"Southend Leaks" - an odd website about Dr Kelly's death

A number of websites and forums have appeared over the last seven and a half years that have tried to make sense of the unusual death of Dr David Kelly.  One of the most recent showed up in the second half of January this year, calling itself "Southend Leaks" it is an offshoot of another website "Southend Voice".  Southend Leaks can be read here http://www.southendleaks.com/index.html

The website has made seven "releases" relating to Dr Kelly's death.  On their Home Page they state 'We always extend total privacy to all our contacts', this is fair enough but it does mean that we have to rely on other (anonymous) people's honesty when the site reports "facts".   There is though one fact I have been able to verify myself, as I will explain in a moment.

At this point I would urge readers to go to the site and read the releases for themselves, it won't take too long as there is very little meat in them.  What they claim though is of some interest to those of us trying to get to the bottom of the Dr Kelly mystery.

I want to particularly draw attention to their Release Four: "The Kellys and the de Haans - Part Two".  First though we need to go back a little further to Release Two in which it is stated that Mrs Kelly is on record as saying that she and her husband spent three nights at Mevagissey (which is in South Cornwall): Thursday 10th, Friday 11th and Saturday 12th July 2003.  This is factually incorrect, Mrs Kelly talks of walking down into Mevagissey on the Sunday morning and it would be easy to infer from this that they stayed there the previous three nights but Janice Kelly doesn't actually say this.

Going to Release Three and it's claimed that witnesses saw the Kellys at Higher Tresmorn Farmhouse which is on the coast of North Cornwall!  We aren't informed of the date.  Now Higher Tresmorn is on a lane to nowhere else really apart from Lower Tresmorn and a very rough gated lane and I  find it almost inconceivable that anyone would have passed the farm at the critical moment and subsequently informed "Southend Leaks" that they saw the Kellys.

The story now gets even more unbelievable with the reference to the village of St Gennys described as a short walk from Higher Tresmorn Farmhouse.  As the crow flies the distance is a little under a mile but of course the distance walking is considerably more and the terrain very hilly, much more severe than that in the neighbourhood of Southmoor in Oxfordshire.  Dr Kelly might conceivably have walked it but as for Mrs Kelly with her arthritis definitely not.  If they visited St Gennys Church it would have been by car.  The very small hamlet of Cleave, which would be on the walk, but not for the Kellys is named on the map but there is no indication on the ground of what it is called so far as I could see when I was there yesterday.

Southend Leaks talk of the alleged disappearance of the visitor book in St Gennys Church and they are correct at least in saying that the present book starts on 2nd August 2003.  They seem to be suggesting that maybe the Kellys visited the Church, signed the visitors book and that someone then removed the book so that evidence of their visit was covered up.  So what proof do Southend Leaks have in support of all this?  None so far as I can see.

It's the bit about the 200/1 odds of the present visitors book starting two and a half weeks after Dr Kelly's death that I find really astonishing.  They say they have done the maths.  Their conclusion on this aspect is utterly ridiculous.  Sorry, but you cannot assign odds to such a thing, it's a nonsense!  We don't know when the previous book started, how many pages it had, how many people visited the church, how many of these signed the book, you can't work out odds on this sort of thing.

I'm not saying that the content of the Southend Leaks is all fiction but I find it very difficult to believe what they are saying.