Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
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The third objection is based on a particular reading of Dr. Kelly’s state of mind on his last morning. “Indeed the evidence from Dr. Kelly’s e-mails written that morning suggests his mood was, if anything, upbeat.” Dr. Kelly had, Baker points out, booked aircraft flights. “It must be said that none of this fits with the profile of a man about to commit suicide. People about to kill themselves do not generally first book an airline ticket for a flight they have no intention of taking.”10 As we will see, both Mrs. Kelly and a professor of psychiatry felt—one from direct and the other from clinical experience—that Dr. Kelly’s state of mind was anything other than “upbeat.” Again, Baker’s assumptions are of the man-in-the-pub kind. He has absolutely no evidence that those who may soon attempt suicide very rarely or never do anything which might suggest a future.
He applies the same kind of reasoning to his fourth objection: that there was no suicide note. Baker claims, “While suicide notes are not an invariable feature, they are very common and one might have been expected in this case.”11 “Very common but not invariable” is one way of saying that the majority of those who commit suicide leave no note at all, perhaps up to two-thirds. Why then, in Norman Baker’s opinion, might a note not be anticipated in the bulk of cases of suicide but be “expected” in the case of Dr. Kelly? Mr. Baker simply doesn’t say.
So what, in a case of suicide, might reasonably be expected? As Baker concedes, David Kelly’s own mother committed suicide. The day before his twentieth birthday, she died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Though there is a great deal of debate, opinion among health professionals tends to favor the notion that the suicide of a close family member or friend helps create an enhanced risk of suicide in the bereft. A 2002 American study proposed that children of parents who had attempted suicide were up to six times more likely to attempt suicide themselves. Some psychiatrists see this as due to a heritability of depression, others argue that such a death is deeply suggestive, or induces “pathologic bereavement.”12
Baker does not acknowledge such evidence, but instead deals with the problem in this way. “The question inevitably arises whether this tragic incident was on Dr. Kelly’s mind on 17 July 2003.”13 A more interesting question would surely be whether his mother’s suicide was in, rather than on, Dr. Kelly’s mind—in other words, whether he carried it with him at all times. Mr. Baker feels that, in any case, Dr. Kelly had got over it, because in discussions with others concerning the death of his mother, “his tone, by all accounts, was slightly dispassionate and quite balanced.”14 You don’t have to be a mental health professional to find such a mechanical interpretation rather ludicrous. Dr. Kelly did not weep, sob, or wail when speaking of his mother’s suicide, therefore we may believe he was relatively unaffected by it.
A second, fairly common indicator of possible suicidal intent is a mental dress rehearsal. After the Kelly death, an acquaintance, David Broucher, came forward with an account of a conversation he had had with him some time earlier. As Baker reports it, Broucher “asked what would happen if Iraq were invaded. Dr. Kelly replied that he ‘would probably be found dead in the woods’—as indeed he was.” Baker goes on to make the following deduction: “At the inquiry, this was construed as meaning that he already had suicidal thoughts. That, of course, is patently absurd . . . Nobody can seriously suggest that Dr. Kelly was suicidal at the time the meeting took place.”15 In fact, no one can know what Kelly’s state of mind was at the time of that conversation, including Norman Baker. But one detail stands out and is incontrovertible, if we trust Mr. Broucher: it was David Kelly and no one else, as far as we know, who associated his being found dead with “the woods.” This makes Baker’s next observation grimly and unintentionally comic, as well as a model of inversion. “It is uncanny that he [Kelly] should have alighted on that very phrase.”16 But if Kelly committed suicide, then it isn’t uncanny at all.
Baker’s book shows him to be ignorant of, and uninterested in, suicide as a phenomenon. When writing about it, he operates at the level of vulgar prejudice masquerading as common sense. But even here he has a problem, since Mrs. Kelly herself gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry suggesting that her husband was in a severely depressed state in the period before his disappearance. “I just thought he had a broken heart,” she said. “He had shrunk into himself.” If you accept this, then it becomes easy to believe that a man in such a state might kill himself.
Baker is ruthless in his dismissal of Mrs. Kelly’s testimony. “In terms of evidence,” he writes, “this is clearly reinterpreting what was to pass with the benefit of subsequent knowledge of the official explanation of her husband’s death.”17 A truly remarkable sentence, this, suggesting that Mrs. Kelly alone among all the acquaintances, cribbage players, and others cited by Baker was incapable of distinguishing her impressions before the death from her views following the verdict of suicide. Their generalizations were more to be trusted than her close-up observations. Baker continues to drive the knife in. “It is perhaps surprising,” he writes, “given how ‘shrunk into himself’ her husband had seemed to her at lunchtime, that she did not worry earlier. That again suggests that any thoughts that he might harm himself were far from her mind. It is also odd that she appears not to have tried to contact him on his mobile phone . . . Surely that is the first thing a concerned spouse would do in such circumstances.”18
Nor is the rest of the family let off. “It is still somewhat surprising that the police were not called until twenty to midnight. The family must have had no serious concerns for his health to leave it that late.”19 Once again Baker displays unearned omniscience. Is it not possible to imagine that Mrs. Kelly, herself an invalid, and her family might have worried about her husband’s absence from, say, six in the evening, but that they were debating as to whether or not to call the police? Was there perhaps some reluctance to bring in the authorities, and certainly cause massive public interest at a time when Dr. Kelly was desperately trying to avoid further exposure?
Janice Kelly’s inconvenience to the Baker theory leads the MP to add this strange codicil: “With a huge headache, being physically sick and [sic] painful arthritis, it seems to be Janice Kelly, rather than her husband, who was well below par.”20 The inference seems to be that Mrs. Kelly was simply too sick and self-preoccupied to notice properly what kind of state her husband was in. No second-party evidence is cited to back up this suggestion. What is more, Baker ignores second-party evidence that supports Mrs. Kelly’s claim that her husband “had a broken heart.” A friend of Dr. Kelly’s, Professor Alastair Hay, was widely quoted in July 2003, recalling the fears that he had felt on seeing Kelly give evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee: “I was so worried after I saw extracts of his evidence to the committee,” said Hay. “He just looked so beaten by the process.”21
Suicide: The Baker Method
Such views wouldn’t matter much, however, if it could be established that it was “well-nigh impossible” for Dr. Kelly to have killed himself in the manner described at the Hutton Inquiry. And this is exactly what Baker attempts to do. The doctors’ letters had concentrated on two aspects of the pathologist’s findings. These were the implausibility of death from severing the ulnar artery, and the low level of co-proxamol in Dr. Kelly’s body. Baker puts it thus: “It is extremely difficult to kill yourself by cutting your wrists. Of course, people can die from wrist or arm cutting, but it requires some basic medical knowledge to be successful.”22 Furthermore, he says, it is “generally accepted that concentrations of drug in the blood can increase by as much as tenfold after death, leaving open the possibility that Dr. Kelly consumed only a thirtieth of the dose of co-proxamol necessary to kill him.”23
But the forensic pathologists who had actually examined the body thought that it was entirely possible for Dr. Kelly to have died from the severed artery, the co-proxamol, and his existing arterial problems. Other than suggesting that these experts were somehow in on the plot, how might one reasonably explain the difference b
etween their verdict and those of the Guardian doctors? Baker achieves this in the first instance by quoting one of the letter writers, retired trauma surgeon David Halpin, who says to Baker, “surgeons know rather more about arteries than pathologists do.”24 However, on a BBC program screened some nine months before Baker’s book was published, Home Office forensic pathologist and president of the British Association in Forensic Medicine, Dr. Allen Anscombe, anticipated this line of argument. Clinicians concentrated on patients surviving, he told the BBC, while “forensic pathologists are biased in terms of seeing what people actually die from.” He was “quite happy” to accept that often severing a small artery might not be fatal, but knew from his experience that occasionally it certainly would be.25
According to national statistics, two deaths occurred as the result of a severed ulnar artery in 2000, one in 2001, and one in 2004. So Baker’s “well-nigh impossible” is statistically quite possible even if rare. But of course, the original pathologists had also attributed Kelly’s death to two other causes: existing atherosclerosis, only diagnosed postmortem, and the ingestion of co-proxamol tablets.
A combination of paracetamol and an opioid, dextropropoxyphene, co-proxamol—usually used to alleviate back or arthritic pain—began to be withdrawn from use in the United Kingdom just two years after Kelly’s death, because the drug, as even Baker’s book admits (though in a footnote),26 was by 2003 responsible for up to four hundred fatal overdoses every year, many unintentional. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) subsequently claimed that taking as few as ten tablets in a twenty-four-hour period could slow the respiratory system, cause abnormal heart rhythms, and lead to possible cardiac arrest.27 Among forensic toxicologists, there wasn’t much doubt that the number of tablets apparently consumed by Dr. Kelly could, by themselves or in combination, lead to death. The president of the Forensic Science Society, Professor Robert Forrest, told a British news station in March 2004, “Twenty-nine tablets of co-proxamol would kill most people.”28 There is no mention of Forrest or his opinion in Norman Baker’s book, despite the fact that it was entirely researched and written after this interview. Forrest went on to tell the BBC in early 2007:
We normally see higher concentrations than that in a person who has died of an overdose of co-proxamol. But if you’ve got heart disease, and if there is something else going on like blood loss, then all three of those are going to act together . . . I’ve got no doubt that the cause of Dr. Kelly’s death was a combination of blood loss, heart disease, and overdose of co-proxamol. Not necessarily in that order. If I was going to put it in order I’d put the overdose of co-proxamol first. But it’s important that all of them had interacted to lead to the death.29
Had Baker shared the views of Britain’s leading forensic toxicologists with his readers, the impression he was attempting to create would, to say the least, have been dissipated. But he was prepared to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into trying to inject a spurious oddness into the verdict of suicide. “A further objection,” he writes, “is that Dr. Kelly undoubtedly knew more about the human anatomy than most people, and the idea that he would have chosen such an uncertain and painful method to commit suicide is not easy to sustain.”30 He pursues this argument: “At the very least, Dr. Kelly would have known that to overdose on co-proxamol could have left him alive but medically damaged . . . Similarly, he would have known that to cut the ulnar artery could well have left him alive, suffering in extreme pain, and with a hole in his wrist.”31 And it comes again, ratcheting up the incredulity: “Are we really expected to believe that someone of the knowledge and maturity of David Kelly would have decided upon such an inept, uncertain, and painful way to kill himself?”32
Any failed bid can leave the attempted suicide badly wounded: one thinks of people who have managed to shoot their jaws off or put holes in their chests. The point is that they believe they are going to die. Actually, as we have seen, co-proxamol was a good method, and if Kelly took the tablets first, the artery severing might have been an attempt to hurry things along. But one wonders what certain and painless methods Baker thought Kelly should have chosen. One of the most common forms of suicide, hanging, is believed to be one of the most agonizing. Perhaps hemlock was unavailable.
Baker’s demolition of Dr. Kelly’s suicide method is lengthy and detailed, employing cumbersome sarcasm in order to suggest strained credulity. “We are told,” he writes, “that the police found twenty-nine of the tablets had been removed from their trays—doubtless the one that David Kelly thoughtfully left helped the police with their inquiries. Dr. Kelly had apparently also very considerately replaced the empty blister packs inside the pocket of his waxed jacket, found at the scene.”33 As opposed, one imagines, to committing one final caprice and carefully digging a hole and putting the tray in it so as to bamboozle any investigators. Much is made out of an aversion that Dr. Kelly was supposed to have had, according to one source, to swallowing tablets. “If this is right, we are then being asked to believe that Dr. Kelly indulged in a further masochistic act in the attempt to take his life.”34 One hardly needs to point out that suicide is an act of self-destruction. Is it really hard to believe that someone intent on killing themselves and with the means on hand would do so?
Previously, Baker points out, Dr. Kelly’s wife had offered a friend, Mai Pederson, some of her tablets for a headache. “Ms. Pederson accepted, but Dr. Kelly criticized his wife for offering tablets prescribed for her alone. If true, this can only reinforce the doubts that exist that Dr. Kelly would actually have chosen to ingest twenty-nine of these tablets.”35 Actually, of course, it does no such thing. If anything, it reminds us that Kelly knew how dangerous these drugs could be. So did Baker really think that Dr. Kelly—intent on suicide—wouldn’t have taken an overdose of tablets unless they’d been prescribed to him personally?
Almost any argument would do. “Common sense tells us that quite a lot of water would be required to swallow twenty-nine tablets, particularly ones such as these, oval with a long axis of about half an inch. It is frankly unlikely, with only a small water bottle to hand, that any water would have been left undrunk.”36 There seems to be no evidential basis whatsoever, and no authority, for Baker’s claim of what was and wasn’t “frankly unlikely.” However, a reader might like to see if they can wash down twenty-nine jelly beans with rather less than half a liter of water. It’s pretty easy.
“Yet what person, intent on cutting their wrists, or indeed swallowing large numbers of tablets, would do so on their back? The natural position, if such a term can be used, is surely sitting, which in a wood does suggest against a tree.”37 Once again, there is no support for the claim about the “natural position” for a wrist-cutting or tablet-swallowing suicide to adopt. But anyway, there had been no suggestion from the pathologists or the police that Kelly had been lying “on his back” at the point when he took the tablets and cut his wrist. He was found with his head slightly propped up at the base of a tree.
Dark Hints
We have already seen, in the case of Janice Kelly, how Baker’s tactic when dealing with inconvenient evidence is to “vanish” the troublemaker. Like a rather desperate defense counsel whose client has been found standing with a bloodied knife above the body of his victim, a fresh £100,000 life insurance policy in his pocket, Baker sets about the naysayers with impressive vim. First up is Dr. Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist chosen by the Oxfordshire coroner (judge), Nicholas Gardiner, to take on the case. Dr. Hunt was, according to Baker, underqualified. “It is curious therefore that the Oxfordshire coroner should have made this choice,” he writes. “Under the circumstances Mr. Gardiner could have been forgiven for employing the most experienced pathologist he could find from the register, or even employing two such people.”38 There is an insinuation here, but we don’t know of what.
Anyone in the way of Baker’s theory gets this dark-hint treatment. Tom Mangold, one of the most experienced investigative reporters in Brit
ish journalism, knew and liked Dr. Kelly, who had helped him in the past. Mangold is an abrasive and outspoken man with no time for conspiracy theories about Kelly’s death, and therefore became a prime Baker target. “Tom Mangold’s role overall is a singular one,” he writes. “Even before Dr. Kelly’s body was officially found on the Friday morning, he was on the phone to Mrs. Kelly.” There isn’t anything “singular” about this at all, since the fact of Kelly’s disappearance was known hours before his body was found. But Baker continues: “Indeed, Mr. Mangold seemed strangely keen to declare the death a suicide and to discredit any suggestion to the contrary.”39 “Strangely” is surely used to convey the impression that Mangold was complicit in a cover-up, or else means nothing at all.
Baker then sets about abnormalizing the police operation, beginning with the search. “It is difficult to understand the purpose of sending a dog through the house,” he writes.40 Is it? In fact, it is surprisingly common for initial searches to miss bodies that are actually concealed in that most expected of places, the home. To give a recent famous example, in the 2006 case of Neil Entwistle, the Englishman who murdered his wife and child in Boston, two searches of the family home failed to discover the shot bodies under a duvet on one of the beds. Why then should it be so unexpected for the police to double-check the Kelly home using dogs? “It is surprising, given that the helicopter was equipped with heat-seeking equipment . . . that Dr. Kelly’s body could not be found.”41 Try entering “heat-seeking equipment” and “failed to find” in a search engine and you’ll find out just how surprising this is. Because something is better doesn’t mean it is infallible. “Could army personnel not have been used on this search?”42 In other words, was there something untoward about the usual procedure not being ditched, and the army (which bit?) not being called out at midnight on a police search?