* * * * *
Forensic Ecology on
the steep and slippery banks of the river Purwell and other cases.
This review is based
on a purchased Kindle edition; other formats are available but the
Kindle edition is fine.
Professor Wiltshire
uses a number of case histories (some more anonymised than others:
the sensitivity level is different for each case) to describe and
explain a scientific discipline which she helped create. She
discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various forensic science
disciplines, in the process making it clear that it is quite
impossible for any individual scientist to have a working knowledge,
still less a command, of all of them, or even more than just a few.
She is clear and honest about where she is the expert and where she
is not.
Her text is not just
technically-informative and fascinating but ethically-informative
too. She explains that as the defence has to find funds for its own
forensic science work and the Legal Aid authorities won’t often
fund this, she works mostly for the prosecution in criminal cases.
(In commercial cases there may well be money on both sides.) But this
is not as unfair as it seems: in civil commercial cases the plaintiff
has to share, with the defence, anything which might help the defence
case or undermine the plaintiff’s own case and this obligation is
mutual. In criminal cases, the prosecution is supposed to (not quite
unilaterally) tell the defence about everything it has got and needs
the judge’s permission to even withhold witness address details.
Professor Wiltshire’s preference would be for all scientific
evidence to be shared and subject to discussion between scientists
(“peer review” in other words) and she doesn’t mind the
prosecution paying her to find evidence which, if she is impartial
and diligent, is going to favour the truth rather than one side or
the other. This didn’t used to be a radical idea: the discussion
and testing of theories against evidence in order to get to the truth
was once the very definition of science. (When did this change and
who exactly decided that it would change?)
This book shows what
is possible and what is not, what can be done quickly and cheaply to
steer an investigation away from pitfalls and blind alleys and how
much more detailed and expensive work has to be done to actually
prove something in court. There are many people commenting on the
current state of the criminal justice systems in many countries who
would benefit from reading it. It is as pleasant a read as the
subject matter will allow and she refrains from conjuring up images
for the reader of certain experiences which understandably caused her
great anguish.
The Natural History
of Crime by Patricia Wiltshire is published in the UK by John Blake
Publishing (Bonnier Books) , 2024.
The Kindle edition
is available on this link:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C2H5PR4Y
Print editions are available from other retailers, for example:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-natural-history-of-crime/patricia-wiltshire/9781789466485
Discussion:
The following more
detailed discussion breaks some of Amazon’s rules for book reviews
(just by being a discussion of
a scientific memoir, which is worrying, really) and will not be
published there.
Update: Amazon "couldn't post" even the fully-compliant review above. This is not the first time they have been highly resistant to publishing any intelligent review of a scientific book.
A re-write has been attempted, but since Amazon tells sinners only that they have violated "a guideline" giving no clue as to which guideline has been broken, and many of the guidelines are wide open to subjective interpretation in human hands and completely random rulings at the hands of any AI, the re-write is entirely a matter of guesswork and if it fails, there's no point in trying a third time!
PS: Waterstones just accepted the same review without a quibble and I didn't even buy the book there!
The Banks of the
“Purwell”
The watercourse in
the living room is that the river-based crime scene in question lies
downstream of the confluence of the rivers Purwell and Hiz (but just
upstream of the confluence with the Oughton) and strictly-speaking it
is known as the Hiz until it meets the Ivel near Langford and becomes
part of that. However, it’s part of the protocol for Professor
Wiltshire to be shown to the scene by the police and then agree with
them what questions need to be answered and her area of operations is
determined by that, so she admits that she worked out where she
actually was afterwards, by looking at a map. And it seems to me
that if the professor, in the light of day and being guided by
policemen and scene of crime tapes, wasn’t totally clear as to
where she was, then the offenders, working more furtively and almost
certainly at dusk or in darkness (it was winter), might have been
equally confused. Because none of their apparent actions make any
sense at all in their actual location, which lies downstream of a
bridge/tunnel carrying the Hiz under the East Coast Mainline Railway.
When I was exploring
this area for completely unconnected reasons in August 2023, before
the Professor’s book was finished, let alone published, it quickly
became clear that everything about the riverbank between that tunnel
and the confluence of the Oughton with the Hiz in a meadow in
Ickleford, is difficult and hazardous in good light and in summer. I
took ONE photograph of the vegetation where the continuing “Hicca
Way” riverbank path was alleged to be, and then packed the camera
away and concentrated on not having an accident, because passive
security measures between the adjoining scrap metal business and the
river made it as impossible for me to leave the riverbank as it would
have been for emergency workers to reach me should I manage to summon
them.
The offence in this
instance involved transporting and then (when things started to go
wrong) improvising a way of hiding, the body of a torture-murder
victim who had been dead for a week and whose head and hands had been
removed prior to transport. Whether you are two men or four, all the
straightforward ways of carrying a dead man over unstable ground rely
on his still having wrists and ankles to grasp: cutting the hands off
in advance deprives the covert undertakers of the wrists. It would
have been difficult enough to get the wristless body over obstacles
and into the riverbed, getting it up the steep, tangled (at that
point) and slippery bank would have been more difficult, and if the
objective was to employ the industrial resources of the scrapyard to
destroy the body in some way, then getting it over the barbed-wire
and corrugated iron fencing from the river would have been quite
impossible.
And, yes, the reason
I am “speculating” that the objective might have
been to utilise industrial resources to utterly destroy the body, as
in the James Bond film “Goldfinger”, rather than to simply drop
the body in the river and try to cover it with bits of random
vegetation, is because the car-crushing scene in Goldfinger was
actually filmed in that very same scrapyard, using appropriate
filters to make the lighting match that of second-unit footage of
locations in Kentucky, with which it was skilfully intercut! The
original crusher may have been replaced by a more modern model, but
it will still be a modern equivalent of the same thing, in the same
place. So, if someone had spent a week or more coming up with a
masterplan that would make them a legend within their own gang, it
might well have been along those lines. And beyond the scrapyard lie
Cadwell Lane, Wallace Way and Wilbury Way offering dozens, perhaps
more than a hundred, other industrial premises containing all sorts
of other useful resources.
The anomaly the
actual location of the body disposal presents, is that it places the
maximum possible number of obstacles between where that body was
abandoned and an industrial area containing a wide choice of
resources which could have reduced the body to slivers, or ash, or an
acid or alkali solution. The safer section of the same steep
riverbank in the two photographs, below, may have been much closer to
where the criminals planned to be than where they actually ended up.
It also gives an idea of how much of a struggle the more overgrown
section downstream would have been to negotiate with a dead body in
tow!
The first photograph
(taken in August 2023) gives the best impression of the bank, the
second a better idea of where the steps are (next to the galvanised
steel railings) and this was taken in October 2023 during an
exercise to diagnose a fault causing the camera to produce usable
images only in deep shade. This fault was not apparent on the earlier
visit. It was, therefore, the final legible image of that day.
It is just upstream
of the big tunnel, where the riverbank path becomes something of a
bugger to follow and because of this there is a convenient flight
of wooden steps embedded into the bank, (not photographed) to
allow walkers to escape onto Cadwell Lane. Unfortunately, the way
onwards from there along the Hicca Way seems to be cut-off by the
relatively new railway flyover, intended to get trains from the slow
“downtrack” of the East Coast Mainline onto the Cambridge Line
without trains on the two fast tracks and the slow uptrack of the
ECML needing to be held.
But if the headless
and wristless body had made its way up those steps, on a day when
no-one much was working on the industrial estate in general and the
chosen facility in particular (hence the week’s delay?) it could
then have been taken in the front entrance (under a bridge) of the
scrapyard, or into any one of dozens of workshops, warehouses and
tool-stores in the wider industrial area. The probable reason for not
simply driving it to the intended destination would be several dozen
security cameras operated by perhaps a dozen different entities. Cars
have distinctive shapes if not numberplates: men in dark clothing and
hoods can keep to the shadows more easily than road vehicles and are
less traceable. The body might have started its journey in Arlesey or
Letchworth, too. Perhaps even further afield? Coming across the river
might have saved a vehicle from driving through Hitchin town itself,
where the number of cameras and witnesses, even at a quiet time for
the industrial estate, would have been a deterrent.
Regardless of
whether “the plan” involved the scrapyard or other industrial
premises, and even regardless of whether the intended direction of
travel was into the industrial area or out of it, it is perhaps
reasonable to assume that the person conceiving that plan and giving
the necessary orders expected the journey to involve the convenient
flight of steps between the river and Cadwell Lane, rather than the
assault-course route it actually took.
Barry George and
Bayesian Analysis.
Towards the end of
her memoir, Professor Wiltshire suggests that, far from the belated
acquittal of Barry George being occasioned by a legal loophole,
corrupt or looney-leftie lawyers, unfair exclusion of
“perfectly-valid” single-particle evidence and all the other
things which allow much of the Metropolitan Police and senior BBC
figures to maintain the Barry George is and always will be the only
possible suspect in the murder of Jill Dando, that the appeal and
subsequent acquittal was actually founded on a comprehensive Bayesian
Analysis of ALL the known available evidence, which determined that
it was extremely unlikely that Barry George had anything to do with
the murder at all.
It makes sense that
this is true, though I have NEVER seen a mainstream media source
even mention this analysis, because “reasonable doubt” only applies in
criminal law during the initial trial. To get a verdict overturned at
a later date requires not just new evidence, but for that evidence to
be extremely strong. None of the accusations levelled at Mr George’s
legal team by those party to his wrongful conviction can
actually be true, because if they were true the appeal would have
been dismissed in much the same way that a senior BBC figure brusquely and impudently instructed
three appeal court judges to dismiss it in a notorious letter which
he sent under separate covers to all three.
Far from benefiting
from “reasonable doubt” Barry George has already had his innocence proved
to a scientific standard exceeding any normal legal threshold of
proof.
One last thought:
Many people, even
some barristers, refer to the balance of probabilities used in civil cases
and trials of fact, as a “lower” standard of proof than “proof
beyond reasonable doubt” as required in any Crown Court criminal trial. This is scientifically illiterate.
Probability can be calculated, these days by advanced
techniques with great precision if the input data is good. If there
is any equation or algorithm for calculating “doubt” can someone
please tell me what it is?
The balance of
probability has to be used in civil cases because their one and only
purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence, nor to lay blame, but
to apportion liability. In the first instance between
the plaintiff and the defendant, and in the second place between
those defendants if there’s more than one of them. Apportioning something is a process of calculation and in this case the
probabilities being balanced are inseparable from that.
