He was that sure

He was that sure."Mandy had cerebral palsy and a history of falls. On the day of her death, she had fallen twice: from a swing and on the stairs."Dr Wrightson wanted more stuff I got more letters going It was probably a load of nonsense, much of what I sent him. I sent him a Child Development Unit report on Mandy - whatever I could lay my hands on. But he was writing back to me and telling me that the evidence was there."Callan fetches in from a box in another room the diaries he kept for four years in jail. They are thin, stapled booklets, a week to a page, handed out by the prison chaplaincy, with chocolate-box colour photographs on the covers: trees in autumn, smart English villages in summer, herons.

But he wrote back and a correspondence began.For the first few months, Callan had no access to transcripts. He wrote down what he remembered from the pathologist's report, as it was conveyed during the trial "Dr Wrightson thought a vessel had burst in Mandy's head And that was before he saw any post-mortem photographs. "It was aimed at lay people - and there was what happened with Mandy. Black and white." He wrote to the book's author, Dr Phillip Wrightson Even this was not simple Dr Wrightson had emigrated to New Zealand.

But I went through it all with him and finally heokayed it."Callan says that when he read Head Injuries: The Facts, he cried. Before he could even order this book, he had to put in an application to see a Senior Medical Officer. "He said, `What do you want it for?' I said, `I lost a child here. I want to know why.' They thought I might become a hypochondriac. She said, `Look in the sports section, there's one there.' "He took it back to his cell "Mostly it was about broken toes, broken arms.

But there was a little bit on haemorrhaging which was, as far as we'd heard at the trial, the cause of Mandy's death Anyway, I realised this book was no good for me. I had to wait a week then, because you can only go to the library once a week."This time, Callan asked specifically about head injuries. The librarian's computer search came up, almost comically, with Head Injuries: The Facts. I said, `What have you got on injuries?' That's how green I was; I didn't even think to say `head injuries'.