The PR Blog

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. The concept of " Beyond Reasonable Doubt. " 

It was 1976. My then husband , a young detective in the New Zealand Police Force, was sent away to work on a murder investigation.

He was away for weeks.

Every so often he would telephone home. There were no mobile phones then, no quick messages sent back and forth, no way of knowing what was happening unless he told me.

So I listened. And I learned. 

There was a young woman who had disappeared. She had been living with her husband in a caravan in a caravan park beside the beach while they looked for a house. That morning he had gone off to his new teaching job. She had gone to the beach. Sunbathing was part of her ordinary day.

Then she disappeared......

That was all I knew. Her husband had rung the police saying that something was wrong.  He had arrived home at 4.15pm the day she disappeared. He was surprised to find the caravan locked and his wife not there. This was unusual as she looked forward to his return each night. He phoned both sets of parents but she was not there. He called the police around 7pm. 

At 5am the following morning, he phoned the police again and they commenced a search which was progressively extended over the next few days to include police, army, search and rescue personnel and volunteers from the general public. The police interviewed more than 2000 local people with still no sign of the woman.
On Saturday 20 March, her brother found her caravan key in sand just north of the surf club. The area was cordoned off and a search began on Sunday 21 March, using metal detectors, sieves, wheelbarrows and shovels. That evening, police concluded the missing woman was not " above ground"  in the area.

What the hell had happened? 

As they used their probes, one hit something solid.  They started to dig. 

Then they found her.

She had been buried in a sandy grave . Her knee had risen up and his probe had hit her kneecap. Had her kneecap not been there, had he not hit that precise place, she may never have been found. 

There was flax around her hands. Tied in strange knots. 

There was masking tape. On her mouth. Around her head. 

And somewhere between the finding of the body and the long, painstaking business of working out what had happened, the little things began to matter.

The flax was one of them.

The investigators found the same sort of knots tied in the flax in the dunes. 

Then there was the masking tape.

At first glance, masking tape is hardly the stuff of detective stories. There must have been millions of rolls of the stuff in the world.

But someone thought it worth asking where this particular tape had come from.

They traced it back to the manufacturer.

And that was when an ordinary roll of masking tape became rather less ordinary.

The manufacturer was able to identify something about it that wasn't immediately apparent to anyone looking at the roll.

The tape used in the binding had been the first cut from the machine after it had been recalibrated.

The measurement was slightly wrong.

Not wildly wrong.

Just slightly off the normal measure.

And the same slightly-off tape was found in the caretaker's shed.

By then the story had changed.

The man who had simply been the caretaker was no longer simply a helpful local.

The police also found a cardboard box that had once contained a bottle of insect repellant known as Dimp. It had been discarded nearby. Not your normal sized bottle. A large one. 

In the caretaker's shed, they found a bottle of Dimp. Large. I remember that the forensic examination matched the inside of the box to the marks on the bottle.

There was no sudden declaration from my husband. Only one phonecall.

“We've arrested Murphy the caretaker and charged him.”

The young woman was Gail McFadyen. Her husband was Graham. The caretaker was John James Murphy.

 Murphy was convicted of her murder in July 1976 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

So why am I writing about this today?

Sometimes there is no “Yeah Nah” or “Nah Yeah”.

Sometimes there is just a knowledge that it is a “Yes”, he did it, and a “No”, he does not deserve our sympathy.

Murphy's lawyer tried to argue that public outrage made acquittal impossible. 

Yet here we are today, watching the Clancy case unfold in an atmosphere of enormous public emotion, while the legal question remains unresolved.

I wonder if today public outrage makes conviction impossible? 

Funny old world, isn't it?

Further reading

http://www.crime.co.nz/c-files.aspx?id=45