Police errors denied justice in Michaela Allen abuse case, inquiry finds

A child abuse case that should have gone to court collapsed after South Wales Police lost the interview tape, then later wrongly shared the recovered footage, leaving Michaela Allen without the conviction prosecutors had once said was warranted.

Michaela was seven in 1995 when she said a babysitter abused her at home in Caerphilly, Wales. After she told her grandmother, her mother, Stephanie Allen, called police immediately. In her interview, Michaela described the babysitter asking for “grown up kisses,” threatening to tell her parents she was not behaving, and saying, “You’re enjoying this aren’t you?” Stephanie said an officer told her the child had given unusually detailed evidence without questioning.

Prosecutors recommended in 1996 that the alleged abuser be charged, but that never happened. Instead, the case became a lesson in how institutional errors can erase the possibility of justice. South Wales Police, which handled the original investigation and evidence storage, lost the video interview. A 1996 boundary change then transferred responsibility for Caerphilly to Gwent Police, breaking the case across two forces and leaving the evidence trail even weaker.

When Michaela tried to reopen the case in 2017, she was told the tape could not be found. Gwent Police investigated again in 2018, but the original officer could not remember the case and said he would have followed Crown Prosecution Service instruction to ask Michaela’s parents about cross-examination. The CPS is the main prosecuting authority in England and Wales, and works independently from police to prepare and present cases to the courts, but the safeguards it depends on had already been undermined by missing evidence.

South Wales Police later found the tape during a digitisation programme, only for the footage to be wrongly shared with complainants in 2022, destroying any remaining chance of a fair trial. The Crown Prosecution Service later confirmed in 2023 that the case could not proceed.

Michaela has now received £32,000 in compensation from police, while two other alleged victims of the same suspect received lower five-figure payouts, understood to be about £10,000 each, from South Wales Police and Gwent Police. Both forces apologised in 2023 for their failures, but Michaela said no amount of money could close the case. She said there was still “a predator on the loose,” and that the apologies “mean nothing” because police never accepted their failure to charge.