Murder Under the Microscope

Serial Killers, Cold Cases and Life as a Forensic Investigator

James Fraser, Jim Fraser

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786495952
• eBook ISBN: 9781786495969

'Jim Fraser has been at the forefront of forensic science in the UK for decades... A superb story of real-life CSI.' Dr Richard Shepherd, bestselling author of Unnatural Causes 'Powerful... Fascinating' Independent Most murders are not difficult to solve. People are usually killed by someone they know, there is usually abundant evidence and the police methods used to investigate this type of crime are highly effective. But what about the more difficult cases, where the investigation involves an unusual death, an unusual killer, or is complex or politically charged? In these cases, bringing the accused before the courts can take many years, even then, the outcome may be contentious or unresolved. In this compelling and chilling memoir, Jim Fraser draws on his personal experience as a forensic scientist and cold case reviewer to give a unique insight into some of the most notable cases that he has investigated during his forty-year career, including the deaths of Rachel Nickell, Damilola Taylor and Gareth Williams, the GCHQ code breaker. Inviting the reader into the forensic scientist's micro-world, Murder Under the Microscope reveals not only how each of these cases unfolded as a human, investigative and scientific puzzle, but also why some were solved and why others remain unsolved or controversial even to this day.

CHAPTER ONE

Robert Black, the Killer of Childhood

[Each attack was] accomplished in the same circumstances, executed in the same way, and showed an identical operating procedure.

Alexandre Lacassagne¹

As a child back in the sixties, I used to walk to primary school on my own. It was safe, and no one worried. Fewer than half of today’s kids walk to school, and almost all of them are accompanied by an adult. The main reason parents give for accompanying children is dangerous traffic. The second most common reason, cited by almost one third of parents, is fear of assault or molestation; ‘stranger danger’. Robert Black, a man now largely forgotten, is possibly more responsible for this change in parental behaviour than any other single person.

In July 1990, Black had attempted to abduct a six-year-old girl in broad daylight in the Borders village of Stow. A local man saw a blue Ford Transit van slowing to a stop on the roadside opposite him, its wheels partly on the pavement. He saw the girl’s legs disappear as she walked past the van; she didn’t reappear. The van then pulled away violently onto the correct side of the road and drove off north, towards Edinburgh. This witness called the police.

Constable John Wilson was one of the officers who responded to the alert and was by the roadside when he saw a blue van travelling south back into the village. He stepped out into the road and flagged it down. The driver of the van was aged about 40, bearded and balding. Wilson opened the side door and found the missing child in two overlapped sleeping bags. Her head had been pushed towards the bottom of the outer bag and the drawstring of the inner bag was tightened around her neck. Her hands were bound and she had sticking plaster over her mouth. As the child gasped for air, he recognised his own daughter.

In August 1990, Black was convicted of the abduction of Mandy Wilson and sentenced to life imprisonment at the High Court in Edinburgh. His arrest and conviction led to a child murder investigation on an unprecedented scale. He was suspected of abducting and murdering 11 children; seven in the UK and four in continental Europe. There were also a number of other abductions and assaults that fitted his modus operandi. A meeting was convened in Edinburgh for those UK police forces that believed he might be a suspect in any of their cases. By the end of the meeting, four cases were identified as being the main priorities of the investigation: the murders of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper, and the attempted kidnap of Teresa Thornhill.

In July 1982, eight years before Black’s arrest, 11-year-old Susan Maxwell went missing on her way home from playing tennis. She lived in Cornhill-on-Tweed, near the border between Scotland and England. Her body was found 12 days later, 250 miles away in Staffordshire. She had been raped and strangled. Her tennis racket and ball, blue plastic thermos flask and one of her shoes were missing.

Five-year-old Caroline Hogg went missing one evening in July 1983 from Portobello, near Edinburgh. Her naked body was found 10 days later in a ditch in Leicestershire, almost 300 miles away. She was so badly decomposed that the cause of death could not be established. Her lilac and white gingham dress, underskirt, pants, socks and trainers were never found.

In March 1986, 10-year-old Sarah Harper disappeared after going to buy a loaf of bread from her corner shop in Leeds. Her body was found a month later in the River Trent near Nottingham. Her pale blue anorak, pink skirt, shoes and socks were missing.

In April 1988, a man tried to kidnap 15-year-old Teresa Thornhill and force her into a blue van. Teresa was older than the murdered girls but was slightly built and looked younger. She managed to fight off her attacker with the help of her boyfriend.

All these cases had striking similarities to the abduction of Mandy Wilson. Black’s snatch of the young girl in broad daylight had been meticulously planned. He carried equipment – sleeping bags, duct tape and other items – for this purpose. The three murdered children had vanished without trace, and two of their bodies had been found in similar locations. Six police forces were now involved in the investigation: Lothian and Borders, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Northumbria.

I had joined Lothian and Borders Police* in Edinburgh in 1989, after 11 years with the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science laboratory in London. At the time, the Met lab was one of the largest in the world, with more than 300 staff. My notebook records my first murder case in 1981, and a total of 62 by the time I left London eight years later. A crude analysis of these cases shows the most common method of killing as stabbing (22), with shooting and strangulation in joint second place (six each). Some of the cases are still unsolved, but there were no child murders recorded, and no serial murder cases.

Lothian and Borders was the second largest force in Scotland but was small by UK standards. I wasn’t anticipating new opportunities in Edinburgh, but I needed a change. Although London was an exciting environment to operate in professionally, the management in the lab I worked in was stifling. The people in Edinburgh would be different and the problems would be different. I was head of biology in one of the smallest forensic science laboratories in the UK, with only 15 staff. The biology section had four full-time scientists, including me.

When I learned of Black’s modus operandi, I thought about my own young children. How could I protect them from a man like that? My impulse was to jump in the car, drive to their school, take them home and lock them in. Only then would they be safe.

—

‘Every contact leaves a trace’ is the snappy slogan of forensic science, the equivalent to ‘Just do it’ or ‘I’m lovin’ it’ – and about as accurate. It is widely misunderstood by police officers, lawyers and jurors to mean that scientific evidence will always be found and that it will be definitive. We now know that if material is transferred, it can also be lost afterwards. Textile fibres transferred from a killer’s clothing to his victim will stay in place if the body is undisturbed. But once the killer has left the crime scene, the fibres transferred to him (or her) will be lost within hours. Many factors determine if particles will be transferred and how quickly they are lost: the degree of contact between surfaces, the microscopic size of the particles, and the type of the surface to which they are transferred. Since all of this is a bit complicated, ‘Every contact leaves a trace’ has become the catchphrase to keep things simple.

I thought about the possibilities for forensic examination in the Black case. The most recent murder, that of Sarah Harper, was in 1986, four years before Black’s arrest. The chance of finding scientific evidence was so small it could be discounted. There was other evidence that had much more potential, such as the missing items of children’s clothing that Black might have kept.

The only comparable case to the Black inquiry was the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, which I spent a short time working on in 1979. Between July 1975 and November 1980, Peter Sutcliffe attacked 20 women and murdered 13 of them. At the time, the Metropolitan Police lab was the only one in the UK using a microspectrophotometer, an instrument that measures the colour of tiny particles as small as 10×10 micrometres.* It was a big breakthrough in fibre examination, overcoming two previously unsolved problems: the subjectivity of colour comparison – we all perceive and describe colour differently – and the microscopic size of fibres.†

By 1979, the Yorkshire Ripper, as he became known, had killed 10 women. The investigation was in a desperate state. Someone, somewhere, probably a forensic scientist, told the investigators about this new instrument and they came up with the idea that it might be a way of linking the cases and identifying the killer. That fibres from the killer’s clothing might be found on the victims was possible, even likely. But the belief that the microspectrophotometer could be used to find this evidence was madness.

The idea was that by randomly analysing fibres that had been recovered from the victims’ clothing, it might be possible to find fibres that were common to more than one victim and that could therefore be from the clothing of their killer. Given the number of victims involved, there would be tens of thousands of fibres to be searched through under a microscope and then analysed: among them might be a few hundred from the killer’s clothing. But since the killer was unknown at the time, no one knew what he was wearing or what colour or type of fibre was involved, or indeed whether he wore the same clothes for each of the crimes. This was like trying to play a colossal game of ‘find the pairs’ on the deck of an aircraft carrier, with hundreds of different packs of cards. Yet it was something the Metropolitan Police immediately agreed to.

My boss was apologetic. He knew it wouldn’t work, but he also knew the importance of maintaining good relations with the police. We agreed I would spend one day a week analysing as many fibres as I could; at the end of each day I would look for matches. In theory we were on board and supporting the investigation, but with minimal effort. This only went on for a few weeks; nobody truly believed that it would produce anything and it was gradually forgotten.

This desperate searching for a technological solution is a recurrent feature of police culture when investigations stagnate or stall. It seems to be born of two things: an overwhelming desire to do something – action always trumps reflection for the police – and the desire to be associated with new technology. Together these things stave off the anxiety of failure, and more importantly can be used to demonstrate that everything possible is being done, and everyone is busy doing something.

I heard an account at a national conference of forensic specialists by the senior investigating officer in the lengthy and successful investigation of the murder of a French student, Céline Figard, who was travelling in England when she went missing around Christmas 1995. She had accepted a lift from a lorry driver. Her naked body was found days later. As the tall Scot took us through the twists and turns of the case, he told us how they had investigated a mysterious yellow stain on Figard’s body. He emphasised the extraordinary lengths to which they had gone to establish the nature and significance of the stain. He also explained that it had been analysed by the only instrument of its kind in the UK. He waved in his hand the lengthy report that the scientists had produced. The stain was identified, but it played no part in the case. This report was not evidence; rather it was symbolic of how much effort had been put into the investigation and demonstrated how investigators were embracing innovation and the latest science.

The Yorkshire Ripper case was one of the most notorious and influential in UK policing history: notorious because it was ineptly investigated; influential because it led to the introduction of new working practices and the computerisation of major investigations. We know it went badly wrong, because it was followed by some very big changes. This only happens in response to two things: either a public disaster* that the police are intimately connected with, or changes in the law.† Even in the latter case, they often fail to respond in a timely way.‡

—

We find out about murders through the media, but what is presented to us is filtered, and there is an unstated hierarchy of presentation. Sexual murders are given more prominence than non-sexual ones; murders of women receive more attention than murders of men, especially if the woman is white, middle-class or portrayed as undeserving of what has happened. Some women are deemed less equal than others; prostitutes make the news less frequently, unless there is someone notable involved or the crime is especially violent. The Black investigation was at the top of this unspoken hierarchy, even when compared to the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. The children were victims of a serial offender and the cases involved abduction, sexual violence and torture. The press pursued the case relentlessly.

The deaths of these three children were no ordinary murders. Black was a loner with no living relatives, who spent most of his life on the road. No one knew his routines or habits. He was highly secretive. All of these factors would hamper the usual approach to an investigation. There were other complications. The crimes were spread over six years and dispersed across the UK, involving six police forces and two jurisdictions, Scotland and England, whose legal procedures were quite different. Like the Ripper case, the Black investigation would generate vast amounts of information, and there was considerable potential for important evidence to be overlooked or lost. The forces involved would all have different practices and perspectives. Each came to the investigation with the assumption that they could do a better job than anyone else. Inter-force rivalries would need to be controlled to prevent them impacting on performance and cooperation. The labs were not much better than the police at cooperating, and this worried me. The lab in Edinburgh could not possibly cope with this case without support from other labs, but I couldn’t see how this would come about.

The Black investigation was led by Deputy Chief Constable Hector Clark of Lothian and Borders Police, and was the first serial murder investigation since that of the Yorkshire Ripper. A formal inquiry into the Ripper case had been conducted by Sir Lawrence Byford.² Clark had the benefit of a personal briefing from Byford and had also been involved in the Ripper case. He wrote about his experience of the Black investigation when he retired....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Robert Black, the Killer of Childhood
• 2. The Many Roads to Justice
• 3. The Chillenden Murders
• 4. The Trials of Michael Stone
• 5. The Murder of Wendy Sewell
• 6. The Murder of Damilola Taylor
• 7. Silent Testimony – ‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace’
• 8. The Mystery Sweatshirt
• 9. On Wimbledon Common – the Murder of Rachel Nickell
• 10. Operations Edzell and Ecclestone
• 11. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
• 12. The Cryptic Death of Gareth Williams
• 13. If In Doubt, Think Murder
• Conclusion: The Killer of Little Shepherds
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• A Note About the Author