Her dying breath

Cardiff/Tiger Bay: The Wales Millennium Centre with, bottom right, the flat where Lynette White was murdered

ST VALENTINE’S Day. A bitter wind bit through the Bay. Wasteland cold, its unforgiving fingers slithered and shivered into those that were left. Those abandoned to the dark and forgotten by a city fathered on their toil.

Tiger Bay. Not Cardiff Bay.

Sir Geoffrey Inkin stood alongside his son Charles on the Penarth Head. At their feet lay a Disneyland-sized industrial tundra. Acres of urban void. Weedy concrete bases, roofless walls crammed with tip and spoil. The living thrown to its edges, growing distances between their streets, hurried journeys past quiet and disquieting dead docks. And in a flat off Bute Street, above the Kingsport bookies and a fag flick from the Casablanca, Lynette White took her final trick. The Cellophane Man stabbed her over 50 times and tried to cut her head off before walking into the night.

Inkin had been tasked with bringing cranes into this Welsh Detroit. But they weren’t pulling crates, filling holds. Not rusty and arthritic from picking coal from train to ship. They were the interlopers, new and shiny, and they began to move in time with a design devised in London.

Destruction, more destruction. Doors splintered, boots on broken glass, shouts from cells, suspects hauled along corridors, station lights glared, beacons in the night. Interrogations. The first suspect was Mr X, a white paedophile. He was watched, then arrested. But new DNA profiling didn’t have him at the scene. The pressure was on. Find the man who mixed his own blood with Lynette’s.

They say it brought Cardiff Bay Development Corporation’s work to a halt. The Norwegian church had been taken down the year before but it would remain under sheeting, in a warehouse, for another four years. The crane drivers stopped, went for their flasks. Black-clad police teams swarmed through Docks, through Grangetown, Splott, and up Bute Street, into its diarrhoea-brown, brick-built, sub-brutalist, unmemorable, soulless modern replacements. Soulless, like so much to come.

Lynette White, aged just 20 when she was murdered

The police took Stephen Miller in first. Lynette’s boyfriend and ponce. He had been playing pool in the Casablanca only 20 minutes after Lynette’s watch stopped. There was no trace in the flat, no mark on him, but he coughed to it, perhaps because he couldn’t see his secure alibi. No fewer than 13 people had seen Yusef Abdullahi working on a boat on the night of the murder. He was scooped up and charged. Tony Paris was shipped by a squealer with a reputation for framing innocents. Into the dock with them went cousins John and Ronnie Actie. The bloodstained, white man seen near the flat did not.

New steel rose. Talk of the murder gave way to debate over new plans. Better that all of this is swept away if murdering prostitutes is what these people get up to. A multiplex, a curious 1990s creation with a modernist outside and faux medieval European village thoroughfare interior, grew up. There were meetings. People in Canton, Riverside and other close-by suburbs were promised they wouldn’t be flooded if a man-made freshwater lake was built where ships had once passed. An opposition movement against the barrage grew. Rhodri Morgan, not yet First Minister, was involved.

It had been the longest murder trial in British history. The prosecution had greater problems in fitting the forensics to the defendants than it did in overcoming their alibis. But the jury confounded expectations and accepted the far-fetched “cocktail theory” for the blood traces. Abdullahi, Miller and Paris went to prison for life. The two Acties did not. Within two years, the Cardiff Three were freed on appeal. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor issued a stinging indictment of its investigation. A subsequent South Wales Police inquiry found it had done nothing wrong.

Development strode along the dockside. The National Waterfront Museum was opened then cleared away in a murk of financial allegations. The bar and restaurant complex Mermaid Quay arrived to muted applause. Something that might have done justice to Powell Duffryn House, the magnificent merchants’ exchange that had once stood on the site, had been hoped for.

Around the time that the cloying pong from the mud flats finally left the Bay as the Barrage looped it shut, Fitted In, The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry appeared. Satish Sekar’s work had helped free the three men, but he ploughed on in search of the killer. New evidence in the book concerning the elimination of suspects through unreliable DNA testing had prompted an investigation that went nowhere, and police were at first reluctant to start over again. Second Generation Multiplex Plus amplification techniques, providing a complete profile from one cell, allowed them to go back to Lynette’s flat with fresh eyes.

St David’s Hotel, and Tiger Bay died. All it took was five stars. No longer regeneration, this was the new Wales rising. A millennial, confident nation, its lodestone a few acres dotted oddly with grand constructions, many yet to arrive. The CBDC took this opportunity to depart, but the back patting, like the applause, only half-hearted. Much of the land it had yet to get develop went in a fire sale to builders who raised tributes to Soviet-era Urals flat blocks among the reclaimed marshes.

Forensic Alliance went to work on many of the 900 items of evidence. One of Lynette’s socks, and her jeans, yielded a full DNA profile. So did the wrapping from a cigarette packet. It gave Cellophane Man his name. The team also peeled back layers of paint from a skirting board to find another match. It all matched. It had been thought that Cellophane Man had simply vanished, but here he was, in the lab, under the microscope, in sample after sample.

The Wales Millennium Centre, opened by firework display. It brought inspection from the critics, still malcontented by the governmental cowardice that denied Zaha Hadid’s opera house. The mollusc would go on to fill its dual roles as venue and community arts HQ quite successfully, but it cut a lonely profile. Next door, the hole in the ground row between Richard Rogers and Edwina Hart played out.

Cellophane Man was not on the DNA database, nor on Interpol’s. He had kept his nose clean. Detective Constable Paul Williams went back to the results. He used one allele to take out 99% of results, before expanding to eight alleles, a full SGM+ and DNA profile, giving him 12 suspects. When he got to 12 alleles, he found only one match in the South Wales area. It was a teenage boy, not born at the time of Lynette’s murder.

Settled – eventually – in the architect’s favour, the Senedd arrives. The Conservatives make a lot of noise about how the over-budget cost could have gone on a kids’ hospital, but they’re missing the point. I leave my office and walk to the Bay for the first plenary in the Siambr. The gallery is packed with coach parties, pensioner groups from places like Cwmfelin, Six Bells, Brackla. All white, all Welsh. No one from nearby. No one who has lived here all their lives.

The 14-year-old leads police to his uncle, Jeffrey Gaffoor, a security guard from Llanharan. He gives a swab and decides to take his own life. Surveillance teams kick his door in. He tells police and paramedics: “Just for the record, I did kill Lynette White. I sincerely hope I die.” Gafoor had lived like a monk since the murder, only once coming to the attention of the law, ordered to do community service for assaulting a work colleague in the month that the Cardiff Three were released. He never denied his guilt but his claim that the two of them got into a fight over money never fully satisfies. He gets life.

Walking back from that first day in the Senedd, St David’s Day, I opted for Bute Street instead of Lloyd George Avenue. While the former endured, the new road had not quite turned out as planned. It was supposed to have been Bute Avenue, as wide as the two roads together, a “continental-style boulevard” featuring a state-of-the-art tram system in place of the single, remaining train line to this end of the docks. The eye-watering cost abandoned it to archive obscurity. The railway track has become a barrier, a peace line, between old Bay and new. One side affluent, the other – the side that successive Cardiff Bay administrations have pledged to help – still poor, and as abandoned as it was the day Lynette was murdered. Perhaps more so, since Tiger Bay now must live cheek-by-jowl with modern, young prosperity. The results of opportunity.

Jeffrey Gafoor, known for years as the Cellophane Man, being taken for sentencing 15 years after the murder

“The guilty plea by Gafoor was the greatest triumph of South Wales Police. But it also emphasised their greatest failure,” said Sekar. After Gafoor’s conviction, police began knocking on doors again. But this was somewhat different to first time around. They were visiting men and women they had worked with. By 2006, some 23 people, including 15 retired or serving officers, had been arrested and questioned on suspicion of false imprisonment, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and misconduct in public office. By December 2008, Mark Grommek, Angela Psaila and Leanne Vilday, all prosecution witnesses at the trial of Abdullahi, Miller and Paris, are jailed after pleading guilty to perjury. In March last year, 15 people – 13 of them police officers, three still serving – are charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice or perjury. They will stand trial either this year or next, most likely in the Old Bailey.

That walk back along Bute Street on that day almost four years ago yielded no surprises, just as it didn’t this week, when I walked it again. The road remains exactly as it did when I first saw it in 1994 (save traffic calming), and probably the same since Lynette’s day. For those people left in this ever-tighter triangle of land, nothing really changed. Life in the Bay got better for someone else. And while the murder of a young prostitute and its aftermath tells the story of a changing city just as well as billions of pounds of inward investment, it ultimately made as little difference to life in Cardiff as the ever-present wind, the same wind that picked up her dying breath, that carries on as it always did, winding its way now past steel and glass, over the Bay – Cardiff Bay, not Tiger Bay – and headed out to sea.