15

An avalanche of opinion

A BOXING COMMENTATOR would have said that the Chamberlains were well ahead on points. Yet Barker had foreshadowed a flurry of knockout punches from the scientists, and it was only the end-result that mattered.

Sergeant Cocks described his experiments on jumpsuits, and provided an impromptu demonstration for the jury, using a pair of curved scissors similar to the pair found in the Chamberlains’ car. He was able to produce damage of the same general shape as that evident in Azaria’s jumpsuit, and his handiwork was passed around so that the jury could see it. He explained that he had tried to reproduce the damage using a scalpel and a razor blade, but that neither had produced the required result. Scissors, he thought, had provided the answer. They had also produced tufts of cotton and nylon similar to those found in the Chamberlains’ car and in the camera bag.

Phillips reminded Cocks of his assertion that the fibres of fabric in the collar and sleeve of the baby’s jumpsuit ‘were all consistent with having been cut’, and contrasted this with his evidence before the first inquest that ‘the majority were cut’. Cocks explained that some of the fibres had withdrawn back into the weave, but that ‘The fibres that I could examine were distinctly cut.’ The point was not without significance. The force necessary to produce tearing may cause a stretching of the fibre and a corresponding retraction into the weave when severance occurs.

‘Are you saying now you could not examine all the fibres in the collar? Yes or no?’ Phillips demanded.

‘That is correct,’ Cocks conceded.

‘Do you not think you should have made that clear to the jury?’

‘Possibly yes, on reflection.’

‘With people on trial for murder,’ Phillips emphasised.

He went on to remind him of his evidence at the first inquest that none of the tufts from the camera bag ‘gave the reaction for blood’.

‘Did you test them for blood?’

‘No, I am not an expert in testing for blood.’

‘How were you able to give that evidence?’

‘Under a microscope you can see the appearance of blood and I did not see any trace of blood. Therefore I gave the reply, which is an accurate reply, “I could not see any blood on any of the loops and fibres, or threads or tufts, that I had removed from the car vacuumings or the bag.”’

‘That is not what you swore at the inquest at all, Mr Cocks,’ Phillips persisted. ‘What you swore at the inquest was that there was “nothing that gave the reaction to blood. They didn’t give a reaction, that is the point”. That is what you swore.’

‘Then what I said at the inquest, if that is how it’s been recorded, is inaccurate,’ Cocks conceded.

‘It is not the first time you have given inaccurate evidence in your career, is it, Mr Cocks?’ Phillips demanded.

‘I don’t consider that I have ever given what I’d call inaccurate …’ Cocks began defiantly before Phillips interrupted to remind him of the trial of a man named Van Beelen, when he gave evidence concerning the thickness of hairs said to identify Van Beelen as the assailant.

‘And you gave three times the correct thickness, in your sworn evidence, didn’t you?’

‘I gave evidence three times of an incorrect measurement.’

‘You didn’t give evidence three times,’ Phillips responded firmly. ‘I suggest you gave evidence of three times the correct measurement; triple what it should have been.’

Cocks capitulated, but Phillips wasn’t done yet. ‘In that case did you produce … slides and photographs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your evidence was wrong, was it not?’

‘There was evidence that some of the photographs had been mixed up, and were in the wrong place, yes.’

‘Was your evidence wrong?’

‘Yes.’

Phillips referred to his evidence about fragments of vegetation embedded in the fibre of the baby’s jumpsuit, and reminded him that he had spoken about ‘a lot of other material; green broad leafed material’. Three small vials of fragments were then produced, but each was nearly empty. They offered little support for the suggestion that the Chamberlains had forcefully rubbed the jumpsuit in vegetation to simulate the effects of being dragged through the scrub for several kilometres.

Professor Chaikin came to the witness box and reiterated his view that the jumpsuit worn by Azaria Chamberlain at the time of her disappearance had been cut by a sharp instrument rather than being tom by dingo teeth. He gave three reasons for this opinion. First, when the damage to the collar was viewed through a scanning electron microscope, the severed ends of the fibres were found to be ‘pretty much in a plane’. This was not consistent with a tear. Second, one fibre had been severed cleanly in what he described as a ‘classic scissor cut’. Third, there were tufts. If a tooth or some other relatively blunt object catches a loop of fabric, it may tear but, once torn, the tension is released and there is no further severance of the same loop. Tufts can only be formed by two severances.

He conceded that some were produced in the manufacturing process, but said that some had been found directly adjacent to the severances. He found that five tufts taken from the car and three taken from the camera bag appeared to be consistent with those from Azaria’s jumpsuit. He also found a number of hairs in the camera bag, six of which appeared to be from an infant.

Evidence that the jumpsuit had been cut rather than torn clearly pointed clearly to human involvement in Azaria’s disappearance — and, if the cutting could be linked to the Chamberlains, it would support a strong inference of guilt. It suggested that the jumpsuit had been damaged to create a false impression that the child had been taken by a dingo. And it raised other disturbing questions. How could they have found the baby’s clothing when they took little part in the searches, and three hundred others, helped by Aboriginal trackers, failed? Why didn’t they tell the rangers of their discovery? Why had they lied about it ever since? And why would they want to fabricate evidence of a dingo attack, unless they were trying to cover up a murder?

Yet, in reality, the suggested inferences drawn from the presence of tufts in the car and camera bag were tenuous. The Chamberlains were to give evidence that the bag had been given to them by someone else, and that they had used it for carrying clothing during trips. Chaikin’s own evidence established that the majority of the tufts in the car had come from other sources, and there was no reason to suppose that those similar to the ones found on the jumpsuit could not have been produced in a similar fashion. Chaikin’s evidence did not go so far as to establish that they had come from the same jumpsuit, and Bonds probably produced such garments by the million. Similar considerations applied to the evidence concerning the hairs. At least half apparently came from adults, and the others varied from ‘a light straw yellow’ to ‘mid to dark brown’. Chaikin conceded that he ‘would not be able to say that all this hair came from the same head’. And even if some of it had been Azaria’s, there was no reason to suppose that it might not have got there innocently, perhaps from a cardigan or bonnet worn on some earlier occasion.

This time, Phillips chose not to attack Chaikin’s credibility, but to explore his opinions in the light of other evidence and to make an implicit appeal to his fairness. He mentioned that the bag had been used for family excursions and asked, ‘In those circumstances, do you find it at all surprising that you found baby hair in the bag?’

‘Well, I’d rather not comment on that. All I know is that there was baby hair in the bag. I wouldn’t know how it got there.’

‘Could you indicate just how many hairs a baby might lose in a day?’

‘On the average baby there are fifty or sixty thousand. Babies start shedding at different times, so one cannot come to any definite conclusion. But when they start falling out, they fall out in large numbers. It can be measured in hundreds of fibres a day.’

‘Even at one hundred a day, according to my indifferent mathematics, this baby would have had the potential to lose seven thousand in its short life? In nine-and-a-half weeks?’

‘On the average, it could be calculated that way.’

Phillips then turned to the question of the damage to the nappy and asked, ‘You are certainly not prepared to exclude that damage as being possibly caused by a dingo’s tooth or claws, are you?’

‘I could not. No.’

A good cross-examiner will not only seek to undermine the force of any adverse evidence that has been given, but seek to bolster his or her own case. Professor Cameron was still to come, and Phillips saw in Chaikin an opportunity to create doubts about the validity of his opinions even before Cameron entered the witness box.

‘We are told that Professor Cameron, from England, will be giving evidence, and he will offer the view that if a dingo were to have taken hold of this child by the neck with the jumpsuit collar up, so that the fabric of the collar is between the child’s flesh and the dingo’s tooth, that would involve the infliction of damage onto the collar. Do you follow that proposition, professor?’

‘I follow it.’

‘Your experiments would run very strongly against that proposition, wouldn’t they?’

‘My experiments would tend to indicate that the proposition would not necessarily follow.’

‘In fact, your experiments show that not only could a tooth press against a child’s flesh, but penetrate it for some distance, and still not cause damage to the jumpsuit or the singlet?’

‘Obviously when it was being held there would be an indentation, but subsequently that fabric would recover.’

‘Exactly.’

Phillips pressed on. Chaikin had ‘scanned the cut’ through the electron microscope and looked at any positions where it looked as if a reasonable picture could be taken of ‘either a bunch of fibres coming together or of an individual fibre that looked like it had a sharp end’. Yet he had been able to find only one fibre which had the ‘classic appearance of being cut’. Furthermore, whilst he had carried out some experiments with dingo teeth on fabric, he had ventured the opinion that a dingo tooth had not produced that damage ‘without ever seeing a live dingo bite anything’ and ‘without ever having examined the clothing of a person who was bitten by a dingo’.

The scientific evidence was interrupted whilst the prosecution interposed a witness named Rohan Tew who had once been involved in an altercation with a plate-glass window and had severed a nerve in his arm. He installed car radios and cassette players and, from time to time, bumped or cut himself. If the injury occurred to part of his arm, the nerve ends would fail to signal that information to the brain, and Tew would find out about it only when he saw the blood. Two-and-a-half months after Azaria’s disappearance, he was working on the Chamberlains’ car when he noticed blood near the console. He checked his arm, but found no sign that he had been bleeding.

The jury had heard nothing of Senior Constable Graham’s minute search of the car six weeks earlier, and had no idea that a version of Tew’s statement had been produced which omitted, among other things, any reference to his employer, Floyd Hart, and his role in the installation. However, Hart became concerned that the defence might not have received a copy of his own statement, and contacted Phillips directly. He was to say that he had carried out most of the work personally and had seen no blood.

Senior Constable Metcalfe gave evidence of his discovery of the spray pattern under the dashboard. He produced the steel plate which had been cut from the car, and it was passed from juror to juror so that each might examine the ‘classic arterial blood spray’. Phillips drew from him the details of an incident which was to remain unexplained not only during the trial, but throughout all of the subsequent investigations. Four months before the trial, a plastic syringe had been found in the Chamberlains’ car. It was empty and bore no needle. Disturbances to cobwebs hanging from the roof of the police compound and dust marks on the floor suggested that someone had climbed over the wire fence and crawled under the car. The gearbox had been removed, leaving an aperture wide enough to admit a person’s arm, and it may have been inserted through this space. However, it seemed unlikely that this could have been the source of any of the blood in the car because there would have been residue left in the syringe. Of course, it could have been cleaned, but it defied credulity to imagine someone using the syringe to fabricate evidence, taking it away to clean it, and then returning to replace it in the car where it was likely to be found. Various hypotheses sprang to mind, but it seemed the only firm conclusion one could draw was that the police custody of the vehicle had not been as secure as one would have liked.

It was left to Sturgess to lead Joy Kuhl through her evidence, as he had done at the second inquest. Metcalfe set up the screen and operated a projector on a table near the witness box, whilst she explained the nature of the tests she had used with an air of polite competence.

Both Professor Boettcher and Dr Simon Baxter, her immediate superior, sat in court to hear her evidence, and each would later be asked to comment on it.

The tests were reliable, she maintained, and the presence of foetal haemoglobin had been demonstrated. Since the second inquest she had carried out a regimen of tests to verify the specificity of the antiserum, and in more than two hundred and thirty tests had obtained not one positive reaction with adult blood.

In cross-examination, Phillips made the point that all of the plates had been destroyed. ‘Did you take any photographs of them? Or did you direct that any photographs be taken of this evidence before it was destroyed?’

‘No. We have no facilities for that.’

Phillips pointed out that there had been facilities to take photographs for demonstration purposes.

‘To produce my visual aids, yes.’

He turned to her understanding of the changing balance of foetal and adult haemoglobin in the blood of a developing infant. To Boettcher’s mind, this was the key. If she had realised the proportions that should have been present in Azaria’s blood, she would have been struck by the obvious incongruity of the results she was obtaining.

‘Now, at the inquest did you swear this? “Human foetal haemoglobin is different from adult haemoglobin. While a baby, or a foetus is in utero it does not have any adult haemoglobin”.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘That was demonstrably false.’

‘I used that statement for the purposes of making things clear and simple. It was not a false statement.’

‘I say false in the sense of incorrrect.’

‘It was incorrect, scientifically. It was used as an indication of the relative amounts.’

‘You are perfectly entitled to give an explanation, which you have, but the fact is, scientifically, that statement is utterly incorrect, is it not?’

‘Scientifically, it is not correct, yes.’

Phillips also challenged her about her assertion that the bloodstains could not be more than two years old. Lenehan had bled in the car when the Chamberlains picked him up on 17 June 1979, just outside the two-year period prior to her tests.

‘Are you suggesting that we should, as it were, shut the door as at September 1979?’

‘That would have been consistent with my opinion, yes.’

‘These stains could not date from August 1979? Do you swear that?’

‘It is an opinion based purely on experience, Mr Phillips. I can’t swear that.’

‘Do you swear they cannot date from July 1979?’

‘Once again the same applies, no, I can’t swear that.’

‘Do you swear that they cannot date from June 1979?’

‘No.’

That was enough for Phillips’ purposes. He cross-examined at length, taking her through the procedure followed in the various tests, Boettcher’s criticisms, and any obvious scope for error. There were few concessions.

Eventually, he resorted to the overhead projector. Boettcher had picked up what appeared to be double bands even on the demonstration slides. Phillips pointed them out. ‘There are two bands, Mrs Kuhl?’ he inquired.

‘Well, there is a band and a smudge,’ she replied.

He inserted another slide. ‘Will you concede at least that there is a band, and a faint impression of a second band?’

This time, the response was more emphatic. ‘No.’

He tried a third slide. ‘That is a band, is it not?’

‘It is not a band … it is an artefact in the staining procedure.’

Phillips gave it away. The jury had seen the projection of the slides, and Professor Boettcher would explain their significance in due course.

Dr Simon Baxter was the senior forensic biologist attached to the New South Wales Health Commission. In 1974, while still in England, he and another scientist had published a paper entitled Immunological Identification of Foetal Haemoglobin in Bloodstains in Infanticide and Associated Crimes. He had retained an interest in such cases, and when he allocated to Joy Kuhl the task of testing samples taken from the Chamberlains’ car, he had asked her to show him all of the plates displaying a positive result. There was some disagreement over this, with Kuhl insisting that he had seen every plate, whether positive or negative, and Baxter remaining adamant that he had been shown only those displaying positive results.

He agreed that the orthotolidine test could react not only with blood, but with other substances such as bleach, horseradish, and some heavy metals. He said that such ‘false positives’ were ‘first stage’ reactions — that is, reactions which produced colouration before the addition of peroxide, and then usually a different shade to the vivid peacock-blue characteristic of blood. When asked whether an experienced biologist could confuse such a reaction with the result likely to be obtained from a genuine bloodstain, he replied confidently, ‘Not while I am around.’

Whilst supporting Kuhl’s interpretation of the plates he had seen, he conceded that even he had no experience in testing denatured bloodstains for foetal haemoglobin.

He had tested the blood of Lenehan, the bleeding hitchhiker, but had obtained a negative result for foetal haemoglobin. He had also carried out a PGM test, and discovered that it fell into a different group from that shared by the Chamberlain family.

Like Kuhl, he was to dismiss most of Boettcher’s criticisms. The crossover electrophoresis tests were qualitative and not quantitative. A band would indicate the presence of foetal haemoglobin, but one could not validly compare the strength of that band with the strength of another in order to determine relative concentrations. He did, however, disagree with Kuhl in relation to the haemoglobin bands evident in the haptoglobin test.

Another forensic biologist, Mr Bryan Culliford, was called to provide some theoretical support for Kuhl and Baxter. He seemed to have been imported from London mainly because he had been the first to adopt the crossover electrophoresis technique in a forensic-science laboratory. Of course, he had not seen the plates before they were destroyed but, on the assumption that what he had been told was accurate, he was prepared to agree with Kuhl’s conclusions. In cross-examination, he conceded that those conclusions could be supported only if the antiserum was in fact specific to foetal haemoglobin. If that had been established, he would regard a second band as ‘insignificant’. Boettcher would not have disagreed, but it was a bit like a zoologist confidently asserting that if you had thoroughly established that a big cat was a lion not a tiger, then the presence of stripes was insignificant.

Dr Tony Jones had been the first pathologist to examine Azaria Chamberlain’s clothing. Unlike Cameron, he did not regard the bloodstains on the jumpsuit as proving an incised wound to the throat. The possibility of some crushing injury to the baby’s head could not be excluded, though he thought an injury to the neck was more likely. He confirmed that, despite a negative orthotolidine test on the under-dash spray pattern, he had cut off five of the droplets and forwarded them to Kuhl. She had earlier given evidence that it was only when she dug into two of these droplets and tested the material that she was able to demonstrate the presence of foetal haemoglobin. Whilst that was a matter for a biologist, Jones added his own contribution: the spray indicated pressure from an orifice such as a small artery.

In cross-examination, Kirkham asked Jones to examine another steel plate with a spray pattern, and asked whether it seemed similar to the spray pattern he had described.

‘It is a fine spray of similar character,’ Jones agreed. He was obviously curious, but Kirkham did not take the matter any further. It was later to be revealed that the plate had been cut from another Torana of the same model. No one could say what had caused the pattern, but it seemed unlikely that the owner, Reverend W.A. Roberts, had cut the throat of another baby under his dashboard.

Bernard Sims, the London odontologist, gave evidence that the damage to the jumpsuit was not consistent with a dog attack. The typical hole and tear marks he would have expected were not present, the damage to the arm seemed too regular, and the damage to the collar seemed too linear. He dismissed the possibility that a dingo might have carried the child away by the neck without leaving any damage to the clothing. He also rejected the suggestion that it may have carried the child off by fastening its teeth into her face.

‘It wouldn’t be able to. The facial tissues would be ripped away.’

He produced a dingo skull and a doll dressed up as a baby. The head of the doll was described as being the size of a three-month-old baby, and he was able to demonstrate the sheer impossibility of it fitting within the dingo jaws.

Kirkham challenged this in cross-examination, but Sims remained adamant.

‘Using lay terms, if a dingo seized the head of a child with a forty-centimetre circumference, the jaws would be dislocated?’ Kirkham asked.

‘Yes,’ Sims replied confidently.

Kirkham asked him to examine a photograph. It showed a live dingo with the head of a doll similar to the one that Sims had used for his demonstration. It was in its mouth.

‘Do you concede, having seen that photograph, that a dog could perfectly easily encompass the head of a child of Azaria Chamberlain’s size, in its jaws?’

‘If that … ,’ Sims began as he stared incredulously at the photograph. Then he broke off and started again. ‘If that doll’s head has not been forced into the dog’s jaws, I would accept that.’

When the Crown finally called Professor Cameron, it was as though the preliminary acts had finished. It was time for the headliner. Barker ran through his impressive list of qualifications and experience, which included a paper on the Turin Shroud. He asked him how many autopsies he had carried out, and was rewarded with the answer, ‘in excess of fifty thousand’.

Whilst not prepared to completely exclude the possibility of an attack by a dingo, Cameron had seen none of the evidence he would have expected, had that occurred.

‘It would be very difficult for me to imagine a dog grasping the head from above. That would be the only way in which I think a dog could possibly grasp a child without damaging the collar. But, in so doing, I would’ve expected extensive bleeding, but not around the collar of the jumpsuit.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when you get a head injury you get rivulets of blood draining down and missing the collar. It goes down the front and down the back, depending on which way the head is bending. Certainly you’ll get bleeding around the back of the collar, depending on how the child lay afterwards, where the pooling of blood …’ He indicated the blood pattern on the jumpsuit and continued, ‘I would’ve anticipated that it can only be described by a cut-throat type of injury.’

He was shown the plate cut from under the dashboard of the Chamberlains’ car, and confirmed that the pattern appeared to be that of an arterial blood spray spurting upwards under the dashboard from a point near the firewall.

Phillips began his cross-examination with the words: ‘Professor Cameron, I would like to ask you some questions about a famous English case, called the Confait case, in which you were involved. Because I want to suggest to you it illustrates some of the difficulties in giving forensic opinions in court.’ This was a clever approach. Cameron’s earlier errors would become an object lesson in how forensic science could misfire.

The Confait case had received considerable publicity in England. Three young boys, each intellectually retarded, had been charged with murder and arson. They had been interrogated by the police and persuaded to sign confessions, but had later repudiated them, and one had an apparently iron-clad alibi. He had been at a Salvation Army club until about 11.30 p.m. The time of death was therefore crucial. Other medical evidence suggested that Confait had died somewhere between 8.00 and 10.00 p.m., but Professor Cameron had testified that ‘rigor was commencing’ at the time he examined the body in the mortuary, and that death might have been as late as midnight. One of the boys was convicted of murder, another of manslaughter, and the third of arson.

After two inquiries and three years in prison, the boys had been declared innocent and awarded compensation. Another eminent pathologist had put the time of death at around 8.00 p.m., and Cameron himself had conceded that ‘I would have thought the time of death less likely to be near the midnight mark’. He had been apparently misled because he had not known that the police surgeon had found rigor mortis complete at the scene of the fire, or that a fireman had found the body stiff to touch, but he had also failed to take a rectal temperature of the body.

These matters were put to Cameron over Barker’s repeated objections. ‘Consequently,’ Phillips concluded, ‘when you gave evidence at the trial, you were not armed with the correct knowledge of all of the attendant circumstances?’

‘I would agree entirely,’ Cameron conceded.

‘Now, I want to suggest to you, Professor Cameron, that you have done the same thing in this case.’

His opinion that a dingo had not been involved in the disappearance of the child had been based in part upon his view that a dingo could not have removed the child from the jumpsuit with only two studs undone. But neither Morris nor Goodwin had suggested the jumpsuit had been found in that state. Their recollections had differed, but only as to whether it was open to the crutch or open down one leg as well. The professor conceded that his belief had been an important factor and that his ‘understanding was wrong’.

His report also included the statement: ‘Suffice to say I have never known a member of the canine family leaving clothes in a neat bundle.’ Again, the evidence of both Morris and Goodwin made it clear that the basis for this opinion had been misconceived.

Phillips then turned to another part of his report. ‘On reading all the evidence, it would suggest the last time the child was seen, by an independent observer, was 1530 hours on the day of the alleged disappearance of the child. Although there is evidence given that the child moved or was seen to be held by the mother, nobody actually saw the child apart from an alleged kicking motion seen at the barbecue site.’ Phillips drew his attention to the deposition of Judy West, who had seen the child as the sun was setting. The professor conceded that the sun would not have been setting at half past three, and that his conclusion was based on ‘a false assumption if one negates, as I have apparently negated, Mrs West’s evidence’.

‘Have you made any other false assumptions, before you gave evidence, Professor Cameron?’

‘Again, not to my knowledge.’

Phillips reminded him of his evidence at the second inquest. ‘I rely entirely on Dr Scott’s negative evidence, in that there was no saliva present.’ Phillips drew Cameron’s attention to Scott’s deposition in which Scott had qualified his statement that he had not established the presence of saliva in the particular portions tested with the acknowledgement that ‘of course, there is no guarantee that there is no saliva elsewhere’.

Cameron was taken to a further passage in his report: ‘Suffice to say I have never known a member of the canine family pulling off the nappy intact.’ This statement may have struck the jury as incongruous given Goodwin’s description of the tear marks and the pieces of lining strewn over the clothing. Cameron explained that it had been based on the appearance of the nappy when he examined it.

Phillips then returned to the Confait case, which had revealed one further bizarre twist. Confait had died of strangulation, and an English barrister studying photographs of the wounds saw what appeared to be writing in blood on his neck. Professor Cameron had preserved the neck and kept it in his laboratory. Further photographs were taken and enlarged three hundred times. The barrister had been convinced that the pattern spelled out the word ‘WANK’. Cameron had been sceptical of this but, when pressed, conceded that there had been marks with the appearance of ‘WA’. Phillips was content to accept that his scepticism was well founded; that was not his concern.

‘Would you not agree that blood from an injury, purely by accident, can take up apparent shapes of objects?’

‘They must have a contact point. By or against an object.’

‘It can occur purely by accident, an apparent pattern of an object?’

‘A pattern of an object can occur, certainly, yes.’

‘By accident?’

‘By whatever means, accident or not.’

The point was plain. If patterns can form by accident on a neck, why not on a jumpsuit?

Barker closed the Crown case. The Chamberlains’ lawyers felt they had weathered the storm and maintained their points lead.