the press, Wallace was arrested and subsequently convicted of the manslaughter of the husband of one of his colleagues. It was reported that Wallace had beaten antiques dealer Jonathan Lewis to death before attending a dinner party with the dead man's wife. Later that night, Wallace was alleged to have dumped the body in the River Arun. He served six years in gaol, from 1981 to 1987. The conviction was quashed in 1996 in the light of new forensic and other evidence. During the appeal hearing, a Home Office pathologist, Dr Ian West, admitted that some of the evidence that he had used at Wallace's trial had been supplied to him by "an American security source". The journalist Paul Foot, in his book Who Framed Colin Wallace?, suggested that Wallace may have been framed for the killing, possibly by renegade members of the security services in a bid to discredit his allegations about the Kincora scandal, and the fact that members of the intelligence community had attempted to rig the 1974 general election after which Harold Wilson came to power with a minority government. Wallace himself suggested that Lewis had been murdered by 'rivals in the antiques trade' and that the police had suppressed evidence to that effect. In June 1998, a former Special Branch officer who was familiar with the Wallace case wrote to Paul Foot saying: I sincerely believe that Colin Wallace was 'fitted up' by corrupt members of the Establishment embarrassed by the events described in the early part of your book. I do not suggest for a moment that any Sussex Police officer involved in this enquiry was corrupt, because I do not believe they were, but I feel there was a hidden agenda, and that the senior officers knew a lot more about the matter than they would ever care to reveal. As the controversy over the Kincora affair gathered momentum, Alex Carlile QC (now Lord Carlile), the SDP–Liberal Alliance's Legal Affairs spokesman, issued a statement saying: "It is clear that Colin Wallace, a principled man, knew too much about the Kincora Boys' Home scandal." Two months later, Mr Carlile was quoted in the Sunday Today newspaper saying: I believe there are many people in high places and within the security services who feel ill-will towards Wallace for exposing their activities. The question is that if MI5 was prepared to kill to get even with