Spennymoor. “They wouldn’t even talk about Middlesbrough Football Club, it was just silence.”

The talking started in the police station where Mr Heron refused a solicitor. “I just said, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, so I don’t need a solicitor. Eventually they went out and got me fish and chips.”

Mr Heron, who was 70-years-old and a diabetic, was relatively calm, but his children were most assuredly not. They heard the news on the radio that ‘a man from Scotland has been arrested for the murder of Ann Heron.’

Their hopes soared in the belief the real murderer was caught. Hope soon turned to devastation. It was Mr Heron’s children who finally insisted he appoint a solicitor.

By this time, Mr Heron’s children did not just mean his own three daughters by his first wife Catherine, but step-children from a third marriage.

APPEAL: Peter Heron appeals to find the killer in 1990

The devastated widower, who would make long trips alone to west Scotland to stand at the grave of his murdered wife had, against the odds, found some happiness again. He had met Freda Buddie, a 49-year-old widow from Motherwell with two children of her own, Morag and Hazel on business trips north. They married in 1993, uninvited press photographers gate-crashing the wedding.

“Freda’s family had serious concerns at first, as you can understand,” says Mr Heron. “But we became very close.”

But more tragedy was in store for Mr Heron, once a happy, ordinary man, a haulage company director from North Ormesby. Freda was diagnosed with cancer in 2000 and, after being nursed by Mr Heron, sadly died.

The second-time widower had moved to the bungalow in Wishlaw, Scotland he was hoping to share with his wife. That was the home he was in when that early morning knock was rapped on the door by a Durham Constabulary police officer.

The reason for Mr Heron’s arrest, all those years down the line, was a tiny speck of DNA evidence found on Ann’s body from 15 years before. It was so tiny that it had to be ‘grown’ in laboratory conditions over a period of many years so that a genetic fingerprint could be taken.

The Herons and police alike had high hopes that the DNA, related to sexual activity, might prove the key to finding the killer. But it wasn’t from the killer. It was from Ann’s own husband and from inside their own home.

Mr Heron, consistently denying doing anything wrong, spent two nights at Spennymoor and, on the second morning, the pensioner, who had never been in even the slightest trouble with police before, found himself being taken to Newton Aycliffe Magistrates Court to be charged with a Category A murder. “My guard didn’t even bother putting handcuffs on me until I was just outside the door,” he recalls.

His composure was not matched by his daughters Debbie and Beverley and lifelong friend, Alastair Bruce, who saw him enter the court in cuffs to hear the accusation against him read in court.

“It was just surreal, totally surreal,” says Debbie Simpson, Mr Heron’s daughter, shaking her head at the memory.

INVESTIGATION: Police at the scene of the murder in 1990

The next time his daughters saw their beloved dad was in Holme House Prison, near Stockton. On his first and second nights behind bars, Mr Heron, being, as is routine, watched in the hospital wing in case he was suicidal.

In fact he was so calm, the wardens actually persuaded him to keep an eye on someone else, a younger man in a far worse state. “I talked about work he might be able to get outside, about becoming a driver,” he remembers, “it calmed him down, he asked for me to stay. But don’t get me wrong, maybe it all would have played better with the authorities if I’d been bouncing off the walls.

“The next day my family came to visit...they were appalled because I was actually wearing jeans.”

It’s a well practised, funny line, and lightens the mood. But Mrs Simpson soon puts the record straight. “It was awful, just awful, seeing dad in there,” she says. “In the jeans and the regulation shirt. But he told us, ‘no tears,’ we had much to do.”

Mr Heron, the man who had never committed a crime, who had been through so much tragedy, stayed in that prison for six days. And yet he had one strange incident on the inside that lifted his spirits. “The warden came in, calling me Mr Heron this and Mr Heron that, very polite. I mean, normally it would be just ‘Heron’ or a number. I asked him, ‘why so polite?’ He said; ‘because you didn’t do it. It’s common knowledge in here.’ Of course I asked for more information and there was none and, really, it meant nothing, but it was intriguing.”

Mr Heron’s lawyer, Peter Wishlade, was clear that he could expect to stay in prison a good while longer. People charged by the Crown Prosecution Service with Category A murder are very rarely allowed out on the streets.

But Mr Heron was one of them. A bail application was unexpectedly granted by a crown court judge.

“I think the prosecution already knew then, their case, such as it was, was crumbling. The judge just said, ‘if Mr Heron was going to abscond, he’d have absconded 15 years ago’. It’s where the case started to collapse.

“The strongest evidence comes in the first bundle (a file of written evidence to be presented to court that is first exchanged between prosecution and defence barristers). My barrister took a look at it and just said, ‘where is the evidence against my client?’ I mean, it just wasn’t there.”

Suddenly free Mr Heron was taken by family to his daughter’s home in Hutton Rudby and, in February, there came that knock on the door from The Northern Echo reporters telling him that the case had collapsed.

“I thanked the reporters for the information. I rang my solicitor and he said; ‘rubbish! There’s no way you’ll be told by two reporters at the front door. And I said, ‘well, that’s what I thought, you know.’ Anyway the following morning Mr Wishlade rang back and he said, ‘I can’t believe it...you’re right. They are the most unprofessional ******** I’ve ever dealt with.

He said, ‘come down and see me at the office’ the next morning. My defending barrister’s junior and he said, ‘yes we can confirm it, it’s collapsed, that’s it.’

“And I said, oh no, no, no, I’m not going to be landed with the ‘man who got away with it,’ because I didn’t do it. They’ve destroyed by reputation, they’ve destroyed my good character, they’ve destroyed my family’s good character...and they think they can just walk away from that. I said, ‘I want to go to the crown court, before my peers, but they said, ‘you’d be the first man in legal history to want to go ahead with a murder trial against you.’ But I want my name cleared.”

Mr Heron has anger against the police. He believes the urge to push for a prosecution for such a high profile case, County Durham’s only unsolved murder in more than 65 years, was too strong for some police officers.

As will be outlined elsewhere, he queries the re-interviewing of several witnesses, not least that of his business associate, Paul Stiller, who is on the record of refusing to sign his 2005 witness statement saying he “didn’t recognise 40 to 50 per cent of it”.

But that night back in 2005, amid the anger, there must have been relief. Mrs Simpson remembers the family going, gathered together in extremis once again, for a drink in a pub in Hutton Rudby. “Dad had done nothing wrong,” she says, “we didn’t want to cower away as if he had. But I remember people staring, really staring that night, with hatred in their eyes, staring as if Dad was a murderer.”

Tomorrow Mr Heron tells of the effect the accusations and suspicions have had on him and his family, pays tribute to Ann...and talks about his on-going fight for justice.