Crime Scene Investigator (20 page)

A case I got heavily involved in was that of Gemma. Gemma had been nursing a sick child. The young mother had not slept, sick herself with worry, she had sat in a chair next to her child’s bed in the emergency room at North Middlesex Hospital. The emergency room had experienced a busy night. It provided a service to a large part of north London. There is nothing routine about a London hospital emergency room at night, other than the volume of people. The nursing staff have to deal with all aspects of human beings at their most vulnerable. The injured, the drunk, the seriously ill and their worried relatives all are there.

In the early hours of the morning, the child was admitted to the children’s ward and was out of danger and resting peacefully. At six am Gemma decided to go home, have a shower and rest for a few hours before returning to the hospital.

She walked out of the hospital, crossed the road and decided to take the direct route home on foot. This meant entering the public park and gardens, the gates of which had just opened.

Walking purposefully through the gates it was only a few paces later that she was grabbed from behind and a hand was pulled over his mouth. The man was much stronger than her and although she struggled she could not get free. She was dragged into a public toilet block and into the furthest cubicle. There she was subjected to vaginal rape. She only saw brief and restricted glimpses of her attacker’s face. She did notice a logo on an article of his clothing, a dark-coloured sweater. It was over very quickly. Her attacker warned her not to look at him and not to scream. Otherwise he would return. He left as quickly as he had appeared. She sat on the toilet seat and, in her own words, she discharged what the rapist had ejaculated into her into the toilet bowl.

I had started duty at Kings Cross Police Station at nine am. The morning ring-around the area identified the number of burglaries requiring examination at each station and the staff available. More importantly, it identified one serious crime. A quick look at the resources told me that the staff on duty were already overstretched and it would be difficult to write someone, let alone two, off for at least a day. It was down to me and so I set off to Edmonton.

The local detective chief inspector was on the case as the officer in charge. The toilet block had been sealed off and I advised and made sure that Gemma was being examined by a forensic medical examiner. She was being counselled by an experienced and trained female officer. It would be some time before a full statement was available, but at a suitable break the story of what had happened was relayed to me by the female officer.

I was immediately struck by the fact that Gemma had not flushed the toilet before she left to seek help after her ordeal. The first officers at the scene had identified that the toilet block had been cleaned and the floors washed before the park gates were opened shortly before six am. To the credit of the officers, no one, not even the first officers, had entered the block at all. A great job of scene preservation.

A sense of urgency struck me. Two potentially useful areas of evidence immediately became apparent. If I could find any, only the shoe marks of the offender and the victim would be on the toilet block floor. Secondly, and more importantly, there was a chance that the discharged semen was still in the toilet bowl and that could help identify the offender.

The year was 1990 and DNA evidence was being used in only the most serious crime cases. The technique was still in its infancy in crime investigation, but its power as an investigative tool was already recognised.

Within an hour or so, the victim examination covered and with a brief indication of what the victim thought had happened, I arrived at the scene.

The toilet block was of red-brick construction at least fifty years old. It sat immediately inside and to the left of the gates to the park. The main road was only yards away with the North Middlesex Hospital on the other side of the busy North Circular Road.

The park was well maintained and the toilet block well cared for, shown by the fact that it had been cleaned that very morning before the park opened.

A police officer stood guard at the gate and the area was cordoned off with police incident tape.

The paths were regular and covered with tarmac and the grass and flowerbeds were soft with residue of the morning dew. A large pyracantha (firethorn) bush was in flower and extended along the path to the right of the door and entrance of the ladies’ toilet where the rape had taken place.

The external paths and flowerbeds would require search and examination, but that would have to come later. There was a greater priority. I was concerned about recovering any remaining semen and the genetic material it contained from the toilet. I was unsure about any degradation or dilution which might occur.

I made a focused examination of the path leading to the toilet block door before peering inside.

The floor was stone tiled and dry. It appeared clean and free from any dust, as you would expect, having just been cleaned. The door faced a wall turning right into a short passage. To the far right was a bank of four toilet cubicles, each with a private door. The victim had described that it was the furthest cubicle from the door, the one on the far left, into which she had been dragged.

I had a dilemma. Normally, I would carefully examine the floor for shoe marks, or at least clear a narrow path to the furthest cubicle. But I was unsure if I had time to do that. If there was semen in the toilet bowl I was unsure how it might degrade or dilute. So I decided to clear a path as quickly as possible within eighteen inches of the wall on the left side. I thought that with the floor having been cleaned and with only two known occupants since (the offender and the victim), this area was least likely to contain shoe marks. I cleared the path with oblique lighting, held close to the floor in front of me. I didn’t find any shoe marks and I was very soon at the cubicle door. Again securing the door back so I didn’t disturb anything for a later complete examination, I cleared the floor area inside the cubicle. Then, looking inside, I could see a column of opaque white fluid stretching from the top surface of the water in the bowl to the bottom. Using a teat pipette I drew the fluid up and secured it in a glass evidence bottle.

It was my intention to quickly freeze it and get it to the laboratory, but when I returned to the Edmonton Police Station to do just that, I received an update from the detective chief inspector.

A suspect had been arrested. A young man had been making a nuisance of himself the night before within the very emergency department of the hospital where Gemma had been nursing her sick daughter. He had demanded to be admitted, but there was nothing physically wrong with him and, although a nuisance, he went away after police were called. His description was very similar to the somewhat thin description Gemma had given of the man who raped her. Events quickly developed.

Having recovered what I thought was going to be important evidence, I called the Forensic Science Laboratory. DNA at that time was only being used in the most serious cases, mainly murder, but I managed to persuade the lab to quickly look at the material I had recovered and a sample of blood (if we could get one) from the suspect. Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act we only had forty-eight hours from the time of arrest to charge or release any suspect.

The suspect was examined in the early afternoon, his clothes seized and a number of samples taken from him, most importantly a blood sample for grouping and profiling. A police motorcyclist took the material which I had recovered from the scene, swabs from the victim and blood samples from the suspect to the lab. It was expected there and they quickly undertook the task of examining it.

I returned to the scene and completed an examination of the toilet block, the floor and walls of the cubicle and then a search of the outside bushes and flowerbeds. The latter in case the offender had been hiding there before the offence. I even took a sample of the flowering pyracantha bush as I thought it would make an interesting contact trace item should the offender have brushed against it.

The extensive examination of the toilet block went on past the late afternoon and into the evening. It revealed some finger marks, but it was a public area and although this particular area was a female domain, I wasn’t too hopeful of identification. I developed a couple of partial shoe marks on the tiled floor of the block. It appeared that the floor had dried before the offender dragged the victim inside. Wet marks may have been more easily left and although I looked for marks in dust, I found none.

Officers searched the suspect’s address and a full statement was being obtained from the victim. It had been a traumatic day for her and she still had a sick child in hospital. The female police officers were trying to help her through this trauma, whilst giving her the best opportunity to identify who had attacked her.

It had been a long day for the investigators, but any thought of that was put aside, with a professional eye on what we had to do and feelings of compassion for Gemma.

I returned to Edmonton the following morning, evaluating any updates in the context of my examination and planning a more detailed follow-up laboratory submission.

The laboratory indicated that the DNA analysis would take longer than the forty-eight hours we had to charge or release the suspect. They did say that they would undertake a simple blood grouping of the scene material and the blood samples from the suspect and the victim. This would be useful in linking the suspect to the scene if he was the offender.

The second laboratory submission would include the clothing taken from the victim, which would be examined for semen, fibres and hair and also clothing from the suspect for fibres and hair. Blood and urine samples would be examined for alcohol to help complete a picture of the events of the offence and of those involved or suspected.

An identification parade was arranged by the officers where Gemma would be invited to try and identify the man who had attacked her from a line of similar-looking men, drawn at random from the local population. It was held in the afternoon of that second day and Gemma identified a man by saying, ‘I think it’s number four.’ It was our detained suspect but it wasn’t the strongest of identifications.

I called the lab a couple of times to see if there was any progress, but there was none. They knew we were under pressure.

By late afternoon a review of the case considered the description of the offender, the actions of the suspect and the fact that he broadly fitted that description and the fact that Gemma had picked him out of the line-up, albeit with reluctance. The detectives decided that they had enough evidence to charge him with the offence of rape and remand him into custody.

A short while before the suspect was going to be charged, I called the lab to see if they had any information. They promised an update within the hour. It was apparent in the voice of the scientist they had something but they were checking their findings.

I was in the charge room of the police station at six pm. The suspect’s hands were still black with the remains of fingerprint ink. His fingerprints had been taken, as is normal, just before he was to be charged with the offence of rape. In the air was the smell of petroleum spirit, which had been used to wash the main bulk of the printer’s ink off the suspect’s hands. The phone rang on the charge room desk. It was for me. It was the scientist. ‘It is not him,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.

I was silent and listened further.

‘I have two pieces of bad news for you,’ she said. ‘OK,’ I said. She went on. The first was that whilst the lab was undertaking the longer DNA examination, they had completed the blood screening. They could completely eliminate the suspect as the donor of the semen by blood grouping. The crime scene samples contained a mixture of two blood groups. One matched the victim, the other did not and could not match our suspect. Whoever the offender was, it wasn’t the man currently in custody. There was further bad news to follow. They had identified semen mixed with vaginal material in the sample from the toilet bowl and also the vaginal swabs taken from the victim. When they examined the sample taken from the bowl they confirmed it was seminal fluid but contained no sperm heads. It is the sperm head which contains the material which could be identified at that time by DNA. In the absence of sperm heads DNA identification was not possible. This was confirmed in the examination of the vaginal swabs.

So there was double bad news for the investigators. The offender wasn’t our suspect and we wouldn’t be able to tell who it was from the DNA.

I indicated to the custody sergeant to wait for a moment before continuing with the charge. I pulled the detective chief inspector to one side and gave him the very bad news. ‘What do you mean?’ he said with incredulity. He didn’t believe me; he didn’t want to believe me. It had been a long couple of days and a lot of hard work had gone into where we were.

We both went up to the CID office to discuss the matter further. The double bad news was difficult to handle and I was more than the messenger, I had orchestrated the urgent laboratory examination. Without this evidence the suspect could have been charged and, for all I know, convicted, on the remaining evidence.

But the fact was simple, on the simple test of blood grouping alone, the suspect could be eliminated as the donor of the semen which I had recovered from the bowl of the fourth cubicle of the ladies’ toilet in the park the day before. A review of that very statement confirmed that the semen in the bowl originated from the offender and as such the suspect could be safely eliminated from the enquiry.

Still not convinced and clutching to any hope that the suspect in the charge room was the right man, the detective chief inspector took me to see the head of the CID on the Division, whose office was two floors above. I had known Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Peters for a number of years. A tall elegant man, it was he who had to show some wisdom in the matter. The facts were explained to him. I was firm; I carefully quoted the words of the scientist as carefully as I had written them down.