Eddie Redman, a once-met-never-forgotten, squat, slightly dishevelled Scotsman, was among the first to arrive. His diminutive stature belied a powerful presence. He was not everyone’s cup of tea and never short of an opinion or two, his heavy accent and booming tone ensuring that all in the vicinity heard it.
I often struggled to work out whether he had just arrived at work or been out crawling around crime scenes all night. But like most SOCOs, he was a grafter. You do not choose that profession for a nine-to-five, weekends-off lifestyle. Criminals do not respect office hours and evidence can have an inconvenient habit of disappearing or degenerating throughout the day and night.
When Eddie and his three colleagues arrived, they began to pore over the microscopic clues the girls and the clearing might hold. Dressed in forensic barrier suits, they trudged through the woods until they found Smudge, dutifully guarding the bodies and scene against interference, be that inadvertent or deliberate.
You only get one chance to examine a crime scene. Once you have cleared it and surrendered control, there is no going back to reconstruct how the killer left it. In my time, I used to drum in to new detectives the importance of cordoning off as wide an area as possible – you can always contract a large scene but never expand small ones.
Preservation and integrity are key. Eddie and his team knew that whatever they did, or did not do, over the next hours, days and weeks would be subject to intense scrutiny in the months to come.
Every movement, every step, is planned and deliberate. Nothing happens by accident and everything is logged. When running investigations, I was a stickler for this, sometimes bawling out officers whose actions compromised the evidence. As a detective chief inspector, I turned up at one suspicious death to find the officer guarding the scene from an armchair in the lounge while a woman lay dead upstairs. I made my displeasure very clear. Luckily for him the death was not suspicious but my roasting would have been nothing compared to the cross-examination he would have suffered at Lewes Crown Court had it been a murder.
Before anything is touched, SOCOs photograph the scene and its immediate area in minute detail and from every conceivable angle – today it would be videoed too. The court will want to know, for example, exactly what Kevin, Matthew and Bishop saw and how. They will want to know how the girls lay, what was on and around them and what was visible to each witness. Sometimes this includes noting which bush is not trodden down, where debris or litter is absent as well as present. What is not there can be as significant as what is.
While there is just one SOCO behind the lens, this is a team effort. The photographer will be snapping away while the other SOCOs are scanning the scene, from a forensically safe distance, pointing out anything and everything that may become relevant.
The photographs taken, Eddie embarked on the painstaking process of methodically recovering what would be hundreds of tiny items that might unmask a monster. These included the seemingly obvious such as a discarded knife, pornographic magazines and fibres, to the less so, like samples of vegetation, soil and scraps of wood. As the light was starting to fail, it was vital this first phase was completed before Nicola and Karen were taken away.
Even though death was obvious, it needed to be verified. Unlike nowadays, where nurses or paramedics can ‘declare life extinct’, in 1986 it was the job of a police surgeon. It may seem a formality but it is critical that clinicians decide whether someone has died, or if they can still be saved. Only when death is indisputable – such as decapitation or where the body is significantly decomposed – is verification not required.
The police surgeon arrived about an hour and a half after the bodies were found. Strangely, he did not encroach far into the clearing and from a distance of about six feet, he confirmed death. As the colossal Smudge had managed to squeeze his way through, it is puzzling why this doctor could, or would, not. The police were lucky that Dr Iain West, one of the country’s most respected and eminent forensic pathologists, was also on call. Thankfully he too arrived promptly. A convivial, heavy-smoking workaholic, he was famed for going above and beyond the call of duty. Famous for not only pinpointing the causes of death, but also providing inspired explanations.
Following the death of the disgraced British tycoon Robert Maxwell in 1991, West carried out the second post mortem and noted previously unseen muscle damage. From this he was able to suggest suicide as a real possibility.
Additionally, his determination of the exact angle of the bullet that killed Metropolitan WPC Yvonne Fletcher as she policed a protest outside the Libyan Embassy in 1984 made it crystal clear that it was a Libyan national who had murdered her. Other notable crimes to which he lent his considerable expertise included the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing, the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster, the Clapham and Paddington rail crashes and the 1990 murder of Kenyan Foreign Minister Dr Robert Ouko at his country residence some 300 miles outside Nairobi.
Pathologists do not always see bodies in situ, but this was not a run-of-the-mill case. Detective Superintendent Bernie Wells returned to the scene with Dr West so he could learn first-hand what science might reveal about how the girls were killed. Bernie confirmed Smudge’s account of how he found them and that of the police surgeon regarding the injuries he saw from a distance. By Nicola’s left hand he spotted what appeared to be Karen’s jumper and knickers – a sure sign of a sexual motive. Having seen all he needed to, West gave the order for the girls to be taken from their cold, damp dumping ground to the borough mortuary, less than a mile away.
This was a most delicate operation, as Dr West would later be looking for any minute clue that would solve the case. Moving a body from A to B can dislodge important evidence or, worse, new and misleading material can attach to it, later sending investigators up blind alleys
Satisfied that the girls had been carefully cocooned in the forensically secure body bags, Redman gave the green light to the waiting undertakers to take the small bodies away.