Professor Linda Kaplan-Greene, former State Pathologist of Ireland
Linda: It took us two days before we could get out to the island after the body was found.
Noah: Because of Storm Ida?
Linda: Yes, there was no way we could chance the journey until the wind calmed down.
Noah: What impact did that have on your investigation? We know that Nessa was left outside and the party guests were trampling the scene, walking up to and around the body. She had been picked up; her father tried to move her at one point. The scene must have been in a state of disarray when you arrived, Professor.
Linda: It affected the forensics. If left exposed for that period of time, some trace evidence on a weapon can be lost; you wouldn’t get the same sort of results that you’d get if the scene was in pristine condition. But it doesn’t necessarily impact the pathology, which is my job. It just made it harder to determine the time of death, and that isn’t an exact science anyway. Ultimately, it came down to the last time Nessa Crowley was seen alive and the time at which the body was found; we called her time of death somewhere between those two points.
Jake: Did you know immediately this was a murder?
Linda: Any death like this, which involves a young, healthy woman found in unusual circumstances with a wound to the head, is going to be treated as suspicious. She had two sites of impact on the skull, which would have been unusual if she had simply fallen and hit her head. One of the wounds was, to my mind, very irregular; it left a laceration on the scalp that suggested she’d been hit with a blunt object. But head wounds are never as straight forward as, let’s say, a stabbing or a shooting. All pathologists have seen cases where a head injury is complicated but it does turn out to be an accident in the end. We’re always cautious in these cases. We have to be.
Noah: What did you do next? After attending to the body.
Linda: I told the gardaí I wasn’t happy with the two blows to the head. Even if the victim had fallen in an area that was rough, as this was – if I recall, the body was found in some sort of ornamental rock garden outside the Kinsella house – I still couldn’t see how the fall would cause two sites of injury. The body was held in the hospital morgue for five working days, but her parents wanted her back, they wanted to bury their daughter. You need to be sensitive in situations like this; no one wants to make it any worse for the family than it already is. But we still had some analysis that needed to be done. That was when the decision was made to release the body but the brain was retained for our purposes.
Jake: Sorry, can you elaborate on that?
Linda: It probably sounds a bit gruesome but it does happen. The brain was retained at the neuro-pathology centre in Cork University Hospital for further examination.
Noah: How long did that take?
Linda: Around six weeks. When I received the neuro-pathologist’s report, it confirmed my suspicions that this was a homicide.
Noah: And that was when the Misty Hill case became a murder investigation?
Linda: Precisely.