Police have admitted a blunder in the Anne Grigg-Booth inquiry which left a man living in torment for nine years under the belief his father might have been murdered.

John Craven has now been told the original report of the police investigation into his father Frederick’s death was bungled and should have been classified as “no crime” and withdrawn from the inquiry.

Instead a senior police officer incorrectly recorded that Mr Craven’s death was as a result of a crime being committed.

Mr Craven, of Oxenhope, near Keighley, even received £12,500 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority in 2005 as a result of the mistake by the officer.

Now he has received bombshell news that there was no “wrongdoing” in the death of his 81-year-old father – a former footballer who played for Bradford Park Avenue and Coventry City – at Airedale General Hospital at Steeton, near Keighley, on November 4, 2001.

Mr Craven, an artist and architect, said he had now submitted a further claim to the CICA seeking compensation for the stress and ill health caused to himself, his 40-year-old wife Deborah and his 84-year-old mother Doreen.

“We’ve had all these years of hell believing my father died as a result of his treatment and now we’ve been told this,” said Mr Craven, who says his art has helped him deal with the trauma.

“I’ve been fighting for information for years, then this drops on my mat.

“My family has been ruined. My mother went into a decline and my wife had a bad breakdown.”

Mr Craven has already set in motion a claim for “truth and justice” at the European Court of Human Rights.

The Crown Prosecution Service went on to charge Grigg-Booth, a night nurse practitioner (NNP), with three murders, an attempted murder and 13 other related crimes, between 2000 and 2002. The criminal proceedings ended after Grigg-Booth, of Nelson, Lancashire, died accidentally after a drugs overdose in 2005.