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Tags Ian Stephen , Jodi Jones , Luke Mitchell , murder cases

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Old 22nd August 2019, 12:22 AM   #121
Sandra Lean
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The girl lived in Kenmore, which is, in fact, over two hours' drive from Newbattle, where Luke lived (for some reason, having been there many times in my younger days, I thought it was just over an hour away).

Luke still spoke with her on the phone, but they had not been together physically since New Year 2003 - he and Jodi got together around the end of March, beginning of April that year.

There was no evidence that Jodi knew about Luke's previous relationship with her and an intended holiday to Kenmore in the summer of 2003 had been cancelled by Corinne prior to Jodi's death - Luke and Jodi were supposed to be at a sleepover in Midlothian the weekend after the murder to celebrate a friend's birthday.

The judge said, at Luke's sentencing, Jodi left "joyfully" to meet him that evening. Her mother said Jodi was "chuffed" to be getting out to see Luke. Jodi indicated in her diary that she would be devastated if Luke finished with her - it seems reasonable to assume she'd be equally distraught if she found out Luke was cheating on her, yet there were no signs of her being disturbed or upset in any way on the afternoon of June 30th, before she left home.

The theory about Jodi finding out about the other girlfriend and the ensuing fight getting out of hand was dreamed up by SIO Dobbie, but the interrogating officer in the Section 14 interview on August 14th 2003 (six weeks after the murder) was trying to suggest that Luke killed Jodi in a fit of jealousy that she might be cheating on him (even though, again, there was no evidence to support such a suggestion).

So, if Luke was cheating on Jodi and she found out, what reason would there be for Luke to kill her? It's not as if they were an adult married couple where Luke potentially stood to lose property, business, money etc in a messy divorce settlement - they were 14 years old. He wouldn't have suffered any of the more extreme emotions - betrayal, devastation, etc, because he was the one doing the cheating in this scenario.

In my opinion, the only way this theory is even remotely credible is if it was the other way around and Luke discovered Jodi was cheating on him. Even then, it's very, very unlikely.
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Old 27th August 2019, 02:48 AM   #122
big-E
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Originally Posted by Chris_Halkides View Post
Big-E,

Welcome to the forum. I see that you have not often been on the foot path; however, I do have two questions about it. How tall is the wall along the path, and is it uniform in height? Thank you.

*cough cough* Join Date: Sep 2006 *cough cough*

I admit I have lurked a lot since then...


Anyway - to the best of my recollection the wall is pretty old and very much not continuous, with gaps where it has collapsed over the years. Most of the walls in the woodland areas around Newbattle are 18th/19th century and quite decrepit in places.

Much was made of the fact that when he joined the search party, Luke went directly for a well-used V-shaped collapsed gap in the wall very near where Jodi's body was found. For those parts that do have an intact wall, it's a good size - at least six or eight feet high - if you use Google Maps and go into Street View mode, and select the road near Newbattle Parish Church, the walls either side of the road are of the typical type, though these are better-maintained for obvious reasons. Hope that helps!
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Old 27th August 2019, 08:49 PM   #123
Chris_Halkides
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Are the items of evidence independent?

Originally Posted by Rolfe View Post
And yet the SCCRC, while acknowledging that the interviews were outrageous, simply said that since Luke didn't confess despite all the pressure then it didn't matter. I think this is also outrageous. Is the message supposed to be, if the police shout and yell at you and refuse to believe a word you say, it's better to confess and then the SCCRC will come to your aid? I don't think so.
Hasel and Kassin wrote an article about how false confessions influence other evidence. They noted, "The legal system presumes that various lay and expert witnesses furnish evidence that is independent, so that one piece of evidence is not ‘‘tainted’’ by another. Yet the cognitive confirmation processes that affect juries may also corrupt witnesses who are apprised of confessions...Perhaps less apparent is that confessions may also suppress exculpatory evidence, leading individuals who had provided alibis to doubt their own recollections and forensic experts to interpret physical evidence differently than they would otherwise."

Hasel and Kassin focused on false confessions, but the problem is not limited to any one form of bad evidence IMO. The SCCRC ignored the implication of the interrogation: If the police were browbeating Luke, it meant that they thought he is guilty; therefore, they had at some point in the past stopped investigating in an honest manner. In other words, the problem of the evidence not being independent is likely to be feature of investigations besides those involving a false confession. The repeated use of dubious forensics in the Lundy case is also suggestive of a poor overall investigation, to take another example.
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Old 3rd September 2019, 08:31 AM   #124
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Originally Posted by Chris_Halkides View Post
Solely for the sake of argument, how strong a case would this be if we took some of the prosecution's points at face value. Let's start by assuming that Ms. Bryson saw Jodi and Luke. Let's also as take as true that the dog did not signal at the wall.

Here are my problems: One, finding a body when one is out looking is not impossible; why wouldn't you check on the other side of the wall? Two, seeing Luke and Jodi together would prove that Luke lied, but I am not sure how much more it proves. We are still left with a motive that is almost pure speculation, no murder weapon, no eyewitness to the crime, no confession, little or no forensic evidence against Luke versus some forensic evidence against others, no time of death from body temperature (unless I missed this). The timeline for Luke to have committed this crime and to have cleaned up is very tight.

BTW this is another crime that according to the various authorities was perpetrated by an inexperienced criminal who nevertheless managed to clean himself up perfectly and to leave little or nothing forensically incriminating behind.

I think there's a bigger problem with the Bryson sighting actually being Luke and Jodi than you outline. It wouldn't just mean that Luke had lied, it would mean that Corinne and Shane had also lied. Sandra has kindly filled in the details of the early evening in the Mitchell household and both his mother and his brother confirmed that he was in the house until about 5.30. The landline activity places him there at both 4.05 and 4.25, but if he had shot off in the direction of Easthouses soon after the second call he could still have made it to the junction of the paths by 4.50 and been seen by Andrina Bryson.

It's Shane's return at 4.40 and then Corinne's return at 5.15 that place Luke in the house at the crucial period between 4.40 and 5.30. If in fact he was in Easthouses at 4.50 then both Shane and Corinne are lying and that's a big deal.

I want to go into this point later. I think the Bryson evidence is both the crucial incriminating point against Luke, and the point which is easiest to refute. It's a very big issue.
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Old 3rd September 2019, 08:37 AM   #125
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Originally Posted by big-E View Post
This is my 'local murder' - in fact I was very close by when it happened. I used to live on Newbattle Abbey Crescent (the same street as the Mitchell family), my parents still did at the time of the killing, and I was visiting them that week. In fact as I recall I arrived from London that very day - my dad picked me up from Edinburgh and we must have been driving in to Newbattle Abbey Crescent from the Dalkeith direction within an hour or two of the actual event, if not actually at the exact time. The next morning I was taking the dog for a walk and passed the Newbattle end of the footpath and saw police standing there - they gave me a look as I looked at them, but didn't actually stop me and I didn't ask them anything... but I hadn't seen anything the day before so there's no missed evidence there, before anyone pounces on that line of inquiry.

Of course just being close by doesn't grant me any special knowledge - other than to confirm that the court of public opinion was swift, and the story about the mother incinerating clothes was certainly spread widely.

However, if there are any specific questions about the local geography I might be able to help as I spent many years in the area - although generally not on the footpath that led to the murder scene itself, as it happens (I must have taken various dogs on hundreds of circuits of the woods around Newbattle Abbey Crescent, but never really had occasion to go to Easthouses).

Originally Posted by big-E View Post
*cough cough* Join Date: Sep 2006 *cough cough*

I admit I have lurked a lot since then...

Anyway - to the best of my recollection the wall is pretty old and very much not continuous, with gaps where it has collapsed over the years. Most of the walls in the woodland areas around Newbattle are 18th/19th century and quite decrepit in places.

Much was made of the fact that when he joined the search party, Luke went directly for a well-used V-shaped collapsed gap in the wall very near where Jodi's body was found. For those parts that do have an intact wall, it's a good size - at least six or eight feet high - if you use Google Maps and go into Street View mode, and select the road near Newbattle Parish Church, the walls either side of the road are of the typical type, though these are better-maintained for obvious reasons. Hope that helps!

Hi, big-E, longtime lurker! I have two questions. First, can you assess how much the location has changed in the intervening 16 years? Has even more of the wall fallen down and so on? Are the white houses and the close-boarded fence and the roundabout just north of the eastern end of the path new since 2003? I only live about half an hour's drive away myself and I was thinking of taking a look at the actual location, but it would be handy to know how similar it actually is now to how it was back then. I understand that the wall is over six feet in height and that the low point of the V was itself about four feet from the ground.

Second, can you say more about the court of local public opinion? I see this case as primarily being about police misconduct, and I think the rumours must have been started by the police, so it would be helpful to know how the whole narrative developed.
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Old 3rd September 2019, 09:03 AM   #126
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Originally Posted by Chris_Halkides View Post
It is my understanding that one motive for this crime that has been advanced is that Luke had a second girlfriend, that Jodi found out, and that in their quarrel he killed her. I am not sure whether or not the prosecution put this forward at the trial.

Offhand, this looks unlikely. From the reading I have done, it sounds as if she lived an hour away by car; therefore, I do not understand how Luke could have traveled this distance regularly, being too young to drive. It is not clear to me that there was an ongoing relationship, nor have I seen evidence that Jodi knew even of the existence of this young woman.

But in the spirit of an earlier comment of mine, let us suppose that there was a relationship and that Jodi found out. How likely is it that a quarrel would end in murder versus tears, angry words, or perhaps a slapped face?

They were fourteen. The other girl was thirteen. The whole thing is in the realms of paranoid fantasy. Luke apparently phoned the other girl from time to time, but they hadn't met for about six months, since before Luke and Jodi got together. A proposed return by the family to the same holiday destination in 2003 had been vetoed before the murder. Knowing 13-year-old girls it's perfectly possible she regarded herself as his "girlfriend" while he saw it as a casual friendship following on from a holiday snog.

If I've got the right Kenmore, it's over 90 miles from Easthouses, almost two hours by car (and the car route involves motorways). (And in fact the other two Kenmores I'm aware of in Scotland are even further away.) It's absolutely impossible that Luke was seeing her behind Jodi's back.

Yes I know Shakespeare's Juliet was also thirteen, but that's actually Shakespeare's point. Something that was in reality merely a first teenage foray into romance and which would probably have cooled as fast as it ignited if left to its own devices, was fanned into a conflagration by the behaviour of the relatives.

Kids of that age fall in and out of relationships readily, and pretty fast. Luke and Jodi were obviously a confirmed couple, given the length of time they'd been together and the fact that the relationship had become sexual, but on the probabilities it's unlikely they'd have ended up getting married or being a cohabiting couple as adults. (Yes, it does happen, but it's unusual. Shifting partnerships are far more usual at that age.)

There's absolutely no evidence of Jodi being annoyed with Luke. And supposing she had been, as you say, tears and angry words would probably have been the end of it. Indeed, think about it. If the quarrel was started by Jodi, because she'd found out about the other girl, presumably the murder could not have been premeditated on Luke's part. So did he just happen to be carrying a knife? I think the prosecution tried to show he regularly carried knives but I don't think they had a coherent theory of how the "quarrel" emerged or what Luke's motivation was. Sandra has covered this in her subsequent post.

The thing is, I've been looking at a lot of intimate partner killings as I'm involved in a sponsored bicycle ride this Saturday to commemorate these victims (I'm riding Glen Orchy for Suzanne Pilley). As far as I can see, intimate partner killing is something done by older men than Luke. Older teens, young men, middle-aged men, older men, yes. The number of women and girls murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, bidie-ins, exes and even rejected suitors is appalling. I think this is why the police latched on to Luke as their preferred suspect. And yes, children do kill. Mary Bell. The James Bulger murder. But the two scenarios are quite distinct. Children who kill usually, as far as I can see, kill children younger than themselves, children young enough to be overpowered. Intimate partner killing is an entirely different animal and I don't think it happens in 14-year-old children. It's a pathology of older men.
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Old 3rd September 2019, 11:41 AM   #127
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I've been on holiday and although I've been reading the forum I've not been in a position to make considered posts. I've been thinking about this case though, and what I've concluded is that this is essentially about police malpractice, probably originating in blundering incompetence, but progressing beyond that fairly quickly.

Ironically I spent the weekend on a music workshop course in, of all places, Tulliallan Castle, better known as the Scottish Police College. This is an environment usually occupied by policemen and trainee policemen. The walls are liberally plastered with posters extolling the virtues and necessity of "Integrity", "Fairness", "Respect" and "Human Rights". It was forcefully brought home to me that the bastards responsible for locking a child away for 20 years for something he quite obviously didn't do had all graduated from this place. I wonder if they paid any attention to the posters? I had a bit of a hollow laugh.

This case was manufactured by the police. The initial, fatal mistake which was made was the singling out of Luke as the preferred (indeed sole) suspect pretty much as soon as the police arrived at the murder scene. Sandra has described this in her book. There were four people in the "search party" which found Jodi's body - Luke, Alice Walker, Janine Jones and Steven Kelly. Three of them went over the wall into the woodland strip. Neither Luke nor Steven approached the body or touched it but Alice went right up to it and cradled Jodi's head in her lap. (Janine didn't go over the wall.) All four were at the scene when the police arrived.

Luke, the youngest of the group and the only one still legally a child (the legal age of majority in Scotland is 16) was separated from the other three and taken to a different police station (Dalkeith I think). His mobile phone was taken away on the journey. At the police station he was stripped and put into a paper suit, and DNA samples and fingernail scrapings were taken from him. His clothes were taken away for forensic examination. (Bear in mind he was a 14-year-old boy who had just discovered the horribly mutilated body of the girl he was in love with.)

To me that sounds like the treatment a serious suspect would be given, but according to the police it was merely correct procedure for examining a witness who had been in the crime scene, to see if significant evidence had transferred on to their person. Well OK, but what about the other three? They were taken together to a different police station where statements were taken, but they weren't examined forensically nor were their clothes taken. By the time the police came looking for the clothes they had been wearing that evening pretty much everything had been washed and there was actually some uncertainty as to what they had been wearing at the time. Obviously they'd had baths and showers and scrubbed their nails, as people do, so no chance of getting any meaningful forensics by then. This includes Alice, who actually touched Jodi's body.

It seems pretty clear that Luke was the target suspect right from that point. There's no other way to explain that treatment. The police did say that they were labouring under the misapprehension that only Luke had gone over the wall and that was why they didn't forensically examine the other three. If that's true that is the first point of gross incompetence. They had all three people there. All they had to do was ask them. Or simply proceed as if they had all been over the wall. Certainly not to omit the forensic examination on the mere assumption that they hadn't been anywhere near the body,

If we look beyond this feeble excuse, what else is there? I don't believe the police knew who Luke Mitchell was. He'd never been in trouble with the police. He wasn't a Damian Echols type character widely believed to be mad, bad and dangerous to know. He wasn't a goth. His appearance seems to have been pretty run-of-the-mill for a young teenage boy in the area. His family wasn't a problem family. Although his parents were divorced that's hardly unusual and his mother owned her own house and her own business. Despite later attempts to paint this as a "bad family" (the Mitchells) versus "good family" (the Joneses) situation, it's actually the Jones family which looks more problematic to me - although that's just speaking relatively. Luke Mitchell was a good pupil who liked outdoor activities, had his own horse, and had been an army cadet until only a few months before. The police could have had no personal reason to latch on to him as a suspect at midnight on 30th June.

The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that someone in the hastily-thrown-together investigation team heard "boyfriend" and "found the body", and put two and two together to get 22. Intimate partner murder is distressingly common. "The boyfriend did it" is not an unreasonable supposition. About 70% of murder victims knew their murderers. But all four members of the search party knew Jodi, and in any case, that leaves 30% of murder victims who are murdered by a complete stranger. Half an hour into the investigation is way too early to be jumping to that sort of conclusion. But it seems they weren't just targeting people who knew Jodi, or relatives, but "the boyfriend". This reasoning is fatally flawed. Intimate partner murders aren't a thing with 14-year-old kids.

It does seem to be the case that murderers do sometimes try to insert themselves into the murder investigation, and/or the search for the body. However, it's a daft thing to do. Engineering the finding of the body was described as "Mitchell's big mistake". I could see the sense of trying to be the one to find the body in order to explain the presence of DNA or body fluids from the victim on your clothes, but for that to work you'd have to go right up to the body and touch it and Luke didn't do that. If things had gone differently one might have observed that it was his failure to go close to the body that saved him! There are a bazillion cases where the body is found by someone entirely unconnected to the crime and the actual murderer has stayed prudently far away. But Luke finding the body was first deemed to be incriminating, and then described as "his big mistake"!

I suspect it was the two things together. Girl is murdered. Body is found by boyfriend. Hey, we know it's often the boyfriend who is the murderer, and we know that murderers often insert themselves into the investigation and often (how often, though?) contrive to "find" the body. Bingo! Bring the little bastard in!
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Old 3rd September 2019, 01:17 PM   #128
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The next mistake was the botching of the forensic examination of the crime scene.

This actually beggars belief, in 2003. Correct procedures were well established and well understood and they were simply ignored. I've read reams of (justified) criticism of the crime scene forensics in the Knox/Sollecito case but that (admittedly four years later) is a shining paragon of perfection compared to this abortion.

Jodi's body wasn't in an inaccessible place. Sure, the wall was over six feet high and even the low point of the V break was four feet from ground level, but the wall didn't encircle the woodland strip and it wasn't continuous even on the side it bordered. The strip is only a few trees deep and on the other side it's only bordered by a wire fence separating it from a barley field. There are paths going into the strip from either end that don't require climbing the wall at all. There is also a section further east where the wall is a lot more broken down and doesn't form much of a barrier. Although Luke and the other members of the search party accessed the murder scene by climbing the wall at the V break, it's perfectly possible Jodi didn't climb over at that point, and the woodland strip has level access a number of different ways.

By the time the body was found it was beginning to rain. The first priority, after taking preliminary photographs (using flash, as it was dark by then) should have been to procure a tent or a gazebo or something like that to protect the crime scene from the rain. This was not done, and the body was left exposed to the weather. I think it was about 2 am when the forensics officer arrived, and if everything had proceeded properly after that, things might have been salvageable. But it didn't. (There must have been a doctor there at some point but I don't know when that happened, or who he was. It should have been a police surgeon at the very least.)

The forensics officer arrived at the V break and announced that he had a "bad back" and couldn't climb into the woodland strip from there - and then apparently left the scene and went home and went back to bed! Even then no attempt was made to shelter the body from the weather, although it lay there right through until a replacement forensics officer arrived at about 8 am (I haven't checked these times, I'll double-check later). This is pure negligence. First, why wasn't the forensics officer directed to take a different way into the woodland strip? Didn't he himself ask if there was another way in? And second, why did it take hours to get a replacement to the scene?

Then when the second forensics officer turned up and actually started to do the job, what was the situation? Apparently the crime scene had already been seriously disrupted and tampered with. Jodi's clothes, some of which had been scattered some distance from her body, had been gathered up and placed with the body, and her body plus the now-sodden clothes had been rolled together on to a plastic sheet. By a couple of policemen. What on earth were they thinking of? Who told them to do that? Did they or the person giving the orders think the forensic examination had already been done?

One serious problem in the middle of all this was that no time of death could be estimated. I'm not aware of the core body temperature being taken. By the next morning, probably more than 12 hours after death, this wouldn't have given a very precise result, but it would still have been worth a shot. It might at least have been possible to separate say 5.30 from say 9.30. I'm not aware of anything from the post mortem about gastrointestinal contents that might have helped narrow it down either (although as Jodi apparently didn't have any of the lasagne before going out this might not have been very helpful either). For whatever reason, none of this was done. There was no scientifically estimated time of death.

This again is sheer gross negligence.

This malpractice obviously limited the usefulness of the forensic evidence that could be acquired. The rain probably washed DNA and other traces from higher areas to lower areas. The bundling up of the clothes and the body must have interfered with the ability to tell which garment or on which part of the body particular traces were found.

Now I don't think this was done deliberately to make it easier to frame Luke Mitchell. I think it was pure blundering idiocy. However it interfered with the investigation and it was also hellish embarrassing. Not wanting to go into the detail of the forensic debacle is probably one of the reasons for steaming full ahead on course with Luke as the suspect rather than having to go back and re-examine the case looking for other people. (That, of course, and the failure to collect any forensic evidence from the other members of the search party - notably Steven Kelly - at the time.)
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Old 3rd September 2019, 02:46 PM   #129
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So it's now the morning of 1st July. The police have put Luke Mitchell through the forensic wringer, but nobody else. They don't have any forensic evidence from the other members of the search party, and they have allowed these people to confer before taking their statements. And the crime scene forensics is a disaster.

They've put out posters appealling for information and in particular sightings of Jodi during the previous evening - using a photograph taken when she was about five years old. What the freaking hell was the point of that?

As far as I can make out this is when the rumour mill started. There's some of this in Sandra's book and maybe big-E can tell us more about it. In my opinion the police themselves were responsible for spreading it around that "the boyfriend did it". This would be very similar to what was done in the early stages of the Joanna Yeates murder inquiry when the Somerset police spread it around that the landlord (Christopher Jefferies) was in custody and the police believed he was the murderer, so let's not pretend it doesn't happen. In that case the police realised they had the wrong person and let him go and investigated properly, and Mr Jefferies won substantial damages from several newspapers as a result. Luke Mitchell was not so fortunate.

At this point I again see marked similarities with the Knox/Sollecito case at approximately the same stage. The police in that case latched on to the couple who had found the body, pulled them in for questioning, used the Reid technique (although in the Mitchell case I think Luke's Reid technique interview was some days later), and paraded them through the town declaring "case closed". Then they sat back and waited for the forensic results to prove the guilt they believed they had correctly intuited.

I think it was about two weeks before the forensic results, such as they were, came back showing no trace of Jodi's DNA on Luke and no trace of Luke's DNA on Jodi. The other problem they must have realised by that point was that Luke Mitchell had a rock-solid alibi. He could be proved, independently, to have been in his own house both at 4.05 and 4.25. After that time he was alibied first by his brother who came home about 4.40 and then by his mother who came home at 5.15, until he went out to meet Jodi about 5.30.

At some point they also discovered that he was also alibied by friends who were not family members at 6 pm and then later in the evening. So, no possible window of opportunity for him to have committed the murder and no evidence whatsoever of his presence at the murder scene - the scene of a frenzied killing with litres of blood gushing out all over the place.

I think that's where they were by mid-July, and Sandra has spoken about a definite change of tack in the investigation at that point. This should have been where they did what the Somerset police did with Chris Jefferies and said they had no evidence against Luke Mitchell, and gone back to square one to find another pet suspect - of which there was no shortage.

But they didn't. They chose to press on and build their case against Luke, despite the absence of forensic evidence and despite his alibi. And I think this is where it became deliberate malpractice rather than sheer bungling stupidity. I don't mean they were conscious that they were framing an innocent boy - maybe they were, but it's also possible they still blindly believed in the reliability of the initial groundless hunch, and were determined to break that alibi which they had persuaded themselves must be false. By whatever means necessary, and fairness, integrity, respect and human rights weren't going to get a look-in.

An initial list, off the top of my head, of things the police either manipulated or simply made up or concealed/failed to investigate.
  • Andrina Bryson's sighting of the two people at the end of the path was moved from 5.45 to 4.50 in order to fit with the police theory about the time of death
  • Jodi's time of leaving home was shifted a bit earlier to fit with the new time of the Bryson sighting
  • Corinne and Shane Mitchell were deemed to have been lying to protect Luke
  • Corinne was alleged to have burned clothing of Luke's some time during the evening - clothing that never existed and for which the burning of same had no evidence at all
  • The text messages between Luke and Jodi (the details of which could have proved that Luke was telling the truth about waiting in Newbattle to meet Jodi and then "hang out" there) were deleted from both phones while the phones were in the possession of the police and no attempt was made to retrieve the data from the mobile phone operators
  • No cell mast analysis of Luke's text messages (around 4.35) or his call to the speaking clock (4.54) was done, when this might have given some clue as to which side of the path he was on at these times
  • The statements of the other three members of the search party were re-taken until the narrative was that Mia didn't do anything at all and Luke simply climbed the wall for no apparent reason
  • A story about Jodi having borrowed a t-shirt from Janine was concocted to explain away the presence of Steven Kelly's sperm on Jodi's body.
I want to drill down into these points individually - and any more that come to mind. But I think the aggregate builds a pretty compelling picture of an investigation determined to implicate one person and one person only.

Why did they do this? I think that consciously or unconsciously they did not want to have to go back and build a case against someone else whom they had failed to gather forensic evidence from at the beginning, although they should have done, and which relied on the mess of crime scene forensics that resulted from the appalling treatment of the crime scene. This latter isn't all that logical, as they had to use the same messy forensics against Luke, but I don't think we're dealing with people who are blessed with crystal-clear analytical thought patterns here.
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Old 4th September 2019, 04:50 PM   #130
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That's all a reasonable summary of the case as it developed! A couple of points worth noting - it's possible (maybe even probable) that the texts were deleted from Luke's phone while it was in police possession (since it was provably interfered with within less than half an hour of it being taken from him, in the school car park, before he was taken to the station). However, there's no evidence that the messages were deleted from Jodi's mother's phone while it was in police possession- from the files, it seems it didn't make its way into police possession for a number of days, by which time the messages were noted as "deleted.".

The claim that Alice cradled Jodi's body didn't specifically state "in her lap;" likewise, we know that Jodi's clothes were gathered up and her body rolled onto a plastic sheet before forensics got there, but not, necessarily, that the gathered up clothes were with the body when Scrimger arrived - in fact, there's nothing in the defence papers to say what happened to the clothing after it was "gathered up" - no record of packaging, labelling, who handled it, who ordered it to be gathered, etc, etc.

The other three searchers were initially taken to Newbattle Police Station (while Luke was taken to Dalkeith), but no statements were taken from them there - they were taken back to Jodi's home where they mingled with assembled family members until some time after 4am, at which point it was decided their statements should be taken. By then, they'd had almost four hours to discuss the evening's events with others who were not involved in the search or present at the scene, family members were hugging each other etc. It was bad enough that they didn't bother to get the clothing and phones of the other three until several days later, but the levels of contamination and transfer in those first four hours may very well have rendered much of the forensic evidence unusable. The utter shambles of the mobile phone evidence relating to Jodi's family that emerged later demonstrates the inability of police investigators to "go back to the start" - they'd allowed so much evidence to be contaminated or lost, it just wasn't possible.
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Old 4th September 2019, 05:25 PM   #131
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Thank you so much for the clarification. I was typing without constantly referring to your book! (I realised later that I had been wrong about the "cradled her head in her lap" part.)

I'm getting interested in how all these points of evidence were massaged or turned around. One might accept that one or two points might be misinterpreted by accident but there are so many of these in this case that I simply can't believe it wasn't a concerted attempt to manufacture a case out of nothing.

I come back to the Bryson statement as being the critical one. As far as I can see, this is the only evidence the police have which supports the allegation that Corinne and Shane were lying to protect Luke. I'd be interested to know more about the justification for the charges that were brought against Corinne and Shane, but dissecting the case logically, it's the Bryson sighting, placing Luke in Easthouses at 4.50, that seems to be the only solid evidence that could suggest they were lying.

The manipulation of a witness so that she testifies to seeing something at 4.50 while driving north, when she originally stated she saw this at 5.45 while driving south, is a big deal and my gut instinct is that this is the pivotal point to unpick the case with. The very asymmetrical nature of the junction of the path with Easthouses Road is a huge bonus because it makes it very easy to be certain that she couldn't possibly have seen what she said she saw if she was driving north. But the process by which this volte-face was engineered to happen is the interesting bit. Do you have access to the sequence of Mrs Bryson's statements that might shed some light on this?

Also, while you're here, why did the sighting have to be as early as 4.50? To make it at that time means having to get Jodi out of the house improbably quickly after getting home from school, and the Bryson timetable would equally well have supported say 15 minutes later if the till receipt time had been taken as correct. Was it to allow enough time for Luke actually to have carried out the murder?
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Old 5th September 2019, 01:04 AM   #132
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Originally Posted by Rolfe View Post
Hi, big-E, longtime lurker! I have two questions. First, can you assess how much the location has changed in the intervening 16 years? Has even more of the wall fallen down and so on? Are the white houses and the close-boarded fence and the roundabout just north of the eastern end of the path new since 2003? I only live about half an hour's drive away myself and I was thinking of taking a look at the actual location, but it would be handy to know how similar it actually is now to how it was back then. I understand that the wall is over six feet in height and that the low point of the V was itself about four feet from the ground.

Second, can you say more about the court of local public opinion? I see this case as primarily being about police misconduct, and I think the rumours must have been started by the police, so it would be helpful to know how the whole narrative developed.

Unfortunately I can't help you much there - as noted, I wasn't living in Newbattle at the time, I'd moved away some years before and was just visiting my parents, and I never really knew that particular path very well (and only at the western end really). Similarly, my knowledge of the rumours is entirely based on what my mother told me at the time and I don't know where she got her information from - probably from other dog-owning residents, at a guess - and she died last year so I can't get any more details!
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Old 5th September 2019, 01:11 AM   #133
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Originally Posted by Rolfe View Post
As far as I can see, intimate partner killing is something done by older men than Luke. Older teens, young men, middle-aged men, older men, yes. The number of women and girls murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, bidie-ins, exes and even rejected suitors is appalling. I think this is why the police latched on to Luke as their preferred suspect. And yes, children do kill. Mary Bell. The James Bulger murder. But the two scenarios are quite distinct. Children who kill usually, as far as I can see, kill children younger than themselves, children young enough to be overpowered. Intimate partner killing is an entirely different animal and I don't think it happens in 14-year-old children. It's a pathology of older men.

In a somewhat bizarre twist there was another murder recently not far from where I live now - the boyfriend stabbing his girlfriend to death. They were 17, rather than 14, but I don't think you can necessarily say it's not a thing that teenagers do...


In this case the police also went straight after the boyfriend, but I believe the case was considerably more open-and-shut than with Luke and Jodi.
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Old 5th September 2019, 04:29 AM   #134
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Originally Posted by big-E View Post
In a somewhat bizarre twist there was another murder recently not far from where I live now - the boyfriend stabbing his girlfriend to death. They were 17, rather than 14, but I don't think you can necessarily say it's not a thing that teenagers do...

In this case the police also went straight after the boyfriend, but I believe the case was considerably more open-and-shut than with Luke and Jodi.

Yes, I did include "older teenagers" in an earlier post. My gut feeling is that 17 is probably about the low edge of that sort of jealous masculine rage behaviour. I've asked Jean Hatchett, who has a special project to memorialise women who were the victims of intimate partner murders, what the age of the youngest perpetrator is that she's aware of. She has documented hundreds of cases just over the past handful of years.

I haven't had an answer yet as she's probably fully occupied organising the "female peloton" which is happening on Saturday, where women all over the country are riding their bicycles in red shirts or jackets in memory of these women. (As I think I said, I'm riding the length of Glen Orchy in memory of Suzanne Pilley, who was indeed a victim of an intimate partner killing.) However I expect I'll get an answer at some point.
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Old 5th September 2019, 04:31 AM   #135
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Originally Posted by big-E View Post
Unfortunately I can't help you much there - as noted, I wasn't living in Newbattle at the time, I'd moved away some years before and was just visiting my parents, and I never really knew that particular path very well (and only at the western end really). Similarly, my knowledge of the rumours is entirely based on what my mother told me at the time and I don't know where she got her information from - probably from other dog-owning residents, at a guess - and she died last year so I can't get any more details!

I think Sandra has all the depressing information on that, as she was living nearby at the time and I think still lives near there. Some of it is in her book.
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Old 5th September 2019, 05:59 PM   #136
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The area has changed quite markedly since 2003. The white houses you mention are new - building them required a slight re-routing of the left hand bend, so it is not as sharp as it was back then. Where these houses now stand was an area of wasteland that went around the back of the garage a little nearer to Easthouses itself. Someone claiming to be a member of Jodi's family once claimed that a bloodstained branch was found in that wasteland. I've never been able to ascertain whether or not that was true, since there is nothing mapping where various items were found (apart from Jodi's body and clothing, and even that's a mere sketch) and all of the bloodstained branches were labelled, "piece of wood (2), piece of wood (2) etc. One officer reported a bloodstained branch found some 10 metres west of Jodi's body, but that's the only one with any sort of directional information.

The wall is pretty much as it was - it's been hit in a couple of places by falling trees, knocking out a couple of stones from the very top and some of the stones at the V have been knocked out (no doubt by the numbers of people climbing over it over the years). It ranges in height I'd say from a bit over six foot to possibly almost 8 foot in places, due to the undulations of the path itself and the slope from East to west.

The Andrina Bryson sighting had to be at 4.49 - 4.54pm to allow the police to claim the time of death was 5.15pm. If it had been 15 minutes later (placing Jodi at the entrance to the path between 5.04 and 5.09) the timing would have been much too tight for the murder to have happened at 5.15pm precisely. Jodi would have needed almost 9 minutes to get to the V point, taking the time to 5.13 - 5.18pm - the former leaves only 2 minutes for the claim that she climbed over the wall with her attacker, an argument erupted, followed by a moving fight in which Jodi fought ferociously to escape before being overcome and her throat being cut - the defensive wounds to her arms clearly being inflicted during the prior part of the attack, before the fatal wound, for example. The latter is, quite simply, impossible if they were to stick to a 5.15pm time of death.

It's interesting the way it worked backwards. Bryson gave her initial statements on July 1st and 2nd. The eyewitnesses who saw Jodi and Stocky Man at 5.05pm appear to have come forward after that, but before the reconstruction on July 7th. Judith, during that period, was saying Jodi left either at 5pm or 5.30pm. Whilst telling the public there had been no reliable sightings of Jodi by anyone, the police took the polaroid picture of Luke from the morning of the section 14 interview on August 14th to Bryson that day, whereupon she made her "identification." From there came the pressure to identify specific pieces of clothing which Mrs Bryson would not do - although she eventually picked out a parka jacket, she told the court she had said to the police it was not the same as the jacket she saw. Then the "reconstruction" timings of her potential routes from the supermarket were carried out - why on earth they didn't ask her what route she took the day after she took it, rather than leaving it 6 weeks and then presenting her with a number of possibilities is anyone's guess. I'm not sure when the till receipt/bank transaction stuff was "discovered" but I'd have to presume it was around the same time, otherwise, there'd have been no need for the re-tracing her potential routes shennanigans. And then, with investigators still studiously ignoring the sightings of two people, one of whom definitely knew Jodi and the statement of a neighbour who said she saw Jodi walking past her window just after 5 o'clock, Judith's statements began to make reference to "before 5 o'clock", eventually settling on 4.50.

That, of course, then opened the other can of worms - when Luke called at 5.38pm to see if Jodi was coming down, Luke claimed Allan Ovens told him Jodi had "just left" and Judith claimed she had no idea almost 50 minutes had elapsed; she'd "lost track of time" and had no idea, at the time, Jodi had been gone so long (supporting Luke's claim that he'd been told Jodi had "just left." Mr Ovens had to know she hadn't "just left" because he said in his later statements that he heard the front door banging when he was in the loo after coming in from work at 4.40pm and assumed that was Jodi leaving. It was he who took the call from Luke almost 50 minutes later and he never, in any of his statements, made mention of losing track of time or not knowing when Jodi left ... so, if Jodi had "just left" at 5.38pm (the original claims being "around 5.30pm) who were the people seen by Andrina Bryson?

We know her descriptions don't fit Jodi or Luke - far from it. Her original timings would have been too late to see Jodi - if she'd left at 5.30pm, she'd have been off the main road and out of sight by 5.33pm.
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Old 6th September 2019, 06:13 AM   #137
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Thanks Sandra. I really ought to go and take a look at the path for myself. If I can hike to the middle of a field near Newcastleton (where crucial Lockerbie evidence was found) and drag myself a thousand feet up a forestry track in Glen Orchy (where I think Suzanne Pilley's body may have been disposed of), I can pop round to a suburban street a couple of miles from the riding school I frequent! That's an interesting point about the bend being even sharper before the roundabout was built.

You're right, this is all about working back to a pre-determined conclusion, and I need to work it back a bit further. Why did the murder have to be at 5.15 precisely?

We know there was no scientific estimate of the time of death. Even if all the forensics had been done right (core body temperature measured ASAP after Jodi was found, gastrointestinal contents properly examined and so on) the best that would have been possible would have been a window. So I'm presuming that the 5.15 timing was purely because that was the only time they could construct a time-line narrative where Luke was the murderer?

Can you get any more blatant than this? The only time Luke Mitchell could have murdered Jodi Jones was 5.15. If she was murdered at 5.15 then the only time she could have been seen by Andrina Bryson at the end of the path was ~4.50. If Andrina Bryson saw her at ~4.50, then Mrs Bryson must have been driving north, towards the house she wanted to see, not south away from it (as she stated in her original statement?) If Andrina Bryson saw Luke Mitchell in Easthouses at ~4.50 then his mother and brother are lying about him having been at home, in the house, until 5.30. Bingo we got him!

This is absolutely outrageous. I mean surely the L&B could do better than that, in 2003? It's got to be that way because if it wasn't we didn't do the forensics on the people we should have done forensics on, really? I've met some scandalous situations in my time but this is right up there with the worst of them.

Anyway, could you outline the timeline the police were fantasisting which meant that the murder had to have been at 5.15? It seems that's what dictates a lot of the rest of it. So what dictates that time?

And, I thought you said in your book that Stocky Man had been identified, but I can't find where you said who he was. Who was he?
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Old 7th September 2019, 09:48 AM   #138
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Quote:
The only time Luke Mitchell could have murdered Jodi Jones was 5.15. If she was murdered at 5.15 then the only time she could have been seen by Andrina Bryson at the end of the path was ~4.50. If Andrina Bryson saw her at ~4.50, then Mrs Bryson must have been driving north, towards the house she wanted to see, not south away from it (as she stated in her original statement?) If Andrina Bryson saw Luke Mitchell in Easthouses at ~4.50 then his mother and brother are lying about him having been at home, in the house, until 5.30. Bingo we got him!
You got it in one!

What dictated the police timeline? Please bear with me - this gets messy!! Basically, the other evidence that couldn't be manipulated. The 5.32pm call from Luke's mobile to the Jones' landline was on record. He was seen sitting on a wall at the end of his street at between 5.50pm and 6pm by boys who knew him. A woman returning videos to a rental store saw him on the Newbattle Road at 6.15pm.

Let's say they'd gone for the time between that 6.15pm sighting and 7pm when he met his pals. That would have knocked out the Bryson sighting - for Luke to have got from the Newbattle Road to the Easthouses end to be seen by Bryson, he'd have needed 18 - 20 minutes (depending on where, on the Newbattle Road, he started off), then another 9 minutes to get back down the path to the V break. He'd need 10 minutes back from the murder scene to where he met his pals. So the to-ing and fro-ing alone would have taken up 37 - 39 minutes of that 45 minute window (leaving not enough time for the murder) and lost them the only eyewitness they had.

The other problem with this scenario is that Jodi would have had to leave home at 6.14pm, but her mother and step-father were out by then on their run to the cemetery, so there would have been no statements to confirm what time Jodi left.

The next available "window" is between 9.30pm, when Luke got home from playing with his mates and 10.38pm, when Judith texted his phone looking for Jodi. Luke was seen in Newbattle Abbey Crescent by a neighbour at 10pm - given the timings above, he couldn't have committed the murder after 9.30pm and been back in his street by 10pm, nor could he have committed the murder after 10pm and been home by 10.38pm.

His being home by 10.38pm is witnessed only by his mum and brother. What if they were lying? Well, the contents of the various phone calls between Luke and Jodi's mother are consistent with him leaving his home at 10.52pm (following a call from Jodi's mother at 10.49pm) and arriving at the Newbattle end of the path at 10.59pm, when they spoke again on the phone. The timings from there to the meeting of the search trio at the junction of the paths etc all support the claim that Luke was at home when the 10.38pm text came in and thereafter made his way to and up the path.

And that's it. For Luke to be the killer, Jodi had to be murdered prior to 5.50pm, less enough time for Luke to escape, clean up and be sitting on the wall at the end of his street. It was unlikely she was being murdered at 5.38 or 5.32, when Luke was ringing her mother's landline, so it had to be earlier than that. But it couldn't be earlier than a time constrained by a leaving time for Jodi of no earlier than 4.45pm (so that there was another witness, other than her own mother) to her leaving.

From all of that, the police were left with a window of 4.45m - 5.32pm, from which they had to subtract enough time for Jodi to get to the V point (almost 12 mins) and still leave enough time for the attack etc before Luke's first phone call to the landline.
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Old 7th September 2019, 07:06 PM   #139
Ampulla of Vater
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Hi guys,
I’ve been on a sabbatical for a while and haven’t read everything just yet. I did read that Rolfe bought books about this case. What books are they? If I decide to go down this rabbit hole I’d like to start by reading a book about it. Thanks!
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Old 8th September 2019, 01:13 AM   #140
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Originally Posted by Ampulla of Vater View Post
Hi guys,
I’ve been on a sabbatical for a while and haven’t read everything just yet. I did read that Rolfe bought books about this case. What books are they? If I decide to go down this rabbit hole I’d like to start by reading a book about it. Thanks!
See post by author above
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Old 8th September 2019, 06:43 AM   #141
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cadaver dogs from Yorkshire

Hi Ampulla,

The book is Innocents Betrayed by Sandra Lean. On page 184 I read that they bleached the area about a week and a half after the crime. The cadaver dogs from South Yorkshire were brought in but were said to be impeded by the use of bleach. I am not an expert in cadaver dogs, but bleaching the scene then bringing in dogs just sounds stupid on the face of it.
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Old 8th September 2019, 07:12 AM   #142
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I have no idea why they would have brought in cadaver dogs in the first place. Jodi's body was found, there. This is a known fact. What would have been the point of cadaver dogs?
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Old 8th September 2019, 07:38 AM   #143
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sniffer dogs

That is an interesting question. Sandra Lean's book implied that they might have been brought in to track blood left on the killer. She also indicated that there were three sets of dogs available to the police. IIUC these were from Dalkeith, Strathclyde and Yorkshire. One wonders why dogs were not deployed immediately.
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Old 8th September 2019, 09:34 AM   #144
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The dogs were brought in, ostensibly, to see if they could find evidence to support the police theory that the attacker had escaped towards the Newbattle area. From that, it has to be supposed that they were looking for the scent of Jodi's blood on the killer (since the area would be awash with scents of human beings not known to the dogs). There was never any intention to bring in the dogs simply to check the whole area for scent traces of Jodi's blood (either to track her own movements within the area before she was killed, or to track the killer as he escaped) - the search area for the dogs was determined in advance by a line drawn across the woodland strip just west of the V, the dogs searching from there westward (towards Newbattle) only.

It seems they never even considered the possibilities of the killer escaping towards the Easthouses Road, across the field behind the woodland strip (heading north) towards Dalkeith, or along Lady Path, even though each of these routes was as possible (some of them, one might say, even preferable) as escape towards Newbattle.

Why did they bleach the scene before the dogs arrived and who ordered that to be done? I have no idea - there is absolutely nothing in the defence papers to explain this, other than the report from the dog handlers stating that the entire area had been bleached, hampering the dogs' abilities to follow the scent.

The Dalkeith dogs could have been deployed the night of the murder - a few weeks later, they were deployed in Woodburn (less than a mile away), following a car break-in late at night. Why not June 30th? I think it was simply because they believed they already had the killer standing right there in front of them, so there was no need to bring in the dogs.

Again, I've no idea why the Stratchlyde dogs were bypassed and the Yorkshire dogs brought in instead. The Strathclyde dogs were brought in, eventually, to carry out the ludicrous "reconstruction," where one officer hid behind the wall and the other officer walked up the path with the dog, which then failed to alert to the person behind the wall. If the dog was sniffing for blood, it's not going to alert to a live and kicking dog handler on the other side of the wall - it would have failed its basic training if it had done so.

So there it is, once again, the dog expert evidence is as clear as mud.
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Old 8th September 2019, 01:27 PM   #145
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Over the top

The whole business about the Strathclyde dog handler going over the wall struck me as odd. A dog might respond differently to its handler versus someone else.
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Old 8th September 2019, 01:39 PM   #146
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The overwhelming sense I get about this case is that there was no detection going on at all. There was evidence-gathering yes, but nobody was evaluating that evidence and trying to draw reasonable deductions from it.

The premise seemed to be, right from the get-go, that "the boyfriend did it". Evidence wasn't analysed to figure out the best line of inquiry to identify the perpetrator, it was all sifted and manipulated into a framework that fit with the pre-determined conclusion. So some evidence that could have been invaluable wasn't even collected, and evidence that was collected that wasn't helpful to the police narrative was sidelined. The police themselves seem to have been trawling up exculpatory explanations for bits of evidence that might have incriminated someone else, and to be selectively twisting and biassing witness statements to conform to their only theory. I know this isn't the only case where this has happened but this one is particularly shocking in its single-minded blatancy.

One problem with the court proceedings is that I don't think the defence really understood what had been done in this respect. But another that would have arisen if they had understood is that attacking police competency and integrity isn't well received by the establishment. It seems to be OK to suggest that the police maybe dropped the odd stitch, but to put forward a case of utter and absolute misconduct as this seems to have been isn't something defence counsel ever seem to want to do.

And as long as they don't want to do it, the problem will continue.
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Old 8th September 2019, 01:44 PM   #147
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I think a lot of what is done with sniffer dogs is frankly Clever Hans effect. If a dog indicates that there's a body there and you dig and you find a body, great. If a dog says there's heroin in that suitcase and you open it and there's heroin there, great. But this idea that a dog "reacting" to something intangible is any sort of proof that a body was there (e.g. in the Madeleine McCann or Suzanne Pilley cases) or that someone walked in a particular direction several days ago, is quite honestly sheer fantasy.
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Old 8th September 2019, 02:12 PM   #148
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I think the whole dog debacle was a back-tracking exercise - they were hoping for something - anything - to support their theories (hence the closing off of other areas of potential search), rather than looking for something specific.

The Strathclyde officer over the wall, for example, was used to suggest Mia "would not have reacted" they way Luke and the others said she did. Was this then used to persuade the family members of the search party that Mia didn't do anything out of the ordinary (even though they described her doing so initially) ... because "experts" said she "wouldn't have"? Because, left as it was, the conclusion from the Strathclyde exercise meant that if Luke was lying, so were the others.

Another bizarre experiment involved letting off smokebombs to give a visual representation of where the scent would have gone (carried on the wind). The conclusions was that the scent would have come up the back of the wall and over the top, towards Newbattle. For human noses, maybe, but for dogs? (Again, this was used to question why Mia didn't react on the way up the path,but did on the way down. Luke's explanation that she may have reacted on the way up, but he wouldn't have recognised it as an "alert" because she wasn't tracking, was disbelieved.)
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Old 8th September 2019, 04:02 PM   #149
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It was all completely pointless. No matter what another dog did on another day, or what smoke bombs did, you can never prove that it was impossible for Mia to have done what Luke said she did on that particular day at that particular time - because it wasn't impossible. It's perfectly possible and any normal person would recognise that. Who knows why she didn't make any indication on the eastward journey? Maybe because Luke hadn't said "find Jodi" at that point. If Mia knew who Jodi was, then that command alone could have been enough to get her paying attention, even without a garment to sniff. Or maybe she did make some sign on the outward journey and Luke didn't notice.

You can say you don't believe him till you're blue in the face, but there is no possible way at all short of a magical CCTV camera recording what actually happened to prove that he wasn't telling the truth. All this shenanigans does is confirm the bias and prejudice of the police. And provide a load of flim-flam to wave at the jury of course.

I was reading about another case the other day, I think it was the Ana Kriegel murder, where the policeman who found the body said he believed he was looking at either a mannequin “or something terrible”. I think it's quite understandable for the mind to default to the possibility that a naked, immobile human-shaped form is a shop mannequin, rather than accept it's looking at a dead body. Particularly if you're only fourteen. By the way Sandra, what do you think about the way the Irish boys in that case were treated by the police?
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Old 9th September 2019, 10:47 AM   #150
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counting cells

It might be argued that the finding of only a few sperm cells on Jodie's garments is proof that the cells were deposited through co-laundering of garments or some other complex mechanism of transfer. My initial impression is that such a sweeping conclusion would unwarranted. For now let me give one reason. Some individuals have oligospermia and some have aspermia, and what might be primary transfer of cells from them would be mistakenly classified as higher-order transfer. I only have time for a quick comment on this subject now, but I might be able to expand upon it later.

It is an axiom of DNA profiling that the mere presence of a DNA profile cannot indicate how or when the DNA was deposited. This cuts both ways. For example, on the one hand, one cannot infer whether a profile arose from primary vs secondary transfer, but neither can one rule one or the other out.
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Old 15th September 2019, 01:31 AM   #151
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Originally Posted by Rolfe View Post
I have no idea why they would have brought in cadaver dogs in the first place. Jodi's body was found, there. This is a known fact. What would have been the point of cadaver dogs?
In the organised chaos that is a major crime investigation, having been a plain clothes officer and trainee DC assisting at a few, being sent on apparently pointless or odd tasks is normal. The HOLMES system should help making sense of a major enquiry, but it is not prefect. There could have been some trigger suggesting a search with a dog, not necessarily a cadaver dog was needed. A junior officer is tasked to arrange, he/she contacts the dogs branch for a search, they ask, what kind of search, the junior officer is not sure, but there was a dead body, so maybe a cadaver dog.

Another possible is that in the morning briefings, suggestions are taken as to what further enquiry is needed and someone may have remembered a previous use of a cadaver dog at some other murder that did find something useful. So, why not try it here on this enquiry?

The result is, even if it was a pointless exercise, it has helped to create the impression that every possible line of enquiry had been followed and the police had done a very thorough job.
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Old 15th September 2019, 07:13 AM   #152
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If this was a public relations exercise it's certainly not fooling me.

I'm highly sceptical of the use of cadaver dogs, not to find actual bodies (will someone please just take a couple of them up the Allt Broighleachan track like yesterday, I mean why not?), but to indicate places where the police then determine a body was present at some time in the past. This is unfalsifiable. It's subjective and the dogs are highly likely to be influenced by their handler's directions or reactions. But in this case it's known where the body was and the point of the dog seems to have been that it might be able to indicate which way the murderer left the crime scene.

So it's trying to track someone, but it doesn't know who, in an area that the public have been yomping all over until several hours after the murder happened. So someone thinks maybe the cadaver dog can pick out the scent of a living person who has been in contact with a dead body, and follow it amoung all the other scents. Where is the evidence for this? And do it even though the person was only in contact with the body for a few minutes after it became a dead body - I don't think cadaver scent develops that quickly in any case. And do it even though other people (police) who were in contact with the body well after the scent would have develioped had been walking around there. And I'm not sure how long after the murder this was, but it was several days at least.

Do the police think dogs have some sort of magical superpowers?
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Old 15th September 2019, 11:21 AM   #153
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My experience of police dogs was that only in demonstrations for school kids did they find anything.

Of all the calls police dogs were brought to they never sniffed out a suspect trying to hide from the police and they never found any drugs (including the large amount of cannabis that I found after a drugs dog search). I never saw a cadaver dog in use and the explosives sniffer dogs probably never had any explosives to find (I saw them in use at the various political party conferences I worked at).
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Old 15th September 2019, 12:59 PM   #154
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I tend to agree with you. I read an article some time ago that suggested these dogs were simply pointing to where their handlers thought the drugs or the explosives were hidden. (Sorry I don't have a link, I don't remember where it was.)

This case seems to be even more of a reach though. The dog was supposed to be able to pick out which human scent among many was of someone who had killed someone and spent mere minutes with the newly-dead corpse, out of all the many and varied scents that were around, including more recent scents of investigators who had spent probably longer with the corpse when it actually was a corpse, and of course the scent of the corpse itself which according to the so-called theory is what the dogs are primarily trained to identify. And it was supposed to be able to pick out this scent days (or was it even a week or two?) after the event, and do it so well that it would reliable indicate which way the murderer had gone when leaving the scene. And there would be no way to verify if any direction the dog indicated was right or not, so presumably the cops were just going to accept it? (I would have thoguht that if there was any validity at all to this, the dog would be more likely to identify the direction Jodi's body had been taken in when it was removed from the scene.)

And to what end? How would knowing which way the murder had gone when this happened days before the dog was brought in and hours after the body was discovered? The whole thing makes no sense at all. But then most of this case makes no sense at all.

Even the single-minded effort to pin it on Luke Mitchell makes no sense. If they needed someone to frame, there was Steven Kelly right there, right beside Luke when the body was found and with his DNA all over the body even though he didn't touch it at the time of thje discovery. If they'd tried to frame him, probably nobody would be running innocence campaigns.
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Old 15th September 2019, 01:09 PM   #155
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Trying to figure out why suspect "A" was favoured over suspect "B" can probably be best explained by the time and resource pressures the police are under. The first person that the senior detectives in a murder enquiry suspect is guilty, is the most likely to be pursued and that can be down to a simple "he don't look right to me".
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Old 15th September 2019, 01:40 PM   #156
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So early though. They seem to have decided "the boyfriend did it" pretty much immediately they got to the scene of the murder if not before. And yet A. the boyfriend was only 14 and this is a very unlikely crime for a 14-year-old to commit, and B. they singled him out before they had any idea whether he had an alibi or not.

It turned out he did have an alibi for the entire evening, or rather a series of alibis which didn't leave enough time for him to have been the murderer. So all they were left with was alleging that the family members who were his alibi for the early part of the evening were lying, with absolutely no evidence for that at all. But of course that allowed Luke's main support people to be attacked too, and charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

All these inspirational posters in Tulliallan, with the clean-cut bobbies saying things about integrity and fairness and human rights - does anyone even see them?
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Old 15th September 2019, 01:42 PM   #157
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The Yorkshire dogs were brought in between July 10th and 12th - from memory, it was unclear in the case papers whether they arrived on July 10th or 11th, but they were briefed on July 11th and did the walk through the scene on July 12th. So they got the dogs to the scene 12 days after the murder.

Jodi's body was taken from the woodland strip over the barbed wire fence at the opposite side to the wall into the north field at around 10.15am on July 1st. The dogs appeared not to have indicated anything in that area, but that's not surprising, since it was outwith the area deemed to be "relevant" for their search - i.e. the area westward from where the body was found, towards Newbattle.

I think I said in the book, this was nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy - the dogs weren't taken up the path (or the woodland strip) towards Easthouses (east), or allowed to follow any scents that many have taken them down Lady Path (south), even though we know that David Dickie went over the V break and was in the woodland strip after the claimed time of the murder, he walked home from the junction of the paths via Lady path and the sole of his boot tested positive for the presence of blood.

Even if it couldn't have told them anything about the murderer, it might have been a useful control to demonstrate that the dogs were, in fact, following a scent that was in some way connected with the scene itself?

However, as Rolfe points out, they couldn't possibly be indicating what their handlers claimed they were for obvious reasons, but it was a helpful "result" for claiming that the murderer "escaped" towards Newbattle.

The next obvious question is, where did he go from there? Luke could have made his way down the woodland either side of the Newbattle Road - he'd have to risk crossing the main road to go down the west side, but could have remained hidden down the east side, but then his cover would have to be broken - he'd have to emerge onto a busy road, turn into the wide entrance to his street and then make his way down that street, in full view, to his front door. (Contrary to the many stories over the years, there was no way to get in through the back door except to go in through the house, into the back garden and back into the house - all of the back gardens bordered each other, so there was no access from the street - or anywhere else - to the back gardens.

That had to be happening between 5.30 and 6pm, when people were coming home from work, getting off buses at the end of his street etc and also when workers from the industrial estate in the grounds of Newbattle Abbey College were leaving and nobody saw anything untoward whatsoever?
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Old 15th September 2019, 04:48 PM   #158
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I know some dogs can appear to be terribly smart, but they're still dogs. Magical intuition about which scent out of about a bazillion the handler wants them to follow, and being able to pick it out ten days after the event, is not within canine powers. Trust me on this. I'm struggling to imagine how anyone even thought this was a thing.
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Old 16th September 2019, 02:00 AM   #159
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Originally Posted by Rolfe View Post
So early though. They seem to have decided "the boyfriend did it" pretty much immediately they got to the scene of the murder if not before. And yet A. the boyfriend was only 14 and this is a very unlikely crime for a 14-year-old to commit, and B. they singled him out before they had any idea whether he had an alibi or not.

It turned out he did have an alibi for the entire evening, or rather a series of alibis which didn't leave enough time for him to have been the murderer. So all they were left with was alleging that the family members who were his alibi for the early part of the evening were lying, with absolutely no evidence for that at all. But of course that allowed Luke's main support people to be attacked too, and charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

All these inspirational posters in Tulliallan, with the clean-cut bobbies saying things about integrity and fairness and human rights - does anyone even see them?
There is a culture whereby in particular senior managers regard the law, policy and procedures as something they can pick and chose if they follow it or not.

There are some detectives or just plain thick and do not understand the law, policies and procedures.

Tulliallan is soon forgotten about "in the real world of policing".
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Old 11th August 2020, 04:08 AM   #160
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the effect of medications on the demeanor of the accused

At the University of Michigan's National Registry of Exonerations I found this passage on Ernest Ray Willis. "In their investigation, the new attorneys found that in the months leading up to the trial, the state began to give Willis high doses of anti-psychotic drugs along with his usual pain medication, without telling him and despite the fact that he displayed no signs of psychosis; it was these drugs that caused his dazed, expressionless appearance at trial"

In the November 2005 issue of The Texas Monthly Michael Hall wrote, "Willis had been drugged with powerful antipsychotic medicine for months before his trial, turning him into a drooling zombie, something the prosecutor made full use of in front of the jury."

My understanding is that Luke was being medicated after the murder. Although the circumstances were quite different, the general public might have drawn the same inference about Luke as the jury perhaps did about Ernest Willis, that he was cold and emotionless.
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