ON A warm August evening in the summer of 1997, the telephone rang behind the bar of a Lake District pub.
The call was for a young off-duty detective. Divers had come across a suspicious canvas package beneath the lapping waters of one of Cumbria’s most picturesque lakes, trussed up with rope and plastic and weighted down with lead. Inside was a body.
Shortly after, Detective Constable Doug Marshall was standing on the shoreline of Coniston Water. High-powered lamps illuminated the crime scene. He peered down at the grim remains of a young woman.
He didn’t know it, but this moment would shape his professional life for the next quarter of a century.
The body was that of Carol Park, a 30-year-old mother-of-three from Barrow-in-Furness. She had gone missing 21 years earlier in 1976. Journalists rapidly booked up every guest house in the shipyard town as they smelt a sensational story that would shock their readers and viewers.
I was a reporter for the local newspaper at the time and thrown into the biggest crime story of my career, trying to make sense of the unfolding events and keep up with Fleet Street’s finest.
The discovery sparked perhaps the strangest English murder mystery of the late 20th century.
From Carol’s disappearance onwards, it would span five decades – before justice was finally served.
Inevitably, newspaper headline writers borrowed the title of Raymond Chandler’s famous detective novel, The Lady in the Lake, to describe the victim.
From the start, Cumbria Police’s prime suspect was Carol’s husband Gordon, who was now aged 53, a respected retired school teacher and married to his third wife.
Park was on holiday in France at the time of the gruesome discovery but detectives wasted no time in securing a warrant to search his semi-detached home in Barrow, gaining entry through an upstairs window. Soon after, officers were seen removing computer equipment from the house and rope samples from the garage.
Meanwhile, Park’s children had been informed the body was that of their mother. Two decades of hoping she might one day return home safely were cruelly dashed in an instant. Carol’s son telephoned his father in France.
“Oh dear,” was Park’s reaction to news that his first wife’s body had been found at the bottom of a lake.
Suspicions intensified after Park failed to immediately rush home.
It would be four days before he finally arrived back in Barrow, where the media and police awaited him. Detectives arrested him the following morning.
By the time DC Doug Marshall and his colleagues sat down to interview Park, they had done their homework.
He had originally been interviewed by police in 1976 when Carol disappeared. During their marriage, she had frequently walked out and, at that time, detectives could not be certain she was dead. Without a body, they were almost powerless.
Now police had a body and a motive. Gordon and Carol had been unhappily married and both had been unfaithful, but they had stayed together only for the sake of the children. Moreover, Park was known to be controlling and coercive.
A keen sailor with a boat on Coniston Water and a mountaineer proficient in the arcane art of tying knots, he also had the knowledge and wherewithal to have hidden his wife’s body. Under questioning, detectives found Park cold and sarcastic. His demeanour did not ring true for someone claiming to be innocent. Within hours, Park was charged with murder.
Yet what might have seemed on the face of it an open-and-shut case would prove to be one of the most complex and challenging in British legal history. To the frustration of detectives, the Crown Prosecution Service felt the evidence against Gordon Park was not enough to go to trial. Largely circumstantial, it was adversely impacted by the passage of time, and so, in January 1998, the murder charge was dropped.
Park wasted no time in trying to restore his reputation. A Sunday newspaper paid him £50,000 for his story in an interview published 10 days later.
“I want her murderer caught. After all I’ve been through, the police owe it to me,” Park stated. The piece was accompanied by a photograph of him gazing wistfully across the Cumbrian lake where his wife’s body had been discovered.
Park’s crocodile tears appeared to taunt the police.
Doug Marshall was unsurprised: it was typical of the man he had observed in police interviews.
Later, in 1998, I saw first-hand Park’s steely carapace when I reported on Carol’s inquest at Barrow Town Hall. Park wasunder instruction from his solicitor to say nothing incriminating when giving evidence. As a result, he said very little at all duringthe hearing.
I sat among dozens of reporters, scribbling notes. I made a point of watching Parkwhen the coroner issued a warning to whoever was responsible for Carol’s death. “I hope that their conscience is troubling them,” the coroner said, as he ruled she had been a victim of murder.
Stony-faced, Gordon Park showed no emotion.
As the 1990s melted into the new millennium, Cumbria Police refocused on new, pressing cases. But the investigation into the murder of Carol Park remained live and ongoing.
As he rose through the ranks, Detective Doug Marshall continued to fight for justice for Carol and her family. He was convinced Gordon Park was guilty and he was committed to building a stronger case. He carried the Carol Park file with him wherever he went. Slowly but surely, he and his colleagues gathered new, compelling evidence. The investigation was kept covert. The last thing they wanted was to spook Gordon Park.
Finally, at breakfast time in early January 2004, detectives knocked on Park’s Barrow front door. They told him he was being rearrested for the murder.
In preparing for the interviews, Marshall and the team meticulously rehearsed their questions, ready to pounce on inconsistencies in Park’s answers. When they werefinished, it fell to Marshall to charge Park with murder.
“I’ve charged the same man with the same murder twice,” he said.
Park’s trial began at Manchester Crown Court in the winter of 2004 and lasted 10 weeks. There would be no single smoking-gun piece of evidence to incriminate Park.
Instead, the prosecution case was built on a solid foundation of overwhelming circumstantial evidence.
There was Park’s boat on Coniston Water, which he sold the same month Carol went missing. There were the ropes binding the package holding the body: they were tied with uncommon knots.
Park possessed the know-how to tie them.
New evidence also included statements from inmates to whom Park had allegedly confessed during his time on remand in 1997. Park’s legal team said none of this proved beyond reasonable doubt he was the man who murdered Carol.
Clearly, Park believed he could not be convicted on such evidence.
On the day of the verdict in January 2005, he was upbeat and promised reporters he would speak about what he called his 28-year nightmare once he was acquitted.
When the jury returned its verdict, the atmosphere in court was electric. “In terms of suspense it’s probably the biggest moment in my life,” Doug Marshall would recall.
How did the jury find Gordon Park? Guilty or not guilty?
“Guilty,” replied the foreman of the jury.
Park slumped in the dock. It was a moment of vindication for the police, but there were no celebrations: their reward was the justice served in Carol’s name. Park was given a life sentence, with no hope of being considered for release for 15 years.
From his prison cell, he protested his innocence. His family and friends launched a Free Gordon campaign and began the appeal process against the conviction. Park found prison life difficult. He had lived his whole life enjoying the freedom of the Lake District.
In January 2010, on the morning of his 66th birthday, prison officers found him dead in his cell. He had taken his own life.
It signalled the end of the Free Gordon campaign. Nevertheless, his family fought on to clear his name posthumously. The final hearing at the Court of Appeal took place in the autumn of 2019. In attendance was Doug Marshall, by now a senior detective in Cumbria Police. It was 22 years since he had stood on the shoreline of Coniston Water.
In May 2020, the Court of Appeal judges published their decision. It read: “We have no doubt as to the safety of the conviction. Therefore, the appeal is dismissed.”
It had been 23 years since I’d reported on the case. In the intervening years I’d worked for many newspapers across the north of England, begun lecturing in journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University, and written my first book, The Jigsaw Murders, about a true crime from the Agatha Christie era.
I wasn’t at Park’s trial or sentencing, but over the years I never stopped thinking about the case.
I had been there at the very start, in 1997, but after the 2020 Court of Appeal hearing, it occurred to me that I should now write the
final chapter on this tragic case and bring the terrible story to a close. The result is The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder.
I was a child growing up in the Lake District when Carol Park went missing in 1976. My parents were similar in age to Gordon and Carol.
The Parks were a family not so very different from my own. The book is about a terrible murder, yes. But it is also about families, mothers and fathers, and about the passage of time.
The outcome of the case is a matter of public record. I hope readers will find my book allows them to experience the story as if for the first time, with all the mystery and suspense of a crime thriller.
The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder, by Jeremy Craddock (Mirror Books, £9.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on online orders over £25. Also available via Amazon and in all good bookshops