The former girlfriend of Babes in the Wood murderer Russell Bishop told the jury at her perjury trial that she lied because she feared for her life.
Jennie Johnson, 55, told Lewes Crown Court that she was under repeated pressure to change her evidence after she gave a truthful statement to the police in October 1986.
Johnson, of Saunders Park View, Brighton, had identified a blue Pinto sweatshirt as belonging to Bishop.
She was unaware that he had worn the top when he killed two nine-year-old girls – Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway – then discarded it on his way home from Wild Park, Brighton.
Bishop’s mother Sylvia found out about Johnson’s statement shortly after she made it and told her to retract it.
Yesterday (Thursday 29 April) Johnson, also known as Jennifer Robinson, told jurors that she was taken to the police station in John Street, Brighton, the next day.
But when she was told that Bishop’s father Roy could not speak for her to make changes to her evidence, she stormed out.
She said that she visited Bishop every day when he was on remand in Brixton prison – taken there by Sylvia Bishop.
And every time Bishop himself would threaten her if she refused to retract her evidence.
Defence barrister Chris Henley asked what he would say – and whether she was scared.
She said: “He didn’t ask me nicely. He threatened if I didn’t change my statement, if he got found guilty, he would come after me, that he’d kill me.”
Mr Henley said: “Were you scared?”
Johnson said: “Yes.”
Mr Henley said: “Did you believe him?”
Johnson again said: “Yes.”
When Mr Henley asked why, Johnson said: “Because he’d strangled me before. He’d hit me before.
“Did I think he was capable for what he’d done to me over the years? Yes.”
After one prison visit, she was taken to Bishop’s solicitor, Ralph Haeems. Johnson said that Haeems had a photo of himself on the wall with the notorious Kray brothers, Ronnie and Reggie.
She was told to sign a retraction but said that she didn’t read what she was signing, just doing what she was told.
Johnson had a son under two and a newborn daughter at the time and said that she would have been tired and exhausted.
Asked if she thought that Bishop was guilty, she said: “I didn’t think he could have done, knowing he was a father himself. I knew he could be violent.”
But the pressure to go back on her evidence that linked Bishop to the Pinto sweatshirt made her think that he might be responsible for the murders.
Johnson said that she didn’t want to change her statement but was told that she had no choice, she said.
Mr Henley asked her when she decided to lie under oath at Bishop’s trial in 1987 which was also held at Lewes Crown Court.
She said from the witness box: “When I was in the dock, where I am now. I just saw his family looking at me.
“I knew I had to say it wasn’t his. I knew it was. None of my family were there. All his family were looking at me.”
She said that she felt frightened and intimidated, adding: “I thought that the jury and the judge would have believed my first statement.
“I just would have thought they would have seen straight through me. They would have saw that I was frightened.
“I just thought they would have believed my first statement and he would have been locked away.”
But the jury in the 1987 trial acquitted Bishop who went on to kidnap another girl in 1990. He sexually assaulted her and left her for dead.
Miraculously, she survived. And her evidence helped to convict Bishop who was jailed for life.
Bishop was retried for the Babes in the Wood murders in 2018 – after the law on double jeopardy had changed and advances in DNA science convincingly linked him to his crime.
He was jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years.
Johnson denies perjury and perverting justice on the ground of duress.
The trial continues.
Jenny isn’t a bad girl she never believed Bishop murdered the girls I have spoken to her in the past and she said “you just never believe your husband is out doing what he did” she told me she felt threatened and was scared for her life after fire bombings on her home and she really didn’t know who had done them, she is telling the truth.