The Mammoth Book of New Csi (35 page)

“This death certificate is evidence of a failure properly to examine the cause of Dr Kelly’s death,” says Dr Powers. “It is evidence of a pre-judgment of the issue. In a coroner’s inquest the cause of death would not be registered until the whole inquiry had been completed. As we see here, the cause of death was registered before the Hutton Inquiry had finished. This is remarkable. To my mind it is evidence that the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was window dressing because the conclusion had already been determined.”

Chief Inspector Alan Young of Thames Valley Police, who headed the investigation into Dr Kelly’s death, did not even give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry. Then, in 2008, a Freedom of Information request revealed that the police helicopter with thermal-imaging equipment sent to search for Dr Kelly on the night he disappeared did not detect his body even though, at 2.50 a.m. on 18 July 2003, it flew directly over the spot where his body was found less than six hours later. Yet the pathologist who took Dr Kelly’s body temperature at 7 p.m. on the day his body was found determined that Dr Kelly could still have been alive at 1.15 a.m. on 18 July – just ninety-five minutes before the helicopter flew over that patch of woodland when the body would have been warm enough to be picked up by the helicopter’s heat sensors.

In his 2007 book,
The Strange Death of David Kelly
, Norman Baker said that Kelly was almost certainly murdered. Both the police investigation and Hutton Inquiry failed to resolve numerous discrepancies and anomalies in the physical, medical and witness evidence. Baker concluded that Kelly’s death was probably a revenge killing by supporters of Saddam Hussein. It was then disguised as a suicide by Thames Valley Police, who appeared to have known of an assassination plot in advance, because the British government was fearful of the political consequences.

In October 2010, the post-mortem report was made public by the new government. In it, Dr Hunt stated: “It is my opinion that the main factor involved in bringing about the death of David Kelly is the bleeding from the incised wounds to his left wrist. Had this not occurred he may well not have died at this time. Furthermore, on the balance of probabilities, it is likely that the ingestion of an excess number of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would both have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than would have otherwise been the case. Therefore I give as the cause of death: 1a. Haemorrhage; 1b Incised wounds to the left wrist; 2. Coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis.”

Dr Powers refused to accept the finding, but Julian Blon reversed his previous position, saying: “Any one of the injuries or disease processes identified – had it existed by itself – would not have been sufficient in itself to cause death. When you assemble it together, you get a different picture . . . The information provided satisfies me that this was suicide.”

O
N
9 S
EPTEMBER
2001, two planes full of passengers crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse. A third passenger plane ploughed into the Pentagon in Virginia; a fourth – possibly destined to crash into the White House or Capitol Building – came down in a field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. This presented investigators with three massive crime scenes. Each presented its own difficulties.

In Pennsylvania a makeshift morgue was set up at the National Guard Armory at the Somerset County Airport by D-MORT, the Disaster-Mortuary Operation Response Team. The team is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ national disaster medical system set up under the 1996 federal Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act. Heading the team at Stonycreek was forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik, the curator at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, who has worked on numerous murder cases.

Some seventy-five people went to work, including X-ray technicians, anthropologists, forensic pathologists, dentists and experts on DNA analysis, to assist Somerset County coroner Wallace Miller in the identification of the thirty-three passengers and seven crew members. The D-MORT workers’ job was to attempt to document every piece of tissue, no matter how small. By walking or crawling over the crash site and by sifting dirt through mesh screens, D-MORT workers recovered even tiny samples that, despite their size, would be analysed and identified. Afterwards, the remains were transferred to the Armed Forces Laboratory at Dover, Delaware, for further tests.

Miller had asked everyone involved, particularly those working in the evidence recovery and search efforts at the crash site, to consider the dignity of the victims and the feelings of their families.

“We give the site the dignity and respect it commands,” said Miller. “These people are loved ones of family members . . . We respect that and embrace it.”

Miller was among the very first to arrive after the 10.06 crash on the sunny morning of 11 September. He was surprised at the small size of the smoking crater.

It looked, he said, “like someone took a scrap truck, dug a ten-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it”.

As coroner, Miller had only handled two homicides in his twenty-year career – a domestic murder-suicide and the case of a woman who killed her husband after he refused to take her rattlesnake hunting.

After about twenty minutes, he said, he stopped being a coroner because there were no bodies at the scene.

“It became like a giant funeral service,” he said. He found himself honoured and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge that he considers to be the final resting place of forty national heroes.

When the FBI arrived, the crash site became an FBI crime scene and agents clambered over it clad in white suits to protect them from jet fuel and possible biological hazards posed by human remains. Investigators drained a two-acre pond about 1,000 ft (300 m) from the crater where the jetliner slammed into the ground. It was full of plane parts, personal belongings and human remains.

When the FBI left, the crash site became the coroner’s crime scene again. Miller said that he could not guarantee to identify the remains of all the passengers or that investigators would find every last trace. The first victim was identified nine days after the incident when a tooth was matched to a dental record. Others were identified in the next few days.

“The identifications we have made for now have been mostly through dental records and fingerprints,” he said. “We’re also using radiology records, and we can find surgical work such as hip replacements.”

Fingerprint specialists examined tissue and dentists examined teeth, fillings or wire from dental braces that had been collected for comparison with X-rays and other records obtained from relatives of the crash victims. Anthropologists and X-ray technicians did the same with bones, looking for evidence of healed fractures, past injuries or surgeries.

As part of the identification process, the FBI insisted that DNA matches be used as a final confirmation. Victims’ families were asked to provide items such as the victims’ hairbrushes, toothbrushes, used razor blades or licked postage stamps, so that medical investigators at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s DNA-identification laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, could glean samples to draw final DNA matches. Blood samples from close relatives were also taken. The FBI also hoped that DNA links would help them identify the hijackers, whose identities at that point were concealed by the fake IDs they had used when boarding the plane.

The victims and the killers together constituted about 7,000 lbs (3,175 kg) of human flesh, most of which was cremated on impact. Some 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue, totalling less than 600 lbs (272 kg) or about 8 per cent of the total, were recovered by the hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods in the following weeks.

Dr Dennis Dirkmaat, a professor of forensic anthropology at Mercyhurst College in Erie who was called in to assist, said: “We would expect in a crash as horrific as this that there would be extreme fragmentation.”

He assisted the FBI and evidence recovery teams at the crime scene, which was marked off in grids of 20 × 20 yards (20 × 20 m). When they were located, debris and remains were marked, photographed and then collected. Personal effects were then transferred to the FBI.

Dirkmaat’s goal was to get the biological material off site as soon as possible, leaving law enforcement officers to handle the non-biological remains. Most of the plane had disintegrated into jagged metallic nuggets, mangled and melted into irregular shapes, little bigger than children’s marbles.

“It’s always very troubling in the terms of putting a human face on this,” Dirkmaat said. “It’s hard to put into words . . . We feel really badly about what happened. But we have a job to do for the families, and we have to do the best job we can.”

The Boeing 757, still heavily laden with jet fuel, had slammed almost straight down at about 575 mph (925 km/h) into a rolling patch of grassy land that had long ago been strip-mined for coal. The impact spewed a fireball of horrific force across hundreds of acres of towering hemlocks and other trees, setting many ablaze. The fuselage burrowed straight into the earth so forcefully that one of the black boxes was found 25 ft (7.6 m) underground.

There was a range of people on board. Aged twenty to seventy-nine, they came from New York City, Honolulu, Manalapan in New Jersey and Greensboro, North Carolina. They were energetic salespeople, ambitious college students, corporate executives, lawyers, a retired ironworker, a waiter going to his son’s funeral, a four-foot-tall disabled-rights activist, a census worker, a fish and wildlife officer, a retired couple who were volunteer missionaries, a former collegiate judo champion, a retired paratrooper, a weightlifter, a flight attendant who had been a policewoman, a female lawyer who had a brown belt in karate, a 6 ft 5 in. muscular rugby player who was gay and a former college quarterback.

Herded to the back of the plane, they used mobile phones or the on-board phones to call 911 and contact loved ones. Only then did they discover that the hijacking of United Airline’s Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco was not an isolated incident. Four passengers in particular – Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham and Jeremy Glick – would be hailed as heroes because their phone conversations provided the most detailed account of the passengers’ plan for a life-or-death charge for the cockpit after the terrorists had seized control.

Beamer, a thirty-two-year-old account manager for a Silicon Valley software firm, made a lengthy 911 call to Lisa Jefferson, a veteran operator outside Chicago. As the plane lurched and passengers screamed, Beamer, a devout Christian, and his seatmates recited the Lord’s Prayer. Jefferson joined in. More screams were heard while Beamer and others recited the twenty-third psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”

Then Beamer said: “Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll!”

The cockpit voice recorder that records the last thirty minutes of every flight was recovered at the crash site. Most of the tape is taken up with the howling wind created by a plane travelling fast at low altitude. But the recording also includes the seven-minute death struggle in which muffled voices are heard screaming and cursing in both English and Arabic as the plane plunges towards the earth. The families of the victims were allowed to listen to the tape, something that is not normally made public. The recording opened the possibility that some of the victims were killed before the plane hit the ground. Investigators who recovered remains from the crash site brought possible stab wounds and lacerations to the attention of FBI pathologists. But the FBI said that “the catastrophic nature of the crash and fragmentation” left them unable to draw conclusions.

The crime scene was in a scenic stretch of the Appalachians – 70 miles (113 km) south-east of Pittsburgh and 170 miles (274 km) north-west of Washington, DC. It was settled more than a thousand years ago by the Monongahela, and crisscrossed by trails of the Shawnee, Iroquois and Delaware tribes. Then Europeans – German, British, Dutch and Italian – arrived here to hunt and trap, then to settle. In the late 1700s, a German named Christian Shank built a mill on the Stonycreek River, and a town grew up that took his name. It was supposed to become the hub of commerce, but remained a tiny community of 245 people, who describe it as a place that time forgot, in the middle of nowhere. They farmed and fished and hunted, cut timber, mined coal and made steel. They built many churches where they were taught to help out one another when crops went bad, when fires and floods hit their neighbours, when loved ones were taken away by death.

When Flight 93 hit this isolated spot, it was suddenly overrun by the FBI, the state police, a federal disaster mortuary team, the Red Cross, the National Transportation Safety Board, officials of United Airlines and the news media. Almost instantly, informal church networks and local telephone trees were activated and a cascade of hot casseroles, pots of coffee, cold drinks and clean clothes materialized at the crash site. An estimated 5,000 people, mostly Pennsylvania natives, came from across the country to help. Meanwhile, the deep gash in the earth was being excavated, examined and sifted. The nearest thing to a local victim was the Reverend Larry Hoover, a Lutheran pastor in Somerset County who also ran a family lumberyard. He and his wife Linda owned 8 acres (32,000 m
²
) of woodland with a secluded cabin that was their weekend retreat and their planned retirement home. Their thirty-four-year-old son Barry lived in a sturdy old stone cottage on the property. The shock wave from Flight 93 crashing just a few hundred yards away spewed debris through the woods with such force that it blew out all the windows and doors, and shook the foundations. Human remains were still being found there months later.