Millionaire or fraudster? Jury told it must decide

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC told the eight women and four men trying Army Major Charles Ingram for allegedly cheating his way to the top prize that they should not forget the officer, whether guilty or not, would have experienced a range of emotions during the high stakes game show.

"It is plainly right to look hard at what was said to you and you should be prepared to do so in order to decide who was telling the truth," he told them on the 19th day of the trial at London's Southwark Crown Court.

"Do not be over critical and over analytical. This was, after all, a game show, although the stakes proved to be very high."

The judge also told jurors the only verdict he could accept from them at this stage was a unanimous one.

The Crown has claimed Ingram, 39, of High Street, Easterton, would never have reached the jackpot on the ITV quiz if college lecturer Tecwen Whittock had not used a series of coughs to guide him to many of the right answers.

Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, also told the court the major's nursery nurse wife, Diana, helped set up the scam.

She and her Royal Engineer husband and Whittock, 53, who lives at Heol-y-Gors, Whitchurch, Cardiff, and is head of business studies at Pontypridd College, south Wales, each deny one count of procuring a valuable security by deception on September 10, 2001.

The officer and his wife have both insisted he won the £1 million honestly, while the lecturer has told the court his coughs were genuine and random.

On Tuesday, the judge said the Crown's stance was that he was a cheat who had used an accomplice's coughs to guide him to the jackpot.

He said: "The prosecution say there can be no doubt about it. He and his wife and Tecwen Whittock were fraudsters and the evidence placed before you in this case is clear for all to see.

"They say here was a fraud, a scam if ever there was one."

The prosecution contended Whittock, a Fastest Finger First contestant at the time, had used a series of coughs to guide Charles Ingram to most of the right answers, while the officer's wife had allegedly set the fraud up.

For their part, said the judge, the three defendants had gone into the witness box to strenuously deny any kind of dishonesty, with the Ingrams maintaining the win was genuine, and the lecturer insisting he had not only suffered a persistent cough for many years, but that it had caused him considerable distress on the night of the show.

The question the jury had to decide was whether the major left the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? set at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, as a genuine millionaire or a fraudster.

Earlier in the case, the major had told the court that his system of repeating options over and over again was based on military training, weighing up the options and taking account of the risks.

He had also insisted, said the judge, that he had not only neither met or spoken to Whittock, but had not even known of his existence.

And the first he knew that his wife had been in touch with the lecturer was three weeks after the show. "Mr Ingram says he won the £1m fairly and squarely and is entitled to that money," said the judge.

Turning to Mrs Ingram's evidence, he said the 39-year-old mother of three maintained she was neither a party to any dishonesty, nor was aware of anybody else being dishonest.

She had said in evidence that her acquaintance with Whittock had been limited to phone conversations and their shared interest in the programme.

The calls were entirely innocent, limited to show trivia and how to become a contestant on it.

Mrs Ingram had also denied Crown claims that she and her husband had earlier considered cheating on the TV quiz by using a series of pagers. Calls to them were a way of contacting her brothers, she said.

Nicholas Hilliard, for the Crown, insisted the major's win was not based on a "process of elimination or even by lucky guesswork...but because he was being assisted by a cheat."