Even Stephen Simmons’s own parents did not believe him when he told them he was completely innocent of a mailbag theft for which he was convicted and jailed back in 1976. But now, more than four decades later in a landmark case, he is hopeful that his name will finally be cleared after it emerged that the police officer who arrested him was not only a mailbag thief himself but also notorious for a series of high-profile cases that had major ramifications for race relations.

Simmons, now 62 and a businessman living outside Dorking in Surrey, was out with a couple of friends in Clapham, south London, just after midnight in June 1975. They were in his car when DS Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police (BTP) and two colleagues approached out of the blue. They were taken in for questioning about stolen mailbags.

“We knew nothing at all about it,” says Simmons, reliving the arrest at the home he shares with his wife, Sue. “But when I was being questioned, Ridgewell threw a trophy – something like a football cup – at me. It hit me on the chest and it dropped to the ground and he said: ‘Pick it up.’ I almost did but for some reason I stopped and he said: ‘Very clever.’” But not clever enough. Although there were no stolen goods in the car, Ridgewell would claim in court that Simmons had said: “We hadn’t got a chance to load it in the motor so don’t plant fuck all in it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stephen Simmons pictured in 1976, about the time he was convicted and jailed. Photograph: Handout

They were given a duty solicitor. “He told us that if we called the police liars the judge would send us to prison for a very long time.” Nonetheless, they pleaded not guilty but were all convicted. Simmons was sent to Hollesley Bay borstal in Suffolk and served eight months. He lost his job at a laundry and his flat, but over the years since has managed to build up a successful business in audio and phone equipment for cars. However, the conviction has haunted him ever since.

“Throughout my whole life I carried the shame for my imprisonment. One of the hardest things was that my parents – my father was disabled during the war and my mother worked six days a week as a cleaner in the hospital to bring up six children – didn’t believe that the police could lie and one of my own brothers still taunts me as a ‘train robber’,” says Simmons, who has suffered from ill-health ever since. One of his co-defendants, also damaged by the case, became an alcoholic and is now dead.

Then one evening four years ago Simmons was listening to an LBC radio programme on legal matters in which the barrister Daniel Barnett answers questions. He rang in and asked for advice about trying to clear his name. “He said: ‘Have you ever thought of Googling the name of the officer?’ I did and was gobsmacked by what I discovered.”

What emerged was that Ridgewell had himself been convicted of conspiracy to rob mailbags from the Royal Mail, was jailed for seven years in 1980 and had died in prison in 1982. What also emerged was that Ridgewell was responsible for a series of notorious cases in which young black men were falsely accused of robbery on the London underground. One of his victims was Winston Trew, who along with three others became known as the Oval Four and was jailed for two years at the Old Bailey in 1972. Trew has recently written a book about the case, Black for a Cause, in which he investigated Ridgewell’s extraordinary career.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Trew uncovered Ridgewell’s strange life, which turned out to be a cross between Life on Mars and a Joe Orton play. He had worked both for the BTP and in what was then southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In London, he made a name for himself by arresting dozens of young black men for “mugging” on the underground, a high-profile issue in the 1970s.

His technique was, dressed in plain clothes, to confront young black men, accuse them of robbing people on the tube, beat them up if they resisted arrest, make up a semi-confession and see the men convicted at the Old Bailey. His behaviour led to a series of causes célèbres. Along with the Oval Four, he arrested those known as the Stockwell Six, the Waterloo Four and the Tottenham Court Road Two.

It was during the last of these cases that the courts finally realised something very odd was happening. The two young men arrested at Tottenham Court Road underground station were devout Jesuit students from Oxford University and the judge, Gwyn Morris, halted their trial in 1973 and said: “I find it terrible that here in London people using public transport should be pounced upon by police officers without a word.”

In the wake of this bad publicity, Ridgewell was quietly moved off the undergound squad and given the job of investigating mail theft. He joined forces with a couple of career criminals with whom he split the proceeds from stolen mailbags before finally being arrested and jailed for seven years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stephen Simmons: ‘That man [DS Derek] Ridgewell ruined three lives for no reason and I am sure many, many more.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

Asked by the governor at Ford prison what had happened to him, his response was: “I just went bent.” At the age of 37, he suffered a heart attack in jail and died.

Having learned all this, Simmons approached the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which examined his case and has now referred it to the court of appeal. A CCRC spokesman has described the case as “highly unusual” because of the timescale.

“I have never even been able to tell my two daughters about this,” says Simmons, “but I saw a psychiatrist who said that I should pursue it or I would never get over it.

“That man Ridgewell ruined three lives for no reason and I am sure many, many more, and if this can help someone else who was also arrested by him then at least something will have been achieved.”

Trew, who still lives in south London, also hopes that Simmons’s story will remind people of the damage that one rogue police officer can cause to people’s lives.

“I was elated when I was contacted by the CCRC about the case,” says Trew, who became a university lecturer in sociology. “It has been a long time coming.”

