Jamie's story is finally told

When Jamie Robe was battered to death by a gang of youths on a south London housing estate, his father also lost his life. Not literally - he sits before me in his small flat and, aside from the roll-ups he smokes more or less constantly, appears healthy enough - but in all other senses.

If ever there was an example of the ripple effect of crime, Stuart Robe embodies it.

Jamie died more than six years ago on 7 August 1997, and three of his killers have served four years of their life sentences. But for Stuart, aged beyond his 54 years, time is something that just needs to be filled, not lived.

"He was a brilliant kid," says Stuart quietly. "You could have a laugh with him. I miss him so much. The pain doesn't go away, it's still there 24 hours a day. From my flat I can see where he is buried. I look over there and I talk to him. I think grieving is what you do for the rest of your life.

"They say time heals..." He doesn't need to finish the sentence. To see a grown man and father who believes he has nothing to live for is a heartbreaking sight.

The tragically short life of Jamie and the hunt for his killers has now been made into an ITV drama, Wall Of Silence. James Nesbitt plays Stuart and, apart from the accent (Nesbitt does not attempt Stuart's south London idiom) and physical differences, he portrays him faithfully. In fact, both men have the same good- natured, easy charm.

The process of getting the drama onto the screen has been cathartic for Stuart. "Talking to Neil Mackay [the screenwriter] was my way of grieving because I was re-living everything. I'd never let anything out before. It helped me a lot to talk about about it."

His main motivation for co-operating with the film-makers, though, was to highlight the police's struggle to get anyone to speak out against the gang who killed his son, even though there were several witnesses.

Says Stuart: "Maybe the TV drama will help someone to come out and speak if anything like that happens in their neighbourhood. And I wanted Jamie's story to be told. My son's memory will never die and it shows what the police really put in to getting his killers put away. They put their heart and soul into it. They're not just police, now, they're friends - and they will be for the rest of my life."

Jamie was an ordinary 17-year-old lad. He was doing a computer course at a local college, had a girlfriend and loved football - he was a fanatical Liverpool supporter, much to the bemusement of his family.

On the night he died, he had been drinking at his sister Michelle's house with her boyfriend, Dylan, who Stuart still blames for leaving Jamie to his fate. The pair stumbled back to the house where Jamie lived in Lewisham with his mother, Evelyn, and brothers Keith and Wayne. His other sister, Kelly, lived with her boyfriend. Although his parents split up in 1990, the family remained close.

On the way, Jamie, who could not take his drink, was sick in the street in Rotherhithe. Two youths with a young woman across the road, outside a kebab takeaway shop, began to make fun of him. Jamie, fatefully naive, began gesturing for a fight. As the youths ran away to the nearby Osprey housing estate, Jamie and Dylan gave chase. At the estate, they were ambushed by a larger gang who had been watching them from a balcony above.

Both boys ran for it, out onto the main street, and Dylan managed to get away. But Jamie was set upon by the gang who had brought makeshift weapons - cricket bats, snooker cues and lumps of wood. It was a horrific attack. Jamie suffered severe injuries: his liver and kidney were split in two, his skull fractured and his head had swollen to twice its normal size.

His father, who got the call at 1.30am to say his son had been taken to hospital, rushed to Guy's. "Just before I left for the hospital, Dylan phoned me and said Jamie had concussion but he was all right.

"But of course he wasn't all right. I said to the doctors and police there, 'He's dead', and they just nodded. I wanted to see him. They said it wouldn't be wise but I demanded to see him. I regret doing that now.

"That night I was completely numb. There was nothing in me at all. But I knew I had to do something."

As the police began investigating the murder, it became clear that although there had been several witnesses it was going to prove almost impossible to get them to come forward, such was the fear of reprisals.

The estate, although it had recently undergone a £4.5 million refurbishment, was terrorised by gangs of youths and drug dealers who knew that their fearsome reputations-made normal people reluctant to speak out against them. It is only a few miles from the estate where Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993. The sight of such gangs must be terrifyingly familiar to every Londoner.

For the Robe family, the wall of silence was torture. But within two weeks, Stuart started a poster campaign to prick people's consciences and get them to come forward.

"The police interviewed people but nobody wanted to know. I had heard the names of the people who were suspected of killing Jamie but they could have been standing in front of me and I wouldn't have known who they were. I put a lot of posters up around the Osprey estate, but people - I'm sure it was the killers - ripped them down. I would just put them up again.

"Some people swore at me, and one day a man shouted: 'Why don't you get a life?' It was unbelievable. I went mad, I just started shouting back at him: 'How can I get a life when my son's been killed?'"

Meanwhile Jamie's mother, Evelyn, became a victim of intimidation, with youths throwing stones at her house and shouting abuse whenever they saw her on the street. The council quickly moved her to another home.

When Jamie's case appeared on Crimestoppers, an anonymous caller to the programme said: "We've killed the son and we're going to kill the father." Stuart also moved home and changed his telephone number seven times - yet he continued putting up the posters.

The campaign was certainly Stuart's way of coping with his grief and the feeling of powerlessness. Did it become something of an obsession? "No, it was my duty as a father to do it. I couldn't have just sat there by the phone and expected something to happen, because it doesn't," he says.

"There were times I was worried, upset and frightened but I thought if they're going to kill me, they'll do it. I thought about giving up many times. It seemed like it was never going to end. The only way I coped was knowing that one day the police would get the killers. Thinking about Jamie filled my days and nights."

Throughout all the frustration, was it hard not to take matters into his own hands? "I'd be a liar if I said I'd never thought about it. Of course I did. But where would that have got me? I would have been as bad as them."

The police - in particular Detective Inspector Tony Cottis and Detective Constable Ian Ashby - had devoted months to the case. But it was not until the local MP, Simon Hughes, became fully involved in the investigation that things began slowly to change.

Traci Broughton, then 18, was the girl who had been with the two youths outside the kebab shop who had started making fun of Jamie. A year after the murder her conscience was troubling her but she was too frightened to go to the police. Instead, her aunt contacted Mr Hughes, who spent two hours convincing her to give evidence.

Mr Hughes, at the request of detectives, then approached the Turkish owner of the kebab shop. He and his uncle were key witnesses but until then had insisted they had seen nothing. Enlisting the help of a Turkish-speaking friend, and meeting the men in a parked car in the middle of the night several times, Mr Hughes slowly gained their confidence.

In October 1999 at the Old Bailey, more than two years after Jamie's death, the evidence of those three witnesses secured the convictions of Aaron Cole and James Pearce, both then 19, and David Huggins, 18, for murder.

The trial had come close to collapsing after the names of the key prosecution witnesses had been inadvertently revealed to defence lawyers. However, police managed to persuade them that they would be safe to testify from behind screens. And this year, thanks to cases like Jamie Robe's, a new Bill in Parliament will aim to improve the Witness Protection Scheme to further safeguard witnesses.

Yet what Stuart Robe remembers as the "best day of my life - and the worst" came with a price. The witnesses had to move away for their safety and were given new identities, while a £10,000 contract was taken out on Simon Hughes's life and he had to be given a 24-hour armed guard.

"I knew I was asking a lot of someone to give up their home and business but you have to think about how the person feels who has lost their child," says Stuart. "Any human being with any sense of feeling would stand up and say 'I saw it and it shouldn't have happened'.

"I can understand what the witnesses were going through. They were terrified but, as for the people who didn't come forward, I just feel sorry for them. They've got to look inside their own hearts.

"These gangs terrorise people because they know nobody will say anything against them. Jamie's attackers had no respect for life. You don't go out armed with cricket bats and the like just to beat somebody up, especially not a drunk 17-year-old kid. What do you need a weapon for? One punch and he would have been out. They wanted to kill him."

Dealing with Jamie's murder has left lasting scars. "I keep myself to myself. I don't have relationships, it's just me. I see my kids and I see Tony [Cottis] now and again. I'm not like I used to be. Before Jamie died I went out a lot with my mates but not any more. I don't trust people now and I don't think my kids do."

Is he worried about revenge attacks? "I'm not worried, I'm here if they want me. Life doesn't worry me, death doesn't worry me. I don't think about the future. There's nothing."

On my way out I notice a baseball bat by the front door. Stuart Robe, a gentle, kind man, may not believe there is much to live for but he is not going down without a fight.

Wall Of Silence is on ITV1 at 9pm on Monday, 12 January.