Sometimes it's difficult to
convince the court of the validity of scientific evidence. Especially
because the members of the court, the judge and the jury, will generally
not have
any scientific training themselves. Let’s go back in 1939 and see how
hard it is to convince the court. It
was approaching midnight on the night of May 21, 1939, when the body of Walter Dinivan,
a sixty-four-year-old widower, was found in the living room of his apartment in
Bournemouth on England’s south coast. His head had been bashed so that his skull was crushed. He was rushed
to hospital, but he died there without regaining consciousness. So the
problem in this case is that the only witness to the crime is the victim, and
he’s dead. The autopsy, performed by Sir Bernard Spilbury,
indicated that the killer had first attempted to strangle Dinivan, and when
that had failed, had finished him off with a torrent of hammer blows to the
head. Chief Inspector Leonard Burt of Scotland Yard studied the crime scene
thoroughly. Everything smacked of robbery as the first thing that could be determined was the
motive because Dinivan's valuables from his safe and from his pocket were
gone. On the floor lay a brown paper bag, crumpled and
twisted; which Burt suspected had been wrapped around the murder weapon. The
room yielded a rich crop of varying fingerprints. Comparison with relative
eliminated all of the prints except one--a thumb print lifted from a toppled
beer glass. One of the odder discoveries was a hair curler found on the floor.
Flushed with embarrassment, Dinivan’s grandchildren suggested it might be
related to the old man’s fondness for entertaining prostitutes. But they had no
explanation for the cigarette butts strewn across the sofa and carpet. Burt,
aware of recent advances in saliva examination, ordered all of the butts to be
gathered up for analysis. In the meantime, he interviewed local prostitutes.
Several knew Dinivan as a regular client, but all dismissed the idea of using
and old-fashioned hair curler. It was during these conversations that the name
of Joseph Williams, a pretty hard up guy with not much money, first cropped up.
But suddenly, he'd come into money, and they
suspected that the money that was now flush in Joseph Williams pockets was
the money from Walter Dinivan. So, the scenario that they pictured was
that the murderer and Walter Dinivan had been talking, smoking cigarettes,
and the conversation had escalated into an argument, into a fight, and
this had led to murder. In 1925, it had been
discovered that some 80% of the population secrete their specific blood group
information in other bodily fluids, such as saliva. This enabled Home Office
analyst Roche Lynch to identify the cigarette smoker’s blood group as AB, the rarest
type, found in only 3% of the population. The obvious question therefore
is, what blood group was Joseph Williams? Now, Williams of course, is not
going to voluntarily give this information and not going to
voluntarily give a blood sample because he knows that it could lead to his
prosecution. The police officer in this case was a very smart man. He knew
Williams was someone who liked to drink, so when he observed that Williams
went into a pub, he followed him in and offered to buy him some beer, and
then to buy him some more and then to buy him some more. And gave
him some cigarettes to smoke and then some more cigarettes to
smoke. So at the end of the evening, all the police had to do was to
gather up the glasses, and gather up the cigarette ends, send them off to
the lab, collect the saliva off them, and analyze the blood
group. And sure enough, Williams was found to have the rare AB grouping.
So, the police have a motive and they have reasonable evidence that links
Williams to the crime scene. So he was arrested, he was taken to
court, he was charged, and the police presented their evidence. Now,
the defense counsel was a very clever man, and he looked at all the
evidence being presented by the police and he saw the weak point was the
saliva. And when he spoke in court, he cast scorn upon the idea that you
can determine blood group from saliva. Because after all, blood is blood,
and saliva is just a fancy word for spit. So it goes against common sense
that you can tell blood group from a piece of spit. And he was very
persuasive, and the jury did not believe the forensic evidence, and
therefore they returned a verdict of not guilty, and Williams walked free.
That night at a hotel, Williams celebrated his
freedom with Norman Rae, a newspaper reporter who had championed his innocence.
In the middle of the night, Rae was awakened by Williams pounding on his hotel
door. Overcome with drunken remorse, the old man sobbed, “I’ve got to tell
somebody. You see the jury was wrong...it was me.”
Rae was appalled. But there was nothing he could
do. He couldn't publish the story
because there were no witnesses and he would be sued for libel. Have once been found innocent, Williams could never again be tried for the
same offense. For more than a decade, Rae kept news of the confession to himself.
Only after Williams’ death in 1951 did he reveal how he and the jury had been
duped.
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