In 1980, Foot began to look into the case of the "Bridgewater Four", who had been convicted the previous year of killing Stourbridge newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater. He repeatedly returned to this case, to the occasional consternation of his editor, but believed this practice would lead to new witnesses coming forward. Foot and his colleagues looked through many thousands of pages of evidence and statements. When his book "Murder at the Farm: Who killed Carl Bridgewater?" was published in 1986, Stephen Sedley wrote in the "London Review of Books" that Foot had not managed to "answer his own question", but did succeed in demonstrating "that if a jury had known what is now known about the case, it would not have inculpated" the defendants. After nearly 20 years in prison, their convictions were overturned at the Court of Appeal in February 1997 and the three surviving men (one had died in prison) were released.