THE BIZARRE news which greeted Frank Johnson on his arrival back at Brixton Prison one evening after a routine remand court hearing simply made his mouth drop open. The startling revelation, which was relayed to the Tipperary man by a fellow prisoner, would have provided a scene for the vintage sit-com Porridge if the consequent events had not been so tragic and their effect long-lasting.

Johnson, along with two other individuals, had been charged with the murder of John Sheridan, a Mayo man for whom Johnson worked as a assistant in his newsagent shop in London’s East End. In a savage and apparently motiveless attack, the 60-year-old shopkeeper was dowsed with petrol and torched. He died three weeks later.

One evening in Brixton Prison, where Johnson was awaiting trial for the killing, another prisoner Mike Regan asked Johnson how his appearance at the Old Bailey had gone that day. Johnson told him that the hearing had not gone ahead as his solicitor had flu and could not attend court. Regan then informed the astonished Johnson that his solicitor David Jonas was not ill at all and was in fact ensconced in a cell in the same prison.

The news that two solicitors, tow former murder squad detectives and a Harley Street doctor had been arrested in connection with a massive diamond smuggled operation had been announced on the radio that afternoon. The two solicitors were partners in the firm representing Johnson. One of the two was subsequently sentenced to four years, while Jonas was eventually acquitted.

This farcical twist perfectly reflects the bizarre and tangled nature of Frank Johnson’s case and the misfortune which seemed to dog him from the moment the police investigation began.

Eighteen years after his conviction, a weary looking Johnson is in Swaleside Prison on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Although he is now eligible for parole, Johnson is determined to stay put until he is proved innocent of a crime which he is adamant he did not commit.

“He (Sheridan) did more for me than any other man on earth and for my wife and children,” he says. “I was never a saint, but what I’m angry about is that at that time I had everything and look what they done. If I had belonged to any other religion in the world they would not have said I done this.”

Frank Johnson’s early years were unremarkable. He was born in Clonmel in 1941 and was one of six children. His father died when he was a young teenager and his mother is also now dead. He attended the local national school and was an enthusiastic hurler and Gaelic footballer.

He left Ireland in 1956 and threw himself into the London social scene, mixing with his fellow countrymen in Irish pubs and clubs. When he initially worked on the buildings, he added a few years onto his real age of 15 in order to secure work. He drifted into petty crime and served short sentences for burglary. It was on one such stretch in HMP Walton in Merseyside in 1965 that he met Waterford man Jack Tierney, who had a history of violent crime. His friendship with Tierney would ultimately prove his undoing.

When Johnson came out of Walton Prison he was determined to go straight. He worked at a number of jobs, including decorating and portering. By 1972 Johnson and his common-law wife Mary, whom he had met in London, were looking after a boarding-house in Kensington. Frank was living in Battersea, while Mary lived in the basement of the lodging house. Eventually the couple were offered a flat at Kay Road, Stockwell by a friend, and it was here that they met John Sheridan, known as Jack, and his wife Madeleine, who ran a boarding house at nearby Mayflower Road. Frank began to help out at the couple’s newsagent shop in the Whitechapel Road and Mary took over the upkeep of the boarding house in which Mrs. Sheridan lived. The two couples were great friends and the working arrangements seemed to suit everyone. The happy scenario, however, was marred by the sudden death of Mrs. Sheridan.

Johnson had been in the shop with Mr. Sheridan’s nephew Larry, from Belfast, when Mrs. Sheridan suffered a brain haemorrhage, collapsed and died. Johnson and his wife made the funeral arrangements for Mr. Sheridan; they put a cross with a red rose on her grave.

In February 1973, shortly after his wife’s death, Mr. Sheridan was knocked down by a car and almost immediately Johnson was summoned to the hospital at his employer’s request. Johnson was asked to see to the morning papers at 4.30am, a task normally carried out by Sheridan who would retire to bed when Johnson arrived at 8.30am. He was also told to look after approximately £4,000 which was hidden in Sheridan’s bedroom.

One suspects that Frank Johnson might be far better off if he’d never heard of that money . . .

n The events of February 3, 1975 are indelibly stamped in Frank Johnson’s memory. His telling of them has never altered. Jack Sheridan’s shop was at No. 228 Whitechapel Road, the busy East End road leading into the Mile End Road. It stood opposite the Blind Beggar pub in which Ronnie Kray had shot George Cornell nine years earlier – the Krays’ first murder victim. Johnson had set out from the shop in the early evening to take Sheridan’s two dogs for their walk. He went earlier than usual so he could be back in time to watch Opportunity Knocks on television. The two men had often placed small bets on who would win.

On the way, Johnson explains, he saw Jack Tierney walking towards the tube station. He shouted across at Tierney, asking him to go back to the shop for a drink, but the offer was refused. After returning to the shop, Johnson says he served two little girls and then joined Sheridan in the living room to wait for their favourite show. As they sat drinking coffee someone shouted from inside the shop and Sheridan went out. A few seconds later, Johnson looked up to see his friend standing in the doorway ablaze from the waist up. Johnson says he threw water on him from the dogs’ bowl and then phoned for an ambulance, a fact which is undisputed.

Johnson says that he visited Sheridan in hospital almost every night following his terrible ordeal. On February 22, however, he was told that his friend was too ill for visitors. Later that same night, Johnson was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Arresting officers found that the Irishman had £700 in his pocket and when they questioned him about it he explained that he was minding £500 for Sheridan and that £200 was his own. The police then informed him that his employer had died. He was released without charge. Again, it was circumstantial evidence which would come to haunt him.

Ten months later, acting on “information received”, detectives from Leman Street police station arrested Johnson and charged him with murder. Jack Tierney and another man David Smart, a former soldier, were also charged; Frank Johnson was cited by them as the instigator of the gruesome attack. He was separately charged with stealing £4,000 from between February 2 and 25, 1975.

Smart pleaded guilty and admitted to throwing petrol over Sheridan in the attack. Johnson and Tierney pleaded not guilty. Two days before the trial began Johnson dismissed his solicitors, who had been implicated in a separate crime, and was given only two days to prepare his own defence by the judge. The jury eventually found Smart guilty unanimously and, by majority verdicts, convicted Johnson and Tierney. On Johnson, they were unanimous on only one matter: that he had stolen £4,000.

This was curious in that no evidence confirming the existence of the £4,000 was ever produced. The prosecution claimed that Sheridan had deposited a sealed package containing £4,000 in a Barclays Bank safe deposit box on February 23, 1974, that he had withdrawn it on October 31, 1974 and hidden it in his shop. But a bank clerk could only tell the court that the package had “felt like money.” No-one had seen inside it.

The prosecution claims provoke an obvious question: why would a businessman like Sheridan put such a sum in a non-interest earning deposit box and then suddenly take it out to store it at home? Johnson’s recollection of events is far more plausible and a yellowing statement in his possession support his story.

A parcel had indeed been put in a bank vault by Sheridan, but this contained personal items belonging to his late wife, and not money. A large sum of cash had instead been placed in a bank account by Johnson on behalf of Sheridan while he was in hospital two years before. A Woolwich Building Society account shows a lodgement of £3,335.84 on April 2, 1973 and shows a £200 withdrawal later that year, a sum which Johnson says Sheridan gave to his daughter Karen so she could start an account in her own name. An Abbey National account also reveals deposits of £2,000 and £1,000 in Sheridan’s name, although the jury were shown only a post office account, with a balance of just £350.65. The suggestion was that this was all Sheridan had, except for the disputed £4,000, of which there was of course no sign.

Johnson had once mentioned £4,000 to Tierney and acknowledges as much. His former prison friend had asked him to be a “fence” for a jewellery robbery in Tufnell Park, North London. Johnson had refused to become involved, pointing out – he claims – that if he wanted to steal, he could have taken his employer’s money.

Police statements produced in court also raise serious questions about the nature and the quality of the investigation into the attack. In a statement made by Johnson on February 12, 1975, and witnessed by Inspector Stevens, he said: “After I had put the flames out, he (Sheridan) was stood in there, the back room of the shop, and he said ‘Why me, why me, I’ve been so good to them’. That was all he said, he did not indicate who he meant by ‘them’.” But in court the pitiful cry attributed to Sheridan had become “Why me, why me, I’ve been so good to you,” implicating the man he had befriended and employed – Johnson.

Without a solicitor in court, Johnson had failed to effectively challenge this piece of damning sophistry. *

n More crucial to Johnson’s case are statements which are believed to have been made to police by two male nurses working on Namian’s Ward at Guy’s Hospital, but which were never brought to court. Johnson says that he gave a note to his solicitor at the time, asking him to track down these witnesses. Detectives maintained that Sheridan had been too ill to make any statements, but this is disputed by Johnson. Gareth Pierce, who has championed a number of miscarriages of justice cases, now represents Johnson and is currently searching for these hospital staff.

The question of motivation doesn’t seem to have been adequately analysed either by the police or by the courts. If Frank Johnson had wanted to rob £4,000 from a shop he already worked in, why attack Sheridan at all? And why involve two other men with whom he would have to share the takings? Jack Tierney’s relationship with the Metropolitan Police may well lie at the heart of this tangled web. His activities as an “agent provocateur” were documented in the book The Political Police In Britain by Tony Bunyan.

In June 1972 Tierney’s police handlers arranged for him to meet Pauline Conroy and Andrew Allesmere, who were associated with the left-wing group The Angry Brigade. Tierney led the two to believe that he could get his hands on police files and even guns. After bugging this and other sessions with them, the tapes were presented as evidence when they were charged with attempting to procure weapons. Tierney, the chief prosecution witness, identified himself to the jury as a police agent. On the evidence presented, however, the jury acquitted Conroy and Ellesmere.

Clearly there is some suspicion that, three years later, Tierney may have been involved in a similar fit-up attempt on Johnson and in collusion with the police. But at best this is a tenuous theory, for which it would be very difficult to put flesh on 19 years later.

There was a local newspaper report of an IRA connection with the attack on Sheridan but this had never been followed up. Johnson believes however, that there was a plot to frame him as a member of the IRA. IRA leaflets had been pushed through the shop’s letterbox in January of that year requesting money for a European Court appeal by an alleged IRA bomber. A similar poster had gone up mysteriously on the wall of Sheridan’s boarding house, complete with the hand-written addition ‘All donations to Frank’. Johnson, who knew no other Franks or anything about the collection, tore it down.

Also tied in to Johnson’s belief that there was a conspiracy against him is another intriguing note. David Smart admitted in his statement to walking up and down in front of the shop in full view of people at the bus stop shortly before the attack. The ex-soldier bore a striking resemblance to an Irishman named McCrutcheon, who lodged in Sheridan’s boarding house.

These straws in the wind notwithstanding, the roles of Smart and Tierney in the whole affair remain confusing to say the least. It is not known what made either Smart or Tierney confess or how they came to cite Johnson as the instigator of the attack. In his statement, Tierney begged for God’s forgiveness and accused Johnson of being the ring leader with dangerous connections in Ireland. This statement – and indeed Smart’s – should have been ruled inadmissible, but the judge allowed them to be heard by the jury. In the heel of the hunt, both Tierney and Smart received lighter sentences than Johnson and both have since been released from prison.

Tracing original statements and witnesses is a hard task after 19 years when the trail has gone cold. A legal submission is to be made by Frank Johnson’s solicitor Gareth Pierce to the British Home Secretary Michael Howard, incorporating the fresh evidence gathered in his defence. Support for Frank Johnson is also mounting, with 30 British MPs signing an early day motion expressing concern over his conviction.

Central to the support campaign is Billy Power of the Birmingham Six, who spent time with Johnson in prison and who believes he will get another day in court, this time with the benefit of effective legal advice. But for Frank Johnson, it will be 18 years too late.