The Mammoth Book of New Csi (7 page)

Professor Meadow was again called as an expert witness in the case against Trupti Patel, a Punjabi-born pharmacist from Berkshire who was accused of murdering three of her children. Her first child was born in 1995, but her second child, a boy named Amar, died unexpectedly at two months. In July 1999, her third child, Jamie, died after fifteen days. Again, a post-mortem revealed no cause of death, but when Mia, a girl, died after twenty-two days in June 2001, she was found to have four broken ribs. Trupti Patel maintained that this had been caused by attempts to resuscitate the child, while Meadow pointed to it as evidence of abuse.

Again the children had undergone several medical examinations shortly before their deaths and had been found to be well. Two key prosecution witnesses who had examined Mia’s body disputed Trupti Patel’s claim that the fractured ribs were caused by attempts at resuscitation. But at the trial they said that they were no longer sure. Paediatric pathologist Professor Rupert Risdon wrote to the judge saying that he had found evidence of rib fractures caused by resuscitation in three children that he had examined in the previous month alone, and a Home Office pathologist, Nathaniel Carey, said he could “no longer state categorically that the rib fractures were not due to resuscitation”.

Meadow’s assertion that “in general, sudden and unexpected death does not run in families” also came under attack. The jury heard evidence that Trupti Patel’s maternal grandmother lost five children in infancy, but that her remaining seven children were “alive and well”. They took ninety minutes to acquit her.

Following the acquittal of Sally Clark and Trupti Patel, the BBC investigated the Angela Cannings case and discovered that her paternal grandmother had lost two children to SIDS and her paternal great-grandmother one. Her appeal was “fast-tracked” and, in January 2004, the original conviction was found to be unsafe.

Professor Meadow was now under attack. Giving his reasons for allowing Angela Cannings’s appeal, the Deputy Chief Justice, Lord Justice Judge, described Meadow’s theory linking Münchausen syndrome by proxy and cot deaths as a “travesty of justice”. A number of other convictions were quickly overturned.

Speaking in the House of Lords, the opposition spokesman for health Lord Howe said that Münchausen syndrome by proxy was “one of the most pernicious and ill-founded theories to have gained currency in childcare and social services in the past ten to fifteen years. It is a theory without science. There is no body of peer-reviewed research to underpin Münchausen syndrome by proxy. It rests instead on the assertions of its inventor. When challenged to produce his research papers to justify his original findings, the inventor of Münchausen syndrome by proxy stated, if you please, that he had destroyed them.”

In July 2005, Meadow was struck off by the General Medical Council. Meadow appealed and the High Court reinstated him. This decision was overturned by the Appeal Court, though it was found, by a majority of two to one, that he was not guilty of serious professional misconduct.

Meadow’s name was in the press again that year when a paper he had written on “Non-accident Salt Poisoning” was used in the trial of Ian and Angela Gay, who were accused of killing their adopted son Christian by force-feeding him excessive amounts of salt. Other medical experts insisted that the elevated level of salt in the boy’s body could have been caused by a form of diabetes. But the couple spent fifteen months in jail before their conviction was quashed.

That is not to say that parents do not harm their children. There was the famous case of Kathleen Megan Marlborough in Australia. At the age of twenty, she married Craig Folbigg and the couple settled in Newcastle, New South Wales. Their first child, Caleb, was born in February 1989. The child had breathing difficulties. One night, Craig was woken by his wife’s screams. He found her standing over the crib. The baby was dead. The cause of death was recorded as “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome”.

In June 1990, Kathleen had a second son, Patrick. Soon after the baby arrived home, Craig was again woken by his wife’s screams. She was standing over Patrick’s cot. The child seemed inert, but Craig noticed faint signs of breathing and revived him. After he was rushed to hospital, it was found that Patrick was blind and suffering from epilepsy. In February 1991, he died while Craig was out at work. A post-mortem determined that he had suffocated while suffering an epileptic fit.

The couple moved to Thornton, New South Wales, and Kathleen fell pregnant again. In October 1992, she had a daughter, Sarah. At eleven months, the child caught a cold and had trouble sleeping. That night, Craig was woken by Kathleen’s screams. Sarah was dead. According to the death certificate, it was another case of cot death.

The couple moved to Singleton where Kathleen gave birth to Laura in August 1997. At nineteen months, she caught a cold and died. Laura was considered too old to have succumbed to SIDS and, this time, the coroner ordered an investigation.

As the police began their enquiries, Kathleen left Craig. In a bedside drawer, he found her diaries, revealing a woman with enormously conflicting emotions, especially where it came to her children.

“My brain has too much happening, unstored and unrecalled memories just waiting. Heaven help the day they surface and I recall. That will be the day to lock me up and throw away the key. Something I’m sure will happen one day,” she wrote on Wednesday, 11 June 1997.

The diary also revealed a terrible secret. In December 1969, Thomas Britton had stabbed his lover Kathleen Donovan to death in the Sydney suburb of Annandale. Britton allegedly told a witness: “I had to kill her because she had killed my child.”

At the time, the couple had an eighteen-month-old daughter, also called Kathleen, who was sent to an orphanage before being adopted. Kathleen Marlborough was grown up before she learnt the truth. In her diary, for 14 October 1996 – with three of her children already dead – she wrote: “Obviously, I am my father’s daughter.”

On 19 April 2001, Kathleen Folbigg was arrested and charged with the murder of her four children. After a four-month trial, she was found guilty of all four murders and sentenced to forty years with a non-parole period of thirty years.

A few weeks after her conviction, Kathleen wrote to the
Sydney Morning Herald
, protesting that she had been convicted merely on circumstantial evidence and attacking her husband for betraying her.

Her appeal against the convictions was dismissed, but her sentence was reduced to thirty years with a non-parole period of twenty-five years. She is kept in protective custody due to the danger of violence from other inmates.

T
HE PROSECUTION OF
Canadian pig farmer Robert William “Willie” Pickton tested crime scene investigation to its limits. Charged with the murder of twenty-six women, he was only tried for the slaying of six. But the court was shown a videotape where Pickton boasted to an undercover policeman posing as a cellmate that he had actually killed forty-nine women.

“I got a murder charge,” he said after he was first arrested, “and forty-eight more to come. Whoopee.”

But he rued being stopped before he had made it fifty.

“Fifty?” asked the undercover cop, Sergeant Bill Fordy.

“I made my own grave by being sloppy,” said Pickton. “Doesn’t that kick you in the arse now? I was going to fucking do one more; make it even.”

Even then his lust for murder would not be satisfied. He said he intended to let everything die down for a while, and then kill another twenty-five.

During the conversation Sergeant Fordy suggested that throwing corpses in the ocean was the best way to get rid of the evidence.

“I did better than that,” said Pickton. “Rendering plant.”

He did this so effectively that he created a massive problem for the forensic teams.

It had baffled the police, he bragged.

“They never seen anything like this before,” he said, boasting he was “bigger than the Green River”.

He was referring to the so-called Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, who in 2003 had pleaded guilty to the murder of forty-nine prostitutes in Washington State – though he claimed to have killed many more – disposing of their bodies in wooded areas around King County and in the Green River itself.

Pickton was well aware that he was being videotaped. At one point, he waved at the camera in his cell and said: “Hello!” Nevertheless, in court, he pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In fact, Pickton may well have killed more than the forty-nine he claimed. He was anything but systematic and well organized. He rarely knew the names of his victims, picking them from the hookers and drug addicts who inhabited Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area known as the “Low Track”. During Pickton’s rampage, at least sixty-five women disappeared from that area alone.

Women had begun to go missing from the Low Track in 1983. By 1997, the police began to fear that more than two dozen had been murdered, though no bodies ever turned up. However, they started to compile a list that would soon include the names of a number of women Pickton was later charged with murdering.

The police already had the first clue to the mystery. In March 1995, a roadside vendor found the right half of a woman’s skull in a marshy area outside Mission, British Columbia, just off Highway 7 on a small hill overlooking a creek that runs into the Stave River. The area was searched by a police dog and divers trawled the creek, but nothing more was found. A pathologist, an entomologist and a coroner all examined the skull. None of them could give a reasonable explanation of how the skull got there or who the victim was. In the files she simply became Jane Doe.

Career cop Tim Sleigh was part of the investigation team. Although he was transferred to another detachment in 1996, he remained absorbed by the Jane Doe case. He even bought a house nearby and, from August 1997 to March 2000, walked the area hoping to find a clue that would tell him who she was. She could have been any one of the growing number of women who had gone missing from Downtown Eastside.

By September 1998, an aboriginal group complained that a number of First Nation women had gone missing from the Low Track area and had probably been murdered. They submitted a list. Detective Dave Dickson took an interest and drew up a list of his own. Soon, he had enough names to persuade his superiors to set up a cold-case taskforce. They began with forty cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to discover a pattern, they narrowed the roster down to sixteen prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time that Pickton was arrested, the list had grown to fifty-four women.

The taskforce’s investigations were given a fresh impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes. The problem was, despite Dickson’s growing list of names, they had yet to prove that a serial killer was at work.

That May, Inspector Kim Rossmo began work on the case. He was the pioneer of “geographic profiling”, then a new investigative technique. Using a computer system, he mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Most serial criminals, it seems, work around an “anchor point” – their home, workplace or other significant location. Using geographic profiling Rossmo maintained that the approximate location of an offender’s home or workplace could be worked out by analysing the spatial patterns of the attacks. In one case, he traced a serial killer to within two-fifths of a mile (0.6 km) of his home.

Rossmo based his technique on research into the way that African lions hunt, believing that it matches the way serial killers work. Lions look for an animal that exhibits some indication of weakness – the old, the very young, the infirm, the vulnerable. They go to a watering hole and wait, knowing it is a draw for their victims.

“We see that all the time with criminal offenders,” says Rossmo. “They go to target-rich environments to do their hunting. Spatial patterns are produced by serial killers as they search and attack. The system analyses the geography of these, the victim encounter, the attack, the murder and body dump sites.”

However, in the Low Track investigation, his superiors questioned his theory and dismissed his conclusions. Rossmo resigned. Nevertheless, geographic profiling later became a respected technique used worldwide to track serial killers. The problem was that, at the time, Canada’s Violent Crime Linkage System did not track missing persons unless there was some evidence of foul play. In some cases, Dickson’s taskforce did not even have a date when the woman had gone missing. Pimps and other prostitutes were reluctant to cooperate with officers who might put them in jail.

On 3 October 1996, twenty-two-year-old drug user and prostitute Tanya Holyk disappeared. Her family feared something had happened to her when she did not come home to see her son, who was about to turn one, after a night out with friends. However, they did not report her missing until 3 November. Pickton was later charged with her murder but, at the time, with no body, there was no murder investigation. It was just another missing-persons case that did not merit much police attention. And there was certainly no reason to connect her disappearance with Robert Pickton, a pig farmer at Port Coquitlam just outside Vancouver, although his name had already become familiar to the local police there.

In 1992, Robert Pickton’s younger brother David had been convicted of sexual assault. He had attacked his victim in a trailer on the pig farm, but she had escaped. He was fined $1,000 and given thirty days’ probation. Soon after, the two brothers converted one of the farm buildings into what they called the Piggy Palace. Parties were held there under the auspices of the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. This was a non-profit body set up to “organize, coordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups”. In fact, it was a drinking club for local bikers and prostitutes were shipped in from the Low Track to provide the entertainment for events that drew as many as 1,800 people. However, the Picktons fell foul of the zoning laws and, after a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1998, they were served with an injunction banning future parties and the Piggy Palace Good Times Society was stripped of its non-profit status.