The Mammoth Book of New Csi (10 page)

Soon after Colette’s abduction, the red Fiesta turned up outside the Generous Briton pub in the local village of Costock. The landlady, Sylvia Widdowson, said: “Around 9.30 p.m., this chap came in. He was a stranger, and the first thing I noticed was he had blood in the cracks of his fingers and under his fingernails.”

Noticing that his hands were drawing attention, the man slipped away from the bar and went into the lavatory to wash his hands. He spent a long time in there. When he came out, he returned to the bar and ordered a pint of orange and lemonade, and a salad sandwich. He told the landlady he had driven up the M1 motorway to visit friends at Barton in Fabis, but they had not been in. But to Mrs Widdowson, the story did not make sense. Costock did not lie on any direct route from Barton in Fabis.

“He wasn’t very talkative,” she said. “I had to drag conversation out of him.”

Mrs Widdowson said the man was clean-shaven. He had a baby face and short hair. Despite numerous witness statements, the man sitting in the Generous Briton pub that night was never traced nor eliminated from enquiries, leading police to believe he was Colette’s killer. A police forensic team later took samples from the barroom.

Months later, a letter was sent to police. They believe it came from the killer and it taunted them for not catching him, even saying that he had returned to the village to watch them make their enquiries.

Written in an unusual style in capital letters with all “S”s replaced by exclamation marks, it claimed he had been hiding in a hut watching girls riding horses when he spotted the red Fiesta with the key left in. He claimed that he wore a Halloween mask so that he would not be recognized.

“Masks are common around haloween [
sic
]. No one knows what I look like. That is why you have not got me. I know I strangled her. I drove around and ended up at Keyworth. I left the key there to fool you and walked back across the fields . . . I go soon and then you will never get me.”

Numerous appeals were made. In 1984, police called in language experts to help identify the suspect’s accent, a hypnotist to help a key witness recall vital facts and even a medium to talk to Colette’s mother.

At the time, twenty-five-year-old Paul Hutchinson lived only seven streets away from the Arams in Keyworth. To allay suspicion, he claimed he had cancer and shaved off his hair to give the impression he was having chemotherapy. Then he moved away. However, he moved back to south Nottinghamshire and led a seemingly normal life. He married twice and had four children. He worked as an electrician and held down jobs as a youth worker, helping children with learning disabilities, and with a local housing association. Later, he set up his own newspaper distribution business.

Soon after the murder, a young policeman named Kevin Flint interviewed Hutchinson as a “person of interest”. In 2004, as a detective superintendent and head of homicide at Nottinghamshire police, he took over the enquiry, which was reinvigorated when officers began actively following up leads produced when the case was featured in the twentieth anniversary programme of
Crimewatch
. Over 1,500 suspects had been ruled out, including 800 men whose DNA had been compared to the profile made from a small sample left on a paper towel the suspect had used to dry his hands in the pub. Then, in 2008, Hutchinson’s youngest son was arrested for a driving offence. A DNA sample was taken. It was entered on the national database and a match was made.

Hutchinson tried to blame his dead brother but, shortly before his trial, the police managed to find a sample of his brother’s DNA and ruled him out. As a result, Hutchinson changed his plea.

According to the prosecutor, “Colette . . . was a sexually inexperienced girl and she sustained a blow to the head. However it may have been caused, it would not have been sufficient to render her unconscious, and she would have been alive and conscious when she was sexually assaulted in the car.”

Sentencing Hutchinson to life imprisonment, Mr Justice Flaux described Colette’s murder as a “truly horrendous attack”.

“The terror and degradation that this poor girl must have suffered at the hands of a stranger in her last few moments are unimaginable,” he said. “It’s clear from the evidence before the court that you [Hutchinson] are a compulsive liar and fantasist. You have lived your life with your wife and children, who were completely ignorant of who you were.”

Hutchinson’s DNA had not been found at the scene of any other unsolved crimes, so it appears that he did not kill again.

On 17 October 2010, Hutchinson was found unconscious in a cell in Nottingham prison. Staff could not revive him and he died on his way to hospital.

C
RIME SCENE EVIDENCE
played a crucial part in the controversial conviction of the American student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of twenty-one-year-old British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on 1 November 2007.

It was All Saints’ Day, a public holiday in Italy, and Meredith went to dinner with some British friends. She walked part of the way home with her friend Sophie Purton, parting company some 500 yards (460 m) from her upstairs flat at Via Pergola 7 at around 8.55 p.m. The Italian students that lived in the apartment below were out of town for the holiday, as were Meredith’s Italian flatmates Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti. Her other flatmate, twenty-one-year-old Amanda Knox, said she was at her boyfriend’s place. Knox was supposed to have gone to work that night at Le Chic restaurant-bar but her boss, thirty-eight-yearold Congolese-born musician and bar owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, sent her a text message saying that it was quiet and she would not be needed. She responded with a text that read: “OK see you later good evening” in Italian. At 8.45 p.m., a friend called at Sollecito’s apartment. Knox answered the door.

At some point during the evening, Meredith Kercher’s neighbour Nara Capezzali said she heard a woman’s scream and the sound of “at least two people” running on the building’s metal staircase. However, doubt was cast on this testimony, as the windows of Capezzali’s apartment were double-glazed and too far away to have heard a scream from Kercher’s flat. It was later reported that she was deaf and suffered from psychiatric problems.

At 12.07 p.m. the following afternoon, Knox called the mobile phone Meredith used to take calls from the UK. She always carried it, Knox later testified, because she was expecting calls about her mother who was ill back in Britain. Then she called Filomena, saying that she had returned to the apartment to find the front door open and blood in the bathroom. Knox called Filomena twice more, updating her. The window in Filomena’s room had been broken and her room had been ransacked.

At 12.47 p.m., Knox called her mother in Seattle who told her to call the police. Knox called the Italian emergency number twice, reporting a break-in and mentioning that she had seen blood. She also said that her flatmate was missing and the door to her room was locked.

By the time the Carabinieri (the army police corps) had responded to these calls, the Italian Polizia postale e delle comunicazioni (Post and Communications Police) had turned up as Kercher’s two mobile phones – one for UK calls, one for local calls – had been found in gardens half-a-mile (800 m) away. They found Knox and Sollecito standing outside the flat, saying they were waiting for the Carabinieri. Knox took the officers inside and showed them the broken window, bloodstains in the bathroom and Kercher’s locked bedroom door. But the Polizia postale were reluctant to break it down, considering it outside their jurisdiction.

Filomena then turned up with three friends. One of them kicked Kercher’s door in. Meredith’s near-naked body was found lying on the floor, covered by a blood-soaked duvet. There was blood on the bed, the walls and the floor. The police then ordered everyone out of the flat as it was now a crime scene and forensic teams moved in.

Pathologists put the time of death at between nine and eleven the previous evening. Her body was covered in scratches and bruises. There were forty-three in all. An attempt had been made to strangle her, but she had actually been killed by multiple stab wounds to the throat. One had severed her superior thyroid artery and she died of suffocation due to inhalation of her own blood. The hyoid bone in her neck, which supports the tongue, was broken, indicating that she had been choked before she was stabbed. There were also the marks of three fingers and a thumb on Meredith’s neck and knife wounds to her hands made when she tried to defend herself. There were also signs of sexual assault. Her body had been disrobed and moved some time after death. Two credit cards and money were missing.

On 5 November, twenty-four-year-old Sollecito was called to the police station in Perugia for questioning. Knox came, too, explaining later that she did not want to be alone. She sat on his knee and was told by police officer Giacinto Profazio that this was inappropriate behaviour in a murder investigation. He also said that they showed a “strange attitude” after their friend was found with her throat cut. Knox was said to have done the splits and cartwheels while waiting.

Monica Napoleone, head of the Perugia murder squad, said: “She had complained that she was feeling tired and at that stage I told her that she could go if she wanted. She said she wanted to stay; Sollecito was also at the station at the time and she said she wanted to wait for him. A few minutes later I walked past a room at the police station where she was waiting and I saw Amanda doing the splits and a cartwheel . . . She and Sollecito had had a bizarre attitude throughout the whole time – they were laughing, kissing and pulling faces at each other.”

Napoleone said that she found their attitude very different from the others who had been brought in for questioning.

“When they were brought in after poor Meredith’s body was found, the flatmates and the British friends were very upset,” said Napoleone, “but Knox and Sollecito seemed to be more interested in each other. They were very indifferent to the situation and I found it quite disturbing considering that the body of a young girl had been found in such terrible circumstances.”

It was later reported that Knox had gone shopping for lingerie with Sollecito the day after Meredith’s murder. On the other hand, when one friend, Natalie Hayward, said she hoped Kercher did not suffer, Knox burst out: “What do you think? They cut her throat, Natalie. She fucking bled to death!”

Investigators were also struck by a gesture Knox made repeatedly in front of them over the next few days. “She’d press her hands to her temples and shake her head, as if she was trying to empty her brain of something she’d been through,” one of them recalled.

Sollecito told the police he could not say for sure that Knox had stayed at his house on the night of the murder. He had passed the evening smoking marijuana and downloading cartoons on his computer. Knox said he used cocaine and acid. He said that Knox had been there, but she left. He could not remember when or if she came back. Computer experts for the prosecution say that the machine had been used to watch a film from around 6.30 p.m. that evening, but there was no activity on his computer between 9.10 on the evening of the murder and 5.32 the next morning – during the time he said he was downloading cartoons. But expert witnesses for the defence maintained that there were records of activity on his computer during the time he was at the police station, implying that his alibi had been tampered with. Curiously, at 9 p.m. on the night of the murder, both Sollecito and Knox’s mobile phones had been switched off, something they did not normally do. Sollecito claimed that he phoned his father that night, but there is no record of the call. Pornography was also found in his apartment.

As Knox was on hand, the police decided to question her, too. Her interrogation began at 11 p.m. By 5.45 a.m., she had told the police that she was in the apartment when Kercher died. She had claimed earlier to have left her apartment at 5 p.m. on Thursday and returned only the next morning when Kercher’s body was discovered. Now she said that on the evening of 1 November she met Lumumba at about 9 p.m. after their exchange of texts. She told police they had gone to the apartment.

“I don’t remember if my friend Meredith was already there or whether she came later,” she said. “What I can say is that they [Meredith and Patrick] went off together.”

Apparently, their objective was to “have some fun”.

“Patrick wanted her, and he had her,” said Knox. “Patrick and Meredith went off together into Meredith’s room while I think I stayed in the kitchen. I can’t remember how long they were in the bedroom together, I can only say that at a certain point I heard Meredith screaming and I was so frightened I put my fingers in my ears.”

She also claimed she had drunk a lot of alcohol and fallen asleep.

“I’m not sure whether Raffaele was there too that evening but I do remember waking up at his house in his bed and that, in the morning, I went back to where I lived, where I found the door open.”

Sollecito continued to claim he was not present on the evening of the murder. In his testimony he said that he had gone into town with Knox.

“I don’t remember what we did,” he said. “Amanda told me she was going to the Le Chic pub to meet friends.”

Around 8.30 or 9 p.m., he had returned home, “smoked a joint”, eaten dinner and then spoken to his father on the phone. After surfing the internet for a couple of hours he went to bed. Knox, he said, had returned at around 1 a.m. He said that Knox rose at 10 a.m. the next morning, before leaving to go to the apartment to change her clothes. She returned saying that she had seen blood there. The pair then went to investigate.

As result of Knox’s testimony Lumumba was dragged from his home in front of his wife and children. He, Sollecito and Knox were then arrested.

The following morning, Knox wrote a five-page memorandum retracting everything she said: “In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for thirty years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly. I understand that the police are under a lot of stress, so I understand the treatment I received.”