Roy Whiting - The Trial

The Trial

By 6 February 2001, Sussex Police had found enough evidence to charge Whiting and he appeared at Lewes Crown Court on charges of abduction and murder. He denied the charges and was remanded in custody to await trial.

The trial began on 14 November 2001 at Lewes Crown Court and the jury heard from several witnesses. The key witnesses included Sarah Payne's oldest brother Lee, who had seen a scruffy-looking man with yellowish teeth drive past the field where he and his siblings had been playing at the time Sarah vanished. A female motorist had found one of Sarah's shoes in a country lane several miles from where her body was found, and forensic scientists had found fibres from Whiting's van on the shoe. The damning piece of evidence was a strand of blonde hair on a T-shirt found in Whiting's van - the forensic experts who made this discovery said that DNA test results meant that there was a one-in-a-billion chance of it belonging to anyone other than Sarah.

This case is particularly notable for the extensive use of forensic sciences in establishing the prosecution case against Roy Whiting. 20 forensic experts were employed during the inquiry from a variety of fields including entomology, pathology, geology, archaeology, environmental profiling and oil/lubricant analysis. It has been estimated that the cost of the investigation involved a thousand personnel and cost more than £2 million.

On 12 December 2001, Roy Whiting was convicted of the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial judge, Mr Justice Curtis, said that it was a rare case in which a life sentence should mean life. This was only the 24th time in British legal history that such a recommendation had been made.

After Whiting was convicted of killing Sarah Payne, it was revealed that he was already a convicted child sex offender; this proved correct the Payne family's belief that Sarah had been killed by a child sex offender. There were renewed calls for the government to allow controlled public access to the sex offender's register. This became the campaign for what is known as Sarah's Law, after Megan's Law in America.