A: I said I didn’t like it very much because she’s only thirteen. I looked up to face him and ask him why he was asking but I didn’t have time, he was drawing something from his clothing. I thought he was going to hit me. So I panic and I push him then I turn and run. I turned round once and saw him stumbling backwards. I carried on running. I didn’t know he was hurt or I would have gone back and helped him.
Further questioning revealed how upset the young man was at the possibility that his friend was having sex with the thirteen-year-old Mary. After one of many breaks, during which he conferred with his solicitor, the accused said, ‘If it’s the knife I think it is then I saw that in his flat. It had fallen out of the plate rack with a load of others and I picked it up and put it on the worktop.’
The solicitor later asked once again for a few words alone with his client who, on re-emerging, admitted to causing the death – but insisted it had been an accident: ‘He was my best friend and no way did I mean to hurt him, that’s it.’
I was sure that the defendant’s version of events was false. My own instinct told me that it would not be possible to turn around a knife held by someone else and penetrate the chest with it in this way – the wound was straight and horizontal. And certainly not to penetrate so high into the chest from a low, crouching position.
However, on the basis that the defendant was innocent until proven guilty, I tried re-enacting the scene at home. I crouched on the floor pretending to tie my shoelace (with my right hand), look up, and deflect an assailant’s approaching ruler (standing in for the knife – which I held in my left hand) into the assailant (a pillow on a chair) and cause a horizontal, straight wound. I had just got the ruler into the pillow when I realized that someone else was in the room.
I turned around. Chris had come into the study. Both children had been taught to knock so that they wouldn’t stumble upon any upsetting material. I must have been so engrossed that I didn’t hear him. Now he was staring at me rather awkwardly.
‘Yes?’ I said, trying to look as if this was all perfectly normal.
He was clutching a schoolbook.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked in a voice which required some explanation. He was nine now and a relaxed, even-tempered child who seemed in no way related to the screaming baby emperor who had tortured us for nights on end.
I stood up. Honesty was probably the best policy.
‘Well, I’m trying to see if a man tying his shoelace … that’s me, here, with my right hand … if another man came at him with a knife … that’s me, too, the other man is my left hand and the ruler is the knife … if the first man could somehow turn the knife around and stick it into the second man, all while he’s crouching down.’
Chris considered this wisely.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I think he could.’
‘Thinking isn’t good enough. The first man could be sent to prison for a long time – so I have to be sure.’
‘Did the first man kill the second man?’
‘Well … yes.’
‘Have you seen him?’
‘The first man? No.’
‘The second man.’
‘Yes, Chris, I’ve seen him in the mortuary. I’ve examined his wounds and I know that the knife went into him at a certain angle, in a certain way. I’m trying to see if the first man could have done that when he was attacked while he was tying his shoelace.’
Chris nodded. I was not sure he really comprehended what I was saying. He just accepted that his father did some strange things.
‘I came to show you my biology book. I got the highest mark of anyone.’
Of course! My son was here for a reason. And I had been so engrossed I had told him about my work without even asking what that reason was. We looked at the biology book together and I exclaimed with great parental pride over his run of As and eventually Chris left looking cheerful and I continued my experiment. Despite trying very hard, I simply could not contrive a way for a crouching individual to deflect or push a knife held by an assailant into the assailant’s chest – not if the result was to be such a high, horizontal track into the pillow. I mean, body. As I had strongly suspected, this case was a straightforward (in both senses), standing stabbing injury.
There was a small knock at the study door.
‘Daddy, we both think he did it,’ said Anna, bursting in.
‘Who did what?’
‘Well, Chris was the first man, tying his shoelace and I was the second man, coming at him with a knife and –’
‘You didn’t use a real knife, did you?’
‘No, I used my pen. Anyway, Chris easily turned it round and stabbed me, so we think the first man is a murderer.’
‘Right. Well. Thanks.’
‘Shall we show you? Or if you like, you could be the first man and I’ll be the second man, I’m better at this than Chris.’
I felt that Anna, who must only have been seven years old, should not really be helping me reconstruct a homicide. If she ever caught me with a knife she tended to regard it as a bit of a joke. She responded to the idea of dead bodies as something unsavoury but the full meaning of death was still lost on her and she had certainly not seen a body, not even a photograph. Not only were the children taught to knock on the study door, I always carefully hid any police pictures on a high shelf.
‘Just what game are you playing with the children!’ demanded Jen, appearing from the living room, her face thunderous.
‘No games, Chris came in, so I told him what I was doing.’
Jen rolled her eyes.
‘I leave my work at the hospital,’ she said pointedly.
Chris and Anna eventually would understand fully what my job entailed but, for now anyway, they were told simply to inform anyone who asked that I was a doctor. They had picked up the fact that I was a specific sort of doctor, that I helped the police and that my name appeared in the newspapers, but they had no real idea what a forensic pathologist was. Although around about this time they began to realize that my speciality did not make people ‘better’. In our household it was fairly normal for Dad to stick rulers and knives into pillows and pieces of meat and, so far, Chris and Anna seemed not to have realized that other people’s fathers didn’t do that.
Today, the defence team in that stabbing case by the canal might successfully offer a manslaughter plea of loss of self-control. A post-Savile jury might decide that seeing ‘a red mist’ because your friend was sexually imperilling your thirteen-year-old sister is enough of a trigger. There were plenty of statements from family members that confirmed how upset and furious the brother had been at her possible abuse by his friend.
For the modern defence of loss of self-control, it must be proved that a person of the defendant’s age and sex with a reasonable degree of tolerance and self-restraint, would lose control in a similar way. I think the young man would have had a good chance of showing that. But for loss of control the defence must also prove that there was no premeditation. The pitfall for this defendant would be that the murder might have appeared premeditated if he had actually carried the knife to the canal that night. He had explained why his fingerprints were on the handle but he would have had to persuade the jury that the victim had been the one to take the knife from the kitchen before they went out for their walk.
This homicide happened long before the reforms of 2010, in less enlightened times. Loss of control was not a defence. There was then no hope for the young man who was so anxious to protect his sister. The charge was murder and he was found guilty: an open-and-shut case in the 1980s.
A routine murder, but one in which the precise angle and track of the stab wound provided important evidence. And it very often does. Not just the track, but, once the knife is in the body, its subsequent movement inside an organ can sometimes chart the respective movements of victim and perpetrator. As my casebook thickened, I became increasingly convinced that knife wounds could tell all, if only we could hear what they were saying. I want
ed to compile a really comprehensive analysis of tracks, angles, hilt bruises … I was always rooting around in the kitchen at home for another knife to stick into another piece of meat. In fact, I bought so many knives of different shapes and hilts that, going home at night, had the police been in the habit of stopping and searching middle-class, white men, I could frequently have been arrested for carrying offensive weapons.
To the continued disgust of my family, I now used pork bellies or cow kidneys for my stabbing exercises. It was extremely hard to reproduce quite the feel of pushing through human skin, muscle and then an internal organ – perhaps because supermarket meat is seldom fresh. In reality, people who have killed with a knife are usually astonished by how easy it is. Once the blade has cut through the clothing and the skin, the inner body tissues put up little resistance. Only moderate force is required to penetrate major organs like the heart or the liver, and so even perpetrators with little strength can kill by stabbing. A lot of murderers say, ‘I didn’t mean to kill him!’ What they are actually saying is, ‘I didn’t think that what I was doing would kill him.’ And this is more likely to be true when knife murderers say it than others. Knives give the murderer an immense advantage over their victim even if the victim is much stronger. No wonder women so often turn to them.
And did I prove, after all these experiments, that it is possible to read the history of a murder by reading the stab wounds like a book as I had hoped? Well, no. But I did find knives could tell a lot about a homicide. I developed the ability to sketch a murder weapon with some accuracy, based on the track it had left in the body. And when the police offer me a series of possible murder weapons, I can exclude most and, if the right one is presented to me, generally pick it out.
22
Just eight months after the Clapham rail disaster I took a call early one Sunday morning to warn me that there had been another disaster. It was August and Iain was on holiday and I was the forensic pathologist in charge of London and the south-east of England. At this stage, no one knew how many bodies there would be but one thing was certain: there would be bodies.
This time catastrophe had occurred not on the railway but on the River Thames. I waited for more news before setting off and my first stop was the Police Pier in Wapping. A leisure boat had sunk somewhere near Southwark and bodies recovered from the vessel were here. That was all I knew.
An old police sergeant greeted me and to my astonishment he was close to tears.
‘Almost got my thirty years in, Doc. And now there’s twenty-five dead from the river, twenty-four on the boat, another one picked up this morning eight bridges upstream at Vauxhall. Never thought I’d see anything like this. They’re all kids. Kids in their twenties.’
So the boat that went down must have been one of those party vessels, the sort people hire to cruise up and down the Thames. I had seen them and heard them many times. Young people on the deck, clothes fluttering under the lights like giant moths. Laughter and music discernible from either river bank. Through the windows, the shadows, colours and movement of a dance floor.
The sergeant added, ‘Doc, the police surgeon’s already been in and certified them all dead.’ And now he really began to cry, walking away, shaking his head. I heard him blow his nose before opening the door and going back to the front desk to fend off the press.
Wapping Police Pier is a Victorian police station standing right beside the river. At the back, an area had been designated the temporary mortuary. It was just a room, really. Its concrete floor was nearly covered by body bags. All of them lay open and in each one lay the body of a young adult. All dressed for a party, many in bright colours. I looked across this devastating scene and I noticed something strange. Their clothing had been disturbed. Dresses were displaced, trousers opened …
I immediately went back out to the sergeant. He grimaced.
‘Police surgeon opened all the clothes. Think he might have been checking what sex they were.’
I wasn’t pleased but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. Probably they had been overwhelmed by events and had needed to feel that he was doing something, anything, useful: check pulses, listen for heartbeats. I had seen this sort of reaction before – even highly trained professionals want to ‘do something’, when they know full well that the correct thing to do is absolutely nothing.
I then went to Westminster. I knew the deceased wouldn’t stay long in the temporary police mortuary. I wanted to ensure that Westminster mortuary was prepared for the large number of bodies that was about to hit them.
Oh no. I remembered that the usual manager, Peter Bevan, was on holiday. His deputy was in charge and I had never found this man to be anywhere near as organized or efficient as his boss. Peter’s calm, capable organizational skills were exactly what we needed when managing a mass disaster. However, at least the staff were busy preparing for the huge intake and all the post-mortem tables and necessary equipment were ready. The sight of these preparations gave me, for the first time, a sense of dread that was something close to nausea. It was fleeting. But powerful.
With another pathologist under my supervision, I agreed to return the next day when the bodies had been brought over from Wapping to start the examinations.
Gradually, the facts emerged. On that calm summer night, a huge dredger had collided on the Thames near Southwark Bridge with a small pleasure boat called the Marchioness.
The Bowbelle had dumped its cargo of gravel at Nine Elms and was proceeding back out to sea to dredge for more. The Marchioness had been hired to celebrate a birthday and an international crowd of young people was partying on board.
Initially, the Bowbelle hit the little Marchioness at the back on the starboard side. This caused the pleasure boat to rock and keel over: a witness said the Bowbelle then ‘mounted it, pushing it under water like a toy boat’. In fact, the anchor of the dredger cut right through the pleasure boat’s upper deck before a second impact pushed the back of the Marchioness round to starboard, causing her to roll over.
Here are some survivor statements:
I felt a jolt … then I noticed the stern moving out in a starboard direction … I saw water come through the open window. I felt the boat keel over … I remember turning around to head towards the windows to escape … as water started coming in … I knew the boat was going to go down. Within a matter of seconds, the lights went out. Everything was in darkness … I was then thrown forward by a wall of water. The whole boat filled instantly … When I surfaced I was some distance away from the Marchioness, which was partly submerged …
I … felt the right-hand side of the boat … dip down suddenly … As the boat tipped over, water came flooding in through those open windows on the right-hand side. Everybody who had been on the dance floor lost their footing and with me and chairs and everything moveable went sliding down to the right, down into the water which was filling the dance area incredibly fast. I went under water …
Suddenly the boat tilted onto its side and the toilet began to fill with water. I tried to unlock the door and get out. When I managed to get the door open the boat was completely submerged.
I felt the boat rock, then it all of a sudden sort of swerved round and I lost my balance. I think I fell against a table … I saw this hull coming through the boat, I saw this anchor coming in, glass started breaking, all the windows smashed and showered us with glass, water started pouring in …
A terrifying ordeal for the young people on board. All passengers’ chances of escape were hampered by the great speed of the sudden rotation, loose furniture, darkness, the cold, turbid water and, for some, the lack of accessible emergency exits. The result was that, to get away, physical exertion and strength were required. Which compromised the survival chances of many.
A much later statement on the disaster made by Dr Howard Oakley, an expert on survival and thermal medicine, said, ‘Sudden capsize is known to be a shocking experience, to which individual reactions would have varied from panic to calm determin
ation to escape and survive … physiological responses to that shock are likely to have shortened the time for which victims could hold their breath, which would in turn have reduced the chances of successful escape.’
Within thirty seconds of impact, the Marchioness was lying at the bottom of the Thames. Fourteen vessels helped to rescue the living. But not for several hours, at least, were the dead retrieved. Many of the dead were probably trapped on the boat. Others must have been thrown overboard. The Thames is a treacherous river, deep and dark, with a rich mixture of currents and tides which are known to hide bodies for days and even weeks before giving them up. In fact, it was five hours before the first body from the Marchioness was found in the river. And almost two weeks until the Thames yielded the last one.
A drowned body – or a body which is immersed in water after dying some other way – will first develop opaque, wrinkly skin. Anyone who has spent too long in the bath will have an idea what this looks like. It is often called ‘washerwoman’s hands’: the thick keratin layers on the fingers, the palms and the soles become macerated and the skin appears very white and wrinkled, whatever the ethnicity of the deceased. After a few days, if the body remains in the water, this macerated skin will begin to separate and it will, eventually, peel off.
I should also say, because it is relevant to what happened next, that the time it takes a body to float to the surface depends on the gas in the bloated and decomposing body. Generally, the obese surface fastest.
The Marchioness went down shortly before 2 a.m. on the morning of Sunday 20 August. By the end of that day, although I had, with a colleague from Guy’s, viewed and organized the bodies, we still had no idea how many people on board had died. There were clearly a lot of survivors so we were harbouring hopes that there might be few further bodies.
By law, the coroner is in charge of those bodies and Westminster’s coroner, Paul Knapman, came back to London from his holiday in Devon and met with me and senior police officers to agree how we would process the dead. As coroner, he had to establish positive identification of the bodies, and we discussed how he wanted to do this.
Unnatural Causes Page 20