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A - You may want a definition of a serious incident and I can't give you that, apart from murder, where anything can be done frankly. Um, then paying due attention to the fact that everyday life must continue at some time... then we have the power to seal off that incident area until we are satisfied that we have done everything humanly possible to extract all evidence from that scene, starting with photographs of course, or video. So that's done very early on and captured for screening later... B - ... we determined the sizes by just looking at the movie, printing each frame and recreating three dimensionally what that looked like and reinterpreting that to... A - ... to give us an idea of the circumstances of the incident... B - ... as exactly as we could have... as closely as we could get it from modelling the shots. Because the shots were completely the same, so the exploration of it... the staircase was in the same place, the other stair was, everything... A - ... we could reconstruct any other scene if we thought there was, er, useful evidence to be obtained... B - You can't recreate everything... I think it was a pointless exercise quite frankly. A - I'm talking ideally now... but, er, every situation has to be dealt with as best as possible at the time. - - - - - A - So anybody could be called to a scene at any one time for their expertise but it's up to us to decide if we need such people... It may be that you would want a specialist in blood splashing analysis if it was an internal scene. You may need to know from the blood that is decorating the walls of how many blows were delivered in the fight. Crucial. If, er, if person A says: 'I was defending myself, I only hit him once', a blood splashing specialist may say: 'From my interpretation of this scene there were eight bloodstain slashes with an instrument.' Now, that works against a self-defence and one initial thrust. B - ... everything about it was... not good. A - Oh, I agree with you totally... The murder of a complete stranger by a stranger is very, quite rare, although it attracts a lot of publicity, of course, because no-one likes to think they're going to be pounced upon by a complete stranger, but... the stranger assault should not be taken out of context - it is the minority, but the most difficult to pin down of course... it's unlikely that would have been pre-meditated, frankly. B - ... and you've got to build something . You've just got to figure out how the scene is going to play, to make, you know... A - ... we are trying to show them that a piece of palm mark was found (that's the original photograph), and this was found in blood on the frieze of a particular wallpaper which corresponds to this... and this one is showing that another palm mark was found at that height of the bottom of the stairway... it's a challenge to us then to try and unravel the circumstances. B - One was Victorian, the house was Victorian, and this was gothic, farm-gothic, country-gothic... a mixture of country and gothic. But when it's this close, what's the point? What do you accomplish? Nothing. - - - - - A - But the unknown is the difficult one; the unknown is the challenge... for us, because now we have the potential of plucking names out of the sky for the investigating officer... B - Oh, I loved it. It was a lot of fun. Being a pointless exercise doesn't mean that I didn't have a lot of fun. I mean, it was ace.
Original postmortem showed abdominal knife wounds, facial lacerations and spinal damage caused by falling. Official report concluded wounds were inflicted by multiple assailants of apparently varying build and gender. Original investigation 1959-60, reopened (with the participation of Production Designer 'B') 1997-98. 'A' was a Senior Crime Scene Examiner during the second investigation. Interviews: Mike Cooter © 2004 |
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