Questioned about his movements on the night Elizabeth vanished, he said he had left home at about 11 p.m. for a midnight start at the downtown railway depot in Dundee where he was a shed man. He rejected suggestions by Mr Stewart that he had commenced work earlier or might have ‘sneaked away’ from the rail-yard, explaining his absence would have been noticed and a search carried out. He elaborated further that, in the event he had not been found, police would have been informed.
Another of the 13 men listed as one of those who might have committed the murder was a city taxi driver who had been on duty at the time of Elizabeth’s disappearance. He told the jury he had gone to the police to volunteer information after reading press appeals but their attitude to him had been ‘terrible’. One detective inspector had even openly accused him of her murder, he said. He went on to describe how, at around 12.45 a.m. at the taxi rank at City Churches a few yards from Teazers, he had picked up two men and a woman. He dropped one of the males and the woman in Dryburgh, Lochee, then dropped the other man off in nearby Menzieshill. When he saw a photograph of Elizabeth, he thought she and his passenger that morning were the ‘exact same girl’.
The cabbie said that subsequently, police searched his home, taxi and personal car. He had been ‘horrified’ at his treatment and he, and taxi-driving colleagues, were of the opinion that police were convinced a taxi driver had been responsible for the girl’s death.
Police witnesses gave details of two others listed among the 13 on the incrimination list, explaining how they had drawn up a catalogue of names of people known as ‘nominals of interest’ to the murder inquiry and from whom DNA samples had been taken. Among them was a young man who had lived a matter of yards from Elizabeth McCabe’s home and who, three years after her death, had broken into a neighbouring house. Once inside he had murdered the woman of the house then raped and assaulted her daughter
(see
The Not So Ordinary John Smith).
Another on the list was a young man who had been interviewed by the inquiry team in 1980 and who had admitted to being in Teazers that night and speaking to Elizabeth there. He had also admitted to picking up females in the nightclub and then taking them to Templeton Woods for sex. Police agreed that around that time the man had been convicted of abducting a nurse. He had also initially lied to police about his movements on the night of Elizabeth’s disappearance.
Medical experts explained to the court how an examination of Elizabeth’s body at the time had revealed that she been manually strangled, possibly as a result of a disruption to the vagal nerve in her neck, which connects to the brain stem and regulates breathing and heartbeat. A small bruise consistent with a thumb mark had been found on the neck and it was likely Elizabeth had suffered ‘a fairly quick death, probably within 30 seconds’. She had not ‘struggled for life’ and there were no defensive injuries indicating she had tried to protect herself.
Pathologists had established that the nursery nurse had had sexual intercourse in the 12 hours leading up to her death and it was quite possible she had been killed in ‘an explosion of temper’ during the act of intimacy when a hand on her neck could have triggered a reflex stopping her heart and breathing.
Partially digested food was found in her stomach and the alcohol level in her blood was 110 mgs, an amount which would not have resulted in her being incapacitated. The court also learned that, depending on the actual ground temperatures when she was killed, Elizabeth’s body could have been stored somewhere cold before being later taken to Templeton Woods and left.
Much of the trial centred naturally on the suggestion that Vincent Simpson’s DNA fatally connected him to Elizabeth McCabe. No one disputed that without apparent evidence of that link, he would never have been charged, far less put into the dock of the High Court. His principal scientific accuser was Dr Jonathan Whitaker, a world expert based at the laboratories of Forensic Science Service in Yorkshire who had previously testified in a number of high profile cases in Britain and abroad, including the celebrated Australian Outback murder of English backpacker Peter Falconio.
Altogether the doctor spent four days in the witness box of the High Court explaining how low copy number samples found on the victim’s blue jumper and the hair root from the mortuary sheet identified them as almost certainly coming from Vincent Simpson. He described how three partial profiles which had been removed from the neck area of the jumper – where someone might have grabbed it – produced odds of one in 8.9 million that they could have come from anyone but the accused. Put together with the hair root findings, he claimed the combined odds of them belonging to someone unrelated to Simpson were one in 40 million.
He used graphs and charts to help present his case and it’s fair to say the evidence was of considerably greater complexity than jurors would normally have to grapple with.
Mr Mark Stewart and his defence team set about dismantling the DNA findings methodically, blazing a trail others would inevitably follow in the testing of this new scientific evidence. By careful cross-examination of Dr Whitaker and a number of police witnesses who had been involved in the case 27 years earlier, he established how the samples could easily have been contaminated because of poor police handling techniques. Much of the unsatisfactory care of various exhibits was a result of the limited stage forensic science was at in 1980. Scenes-of-crime investigations were unaware then of the demanding, sophisticated protocols that would one day follow for the essential preservation of evidence, and it was normal practice for crucial areas to be examined by squads of people wearing just their usual outdoor clothing. Vital productions, and even the bodies of murder victims, would be handled in comparatively casual circumstances, there being no concept of the ease with which invisible traces of genetic material could be transferred or mixed by people touching two separate items. Under cross-examination, Dr Whitaker admitted that secondary transfers of DNA could create difficulties and agreed with Mr Stewart that the condition of some of the evidence before the court posed ‘a real, not theoretical problem.’
Other aspects of police protocols were shown to have been shoddy, even by standards existing at the time, such as when productions from the Elizabeth McCabe and Carol Lannen cases were placed together. None of the bags used to store evidence had been sealed and items belonging to Vincent Simpson had been placed alongside some of Elizabeth’s possessions. It wasn’t contested either that some of the McCabe items were stored beside departmental Christmas decorations, nor that others had been used for training purposes. Some pieces of evidence, such as Vincent Simpson’s cash bag, on which he told police he had wiped his soiled hands after emerging from Templeton Woods, had simply become lost over the years. So had hair, blood, urine and saliva from Elizabeth’s body, along with her tights and underpants.
One police officer, detailed to examine and catalogue the evidence during a case review in 1998 had stated in his report: ‘The condition of productions is poor and given the manner in which they were stored over the years, it is highly unlikely any court could accept their integrity.’ It was a damning indictment of his own force’s inept procedures and far from helpful to the prosecution case.
Perhaps most frustrating of all was the unexplained disappearance of four vaginal swabs which had been taken from Elizabeth after her body had been found. During a cold case review in 2004 one of them had been discovered, almost by accident, in a folder kept in a cabinet. But although earlier examination of the swab established the presence of semen, it had been tested to destruction and, along with natural deterioration, the integrity of the sample had been degraded to such an extent that the extraction of a helpful, identifying DNA profile was impossible. Had the other swabs – likely to have been far less closely scrutinized – been properly retained, conventional and completely reliable DNA might have been found which could have proven who had had intercourse with Elizabeth prior to her death; a potentially crucial link to who might have killed her. Considering that one estimate of the cost of subsequently examining the low copy number samples was put at £1 million, the loss, or disposal of the original vaginal swabs was a major economic, as well as fatal, shortcoming in the Crown case.
Mr Stewart exposed other prosecution weaknesses, in the case against his client, among them the evidence which had made Simpson a suspect in the first place after the apparent sighting of him emerging from Templeton Woods in his taxi around the time of Elizabeth’s disappearance. The couple driving home who spotted the cab were positive that this had occurred between midnight and 12.30 a.m., practically the exact time other witnesses had said they had seen Elizabeth setting off from Teazers in the centre of town. If all of them were accurate in their timings, it meant she was still alive at the time the taxi was leaving the woods.
Referring to a detailed examination of Simpson’s taxi, the defending QC also pointed out: ‘Not one fibre, not one hair, not once piece of evidence linking Elizabeth McCabe with Vincent Simpson was recovered.’
The jury did not have the benefit of hearing from the accused man himself. He, along with his wife Gillian who attended the court daily, declined to testify, as was their right, and Lord Kinclaven properly stressed that no inference should be taken from their refusal to enter the witness box.
However, the detective inspector who had gone from Dundee to Camberley to arrest Simpson told the court that in interviews conducted at Woking police station the accused man had resolutely denied any connection with Elizabeth McCabe. He had also been adamant in repeated denials that he had visited Templeton Woods that night and suggested his supposed statement in 1980, that he had gone to the woods with his dog to watch couples having sex, was something that had been inserted into his statement by detectives. He denied even having a dog at that time. When police officers told him that they had him ‘bang to rights’ he had replied, ‘In that case then bang me up. Let’s go to court – let’s do the business. I have got nothing to hide.’ The detective inspector admitted that the police car used to take Simpson back to Dundee after his arrest in Camberley had been fitted with concealed listening and recording devices in the hope he would say something incriminating on the journey north. Nothing of the kind occurred.
When Mr Alex Prentice QC, the prosecuting advocate depute, rose to his feet to sum up the Crown case seven weeks after making his opening remarks, few would have envied him his task. His entire case hinged on the acceptability of the vital scientific DNA evidence and he admitted as much to the jurors. He invited them to view the lengthy proceedings as a 27-year-old jigsaw puzzle which, although containing missing pieces, could still be fitted together to create an understandable picture. A main component was the evidence of the couple who had seen the taxi emerging from Templeton Woods being driven ‘bizarrely’ by someone they could accept was Vincent Simpson. He dismissed the contradiction in the timings as simply being an honest error in their precise recollections.
The advocate depute conceded that there had been contamination of the mortuary sheet containing the hair root. However, even if they rejected this part of the Crown case, they should accept the expert findings of the DNA on the victim’s jersey. Not only had three partial profiles been recovered, they had been found in an area of the neck where experts would have expected someone to have grabbed the jumper.
‘Remember, Vincent Simpson rejects any suggestion he was in contact with or ever met Elizabeth McCabe,’ he stressed to the jury. ‘This is not a case where it is suggested she was in a taxi and he might have helped her out or anything like that.’
In contrast to the less than satisfactory presentation of conclusive evidence by his colleague, QC Mr Mark Stewart had built a formidable case indicating his client’s innocence. Over the long weeks of the trial, and with the precision of a surgeon, he had systematically dismantled the scientific evidence, exposing the possibilities of its contamination and the slack police work surrounding it.
However, he did more than just demolish the forensic case. He also introduced other scenarios as to what might have happened after Elizabeth walked away from Teazers that cold February morning, saying the circumstantial evidence was stronger against several other individuals. Although he pointed out it was not the job of the defence to prove another’s guilt, he suggested it was more likely that the nursery nurse had visited the flat of Sandra Niven’s one-time boyfriend, where she had gone before to engage in sex. Then, after having something to eat, she again had consensual sex before a ‘sudden violent explosion’, which resulted in her death. Mr Stewart said he was not even sure the Crown had proved Elizabeth had been murdered and that the crime may have been one of culpable homicide.
Pointing to the absence of injury on her body, he said any young woman in Dundee would have been aware at that time of the shadow cast by Templeton Wood after the finding of the body of Carol Lannen there months earlier. But if Elizabeth had been taken unwillingly in a taxi past her street towards the woods, she would have had six minutes in which to defend herself. There was no evidence that anything of that kind had occurred.
Mr Stewart accused police of being blinkered in their investigation and suggested Vincent Simpson had become a suspect only because he was a taxi driver. Having discredited so much of the vital scientific evidence, as well as advancing possible alternatives to what had happened to Elizabeth on her journey home, the QC crushingly used four words to describe the investigation by Tayside Police and the subsequent prosecution. They were ‘not fit for purpose,’ he said.