Case #2 - Joseph Williams

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.