I Spent 12 Years In Jail For A Murder I Did Not Commit! Raphael Rowe

I was destined to spend the rest of my natural life in prison, for crimes I didn't commit. (dramatic music) Gonna talk to you about Raphael Rowe. Who's a presenter, journalist, documentarian. This is prison soil. You're going to hear a story. There's only a short period after my son was born, two months, in fact, my life changed forever. (screaming)

On 15th December 1988, a series of terrifying crimes took place along the newly built M25.

I was being accused of a murder and a series of aggravated robberies. They fabricated evidence and changed things to fit me into the crime.

Fucking hell.

They convicted us, and I was destined to spend the rest of my life in prison for the crimes I didn't commit. (door opening and slamming) When I was in the isolation cell, stripped naked, bleeding and bruised, I screamed and I shouted through the pain that I was suffering and nobody heard my voice. At that moment, something started to grow in me that made me become the person that I am today.

What is that thing that started to grow in you?

Hope. Free after more than a decade behind bars.

What is a mistake that you know you've made that you haven't yet fixed?

The consequences of my actions has meant that I've never been able to discover anything about my son.

If I put a button in front of you and said, "You press this button and it erases those 12 years..."

I'll never ever get those years back.

... would you press the button? Before this episode begins, I just wanna say a huge thank you to all of our new subscribers. 74% of you that watch this channel didn't subscribe before, and we're now down to about 71%. So, that helps us in a number of ways that are quite hard to explain. But simply, the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests get. So if you haven't yet subscribed to The Diary of a CEO, if I could have any favors from you, if you've ever watched this show and enjoyed it, it's just to, to please hit the subscribe button. Hope you enjoy this episode. (upbeat music) Take me back. I am... If you've ever heard this podcast before, I'm a huge believer that in order to understand a person, you have to really understand their context, and their earliest context. You're from a council estate. Um, your home life, to me, from reading through your autobiography, seemed to be incredibly defining. So take me back to those earliest years and give me the context I need to understand the man that you were in your early 20s.

I'll go back even further and take you to the kind of, um, environment that I grew up in. So I grew up in southeast London, Camberwell to be precise, um, just at the bottom of Coldharbour Lane, which is the kinda junction between Brixton and Camberwell before you get to Peckham, so that kinda circle of, or that triangle, as I like to describe it, in, in southeast London. And it was quite a typical, um, working-class environment, council estate. A- and the privilege of it was that we were all the same. Nobody had anything. A- and the other thing about that council estate and the environment that I grew up in, and it was a bit of a, a, a, a kind of cul-de-sac, you know, in these kind of estates where you've got block after block. There were little roads in, little roads out onto this estate, and that little patch of grass in front of our blocks of flats. And it was quite diverse. Y- you know, I was from the mixed-race family. My mum's White, my dad's Black. You know, the floor below my flat, we had the Chinese family. Below that, we had the kind of overweight family, and opposite them, we had the smelly family. So there was this Scottish family over in the other block, and the Irish family, so it was a real mix of cultures and personalities and characters and parents. And I'm not gonna say there weren't, there weren't issues and problems. Of course there was, and you'd always have the shouting, but there... And I'm not gonna make it sound mythically like it was a great time, because it wasn't, but when you're a kid, you don't recognize the problems that your parents are facing, not being able to pay for the electricity, not being able to buy the things that kids want, new trainers and stuff like that. So it's quite stable but unstable at the same time, because there was also a lot of, um, crime, but not crime that was obvious to young guys like me and the girls. And, you know, having a camp in the bottom of a block of flats would be our highlight, you know. We'd go in there, put dead mattresses in there and bits of blankets. That was my kind of environment. So I kinda grew up in this council estate that was very diverse, had lots of different cultures, um, and it made me comfortable. My home life was slightly different. Y- you know, my dad is Jamaican. He was strict. He came from a very strict family back in Jamaica, so when he was in the UK, kind of brought that chip with him, didn't quite integrate into British society, was a laborer, had a strong Jamaican accent, still has a strong Jamaican accent, because he never kind of... never really kind of integrated himself. Now, whether that's because he couldn't, because he couldn't read and write, whether that's because he wasn't accepted because he was a Black man who came in on the Windrush, or whether it's because he didn't want to, I've never really found out, because I've never really had that conversation with my dad. So that's the context. That's what I was growing up, in a council estate, that was working class, and very poor.