Dacre's most prominent newspaper campaign was in 1997, against the suspects who were acquitted of the murder in 1993 of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. It "turned out to be one of the very rare instances in which the editor showed fellow-feeling", wrote Andrew O'Hagan. According to Nick Davies in "Flat Earth News" (2008), the paper originally intended an attack on the groups arguing for an inquiry into the Lawrence murder, but the paper's reporter Hal Austin, on interviewing Neville and Doreen Lawrence, realised that some years earlier, Neville had worked at Dacre's home in Islington as a plasterer, and the news desk instructed Austin to "Do something sympathetic" about the case. Dacre eventually used the headline "MURDERERS" accusing the suspects of the crime on 14 February 1997. He repeated this headline in 2006.