NIGHTMARE CLAIMS Twisted ‘sex attack’ letter landed my innocent pal in jail & ripped his life apart – it could happen to anyone
David remained behind bars until a detail about his accuser came to light, turning the whole case on its head

AS chief of the local fire station, David Bryant was a well-known, respected and likeable figure in the small town of Christchurch, Dorset.

Recognised in the streets from various positive newspaper articles, he had been awarded the ‘Freedom of the Town’ for his work and everyone thought he and his wife, Lynn, were a close and loving couple.

 

“They were living life to the full, really, until 2012, when their world fell apart,” says close friend Simon Stanley, who was a firefighter at the station where David was his boss.

Then, a letter posted through David and Lynn’s door ended their contented life in the most nightmarish way.

It was from a man who accused David of having raped him as a teenager 35 years earlier. Now he was seeking justice.

David vehemently denied it but, in court, it came down to one man’s word against another. He was found guilty and sent to prison.

But as his family and friends set about fighting the conviction, a detail about his accuser came to light that would eventually turn the whole case on its head and clear David’s name once and for all.

The extraordinary story is told in the Channel 4 documentary, The Accused: Beyond Reasonable Doubt?

Diagnosed with dementia, sadly David is now too ill to speak about his ordeal, but in an exclusive interview with The Sun, his close friends, married couple Simon and Alex, talk about how the accusation, without any evidence, sent an innocent man to jail.

David’s nightmare began when the bombshell letter was hand-delivered in October 2012, the day after the Met Police launched Operation Yewtree, an investigation into historic sex crimes, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal.

Simon’s wife, Alex, was a friend of Lynn’s, and had met Simon through her. The foursome became good friends.

David was Simon’s best man at their wedding and he and Lynn were godparents to their daughter, Grace.

It was Alex who a shell-shocked Lynn turned to in the immediate aftermath of the letter arriving.

“That afternoon, Lynn phoned to say, ‘Can we come round?’” Alex recalls. “Something in her voice didn’t sound right. She was normally upbeat. When they arrived, she showed me the letter.”

It read: “Dave, it’s Danny Day. 35 years ago I used to collect the glasses in the Legion and I am the one that you and Spindel played darts with in the fire station. Remember?

“At 6 o’clock tonight I’m going to the police station to report what went on. And at 7 to the national papers. I think it’s time you and me had a chat. I think it is in your interest to call. One way or another, you will pay for what you have done in late ’76 to early ’77.”

“Dave was in shock,” says Alex. “He had no idea who Danny Day was and couldn’t think of anything that had happened in the past to warrant this.”

In his police interview, Day told them that he had been a teenager, collecting glasses at the local British Legion club in 1976 where he met Dave Bryant and his fellow firefighter colleague, Dennis ‘Spindel’ Goodman.

 

They had suggested he join them for a game of darts at the fire station and when he got there, he claims he was forcibly held across a table where he was raped by both men.

When asked why he had decided to come forward about it now, he said it was because of: “This Jimmy Saville thing about all these poor people that he’s been around. I can’t help thinking that it wasn’t only me. There must have been other people involved in this, other youngsters. And some maybe aren’t as strong as me.”

“Dave and Lynn thought this was just somebody on the bandwagon and it was blackmail to get money, so they decided they would go to the police straight away,” says Alex.

David eventually recalled Danny from the British Legion but said he had no recollection of the darts match at the station and he was insistent that he had no sexual contact with him whatsoever.

Despite there being no evidence, David was startled to find himself charged with rape.

Dennis ‘Spindel’ Goodman’s behaviour and reputation were at polar ends to that of David’s. He had been discharged from the fire service for sex offences and had died in 2003.

“There was something about my Uncle Dennis that I never liked and when he was discharged, I realised my gut feeling was right about him,” says his niece, Julie Goodman. “But Dave was not like that. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body.”

At David Bryant’s trial in December, 2013, Alex was startled to find herself sitting next to Danny Day.

 

“It was bizarre and horrible,” she says. “He was often muttering under his breath.”

There were some inaccuracies in Danny Day’s statement. He said he thought he had been raped across a pool table, but a pool table was not installed until 1992. He also mentioned walking through a fire exit which was not there until several years later.

“It’s a small fire station and anyone can easily walk by it and see the pool table through the window downstairs, and the emergency exit,” says Simon.

“Apparently the rape happened on a Thursday night, which has always been drill night at the station, so multiple people would have been there from six o’clock.”

Despite this, the jury found David guilty and he was sentenced to six years.

“I was absolutely flabbergasted that the jury believed Danny Day,” says Alex.

“Lynn and I had done some research into his background and on Companies House found he had set up so many companies that had failed.

“It was obvious he was trying to make money by accusing David. He didn’t come across as credible at all, in court, in my opinion.

“David doesn’t show emotion. Simon’s the same. When you’re in the fire service for so long, you see so many different incidents, some that you would rather not see, that you kind of put your emotions in a box and get on with things.

“David can’t show he is weak. He has to get a hold of a situation and deal with it on his terms. I think that lack of visible emotion almost went against him in police interviews and in court.

“He’d do anything for you and never had a bad word to say about anybody. You could rely on him if you needed help. He’d be the one person that you would always call for anything. He was a lovely, lovely guy and nobody had a bad word to say about him.”

Danny Day’s legal team went on to appeal the sentence, arguing it had been too lenient and they managed to get it increased to a minimum term of eight years.

“We would visit Dave in prison once a month on a Saturday,” says Simon. “He enjoyed the banter with me and others from the fire service but as soon as we got up to leave you could see the emotion in his face change, which was unlike him. And you could see a tear drop, because he knew he couldn’t come with us.”

While in Dartmoor prison, David met an inmate named Chris White, who had been convicted of rape in Bournemouth. Coincidentally, he knew Danny Day.

In his police statement, Day had said that he had told Chris White about having been raped by David Bryant and Dennis Goodman and that he had replied, “I always knew there was something not quite right with them.”

Mark Hensleigh, David Bryant’s solicitor, visited Dartmoor to talk to White where he categorically denied any such conversation with Danny Day took place.

 

“That was Lynn’s ray of hope then,” says Alex. “She said they were going to appeal and try to get Dave out.”

It was ten months into his sentence when David received a letter from lawyers acting for Danny Day, demanding compensation.

Day had had already received £11,000 from the criminal injuries commission but the decision to sue David in the high court was to prove his undoing.

The court requested Danny Day’s medical records, which were disclosed to David’s defence team. What was in them, was a bombshell.

“There was a history of him going to see his GP and seeking help with regard to the fact that he was lying,” says Mark Hensleigh. “It’s a very strange thing to go to your doctor and say, ‘I can’t stop myself lying.’”

Incredibly, a judge ruled that this was not enough grounds for appeal. It was only after Lynn recruited the help of a private detective to look further into the background of Danny Day, that they got the extra information they needed to beef up their case.

Day had said that the rape had changed the course of his life. He had been a top-drawer boxer before it happened. But this, also, was a lie.

In the documentary, the private detective reveals: “The potential was that Mr Day was such a skilled boxer that he could have got to the level of going to the Olympics to represent the country. That was a fairly big statement to make.

“As an amateur boxer, to get to any level of recognition, he’s going to have been a member of an ABA (Amateur Boxing Association) club. But nobody had heard of him.”

David’s defence was granted an appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice on 20 July 2016, in front of three judges, having been in prison for two and a half years.

Mark says: “It was probably over in 18 minutes – if that.

“Because they were reading out a judgement that had already been prepared.”

 

Almost four years after Danny Day posted the letter through David’s door, three judges concluded that the conviction was unsafe. It was quashed and he was released from jail.

Alex and Lynn drove to Dartmoor on the day of David’s release.

“We were waiting at the big wooden gates and literally he just appeared with a clear bag with all his belongings in, and he came out, the door was shut behind him, and that was it,” says Alex.

“We were laughing and crying but Dave, as usual, didn’t show much emotion. We drove down the road to a pub and had a lunch and a pint.

“When he came out of prison, people shook his hand, they gave him back the freedom of the town and he had a letter from the chief of the fire service saying he never doubted him,” adds Simon.

Sadly, having lost so much of his life, David then lost his wife. Lynn died eight months later from sepsis. A couple of years later, David was diagnosed with dementia.

“You could see a change in him after Lynn died,” says Alex. “She was his life. I mean, they did everything together. She was the force behind him, if you like.

“We were caring for him a lot at the beginning but he has 24-hour care now. He’s a lovely man, a gentle soul and he didn’t deserve what he got.

“The scary thing is that, if it could happen to David, it could happen to anyone.”

In 2020, Danny Day was charged with perverting the course of justice. He was convicted on one single count and given a nine-month suspended sentence.

David Bryant asked the Ministry of Justice for compensation for being wrongly imprisoned, but he is yet to receive any.