Unnatural Causes

by Dr Richard Shepherd

  I said, ‘At first I thought she must have strangled him from behind by pulling on both ends of the tie but she’s given this very accurate description of his face as he was being strangled.’

  ‘She did say she was at the front of him.’

  ‘That, at least, I believe. But if she did it in the way she describes then a conscious adult male could have easily stopped her.’

  They waited. A detective, his face puzzled, murmured, ‘So how …?’

  ‘Tony Pearson was very drunk, not far off three times the legal drink-drive limit for alcohol. Also, he’d smoked cannabis, which would have magnified the effect of the alcohol. The most likely scenario is that he was lying on the bed, incapacitated. I think she must have simply held the tie across the front of his neck and pressed down. And he must have been too drunk to struggle. There’s a good case for saying that he was face down, that she ran the tie under his neck and simply pulled back on the two ends. But then she wouldn’t have been able to describe his face so accurately as he died.’

  The lawyer leaned forward.

  ‘Are you telling us there was no fight in the flat? That she made it all up to justify the fact that she just …?’

  ‘I think there was an argument in the flat – the neighbours heard something, after all – but it was on nothing like the scale she describes. There is no evidence that she was a victim of physical violence and that her action was self-defence. On the contrary, I believe that she must have strangled him when he was unconscious or barely conscious. Then self-inflicted her injuries.’

  Everyone looked at everyone else.

  ‘No way do we take manslaughter for this one,’ said senior counsel. ‘This is murder. And we’re not going to let her get away with self-defence either.’

  We shook hands and went in our different directions. The trial was scheduled for a few weeks’ time and we would next meet in court.

  In my earliest court appearances, I had been so nervous that I had only been able to stare back at whichever barrister was asking me questions. Or sometimes, if feeling bold, I’d looked at the judge.

  Iain West once came to watch me in the witness box. Afterwards, in the pub, he said, ‘So, who needs to believe you and understand your evidence?’

  In typical Iain fashion, he answered his own question before I could.

  ‘Not counsel, that’s for sure. Counsel knows what you’re going to say, and he knows what he’s going to try to make you say. As for the judge, you’re not really in the business of convincing him either.’

  ‘The jury.’

  Iain nodded his huge head.

  ‘The jury, Dick,’ he rasped in his Scottish accent. ‘The jury, don’t forget the jury.’

  Of course, he was right. In court, Iain was in his element. Twelve good citizens and the public and press gallery too was his idea of an audience and he never failed to play to them. I am simply not an actor and could not do courtroom drama any more than I could do emotional, loving husband.

  However, I did try to learn from Iain. I studied him in the Old Bailey, how he listened to counsel’s question, thought for a moment, turned to face the jury, paused to take a deep breath and place his hands on the edge of the witness box, from which position he could make extravagant gestures, and then replied to the question as though the jury had asked it. His eyes ran constantly over their faces. He delivered his words with aplomb. For the jury, it must have been like having the entire Royal Shakespeare Company in their living room.

  There was no way I could emulate Iain’s performance, but by the time the Lazenby case came up I was turning to the jury as much as I could. Since I am in court to offer scientific evidence and not to pass judgment, I tried then and try now not to look at the defendant. But in those early years I sometimes failed to control my curiosity. I couldn’t resist the urge to see the person accused of the heinous crime whose effects I had witnessed. I was often amazed at how nondescript most murderers seemed. So many looked like that mild-mannered individual you barely notice sitting next to you on the train until he obligingly picks up your ticket if you drop it.

  As I stepped up into the witness box in Regina v. Lazenby, I found myself sneaking a glance at the defendant.

  I saw a young woman who, as in the pictures taken immediately after the murder, was pretty, fresh-faced and alert. Her red hair hung in a neat and charming pony-tail. When I gave evidence, her eyes glistened with tears. Her lawyer passed her a tissue. She dabbed at her cheeks and bowed her head. I saw members of the jury stare at her with compassion.

  How could this small, delicate woman be one of the UK’s very few female stranglers? How could she have carried out this act in cold blood and then had the presence of mind to inflict false injuries all over her body before presenting herself tearfully at the police station? It seemed impossible. I almost doubted my own conclusions.

  Nevertheless, I held firm under cross-examination. And I learned later that the pathologist instructed by the defence to review my findings and opinions did not contest my report: he agreed that at least some, or even most, of Theresa’s injuries were self-inflicted.

  The prosecution was insistent, based on my evidence, that Theresa had simply strangled her boyfriend when he was either unconscious or too incapacitated to struggle against her. All the indications were that Theresa had not needed to defend herself against the extremely drunk Anthony. But it was hard for anyone to believe a woman so sweet and remorseful could have done such a thing unless to save her own life. It was certainly hard for the jury to believe. They accepted her plea of self-defence and found her not guilty.

  Theresa’s lawyers had successfully persuaded them that the prosecution had failed to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. Beyond reasonable doubt is a high hurdle to jump, but the one that I would want applied if I ever found myself on the wrong side of the dock. Despite this, I was surprised when Theresa walked free from court. I knew that, through me, Anthony Pearson had spoken, but it was also patently clear that the jury had not listened. I felt they had ignored the evidence and their verdict was simply a vote of sympathy for an allegedly abused woman.

  Jen raised her eyebrows that evening as I talked about the case extensively and from the heart. I explained how a woman I believed to be a murderer had just walked free. I suspected her youth and beauty were factors in her acquittal, and that seemed unfair.

  ‘Well it makes a change from a pretty young woman being the victim,’ Jen pointed out. She was baffled by her unemotional husband’s rather emotional response to this court case. Even I was starting to feel uncomfortable at trespassing into an anger zone I usually avoided.

  ‘I’d better pull myself together,’ I said. ‘I can’t get upset like this about every court case that goes the wrong way.’

  And, of course, I did pull myself together. The Lazenby case was probably the last time I allowed myself any emotional involvement in the outcome of a trial. It is my job to ascertain the scientific truth. I tell the jury that truth. They have the right to do with it what they will – after all, they hear all the statements and details of a case, which I seldom do. I now desire no further involvement once I have offered the facts.

  So, no more emotional payloads for me. No more sneaking a look at the defendant or grilling police officers on the outcome of a trial. Very often I am not informed of the verdict when I’ve given evidence in a case. If I don’t spot reports in the newspaper then I have to ask police officers or other colleagues who might have been involved. After the Lazenby trial I decided never again to ask. I would be indifferent to the verdict and restrict my interest to my own evidence. I must feel no crusading zeal to see perpetrators behind bars and no emotional need for the jury to vindicate my findings. Let Iain West put his heart and soul into his court performances and then suffer personal devastation if the jury found against his evidence. From now on in the witness box I would perfect the art of emotional detachment I had learned in the mortuary.

  I told Jen this and she looked sad. />
  ‘More detachment,’ she said. ‘It’s your answer to everything.’

  ‘I shouldn’t let myself care about verdicts. I’m sure that’s right,’ I said.

  Jen shrugged. ‘It was interesting watching you talk about that case with so much passion. Maybe you should do it more often.’

  I shuddered. Passion. I certainly didn’t want to feel that at all, let alone more often. It was the sort of thing that could get you into a lot of trouble.

  18

  In the late 1980s the UK saw a series of disasters which claimed many lives. Few if any of these disasters could exactly be called an accident. They almost all exposed major systems failures. Or maybe this was a period when post-war values of self-reliance were morphing into conflicting interests of self and state. Certainly, attitudes were changing as the population grew and the systems we relied on had to increase in size and complexity.

  In March 1987 the car and passenger ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge because the bow door had been left open: 193 passengers and crew died.

  In August 1987 Michael Ryan went on a killing spree and shot thirty-one people in Hungerford before killing himself.

  In November 1987 a lighted match dropped down through an escalator on the Piccadilly line at King’s Cross, causing a fire that claimed the lives of thirty-one people and injured a hundred more.

  In July 1988 the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea blew up, killing 167 men.

  On 12 December 1988 three trains collided due to signal failure just outside Clapham Junction. Thirty-five passengers died and more than four hundred were injured, sixty-nine of them very severely.

  Later that month a bomb planted on a Pan Am jumbo jet exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people on board and eleven on the ground.

  Less than three weeks later, on 8 January 1989, an engine fault developed in a British Midland Boeing 737 which, compounded with pilot error, brought down the plane on the embankment of the M1, just short of the runway at East Midlands Airport. Of 126 people on board, forty-seven died and seventy-four suffered serious injury.

  In April 1989 ninety-six Liverpool football fans were crushed to death and more than seven hundred were injured at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield. It was only in 2016 that a second inquest ruled the victims were unlawfully killed due to gross negligence: the police, ambulance services and safety standards at the stadium were all criticized.

  In August 1989 a collision between a pleasure boat and a dredger in the Thames claimed the lives of fifty-one people, most of them under the age of thirty.

  Each event shocked the nation. Each resulted eventually in significant improvements, when emotions were calmer and the often multiple, interconnected causes had been unravelled and analysed. Ancient systems were overhauled, the health-and-safety culture blossomed – some might say exploded – employers began to recognize the importance of training, of corporate and state attitudes to risk and responsibility. These areas had suddenly become more serious and security was no longer just a managerial afterthought but a necessity.

  I was involved, at emergency or inquiry stage, with many of these events. Pathology learned a lot from them about how to deal with mass disasters – and so did I. It was the lessons of this watershed era that enabled us to cope efficiently with the terrorist horrors of the 2000s.

  For me, the first such case was Hungerford. But this was largely an era of transport disasters, and the first of these I worked on was the Clapham rail crash. A fast passenger train from the south coast, full of commuters, drove through a green light near Clapham Junction and rounded a bend on a Monday morning at 8.10 a.m. – only to find that the slow service from Basingstoke had halted on the same tracks.

  An inevitable collision ensued. Because the green signal should have been red, but wasn’t. Because a wire was loose. Because the electrician had left it that way. Because he had taken only one day off in the preceding thirteen weeks. And, although his managers thought his work was satisfactory, later investigations showed that it had, in fact, been poor, very poor or simply unsafe for sixteen years. It transpired that no one had supervised or inspected anything he did because he was ‘trusted’ and because there was no culture of inspection. The fundamental trigger, however, was this: everyone had been rushing to replace the signalling wiring. And why replace the wiring? Because it dated from 1936. And there was a need to ensure greater rail safety. We are now inside a law of nature that sometimes seems to account for the bulk of my work: the law of unforeseen consequences.

  At the collision, the fast train buckled to the right and hit a third train on the adjacent rails going the other way. Fortunately, this train was empty, heading back to Haslemere: the driver saw what was happening ahead of him but had no time to stop. A fourth train, coming up behind the fast train, was travelling at speed but, because the electrical current had automatically shut off after the earlier crashes, it was slowing down and coasting around the bend. The driver managed to apply emergency brakes in time to narrowly avoid a further collision.

  The thirty-five people who died were all in the front two coaches of the fast train. These coaches were ripped open on one side. Closest to the point of impact they completely disintegrated. The first senior fire officer on the scene – and the collision had inconveniently occurred in a deep and wooded cutting – looked down and immediately ordered eight more fire engines, eight ambulances and a surgical unit, as well as cutting and lifting equipment to extract trapped passengers.

  A disaster plan is all about the victims, but at an initial glance so much of it seems not to be relevant. Traffic and parking may appear to be minor issues, but if these are not immediately controlled rescue vehicles cannot get to or away from the site quickly. The site must be made accessible (in this case, trees and railings were removed), hospitals must be put on alert and the removal of the severely injured coordinated. Medical teams must arrive. Casualty centres for the walking wounded must be set up and managed, a casualty collection point must be provided as well as a temporary mortuary. Every passenger must be accounted for and this information must somehow be made available to anxious relatives (there were no mobile phones in 1988). There must be stretcher bearers and people delivering medical supplies to doctors, and the entire operation must be co-ordinated by a forward controller who has established radio links so that rescue workers can communicate.

  This is a huge task, and it must be carried out at speed. Speed is only possible after planning and practice. As it happened, 12 December 1988 was the first day the new A&E department at the nearest hospital, St George’s in Tooting, was open. The staff who took the initial ‘red alert – disaster call’ had to be persuaded that the rail disaster was real and not a hoax from colleagues at another hospital.

  The total numbers involved in the Clapham rescue were vast: they came from all over London for the London Fire Brigade, the London Ambulance Service, the Metropolitan Police, the British Transport Police, the British Association for Immediate Care (specially trained doctors, mostly GPs, who are on call to leave their day jobs and rush to disasters), British Rail, the London Borough of Wandsworth (fortunately one of the very few local authorities in the country at that time to have its own emergency plan, which was put into immediate action, providing 134 invaluable staff) and, of course, the Salvation Army, who arrived with a mobile canteen to offer physical relief in the form of drinks and food but also psychological relief to rescuers, staff and relatives.

  The first role of the emergency services is certainly to take care of the living, to extract the trapped and to get casualties to safety as quickly as possible. Only after that come the dead.

  The London Fire Brigade, as first on the scene, having been assured the rail power was off, allowed the traumatized walking wounded to leave the train. They were escorted to casualty centres in the adjacent Emanuel School and the Roundhouse pub and there was a collection point for them in Spencer Park.

  Sixty-s
even ambulances were used to ferry the wounded to hospital. The thirty-three who died at the scene were removed along with any body parts. Initially they were put in a temporary mortuary but their stay was brief, as it should be. The coroner organized a fleet of undertakers to pick up the bodies and body parts from here. They were to be taken to the mortuary for full identification and autopsy. In any mass disaster, one of the key questions, as well as dealing with the wounded, is: where do we put the dead?

  By 1.04 p.m. the last live casualty had been stretchered away from the train. By 3.40 the last body was removed from the wreckage. Unfortunately, no pathologist was sent to the scene so there were no detailed pictures taken of the bodies in situ, which might have helped with identification. And it would certainly have assisted greatly in our analysis of the injuries.

  The mortuary chosen to receive the dead was that recently rebuilt and state-of-the-art facility, Westminster.

  Four of us from Guy’s went, including Iain, who was of course in charge, as well as Pam, to keep us (and the Metropolitan Police) in order. Initially we had no idea how many dead to expect, so we created a flow diagram showing how the bodies would progress through the mortuary. This started with the numbering, labelling and photographing of each body or body part on arrival. Each then went straight into a specific fridge labelled with that unique number.

  The four of us, helped by mortuary staff, were working simultaneously, and as soon as one of us was free, the next body, escorted by a police officer, was taken from its fridge and again photographed. This is a crucial part of the ‘chain of evidence’. We had to be able to prove that the body that came into the mortuary as Body 23 was the body we examined as 23 and that Body 23 was, eventually, when positively identified to the satisfaction of the coroner, the one released to the undertakers for burial.

  Initially we did not carry out full post-mortems but focused on information that might identify the bodies. We described general appearance, any jewellery, clothing or tattoos plus major obvious injuries like missing limbs. The police filled in ID forms. The bodies were fingerprinted and cleaned. They would be removed from their fridges a second time for full post-mortem and for the retention of blood samples.