All That Remains

by Sue Black

  As he continued to maintain that he had no recollection of what had happened, some of what follows is fact and some conjecture. What is certain is that Gemma had received at least one fatal blow to her head from a heavy object which was neither identified nor recovered. It is likely that she died where she fell. When McCluskie, probably high on drugs and enraged, realised that he had killed her, he panicked and, rather than standing up and taking responsibility for his actions, chose to try to hide them and plead ignorance.

  It was a small house and there was nowhere her body could be concealed once the police came looking for her. So he decided that he had to get rid of her. He knew the only way to get her out of the house without being detected would be in parts. Where did he put her while he worked out what to do? We don’t know. No evidence of blood was found in the bath, the likeliest site, and indeed a layer of undisturbed dust was noted here. Perhaps he laid her down on plastic sheeting on the floor, using towels to soak up her blood. Whatever he did, the surface on which he did it was protected.

  At some point, he undressed her down to her underwear. Where on earth do you start to cut someone to pieces and how are you going to do it? And not just anyone, but your own sister? It would be a horrific prospect for anyone in their right mind and must have been driven by intense desperation. Perhaps he looked around the kitchen, saw the block of knives and decided to begin with one of those – certainly one of them was missing.

  He began with the front of her right leg, using a serrated blade to cut across the limb about a third of the way between hip and knee. Needless to say this attempt failed, but he made around fifty-six cuts before conceding defeat. He then found something much heavier, perhaps a meat cleaver, and, having discovered that this was far more effective, stuck with it for the rest of the process. That he used the unsuccessful blade on only one part of her body told us that he was learning how to do this as he went along. In total there were at least ninety-five cuts, thirty-nine caused by the heavier implement on top of the fifty-six made with the fine-bladed knife.

  Her torso was then squeezed into a wheeled suitcase. CCTV showed McCluskie lifting a very heavy bag into the back of a taxi. When the driver was tracked down he confirmed that he had been directed to the nearby canal and identified the accused as his fare. McCluskie probably returned afterwards with the limbs and head and dropped them into the water at around the same point, although there is no CCTV footage to verify this. Presumably he did not need to use taxis for those journeys as the body parts he had to carry were less bulky.

  I received a summons to give evidence at the trial. I am not sure what it really added to the case being heard but my suspicion is that the Crown considered a full scientific account of the dismemberment and the number of cuts made to remove each of the body parts to be of value in showing how prolonged and callous the disposal had been. You choose your words very carefully in these circumstances, being only too aware that relatives are in the room. The last thing you want to do is to add to the monstrous pain and grief they have already experienced. We try not to be emotive in our language but there are few soft words you can use to describe such a heinous offence as criminal dismemberment.

  I had to testify to precisely what was done to Gemma’s body, confirming the order in which her limbs and head were removed and whether she was lying prone or supine for each cut. It was challenging to have to articulate all of this in front of her family and between the sobs and cries of pain it evoked. I was relieved that my evidence was accepted by the defence and that there was therefore no cross-examination, which spared the relatives having to hear even more details of what had happened to her.

  I was in and out of the witness box within an hour, and about to leave court when the family liaison officer (FLO) stopped me and asked if I would be prepared to meet Gemma’s father. He had spoken to, and personally thanked, everyone else who had been involved in his daughter’s case and he wanted to meet me, too.

  In our world, we strive to maintain a clinical detachment while engaged in our work and are largely removed from the immediacy of the grief and distress of family and friends. While I had met victims’ relatives on overseas deployments, I had never before done so in the UK, and certainly none who had just sat through my evidence at a murder and criminal dismemberment trial listing the insults meted out to one of his children by another. I was very nervous and uncomfortable. What on earth do you say? What could you say? I could not, and would not wish to, experience his pain and I had no words that could in any way ease his family’s agony. But he was not looking for anything from me. This was about him completing a task he felt it was his responsibility to fulfil.

  As I waited in the witnesses’ room for the officer to bring Mr McCluskie in, I was both hot and cold at the same time. The door opened quietly and a short, burly figure entered confidently. He was the kind of man you might expect to see propping up the bar of an East End pub; someone who in other circumstances would probably be the life and soul of a party. He shook my hand and sat down without a word. I could tell he was broken: there was a deadness about him and a well of sorrow behind his eyes. He was performing the last service he could for his lovely daughter: thanking the people who had enabled the truth to be told by playing their part in convicting his own son. With astounding fortitude, he had thanked everyone from the divers who took her body parts out of the canal to the SOCOs and the investigating officers, and now he was thanking the forensic anthropologist. In the face of the astonishing dignity, respect and sense of duty he displayed, my words were lame and redundant.

  For as long as I live, the depth of that man’s love for his daughter – and indeed for his son – will remain with me as a beacon of how humanity and compassion can triumph even amid the most appalling adversity.

  CHAPTER 10

  Kosovo

  ‘More inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s causes’

  Baron Samuel von Pufendorf

  political philosopher (1632–94)

  Day one in Kosovo.

  OUR WORLD SEEMS to grow smaller with every day that passes. Our constant craving for instant information on events taking place around the world has been fuelled by the rapidly advancing technology that can supply it. The days when our news was delivered by the papers every morning, and in bulletins on the radio or television broadcast at scheduled times, are long gone and what was once global now feels almost local.

  It was cable television that first got us hooked on the twenty-four-hour-news habit. The ease with which a TV crew could transmit pictures around the entire planet from the site of an attack or disaster within minutes of it happening fed our demand for rapid information. In 2014, images of the smoking wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines plane shot down over the Ukraine were beamed around the world before the families of its passengers and crew even knew that a disaster had befallen their loved ones. I remember a time when news like that would be brought by a knock on the door, usually late at night, from a police officer, grave of face and with his hat tucked under his arm.

  In the twenty-first century, even our round-the-clock news channels are no longer sufficient for us. The endlessly repeated cycles provide little new material with each telling, though we will try to squeeze every drop of information from what is on offer. Today, social media and mobile phones keep us up to date on the move, so we don’t need to be in our sitting rooms monitoring the box in the corner to keep abreast of developments.

  Of course, change is constant, and for the most part positive, and new technology has revolutionised our lives for the better, but occasionally I can’t help thinking wistfully of a formidable Highland matriarch who, in days gone by, was horrified to learn that improvements to the mail system would mean she would have her post delivered every weekday. ‘Is it not bad enough that I have to suffer bad news once a week?’ she lamented. ‘Now you want me to have it every day.’

  Sometimes we forget that a simpler life has its benefits. So many of the news stories we
follow are in truth of limited interest, and have no direct impact on our daily lives, yet we still want to know every last detail. We absorb most of it passively, even dispassionately, and I do fear that information fatigue is in danger of leaving us with the sense that the world holds little that can surprise us.

  Death invariably has a starring role in the headline news, from her large-scale, though often impersonal, depredations in wars, famines and natural or humanitarian disasters to her seemingly random cull of individual loved and respected figures. She got a pretty bad press in 2016, when there was a collective feeling that she was taking more than her fair share of people well known to us all, although in fact there was no increase in the death rate that year compared with any other. Once such an idea takes root in our minds, we are inclined to view subsequent similar events as supporting such a misconceived theory – an example of a well-known forensic problem called confirmation bias, in other words, a tendency to seek out evidence that fits a pre-existing hypothesis.

  In 2017, death seemed to be stalking the UK in the form of random terrorist attacks as the worldwide trend for using unsophisticated and simply planned and executed methods to injure and kill innocent members of the public gained ground. Mowing down pedestrians with a vehicle and then attacking them with common or garden domestic knives, as happened in London at Westminster and London Bridge, was first seen in the UK in the shocking murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013 and is a difficult form of attack for intelligence agencies to predict and therefore to prevent. Terrorism is by its very nature about generating fear. Our knee-jerk responses, such as placing security barriers on London’s bridges, will of course serve some purpose, but those responsible will merely adjust their methods and adopt new ones. All we can do is remain intransigent to its tyranny and strive to keep one step ahead of the barbarism.

  By and large, unless we have been directly affected by the events that make the news, the coverage death receives in our media fails to make a deep and lasting impression on our everyday lives. The war in a far-off land or activities of the despotic military regime that preoccupied our attention last week will inevitably fade from the news banners on our screens as we, the news consumers, move on to the latest celebrity revelation, reality TV scandal or political blunder. Until something, somewhere happens that changes our perspective. Suddenly, a story becomes very real and very personal and, before you know it, has come to dominate the direction of your life.

  For me that moment came when I took a phone call one afternoon in June 1999 from Professor Peter Vanezis, at that time a Home Office pathologist at Glasgow University, where I was a consultant forensic anthropologist. I had known Peter for many years and so hearing from him was not an unusual occurrence. When he asked me what I was doing at the weekend, I told him, foolishly assuming he was going to suggest dinner, that I had nothing planned. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You are coming out to Kosovo.’

  From that moment on, I was glued to the coverage of the crisis in Kosovo and hanging on the reporters’ every word, trying to soak up all the information I could about a part of the world which, I am ashamed to admit, I had to go and look up on a map.

  During the 1990s I had been aware, like everyone else, of the atrocities unfolding in Bosnia and was shocked that, in this day and age, such things could be going on in a country right on Europe’s doorstep. I was also aware that the news reaching us would be sanitised, as in such situations some stories will be deemed too distressing to broadcast. If what we do see and hear is disturbing, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be a whole lot worse happening on the ground. But it was still ‘somewhere else’, somewhere foreign, and someone else was taking care of it.

  By today’s standards, detailed and reliable information was slower to get out and it wasn’t until more horrific images began to emerge that we all started to wake up to the true extent of the horrors being perpetrated on innocent people. Nothing on this scale of deprivation and dispossession had been reported in Europe since the Second World War.

  Forensic anthropologists have little forewarning of when their assistance might be required in an international crisis, if it will be required, and if it is, how long they might be away. In a tip of the hat to the 1970s Martini advertising slogan – ‘Any time, any place, anywhere’ – my team has been dubbed ‘the Martini girls’ (you probably have to be old enough to remember those rather cheesy television ads for that to mean anything).

  As the crisis deepens, we try to construct a reservoir of background information, sourcing reliable journalism and launching extensive internet searches, just in case. Because we know that the only predictable thing about a mass fatality is that it cannot be predicted.

  By 1998 it was becoming clear from intelligence coming out of Kosovo that the humanitarian situation was escalating to intolerable levels. The United Nations (UN) was in discussion with the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, and his government, and working to secure the withdrawal of troops and militia gangs from Kosovo. The OSCE (Organisation for Security and Communication in Europe) was reporting humanitarian crimes on an unprecedented scale and armed attacks were allegedly being made on civilians – the elderly, women and children. While diplomatic and political negotiations can seem dreadfully dull and slow to the outside world, the process is fascinating when you start to see where, when, why and how events are happening and begin to identify your own very small but emerging place in the story.

  Peacekeeping troops were sitting across Kosovo’s borders, aware of the murders, rapes and torture taking place and desperate to receive the signal to enter. But nothing could be done until there was UN agreement that all peaceful attempts had failed irretrievably. The appropriate international protocols had to be observed and, while there were clear reasons for that, they seem to make no sense when you know that every single day of inaction will result in innocent people being butchered or driven from their homes. It should come as no surprise, then, when vigilante groups gain ground and fight back, or guerrilla warfare gathers momentum, as a population struggles simply to stay alive. It was a horrendously complex situation and not one that could be resolved quickly.

  ◊

  The Balkan region is no stranger to conflict. It has been a hotbed of political and religious tension since 1389, when the infamous Battle of Kosovo, the vicious and bloody defeat of the mediaeval Serbian state by the Ottoman Empire, set Muslim against Christian for generations to come. It forged a mutual hatred and sense of injustice so deep that throughout the centuries it would erupt on a regular basis into brutal combat.

  Emboldened by their success, the victorious Ottomans started to assimilate many of the Serbian Christian principalities, including Kosovo, which has remained a disputed territory ever since. From the middle of the twentieth century, an uneasy peace prevailed in the region as a result of the active repression of nationalism under the lengthy iron rule of Josip Tito, president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

  But nationalistic fervour remained undiminished on both sides. That such intensity of emotion could persist so close to the surface in both communities so many centuries later is an indication of the almost genetic imprint of the hostility with which each group viewed the other. The strength of Serbian nationalism and the belief that Kosovo belonged to the Serbs by right is demonstrated by the inscription on the monument commemorating the Battle of Kosovo which, though the words may be attributed to the mediaeval Serbian leader Prince Lazar, were chosen for a memorial erected as late as 1953:

  Whoever is a Serb and of Serb birth

  And of Serb blood and heritage

  And comes not to the Battle of Kosovo,

  May he never have the progeny his heart desires!

  Neither son nor daughter

  May nothing grow that his hand sows!

  Neither dark wine nor white wheat

  And let him be cursed from all ages to all ages!

  The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 gave Kosovo extensive autonomy and allowed it to be ru
n largely by the majority Muslim Albanian population, the descendants of the Ottomans. The predominantly Christian Serbians bitterly resented this control over what they saw as their spiritual heartland and viewed the Muslim presence and power as an intolerable insult.

  After Tito’s death in 1980, others with different agendas were soon disrupting and challenging the fragile peace. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic pushed through legislation that began an erosion of Kosovo’s autonomy. The violent suppression of a demonstration in March of that year was the first obvious portent of what was to come and on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milosevic made reference to the possibility of ‘armed battles’ in Serbia’s future national development. It would not be long before the Republic of Yugoslavia began to collapse.

  Did each side have murder in mind from the outset, or did the barbarism simply escalate as the struggle intensified? Whatever the case, the Serb mission appeared to be to rid their spiritual homeland of the ‘vermin’ (I quote a word used to me) that had gained a foothold there. In short, genocide. No mercy was shown as the smouldering bitterness, nursed for over 600 years, was fanned into a slow burn that would eventually become a raging inferno.

  The first significant trouble in Kosovo began in 1995 and the region erupted into armed conflict in 1998, partly as a consequence of the 1997 uprisings in Albania, which had put over 700,000 combat weapons into wider circulation. Many of them found their way into the hands of young Albanian men, seeding the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which launched a major guerrilla offensive targeting Yugoslav authorities in the territory. Reinforcements from the regular forces were sent in to maintain order and Serb paramilitaries began a campaign of retribution against KLA and political sympathisers, resulting in the deaths of up to 2,000 Kosovars.