Silent Witnesses (30 page)

Castor beans, from which ricin is derived. The poison works by inhibiting the ability of the cells to make protein. The pulp from just eight beans would cause dangerous levels of toxicity in an adult.

Although both Bulgaria and Russia were suspected of being involved in the assassination, there was little that the British
authorities could do. To this day, Markov's killer has still not been brought to justice, though since the fall of communism in Bulgaria, there is renewed interest in the case.

The case of Alexander Litvinenko is even more recent and again involves the use of a new and extremely unpleasant poison. Litvinenko had worked for both the KGB and that organization's successor, the FSB. In November 1998 he, along with several FSB colleagues, publicly accused his superiors of ordering the murder of a Russian oligarch called Boris Berezovsky. As a result, in 1999 Litvinenko was arrested and charged with exceeding his authority. In 2000 he was released, but fearing arrest under new charges, he fled Russia with his family and was granted political asylum in Britain (having been refused it by the United States). He became a writer and journalist while also secretly working for MI5 and MI6 as a consultant.

While in London, Litvinenko wrote several controversial books. In one he accused the FSB of staging a Russian apartment bombing in which over 300 people had died and which, at the time, had been blamed on Chechen separatists. He went on to claim that the FSB had been connected to other terrorist acts, saying that this had been part of a coordinated effort to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko suddenly became ill and was rushed to the hospital. He experienced severe diarrhea and vomiting and became physically weaker and weaker. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. He died on November 22, with doctors still unable to determine the exact cause of his illness. (They had even suspected thallium poisoning for a time, but tests ruled this out.) It was only after his death that they were able to ascertain that he had been poisoned with radioactive
polonium-210. This is extremely hard to detect, since unlike most radioactive isotopes, it does not admit gamma rays, only alpha particles, which are not picked up by the majority of radiation detectors. The investigation into Litvinenko's death turned up a Russian agent named Andrey Lugovoy as a prime suspect, but when the British government requested his extradition, the request was refused. Lugovoy himself denied any connection with Litvinenko's death and in turn accused the British security services. As such we will probably never know who poisoned Litvinenko, or on whose orders they acted. According to Professor Nick Priest, a Middlesex University environmental toxicologist and radiation expert, Litvinenko was probably the first person ever to die of the acute a-radiation effects of polonium-210. With his death, poisoning had entered the nuclear age.

DNA technology could be the greatest single advance in the search for truth, conviction of the guilty, and acquittal of the innocent since the advent of cross-examination.

Justice Joseph Harris, New York State Supreme Court

W
e have already mentioned DNA fingerprinting and its forensic applications elsewhere in the book (see Introduction). However, as it is without doubt the greatest advancement of our times in the field of forensic science, it merits further discussion. I am also going to indulge myself a little by discussing a couple of cases with which I was personally involved: one an infamous murder case from the 1980s, the other a historical mystery that I had a small hand in solving.

Colette Aram was a bright sixteen-year-old girl from the village of Keyworth, just outside Nottingham, England. She came from a loving home and was well thought of by her peers. She had left school to train as a hairdresser and by all accounts loved what she did and was on track to become a success. Sadly, this was not to be. Shortly after 8
PM
on October 30, 1983 (I will always remember the date because it was my birthday),
she left her home on Normanton Lane in Keyworth to walk to her boyfriend Russell Godfrey's house, just over a mile away. Normally he would have picked her up in his car but, as often seems to be the case when such awful events occur, fate intervened—on the night in question, his car was out of commission. Colette was last seen a little after 8
PM
talking to friends at a junction between Nicker Hill and Platt Lane. She was walking in the direction of Willow Brook. A witness later reported having heard someone screaming and then a car driving off at high speed not long afterward. He looked out onto the street but saw nothing and, since he was used to hearing children shouting and screaming nearby, did not think it unusual or report it.

When Colette hadn't arrived at Godfrey's house by 10:30
PM
that evening, people started to become concerned. Finally, the police were called. It was a freezing cold October night, and a hard frost was already beginning to set in. After several fruitless hours, the search was called off until the next day. In fact, continuing it proved horribly unnecessary; the following morning a man driving to work along Thurlby Lane, less than two miles from where Colette lived, spotted something strange-looking in a field beside the road. Concerned, he turned his car around and went to investigate. What he had found was Colette's naked body. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and then strangled. She had been dead for several hours.

The murder investigation began at once, headed up by Detective Superintendent Bob Davy. An incident room was established on the Keyworth and Normanton playing fields, close to Nicker Hill where Colette had last been seen.
Hundreds of police officers, including myself, were called in for a vast and wide-ranging inquiry. As a result, as is frequently the case with major inquiries, other previously unreported crimes—some extremely serious—came to light, and several people were arrested for offences unconnected to Colette's murder.

It transpired that a red Ford Fiesta had been stolen earlier on the day of the murder from the stables at Holme Pierrepont, another small village in the area. This car was then discovered abandoned in Keyworth, while its keys were subsequently found hidden in a bush. When Colette's body was found, her feet were free of mud and there were car tire marks leading out of the field. This suggested that any assault on her had probably taken place inside a vehicle, so the discovery of the car seemed highly significant to the murder squad. A thorough forensic examination of its interior turned up traces of both blood and semen.

Two girls now came forward, each to report that she had been followed by a man in a red Ford Fiesta on the night Colette disappeared. One had felt so threatened that she had actually run into the house of a friend. The other, who was fourteen years old, had been approached by the man, but the fact that she had a large dog with her had been enough to make him think twice, and he drove away. Both girls gave a similar description of the suspect: a white male about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with dark wavy hair. This was definite progress for the inquiry. However, even more promising was information from the manager of the Generous Briton pub in the village of Costock. A man had visited the pub at approximately 9
PM
on the night of the murder. He had
ordered an orange squash, and she had noticed blood on his hands. When she pointed this out he went into the bathroom to clean them. This was highly fortunate; following a search of the bathroom, a bloodstained paper towel was recovered and kept as possible evidence. It would later prove extremely significant.

On June 7, 1984, the case became the first ever to be featured on the now long-running BBC crime show
Crimewatch,
a fact that delighted the senior investigating officers. The program received over 400 calls offering information connected to the case, as a result of which the murder squad was able to eliminate over 1,500 suspects from its lists. Still, in spite of all of this useful information, they seemed no nearer to actually capturing the killer.

On November 17, 1983, the incident room received a letter bragging about the murder. It revealed things that only the killer could have known, and the writer taunted the police, saying that they were never going to catch him. The letter was thoroughly examined and a fingerprint was discovered on it. Unfortunately, any hopes the police might have had of this finally leading them to the killer were soon quashed; there was no match for it in their database.

And so, despite a lengthy inquiry involving hundreds of police officers, the culprit remained at large. There is always a strong feeling of gloom and failure within a team when, in spite of everyone's best efforts, a culprit eludes them. It was no different with the Colette Aram murder squad. There was a sense of anger and frustration at not having found the criminal. Gradually the investigation was shut down—it remained on file with the odd piece of information being followed up on from
time to time, but for all intents and purposes the case seemed to be dead in the water. The years rolled by. The case was featured yet again on
Crimewatch
for their twentieth anniversary show in 2004, but despite this once again prompting a flurry of phone calls, no useful new leads came out of it. The memory of Colette and the feeling of failure attached to the case lingered with me personally for the next twenty-five years. I've often thought how much worse it must have been for the senior investigating officers, not to mention her family as well. So that was it: just another unsolved murder.

But science had not been idle all those years, and twenty-five years after Colette's death, forensic technology had exceeded even the most optimistic police officer's wildest dreams. DNA had burst upon the scene when Alec Jeffreys from the University of Leicester, along with Peter Gill and Dave Werrett of the Forensic Science Service, developed DNA profiling or genetic fingerprinting. We have already seen how this work came into its own during the infamous Black Pad murders. I would later work with Peter Gill in connection with a major historic mystery (more on that in a bit), and he explained his own part in the development of the technology as follows: “I was responsible for developing all of the DNA extraction techniques and demonstrating that it was possible after all to obtain DNA profiles from old stains. The biggest achievement was developing the preferential extraction method to separate sperm from vaginal cells—without this method it would have been difficult to use DNA in rape cases.” These techniques were, of course, highly applicable in the case of Colette Aram.

In fact, in 1997 Colette's murder was reviewed and an attempt was made to establish a DNA profile of the killer. Dr. Tim Clayton
managed to reconstruct Colette's DNA from samples kept after her postmortem. However, his attempts to provide a DNA profile of the killer from the samples of semen found in the car and on Colette's clothes were only partially successful. Unfortunately, to get a full profile, he needed twenty markers, ten from the father and ten from the mother; he was only able to establish three. (DNA markers are sections of DNA that are unique to an individual and so can be used to identify them. They are found at particular locations on the DNA molecule.) Clayton certainly did not have enough to recognize the killer, though it did help to eliminate a number of other people of interest from the inquiry. Still, the 1997 review was finally wound down, with the case being not much further along than it had been in 1983.

In 2004 Detective Superintendent Kevin Flint, who had only been a detective constable at the time of Colette's murder, became head of the Nottinghamshire homicide unit. Like the rest of the team who had worked on the case in 1983, he was disappointed that the killer had still not been brought to justice, and Flint was determined to put this right—which is perhaps unsurprising considering his reputation for dogged persistence.

Once again the evidence was reviewed, and once again Tim Clayton was asked to examine the evidence. This time, however, advances in DNA techniques allowed Clayton to work on the paper towel found in the pub bathroom. Developments in “low copy” DNA, in particular, now enabled scientists to build a full DNA profile from a very small number of DNA markers. Clayton thought it was a long shot, since they had no idea who the man in the pub had been, never mind whether he was involved in Colette's murder. But when he examined the
towel he discovered that it contained DNA from two separate people, one male and one female. He immediately compared the female sample with the known DNA profile of Colette Aram. It matched. This was enormously important: it almost certainly meant that the man who had been in the pub that night was Colette's killer. And just as significantly, Clayton was next able to extract a full sample of this man's DNA. This matched the three markers he had managed to obtain back in 1997. The team now had a full DNA profile of their killer.

That profile was then searched for against the police database. Hopes were high, since a man capable of murder in 1983 might well have committed further offences in the years since. But the results were another disappointment: there were no matches. Still not admitting defeat, Clayton suggested the idea of doing a familial DNA search. Such a search highlights anyone whose DNA bears similarities to the sample in question and who therefore might be related in some way to the person from whom the sample comes. The results were daunting, to say the least: initially the system turned up thousands of possibilities. With some work, however, this was eventually cut down to approximately 300 people of interest. This was obviously an improvement, but even this smaller number would take many months to examine.