The former girlfriend of Babes in the Wood murderer Russell Bishop is due to be freed from prison next month after serving three years of a six-year sentence.
Jennifer Johnson, 58, also known as Jennie or Jennifer Robinson, was jailed for six years for perjury and six years for perverting justice, to run concurrently.
She is expected to be released to serve the rest of her sentence on licence.
Johnson, of Saunders Park View, Brighton, lied at Bishop’s trial in 1987 when he was cleared of the murder of nine-year-olds Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows in Wild Park, Moulsecoomb, in 1986.
The case became known as the Babes in the Wood murders and Johnson’s lies and the acquittal of Bishop left him free to strike again.
He went on to snatch seven-year-old Rachael Watts from the street in Whitehawk in February 1990, shove her in the boot of his car and drive her to the Devil’s Dyke.
At the Dyke, he sexually assaulted her, strangled her and left her for dead in bushes. Miraculously she survived and her evidence helped to put Bishop behind bars.
When Sir Peter Fraser, known as Mr Justice Fraser, jailed Johnson at Lewes Crown court in May 2021, he said: “The significance of your perjury at the 1987 trial cannot be overstated.”
Mr Justice Fraser, the High Court judge who ruled against the Post Office in the sub-postmasters scandal, said that the abduction was a “dreadful consequence” of Bishop’s acquittal. The judge said: “He was free to offend again and he did.”
He also spoke of the Hadaways and Fellows families’ long wait for justice after they had campaigned successfully for a change in the law of double jeopardy.
The effect of the wrongful acquittals on the families of the two girls, the judge said, “was most profound.”
As a result of the lies told by Johnson – to the police as well as in court – it took 32 years to bring Bishop.
Johnson applied for permission to appeal but three judges dismissed her application in June 2022, months after Bishop died aged 55.
He was finally convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey, in London, in December 2018.
He was jailed for a minimum of 36 years for the murders of best friends Nicola and Karen.
Bishop was 20 when he sexually assaulted and strangled Karen and Nicola in a woodland den in Wild Park.
While serving life for attempted murder, Bishop was ordered to face a fresh trial under the double jeopardy law, after a breakthrough in DNA science.
The Old Bailey jury returned their guilty verdicts on the 31st anniversary of his original acquittal.
when she gets out, if she had any shred of decency she’d make her way to beachy head and do the right thing.
I will gladly give her the bus fare
Ditto
May the very thought of that third girl’s dreadful ordeal be ever present in this woman’s mind. I hope it tortures her to the grave. She could have prevented that happening if only she had told the truth at the initial trial.
She should have got 32 years in prison!
The families had to wait that long for justice. No one wants someone like her in society, she is as bad as Bishop, to lie for scum like him and put the families through that. Not to mention the other little girl he nearly killed. I hope this plays on her mind for the rest of her miserable existence.
What I will never understand is why this ‘woman’ kept her mouth shut through 30 years of her freedom, knowing that people in her community, the family of Nicola and Karen, in sheer hell without justice, and she’s the one that stopped that justice happening. Had she been a human not a monster, she would have told the police/court and EVERYTHING would have been so different. That 3rd girl bless her, will be going through PTSD for the rest of her days no thanks to Bishop and Johnson. Johnson should have been given a life sentence, because that’s what she gave the families of Nicola and Karen.
And how many more children will have found themselves at the hands of Bishop before he was caught? Absolute monsters, the pair of them.