On Valentine’s Day 1988, the body of 20-year-old Lynette White was discovered in a dank, unfurnished flat above a betting shop in Cardiff’s docklands. Her throat had been cut and she had been stabbed up to 70 times. South Wales Police launched one of its biggest murder hunts to date, focusing on a distinctive looking man seen huddled in the doorway of the flat hours before. Crying and mumbling incoherently, he was nursing a bloodied, wounded hand.

The murder of Lynette, a sex worker at the time, happened at a pivotal time in Cardiff’s history. Just months before, plans had been unveiled to transform its once mighty but now desolate and largely abandoned docklands into a brand new, shiny Cardiff Bay. Billions were being sought by private investors and the brutal unsolved murder jarred with the sales pitch.

The high-profile murder hunt flew out of the traps but as time dragged on, the media smelt a rat and pressure mounted on detectives. Then, finally, 10 months on in December 1988, five men were rounded up and charged. The distinctive looking white man seen outside the murder scene appeared to have been airbrushed from the picture. All the suspects were black or of mixed heritage.

All five lived in or had family links to the city’s historic and once world-famous docklands district of Tiger Bay. At a time when Cardiff’s fortunes swelled as the coal metropolis of the world, seamen from all ports of the British empire docked in South Wales, many marrying local women and settling into a cheek-by-jowl melting pot of some 57 different nationalities. Arguably the UK’s oldest multi-cultural districts lived in harmony and respect of one another’s customs.

But Tiger Bay’s rhythm of life, its unrepressed and egalitarian culture, was out of kilter with the rest of the city and the accepted British way of life at the time. There were no bones made about it, as an archive of racist headlines will attest, Tiger Bay, was vilified as a scourge of impropriety and miscegenation.

By the Eighties, for the younger generation of the square mile district, officially known as Butetown, little had changed. Its once stately architecture may have been razed and replaced with a concrete jungle but prejudice and unemployment remained sky high. Their inheritance as the city’s collective scapegoat was undeniable.

Such was the fear of the area viewed by outsiders as a crime-riven ghetto on the borders of which Cardiff’s red-light district plied its trade, the guilt of a group of its troublesome young men was readily accepted, no questions asked. Case solved.
But what no one knew at the time was the fateful day of the men’s arrests ignited the first in a series of dynamite explosions that would not only kill off the vestiges of Tiger Bay once and for all, but go on to rock the foundations of criminal justice and threaten an entire police force with demolition.

The story first drifted onto my to-do list in the autumn of 2017 when I worked as a journalist in BBC Wales’s investigations unit.
The 30th anniversary of Lynette White’s murder loomed and a difficult question hung in the air. What was there left to say?
Only a few months before the case had finally reached its legal conclusion. There had been yet another flurry of media coverage, another drip-feed instalment, the many years passing between the case’s fits and starts diminishing the full force of its astonishing entirety. But now, surely, the thorn-in-the-side case could finally be consigned to history.

So it was decided I would write a valedictory long read for the BBC news website, a reflective canter through a story’s dizzying twists and turns of a stranger-than-fiction story in a few thousand words. I had never actively covered the case before and knew little about it beyond the cursory. As part of my research, I contacted the three surviving members of the Cardiff Five – John Actie, Tony Paris and Stephen Miller. Yusef Abdullahi and Ronnie Actie had both died aged 49 some years before.
In both physical stature and reputation, John Actie was the most prominent among the men.

A scion of the widely known Actie clan, an extended Cardiff family which began with the arrival in the city in 1916 of a teenage seaman from St Lucia, I was aware of John’s reputation as a man not to be crossed while growing up in the city. I had been warned he distrusted journalists and was nervous about approaching him, needlessly as it turned out.

I soon realised that while he had clearly mellowed with age, his fearsome reputation was little more than a caricature of a complex and multi-faceted character who, his phosphorescent anger notwithstanding, was smart and polite.
No one, he said, has ever given us a chance to tell our story. And he was right. No one ever had.

My long read quickly swelled to near 10,000 words. It seemed a lot but barely scratched the surface. I had to do more.
As an avid listener of deep-dive podcasts at the time, a colleague suggested it as an ideal platform. I pushed for a small budget and set out on a wing and a prayer.

The 13-episode podcast series – Shreds: Murder in the Dock – was a success and paved the way for a three-part BBC TV documentary, A Killing in Tiger Bay, which I co-produced. But even after all that, I still felt dissatisfied, the thought that too much had been left unsaid nagging in my mind. The devil of this story is in its detail, the depth of which is not easily conveyed within the constraints of broadcasting.
And so, my home became overtaken with towers of case files as I navigated the tricky terrain of writing a no-holds-barred book, chiefly told from the perspective of John Actie, as Tony Paris, with whom I had become close, had died in 2022.
The Boy from Tiger Bay was finally published in May of this year. Surely now, eight years on, I could finally strike the story of the Lynette White murder investigation off my to-do list?

Within weeks of the book coming out, the option of film rights option was sold. This epic, stranger than fiction story will hopefully have its day in the TV drama sun sometime soon. The reasons for the importance of its telling, are as manifold as its victims, many still living, innocents whose lives continue to be blighted by the injustice. But as many more went to early graves bearing the stigma and pain of a Shakespearean-style tragedy that in the nature of all scapegoats, was never theirs to bear.
It is all in the past, many loudly insist, and could never have happen again in modern day policing and forensic investigation. That is as maybe. Chiefly, The Boy from Tiger Bay is not so much a true crime story but a study of the dark side of human nature. Despite the advances and evolution of society, there are painful and constant reminders all around us that human nature might well adapt but at its core never really change.

Ceri Jackson is an award-winning journalist based in Cardiff, specialising in true crime, she is the voice of Sky Crime TV series Forensics: Catching the killer.
The Boy from Tiger Bay: A True Story of Murder, Betrayal, and a Fight for Justice is published by Little A.