Forensics

by Val McDermid

  The report damned Eamon Butterly for many things, including not complying with electrical safety standards and using locks rather than doormen to guard doors. The cost of employing extra doormen would have been £50 – just over £1 for every life lost. On the question of the armoured toilet windows the report said, ‘While their primary purpose was for ventilation, it might have been possible for a person to get through them in an emergency.’ Despite all of these points, the report legally exonerated Butterly from responsibility for the fire because it had been ‘probably caused by arson’. So in 1983 the state paid Butterly compensation for malicious damages in the region of £500,000. In 1985 the victims’ families received an average of only £12,000 each.

  The families were far less interested in money than in why their relatives had perished. So much potential evidence had been obliterated that it seemed unlikely they would ever get an answer. But that didn’t stop them trying. In 2006 the Stardust Victims’ Committee enlisted the help of a new set of forensic experts in a bid to make the case for a new public inquiry. Those experts pointed out that in the reconstruction in the hangar in Cardington the fire had taken thirteen minutes to burn through all the seats and had never breached the roof, whereas the real thing had shot from the first seat it was seen on – at 1.41 a.m. – up into the night sky within five minutes. Something didn’t add up.

  The experts also drew attention to various witness accounts that supported this view. Eyewitnesses standing outside the building said they had seen flames coming from the roof several minutes before 1.41 a.m. In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, Stardust employees had seen a smoke-like substance and ‘sparks’ coming from the Lamp Room above the Main Bar, which was right by the rows of blazing seats. On Valentine’s Day itself, Linda Bishop and her friend had been sitting below a grille in the ceiling, listening to ‘Born to be Alive’, when they felt a great increase in temperature. Linda looked down at the new digital watch she’d been given for Christmas. It read ‘1.33’. A barman who had fought the fire on Valentine’s Day said he had ‘felt a monstrous heat coming from the ceiling. I was positive that the fire started up in the ceiling.’

  The Stardust Victims’ Committee experts came to the conclusion that the burning ceiling had set fire to the seats, rather than the other way around. They believed that an electrical fault in the Lamp Room – which was located in the roof space and contained spot-lamps and plastic seats – had ignited the ceiling. Right by the Lamp Room was a storeroom, and the experts thought the original inquiry had been misled about some of its contents. Eamon Butterly’s solicitor had provided a list of the ‘approximate contents’ of the storeroom, including ‘bleaches, brio wax, aerosols, petrol-based waxes and polishes’, but did not mention the highly flammable ‘drums of cooking oil’ which were also present.

  Professor of Fire Dynamics Michael Delichatsios reasoned that if enough heat had come from the Lamp Room, the highly flammable contents of the storeroom would have spontaneously combusted. This would account for the extreme speed at which the fire spread, raining burning plastic on to the heads of people on the dance floor, and eventually bringing the whole ceiling down. In 2009 the government commissioned Senior Counsel Paul Coffey to examine the Stardust Victims’ Committee case for a new public inquiry. He found the ‘probably deliberate’ finding of the original inquiry ‘so phrased as may well give the mistaken impression … that it is established by evidence that the fire was started deliberately and not a mere hypothetical explanation for the probable cause of the fire’. He recommended against a new inquiry, but suggested the government change the public record to make it clear that the cause of the fire is unknown. So, twenty-seven years after the most lethal fire in Ireland’s history, the government officially clarified the cause of the fire as unclear. Because the Lamp Room had been ‘totally destroyed’, 800 eyewitnesses and scores of dispassionate forensic scientists could never know if it was the true origin of the blaze. The secrets of the fire were destroyed with it. And that is often one of the frustrations of fire investigation.

  Fire scenes vary in their complexity, but even relatively simple ones challenge the investigator, who must try to reconstruct a destructive chain of events. Let’s take a typical scenario. A passer-by sees a house on fire and calls the fire brigade, who put it out. A structural engineer declares the building safe to enter, and a fire scene investigator like Niamh Nic Daéid arrives to determine the origin of the blaze, why it happened, and how it spread.

  First of all – and unusually for a forensic practitioner – Niamh may sometimes interview eyewitnesses. Where exactly did they see the fire? Was there yellow flame and white smoke, which petrol gives off, or the thick black smoke of burning rubber? Getting the best out of eyewitnesses is a skill. Niamh is often talking to people on the very edge, sometimes after the centre of their world has burnt down. Occasionally the fire investigators may have to ‘stop the interview and let the police know that this person might have turned into a suspect’. It is a well-known axiom that industrial fires increase when business conditions get tough, as some firms consider the advantage of a successful insurance claim over a loss-making factory. Arson aside, when accidents do happen people can be cagey. When Niamh asks employees where they were smoking before a fire in their office started, they usually say in the allocated area. But experience has told her that ‘when it rains people tend to smoke beside the back door, where the rubbish is’.

  The fossilised remains of a diatom – a single-celled organism – viewed under a microscope

  The talking over, Niamh walks around the outside of the building and lets things sink in. Are there patterns of smoke on the walls? Which windows are broken? Anything potentially significant in the garden, like a petrol can or cigarette ends scattered about? Then she walks through the building ‘hands in pockets, not picking things up’, looking for anything unusual. Now she’s ready to get dirty. Outside she deals with the petrol cans and cigarette ends she saw earlier, ‘photographing them in situ with a scale if possible, drawing them on a plan, packaging and labelling them appropriately’. Inside she approaches ‘the business end’ – where the fire most likely started, moving from areas of least to most damage in a systematic way, documenting and photographing the scene as she progresses.

  As a fire spreads from its point of origin it creates more heat, which ignites more material in a self-sustaining chain reaction ruled by the supply of fuel and oxygen. By the time it stops burning it has often brought down ceilings and walls, which shield things as they fall. The scene is all the more resistant to interpretation once firefighters have directed thousands of gallons of water into it. ‘So you’ve got your burnt-out shell of a house with material all over it. In order to get to the bottom of where it started, you need to de-layer it, like an archaeological dig.’ Like a pathologist sawing open a ribcage to perform an autopsy, Niamh has to cause more destruction to reach her answers. She works from the area of least damage inwards because ‘if the big black hole in the corner is where the petrol was poured, and you march over to that and walk around in it, you’ll cross-contaminate your scene’. In extreme cases, the investigator will use tape to construct a grid on top of the scene, numbers each square and takes everything out in buckets to sieve for any evidence that might have survived.

  Because fires tend to rise and spread sideways, they sometimes leave the charred outline of a ‘V’ pointing at their origin. Things are less clear cut when an arsonist has sloshed petrol throughout a house. Thin lines of severe burning on the ground, surrounded by milder burning, can indicate a petrol trail, but flames follow the petrol’s path with such speed that a single point of origin is well nigh impossible to discern. If Niamh finds several widely distant instances of equally bad burning, this may also indicate arson; two unconnected accidental fires beginning at the same time in a house is a vanishingly rare occurrence.

  Once Niamh has found the most likely origin/s of the fire, she looks for potential sources of ignition – matches, li
ghters, candles; and fuel – TVs, newspapers, rubbish bins. Arsonists often leave matches behind, assuming they will burn away to nothing. But the powdered rock in a match head contains the fossilised remains of single-cell algae called ‘diatoms’. A diatom’s shell is made of silica, which is abrasive enough to help you strike the match, and tough enough to endure extremely high temperatures. Each of the 8,000 known species of diatom has a unique shell structure, identifiable through a microscope. Different brands make their matches using powdered rock from different quarries. If forensic scientists can spot the diatoms, they can identify the match brand. Then a search of a suspect’s pockets or CCTV footage from local shops can provide incriminating evidence.

  In her mind Niamh tries to imagine how the scene was arranged when the fire broke out. Then, as far as possible, she reconstructs it for real. Fire investigators don’t always get this right, as Niamh once experienced in the case of a suspicious house fire that had begun on a desk. The police asked the Fire investigators to put the sooty items back on the desk in their original positions. When Niamh was called in to review the scene, she thought it best to do her own reconstruction and compare it to theirs.

  ‘The other investigators had reconstructed it in a way not sustained by the physical evidence, not noticing things like a circle where a cup had protected the desk from smoke. They’d put the items in the wrong place and taken photographs which told an incorrect version of the story. With the items put back in their correct position the set of circumstances that created the fire came to life.’ In 2012 Niamh ran a series of workshops relating to fire scene investigation in Scotland, which concluded that, whilst many investigators are very well equipped for the job, ‘97 per cent of fires in Scotland are investigated by personnel who have less than a week’s training in fire scene investigation’. While many of these fires are relatively straightforward to investigate, the point relating to appropriate training still remains. Trained fire investigators are critical in the correct determination of the origin and cause of a fire, and this is particularly the case ‘in fire fatalities where the investigators have a huge obligation both to the victims and to their relatives to be able to say how individuals died in that fire.’

  Mishandling evidence leads to confusion and to conflicting versions of events being presented in court. It’s crucial to get it right first time, not least because the clues are often so fragile. Can you get fingerprints? Can you get DNA? Can you recover information from a hard drive in a melted computer? ‘The answer to all of those is “yes”, if you have the awareness not to go clumping around damaging material.’

  Treading lightly is not easy for Niamh in her heavy-duty steel-toe-capped boots, hard hat and protective overall. The scenes that she enters can contain live electrical hazards, jagged glass, partially collapsed walls. ‘It’s usually pretty dark, smelly, uncomfortable and physically demanding. The days are long and you come home absolutely filthy and stinking of burnt plastic. There’s nothing glamorous about it. But it is fascinating.’

  At the suspected point of origin, Niamh collects the debris and sifts through it by hand. ‘You would be astonished at what survives. Fires are destructive things, but they generally leave quite a lot of material behind. Things like buttons, lighters, bottles, beer cans, anything metal, survive relatively well. Plastic materials can be melted on one side but fine on another. So you might be able to lift a fingerprint from the underside of a TV remote control.’

  Electricity can be your friend in the fire scene, and can provide corroborating physical evidence relating to the cause, origin or spread of the fire. Fire investigators like Niamh crawl around in the muck armed with pliers, following cables as if they were Ariadne’s thread guiding her through the labyrinth. ‘Many scene investigators don’t see the value of the electrical circuitry. It’s very laborious and time-consuming work, but enormously useful because it gives solid physical evidence, compared to burn patterns which can be interpreted more subjectively.’

  On the wall of her office Niamh has two photographs of a 12-storey building by Piccadilly Tube station in London. The top seven storeys were wrecked by fire to the tune of £12 million pounds’ worth of damage. When the investigators first arrived at that scene they spoke to a cleaner who reported that she’d spotted the fire when it was still small, in the lighting system of one particular floor. That gave the investigators a pointer, but finding the exact origin of such a severe fire was nevertheless still daunting. Niamh spent two days in the building with her colleagues before they finally tracked it down to an electrical fault within a water cooler. ‘It was a really interesting fire because it involved a lot of use of the electrical system to corroborate the area of origin. So it’s dear to my heart, which is why I’ve got a picture of it on the wall.’

  Some fires begin with electrical faults. But others have less innocent origins. Fire scene investigators will often bring in sniffer dogs, whose sense of smell is 200 times more sensitive than a human’s, to find ignitable liquid accelerants like petrol, paraffin and white spirit. There are about twenty hydrocarbon dog teams in the UK, many of whom wear little boots to protect their paws (and to protect the scene from contamination). ‘I’ve seen them in action and, boy, are they good. They just sit down and indicate when they smell something,’ says Niamh.

  Once a dog has identified the presence of a hydrocarbon, the fire investigator starts to bag the evidence. Because plastic bags react with the hydrocarbons in substances like petrol, they put suspicious material into nylon bags and takes it back to the forensic science lab for analysis. If the material is something like a piece of carpet, the investigator tries to take a separate, unburnt piece from the scene, for comparison. In the laboratory forensic chemists will analyse the fire debris submitted. They use various techniques to extract possible chemical accelerants, including ‘headspace extraction’. The most common way of doing this involves placing the material in a closed container and heating it to allow vapours to rise off it. These are then collected using an absorbent material, and extracted using a chemical solvent. From this vapour the forensic chemist tries to identify particular compounds, usually using gas chromatography. This is a fairly complex scientific process which causes the chemical molecules within the vapour mixture to separate according to their size. Niamh explains: ‘If you can imagine a drainpipe that’s ten feet long and you pour treacle down it, so the inside is coated with treacle, and then you get a box of marbles of different sizes and you pour them down it, the little marbles will stick longer than the big marbles. So you get big marbles out first and then little marbles. That’s what GC does, in a nutshell. Juries can visualise that, so they go, “Oh, now I get it.”’

  If the tests show petrol, then, depending on the case, the next step may be to carry out ‘petrol branding’. Most molecules in a can of petrol will evaporate at room temperature (which is why you can smell it), but manufacturers put additives in their petrol which do not evaporate. The additives make car engines run more efficiently, and can survive very high temperatures. They are also quite specific to different brands. Additives are extremely stable and can stay on clothes until they are washed out with detergent.

  Petrol branding was important in obtaining convictions following one of the most distressing house fires in recent memory. At 4 a.m. on 11 May 2012, a fire began burning the inside of the front door of 18 Victory Road, Allenton, Derby. Two minutes later, it had raced up the carpeted staircase to the open doorway of a bedroom full of sleeping children. Their father, Mick Philpott, called 999 – ‘Help me! My babies are trapped inside the house!’ Jade, John, Jack, Jesse and Jayden Philpott, aged between five and ten, died at the scene, and Duwayne Philpott, aged thirteen, died later in hospital, all from smoke inhalation.

  Hours after the flames had been put out, Mat Lee from Derbyshire Fire Service arrived at the scene. A colleague had found an empty petrol can and a glove near Victory Road, so Lee was on especially high alert for arson. He removed the top layer of debris from underneath
the front door, and a hydrocarbon dog started barking. Lee packaged the material and sent it off to forensic chemist Rebecca Jewell for analysis.

  Five days after the blaze, the parents of the dead children, Mick and Mairead Philpott, gave a press conference to thank friends and family for their support. But their behaviour aroused police suspicions. Assistant Chief Constable Steve Cotterill felt that Mick acted like an ‘excited child’ instead of a grief-stricken parent. ‘I would have expected him to be completely and utterly destroyed,’ Cotterill said later. ‘It was a sham, in my view.’

  The police put the Philpotts under 24-hour covert surveillance. A bug in the couple’s hotel room picked up Mick telling his wife: ‘You make sure you stick to your story,’ and later, ‘They’re not gonna find any evidence, are they? You know what I mean?’ On 29 May, the Philpotts were arrested on a murder charge (which was later downgraded to manslaughter).

  Over a period of six months Rebecca Jewell received various samples from the scene and from the defendants’ clothes. In the abandoned plastic tank, she found a mixture of additives including those from Shell petrol. She found traces of petrol in the carpet under the door of the house, but couldn’t tell which brand it was because the additives were contaminated by a chemical from the carpet underlay. She found Shell additive on Mick’s boxer shorts and right trainer. She found Total additive on leggings, a thong and a sandal belonging to Mairead, and on the clothing of Paul Mosley, who had been charged with helping the Philpotts set the fire.

  When the trial began in February 2013 the jury was told that the Philpotts and Mosley had started the fire in a bid to incriminate Lisa Willis, Mick Philpott’s former mistress. Lisa had spent ten years living in the house with Mick, their four children, her fifth child from a previous relationship, and Mairead and her children, but had recently left the house and taken her children with her to live with her sister. A custody hearing had been scheduled for the morning after the fire, and Mick Philpott had hoped to pin the arson on Lisa, to prevent her winning the right to keep their children. Mick and Mairead had put all the children to bed in one bedroom, and rested a ladder up against the bedroom window. The plan was for Mick to climb up and rescue them, making him look like both a victim and a hero. But the fire spread too quickly. There was no time to get in through the window and save the children. All three defendants were found guilty of manslaughter; Mairead and Mosley were sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and Mick to life. The Philpott fire dominated the media for weeks; the Daily Mail headlined an article ‘Mick Philpott: Vile Product of Welfare UK’. While some were wondering if the Philpotts had been using the kids to generate their £13 per week child benefits, Niamh Nic Daéid’s thoughts were somewhere entirely different. ‘Why didn’t the smoke detectors wake the kids?’