Forensics

by Val McDermid

  By 1998, some members of the Hyde community were beginning to grow suspicious. A local taxi driver, who often ferried old ladies around, noticed that they seemed to die shortly after seeing Shipman. Linda Reynolds, a nearby GP, noticed that his patients were dying three times more frequently than hers. Shipman sensed that he was being watched. He made sure that his next few victims were Roman Catholic women, who were certain to be buried rather than cremated, as, before a body could be cremated, two doctors had to examine it to make sure there was nothing suspicious that might necessitate an autopsy.

  His final victim was Kathleen Grundy, 81, a former mayor of Hyde. She was, said Shipman himself, ‘fit as a fiddle’ when he went round to her house on 24 June to take blood for a test. The next day when she failed to turn up to help at a luncheon club for the elderly, two friends found her lying on her living room sofa, dead. They called the police, who informed Shipman. He went round to her house, gave her a quick examination and signed the certificate, writing ‘old age’ under cause of death. He falsified her medical notes, too, adding observations suggesting that she was abusing codeine, a cough medicine which breaks down into morphine after death, because he knew that toxicology tests were likely to find morphine.

  She was buried, according to her wishes. But then a will was produced that left her entire £380,000 estate to Harold Frederick Shipman. ‘I give all my estate, money and house to my doctor,’ the will read. ‘My family are not in need and I want to reward him for all the care he has given to me and the people of Hyde.’ When Kathleen’s daughter saw the will she was shocked, finding it ‘inconceivable’ that her mother had written it. She alerted police, who ordered the body to be exhumed and a post-mortem performed. Meanwhile, investigators discovered one of Shipman’s fingerprints on the will and linked it to a battered old Brother manual typewriter that he kept in his surgery.

  Serial killer Harold Shipman, and (inset) a letter accompanying the forged will of his final victim, Kathleen Grundy. The letter was later matched to a typewriter in Shipman’s surgery

  Kathleen was exhumed on 1 August, six weeks after her funeral. Forensic pathologist Dr John Rutherford carried out an autopsy, but could find no obvious cause of death. He sent the muscle from her left thigh and a liver sample to forensic toxicologist Julie Evans. The thigh muscle is the most stable tissue in the body, making it a good place to find traces of poison. Julie Evans tested the thigh and liver using mass spectrometry, which produces a graph showing the levels of different chemicals in the sample. On 2 September she reported that Kathleen Grundy had died from a fatal dose of morphine.

  Morphine is medical heroin, a strong and highly addictive painkiller usually only prescribed for patients in the final stages of a terminal illness. Shipman had been stockpiling it through false prescriptions and by secretly taking it from cancer patients after they had died. The drug acts on the central nervous system, alleviating pain and inducing peacefulness. If it is injected into a vein, breathing slows instantly, followed by loss of consciousness, and death. As murder goes, it’s quick and painless. But it’s still the violent sundering of a person from their life.

  Understanding that morphine remains in bodies for a long time after death, the coroner ordered a further eleven of Shipman’s patients to be exhumed. All contained lethal quantities of morphine. Shipman was arrested and put on trial on 4 October 1999, charged with fifteen murders and the forging of Kathleen Grundy’s will. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but in 2004 he made a noose from a bed sheet and hanged himself from the bars of his cell window.

  The Shipman Inquiry, chaired by High Court Judge Dame Janet Smith, examined all the deaths among Shipman’s patients during his entire career – 887 in all. Smith’s final report in 2005 estimated that Shipman had murdered 210 of his patients, with a possible further 45, making him the most prolific killer ever convicted. Though the majority of his victims were elderly, there was ‘quite serious suspicion’ that he had killed one patient aged four. That he was not caught sooner provoked anger among the public, and soul-searching among the medical and forensic community.

  How did Fred Shipman become such a calculating monster? And why? Until Kathleen Grundy, Shipman had never killed for financial gain. Probably, we will never know: he took all his conscious motivations with him to the grave, lying about his murderous ways until the end.

  Perhaps he was influenced by Dr John Bodkin Adams, who was charged in 1957 with using morphine to murder 160 of his wealthy patients in Eastbourne, Sussex. (Although he was acquitted, in recent years opinion has tended towards the conclusion that he was probably guilty.) However, psychologists propose that the afternoons Shipman spent observing the calming effects of morphine on his mother as a factor. Robert Forrest, who has written several papers on healthcare murderers, makes the point that doctors are a cross-section of society and have ‘no special charisma of virtue’. Some common reasons to work in health care include intellectual curiosity, altruism, the promise of social status and financial security. Robert has estimated that about one in a million enters based on darker feelings, ‘with a more overtly disturbed psychology, where the perpetrator is thrill-seeking or even actively psychotic’. For someone like Shipman, ‘being able to manipulate and control patients up to the point of killing them is interesting’. Given the arrogance he showed to police officers who interviewed him in the days after his arrest, given his belief that he had the right to privately murder whoever he wanted, it seems that Shipman enjoyed exercising the power of life and death, and thought he could play God for ever.

  Thankfully the majority of would-be murderers do not have access to the same armoury of drugs as medical professionals. They are also unlikely these days to turn to metallic poisons like arsenic because they are easy for modern toxicologists to identify. Their poisons of choice are plant-based, and they sometimes administer them in barely credible ways. As a writer, I was inspired by the Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle to create a serial killer whose fascination with vegetable poisons proved fatal for several victims.

  But stranger than anything I could have invented is the case of Georgi Markov. On 7 September 1978 Markov was standing at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his right thigh. Markov was a Bulgarian dissident writer who had defected to the West in 1969. He was waiting for a bus to take him to his job at the BBC World Service, where he broadcast shows satirising the Communist regime in Bulgaria. Markov flicked his head round and noticed a man close by pick up an umbrella from the ground, hail a taxi and disappear. He felt like he’d been stung by a wasp or a bee. When he reached his office, he noticed a small red pimple on his leg. Later that evening, his leg became inflamed and he developed a fever. Next morning an ambulance took him to hospital. The doctors X-rayed his leg but found nothing. Despite large doses of antibiotics, Markov died four days later.

  The coroner suspected poisoning and ordered an autopsy. The pathologist, Rufus Crompton, found nearly all of Markov’s organs to be damaged, and confirmed that he had died of acute blood poisoning. He also found a tiny pellet, the size of a pin head, just underneath the skin of Markov’s thigh, with two tiny holes drilled into it.

  Crompton sent the pellet and the tissue surrounding it to toxicologist David Gall, who ran tests but could not identify the poison. But based on the sequence of Markov’s symptoms, he thought the bullet might contain ricin, a substance extracted from the seeds of the castor oil plant – 500 times more powerful than cyanide. Harking back to Mathieu Orfila and his tests on dogs, Crompton decided to inject a pig with ricin. ‘It had exactly the same symptoms,’ he observed. ‘It died in the same way; samples of its blood showed the same high white cell count that no other poison produces.’

  If ricin is swallowed, its symptoms are nasty but not fatal. But if it is injected or inhaled or absorbed through the mucus membranes, a dose the size of a few grains of salt will kill an adult man. Ricin inhibits the protein synthesis of cells, causing cell death, and damage to t
he major organs. There is a delay of a few hours before the appearance of symptoms, which include high fever, seizures, severe diarrhoea, chest pains, breathing difficulties and oedema. Death ensues within three to five days; there is no antidote. Poisoners have favoured it over the years because, like arsenic, its symptoms mimic natural causes.

  In the Markov case Crompton supposed that someone had drilled into the pellet, inserted a few grains of ricin and sealed it back up with a sugary coating designed to melt at 37 degrees, the temperature of the human body. To fire the pellet, the assassin must have used a mechanism that worked like an air rifle and looked like an umbrella. There had been a similar attempt, using the same kind of pellet, on the life of a Bulgarian defector in Paris ten days before Markov was hit, but the victim had survived because the coating on the pellet had only partially melted.

  Because there had been two previous assassination attempts on Markov, the police suspected that his murder was orchestrated by the Bulgarian secret police, probably aided by the Russian KGB. In 1990, Oleg Gordievski, a double agent, claimed that the KGB had supplied the poison and made the umbrella gun. The Soviet Union fell in 1991 and in the following year the former head of the Bulgarian intelligence service destroyed an archive of ten volumes which gave details of assassinations ordered by the regime. Exactly who killed Markov will probably never be known.

  Ordinary civilians tend to administer their plant poisons of choice in less elaborate ways. In 2008 in Feltham, west London, 45-year-old Lakhvir Singh, a mother of three, had been dumped by Lakhvinder Cheema, her lover of the past sixteen years. Cheema, known to his friends as ‘Lucky’, had started seeing a woman half her age. Lakhvir was heart-broken. Then Lucky announced he would marry his new girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. Lakhvir decided that she would rather kill him than suffer the perpetual anguish of knowing he was with another woman. So she went to Bengal for a month, to the foothills of the Himalayas, and came back with poison extracted from the beautifully flowering monkshood plant, also known as Indian aconite, thought to be the deadliest plant in the world. (Incidentally, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Professor Snape uses the British version, wolfsbane, to stop Remus Lupin turning into a werewolf.)

  Aconite, also known as monkshood and wolfsbane. Symptoms of aconite poisoning include nausea, vomiting, burning and tingling in the limbs, and difficulty in breathing. If untreated, death can occur within two to six hours

  On 26 January 2009, two weeks before the planned wedding, Lakhvir Singh let herself in to Lucky’s house in Feltham, took a container of leftover curry from the fridge and laced it with aconite. Lucky and his fiancée ate the curry for dinner the next day. He enjoyed it so much that he had a second helping. Shortly afterwards, both of them started vomiting. His fiancée recalled what happened next: ‘Lucky said to me, “I am not feeling very well. My face has become numb and, when I touch it, I cannot feel it.”’ Next he started losing the use of his arms and legs. He managed to call 999 and told the operator that he thought his ex-girlfriend had poisoned his food. The couple were rushed to hospital, where Lucky died.

  Aconite stops the heart and other internal organs from working. After the severe vomiting, the victim feels like they have ants crawling over their body, then they lose sensation in their limbs, their breathing becomes slower and slower, and their heartbeat weakens, disturbing the rhythm of the heart. However, the mind remains clear throughout. Lucky’s fiancée was put in a drug-induced coma for two days while toxicologist Denise Stanworth tried to trace the poison. Robert Forrest explains: ‘Fortunately Denise had enough post-mortem material to go on. It was only when she started looking for exotic vegetable poisons that she found the aconite.’ The woman was given a dose of digitalis, which calmed her abnormal heart rhythm, and she went on to make a full recovery.

  When the police searched Lakhvir Singh’s flat, they found two packets of brown powder containing aconite in her coat and handbag. She claimed it was medication for a rash on her neck, but was found guilty of murder and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.

  Sometimes toxicologists are confronted with poisons before they have entered the body. The fire scene investigator Niamh Nic Daéid, whom we met in chapter 2, is also an analytical chemist who specialises in fire, explosives and drugs. When Niamh wants to know if cocaine is present in something, she first uses a simple yes-or-no colour test. ‘We stick it in a little tube, shake some reagent on it and if it goes blue then it’s cocaine.’ Next she employs more sophisticated techniques, such as gas chromatography, to find out how concentrated the drug is.

  When a researcher from Thailand came to visit, she explained to Niamh that poorer countries can’t afford this second round of tests. Niamh realised that people were being arrested on the basis of the colour test alone, regardless of the concentration of the drug. So Niamh and her team devised a cheaper solution. ‘You take a photograph of the colour using a smartphone and then, once you’ve calibrated the camera, you use the colour to give a tentative percentage of drug that’s present in the sample. Because you’ve taken it with a smartphone, the image has GPS co-ordinates attached, and you can beam it up. We’re now working with the United Nations to create a living global map of point-of-seizure drug samples. A lot of the frontline forensic science work that makes a difference in a global sense doesn’t have to use complicated technology. It can be actually a very simple solution to a problem.’ A Pantone test for cocaine concentration may not have been what Mathieu Orfila had in mind two centuries ago, but I can’t help feeling that he’d have enjoyed its elegance.

  SIX

  FINGERPRINTING

  ‘And he gave unto Moses two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God’

  Exodus 31:18

  The governing principle of forensic science, as laid down by Edmond Locard at the beginning of the last century, is that ‘every contact leaves a trace’. But unless we know how to analyse, categorise and understand those traces, they’re not much use when it comes to catching criminals. As scientists have made new discoveries, so the art of detection has advanced. And the technique of identification from fingerprints was a headline-grabbing trailblazer in terms of bringing criminals to justice

  Forensic science did not begin with fingerprinting, but it caught the public imagination in a way that no other development had. And because it was so easy to comprehend, the courts also took to it readily. In the early 1900s the law-abiding citizenry fell in love with the idea that a silent burglar who touched what wasn’t his could be identified just as silently; that the murderer who took a life with a blunt instrument could swing from the gallows thanks to the pattern on the tip of his pinkie; that a moment’s carelessness would lead inevitably to conviction thanks to the unique arrangement of a clutch of ridges and loops.

  One of the first Europeans to grasp the idea of the individuality of fingerprints was a young man named William Herschel. In 1853 he set sail from England to work for the East India Company, which effectively ruled large parts of India. Four years later a dispute over the type of grease used in gun cartridges led to a group of the company’s Indian soldiers mutinying against their British commanders. The subsequent rebellion – known as the Indian Mutiny – spread across the country, leading to widespread violence met with vicious reprisals from the British forces. When the dust settled, the East India Company was forced to turn over its territories to the British Crown and many of the company’s employees were transferred to the Indian Civil Service. Herschel was put in charge of a rural region in Bengal.

  The brutality of the rebellion had left feelings running high and many Indian citizens were determined to make life as difficult as possible for their British overlords. They stopped turning up for work, paying taxes and cultivating British farms.

  Herschel, an ambitious 25-year-old, was determined not to let civil unrest stand in the way of his making a mark. One of the first decisions he took in his new role was to build a road. He drew up a contra
ct with Konai, a local man, to supply equipment for the project. Then he did something very odd.

  ‘I dabbed Konai’s palm and fingers over with home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the whole hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on another impression.’ When Herschel printed Konai’s hand, he wasn’t thinking of it in terms of identification, but as a kind of insurance – ‘to frighten him out of all thought of repudiating his signature’.

  Although rare, and by 1861 illegal, Herschel may have come up with the idea for the handprint from the Hindu practice of suttee, whereby a widow was burned alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. As she passed through the ‘Suttee Gate’ on her way to death, the doomed woman would dip her hand in red dye and place it on the Gate. The stonework around the print would then be carved away to make it stand out in bas-relief.

  Twenty years later, Herschel was appointed magistrate at Hooghly, near Calcutta, where he was responsible for the courts, the prison and pensions. We think of benefit fraud as something modern, but Herschel was aware of it 140 years ago. He set up a system for taking the fingerprints of pensioners so that when they died other people couldn’t fraudulently collect their pensions. He also took the prints of people when they were given jail sentences, to stop convicted criminals paying others to serve their prison sentences for them.