Trial & Error: The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars TV - Scotsman online article
If the judges think they’ve closed the files on the Ice Cream wars they’re wrong. For six years we’ve been uncovering the full extent of a conviction that disgraces Scottish justice. And now at last we can reveal it: it began one winter’s evening 14 years ago in the bleak outer suburbs of Glasgow. Trial & Error: The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars, Channel 4 1998
There was a war on: In Easter week 1984 he [Doyle] was murdered, so were five other members of the Doyle family … We believe that those responsible have never been brought to justice, and that two men innocent of it have already spent a decade behind bars. ibid.
The travelling vans provide a necessary service: there’s money in a van round. ibid.
The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars trial started at Glasgow Crown Court in the Autumn of 1984. The trial did not run smoothly … It was to find brothers [T C] Campbell and [Joe] Steele guilty. ibid.
A conviction which depended so heavily on the word of criminal informants … Campbell and Steele were convicted on evidence which by the law’s own logic simply could not be true. And the system which convicted Campbell and Steele had held in its own files for twelve long years the evidence which could have freed them. ibid.
There are five ways to prove William Love is a deliberate liar. ibid.
As they were cleared at the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh of the murder of six members of a Glasgow family during a fire-raising attack in 1984, Joseph Steele and Thomas Campbell did not turn to each other or their loved ones packed together in the public gallery, but looked straight ahead, staring unflinchingly at the bench.
Their reaction was perhaps fitting in the circumstances – the true legacy of their 20-year campaign for freedom has been their blinkered determination to overturn one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Scottish criminal history.
The murder of six members of the Doyle family in an arson attack at the height of the so-called ice-cream wars is surpassed in Scottish criminal notoriety only by the horrific deeds of Peter Manuel, who was hanged at Barlinnie Prison in 1958 after being convicted of seven murders. Scotsman online article 18th March 2004, ‘Ice-cream wars verdicts quashed as justice system faulted