Reasonable doubt: was ‘the Coughing Major’ innocent?

 In April 2020, James Graham’s TV series Quiz was watched by millions in the UK and then in many other countries.

It is about the notorious case of “the Coughing Major”, Charles Ingram. He won the top prize on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in 2001 and was subsequently convicted in 2003 for cheating. His alleged accomplice, Tecwen Whittock, was found to have guided him by coughing after Major Ingram mentioned the right answer of the four options. Whittock, along with Ingram’s attendant wife, Diana, were also found guilty of cheating. All three were given suspended sentences and heavy fines. The fines were later reduced on appeal, but Ingram had to resign his commission and went bankrupt, while Whittock lost his teaching post.

Nineteen such “significant coughs” were recorded and, regarding such a distribution, an earlier winner of the million, David Edwards, noted,

“Had there been an attempt on the million every day for the entire history of the universe, we would still find ourselves significantly short of an even chance…”

Quiz was inspired by Bad Show, a book the late Bob Woffinden and I co-authored about what we took to be a miscarriage of justice. (In 2005 I was a contestant on Millionaire? and won £250,000 — the subject of my book Bread and the Circus.)

The jury deliberated for over thirteen and a half hours, plus a weekend, before the foreman told the judge they thought Tecwen and Charles guilty but were unsure about Diana. Since all three were charged with the same offence, 20 minutes later he was to come back with a now amended verdict: “Alright then, she’s guilty as well.”

Alyn Morice, Professor of Respiratory Medicine at Hull University, testified. He said afterwards he was “astonished” by the guilty verdict.

The golden opinion has to be that of the host, Chris Tarrant: “… there was not enough concrete evidence. It was all very circumstantial. The whole story of it is so extreme and it’s in the hands of a jury so it could have gone either way.”

So what made it all so finely balanced?

On three of his last six questions, Major Ingram jettisoned his first cited preference for the correct “Final answer”. So he and his wife were frisked immediately afterwards. Nothing was found.

Mobiles emit blips as they seek nearby cell sites and antennae. Those would be discernible on the tapes. But nothing was found.

So the signals must have come from within the studio.

Removing the certainty of the signals being valid has to constitute a major cause for doubt. For Whittock was no “Quiz Whiz”. He could only win £1,000 that night, which led Tarrant to write in his memoir Millionaire Moments how strange he found it to receive prompts from such a person. An observation he repeated in the Radio Times.

Whittock also tested positive for cough variant asthma, hayfever and rhinitis, This caused Jon Ronson, who attended all eighteen days of the trial, to write in The Guardian: “Many in court, journalists as well as witnesses, felt perplexed by this, but we put it to one side because we had already convinced ourselves of their guilt. We were very much enjoying the narrative of their guilt.”

Ronson would also (unwittingly) supply an entirely innocent explanation for the placement of the coughs: “… pensioners… spend much of the day noisily unwrapping packets of Lockets. Each time the barristers mention the word ‘cough’ — and the word ‘cough’ is mentioned very frequently — many people sitting around me involuntarily cough.”

Responsive coughing. People with respiratory problems may cough on unrecognised triggers.

I pointed out to Ronson that this was the key point in exculpating The Millionaire Three and he agreed. We then met and discussed it over a drink.

His resultant shift in opinion may be seen in another article for The Guardian of July 17th 2006 in which he gives his own, now amended, verdict: “Are the Millionaire three innocent?”

This could be unique in the annals of justice. As if by magic, a myth was playing itself out in the courtroom.

Cases have swung on things unavailable at the outset, e.g. a document or photo. But the crucial exonerating evidence here was generated via the trial itself. It needed a prosecution where the accused were alleged to have used coughs to pull off a seven figure heist in order to illustrate that there truly was an unacknowledged syndrome to account for a pattern of coughing.

The BBC´s Have I Got News For You showed it when, in satirising Major Ingram, Paul Merton said the idea was that when he mentioned the right option, Whittock would cough.

There came a cough from the audience. “We haven´t got to the answers yet!” quipped Merton, failing to appreciate a harmless exemplar of the phenomenon he was ridiculing. “I think it’s the story of the year. Can we talk about it every week?” he added. Like Ronson, Merton admitted to really enjoying the narrative of Ingram´s guilt.

Only I, it seems, picked up on the fact of “responsive coughing”. Had somebody spotted it at the trial, then I doubt The Millionaire Three would have lost.

When I checked the run of a previous Millionaire? winner, Judith Keppel, I discovered clear coughs between her first enunciation of the correct option, but before “Final answer”, at the £2,000, £4,000, £64,000, £500,000 and £1,000,000 questions. (A faint noise may be discernible during her answering of the £8,000 question.)

And when addressing her £16,000 question: “Prime Minister Tony Blair was born in which country?” she remarks, “I know he went to school in Scotland. I wonder if the audience… do you know, audience?” There immediately comes a woman´s cough. Tarrant smiles and says, “Judith, you can’t just do it like that!” She laughs and then uses her Ask the Audience lifeline. 53% vote for Scotland. Which she follows.

An almost exact concordance with Charles Ingram, for he too was convicted for coughs in such spots on six of his last ten questions across two adjacent evenings. This must strongly support the contention that there could well be an innocence in coughs following the mentioning of correct options.

I drew James Graham’s attention to these “Keppel coughs” when he was writing Quiz. He had the late Helen McCrory, portraying Ingram’s counsel, Sonia Woodley, ask why the police had not been called in on Judith Keppel, too.

Celador’s DVD Magic Moments and More has Keppel’s complete performance and was extant a year before trial. Failure to listen out for similar coughing, when a previous contestant went the whole way, is the first criticism I must make of the three defence teams.

Had that been done then I doubt The Millionaire Three would have lost.

Many viewers of Quiz thought that Graham allowed himself some artistic licence by adding a scene where an outbreak of coughing amongst the jurors was so severe that the judge sent them home early. But that actually occurred!

And why weren’t codes used? They had each been on the show before and yet, despite “casing the joint”, the coughs did not follow the mention of a (prearranged) wrong option. Neither was the presentation coded by, e.g. a sip of water for option “A”, a key word for “B” etc.

Affirmation and presentation could be coded. With two (or more) separate codes (visual and/or verbal) for each option, then the signaling becomes almost untrackable.

That Whittock, a senior college lecturer, and Ingram, a civil engineer and Mensa member, didn’t resort to such a simple and effective a device, I found quite crazy.

It seems I wasn’t the only one.

For the prosecution, Nicholas Hilliard introduced the case with the following statement: “The evidence suggests this plan: if you know the answer, cough after I say the right option. It’s as simple as that.”

Sounds a bit too simple to me. Whittock, in the dock, observed a moment on the tapes when a cough ought to be audible, but there was none. And Hilliard said to him,

“But you have to be careful with these coded systems, don’t you?”

Which led to his being worsted by,

“I don’t know. I’ve never used one.”

Nothing could illustrate better just what a farce this prosecution was than Hilliard´s posing of that question. Having presented the case as theft by use of an uncoded system, he would go on to accuse the “signalman”, Whittock, of having used a coded system. 

The failure of defence counsel to seize this opportunity to destroy the prosecution case — by hammering home that the prosecutor himself had just undermined it — is the second criticism I must make.

There were hundreds of calls to four or more pagers in the weeks before Charles Ingram played. Sequences like 1111 or 2222 were transmitted.

I must concede that these, initially, did look most suspicious to me.

Diana said she had called them to contact her two brothers, to whom she had loaned £14,000. They had made themselves scarce and refused to answer even their own mobiles to avoid speaking with others to whom they owed money. So they gave only their trusted sister the pager numbers, with more than one just in case some did not work properly.

But it was extraordinarily unfortunate to supply a number of pagers equal or surpassing the number of options to a question on Millionaire?. As it also was for her to be unaware that pagers can receive text messages. So she would often resort to leaving daft number sequences on four or more, including calls on the very day before her husband played.

She said those last calls were because Charles had only just learned he had qualified for the show and she wished him to have one brother for Phone A Friend.

Her testimony provided a collection of facts sufficient to give any reasonable person pause. It was a mistake not to have had her version buttressed by calling both brothers to the witness box. And that is my third criticism of the defence.

The lack of their testimony granted Hilliard the chance to make his allegations register and form, as Bob Woffinden termed it, “the entire bottom layer of the prosecution case”. But I must also say how struck I was by Mrs Ingram’s ability to extemporise an innocent explanation for those pager calls in the hope that it could come across as plausible.

And if the so-called conspirators felt they had to drop such a sophisticated scheme, then just coding the coughing sounds hardly too high-tech a replacement to me.

There was no hard evidence that cheating with pagers ever happened. There was also no evidence of Whittock having met either Ingram before in person.

There were thirty-eight phone calls between Whittock and the Ingram household in the seven months before Charles played, totaling some thirty minutes. As Diana and her brother were writing a book on the show, it is understandable that a wannabe would seek her out for tips. And, since there was no way of knowing they would be on the same show, The Sun asked how those calls could have been “preparatory”.

A cough, apparently, leaves a distinct “fingerprint”. In his evidence Professor Morice wanted to say his analyses of the tapes indicated two separate individuals producing the nineteen “significant coughs”. The other person could not have been Diana, for she was filmed throughout. However, since the technology underpinning the analyses had not at the time been peer-reviewed, the Professor was unable to tell the court that. Since then, it has been peer-reviewed. This hugely strengthens the case for the defence, if only retrospectively.

The only suggestion for how Ingram cheated was signals by coughs. I think the points I have raised show that this claim may now be viewed with reasonable doubt.

So all we really have to account for is Major Ingram’s highly unusual behaviour and changes of direction on three of his last six questions.

At the £32,000 question, he said he would choose one of the two remaining options, whilst omitting to affirm with “Final answer”. The audience gasped. Therefore he switched and chose the other one.

That device I call “lifeline four”.

Not the sort of conduct expected from an officer and a gentleman, which is probably why Ingram has never admitted to it. Although it’s obvious that’s what he was up to.

Sly. But I would not have thought it the kind of subterfuge sufficient to warrant the term “cheating”.

He openly says he is trying to read the host’s face for clues when answering his £125,000 question. That’s also “unauthorised” and I’ll call it “lifeline five”.

Then there’s the entertainment factor. When I went on Millionaire? I hammed it up and even told blue jokes, which had the host screaming with laughter. Prevaricating can heighten the tension.

And sometimes people will just behave very unusually in the chair.

In Bad Show Woffinden and I gave the example of Richard Deeley who, upon receipt of his £32,000 cheque, screwed it up and chucked it across the studio, saying, “I don’t want that!” Many viewers must have thought: “What a jerk!” But people who knew Deeley said he was quite a reserved type and this behaviour was most atypical.

On the last question, after forty seconds, Ingram said he was not sure. After eighty, “I think it’s a Nanomole… but it could be a Gigabit.” Two minutes in: “By process of elimination I actually think it’s a Googol, but I don’t know what a Googol is.” After three and a half minutes he entertained everybody with, “I don’t mind taking the odd risk now and again. That was a joke, by the way.” And after four minutes, during which he reasoned out loud why he had to eliminate the three other options… gave “Googol” as his “Final answer”.

But on the £500,000 question he six times cited “Berlin” as his preference. Then, having expressed doubts that it could be “Paris”, gave the “Final Answer” of “Paris”. And proffered no further explanation than, “I think I was wrong.”

After which I think I myself would have called the police in on him.

True enough, with £250,000 (tax free) he now had sufficient funds to pay off his credit card debt and buy a house. And so very well might have been moved to carry on using those cunning extra aids by repetition of options and looking out for clues from audience reaction and/or the host´s face. Also, partly just  through inertia.

Still, in twenty-five years of the show, in some one hundred and fifty countries, only one man has ever behaved like that. So I find my confidence in his innocence now sinks to only 90%.

Since Quiz aired four years ago, polls reveal a substantial gain in support of the view that there was a miscarriage of justice. But a large caucus of opinion has formed that, somehow or another, Ingram got illicit help, with the coughing perhaps no more than a mooted ancillary means which played little or no part at all in the scam.

But, with nobody yet on the “Oh yes he did!” side of the pantomine chorus able to pinpoint how he cheated, my confidence that the prosecution failed to make its case still remains 100%. There was indeed “reasonable doubt”.

Was this trial perhaps held to account for little more than some quite inconsequential and not unprecedented (Judith Keppel) noises off?

I am inclined to believe that much of the seeming bewilderment of The Millionaire Three was due to their trying to account for those sounds as they found themselves dragooned into playing the principal characters in a Shakespeare play.

And not “the Scottish Play” (Robert Brydges labeled Diana “Lady Macbeth”). Rather, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

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