An investigation is underway after the family of a man jailed for murdering his own wife took out an advert to trace the JURORS who sent him down.
The brightly-coloured newspaper ad offers £1,000 for jury members to give their opinions on new evidence and to take part in a “documentary” relating to convicted killer Ian Workman.
He was found guilty of murdering wife Sue, 55, at their remote farmhouse in Edgworth, Lancs., in 2011, and was jailed for a minimum of 17-and-a-half years.
Lancashire Police is now looking into the advert after Workman’s son Grant admitted he and his family are behind it, to see whether an offence has been committed.
Grant claims they plan to create a film of the jurors discussing fresh evidence about the case and publish it on YouTube.
He said the family has taken legal advice and are confident they are doing nothing wrong in placing the advert.
Grant said: “We have had quite a few people contact us but have not set up an interview yet.
“We are not approaching jurors, we are inviting them to talk to us.
“We have checked and checked the law and we are not breaking any laws.
“We have put the advert out as we want to know whether the new evidence would have affected the outcome.”
The jury in Workman’s trial agreed with the prosecution that he killed his wife, stabbing her while she was typing up an account of the couple’s rows.
He then stabbed himself in the stomach in a bid to disguise his crime and told police his ex-wife had attacked him.
An attempt to overturn the conviction in the Court of Appeal failed in March last year.
Workman, who has now been in prison for more than four years, has always maintained his innocence.
He claimed his wife attacked him with the eight-inch blade and that he had protected himself by standing behind her and placing his arm around her neck.
Workman then said she was stabbed during his manoeuvre.
But his appeal was thrown out despite biomechanics experts saying it was possible Mrs Workman had stabbed herself.
According to Grant Workman, the judge said he did not believe the jurors‘ verdicts would have been changed had they seen the new evidence.
The family say they want to produce the videos to bolster their assertion that the jurors‘ findings may have been different.
Mrs Workman’s document was interrupted by the fatal incident, with the final entry reading “standing, staring at me acro”.
Grant Workman said fresh evidence from computer experts shows that Mrs Workman manually saved the document, rather than the autosave feature being responsible, making it less likely that his father stabbed her while she was working.
The family also argue, having commissioned independent biomechanics experts to research the case, that more force would have been created by “auto-recoil”
than if Mr Workman had pushed the knife into her by holding her arm.
Auto-recoil describes the process by which Mrs Workman’s arm could have been released during the struggle, driving the knife into her by mistake.
Grant Workman added: “We are coping by continuing to defend an innocent man.
“These are the actions we are having to take and how far we are having to go to help an innocent man.”
The advert was published in the Lancashire Evening Post on April 30, and encourages jurors to write to an email address relating to a company called
Regie Productions, or call a supplied phone number.
The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 inserted into the Juries Act 1974 a new provision making it an offence to disclose information about a jury’s deliberations or to solicit or obtain such information.
