The whole world is waiting to see how Ian Huntley is going to justify having been present at the time of death of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and still plead innocent to their murder.
The case against Huntley, who is accused of the murder of the two girls who went missing in Soham in England last year, has been built on such microscopic specks of information that the volume of the evidence against him probably wouldn`t fill a matchbox. I have been reading, with a combination of fascination and horror, the daily coverage on The Guardian, as the prosecution presents its argument.
If there`s one thing we`ve learnt from the last 10 years of forensic science, it`s that people leave tiny trails of microscopic footprints everywhere that they go.
Georgina Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb
A couple of microscopic fibres, shortened as is apparently necessary for flexibility and durability in sports gear, were found in his house. These fibres were linked to the Manchester United football jerseys that Jessica and Holly were wearing that day. Anyone who has been following the story has seen the photograph of the two pretty girls laughing and holding on to each other just hours before they were brutally murdered.
The final signal sent out by one of the girl`s cellphones as its battery died was received by a tower, not in Soham, but in a neighbouring town. That tower only picked up signals from one very specific location in Soham, and unfortunately for Ian Huntley, that location was his address. This is a part of the story that blows my mind: he was located in the one house on an entire street that would fall under that tower`s footprint. If he had lived just next door, all that the police would have known was that the girls were somewhere in Soham when the phone went offline.
So the police have the girls located in Huntley`s house, but only a couple of the fibres from their jerseys could be found. This suggests a massive clean up operation, because if there`s one thing we`ve learnt from the last 10 years of forensic science, it`s that people leave tiny trails of microscopic footprints everywhere that they go.
In another example of science-fiction-like investigation, a photograph of Huntley`s car, incidentally taken by the enthusiastic press trawling the area, once enlarged and clarified by the forensics team, showed that his car`s tyres were a little worn down. But a couple of days into the search for the girls, after having asked the police about what evidence they were searching for, his car was suddenly seen sporting an entirely new set of radials. The detail that the photograph was able to show revealed that the tyres had been worn down, but not worn down enough for their owner to consider replacing them.
This led the police to examine his car a little more closely, and since Huntley had been unable to replace the entire engine, traces of the kinds of plant and mineral material that pointed to the area in which the girls` bodies had been hidden were found.
Given the mountain of minuscule evidence against him, it became impossible for Huntley to deny any involvement with the girls` deaths or the disposal of their bodies. So he has admitted that he disposed of their bodies and that they were in his house when they died. He is only contesting his actual involvement with their deaths.
It is incredible that we now live in a world in which it is possible to track the movements of two young girls through a sleepy English town down to the last few minutes before their deaths. And fascinating to note that the plea of innocence from the accused is going to have to hinge on some sort of semantic argument about the actual manner in which they died, whereas in the past a lack of microscopic evidence allowed murderers to get away with far looser defences.
Long live technology!
Share
