The Mammoth Book of New CSI Read online

  Nigel Cawthorne is the author of Military Commanders and Vietnam – A War Lost and Won. His writing has appeared in over a hundred and fifty newspapers, magazines and part-works – from the Sun to the Financial Times, and from Flatbush Life to the New York Tribune. He lives in London.

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  THE MAMMOTH BOOK

  OF NEW CSI

  by

  NIGEL CAWTHORNE

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Nigel Cawthorne, 2012

  The right of Nigel Cawthorne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-002-0 (paperback)

  UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-534-6 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

  Books published by Running Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4469-4

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930510

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

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  www.runningpress.com

  Printed and bound in the UK

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  MADELEINE McCANN

  SNOWTOWN

  RACHEL NICKELL

  HADDEN CLARK

  COT DEATHS

  THE PIG FARM

  THE PAPER TOWEL

  MURDER IN PERUGIA

  LINDSAY HAWKER

  SECRETS OF THE CELLAR

  VIKKI THOMPSON

  CLEARED AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY

  LOCKERBIE CRIME SCENE

  SATAN ON THE SCENE

  DARLIE ROUTIER – CHILD-KILLER?

  A STAGED SUICIDE?

  KILLERS FOR THE KLAN

  “MAD DOG” MURDERS

  O. J. SIMPSON REVISITED

  DR DAVID KELLY

  9/11

  7/7

  THE UNREFORMED JACK UNTERWEGER

  CONCORDE CRIME SCENE

  THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DI

  THE MURDER OF MARILYN MONROE?

  THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

  THE ICEMAN

  THE ROMANOVS

  MURDER AT FORT BRAGG

  THE PENNSYLVANIA POISONER

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FATHER OF modern crime scene investigation was Alphonse Bertillon, who went to work for the Prefecture of Police in Paris as a clerk at the age of twenty-six in 1879. Three years later, he introduced a system known as anthropometry (also called Bertillonage) to identify criminals through the measurements of the head and body, which was adopted by the police in Britain and the United States. Although it was later superseded by fingerprinting, it remains in use as a means of furnishing a minutely detailed portrait, valuable to investigators. Bertillon’s system brought with it the methodical collection of detailed criminal records and he took standard photographs of criminal suspects, full face and in profile, giving us the modern mug shot.

  Bertillon also took his camera to the crime scene to photograph the evidence before it was disturbed. He employed a system he called “metric photography”, mounting the camera on a high tripod and laying down maps with a grid printed on them so that the relative position of objects could be measured accurately. He also developed the science of ballistics, the casting of footprints to preserve them, the use of the dynamometer to measure the amount of force used in breaking and entering, and the forensic examination of documents. Bertillon was called as an expert witness in the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France, testifying that certain incriminating documents were written by Alfred Dreyfus. However, he was not a handwriting expert and, in this case, he was wrong and contributed to the conviction of Dreyfus, who was then sent to Devil’s Island.

  Nevertheless, Bertillon’s scientific approach to crime scene investigation endured and was popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who mentions Monsieur Bertillon in The Hound of the Baskervilles and the short story “The Naval Treaty”, in which Dr Watson says that Sherlock Holmes talked of the “Bertillon system of measurements” and “his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant”.

  Crime scene investigation has developed by leaps and bounds since Bertillon’s day. In 1892, the world’s first fingerprint bureau was set up in Argentina. That year, Francisca Rojas of Necochea, some 300 miles (482 km) south of Buenos Aires, was convicted of murdering her two sons on the strength of fingerprint evidence. A fingerprint bureau was established in Calcutta in 1897 where a system of classification was developed by Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. It was called the Henry Classification
System after their supervisor Sir Edward Richard Henry and was adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901. The following year, Bertillon used it to identify a thief and murderer named Henri-Léon Scheffer.

  Modern scientific equipment is used to study tiny fibres, hairs, poisons, pollen and dust. Murder weapons are subjected to minute scrutiny and pathologists make the most detailed study of dead bodies. But the greatest breakthrough came with DNA profiling, developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys of Leicester University in 1984. Using modern duplicating techniques, forensic scientists are now able to magnify samples, making it possible to identify an intruder from the tiny traces they leave behind.

  Not only are the latest forensic techniques employed to solve current criminal cases, they are also used in historical investigations into, for instance, the fate of the Russian royal family killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 or the murder of a man whose 5,000-year-old body was found in the Alps in 1991. However, crime scene investigation still has its limitations. So far, it has not been able to tell us what became of Madeleine McCann . . .

  Nigel Cawthorne

  MADELEINE MCCANN

  IN MAY 2007, Madeleine McCann was on holiday with her family in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. At around 6 p.m. on the evening of 3 May, just a few days before her fourth birthday, Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, put Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, to bed in the ground-floor bedroom of their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz. Madeleine was wearing a pair of pink pyjamas with the words “Sleepy Eeyore” on them. Before she went to sleep, Madeleine said to her mother: “Mummy, I’ve had the best day ever. I’m having lots and lots of fun.”

  At around 8.30 p.m., Kate and Gerry McCann left the children asleep in the apartment and went out to the tapas bar of the Mark Warner Ocean Summer Club. It was just 130 yards (120 m) away and part of the resort complex where they were staying. The McCanns and their fellow holidaymakers – Dr Matthew Oldfield and his wife Rachael, Russell O’Brien and Fiona Payne – agreed to take it in turns to check up on the children.

  At 8.55 p.m., Dr Oldfield went to the apartment and listened outside the bedroom window to see whether he could hear any noise from the children. Ten minutes later, Gerry McCann went to check up on the children. Soon after Jane Tanner, another resident of the resort, noticed a man carrying a child but did not think anything of it. Gerry McCann had stopped to talk to Jeremy Wilkins, but did not notice Tanner as she walked past them to join the rest of the group.

  Dr Oldfield checked on the children again at 9.30 p.m. This time he glanced through the open bedroom door. He only saw the twins, but had no reason to suspect anything was amiss with Madeleine. However, when Kate McCann took her turn to return to the apartment, she went inside. To her horror, Madeleine’s bed was empty. The bedroom window was open and she was heard to scream: “They’ve taken her, they’ve taken her! Madeleine’s gone!”

  The police were called and, within ten minutes, were at the crime scene. Meanwhile, the staff and guests had begun searching the holiday complex. There was no sign of Madeleine and it soon became clear that the little girl had been abducted, so the police on the border with Spain were alerted, along with the authorities at all Portuguese and Spanish airports. Sniffer dogs were brought in. The local council searched the sewers and other waterways. But, after a week, they had found nothing.

  The search was then widened. The Maritime Police combed the caves along the coast. Holidaymakers’ photographs were examined for suspicious characters that may have been caught in the background. Even the Portuguese Secret Service was called in, in case there was some terrorist aspect to the abduction. Portuguese newspapers reported that a man with short brown hair, approximately 5 ft 7 in. (1.7 m) tall, was being sought. But otherwise the police drew a blank.

  There were two initial theories about what had happened to Madeleine. One was that she had been kidnapped by a gang who would sell her for adoption. The other was that she had been snatched by a paedophile ring. A top forensic expert said that the layout of the Mark Warner holiday complex made it a “perverts’ paradise” – with plenty of hidden corners where paedophiles could watch children unobserved. The police could not even say whether Madeleine was alive or not. Chief Inspector Olegário de Sousa said that so many people had been in the apartment that night, any forensic evidence the police might have gleaned from the crime scene had been lost. However, there would soon be plenty of work for crime scene investigators to do.

  Lori Campbell, a journalist from Britain’s Sunday Mirror, drew the attention of the police to Robert Murat, a dual British-Portuguese national who had been staying nearby at Casa Liliana, his mother’s villa. He had been acting as a translator for the police and was said to be particularly concerned about the case because he had recently lost a custody battle over his own three-year-old daughter. Rachael Oldfield, Russell O’Brien and Fiona Payne said that they had seen him in the Praia da Luz complex on the night Madeleine had disappeared, though his mother said that he had been at home with her.

  On 14 May, Casa Liliana was sealed off. The swimming pool was drained and videotapes, mobile phones, computers and the two cars used by the Murats were taken away for forensic examination. There was speculation that the villa had a secret basement. A laptop and hard drives were also taken from twenty-two-year-old Sergey Malinka, an associate of Murat’s who had set up a website for him. The two had been in frequent phone contact since Madeleine’s disappearance. With no other clue to go on, this was found to be suspicious.

  On 15 May, Robert Murat was named as an arguido, or official suspect, which, while falling short of actually charging him, granted him the right to remain silent. While Portuguese detectives flew to Britain to interview Murat’s estranged wife, British detectives flew to Portugal with their own sniffer dog and hi-tech scanning equipment to search Casa Liliana once again. Desperate to find a clue, the vegetation was razed to the ground. Even so, no evidence linking Madeleine to Murat could be found. Nevertheless, it was ten months before his possessions were returned to him and, finally, four months after that, his arguido status was lifted.

  By that time, the case had taken a shocking turn. On 7 September 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann were named as formal suspects and given arguido status. This was prompted by new crime scene evidence. Madeleine’s blood, hair and other DNA evidence had been found in the car the McCanns had hired twenty-five days after Madeleine had disappeared. However, the Leicester Police who had been helping the Portuguese detectives with their enquiries said that the forensic evident was “very flaky”.

  “The preservation of the crime scenes carried out by the Portuguese police was very poor,” a police source who had dealt with the British Forensic Science Service in Birmingham told the Daily Mail. “Every man and his dog has been to the crime scene at the apartment, and used the McCann’s hire car. It means it’s very hard to pin down where any fluids or other sources of DNA came from in the first place. And as for Madeleine’s hair being found in the hire car – well, of course it could be. Hair stays around for ages, and sticks to clothes. So Madeleine’s hair has been found in the boot? So what.”

  Another leading forensic scientist told the Daily Telegraph: “If they are spots of blood, it could not be from a car used by the McCanns twenty-five days later. That doesn’t make sense. The blood would have dried and it would not transfer as spots unless the child is alive. It would be fragments, but that is not what the police are saying they have. This is the prevailing view among other forensic scientists I have spoken to.”

  There were other claims that analysis of the hair could show whether Madeleine had been drugged on the night she disappeared, supporting the theory then circulating that she had died after being heavily sedated. But toxicology could only show signs of drugs or medicines she had taken over the preceding months or years. It could not show what she had taken on the specific night. In the event, samples of Madeleine’s hair were tested. They showed she had not received any medicatio
n for at least eight months. Her brother and sister were also tested and no traces of sedatives were found in their systems.

  Naturally, the McCanns protested their innocence. Although they had not been charged, they paid for independent forensic tests to be performed on the hire car, which they had garaged in the home of tycoon John Geraghty nearby. However, British forensic experts considered a fresh examination of the car a waste of time.

  “All of the evidence should have been taken out of it by the police,” said Leicester Police. “But saying that, of course, in England the police would have kept the car as well, because we’re so careful about preserving forensic evidence for potential court cases.”

  Sir Alec Jeffreys, the originator of DNA fingerprinting, offered his services as an expert witness to the McCanns. He pointed out that Madeleine’s parents, brother and sister, who carried similar DNA, had all been in the hire car, so it would be nearly impossible to establish anything positive.

  “There are no genetic characters in Madeleine that are not found in a least one other member of the family,” he said. “So then you have an incomplete DNA profile that could raise a potential problem in assigning a profile to Madeleine, given that all other members of that family would have been in that car.”

  One of the useful clues from the crime scene was Madeleine’s favourite cuddly toy, a pink cat. Kate McCann tucked Madeleine up with it, but later it was found on a shelf too high for Madeleine to have reached. This meant it had been handled by whoever took Madeleine and it might have yielded vital forensic evidence. Yet the police let the McCanns keep the pink cat. They used it as part of their “Find Madeleine” campaign and took it around Europe and North Africa as they followed up reported sightings. Many people had touched it when they visited the Vatican and the shrine of Our Lady of Fátima in Portugal. After one newspaper said that it looked a little grubby, Kate McCann put it in the washing machine. So any useful forensic evidence had long since been lost.

  Then came news that a trace of blood had been found in another apartment at the Praia da Luz complex. The blood was sent to the Forensic Science Service in the UK, along with bloodstains found in the McCanns’ original apartment. But it was impossible to assess its significance. Even if it had been Madeleine’s blood, there could have been an innocent explanation, such as someone squashing a mosquito after Madeleine had been bitten by it.