Expert Witness (22 page)

I
n order for sense and sanity to prevail in a world full of chaos, anger and loss, there have to be ways of managing jobs like mine and those of people who are more directly involved with crime. Either let the emotions out and hope they go away or bottle them up until they escape of their own accord in ways that can't be predicted. For me, it's pressure release through humour. Although the accounts in this chapter are tragic in their own way, there is an edge of humour to many of them and they should be read on that basis. I'm not trying to belittle anyone or make light of any given situations; rather I hope to demonstrate that people in what would otherwise often be unbearably serious situations do, and say, funny things. And when you work with people all the time, I think it's nice to acknowledge these funny things. When they're read out of context and in the cold light of day, you have to wonder about how the events appeared at the material time. For further comment by the police on the job of the police, I suggest reading
Wasting Police Time: the crazy world of the war on crime
by PC David Copperfield (it's not his real name but it stops him getting lynched by various parties). At this point, I should add that despite the glares and dirty looks I some times get as
an independent expert, I have a huge respect for most police officers. They have an extremely challenging work life and they see the absolute worst of the human race.

There has been criticism that literacy and numeracy standards in the English police have dropped over the years and I have to say that in some circumstances I do wonder how particular officers passed their exams. Read this and decide what it says:

Remind me again, who's taken the drugs with drink?

There are also many set ways of doing things within police forces, for the sake of clarity and continuity. You can always spot an independent finger print examiner as being a former police officer, because they always write people's surnames in CAPITAL letters.

The police are taught to handle any kind of situation and they have ways of dealing with difficult, drunk, drugged-up, belligerent people. They also have a duty of care and to ensure that the people they hold in custody don't come to any harm and that if there is any suggestion a person is ill, medical assistance is sought. Excess alcohol consumption can potentially be fatal. If sufficient is consumed then a person can lose the ability to coordinate their muscles to such an extent that they stop breathing. It's called ‘respiratory arrest'. So it's important that the police establish if someone truly is at risk, or if they've got a faker on their hands. This extract shows an example of how they can manage to make the distinction:

That's polite police speak for
he was faking it so I pinched his ear good and hard to get a reaction. I got one and he told me to sod off.

The interesting circumstances of this case are that Mr Smith was found slumped at the controls of a mobility scooter he'd stolen from outside a local super market. Just a quick note here: Mobility scooters are incredibly common in certain parts of England, particularly the flat parts. In the town where I lived at the time, there was one old guy who drove his scooter everywhere, including down the main roads into town, down the country lanes and on the bypass around the next town over. He never stopped for traffic lights, pedestrian crossings or cars. What made it yet more interesting is that his scooter had no indicators so if he had to cut across traffic or make a turn, he just stuck his arm out and off he went. The problem was, he only had one arm so you never knew when he was going to turn right.

Anyway, back to Mr Smith, who was so drunk he couldn't be bothered to walk home, hence the reason for acquisition of a form of transport. Unfortunately, he passed out while he was driving his stolen mobility scooter off down the road, as
he made what was probably not the fastest getaway in history. When the police caught up with him, presumably at a slow jog, and checked the front basket of the scooter, they found a half-f pint glass of beer. Not only was he drunk in charge of a mobility scooter, he'd actually been drinking on the job.

More police-speak was apparent in another case where the final line of the statement very casually stated that
the defendant was taken to his cell where due to his demeanour and threats he was strip-searched.
There were no more details on his demeanour that had caused this occurrence but I can only assume that he must have upset them in a major way.

Perhaps our previous defendant had upset the police but this next one must have made them wonder why they even bother. In this case, the police describe how a car left the road, failed to negotiate a road junction, demolished three street signs in the process and came to rest in a field on the other side of a ditch approximately 10 feet wide and six feet deep. This is police-speak for
he drove like the clappers, missed the junction and was going so fast he flew over a 10-foot-wide ditch and landed in a field
. The police officer approached the car and asked the driver if he was alright, to which he received an obscene gynaecological description of himself. Why indeed would you bother? And please don't say that his outburst could have been some stress response to the accident because I read the rest of the case circumstances and his behaviour towards the police did not improve — he was just rude.

When someone in England and Wales is required to provide breath samples to an evidential breath-testing device (the one they have at the police station), the police input the name of the person who is providing the breath samples using a
keyboard at the start of the testing procedure. This is so the police don't get accused of adding someone's name to the wrong printout at a later time. The person who provided the breath samples is then asked if they want to receive a copy of the printout for their own records and they are also asked to sign all three copies (one for the subject, two for police paper work). The three printouts from the device then have all the details of the test including the name, gender and date of birth details the subject provided to the police at the start of the breath-testing procedure, along with their breath alcohol results and some other bits and pieces. In one case, the man in question informed the police he had been arrested 76 times, which is probably how he justified carrying three metal bars in his car, although I doubt any magistrate or judge would be best impressed.

When asked his name so it could be entered into the breath-testing device, he answered FUCK OFF FIND IT OUT FOR-YOUR SELF. Just all charm some people. Quite accurately and appropriately in the circumstances I think, the officer referred to the defendant as Mr FUCK OFF FIND IT OUT-FOR YOUR SELF all the way through his statement and also when giving evidence at court, because it was the only name he had at the time.

Yet other members of the general public must either make or break a police officer's night shift. Imagine this: you're on patrol when you see some drunk bloke at a petrol station who's driven his vehicle into a concrete curb. He's so drunk he can't get out of the car so you go and help. The driver's committed an offence (drink driving) so you arrest him. According to the police statement, during the course of the
arrest the driver (who becomes the defendant by the time I get involved) stopped using his legs, either because of alcohol paralysis or stubbornness, so he was
lowered to the ground
. After they eventually manage to get him to the police station, officers then tried to get the defendant to go from the car to the custody desk. He refused to walk so he had to be dragged which, the officer pointed out, seemed strange: …
as when I had left him with the other officers, he was struggling and shouting at police. He was taken straight through towards the cells but then was laid on the floor for the Custody Sergeant to review him medically. The defendant was refusing to respond to anything said to him but was conscious as he responded to pain.

An ambulance was called and when the ambulance crew arrived, the defendant was still refusing to cooperate and was rolling around on the floor holding his head. The police officer was again surprised when he turned up at the hospital to see the defendant being taken through Casualty in a wheel chair, smiling and chatting to the nurses. The defendant was then put in a bed in a cubicle on his own. The officer said in his statement that,
at one point, he was in the cubicle on his own and I was a short distance away. I saw him lift his head and look around. He then lay back down again before lifting himself over the side rail of the bed and throwing himself onto the ground. He did this on two occasions. It led me to believe that he was trying to get our attention.

On other occasions, I seriously wonder how officers keep a straight face. It's one thing to write some thing in a statement; it's an entirely different thing to have to get up in court and say it out loud. But it has to be done because detail is everything. For example:

Here's an example of when the police must seriously have had a good chuckle back at the station: police attended the relevant location after receiving a report from a member of the public that a drunk woman was trying to drive a car away from a supermarket car park on a Monday afternoon. When the police approached the car, they found the defendant sitting in the driver's seat, naked from the waist down and wearing a white top pulled up exposing her breasts. When she spoke, she was very difficult to under stand and was apparently VERY drunk (their emphasis). When asked what she had been doing, she slurred, ‘Shagging', although she was on her own in the car.

Police officers, particularly those who have been in the job for a while, often have that look about them that says,
I've seen it all and nothing surprises me any more.
Imagine the thought processes of an officer who attended the scene of a crashed vehicle that was badly damaged. As he approached, the officer noticed two men sitting inside. When asked what they were doing, they replied that they were helping the owner by taking out the radio and speakers before they were stolen. When asked who owned the car, they were unsure.

As I said before, the police have a tough job, and some times it's physically demanding, as in the instance when two officers in a patrol car encountered a man slumped over the steering wheel of his car. The police knocked on the side window to
try to raise a response. Calls to dispatch helped establish the man's name and that the car was parked on his own front lawn. The driver was unable to move, walk, talk or even crawl to the police car and, although it may seem unnecessary, the officers decided to call for backup. A riot van with two more officers duly arrived. It transpired that this wasn't because of the risk of the driver becoming violent but because he was 21 stone (133 kg). He couldn't be manoeuvred into the back of a patrol car so he had to be placed on a riot shield and dragged across the lawn.

The stories the police have are many and varied and not all of them can be told. Their jobs aren't getting any easier but I hope for their sakes they can remember the lighter side of things when they get the chance.

A
friend of mine does far more crime scene attendance than me. One of the worst cases for him was turning up at a murder scene to find that the victim looked just like his wife. It was years ago but he still remembers it, clear as day.

We all have them: the cases that cause a sort of mental trauma and therefore refuse to leave your head and also refuse to be shoved into the dark box in the recess of your mind where you store all the really worrying, scary stuff. When I say ‘we', I mean anyone who has to deal with any kind of trauma. People have different standards of what qualifies as an event or occasion for the Dark Box of the Mind but people involved with suffering and trauma must have a larger box than a lot of other people. I guess a psychologist would be better placed to talk about the whys and wherefores, but that's not me; I just know that people in front-line positions, like medics, police, CSIs and forensic scientists, often need access to a psychologist or some times just need to know that there's one there to help, if need be. There are of course plenty of other people who need psychological assistance to deal with an enormous range of issues but before anyone says I've missed these people out, I'm just talking about the arena of forensic science.

As an independent forensic scientist in England, the issue of receiving help to deal with particularly traumatic cases wasn't one that needed to occur very often. However, when your day-to-day job involves tripping around the countryside collecting fly pupae off rotting corpses, some times the circumstances get to you and every now and then you need help dealing with the disgustingness of it.

For whatever reason, the heebee-jeebies cases literally haunt you, even during the day. It's similar to when you're reading a really, really good book and you become so immersed in it you take on the emotions of the character and the story. I used to do that a lot when I was reading
Rachel's Holiday
by Marian Keyes. Rachel was angry a lot in parts of that book and I used to carry it into my real life, where the real people, like my partner, lived. Poor bloke. He had long hair at the time, like the main man in
Rachel's Holiday
. He got a lot of stick in the days when I was reading about the main character, Rachel, having to hear from her beau what she'd been like as a drug and alcohol addict. Not that I have ever been either, but still, I carried that rage with me throughout the day and the sense of loss when I finished reading that book was palpable — it left me with a big empty hole of disappointment in the pit of my stomach.

If that's what it's like after reading a work of fiction, imagine how it can feel if you allow emotion to enter into your casework. I don't consciously allow it. I don't personalise cases and I don't think about them in anything but clinical, scientific terms. My job is to solve a problem using science and that's exactly what I set out to do. I have it easier than other people involved in this game because of my distance from the
actual cold, hard events. Nevertheless, every now and then a case gets through the armour and lodges itself in the soft underbelly of your consciousness.

Someone I know was attending only her second postmortem, a case where the body of a 17-year-old girl had been exhumed from beneath the floor of a house. Even though the body had been underground for years, because it had been wrapped in rubbish bags it was still partially preserved. She said she has never lost the memory of the skin on the nape of the victim's neck, because it looked so complete and lifelike. She immediately thought of her own child, who was also 17 at that time.

In July 2005 I attended a training course in London. Just days earlier, some of the people on the course had been the first fire officers on the scenes of the London Tube bombings and the Tavistock Road bus bomb. Their faces said it all. Then you add into the equation the information that people who were running the course had their offices in Tavistock Square and their offices were currently crime scenes. They'd had crime scene examiners taking biological swabs from their desks. The results would not only help determine the mechanics of the explosion but potentially identify some of the victims. Think about what it would be like to have that to remember every time you sat at your desk in future. This was also a problem in 2001, after the World Trade Centre destruction. Some times, victims can only be identified by their vaporised remains; tops of adjacent buildings had to be checked for body parts and it's someone's job to go and do that collecting.

With some cases, it's easy to predict when they're likely to cause problems. For me, it's usually the ones involving young
children. Like the children who die of methadone overdoses because their parents were too wasted to keep it out of the child's way, or the children who suffer abuse at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them. I know that someone has to do these cases because otherwise the justice system isn't working properly, but if I have a choice, I occasionally say no, grateful of having the luxury of being able to choose my cases. Having said that, recently I worked on a case involving the death of a toddler in unusual circumstances (was he pushed or did he fall?) and it hasn't caused me any problems.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how my mind selects cases to use for mental torture; it's just a lottery. For example, I remember that when two-year-old Aisling Symes disappeared from an Auckland suburb in October 2009, I could barely watch the news — the pain of the family was palpable and I was feeling it with them. Perhaps it was because the media portrayal was designed to be emotive, or perhaps I was simply caught off-guard.

When it was announced after seven days that Aisling had been found dead in a storm drain, the police family liaison officer had to break it to the waiting media. Here was a man, a police officer, whose job it was to tell the parents their child was dead, then go and tell the press, all the time not being allowed to show emotion, just be strong, impartial, being an information transfer point, a representative of the police force. Under standably, and in my mind, entirely to his credit, he struggled to hold it together in that press announcement. He is trained to do an incredibly difficult job and carry that burden with the family — and then go and do it again next week for someone else. No matter what we think we under stand about
some people's jobs, it some times pales into insignificance with what they actually have to do.

The thing with the cases that stick with you and have an emotional impact is that there is never any clue when they're coming. You just pick up a case file one day and it leaps out at you. And no matter what you do, it's like a leech sticking to part of your memory bank. Even the cases you know you don't want to do. I remember a case in England where a baby had been kicked to death and our company was instructed to do a review for the defence. Having just had a baby, I could no more do that case than fly a plane, so I passed it off to a colleague with some feeble excuse about having so many court appointments coming up I didn't have time. I don't regret passing on that case, but I haven't forgotten it either, and all I read were the first two paragraphs of the solicitor's letter of enquiry.

There are several other cases that will never leave me for one reason or another. The one that has stuck because of the ‘it-took-me-by-surprise' element is from 2008 and involved a triple murder that had occurred the previous July in Manchester. A 36-year-old mother and her two children, an 18-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son, were bludgeoned to death with an engineer's hammer. The two females had been sexually assaulted. No one really knows who died first but the son's body was found covered with a duvet on the floor next to his mother's bed — this is the image I just can't escape, that sits as a static frame in my mind's eye.

It was an enormously involved case, which included two days
examining items at the Crown's forensic science laboratory. It didn't help matters that it was the furthest lab from where I worked. It was a two-person job so my boss came with me. It was dark and cold, being February in northern England. We were looking at the footwear mark aspect of the case because a lot of the upstairs floors in the house of the deceased had not been carpeted, which meant good surfaces for recording footwear marks. In all, we examined several marks, a blood-stained carpet and some shoes. I didn't see a single crime scene photo depicting any of the deceased
in situ
and I didn't see any post mortem photos, but for some reason, the image of that child next to his mother's bed is strong as strong can be.

Another case I will never forget was a murder that took place in London. For months, it held nothing more than a scientific interest; I was looking at the footwear aspect of the case and whether the defendant had been where he said he'd been in the house. The reason I now remember that case is because a colleague worked on the blood pattern aspect. He mentioned one of the post mortem photographs that had disturbed him. Up until that point, neither the case nor the photographs, including the one in question, had bothered me and none of them had made it past my sophisticated mental filtration system. The reason the case got through and lodged in my mind is because the filtration system wasn't activated at the time the mental breakthrough was made; I was on the phone with this colleague who had reviewed the blood pattern aspect of the case but we were talking about something entirely different. The case had obviously got into his brain and some thing in our conversation made him mention that one post mortem photo graph. Since then, I can't think of
a blood pattern case without an image of the victim's front hallway and that one post mortem photo popping into my head. Thanks for that, colleague mate!

Occasionally, it's not the actual case that gives you the heebie-jeebies, it's the people involved. I attended court once for a drink-drive case. The issue was about whether or not the police officer should have requested a second breath-screening sample from the defendant: the first time she tried, the screening device she was using was dodgy and came up with a pass, but because the driver stank so badly of alcohol she asked a colleague to lend her the breath-screening unit from his patrol car, which he did. The defendant provided a further breath sample, which registered a fail. This gave the police officer the authority to require the defendant to accompany her to the nearest police station where he would be required to provide an evidential breath test, blood test or both. The breath samples he provided at the police station were both
way
over the legal limit and, from an analytical point of view, there was nothing wrong with them. As far as I could see, the defendant had been caught drink driving, end of story.

The solicitor, on the other hand, was running a technical argument about the legality of the basis on which his client had been arrested. If he could convince the court that the police officer had unlawfully acquired the second sample of breath to the screening device then the damning evidential breath tests undertaken at the police station would not be admissible as evidence and his client wouldn't be guilty of anything.

All he wanted me to do was say that the first breath-screening device was operating perfectly well at the time his
client provided the breath sample, which meant he could argue his case with a good chance of winning. The thing was, at the time he was asking me this question I was in an interview room at the court, which had no windows and the window in the door was covered over. No one knew I was in there; no one had seen me go in because it was a very quiet court and everyone was having a tea break. The client, his dad and the solicitor stood between me and freedom beyond the door. It made me feel very uncomfortable, particularly as they weren't going to like anything I had to say because I thought the first breath-testing device
had
been malfunctioning (based on paper work I had received about it) and that there was nothing wrong with the defendant being asked to provide a second sample for a screening test. So what did I do? I made vague comments to the solicitor that sounded reasonably helpful and then suggested we get a cup of tea, seeing as everyone else was on tea break. Once we'd made it out of the door, I firmed up my vague view that there wasn't a leg to stand on from the defence point of view, and scarpered across the foyer where I could see the security guards. Needless to say I didn't give evidence in that case. Never again have I gone into an interview room without at least some fuss or a hot cup of tea as a defence or distraction.

Until I give up this work, I will have to deal with the difficult aspects of cases such as those briefed above or the others that aren't for general consumption. It's part of the job, I accept that and I know how to deal with it; the enjoyment and the sense of achievement I get far outweigh the negatives. I just hope that my old age isn't dogged by remnant images.