M62 coach bombing - February 4, 1964

On this day in 1974, twelve people were killed in a bombing on the M62 motorway in northern England. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Greetings, I'm Eves and welcome to This Day
in History Class, a show that believes no day in
history is a slow day. Today is February four. The

(00:25):
day was February four, nineteen seventy four. Twelve people were
killed in a bombing on the M sixty two motorway
in northern England. That Monday. A private coach was carrying
more than fifty military personnel and their family members as
they traveled along the M sixty two. Just after midnight,
a bomb exploded in the coach's luggage compartment. The explosion

(00:48):
could be heard for miles. Eleven people were killed on
the scene, and one person died a few days later.
Among the deceased were nine soldiers, a woman, and two
childre dren. At the time, people suspected that the Irish
Republican Army or i ra A was responsible for the bombing.
The previous several years had seen the ira A carry

(01:11):
out a series of deadly bomb attacks in Britain. Politicians
and the press immediately began blaming the paramilitary organization. A
quick investigation of the attack led to the arrest of
Judith Ward. Authorities knew that she attended shin Fein Marches.
Shin Fag is a left wing Irish Republican political party,

(01:32):
and forensic tests on the explosives done by forensic scientists
Frank Excuse supposedly linked her to the bombing. The Greece
tests found that she had nitro glycerin on her hands.
Van and bag Ward was arrested just ten days after
the bombing when she was in Liverpool waiting on a
ferry to Ireland. She even had a notebook on her

(01:53):
with ira A slogans in it. After a couple of
days of questioning, Ward admitted to committing the bombing. The
police planned on charging her with putting the bomb at
the bus station, but when it became clear that she
was nowhere near the bus station at the time of
the bombing, they decided to charge her with planning and
organizing the explosion. She went to trial in October of

(02:16):
nineteen seventy four. Though she had a history of mental illness,
This information and the potential that she was not fit
to inter aply was concealed at trial. She had also changed,
retracted and made contradictory statements in her confessions, which were
made under disorienting conditions. She confessed to two other bombings

(02:36):
besides the M sixty two one. Her confessions and the
forensic evidence were used to convict her of murder, and
in November she was sentenced to twelve concurrent life sentences,
one for every person who died in the bombing. The
media portrayed her as a dangerous criminal. Later, the method
that Skews used to test the explosives was discredited. The

(02:58):
test could show up pause it if with harmless materials
that had nothing to do with the bomb, and the
forensic scientists involved in Ward's case could have manipulated their
interpretation of the evidence. Plus, the prosecution did not reveal
that Ward had a record of confessing to crimes she
did not commit. The Court of Appeal determined that her
confessions were unreliable and quashed her criminal convictions. Ward spent

(03:23):
eighteen years in prison before she was freed on unconditional
bail in n I'm Eve Jeff Cote and hopefully you
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
No any fellow history buffs who would enjoy the show,
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(03:45):
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