General Update ... (nothing special)..

Nothing much has been happening.

I did keep up with some of the Scottish Fingerprint Inquiry involving Shirley Mckie's misidentified print. I became a bit disillusioned with the official inquiry however when there seemed to be a focus on experts merely having a difference of opinion rather than a focus on the fact that the mis-identification is utterly unsupportable by anyone with even a few weeks of experience in fingerprint identification. It seems that the five technicians who had been prevented from voicing their doubts were still being ignored and that the inquiry never addressed the real issues which were clearly more political than technical.

I think the police campaign against Detective Constable McKie including all those rumors about her having had sex at a murder scene were not due to her having challenged her misidentified fingerprint but were more likely due to her having approached defense counsel about the likelihood of evidence having been planted at a crime scene based on her having been told that her fingerprint had been found at that crime scene when she knew she had never been there. The cops were willing to drive one of their own into the madhouse simply because she had been honest and forthright with defense counsel. The pre-dawn raid on her home to effect the perjury arrest was simply to humiliate her as a further punishment for being a renegade who spoke to defense counsel and thus was on the wrong side. Weird tales about sex with married constables at the murder scene were just to make things worse for her on the job and in the newspapers there could have been no basis in fact for them. Indeed, the very certainty that she had about the print not being there legitimately shows that she clearly knew she had never entered the premises for any purpose, much less an illicit one to be conducted in a disgraceful place and time.

I've heard of the recently recanted testimony of Chuck Erickson in the Ryan Ferguson case but think it will have absolutely no impact whatsoever. Lost amongst all the hoopla in this case is the fact that the police interrogators were capable and experienced police officers who had a history of conducting proper interrogations. It seems there is a general acceptance by the press and the public that this one interrogation of Chuck Erickson was some sort of an annomally. Of course if the motion does indeed get the appeal away from the "Good Old Boys" of Boone County that will surely be of some benefit to the chances of justice finally being done. The factual situation remains: neither of the two young men were anywhere near the scene of the crime! At the time Chuck Erickson testified at the trial he knew he was not involved in the murder in any way. The police and the prosecutor were intelligent men who were experienced at their jobs. Those cops had not just fallen off some turnip truck and wandered in to conduct an interrogation. They know they shouldn't be spoonfeeding information to the subject much less spoonfeeding him information that was originally withheld from the press solely to aid the police in eliminating false confessors. The cops had a two year old homicide on which they had made absolutely no progress and if some punk-kid weirdo wanted to confess to having dreamed he was involved in the murder that was fine with them and fine with the prosecutor who knew he was likely to win the career-enhancing case. After all, it doesn't take all that much in brain power to realize that a 300 pound former football player is not going to be attacked by a seventeen year old slightly built youth who doesn't even know how to fight. Its clear from the crime scene that the attacker had to be a very large and powerful man, but above all, he had to be a man who really knew how to fight. Although I've had doubts about the co-worker and his various lies, I think it likely that this was simply a chance encounter with a very violent career criminal. The belt has probably been handled by far too many persons for touch dna testing to be of any use but other clothing should certainly have been subjected to such testing. It is however troubling to invent some large male passerby who escapes by car simply because I think the co-worker is large but not large enough and not skilled enough. Its clear the co-worker had a car there though he lied about which car it was and he lied about his departure time.


I was disappointed that the Nobile Officium plea at the Court of Sessions went against Luke Mitchell. This is yet again a case of great distress to me. I saw a brief video clip of Jodi Jones and she seems to have been a nice fourteen year old girl who deserved to live. I didn't consider her particularly Goth-like despite the modest lip piercing she sported. She seemed to be pretty much like all fourteen year old girls: young, beautiful and full of promise. It is a sorry state of affairs that she died with the dna of at least three males associated with her corpse or her murder-scene and yet none of those three males was arrested or prosecuted. It may be that her home life was rather more difficult than she had indicated in her diary or her statements to her boyfriend. It is to the ever lasting shame of the Lothian and Borders police that the sole focus was on her 14 year old boyfriend whose dna was not found on her and who bore no cuts or scratches at all despite the vigorous defense Jodi Jones had clearly put up. The initial blundering by the police is suggestive to some of a police involvement in the murder but I consider it to be merely a situation involving a typical police blundering due to stupidity and arrogance and general incompetence. Once the police adopted the viewpoint that the assailant was the boyfriend no action was later taken that in any way challenged that "party line" viewpoint. I doubt the police even suffered any increasing concern about the very strange and highly illogical behavior of the victim's family in the hours before the discovery of the corpse.

Luke Mitchell seems to have been railroaded right from the start. I fail to see how the police could have been so inept at their forensic duties. While the media role may bear the greatest fault, it does seem that there was police influence if not downright police orchestration of the media campaign. This of course is not justice. I do wonder however just how despite all the shortcomings in the performance of the police, press and prosecutor, there was not one single solitary juror with an ounce of backbone and common sense! Decades ago Scottish jurors used to be held without heat, light, food or water until a verdict was reached. It took real courage in those days for a juror to be bold. I simply can not imagine a juror being able to maintain his composure during testimony from a so-called expert that a small amount of semen on a bra strap was able to migrate due to rain water across the adjacent bra cup, across the cleavage area and upwards against gravity all the way across to the contra-lateral bra cup. Why is it that jurors lose all sense of reality when listening to an expert and accept utter nonsense. Its not as if a woman's breasts and the law of gravity are alien subjects that need an expert's testimony before a juror can understand them. And a juror is not supposed to forget his knowledge of a woman's breasts or his knowledge of the laws of gravity when he enters the jury room.


I don't know if Jodi Jones was killed by a family member but I seem concerned by the general level of lack of candor from her family coupled with a sort of unified script of family member evidence. Such orchestrated testimony is deplorable and certainly suspect. After all, just how many families have 67 year old grandmothers who go out at dinnertime for a search while all the able-bodied men stay home? How is it the family members stride purposefully and directly to the area in which the corpse is found and do not engage in any enroute searching behavior? And why, with so many blood relatives living nearby the search area do the women not phone them and have them simply walk a short distance and do the searching? And why is it that the family claims they had a sudden impulse to pay a grave-side visit on that afternoon. This gives them use of a car and no witnesses as to their location: just what is needed for a body disposal interlude. One voice mail message that was preserved rather than being immediately deleted was a sugary-sweet "you're grounded" message that sounds like it was drafted by a script-writer intent on having the message publicly disseminated. Ozzie and Harriet talk like that to a teenage daughter, real parents don't. If the voicemail message had been "Okay, you little slut, you are grounded for life!" it might be more believable. Also I am a bit concerned about the family's impromptu trip to the cemetery. An impromptu trip to the pub would have been more believable! Was it a crime of sudden passion by the mentally disturbed brother with a history of violence? Was it rape by the fiance of Jodi's sister? After all, it is his DNA that is all over the victim's bra. (Oh yea, I forgot: innocent transfer!) Usually its a bold and clever defense attorney who makes such unbelievable statements about a man's DNA being found on a murdered woman being the result of an innocent transfer but in this case its the police and prosecutors who keep saying that its not a sex crime and the transfer is innocent because the fourteen year old girl chose to wear a shirt that had semen on it from her sister's fiance. Or perhaps, rather than a crime of passion, was it simply that the victim had discovered something and had to be silenced? Its clear the newspapers made a big deal about the defendant's drug dealing but the fourteen year old defendant was no major drug dealer, he only sold a little bit to his friends. The victim's family members seem to have a variety of criminal activities in their past. Perhaps Jodi overheard something and became a threat? Its probably not too likely because they would have planned the crime better. Its more likely that it was a crime of sudden passion either committed by the mentally disturbed brother or by the sister's sperm-donating fiance.

I've not made any progress on my project involving an artificial intelligence program to be more discriminating regarding submerged metallic items. Finding a cell phone in a muddy river bed just seems beyond the capability of the devices. In the Britanee Drexel case I had thought that the corpse and cell phone were each jettisoned at the same time and location well south of the point of abduction. Despite it being Spring Break with hundreds of college aged males in the city, I'm quite certain the abduction and murder was the work of a local who was familiar with the area. That seven minute window of opportunity is in reality even narrower and I think the only way the abduction could have taken place was a non-threatening approach with a suitable vehicle being immediately available. A church van with someone hawking treatises or tapes would have been a perfect lure. Doors already open and draped. The van carpeted. A few strong arms to instantly subdue her and stifle any screams. I don't think it was some alleyway or shortcut that Britanee took. It happened right there on her intended path of travel and well before she reached that seventh minute after her departure filmed on the hotel's lobby surveillance camera. The mother's constant tattoo of her daughter being depressed seems a strange attitude to be taken given the circumstances of the crime.

I tried to see if I could find a product of decomposition that was uniquely human but it seems that idea didn't pan out. I had thought that water courses could have downstream sensors that would indicate decomposition of human remains but it seems nature does not really endow humans with any unique decomposition products. Pheremones and kairomones are not a help since no carrion-oriented species seems to have evolved to favor human flesh over other decomposing flesh. It was an interesting study particularly of the statistical basis for determining if someone truly was the bite-magnet that he imagined himself to be. Jack Jumper ants from Tasmania seemed interesting though they hunt largely by sight and not by chemosensitive receptors. I've often wondered why fleas can detect an odor of an approaching mammal and then the heat source but search and rescue parties have such problems in locating missing persons that mosquitoes and flies are able to find from great distances. I thought that perhaps the abilities of some insect species to seek out targets from great distances could be utilized in forensic work or search and rescue missions but I've not been able to make sufficient progress on this project.

I've had minor correspondence with the people involved with the James Kim search in Josephine County, Oregon. Oddly enough the search and rescue people there in Oregon were very impressed by the news reports of a search in The Everglades wherein search parties were at all times accompanied by an armed guard with a rifle actually in his hands ready for instant use. It seems that SAR personnel have different attitudes and often share the same lack of situational awareness that causes people to become lost in the first place. The Kim family made a mistake when they ventured onto a road that looked deceptively inviting on a map but was in fact a poorly marked maze of roads not used at that time of the year. The Kim's assumptions about traffic or snowplows finding them were unwise but its often hard for people to transition to an "outback mentality" when they don't realize that they are in fact in the outback! Use of their residual gas or oil to light a spare tire and generate a large quantity of dark smoke might have helped them as would have remaining with the car for only a few more hours. Even the highly-specialized SAR personnel seemed unable to get things right. One technical rescue team arrived in SWAT clothing that was dark while brightly colored vests were available in the local school's gymnasium. Volunteer Search and Rescue personnel in a poor county did a wonderful job but miscommunication of vital information and unnecessary delays made the mission successful only as to the wife and two children.

I'm not doing much of anything else right now due largely to some health issues. Gout is a particularly immobilizing and distracting disease and it seems strange that its impossible to obtain testing for Pasturella Multicida in relation to gout symptoms. Gout's onset is always nocturnal and in early Spring. Triggers involve fungal products and all effective treatments happen to be anti-fungal agents, yet Gout is not viewed by medicine as a disease caused by a microbial agent. It is utterly absurd. The events of September 11th and their consequences on our nation and its economy weigh heavily on me despite the efforts of friends and acquaintances to excuse my cowardice and incompetence on the eve of the attack. I was so concerned with being charged with the making of a terroristic threat! I do admit that as I become more and more frustrated with the medical profession over the issues of gout and diabetes, I also become less and less concerned over my failures on September 10th. I sit here in the wee hours of the morning listening to a feral cat slowly coughing its life away as it suffers from pneumonia of some sort that it came down with during a sudden cold spell. I feed the feral cats as best as I am able to, but it is of course not enough. And as I think back on mistakes and wasted opportunities, I refer to medicine as A Black and Evil Art and I truly mean it.

My interest in the JonBenet Ramsey case has not waned despite the relative inactivity in the investigation. For quite some time little else has been done on the case but perform an automated search of the CODIS database search for a match to the intruder's dna found beneath the fingernails and on the panties and outer garments. Of course that is better than not performing the dna searches but I've often felt the crime may not have been the sex crime that it appears to be and that therefore the likelihood of an eventual arrest for some other sex crime is very low. I've never really settled on an estimate for the perpetrator's age. Some items thought to be indications of maturity such as the use of the term brown paper bag or the use of the term attache case may not be at all valid as indicators of maturity. The wiping of the corpse afterward may indicate a forensic awareness which some feel is an indicator of maturity but I think even twelve year old boys know enough about crime to avoid leaving evidence at the scene.

I've not kept up with the Borgesson case in Scotland. Its unfortunate that a police force would so adamantly cling to a suicide or accidental drowning theory when the facts make such a conclusion absurd. Making an appointment with a hairdresser in Sweden and having the Swedish library books with her show an intent to return to Sweden rather than some sort of intent to commit suicide in Scotland. The weirdo who impersonated a noted soccer player is the prime suspect.

It so often takes great courage for a homicide investigator to avoid being lead astray by potentially lurid matters. In the carbon monoxide related boating accident on Lake Huron, Dateline did a great disservice by focusing on the abuse and prior violence issues as well as the intent to break off the relationship. Such things improve the shows Neilson ratings but they don't improve the show's ratings with me! Britanee Drexel disappeared a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday and so much was made of the fact that she was underage. What a foolish distraction to the investigation! Moira Murray's little white lies and her alcohol use have been great fodder for the would-be sleuths but the fact remains: once her car careened into a snowbank in the dead of night she didn't get far before something went very wrong for her. My first thoughts were the nearby houses, the tow truck driver and others who would be those she first encountered. Yet these would-be sleuths are forever going off on tangents about a different destination, a secret rendevous, or some other lurid nonsense that is entertaining for them to consider but hardly advances the status of the search.

I meant to check up on the status of the compensation claim in the Billie-Jo Jenkins murder case. There again it was a police force that turned the wife against the accused and she then refused to allow the daughters to give evidence at his trial. Even without such police misconduct the case was contaminated by poor communication with the serology expert and a failure to photograph the status of perimeter fence gates. If there is a mental case recently arrived in the area who is enamored of plastic and the victim is found with plastic placed inside her nose, why did the police focus on the father?

Well, as I said. Nothing much going on.