Smash hit

Sneddon, a former Vietnam veteran whose tenacity has earned him the nickname of the Bulldog, is a man with a mission: to jail the star he depicts as a monstrous predator. He first investigated Jackson in 1993, when he received reports of abuse from Chandler’s family, and was furious when the singer used his fortune to avert a comprehensive police investigation.

Sneddon kept seeking witnesses to the abuse — earning condemnation from Jackson as a “cold, cold man” in a 1997 song, DS, which ends with the sound of a bullet. Police, worried about deranged fans, have stepped up security at Sneddon’s home.

The Bulldog got his second chance to sink his teeth into Jackson when Bashir filmed him holding hands with a 13-year-old cancer patient, Gavin Arvizo, and proclaiming it was normal to share a bed with boys.

Sneddon demanded an examination of Gavin by social workers and psychologists, and the child alleged that Jackson had repeatedly abused him in his locked bedroom at Neverland.

The evidence Sneddon collected at Neverland, from pornographic magazines to DNA samples, is now being put to the Santa Maria jury in the new millennium’s first “trial of the century”. Jackson could face 24 years in prison if convicted of 10 charges of abusing a minor, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to hold him hostage.

Sneddon’s first significant witness, Gavin’s 18-year-old student sister Davellin, calmly recounted how she saw Jackson give him wine disguised in a fizzy drink can. The pair would then disappear for up to 30 minutes at a time into locked rooms, she said, after which Gavin would “act weird.”

But she also admitted, under cross-examination, that she initially told social services her brother had not been molested.

The concession was wrung by Thomas Mesereau, Jackson’s defence lawyer who is known as the Fox after a series of unexpected pro bono victories in the American Deep South in which he rescued poor black men from death row.

He also secured the acquittal of Jackson’s friend, the boxer Mike Tyson, on a rape charge.

His main target will not be Gavin or his brother Star, who claims to have witnessed some of the alleged abuse, but their mother, who has remarried and is now confusingly named Janet Jackson. Mesereau claims she turned Gavin against Michael Jackson in a failed blackmail plot.

Before she met Jackson, the defence argues, Gavin’s mother had written begging letters to numerous celebrities including Jim Carrey and Tyson, seeking money for her son’s medical treatment.

Mesereau told the court that when she finally received a £14,000 cheque from Louise Palanker, a comedian, part of it was spent on a large television.

Mesereau said Janet had used fabricated evidence to sue a supermarket chain, alleging that its security staff had manhandled her, and that she had also illegally claimed social security payments. Calling her a “shakedown artist”, he said Janet had been preparing to blackmail the star when Sneddon intervened.

Mesereau is understood to have a back-up plan if the witnesses fail to crumble and if he decides he cannot trust Jackson on the witness stand. He will then consider producing psychiatrists to argue that the star is fixated with children but has no sexual interest in them.

Another strategy has already been abandoned by the Fox: he will not pretend that Jackson is “normal”. On Friday, as tears flowed down the star’s heavily made-up face during the cross-examination of Davellin, the chances of any juror dancing to that tune seemed remote.

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