Police Held Fingerprint Evidence Months Before Councillor's Hate Mail Campaign

Police held fingerprint evidence linking a high-profile councillor to a poison pen letter up to 12 months before he went on to target another politician in what a court heard was a persistent and wicked hate mail campaign. Gerard Woodhouse, 63, a well-known Liverpool anti-poverty campaigner, was given a community order last year for harassing Christine Banks, a former Lord Mayor he had known for 50 years, with anonymous letters and cards posted between 2023 and 2025.

The BBC has learned that an earlier investigation, which pre-dated his campaign against Banks, produced fingerprint evidence from a letter sent to a housing association chief. That inquiry was stood down because officers were unable to establish contact with the alleged victim after she left her job. Police reopened the case earlier this year but have now dropped it, as the time limit for prosecuting harassment allegations has expired.

The alleged victim, Julie Fadden, 65, said that had Woodhouse been dealt with then, he might have been stopped before he began harassing Banks and other suspected victims. Merseyside Police did not respond to the BBC's questions about whether it had done enough to contact Fadden during the 2022 investigation.

Woodhouse became a councillor in 2010 and served as the city's older people's champion, gaining national attention for his anti-poverty campaigning. After Labour de-selected him in 2022, he bombarded Banks with more than 100 offensive cards and letters until his fingerprints were found on one in the summer of 2025. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to harassing Banks, whom he claimed to have become fixated on amid internal Labour Party fall-outs while suffering severe mental health problems. A BBC investigation at the time found evidence suggesting several other people had also received offensive anonymous letters from him while he was a serving councillor, claims he has never addressed.

The BBC has since learned that in 2022 the force received a complaint from Fadden after a card arrived at the housing association where she worked. It suggested her time was coming and included the phrase tick-tock, tick-tock. Fadden, now a Liverpool Labour councillor herself, said the message could have meant anything, from losing her job to someone being harmed. She reported the letters and police took away the original hard copies.

She did not suspect Woodhouse at the time, and only came to do so after seeing a BBC investigation into the former County ward councillor. It featured handwriting from letters received by other Labour members, which she recognised as the writing on the cards sent to her. The pieces then fell into place. She recalled that Woodhouse had once sent a text message about her to a former employee of the housing association. "I had done an abseil down the side of the CN Tower in Toronto to raise money for the charity Crisis, and there was a photo of me doing it on the internet," she said. "He sent a text message saying that they should have cut the rope." The phone had previously belonged to a member of staff he knew who had left, and had been passed to the finance director, who brought the message to her. She said she now believed Woodhouse, a councillor at the time, may have harboured a grudge because the housing association had withdrawn funding from one of his community projects.

Merseyside Police reopened its investigation in February. Woodhouse was later arrested and questioned. But Fadden has since learned that the force will take no further action. In a letter from a detective constable, she was told that at the time of the incident a number of other offences besides malicious communications could have been considered, including harassment. However, harassment is a summary-only offence carrying a six-month limitation period, which had expired in June 2022. That was why the matter proceeded as malicious communications, which carries no such limit. The officer added that while the letters were offensive, the police decision maker did not believe they went beyond the limits of what is tolerable in society, aiming to shock, insult or degrade the victim.

Fadden said she was disappointed that the chance to prosecute Woodhouse had been missed. "They said they didn't know how to contact me [when I left my job], but they had my phone number," she said. "When I went back to them, they told me they'd found a fingerprint on one of the letters." She acknowledged that police have a hard job and lack the resources they need, but argued that if they had done what was required four years ago, Woodhouse's campaign against Banks might have been avoided.

A spokesman for Merseyside Police said its initial 2022 investigation was initially limited due to evidential constraints. In September 2022, fingerprint analysis confirmed the identification of a suspect, and efforts were made to obtain a further statement from a victim in order to progress the investigation and consider further action. "But we were unable to establish contact with her at that time and the investigations remained closed," he said. The spokesman added that as the limitation period for harassment had expired, a malicious communications case was considered in 2025 when the victim made contact, but the evidential threshold for the alternate offence was not met. Woodhouse was approached for comment.