Medical Detectives (27 page)

Lord Sorn asked the witness if ‘… you would not go so far as to say that you might not find two identical hairs microscopically from different heads?’ Glaister replied, ‘I can only say that by matching one sample with another that way, finding the detailed and gross microscopical characters to be identical, it permits us to say they are consistent with a common source. Beyond that I cannot go.’ His balanced appraisal of this aspect of the evidence allowed the jury of eleven men and four women to decide what confidence they could place on it.

Despite Mr Wall’s special defence that Myszka was not guilty because he was insane and not responsible for his actions at the time of the crime, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. It took them only twenty minutes to reach a verdict and, as Robert Jackson put it in his book
The Crime Doctors
, the additional weight provided by the forensic medical evidence helped the jury to find Myszka guilty. The deserter from the Polish Army in exile was sentenced to death and Albert Pierrepoint carried out his hangman’s duty in February 1948.

The satisfaction in this case for John Glaister was not so much in bringing a murderer to justice but in demonstrating the important role of trace evidence in the investigation of crime. He had spent the best part of his career developing methods which would enable forensic scientists to confirm links between criminals and victims. He called these links the theory of interchange and wrote, ‘I can’t say how the term first came to be used,’ but acknowledged the theory, ‘has always been one in which I have taken a particular interest.’

The principle of interchange is a simple one; it is that no one involved in a crime departs from the scene without leaving some trace of his presence behind or carrying away some trace which links him irrevocably to the scene. It is the scientific principle underlying Sherlock Holmes’s remarkable powers of observation when he was consulted by John Openshaw in 1887 in the case of
The Five Orange Pips
.

‘You have come up from the south-west, I see,’ observed Holmes.

‘Yes, from Horsham,’ answered his visitor.

‘That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toecaps is quite distinctive,’ explained the great detective.

The pioneering French criminologist, Edmond Locard, was one of the first investigators to employ scientific methods in this new field. He stated the principle that ‘every contact leaves a trace’ and demonstrated it in a criminal case in 1912. The trace evidence in question was debris taken from beneath the fingernails of a murder suspect. When Locard examined this under the microscope he found epithelial cells coated with a pink dust which proved to be face powder identical to the cosmetics used by the murder victim. This material had been forced under the murderer’s fingernails when he strangled the girl.

‘The scientist’s task,’ said John Glaister, ‘is to examine these links which, in crime, can establish a suspect’s presence at the scene and occasionally even indicate his actions in relation to the incident’. He illustrated the principle from a case in his own files involving two Glasgow robbers and a bungled attempt to blow a safe. They broke into a carpet warehouse and prepared the safe in the manager’s office with explosives and detonator, trailing their wire to a battery at a safe distance. In order to muffle the explosion, they placed some rugs over the safe and, retreating to their refuge, blew the charge. The result was an explosion which, in consequence of being poorly calculated, had not only destroyed the lock but also damaged the safe door so that it could not be opened. In addition, the explosion had caused the rugs to disintegrate, plastering the room with a shower of coloured fibres.

The would-be safe breakers escaped empty-handed but not unmarked. When John Glaister was called in, his eyes no doubt lit up when a detective asked him, ‘We wondered whether these fibres might help.’ By this time, the police had two suspects in custody and Glaister immediately asked to see their clothes. One set of clothing was clean, indicating that its owner had changed after the attempted robbery, but the other set was a kaleidoscope of trace evidence. There were fibres from the selection of coloured rugs blown to smithereens in the warehouse and traces of powder similar to the explosive used in the incident. As a clinching piece of linking evidence, it was found that a footprint at the warehouse matched the worn-down shoe of one of the men’s footwear. His companion had the forethought to change his clothes but not his shoes. Adhering to the heel of the right shoe was a piece of chewing gum in which was embedded a random sample of the myriad of fibres scattered about the warehouse by the explosion. Thus there was ample proof to link both men to the scene of the crime and ample evidence in the hands of John Glaister to convince the court of their guilt. As he wrote later, ‘I doubt if it would have consoled them to know that … they inadvertently furnished university classes with an excellent demonstration of interchange.’

Another kind of interchange occurs as the result of violent contact, for example, during a struggle between victim and assailant or in a hit-and-run incident. In the early hours of 28 July 1950, a Glasgow taxi driver cruising down Prospecthill Road on his way to Kilmarnock, saw the mangled body of a woman lying in the road. His immediate reaction was that she had been run down by a fast-moving vehicle. He called the police and PC William Kevan arrived at the scene.

Kevan was a veteran police officer with over twenty years’ service which included experience of investigating many traffic accidents. As he paced the area and looked for the signs normally associated with a hit-and-run incident, he realised that the evidence did not add up. To begin with, he thought the injuries to the woman were far more severe than those normally associated with such incidents. What he found more vexing was the complete absence of any debris at the scene. There was usually broken glass and dirt shaken off the underside of the vehicle when contact was made with a pedestrian. Added to this were curious tyre marks in the road. There were two sets of brake marks and the body lay across them. One set of marks had been made by a vehicle travelling in a westerly direction while the other set, slightly curving, had been made by a vehicle moving in the opposite direction. His suspicions well and truly aroused, PC Kevan called in his CID colleagues.

The post-mortem examination of the victim bore out the constable’s initial impression that the incident was not what it seemed. Dr James Irvine and Dr Andrew Allison found gross injuries of a type and extent not normally seen in motor accidents. There were thirty external wounds, together with severe internal injuries, yet only superficial abrasions on the legs. When the doctors discovered that a bruise on the woman’s head had been made before she died, while other injuries to the face had been caused after death, the whole incident took on a more sinister aspect. The conclusion to be drawn from the forensic evidence was of a woman probably unconscious from a blow to the head when she was run over and killed; then, once dead, the vehicle was reversed and she was run over a second time. All the tyre marks, which PC Kevan had been astute enough to note on his inspection of the road, were made by the same car, so there was no suggestion that two vehicles were involved.

The dead woman was not identified until a friend, worried by her absence, reported the matter to the police. Catherine McCluskey, a forty-year-old unmarried mother, had left her two children with a friend in order that she could have an evening out; it was an evening that ended in disaster. When Rose O’Donnell identified McCluskey’s body in the mortuary, she said, ‘She told me she was going out with a bobby.’ A neighbour confirmed the dead woman’s liaison with a police officer whom she claimed was the father of her three-month-old baby and was expected to pay her maintenance. Corroboration of this came from the Glasgow Assistance Board when an official said McCluskey had applied for assistance after the birth of her second child, but refused to name the father, saying only that he was a policeman.

Suspicion was quickly directed at PC James Ronald Robertson by his fellow officers’ observation of his movements. Robertson was unusual among the lowly paid ranks of the police at that time in that he could afford to run his own car. During the course of his duty on the night of 28 July, he absconded for a period, telling a fellow officer, ‘I’m off to see a blonde.’ When Robertson returned to duty well after midnight, it was noticed that he was perspiring a great deal and looked somewhat dishevelled. He explained his appearance saying that he had to stop to carry out repairs on the exhaust system of his car. One of the last duties he performed on his shift was to record the details of the hit-and-run incident in Prospecthill Road, telephoned in by a divisional officer.

Robertson was questioned the following day and found to be in possession of a number of stolen goods. Asked about Catherine McCluskey, he admitted knowing her and said he had picked her up in his car by prior arrangement and she wanted him to drive her a distance of some fourteen miles to Neilston to stay with a friend. He told her he could not abscond from duty for the length of time it would take to drive to Neilston and back. They argued and he told her to get out of the car. She complied and he drove off; then, having second thoughts, he stopped and reversed the car to go back for her. While reversing along the hundred yards or so that he had travelled, he noticed an increase in the exhaust noise of the car. He stopped, and walking round the car, found Catherine McCluskey trapped beneath it with her clothing caught up in the transmission shaft. He realised that he had accidentally run her down. On finding McCluskey under the car and realising that she was dead, he tried to pull her clear, a task which he found nigh on impossible due to the low ground clearance of the vehicle. Climbing into the driver’s seat, he engaged first gear and drew forward slightly with the result that the body dropped free onto the road. He said, ‘The hopelessness of the situation seemed to be overwhelming. I started the car up and drove away.’ This was the account that Robertson gave to fellow officers and, such was its flimsiness, that he was immediately arrested.

Robertson’s lies soon became apparent when his car was examined by officers from the traffic department. The bodywork showed no signs whatever of superficial damage that usually resulted from collision with a pedestrian. The evidence was on the underside of the car in the form of blood and hair, but did it substantiate his account of what had occurred?

This was where John Glaister stepped into the scene. He examined all the artefacts of the incident and came up with his own reconstruction. Robertson’s uniform was entirely free of blood which seemed strange in view of his account that he had struggled to free the mangled body from beneath his car. By a strange contrast a heavy, rubber truncheon of a non-regulation type which he had in one of his pockets was slightly bloodstained. Glaister next went along to the garage at police headquarters where Robertson’s car was housed. ‘I spent several days there,’ he said, ‘crawling around underneath the car.’

Glaister found nothing to support Robertson’s story; there was a complete lack of the evidence of interchange which occurs when a person is knocked down by a motor vehicle. The tyre marks in the road at the scene of the incident, combined with the gross injuries to the victim, told their own gruesome tale. It appeared that McCluskey, already dead or unconscious, lay in the road and was run over from different directions. Thirty-three-year-old Robertson, a policeman for five years, was sent for trial on a charge of murder. He appeared at Glasgow High Court before Lord Keith and was defended by John Cameron KC.

Defence counsel tested Glaister on his medical evidence and, in particular, on the injuries to the victim’s legs, Cameron suggested that because a great deal of flesh had been torn from the knees, it was difficult to assess how the injuries had been caused. The Professor’s reply was to the effect that the injuries were not to the knees as such but to the inner aspects of the knees and he added rather dryly, ‘my experience of the female anatomy is that a woman doesn’t stand presenting that part to an oncoming car.’ Counsel was at pains to establish the possibility that the victim’s death resulted from an accident. He asked Glaister, ‘If there is no proof that this woman was laid down insensible in the track of the advancing car, can you in any sense eliminate the possibility of an accident?’ Choosing his words with meticulous care, the witness replied, ‘To this extent, that it is my opinion that the injuries were caused by a forward motion of the car going at some speed. I do not mean at a colossal speed, but I mean at some appreciable speed, and I think that that was done on more than one occasion.’

This damning assessment plainly ruled out death by accident. Robertson might have got away with his callous act if he had not made the mistake of reversing and then driving forward over his victim again to ensure she was dead. But then he did not understand the principle of interchange which as Glaister noted later, had in this case, ‘operated both by its absence and its presence’. James Robertson was found guilty by a majority verdict; eight members of the fifteen-strong jury voted for conviction and seven for acquittal. He was hanged at Barlinnie Prison in December 1950.