by Paul Millen
There was one sight which soon captured their attention. On each corner of the bed, there was a bedpost. Sitting on top of them were round wooden balls.
The room was searched in detail. The plugged-in wash and vac was particularly interesting. If there had been a clear-up the scene might be largely inside the machine by now. The bed was made, so the bedding was removed and recovered in sequence, eventually exposing the mattress, which was clean. That was until it was turned over to reveal a large area of blood staining. It was still wet. It also contained a blue dye which would turn out to be ink. Was this part of the attempt to cover it up? Things moved quickly, well quickly for scene investigations. Examination of the bed frame at the foot of the bed at first sight looked unpromising. That was until a detailed examination revealed blood in the crevices and edges. The blood had been cleaned up, but it could not disguise what had soaked into the recesses.
The bedhead looked more and more like a potential murder weapon. So it was the subject of a careful examination and detailed search.
Feedback from the forest scene had revealed that there was the remains of a black plastic bag, similar to those used as refuse bags. Under the bed two black bags were also found.
When the loft was searched, a black plastic bag was found containing two blood-stained pillows. Pat Crossan was not happy when they were found. The loft had been searched when Anna was reported missing, long before we were involved. I stood up for the two police officers who had conducted the search. They were looking for Anna and not searching for evidence, even something which now looked obvious.
The forest search revealed only a little more. It looked more and more like a disposal site. One interesting observation was the depression in the frost-laden grass of two tracks. It indicated that a vehicle had been backed up to allow the body to be removed. The rough distance could be measured. We might be able to narrow down the type of vehicle and implicate or eliminate.
A wider search of the forest would be made over the coming days, extending from where the body was found. It would involve cutting back some of the vegetation and gorse. Although some items would be found, they were unconnected with this crime.
Examination of the refuse bags found under the bed, in the loft (the one containing the blood-stained pillows), and a fragment found under Anna’s body would all be linked to the same source. When I asked the laboratory at Aldermaston to undertake this, I was surprised to hear that they were not aware of the technology. So I put them in touch with a scientist at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory who enlightened them. When plastic bags are made the plastic is drawn through rollers which leave extrusion marks. Viewed under polarised light the striations form a pattern which extends along the batch. There is always a possibility that if two bags are in direct sequence there may be uneven tears which line up along the perforated edge. Examination of the bags would link them together.
The two vehicle scenes would take a few days to complete. The vehicles were relatively clean. We knew that Bill had cleaned them. However, blood was found inside the car and also on the edge of the boot. The boot was also examined for fibres, in case fibres from Anna’s nightdress could be found there. Although there could potentially be a legitimate reason to find such fibres there, I argued that finding them there would be unusual.
A petrol can was found in Bill’s car and enquiries were made to see if he had purchased petrol on the day of Anna’s disappearance. The laboratory was also asked to compare the remnants in the petrol container with any residues found in the debris under Anna’s body. This technology is now more advanced as it is possible to link petrol by its chemical profile and any contaminants back to previous sources.
Enough evidence was found in the first two days for Bill to be charged with his wife’s murder. Further examinations would continue.
Two weeks after the initial post mortem, a second post mortem was undertaken. This was to allow a pathologist for the defence to make his examination. We took the opportunity to undertake some further reconstruction. So our preparations included bringing along the bedhead and a mannequin to reconstruct the injuries. In the event they were not needed. Injuries recorded on Anna’s head and shoulder showed that the bedhead was the murder weapon. The deputy SIO was present with members of the team and a full CSI team. The defence pathologist noticed that there were two and possibly three blows, more than our pathologist had noticed in the original examination. The head wound had caused Anna’s death. Both pathologists were in no doubt. I waited as this sank in and I held back, waiting for the deputy SIO or someone else to ask the next and to me fundamental question. It didn’t come, so I then asked, once she had received this injury could she have got up and walked out? The response was equally profound. She had died instantaneously. Bill was the only other person present.
Bill would deny murder. He offered no defence, insisting that he was not responsible for hurting his wife. He was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
21. A Murder Crime Scene With No Body
Maureen Foot had not been heard from for over a week. Her brother, who lived in the north of England, reported her missing.
The thirty-seven-year-old woman had come to the UK from South Africa in the autumn of the previous year. She rented a room in semi-detached house on an estate on the outskirts of Guildford. Also renting rooms were two men, Neil Sanders, a twenty-two-year-old shed builder, and James Woolf, a twenty-seven-year-old dustman.
The owner of the house lived elsewhere on the estate. The rooms rented by the three occupants were on the first floor of the house with a shared bathroom. Downstairs there was a communal lounge and shared kitchen.
In December, Maureen started a job at a fast food restaurant in the town. On a day in the following March she left work shortly after five pm. The same day she used a cash machine in Guildford. She was not seen again.
Her brother, worried that he had not heard from her, made all the calls he could make from a distance and then, a week after she had last been seen, he reported her missing.
People go missing every day. Many turn up within a day or so, just not having told their friends or family that they were going away. Others leave a life and their problems behind. Some never return.
The concerns of family and friends are real and deep. It may seem out of character and the police may not immediately appear over concerned but it is a difficult call. With adults, hospitals will be checked and enquiries made at work and with all known friends are the first steps. Adults are responsible for their own lives. A missing child will, however, always call for a wider and immediate search.
Police officers went to Maureen’s home and managed to get into her room. It was sparse but tidy. The officers were not unduly concerned, although they noticed some staining on the walls and ceiling which the other occupants put down to a leak in the loft.
No one but her brother was concerned about her disappearance. Apparently she had gone walkabout before, the police were told. The managers at the fast food restaurant where she worked were used to staff taking time off without giving any notice. Even after a week nobody had thought or cared to check with her.
In the following week the officers made their enquiries but no sign could be found of Maureen. She had not accessed her bank account and she had not been seen. A few days later the officers returned to her flat. This time they were more concerns about the staining.
The officers called Trevor Wykes, a crime scene manager, and asked him to go to the scene. They wanted him to have ‘a quick look’. Well, there is no such thing as a quick look in these circumstances. Once you have set your foot in the door you are committed and you can’t go back. So, as head of the CSI department, I was called. The decision was easy but it had cost implications. There was only one way of doing this and it was the right way. It could have turned out to be a waste of time but there was no way of knowing that until we looked, and to look we would use all the resources systematically and thoroughly examine the scene.
With a sense of urgency, a scene investigation team was put together. No detectives were involved at this stage; it was a simple missing person enquiry. The focus of our search would be Maureen’s room. That would be our inner cordon. At this stage we had no reason to search the whole house. To get to her room, access was via the front door and up a flight of stairs, immediately inside it, to the first-floor landing, off which all the bedrooms were situated. An officer would protect the front door entrance to make it our outer cordon. There would be no search of the hall and stairs at this stage. It had been well trod since her disappearance. We would have to deal with that later. The priority was to examine her room and go nowhere else until that had been done.
The officers made arrangements for the occupants to restrict their access whilst we made our examination.
The room was small but that did not necessarily make it an easy task. The search would start with the carpeted floor to allow access to the rest of the room. The walls would be searched without disturbance. The bedding would be examined and carefully removed and the furniture searched methodically. All the furniture would be removed in sequence to expose the whole floor. Once fully examined it would be removed so that the floor and walls could be examined.
Our search would include the use of light sources to examine the carpet, recover any footwear marks and alien fibres. Forensic photographers would work alongside a scene of crime officer under the direction of the crime scene manager. I also agreed from the outset we would involve a specialist in blood pattern analysis. So Roger Mann (a forensic biologist from the Aldermaston Forensic Science Laboratory) was there from the start.
Throughout the scene, investigators would review progress as they made any observations or made any finds.
Very quickly, once the floor had been cleared, the staining on the wall was examined. It was blood. Under the bed a small piece of bone was found. This was sent to a forensic pathologist to see if he could determine its origin. The big question was, Is it human? Once the bed covers were removed from the bed, the mattress looked unremarkable. Until it was turned over. It revealed heavy blood-staining. It was apparent that someone had bled heavily on the bed, and there were stains up the wall. It looked like it could be as the result of a violent assault. What was more, there had been a significant clean-up. Someone knew about this. But who?
The senior detectives were immediately informed and started a major investigation. Brian Woodfield was appointed the senior investigating officer. He was in charge of the overall investigation and I and my team were totally at his disposal now. I would now work closely with Brian, coordinating all the crime scene investigations and forensic science examinations.
A team of detectives continued to make enquiries to see if Maureen could be found alive. There was also a focus on the fact that Maureen could be dead and the knowledge that if she were we would have to find her body. All the men associated with her accommodation (the landlord and male occupants) were under suspicion.
We would eagerly await the results of the bone examination and confirmation that the blood was human, although all of us thought that in a bedroom it was unlikely to be anything else. Nonetheless it needed confirmation and we would expect that within a few hours.
The cordon was immediately extended to the front gate of the house. The results quickly confirmed that the blood was human. This was followed by news from Dr Dick Shepherd, the forensic pathologist, that the bone was human and from a skull.
In the days following the initial search two crime scene investigators (Jon Young and Andy Penson) continued the systematic search and examination of the rest of the house under Trevor Wykes’s management. No sign of Maureen could be found. An extension had been built and a concrete floor laid. Enquiries were made to see if it had been laid after Maureen’s disappearance. It was determined that it had been completed before Maureen went missing so it was recorded that there was no need to disturb it. The examination revealed that Maureen had been attacked whilst on the bed. Directional blood distribution emanated from this location. The stripped room was pasted with lines of string to indicate the distribution so it could be photographed for presentation in court. The clean-up attempt had been thorough, but it was never going to be thorough enough.
Detectives made extensive enquiries of the owner and male occupants. They were interviewed at length. They were also the subject of thorough examination. There had been a clear-up and one of these men knew something, although there was no evidence to say who at this early stage.
A large team of police officers was involved in searching the area which surrounds the housing estate. The searches were going on everywhere. The objective was quite simply to find Maureen or her body. Amongst the areas which would need specialist search were the local streams and drains. In the middle of the estate there was a pond. It was surrounded by a large green. Houses overlooked the perimeter offering clear uninterrupted views of the green and central pond.
As a senior manager, I had to balance a budget. This and a number of other investigations in the preceding months had severely reduced the funds I had available. I had to make some correctional decisions. Our policy and practice had been pretty firm. Even at the risk or running over budget I would not let cost limit an investigation that needed to take place. We would always look at the most cost-effective way of meeting our goals in a professional manner. Up to that time it was the crime scene managers who knew the criteria and managed the problem of authorising overtime to investigators. They managed this process well. To relieve CSMs of the pressure, I decided to be the sole arbiter for authorising overtime. The final decision would have to come from me. After all, the buck stopped with me. I didn’t like doing it because the managers were doing the job well but if I continued to go over budget, I would have to demonstrate the steps I had taken to try and reduce it. I had a department of fifty. Thirty-three were scene of crime officers or forensic photographers of which four were on call to cover events through the night.
On the very day, and within an hour of making the decision and notifying the department, events took place which would mean I would have eleven staff working throughout the night. So much for trying to limit the overtime costs. It looked like the crime scene managers were doing a better job than me!
Having no underwater search unit within our police force we arranged for a team from a neighbouring force to undertake a search of the pond. Accordingly, the underwater search team from Sussex Police was called in. Within forty minutes they had found a body in two black plastic bin liners.
I was at Police Headquarters when Brian Woodfield, the senior investigation officer, called me with the news. Trevor Wykes and his team were nearby but obviously committed, and could not get involved because of contamination issues.
I made my way quickly to the pond. It was only a ten-minute drive from Police Headquarters. I called John Armstrong (who was the crime scene manager on the neighbouring Woking Division) to muster a team. I got to the pond scene first. The Sussex Underwater Search team had set up their equipment at one end of the oval-shaped pond. They had found the two bags submerged under a fallen tree. The green was covered in grass but the edge of the pond was slightly muddy around the perimeter. It was all in full view of the houses around the green. The search team had yet to remove the bags from the water. This would have to be planned and carefully undertaken in such public view. I quickly set a new five-metre cordon around the perimeter of the pond to protect potential areas where the body may have been introduced. There could be shoe or tyre tracks in such an area.
Another problem was that the local senior school was about to turn out for their lunch break. The presence of the underwater search team was drawing the attention of a large number of people and this would soon be swelled with hundreds of teenagers. This could be a disturbing and unpleasant sight. So the recovery had to be as dignified and as simple as possible. The outer cordon in place, a path was cleared from where the search team had set up to the water’s edge
and a tent erected and brought close to the water so that the bags could be brought into this controlled area.
Putting up the tent went well. This may seem like a strange statement. Only a few weeks before, I had been horrified to see on the TV news a CSI team from another force trying to erect a tent around a body in the full gaze of the cameras. Not only were there poles missing, but they managed to get it inside out. It looked like the Keystone Cops. Seeing this I took the precaution of calling in the Surrey CSI staff to the Force HQ gymnasium to practise in small groups. It paid off and the tent went up without any fuss.
The tent prepared, the bags were photographed and briefly examined within the tent to preserve evidence and then removed to the mortuary for closer examination and post mortem. The bags each contained half of a female body severed at the waist. Dick Shepherd, the forensic pathologist, had already been called and attended the scene at the pond.
An investigator remained at the scene searching inside the five-metre cordon for signs of where the body may have been introduced into the water. It was their job to look for shoe or tyre marks or any other signs.
John Armstrong led the remainder of the crime scene team at the mortuary. We had a number of new, younger staff for whom this was their first murder investigation and postmortem examination. I went to the mortuary to keep an eye on them and see how they performed as members of the team. John Armstrong was more than capable of leading the CSI team. John carefully briefed his team, and included the message that if at any stage they felt unwell, they should let him know. It was not a problem; in fact it was quite natural. Being present and taking part in a post-mortem examination is not a pleasant experience. It is a necessary part of our work, but not something we should take lightly.
