Crime Scene Investigator (12 page)

I placed each item in separately labelled bags and secured the closure to prevent any contamination. The items I found included two black motor-cycle type gloves, one bearing the handwritten number 558 on an inside label, and a denim jacket bearing the manufacturer’s label ‘Manto’.

Having recovered all the items from the alleyway I stood at the point where it opened out on to the waste ground behind and the dwellings beyond. Much, much later I was to find out from Dick that the suspects had dropped the bag of stolen money in a waste bin a few hundred yards away. They returned later that night to claim their booty. To me the choice of where to go at the end of the alley was too large, the ground opened out in all directions and for me the trail ended there. The search area was getting too large and the trail weak. It still pains me to think there was a prize clue still within my grasp. It had always been my practice to look, as without looking you won’t find, but this was one step too far, even for me.

Mind you, looking does sometimes have its downside. My first investigation with Dick had been on my very first day on the Flying Squad. A robbery had taken place in the very high street of the area where I lived. The suspect, having left the bank he had just robbed, ran around the corner to his getaway vehicle. I traced his route and noticed a litter bin attached to a lamp post. Checking to see if he had dumped the gun (always an incriminating piece of evidence if found on you), I gingerly lifted the uppermost contents and had a good look. I then noticed one of my neighbours standing in front of me, an elderly lady from my street. She had a horrified and quizzical look on her face, which quickly turned to pity as I turned red with embarrassment. ‘Poor dear, what has this come to?’ she must have thought before marching off clutching her bag whilst turning her head to look back at me. She had no idea what I did for a living and I had no time to explain. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that all the Squad officers were in plain clothes and drove unmarked vehicles. For many years she gave me a wide berth whenever I saw her.

Having completed the lengthy examination of the car, which revealed a large number of potential pieces of evidence (including fibres and finger marks), I returned all the items I had collected to my office.

I then carefully opened, searched and examined the items I had recovered from the alleyway, making more detailed notes about them.

Looking once again at the key, I was convinced that it contained a bite mark. I also prepared a note to Dick to make sure that he knew that he should investigate which shop had supplied the ‘Curtis’ key, in case that might lead to a suspect.

The gloves were indeed heavy duty but revealed nothing further. The jacket was much more interesting. It was a bomber-style denim jacket with outside waist pockets. In one pocket I found two smoked cigarette ends, in the other I found a Yale-type front door key. I documented both before packaging them separately.

In the days that followed, Dick pursued every line of enquiry he could. Dick was a consummate and complete detective. A small wiry guy, he just about made the five foot ten inch height requirement to join the force. He was sometimes referred to by his colleagues as Nipper. This reflected his tenacious nature but was also in honour of his Flying Squad hero Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read from the 1960s. He was thorough, skilled and hard working. He oozed commitment and a sense of justice, rough justice in some cases. He knew how to deal with criminals in a way they would understand. He never cut corners and always took advice once he knew that you were just as committed as he. Dick has gone on to become a successful writer. When I read
Rough Justice
and
The Real Sweeney
, both written by him, I hear his voice and feel the pace of my heart quicken, such was the joy of working with him. He was amongst a handful of the best detectives I ever worked with. I always felt our combined efforts ensured a professional and complete investigation.

Dick decided he wanted to put the items I had found on the
Police Five
TV programme on the Independent Television network, ITV. It was a weekly five-minute show where the police appealed for witnesses to crimes in the London area.

This presented me with a problem. The opening and display of these items on TV would jeopardise any fragile evidence, such as fibres, which they might contain. It would be very difficult to supervise the viewing of such items and still maintain their evidential integrity. A defence lawyer would rightly ask some difficult questions if any evidence was later presented. Although I had undertaken an examination of the gloves, keys (car and Yale) and the jacket, I was mindful that further examination and comparison for fibres on the recovered gloves and jacket with clothing from a suspect at a later date might prove an evidential link.

Dick’s problem was much more immediate. He didn’t want to lose the media attention and the opportunity to find a witness with events fresh in their minds, and without such a witness we were unlikely to ever get to the laboratory comparison stage. Therefore I took the step of once again opening the exhibit bags and recovering what I could for future examination. This was a compromise as a laboratory search would be much more detailed but would take time we didn’t have.

The items were opened for the recording of the show the following day and viewed on TV within a few days.

Nothing much happened but Dick got lots of calls. The gloves were identified as those issued to members of the British Army and referred to as ‘Northern Ireland Gloves’ by those in the know. The numbers ‘588’ in the gloves, it was suggested, referred to the last few numbers of a soldier’s warrant number. Dick had a bit to go on there.

No witnesses came forward to immediately identify the ‘Manto’ jacket and the trail ran a bit cold over the later months. But Dick never gave up.

One afternoon a few months later, Dick informed me that he was going to arrest two young men in connection with the robbery. I dug out my report and made a note of the things we should look for to connect a suspect with the robbery. I knew Dick would have retained my thoughts and advice on this from the original investigation, but I wanted to be thorough.

The Yale key might fit one of the suspects’ front door locks. If it did we should photograph the door in its position before seizing the door, complete with flat number and lock in place. This was to prevent any defence lawyer suggesting that we had switched the lock; I was beginning to get wise about such allegations.

I also suggested that we should take dental impressions from the suspects. I had a few forensic dentist contacts and I made the necessary calls to get one on standby for the day of the arrest and search.

So a few mornings later we converged at Romford Police Station shortly after five am for a briefing with local officers.

Two teams set out, one to each of the addresses of the two suspects. I went to one, armed with the key. Shortly after the occupants, politely and without fuss, opened the door to the first address, the premises were secured by armed officers and I removed the Yale key from its bag and, in Dick’s presence, tried it in the lock. The barrel turned with reassuring ease. It fitted. Cinderella, you will go to the ball, I thought.

In the coming hours the door was photographed removed and then replaced, free of charge, courtesy of the Metropolitan Police. In the next months the significance of the key and lock would be investigated to identify the number of combinations and the probability of one particular key fitting an individual lock. For the moment it was, of course, promising that the key opened the door.

Back at the police station it was time to take the dental impressions. First, we had to seek the consent of the suspects and also get the authority of a police superintendent. The former was remarkably easy. The suspects had been dealt with courteously but the request took them by surprise. One detective remarked that they probably expected the police to knock their teeth out and were relieved we only wanted to take impressions.

My call to the London Hospital Medical School a few days earlier had intended to instruct Bernard Sims, the renowned forensic odontologist. Such was the emerging demand for this science (mainly in the area of disaster victim identification), that he designed and delivered a course in Forensic Dentistry. So it was one of his graduates, Luigi Ciapperelli, who came on this occasion.

Luigi looked at the Curtis key and confirmed that it was a bite mark and he set about obtaining the dental impressions from the two suspects. Enquiries which Dick later made revealed that of the two men arrested, Saul and Fowler, only Fowler held a driving licence. Not that having a driving licence had anything to do with it – many people drive cars without licences. The fact was that Saul couldn’t drive. We made a point of not telling Ciapperelli this as it was irrelevant to his examination and we wanted his opinion based solely on the marks evidence and not clouded by other issues.

In the weeks that followed I had meetings with Luigi about the bite marks. I also took him to meet Pam Hamer, a forensic chemist at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory, and discussed with them both the bite mark and striation evidence. Luigi had already made some examination of the dental impressions taken from Saul and Fowler. Pam Hamer was interested in the striations but the marks were very small. Any meaningful comparison would have to consider the angle and direction of the marks, if this evidence was to be useful and a potential match found. In the end it was clear that Luigi thought there was enough detail in the spatial arrangement of the marks on the key itself for a meaningful comparison to be made. He had noticed something I had not. Although there were striations emerging from the marks, there were indentations relating to the spatial arrangements and shapes of the tip of the teeth which could help identify the donor.

A few weeks later I got a call from Luigi. Having completed his work and undertaken quality checks with his colleagues at the London Hospital regarding his methodology, he was sure that only the teeth of Fowler could have made the marks on the key. His statement arrived. It appears that the dentistry (that is the spatial shape and arrangement of our teeth) is unique and there was enough information within the mark to match the specific dentistry of Fowler.

That was good news for the investigation but more was to follow. Dick had come across Saul when he was investigating the source of the gloves I had found in the alleyway. They were indeed military issue and the number did refer to the last three digits of a soldier’s warrant number. When Dick traced all soldiers whose warrant numbers ended in 588 he got a tidy list. None of them, however, could he implicate in the robbery. But one of these soldiers had had his gloves stolen. This seemed to be going nowhere until Saul’s name came to his attention and Dick realised that Saul had been discharged from the Army and had served in the same regiment as the soldier who had lost his gloves.

When I had heard the name ‘Saul’, as we were briefed by Dick at Romford Police Station on the morning of his arrest, his name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember why. It wasn’t until some weeks later that I suspected that I had dealt with him before and found time to do something about it. I pulled out all my reports and flicked through them all.

There it was. Many, many months before, Saul had been arrested by another detective in the office, also for an armed robbery offence. It wasn’t a promising investigation. The officer in that case had come to me late, the offence was already old. He had arrested the suspect and seized his clothing. There was one big problem. The getaway car had been recovered, but it had not been initially linked to this robbery and had been restored to the owners many miles away in the heart of Essex. The family had been using the car for a week.

Once again, listening to the saying ‘if you don’t look you won’t find’, I agreed with the officer to drive to Essex. I contacted the owner of the car and arranged to examine it at their house. The examination wasn’t very fruitful. But I did recover some fibres and some finger marks. All the finger marks were later found to belong to the owner and family members. Given the seriousness of the offence I also prepared a laboratory submission with all these details. Submitting the seized clothing of Saul (who I had not seen) and the fibres I had recovered from the cars, I was not surprised when the scientist stated that the fibres of the clothing were too common for any meaningful comparison. The items were collected and, with no evidence in the case, the clothing was returned to the suspect and any prospect of charges dropped.

When I looked closely at the laboratory submission I noticed that a ‘blue jacket’ had been taken from Saul on that first occasion but it had been returned to him when the case was dropped. I thought the unthinkable. What were the chances of the denim ‘Manto’ jacket which I had recovered from the alleyway being the ‘blue jacket’ previously taken from Saul and returned to him before this latest robbery occurred.

Having worked as a member of the scientific staff at the Forensic Science Laboratory for three years I knew that whoever had examined the jacket taken from Saul would have some specific notes about it and this would include any labels. I excitedly called the laboratory and was put through to Dr De Souza, a forensic biologist. When I explained my enquiry and asked if she could identify the jacket from its labels she went to get the file and called me back within a few minutes. I was particularly interested to know if the jacket had a manufacturer’s label bearing the name ‘Manto’. There was silence as she read her notes and then she said, ‘Yes, it is a Manto jacket.’ I could hardly confine my excitement. I then asked if I brought a jacket which I suspected of being the same one, could she identify it from her description, the labels and her notes. From my own training at the laboratory I knew that was likely to be so. What she then said stunned me. ‘I can do better than that.’ She went on. ‘I cut and removed a small square control sample from under the arm and it is retained on the file.’ If I had the jacket, the small square would physically fit back in the hole which was made.