Forensics

by Val McDermid

  At the trial, prosecution lawyer John Kastrenakes made a powerful opening statement to the jury: ‘You will hear scientific evidence regarding fingerprints, ballistics evidence, business records … All of it points to this defendant – nobody else – as the killer.’ Kris’s fingerprints were found in the hotel room where the murders had been committed – because, Kris said, he had attended a business meeting there earlier in the day. Kastrenakes called an array of eyewitnesses and experts, including a police officer who testified to selling Kris a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun some months before the murder. Kastrenakes made a compelling case, studded with phrases like ‘mechanically planned’, ‘brutal act’ and ‘overwhelming evidence’.

  When it was the turn of the defence lawyer, Eric Hendon, to call on his witnesses, he shocked all present. He simply said, ‘The defence rests’. Hendon had six people ready to confirm that Kris had been with them at the time of the murder, in a location forty miles away from the hotel. But the jury never heard from them. Incomprehensibly, Hendon completely blew his chance to introduce doubt into Kastrenakes’ narrative.

  The jury deliberated for a short time and found Kris guilty of first-degree murder, causing him to faint in his chair. Later on, the same jury returned to the courtroom and sentenced him to death.

  For innocent murder suspects to have a lawyer of Hendon’s calibre is not uncommon in the US. By definition the guiltless are unlikely to know much about what the criminal justice system requires of them: they feel their innocence will speak for itself. Keen to clear their name, they rush to trial without getting a competent team together to trouble the prosecution’s case. Kris had paid Hendon a flat fee of $20,000. (By comparison, O. J. Simpson had spent around $10 million on his defence team, which works out at $16,000 per expert per day.) In Stafford-Smith’s words, ‘Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment.’ As for experts, Kris couldn’t bear to spend the money. What was the need to refute evidence that couldn’t possibly exist? Even though he had made money importing fruit from the Caribbean into the UK, Kris would eventually bankrupt himself and his long-suffering wife Marita at the Courts of Appeal.

  It may have been that there was more to Hendon’s lacklustre performance than lack of monetary incentive. According to the investigator who worked with him on Kris’s defence, he had received a threatening phone call a few weeks before the trial. Something would happen to his son, the caller said, if it looked like he was doing too much to get Kris off.

  The prosecution’s case had relied on more than just the healthy fee and bustling energy of lead man John Kastrenakes. The witnesses played their part, particularly ballistics expert Thomas Quirk. The question of the murder weapon was at the front of the jury’s mind, since the police had never found it. Quirk testified that the bullets found in the bodies of the Moo Youngs had been fired from one of six possible brands of 9 mm semi-automatic. He had fired all these possibilities in his lab, and found that the marks on the bullets – made by the spiralled ‘rifling’ on the inside of the gun barrels – resembled the marks on the fatal bullets.

  Quirk then talked about the bullet casings which the CSIs had recovered from the hotel room: ‘The only fired standard that I have in the lab that matches the morphology on the casings from the scene is a Model 39 Smith & Wesson.’ Considering a police officer had already told the court that Kris had bought this very gun some months prior to the murder, these were damning words.

  Finally Quirk presented a photograph of a silver Smith & Wesson handgun to the jury. It filled the gap left by the absent murder weapon, and stuck in their minds. Hendon objected to Quirk showing the weapon, saying it had nothing to do with the facts, but the judge snapped, ‘It’s demonstrative!’ and let him go on. When Hendon cross-examined Quirk, he was able to get him to admit that around 270,000 Smith & Wesson handguns had been produced in the US since the 1950s, and that the bullet might have been fired from any one of them. But by this point the jury had in a sense seen the murder weapon.

  Was Quirk’s science valid? Could he really narrow down the source of the bullets to a Model 39 Smith & Wesson? Or had the Moo Youngs been killed by another of the 65 million handguns knocking around the US in 1986? The ability of ballistics experts to match a bullet to a gun – ‘ballistics fingerprinting’ – had not been properly challenged since its inception in the nineteenth century. Like fingerprint examiners and forensic hair specialists, ballistics experts had been reluctant to question the scientific basis of their own livelihood. It was only in 2008 that Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in New York, finally held hearings to look into the status of ballistics evidence. He suggested that it had been more reliable in the days when bullets were made from individual moulds, but was much less so in the era of mass production. ‘Whatever else ballistics can be called,’ he said, ‘it cannot fairly be called “science”.’

  After the trial it came to light that Quirk regularly gave testimony in the language of absolute certainty. In the murder trial of Dieter Riechmann, for example, accused of killing his girlfriend in the front seat of his rental car in Miami Beach in October 1987, he testified that the fatal bullet had come from one of three types of gun, two of which Riechmann owned. Riechmann was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death. At an appeal hearing ten years later, Quirk admitted that he had run the details of the bullet only through the Miami Police database, rather than through the FBI database which had many thousands more possibilities.

  Via his charity, Reprieve, Stafford-Smith has been investigating the Moo Young murders for a decade. He has brought a great deal of new evidence to the surface, from the police files and from the people involved in the case.

  In the hotel room where they were shot, the Moo Youngs had documents detailing their laundering of as much as $5 billion for the notoriously violent Medellín drug cartel in Colombia. They were trying to skim off 1 per cent for themselves, which might have annoyed the cartel. Most significantly, the original jury was never told about the person in the hotel room opposite the Moo Youngs’ – a Colombian who was under investigation for hiding $40 million in his luggage en route to Switzerland. No other guests were staying on that floor of the hotel on the day of the murders.

  In 2002, Kris’s sentence was reduced to life, with the possibility of parole when he reaches the age of 103. In April 2014, a Miami judge granted Kris a full evidentiary hearing on the strength of the new evidence. According to Reprieve, ‘this represents the biggest step towards Kris’s exoneration since his conviction in 1987’.

  In the adversarial system, equality of arms makes a fair trial possible. At the very least Kris Maharaj should have had a good lawyer and a ballistics expert. If any theory is to be trusted – whether it is a theory of guilt or anything else – it needs to be scrutinised and criticised by competent outsiders. The scientific method demands it.

  Without the scrutiny of the courtroom, the science assembled by forensic experts is meaningless. The job of forensic science is to support the legal system from the crime scene to the courtroom. But everything depends on that final stage being scrupulous and even-handed. That is not only in the best interests of science; it’s in the best interests of all of us.

  CONCLUSION

  This book has charted the astonishing leaps that forensic science has made over the last two hundred years. If we presented Michael Faraday or Paracelsus with the scientific evidence our courts now take for granted, it would seem like magic to those most rigorous of researchers. And the advance of science has run hand in hand with corresponding advances in the delivery of justice.

  When beat officer John Neil arrived at the scene of the first Jack the Ripper murder in 1888, he faced insurmountable problems. No one in Whitechapel’s intricate network of alleyways and streets had seen the murderer on that August night. There was no obvious motive, and no obvious suspect. Mary Nichols’s body offered evidence about the murder weapon, about the strength of the murderer himself and the state of his twisted mind. But none of this poin
ted in any decisive direction.

  Had Neil and his colleagues had the skills and technology of modern forensic investigators, processing the scene would almost certainly have led them to follow Holmes’ ‘scarlet thread of murder’ inexorably to the man who killed those Whitechapel women in the dead of night. But without the most basic of scientific resources, the police were fumbling in the dark. They knew it, and the public knew it: a popular cartoon of the time showed a blindfolded officer stumbling hopelessly around in a street full of Rippers laughing and goading him.

  The five acknowledged victims of the Ripper were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. They represent a tiny proportion of the men, women and children whose killers have escaped retribution, simply because there was no way to unravel the complex circumstances of a murder scene. But the police and forensic services have learned lessons from these failures that ultimately have served to protect others. Even the several thousand dogs who died slow deaths by poison at the hands of the ‘father of toxicology’, Mathieu Orfila, in the early 1800s, had a significant role to play.

  In the course of researching this book, I have been struck, above all, by the integrity, ingenuity and generosity of the forensic scientists I have met. They care so deeply about the cases they work on that they are willing to engage with the darkest and most frightening aspects of human behaviour on a daily basis. They are willing, like Niamh Nic Daéid, to spend hours in the sodden debris of a fatal fire; like Martin Hall, to collect maggots from a week-old corpse; or, like Caroline Wilkinson, to reconstruct the face of a mutilated child the same age as her own daughter. They make sacrifices so that the rest of us can live knowing that, if we are the victims of crime, the perpetrators will be brought to justice. They do not guard their knowledge jealously; they share it as widely as possible in the hope that one of their colleagues may use it as a springboard for the next leap forward.

  And the importance of their work makes them astonishingly creative in the face of a tricky forensic problem. The proliferation of forensic tools made available to crime investigators over the last two hundred years is nothing short of astounding. And, although they are all imperfect, nearly all have strengthened the criminal justice system. We’ve heard about the ‘bucket science’ that characterised the early days of DNA analysis; now a scientist like Val Tomlinson or Gill Tully can use a bloodstain a millionth the size of a grain of salt to provide a profile that can find not only the person it belongs to, but also a member of their family who might have committed a crime, maybe years ago. Confronted with a video that appeared to show sexual abuse but not the abuser’s face, Sue Black became the first person to identify someone from the unique pattern of veins on their forearms and freckles on their hand. These scientists find their imaginations stimulated rather than curbed by the challenges of crime investigation – and by the need to be rigorous.

  Crime scene evidence would not be so effectively utilised today if it hadn’t, for more than two hundred years, been forced to pass the strict credibility tests of the courtroom. The first pressure is put on a scientist’s theory by their scientific peers, who force them either to abandon it or meet the challenge and make it stronger. Then, in the courtroom, lawyers do everything they can to excite scepticism in the jury. Very few holds are barred on the witness stand, and a lawyer may choose to ignore their scientific methods and interrogate their character instead. But, however personally stressful a forensic scientist may find giving testimony, the courtroom is the anvil on which scientific evidence is struck. With a well-prepared lawyer playing the part of the hammer, forensic techniques are either strengthened or broken, according to their merit.

  Of course, as parts of this book have shown, it doesn’t always run like clockwork. But when it does, inspirational sparks fly, new ideas are knocked out and the room for manoeuvre enjoyed by violent criminals shrinks a little more.

  The methods of science and justice have much in common. Both attempt to shine a clarifying light on obscurity and uncertainty. At best, their core aims match, too, as they try to go beyond assumption and arrive at the truth though demonstrable facts. Yet because forensic science is made up of so many human layers – criminals, eyewitnesses, police officers, CSIs, scientists, lawyers, judges, juries – it cannot avoid either missing or misrepresenting the truth at times. The stakes are always high; life and liberty depend on it. I hope this book has demonstrated the commitment of forensic scientists across the disciplines to be imaginative, open-minded and painstakingly honest in the interests of justice for all of us. It has certainly reminded me of what I have known for a long time – the work itself is amazing and the people who do it are, frankly, awesome.

  1 Crime scene notes taken by John Glaister Junior, the leading forensic investigator in the Buck Ruxton case

  2, 3 Police officers comb the area where the remains of Isabella Ruxton and her maid, Mary Rogerson, were found. The bodies were recovered in over thirty separate packages, leading many to call the case the ‘Jigsaw Murders’

  4 A maggot’s head under a microscope. Note the two prongs, used for scraping decaying flesh into its mouth

  5 Blowfly (Sarcophaga nodosa) on decaying flesh. Blowflies can smell decomposition from over on hundred metres, making them ‘the gold standard indicators’ of the insect world

  6 An illustration from Eduard Piotrowski’s seminal work on bloodstains; as part of his research, he bludgeoned animals with a variety of instruments to observe the effects

  7 At the University of Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’, bodies like this one are left to decompose in a variety of different settings for the purposes of study. This image is part of photographer Sally Mann’s series ‘What Remains’. Sally Mann, ‘Untitled’, 2000, gelatin silver print, 30 x 38 inches, edition of three

  8, 9, 10 Graham Coutts, who was convicted of Jane Longhurst’s murder, caught on CCTV moving her body from the storage facility where he kept it in the weeks after her death

  11 Death of a court lady, from a series of eighteenth-century Japanese watercolours depicting the nine stages of a decaying corpse or kusōzu: the putrefying body is carrion for scavenging birds and small animals;

  12 at this stage the flesh has almost all decayed revealing the skeleton. Wistaria blossoms above her body;

  13 only a few fragments of bone, including the skull and ribs, hand and vertebrae, remaiN

  14, 15 Betty P. Gatliff (see p.198) working on a facial reconstruction of one of serial killer John W. Gacy, Jr.’s nine unidentified victims in July 1980. Photographs of the reconstructed heads were released to the media in an attempt to identify the victims. To her right are a completed reconstruction and a skull with the rubber guides which show the average thickness of tissue on a human face

  16 Sections of the brain of a gunshot victim, showing the path of the bullet, and (to right) the bullet itself

  17 A section from a liver, and (to left) the knife that caused the fatal wound

  18 One of Frances Glessner Lee’s doll’s house-sized ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’. Designed to help train police recruits in detection, the Nutshell Studies depict imaginary crime scenes down to the tiniest details

  19 A model of an old man’s head in wax, created by the seventeeth-century sculptor Giulio Zumbo. Zumbo created many detailed anatomical models; in this case he built up layers of coloured wax onto a real skull

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I was lucky enough to be educated in Scotland, where the education system allows students to study arts and sciences alongside each other all the way up to university level. I enjoyed both equally and I still love being gobsmacked by the latest developments in science and technology.

  However, I am primarily a writer of fiction, albeit one with an appetite for authenticity. But when I get stuck, I generally make something up. So when it comes to writing non-fiction, I need a lot of help. Thankfully, it was forthcoming.

  In the first instance, I owe a huge debt to the experts
I interviewed in the various disciplines I’ve written about here. It was a privilege to be in touch with their enthusiasm, good humour and insight into what is often challenging and harrowing work. Some I’ve known and exploited for years; others are new to the experience. I could not have begun to produce this book without their generosity with their time and their expertise. So thank you Peter Arnold, Mike Berry, Sue Black, Niamh Nic Daeid, Robert Forrest, Martin Hall, Angus Marshall, Fiona Raitt, Dick Shepherd, Val Tomlinson, Gill Tully, Catherine Tweedy and Caroline Wilkinson.

  I’ve had enormous support and help right from the start of this project from Kirty Topiwala and her colleagues at the Wellcome Trust, backing me up with a wide range of facilities – from Bernard Spilsbury’s handwritten notes to all the coffee I could drink!

  I had two first-class researchers who supplied me with exactly what I needed along the way. Anne Baker and Ned Pennant Rea were both patient and efficient. I couldn’t have written the book without their help. Nevertheless, I take full responsibility for any errors.

  Most of all, I want to thank publisher Andrew Franklin at Profile, who first came up with this crazy idea, and my editor Cecily Gayford who has gone the extra mile so many times, she’s covered the equivalent of the London Marathon. I can’t believe you never shouted at me. I would have.