When prisoners write to me, as they do all the time, protesting their innocence, I always start with the question: 'Why were you arrested?' The answer usually gives some sort of clue as to whether their claims can be justified. In Judith Ward's case the answer gives no clue at all. She was taken off the streets of Liverpool at half-past six one dark wet February morning in 1974. For several weeks she had been living the life of a drifter, sleeping in railway wagons off Euston Station. She had hitched a lift to Cardiff with a friend to spend a single night between sheets. From Cardiff she'd hitched again to Liverpool, where a police car came across her shivering in a shop doorway. She was taken in for questioning for one reason only: her driving licence was issued in Northern Ireland. Ambushed doesn't help us much about what happened next: Judith Ward doesn't remember. She was suffering from a serious mental disorder. One result was that she told the police anything she thought they wanted to know.

LRB 4 November 1993 | PDF Download