Killing the Cricket Coach: Bob Woolmer

 

On Saturday 17 March 2007, the Pakistan cricket team was knocked out of the World Cup when it was defeated by the Ireland team. The defeat was all the more mortifying for Pakistan because the Ireland team was made up of part-time players. At a quarter to eleven the following morning, Sunday 18 March, a chambermaid at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, found the Pakistan cricket team’s fifty-eight year old coach, Bob Woolmer, naked on the floor in his bathroom. He was taken to hospital but shortly afterwards pronounced dead.

It was four days later that the Jamaican police announced that Woolmer had not died of natural causes as at first thought: he had been murdered. He had been strangled with enough force to break a bone in his neck and splatter the walls with vomit. There was no sign of a forced entry into the hotel room, implying that Woolmer had known his murderer and let him in. The police had to wait some weeks before the results of toxicology tests came through. These might establish whether Woolmer was to some extent disabled with poison before being strangled.

British experts wondered whether their Jamaican counterparts had too quickly jumped to the conclusion that Woolmer died by manual strangulation. A British pathologist spoke contemptuously of the standards of Jamaican pathologists. If Woolmer had indeed died by manual strangulation, it was very odd that there were no bruises or scratches on his neck. His last meal had been lasagne, which was delivered to his room by room service. The Jamaican police had not ruled out the possibility that death was due to aconite poisoning, which can cause asphyxia.

The Interpol forensic expert, Susan Hitchin, took the view that the post mortem examination was bungled. She believed that the evidence pointed towards Woolmer dying from natural causes. He was a diabetic, and his blood testing kit was found on the floor near the body, which was leaning against the door. This had made it difficult for the chambermaid to push the door open. The fact that Woolmer’s body was propped up against the door raises the question of how a killer could have escaped. He would have needed to push the body out of the way to get out, but how would he then have got the body back up against the door? The location of the body alone suggests that no killer entered the bathroom. Woolmer could therefore not have been strangled – though he could have been poisoned.

Police investigators travelled to Pakistan to clear up discrepancies between the statements given by officials and team members. The scale of the investigation expanded when a team of detectives from Scotland Yard arrived, and an Interpol forensic expert. The British police carefully searched the twelfth floor hotel room, looked through the witness statements, and scrutinized the closed-circuit television footage showing the corridor outside Woolmer’s room.

The police had no particular suspect in the frame, but it was not hard to guess that Bob Woolmer’s death was closely connected to the humiliating defeat of his team the previous day. The performance of Pakistan’s cricket team was closely followed, with an almost hysterical zeal, by its millions of supporters. Any one of them could have felt sufficiently let down to want to wreak revenge on a scapegoat – and who better than the coach who trained the team? Pakistan’s defeat by Ireland was the most humiliating in the team’s history. It was greeted in Pakistan by the ritual burning of effigies of Bob Woolmer, and chants of ‘Death to Woolmer’. With feelings among the team’s fans running this high, it is a distinct possibility that an over-zealous fan could have taken the chanting literally.

The Kingston police began looking for three Pakistani fans in particular: the three who checked out of the Pegasus Hotel immediately after the murder. It would have been quite in character for Woolmer to have opened his door to chat to a fan, or even a trio of fans. He was friendly, approachable, good-natured and freely mixed with fans. He would have thought nothing of opening the door, wearing only a towel after his morning shower, to oblige an autograph hunter.

But there are other possibilities. Woolmer was white, not a Muslim, and something of an outsider as far as the Pakistan team were concerned. Allegations of match-fixing had circled round the sport for many years. The match with Ireland was regarded in cricketing circles as a very strange game. Pakistan’s opening match against the West Indies was similar. Bob Woolmer may have had his suspicions that team members had accepted bribes to throw these games. Given his strength of character, he would have confronted his players with these suspicions.

Gambling on the outcome of cricket matches and even on individual batsmen’s scores is a major activity in the subcontinent of India. It is estimated that as much as £20 billion a year is gambled on cricket matches in India alone. Such large sums are staked that there is an enormous temptation to fix matches. For significant bribes, players may produce the desired outcome. Both the Pakistan and the South Africa teams have been involved in match-fixing in the past. Bob Woolmer had acted as manager to both teams and he knew all about match-fixing. He had also written about the sport, and it was rumoured that he was about to write a book that would reveal the extent of the match-fixing. If that rumour was believed, it is possible that one of the illegal betting syndicates hired a professional killer to silence Woolmer before he got round to publishing. On the other hand, the book Woolmer was writing is said to have contained no such material. Following his death, his co-writer said that match-fixing would be included.

Match-fixing is a possibility, but at the same time the Pakistan players had their reputation as players to consider, and it seems unlikely that they would have exposed themselves to humiliation and ridicule for the sake of bribes. It would be a very short-term gain. Tim Noakes, Woolmer’s co-author, does not believe that Woolmer was murdered because of the match-fixing. In his view it is match-fixers and not coaches who are killed by other match-fixers.

The book Bob Woolmer was working on when he was murdered will have a section on match-fixing added to it prior to publication, its co-author has revealed. At the time of his death, Woolmer was working on a book with Tim Noakes, who was at one time doctor to the South African team and a sports science professor at Cape Town University. Woolmer was editing the original 600 pages, of which he wrote over three-quarters in the week before he died. The page proofs arrived at the Pegasus Hotel the day after he died. These were clearly not the manuscripts that were said to have been stolen from his room. Noakes decided to let it be known that there would be a chapter on match-fixing in their jointly-written book. He also made it known that the print-run would be increased from 5,000 to 100,000 copies, anticipating a huge surge of interest in what Woolmer might have to say about the sport. The rumour that Woolmer might have been murdered because he was about to blow the whistle on match-fixing led to the decision to examine the match-fixing phenomenon statistically. Thomas C. Gilfillan was recruited by Noakes to analyze all the data relating to South Africa’s one-day matches in the 1990s. For much of that time the team was coached by Woolmer. Gilfillan worked on the assumption that if you know the form of both of the teams playing, it is possible to predict the outcome of seventy per cent of matches. Noakes commented that the results would shed light on the character of the team captain.

A third possibility is that Bob Woolmer was an incidental victim of Kingston’s high crime rate. Murder is not an uncommon crime there and this might have been a random killing completely unconnected with cricket or Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pakistan cricket coach’s body remains at four degrees Celsius in a zipped-up black bag in a cold room in the basement of a Kingston funeral parlour. The body, like the case itself, is going nowhere. It stays in Jamaica until the coroner decides to release it to the family in South Africa. Nothing of any substance has so far emerged to resolve the mystery. Woolmer’s final e-mail messages give no hint of concern about match-fixing. There is no hint of any fear, either.