Читать книгу The Cutter - It started as an obsession with hacking hair from women's heads. It ended with murder - Michael Litchfield - Страница 10

Names and addresses were documented of every person gathered on the streets in the vicinity of Heather’s home, 112 Capstone Road. Everyone was told that he or she would be interviewed within the next few hours or days. All this information would be fed into the National Criminal Records database. Desk-strapped officers trawled tirelessly through the names of residents in the streets that surrounded Charminster Road, the main thoroughfare that ran through Heather Barnett’s neighbourhood. The computer searches would flag up anyone with a criminal record for violence, sexual assault or harassment. The sex offenders register was also checked. Of particular interest would have been anyone from outside the immediate area who was among the sightseers in Capstone Road as the drama unfolded. Nothing immediately leapt out.

With so much blood and mutilation, plus the fistful of hair in Heather’s right hand, senior officers of Dorset Police had every reason to be upbeat about an early arrest. They could be forgiven their confidence – not to be confused with complacency – that the crime scene must have been a treasure trove of forensic and DNA opportunities. One senior officer was heard to say to an angry, tearful colleague, ‘Don’t fret, we’ll have this bastard canned by tomorrow.’

Certainly they were all buoyed up by the impetus of the investigation. They had started this enquiry as if in a sprint, and no one at the outset was prepared for the marathon that lay ahead.

Forensic units are trained to be diligent and painstaking. Fiction, especially on the big and small screens, has always peddled the romantic fable that murder cases are cracked by swashbuckling, foul-mouthed, maverick, beer-swilling urban cowboys with scant regard for authority or the rule book. In the real world, however, it has always been the plodders who get their man – or woman. Nowadays, the plodding takes place in forensic laboratories. Microscopes elicit far more meaningful information than any truncheon. Unfortunately, many a cast-iron case has foundered, not because of a lack of evidence but because it has been ‘contaminated’ due to rushed and sloppy detective work. Hence the meticulous care, right from the outset.

Hair samples were delicately deposited into special forensic ‘envelopes’, then sealed. Blood went into glass tubes. Clothing was dried before being packaged in separate bags, with great care being taken not to disturb trace materials. The need for drying was to avoid damage and deterioration due to mould, hence the containers into which the materials were fastidiously packed were deliberately not airtight: the contents had to be allowed to ‘breathe’. Everything was labelled, timed and dated. The exact location of each discovery had to be included on the labelling and initialled by an inspector supervising the search.

Everything had to be accounted for, and an audit trail had to be developed for each and every item of evidence. There had to be a traceable ‘footprint’ of all forensic evidence from the crime scene to the court for the trial. The prosecution had to prove that all forensic evidence had been kept secure and in appropriate conditions throughout the entire ‘journey’ of collection, collation and analysis; in other words, from the flat, to the laboratories, and to the courtroom. Everyone handling the evidence had to be named; all times and dates when it was tested had to be logged.

If the prosecution was not able to satisfy a judge that the forensic evidence could not have been tampered with or substituted, it would be ruled inadmissible. Paper bags were used to store a considerable number of samples because they prevent condensation and bacterial growth. Vials of hairs were placed on official record sheets that were sealed with wax as a means of eliminating the danger of tampering.

Of course, all this forensic activity was spread over a period of weeks and months. Meanwhile, other avenues of the investigation were pursued vigorously.

The three police officers first to arrive at the murder scene found that the front door keys were still in the lock on the inside. The patio door was locked and there was no sign of a forced entry. The paramedics quickly assessed that Heather was well beyond saving. One of the officers escorted the children back to Fiamma’s house, where he stayed with them, doing everything possible to stabilise their shock and distress.

Dr Allen Anscombe, a Home Office forensic pathologist, arrived at Heather’s flat at 8.45pm on the day of the discovery to examine the body and note all relevant medical and scientific evidence. The postmortem examination, conducted by Dr Anscombe, was performed the following day. As he went about his meticulous work, he recorded his findings on tape, which were later transcribed. His completed report read:

Scattered over the top and back of the head were ten separate, full thickness scalp lacerations, being of linear, curved or irregular outline, between 1cm and 4cm in maximum extent, many showing bruising of adjacent scalp tissue. The largest of these lacerations was a gaping, irregular, three-cornered laceration 4 x 2.5cm, centred 10cm above the top of the left ear, which had penetrated through the underlying skull, brain tissue being visible in the depth of this wound.

Large, gaping, incised wound completely across the front of her neck, extending from 2cm below her right ear to just below her left earlobe. This wound had cut through all soft tissues of the front of the neck and had cut through into the front of her spine.

TRUNK: Both breasts had been cut off by means of a knife or other sharp-edged implement. Shallow, interrupted incised wound vertically down the mid-front of her abdomen, 24cm long, with a horizontal, similar incised wound 1.5cm long, joining right mid-part, and a smaller separate, similar wound 3cm long on the lower left abdomen. All these incised wounds were of dry, parchmented appearance, without apparent bleeding from them.

HANDS: She had lacerations and bruises to the backs of her hands, with a fracture to the underlying bone of her left hand.

CONCLUSIONS: The deceased died as a result of brain injuries due to multiple impacts to the head, which also caused scalp lacerations and skull fractures. The pattern of head injury suggested impacts from an implement having a relatively small striking face, but delivering high impact energy, for example, some form of hammer.

The lacerations and associated crust-type fractures to the left-hand were typical of defence injuries, for example interposing her hand as a hammer-blow was delivered to her head. At least ten lacerating blows had been delivered to her head.

The relative lack of bleeding associated with these injuries suggested that these were inflicted after she was already dead.

Heather had fought to defend herself, desperately trying to fend off the ferocious hammer-blows as they rained on her skull. Her slayer had then committed the atrocity of sadistic mutilation after she had died.

Dealing with the time of death for the police, Dr Anscombe stated that the axillary body temperature at 9.05pm on the day of the murder provided evidence that Heather died ‘considerably nearer to 8.40am’ when she arrived home from taking the children to school, ‘than 4.00pm’, the approximate time that her body was discovered.

The doctor believed that the attack, including dragging Heather into the bathroom and mutilating her, would have taken only a few minutes.

Geoffrey Robinson, a forensic scientist and expert in the examination of crime scenes, visited Heather’s home before her body was removed. He concluded:

The blood-spatter in the workroom, adjacent to the patio door, pointed to this being the general area in which Heather Barnett sustained beating injuries to her head.

The location of the spatter indicated that its origin would place Heather Barnett’s head close to the floor. In other words, she was not standing upright when she received the blows which caused the spatter.

Based on the location of spatter in that area of the room, Mr Robinson estimated that Heather’s head was about three feet from the floor when the hammer-blows crushed into her skull.

Since the wounds were predominantly towards the back of her head, it is likely that she was generally facing backwards to her attacker and towards the patio door at the time.

Heather Barnett was probably dragged from the attack location, through the workroom, the living room, across the second hallway and into the bathroom. Further injuries were then inflicted upon Heather. The absence of any bloodstaining, due to artery damage, suggests that she was dead by the time these injuries were inflicted.

It was likely that once in the bathroom, the fly-zip of Heather Barnett’s jeans was unfastened and the material either side of the zip moved to expose the front panel of her knickers. There was evidence that a fabric covered them, possibly a hand, brought into contact with the inside surface of the front panel of those knickers.

Once in the bathroom, a hank of hair was placed in the palm of her right hand as it lay over her abdomen and some of her own head hair was cut. The evidence suggests that the killer then left the bathroom and re-entered the living room, before leaving the premises by the front door (which was at the side of the house, of course).

The action of dragging Heather into the bathroom, after she had sustained bleeding injuries to the top and back of her head, was almost certain to have caused the attacker’s upper and lower garments, including footwear, to become stained by dripped and ‘contact’ blood.

It was also possible, but less certain, that during the beating assault some blood drops would have spattered on to the attacker, possibly on to hands and face, as well as clothing.

Another forensic specialist, Andrew Sweeting, reported, ‘From the footwear-mark patterns found in blood in the bathroom, it seems likely that the attacker was wearing footwear in the size-range approximately 9–11.’

Of course, much of this harvesting of forensic evidence was spread over an intense but lengthy period of activity, extending into months.

On the Wednesday, the day after the children returned to their family home, Terry bravely agreed to be interviewed and filmed by video recorder. The interview was conducted compassionately by Helen Davis, a specialist police officer. He repeated the events of the previous day, from the time he and his sister were driven to school by their mother. Still in shock, he had to relive the nightmare.

He described pitifully how his sister had gone ‘absolutely ballistic’ on entering the bathroom. He said, ‘I saw her [Heather] lying on her back and all the blood, and shouted, “Mum! Mum! Mum!” He had to drag his sister out of the house and into the street, and almost simultaneously saw neighbours Fiamma Marsango and Danilo Restivo getting out of their car. Of Mr Restivo, he said, ‘He grabbed me and my sister and we both started crying.’

* * *

Heather Barnett was born on 29 August 1954 and grew up in Sturminster Newton, a remote region in north Dorset, a rural backwater that for many people, especially those living in the ‘progressive’ south of the county, seemed to be trapped in a time-warp. Heather’s father owned an ironmonger’s shop in which Heather, as a girl, regularly helped out for extra pocket-money.

Years later, when an adult, she moved south to Bournemouth, which for those from sleepy, darkest Dorset, was often looked upon as the land of opportunity, where people grew rich. There, Heather embarked on a curtain-making course at a local college.

After getting her diploma, she made a living as a self-employed curtain-maker, working mainly from home. But for a while she did rent a small workshop in Winton, a neighbourhood about half a mile away from her Capstone Road home. She was successful almost from the very beginning and steadily built up a solid client base.

Heather was soon in a relationship with a man called David Marsh, who moved in with her. Marsh was the father of both her children, but they parted when Caitlin was less than two years old.

* * *

Heather’s relatives undertook everything humanly possible to comfort and support Terry and Caitlin. Social Services had a significant input, but the children had suffered the brutal loss of their mother, one who had been so vibrant, and one who had devoted her life to their care and had always been there for them. A huge responsibility rested, therefore, on the shoulders of Social Services and the children’s extended families.

Remarkably for that time of day, neighbours had neither seen nor heard anything untoward. One of the first questions the police were anxious to have answered was the means by which the killer entered the premises. There was no sign of a break-in at the front or rear. A forced entry at around 9.00am on a weekday could not possibly have gone unnoticed in such an exposed location. Very quickly they concluded that Heather had opened the door voluntarily to her killer or he had been in possession of a key. This was a starting point. And very soon they were learning from a neighbour that about a week earlier Heather had mentioned that her house keys had gone missing. This had troubled her, apparently, because she did not like the idea that a stranger might be in possession of the key to her front door. The consolation was that there was nothing on the key ring that identified Heather or her address. ‘What niggled her most of all was how she came to lose the keys,’ said the neighbour. ‘She was always so very careful about those kinds of things; careful about everything, in fact. She was annoyed with herself for being careless, but she wasn’t too bothered in the end because she couldn’t see how anyone with the keys would know which locks they fitted.’

On 20 November, 12 days after the murder, the interior of Heather’s flat was subjected to Luminol testing, a technique for uncovering faint traces of blood. Luminol reacts with blood and the chemical reaction causes any normally invisible remnant to emit light for a short time, in the form of a blue luminescence. This enables otherwise invisible blood traces to be observed in conditions of low light and the results can be photographed.

Expert Philip Webster summarised his findings as follows:

The diffuse, fine, latent spray pattern developed on the carpet was confined to an area directly adjacent to the patio door and the sewing desk. Fine spray patterns are usually associated with high-velocity, blunt force trauma. As a general rule, the harder and faster someone is hit with an implement, the finer the spray pattern in blood is produced.

Within the sewing room and the lounge, there was a long contact smear, stretching from the area of the patio door threshold of the hallway to the bathroom. These stripes were consistent with that of a body, which was bleeding, gently being dragged from the sewing room to the bathroom.

There were several footwear marks developed using Luminol in the lounge and sewing room, and there was a visible footwear mark in blood-staining, located on the wooden floorboards in the small hallway, between the bathroom and the lounge. All the footwear marks developed or observed were from a similar type of trainer.

The strongest marks developed or observed were located at the bathroom end of the lounge and in the small hallway. The closer the footwear marks got to the patio door in the sewing room, the weaker the marks developed became and the more fragmentary the footwear impressions became.

This general trend of footwear strength and fragmentation was consistent with the killer’s shoes becoming contaminated with blood while in the bathroom. This area was a strong source of floor-based blood. The marks developed were consistent with a person walking towards the patio door in the sewing room. Each mark is made sequentially and consequently each one becomes weaker as some of the blood contaminate is deposited on the carpet.

In the sewing room, several weaker fragmentary footwear marks were developed in Luminol. The marks developed were located from the entrance of the lounge and on to the area adjacent to the sewing table and work desk. The footwear fragments lead in a short trail, continuing from the lounge area and up towards the patio door. Once opposite the work desk, the footwear fragments developed orientate towards the table. It appears that a few steps were taken in the sewing room away from the patio door and they appear to terminate next to the sewing-machine table.

There were no further traces of footwear marks developed in blood within the property. There were no traces of any Luminol development at the threshold of the door leading from the lounge to the hallway.

The hallway leading from the lounge to the main front door developed no footwear marks at all in Luminol. No bloodstains of any type were detected using Luminol on the hallway carpet.

This was significant because if the killer left the flat by the front-door – there was no other way out because the patio door was locked from the inside – and was still wearing bloodstained footwear, Mr Webster would have expected to have seen illuminated Luminol reactions. Bloody footmarks were also conspicuously absent from the area adjacent to the rear patio door. The strange ending of the footwear blood trail in the middle of the flat was to become one of the most baffling features of the investigation for the police.

Further scientific tests later in the investigation would establish that the killer had been wearing distinctive Nike trainers. Along with much else, the footprints were photographed with a digital camera from every conceivable angle, some of the shots delineating the general traction, while others were individual close-ups.

As soon as the photographing was complete, a powder was applied to the coagulated footprints, which could be ‘lifted’, in a similar way to fingerprints, by fabric smeared with a sticky gel. This job could be achieved equally well with an electrostatic device. Detective Superintendent Phil James, who had taken charge, had the footprint images sent to the Forensic Science Service, a highly-skilled organisation that supports every police force throughout England and Wales. However, it was not until 2007, five years after Heather’s murder, that the Footwear Intelligence Technology System (FITS) was introduced. Stored within the FITS system were at least 13,000 images of footwear types for identification purposes. But even before that innovation, the technicians were able to determine definitively that Heather’s killer had arrived in distinctive Nike trainers, and had killed and mutilated in that particular brand of footwear. But, bizarrely, they were unable to shed any light on what the perpetrator was wearing on his feet when making his getaway. Here we come to yet another enigmatic feature of this case.

Although the network of crimson footprints made a trail that was childishly easy to follow and record photographically, there was one incomprehensible feature to them – they did not lead to any exit; they simply went in circles; the blood trail in Heather’s home ended abruptly in the front room. This made no sense, unless … for Supt James, there seemed only one reasonable answer, a solution that was almost as unthinkable as the crime was unspeakable: the perpetrator had pre-planned all this butchery meticulously to the extent of taking with him a change of clothing.

Certainly most of his clothes, not just his shoes, would have been heavily bloodstained. After such brutal, ritualistic mutilation of his victim, was it possible that he had calmly undressed, put on a change of clothes, bagged everything soaked in Heather’s blood and then let himself out into the morning rush hour? Looking around him that bleak day, Supt James believed that anything was possible, no matter how sickeningly unlikely.

Working closely with the forensic examiners, Supt James and his hand-picked team, with the help of diagrams, plus some plausible speculation, put together a provisional reconstruction of the last frenetic moments in Heather’s life. Without a doubt, she confronted her killer on the front doorstep, which was only a few yards from the well-trodden pavement. The stone wall at the front was low and did not afford privacy, so any caller would have been clearly visible to passers-by or, indeed, residents in a number of houses opposite, should anyone have been looking from their windows at that exact time. Was he just lucky or had he timed his visit to military precision? Maybe Heather was enticed to the door by a demanding knock or the ringing of the doorbell. Conversely, Heather’s lost keys could have been in the murderer’s hands, and he simply let himself in.

On hearing someone turning the lock and entering, Heather would have headed for the front door, quite possibly imagining that it was one of her children, returning from school to collect something forgotten or because he or she was unwell. However, the latter possibility was unlikely because someone from the school’s admin office would have phoned, asking Heather to collect the child. No matter how implausible, the police had to consider every possible scenario.

Supt James believed that Heather realised she was in deadly danger from the moment she came face to face with her killer. Scuff marks and superficial damage to the property revealed that Heather had run for her life through her home, knocking over furniture as, almost certainly in blind panic, she made a last-gasp dash for the patio door at the rear, her only hope of escape, however forlorn. Any other season of the year and those doors might have already been open, but this was the beginning of winter and luck was not on her side.

She got no further before being felled from behind by a blunt instrument, believed to be a hammer, due to the shattering of her skull. The initial blow, delivered with immense ferocity, landed on the rear of her head, splintering the bone. As she was falling, and while crumpled on the carpet, already fatally wounded, a frenzy of blows were rained on her skull, as if her assailant was intent on destroying her entire facial features. Marks on the floor, plus the trail of blood, proved that she had been dragged into the bathroom, where her breasts had been cut off.

The position of her body in the bathroom and the lividity indicated to the pathologist that she had been moved after death. In other words, she had died from the hammer blows. The wounds left by the breast amputations also provided useful clues about the cutting tool. The killer had been in possession of a very sharp knife, maybe even a scalpel. Was he someone in the medical profession? A doctor, a nurse, or even a path lab assistant? Perhaps this wasn’t so far-fetched, as most of the Victorian Jack the Ripper theories have revolved around his having had considerable medical knowledge and surgical expertise. But this was only one of many possibilities that the detectives gradually started to consider.

At that early stage, the strands of hair clutched in Heather’s right hand still seemed pivotal. If there had been a struggle and she had wrenched hair from her attacker’s head, she was also likely to have scratched him, which would mean that there should be skin and blood from the murderer trapped beneath Heather’s fingernails, but there was no such evidence visible to the naked eye while she lay in her bathroom – nor when her hands were examined under a microscope on the slab at the morgue. None of her fingernails had been broken … so whose hair had she been gripping? Certainly not her own, it was soon established in the forensic laboratory. And, much more pertinently, neither did the hair come from the perpetrator – unless the killer had been a woman.