On other occasions, I seriously wonder how officers keep a straight face. It’s one thing to write some thing in a statement; it’s an entirely different thing to have to get up in court and say it out loud. But it has to be done because detail is everything. For example:
ZEBEDEE was dressed as a woman in a sweater, short skirt, fishnet tights and high heeled boots. His face was made up; he had lipstick on and a blonde wig. He said he would like to be addressed as ZEBEDEE. His mood was low but he had good eye contact.
Here’s an example of when the police must seriously have had a good chuckle back at the station: police attended the relevant location after receiving a report from a member of the public that a drunk woman was trying to drive a car away from a supermarket car park on a Monday afternoon. When the police approached the car, they found the defendant sitting in the driver’s seat, naked from the waist down and wearing a white top pulled up exposing her breasts. When she spoke, she was very difficult to under stand and was apparently VERY drunk (their emphasis). When asked what she had been doing, she slurred, ‘Shagging’, although she was on her own in the car.
Police officers, particularly those who have been in the job for a while, often have that look about them that says, I’ve seen it all and nothing surprises me any more. Imagine the thought processes of an officer who attended the scene of a crashed vehicle that was badly damaged. As he approached, the officer noticed two men sitting inside. When asked what they were doing, they replied that they were helping the owner by taking out the radio and speakers before they were stolen. When asked who owned the car, they were unsure.
As I said before, the police have a tough job, and some times it’s physically demanding, as in the instance when two officers in a patrol car encountered a man slumped over the steering wheel of his car. The police knocked on the side window to try to raise a response. Calls to dispatch helped establish the man’s name and that the car was parked on his own front lawn. The driver was unable to move, walk, talk or even crawl to the police car and, although it may seem unnecessary, the officers decided to call for backup. A riot van with two more officers duly arrived. It transpired that this wasn’t because of the risk of the driver becoming violent but because he was 21 stone (133 kg). He couldn’t be manoeuvred into the back of a patrol car so he had to be placed on a riot shield and dragged across the lawn.
The stories the police have are many and varied and not all of them can be told. Their jobs aren’t getting any easier but I hope for their sakes they can remember the lighter side of things when they get the chance.
Chapter 16
The case of the heebie-jeebies
A friend of mine does far more crime scene attendance than me. One of the worst cases for him was turning up at a murder scene to find that the victim looked just like his wife. It was years ago but he still remembers it, clear as day.
We all have them: the cases that cause a sort of mental trauma and therefore refuse to leave your head and also refuse to be shoved into the dark box in the recess of your mind where you store all the really worrying, scary stuff. When I say ‘we’, I mean anyone who has to deal with any kind of trauma. People have different standards of what qualifies as an event or occasion for the Dark Box of the Mind but people involved with suffering and trauma must have a larger box than a lot of other people. I guess a psychologist would be better placed to talk about the whys and wherefores, but that’s not me; I just know that people in front-line positions, like medics, police, CSIs and forensic scientists, often need access to a psychologist or some times just need to know that there’s one there to help, if need be. There are of course plenty of other people who need psychological assistance to deal with an enormous range of issues but before anyone says I’ve missed these people out, I’m just talking about the arena of forensic science.
As an independent forensic scientist in England, the issue of receiving help to deal with particularly traumatic cases wasn’t one that needed to occur very often. However, when your day-to-day job involves tripping around the countryside collecting fly pupae off rotting corpses, some times the circumstances get to you and every now and then you need help dealing with the disgustingness of it.
For whatever reason, the heebee-jeebies cases literally haunt you, even during the day. It’s similar to when you’re reading a really, really good book and you become so immersed in it you take on the emotions of the character and the story. I used to do that a lot when I was reading Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes. Rachel was angry a lot in parts of that book and I used to carry it into my real life, where the real people, like my partner, lived. Poor bloke. He had long hair at the time, like the main man in Rachel’s Holiday. He got a lot of stick in the days when I was reading about the main character, Rachel, having to hear from her beau what she’d been like as a drug and alcohol addict. Not that I have ever been either, but still, I carried that rage with me throughout the day and the sense of loss when I finished reading that book was palpable — it left me with a big empty hole of disappointment in the pit of my stomach.
If that’s what it’s like after reading a work of fiction, imagine how it can feel if you allow emotion to enter into your casework. I don’t consciously allow it. I don’t personalise cases and I don’t think about them in anything but clinical, scientific terms. My job is to solve a problem using science and that’s exactly what I set out to do. I have it easier than other people involved in this game because of my distance from the actual cold, hard events. Nevertheless, every now and then a case gets through the armour and lodges itself in the soft underbelly of your consciousness.
Someone I know was attending only her second postmortem, a case where the body of a 17-year-old girl had been exhumed from beneath the floor of a house. Even though the body had been underground for years, because it had been wrapped in rubbish bags it was still partially preserved. She said she has never lost the memory of the skin on the nape of the victim’s neck, because it looked so complete and lifelike. She immediately thought of her own child, who was also 17 at that time.
In July 2005 I attended a training course in London. Just days earlier, some of the people on the course had been the first fire officers on the scenes of the London Tube bombings and the Tavistock Road bus bomb. Their faces said it all. Then you add into the equation the information that people who were running the course had their offices in Tavistock Square and their offices were currently crime scenes. They’d had crime scene examiners taking biological swabs from their desks. The results would not only help determine the mechanics of the explosion but potentially identify some of the victims. Think about what it would be like to have that to remember every time you sat at your desk in future. This was also a problem in 2001, after the World Trade Centre destruction. Some times, victims can only be identified by their vaporised remains; tops of adjacent buildings had to be checked for body parts and it’s someone’s job to go and do that collecting.
With some cases, it’s easy to predict when they’re likely to cause problems. For me, it’s usually the ones involving young children. Like the children who die of methadone overdoses because their parents were too wasted to keep it out of the child’s way, or the children who suffer abuse at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them. I know that someone has to do these cases because otherwise the justice system isn’t working properly, but if I have a choice, I occasionally say no, grateful of having the luxury of being able to choose my cases. Having said that, recently I worked on a case involving the death of a toddler in unusual circumstances (was he pushed or did he fall?) and it hasn’t caused me any problems.
There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how my mind selects cases to use for mental torture; it’s just a lottery. For example, I remember that when two-year-old Aisling Symes disappeared from an Auckland suburb in October 2009, I could barely watch the news — the pain of the family was palpable and I was feeling it with them. Perhaps it was because the media portrayal was designed to be emotive,
or perhaps I was simply caught off-guard.
When it was announced after seven days that Aisling had been found dead in a storm drain, the police family liaison officer had to break it to the waiting media. Here was a man, a police officer, whose job it was to tell the parents their child was dead, then go and tell the press, all the time not being allowed to show emotion, just be strong, impartial, being an information transfer point, a representative of the police force. Under standably, and in my mind, entirely to his credit, he struggled to hold it together in that press announcement. He is trained to do an incredibly difficult job and carry that burden with the family — and then go and do it again next week for someone else. No matter what we think we under stand about some people’s jobs, it some times pales into insignificance with what they actually have to do.
The thing with the cases that stick with you and have an emotional impact is that there is never any clue when they’re coming. You just pick up a case file one day and it leaps out at you. And no matter what you do, it’s like a leech sticking to part of your memory bank. Even the cases you know you don’t want to do. I remember a case in England where a baby had been kicked to death and our company was instructed to do a review for the defence. Having just had a baby, I could no more do that case than fly a plane, so I passed it off to a colleague with some feeble excuse about having so many court appointments coming up I didn’t have time. I don’t regret passing on that case, but I haven’t forgotten it either, and all I read were the first two paragraphs of the solicitor’s letter of enquiry.
There are several other cases that will never leave me for one reason or another. The one that has stuck because of the ‘it-took-me-by-surprise’ element is from 2008 and involved a triple murder that had occurred the previous July in Manchester. A 36-year-old mother and her two children, an 18-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son, were bludgeoned to death with an engineer’s hammer. The two females had been sexually assaulted. No one really knows who died first but the son’s body was found covered with a duvet on the floor next to his mother’s bed — this is the image I just can’t escape, that sits as a static frame in my mind’s eye.
It was an enormously involved case, which included two days examining items at the Crown’s forensic science laboratory. It didn’t help matters that it was the furthest lab from where I worked. It was a two-person job so my boss came with me. It was dark and cold, being February in northern England. We were looking at the footwear mark aspect of the case because a lot of the upstairs floors in the house of the deceased had not been carpeted, which meant good surfaces for recording footwear marks. In all, we examined several marks, a blood-stained carpet and some shoes. I didn’t see a single crime scene photo depicting any of the deceased in situ and I didn’t see any post mortem photos, but for some reason, the image of that child next to his mother’s bed is strong as strong can be.
Another case I will never forget was a murder that took place in London. For months, it held nothing more than a scientific interest; I was looking at the footwear aspect of the case and whether the defendant had been where he said he’d been in the house. The reason I now remember that case is because a colleague worked on the blood pattern aspect. He mentioned one of the post mortem photographs that had disturbed him. Up until that point, neither the case nor the photographs, including the one in question, had bothered me and none of them had made it past my sophisticated mental filtration system. The reason the case got through and lodged in my mind is because the filtration system wasn’t activated at the time the mental breakthrough was made; I was on the phone with this colleague who had reviewed the blood pattern aspect of the case but we were talking about something entirely different. The case had obviously got into his brain and some thing in our conversation made him mention that one post mortem photo graph. Since then, I can’t think of a blood pattern case without an image of the victim’s front hallway and that one post mortem photo popping into my head. Thanks for that, colleague mate!
Occasionally, it’s not the actual case that gives you the heebie-jeebies, it’s the people involved. I attended court once for a drink-drive case. The issue was about whether or not the police officer should have requested a second breath-screening sample from the defendant: the first time she tried, the screening device she was using was dodgy and came up with a pass, but because the driver stank so badly of alcohol she asked a colleague to lend her the breath-screening unit from his patrol car, which he did. The defendant provided a further breath sample, which registered a fail. This gave the police officer the authority to require the defendant to accompany her to the nearest police station where he would be required to provide an evidential breath test, blood test or both. The breath samples he provided at the police station were both way over the legal limit and, from an analytical point of view, there was nothing wrong with them. As far as I could see, the defendant had been caught drink driving, end of story.
The solicitor, on the other hand, was running a technical argument about the legality of the basis on which his client had been arrested. If he could convince the court that the police officer had unlawfully acquired the second sample of breath to the screening device then the damning evidential breath tests undertaken at the police station would not be admissible as evidence and his client wouldn’t be guilty of anything.
All he wanted me to do was say that the first breath-screening device was operating perfectly well at the time his client provided the breath sample, which meant he could argue his case with a good chance of winning. The thing was, at the time he was asking me this question I was in an interview room at the court, which had no windows and the window in the door was covered over. No one knew I was in there; no one had seen me go in because it was a very quiet court and everyone was having a tea break. The client, his dad and the solicitor stood between me and freedom beyond the door. It made me feel very uncomfortable, particularly as they weren’t going to like anything I had to say because I thought the first breath-testing device had been malfunctioning (based on paper work I had received about it) and that there was nothing wrong with the defendant being asked to provide a second sample for a screening test. So what did I do? I made vague comments to the solicitor that sounded reasonably helpful and then suggested we get a cup of tea, seeing as everyone else was on tea break. Once we’d made it out of the door, I firmed up my vague view that there wasn’t a leg to stand on from the defence point of view, and scarpered across the foyer where I could see the security guards. Needless to say I didn’t give evidence in that case. Never again have I gone into an interview room without at least some fuss or a hot cup of tea as a defence or distraction.
Until I give up this work, I will have to deal with the difficult aspects of cases such as those briefed above or the others that aren’t for general consumption. It’s part of the job, I accept that and I know how to deal with it; the enjoyment and the sense of achievement I get far outweigh the negatives. I just hope that my old age isn’t dogged by remnant images.
Chapter 17
David Bain
… the evidence is being re-presented in court, and tiny portions of it drip-fed to us day-by-day … This does give the impression, though, that there are millions of viewers and readers who are now the jury and not the 12 citizens chosen for the task. Of course we would have to hear, see and read all the evidence presented before making judgment. In theory the facts presented to us daily are objective. Yet they are chosen to frame a story about the case.
Mark Houlahan talking about the David Bain retrial, Waikato Times, 21 March 2009
Mr Bain has now been acquitted and Mr Karam vindicated. The latter has won almost as many detractors as admirers for his dogged pursuit of the case, but there would be few who would not welcome his aid if they found themselves convicted of a crime they did not commit.
Dominion Post, 9 June 2009
The clock on the wall says 4.43 p.m. and it’s all over. Or maybe it’s just heading in a new direction.
The Bain ca
se is kind of a Kiwi institution. It’s never really gone away since 20 June 1994, when five members of the Bain family were found dead and one family member was stretchered from the family home. David Bain was tried and convicted in May 1995, then sentenced in June 1995 to life imprisonment with a minimum 16 years non-parole period. He appealed the conviction but before the appeal process was completed, the police had arranged for destruction of many samples that had been collected in relation to their investigation. The house itself was burnt to the ground by the fire service, under direction from the wider Bain family, in unexpectedly dramatic fashion 17 days after the deaths themselves, just over a week after David Bain had been charged. Destruction of the house made national news as footage of enormous flames and billowing smoke were filmed from a helicopter.
The Bain family lived at 65 Every Street, Dunedin, New Zealand, where they had been living since their return from Papua New Guinea a few years earlier. At the time of death, father Robin was aged 58, mother Margaret was aged 50, elder son David was 22, elder daughter Arawa was 19, younger daughter Laniet was 18 and younger son Stephen was 14 years of age. Robin was the principal of Taieri Mouth Primary School, a small two-teacher school approximately 50 kilometres south along the coast from Dunedin. Margaret didn’t work. David was a Music and Classics student at the University of Otago, Arawa was in her second year of teacher training, Laniet had lived in Dunedin and Stephen was attending Bayfield High School. Margaret and Robin were estranged, although this was not widely known at the time. Robin returned to the Every Street house at weekends, although he didn’t sleep in the house itself, instead sleeping in a caravan in the back garden.
Expert Witness Page 20