Post-mortem examination confirmed that the cause of death was hanging. There was a single ligature mark and, apart from two small scratches immediately above it, no other injury to the body. There was no sign of drugs or alcohol in Paula’s system.
Paula was 5 ft 8 in. (1.73 m) tall. Her total reach was 7 ft 2 in. (2.18 m). But the distance from the top platform of the ladder to the underside of the beam was 7 ft 4 in. (2.23 m) and to the topside of the beam 7 ft 10 in. (2.39 m). Her legs were crossed and bent at the knee, with one foot resting on the bottom rung of the aluminium ladder. According to the coroner’s officer, the rope had been wrapped round the beam three times with a knot halfway up the side of the beam. He was 6 ft 1 in. (1.85 m) tall and the knot was only just within his reach when standing on the platform of the ladder.
After the body was cut down, a mortuary technician removed the ligature from around the neck and, as the coroner had decided there were no suspicious circumstances, threw it away. The technician subsequently reconstructed the two knots on the ligature, one on top of the other, as he remembered them. This would have permitted the ligature to tighten under the weight of the body.
The end of the rope that had been attached to the beam had been preserved. But there was no evidence concerning the exact length of the rope, or where the knot was positioned on the beam, or the exact distance of the deceased’s feet from the floor. However, it was later estimated that her knees were about 15 in. (38 cm) from the floor, so that her feet would have touched the floor had her legs not been bent.
In a drawer in the house, another noose was found. This was thought to have been a practice noose, but there was no evidence about who had been practising. However, the prosecution contended that Eddie Gilfoyle had killed his wife and had dressed up her murder to make it look like suicide. He had tricked his wife into writing the suicide note, which he said he had found after her death, then persuaded her to take part in a lethal experiment. He had got her to put her head into a noose, then suddenly knocked her off her feet, giving her no time to struggle. The ligature tightened under the weight of her body, quickly causing her death. The pathologist Dr Burns noted two small parallel scratches on the deceased’s neck above the ligature. These could be interpreted as the deceased’s attempts to release the ligature. He said that in twelve years, seeing about ten suicide cases a year, he had not seen one in which there was a scratch mark on the neck.
Dr Burns conceded that, while most suicide victims had their feet well above the ground, in many cases the feet were on the ground and there were successful suicides when the victim was sitting, kneeling or even lying down. The coroner’s officer said the body touched the floor in about half of the many hanging deaths he had seen. But the prosecution said that Paula was not tall enough to put the rope round the beam several times and tie it at the side of the beam when standing on the aluminium stepladder. She was also was too heavily pregnant to have done this. Had she been set on suicide, there were loose timbers at about head height that were far more obvious and accessible.
A longer wooden stepladder was found in a storeroom. She could have used it to rig up the noose, but in that case why would she have returned the ladder to the storeroom before committing suicide? However, her husband could have used the wooden stepladder to rig up the rope in advance and then put the ladder away. Neighbours heard a noise from the garage at around 4 a.m. on 4 June. The prosecution claimed that Gilfoyle was preparing the noose at that time. He then removed his wife’s garage key from her key ring in case she went into the garage and saw it.
When interviewed by the police, Gilfoyle denied murdering his wife and maintained that she had committed suicide or killed herself accidentally while making a grand gesture. He said she had not been herself for several days and was terrified of giving birth. Suicide was on her mind. She had been talking about it for a week or so before she died. He thought she may have written the Nigel letter to stir emotion in him and she may have told him she was having an affair with Peter Glover for the same reason.
The defence contended that the position of the body was consistent with suicide and that it was not uncommon in suicide to find the feet within reach of the ground. There was no indication of any struggle having taken place in the garage and the two scratches on Paula’s neck could be explained as the instinctive reaction of the hands, bringing them to the neck as the ligature tightened. Gilfoyle maintained that it was ridiculous to suggest he had persuaded his wife to go into the garage and let him tie a rope round her neck. There were bound to have been signs of a struggle. It was possible she had tied the rope to the beam with no intention of taking her own life, but something had gone wrong and she had died by accident. Besides, Gilfoyle was looking forward to the birth of their child. He maintained he did not have the opportunity to kill his wife between the departure of the market researcher and leaving to go to work. The courier from Freemans and the neighbours who said they had seen him at home that afternoon were mistaken. The jury did not believe Gilfoyle and he was convicted.
In 1998, Professor Crane, a distinguished pathologist from Northern Ireland, produced a report for the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Unlike Dr Burns, he said he had seen scratch marks in cases of suicide, and said that one might expect more severe or extensive marks in a case of homicide. He had personal knowledge of a case where a pregnant woman had committed suicide.
He accepted that homicidal hanging could occur with a compliant victim. This was relatively easy to effect as the pressure required on the neck was small. He attached no significance to the fact that the deceased’s feet were on the ladder and believed that death could have occurred whether the deceased had been standing on a lower or higher step. He disagreed with Dr Burns who had said that, in the majority of suicides by hanging, the feet are well above the ground.
Dr West, a highly experienced pathologist, prepared another report in 2000. He had personally been involved in the cases of the murder or attempted murder by hanging of three compliant victims in prison. He agreed that it would not be necessary for the victim’s feet to be off the ground. All that was required was pressure to the front of the neck, which, if it constricts the arterial flow, leads to loss of consciousness within seconds. This could have been achieved by pushing the deceased in the back when her neck was in a loose ligature. Homicide and suicide would produce the same mechanical effect, namely the body moving forward against a ligature, whether that person was standing or sitting on the steps of the ladder. If the legs had been held he would have expected the ligature mark to be much broader, with signs of the ligature being in more than one position. In this case, he concluded, the pathological evidence does not help in determining whether the death was homicide or suicide. The scratch marks did not help either, because they were found in 5 per cent of suicide cases.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission also heard from Mr Ide, a forensic scientist for thirty years and a specialist in knots and ligatures. His conclusion was that the deceased could not have been standing on the floor when the noose was put round her neck. Initially, she would have needed to be at a higher level in order to finish with her knees 15 in. (38 cm) above the floor as the rope would have stretched and the individual knots and the noose would have tightened. His conclusion was that she would have needed to have been standing on the ladder somewhere near the top. She would not have been high enough if she was sitting. While the knots and rope did not provide unambiguous evidence to indicate whether her death was murder or suicide, he concluded that “this evidence provides slightly more to support the hypothesis that Mrs Gilfoyle had been murdered rather than that she had killed herself”, as it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the deceased to tie a knot at the side of the beam. While it would have been technically possible, it would have been very difficult for her to have wrapped the rope several times round the beam. If a knot had been tied after the rope had been wrapped round, it would have had to have been higher than where it was found. However, his evidence did contradict Dr Burns’s evidence at the trial that Paula had been standing on the floor with the noose around her neck – before Gilfoyle had knocked her off her feet, thereby killing her.
The dispute between the pathologists went on through two appeals and a review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which again upheld the original verdict. It was not for the Crown to show how Eddie had killed his wife, the Commission said, only that he had. Eddie Gilfoyle has protested his innocence throughout and in 2010 was released on licence by the parole board.
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1998, in Jasper, Texas, three white men offered a ride to a forty-nine-year-old handicapped black man named James Byrd Jr, who was hitchhiking home from his niece’s bridal shower. Instead of taking him home, they drove to a wooded area where they beat, kicked and tortured him simply because of the colour of his skin. They stripped him and spray-painted his face black before wrapping a heavy logging chain around his ankles, which was tied to the back of their truck. Then they took off down an isolated road, dragging him for nearly 3 miles (4.8 km) as the truck swerved from side to side. Forensic evidence showed that he tried keeping his head up, and the autopsy showed that he remained alive for most of the ordeal. His skin was torn off, his bones broken and his elbows shattered to the bone. When his head hit a culvert, it was ripped off, along with his right arm.
“It was my opinion that Mr Byrd was alive up to the point he hit the culvert,” said forensic pathologist Dr Thomas J. Brown. “He was alive when the head, shoulder and right arm were separated.”
What was left of his shredded torso was dumped in front of a church for its black congregation to find. The three men went on to a barbecue.
The following morning, James Byrd’s limbs were found scattered along a trail of blood down the seldom-used road. The police found remains at seventy-five places along the route. They also found a lighter carrying a Ku Klux Klan symbol and the name “Possum”, the prison nickname of twenty-three-year-old white supremacist John William King, and a wrench with the name “Berry”on it. This led them to twenty-four-year-old Shawn Allen Berry and thirty-one-year-old Lawrence Russell Brewer, who had met King in prison. The three were room-mates in Jasper, a small town with a population of 8,000, and an equal number of blacks and whites.
King was unrepentant about his crime, though he knew he faced the death penalty.
“Regardless of the outcome of this, we have made history. Death before dishonour.
Sieg Heil!
” he wrote from jail.
His body carried tattoos showing a black man being lynched, the insignia of the white supremacist prison gang, the Confederate Knights of America, Nazi symbols and the words “Aryan Pride”. He said he joined the group for self-protection after being gang-raped by black inmates in jail. He was accused of beating Byrd with a bat as well as kidnapping and murdering him. Convicted by a jury of eleven whites and one African-American, he was sentenced to death.
Prior to Byrd’s murder, Brewer had served a prison sentence for drug possession and burglary. Paroled in 1991, he was returned to prison in 1994 after violating his parole conditions. According to his court testimony, he joined the Confederate Knights of America with King in prison in order to protect himself from other inmates. A psychiatrist testified that Brewer did not appear repentant for his crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
Although Berry drove the truck, he claimed that King and Brewer were solely responsible for the murder. Brewer claimed that Berry had cut Byrd’s throat before he was tied to the truck, but the jury decided that there was little evidence to support this claim. There was no evidence that Berry was a racist. Consequently, he was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He will be eligible for parole on 7 June 2038, when he will be sixty-four. It is thought that Berry knew Byrd; they shared the same parole officer.
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2008, the fire brigade were called to a ground-floor flat in Sterling Gardens, New Cross, south London, when neighbours phoned 999 after an explosion at the premises. The blast blew the windows out and ignited a blaze shortly after 10 p.m. One neighbour described hearing several loud bangs before seeing flames coming from the windows of the ground-floor flat.
“I went outside to see what was going on and there were other residents banging on the door and shouting to see if anyone was in,” said a thirty-two-year-old man who lived above the flat. “People were throwing water through the windows to try to put the fire out. Because there was no answer we thought there was no one in.”
A white man was seen running from the flat moments after the explosion, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Once the fire had been extinguished, two dead bodies were found in the burnt-out apartment. It soon became clear that the victims – Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez – had been dead before the fire took hold. Laurent had spoken to his fiancée on the phone at around 1 a.m. on that morning. After that, no one but the killers heard from or saw Bonomo or Ferez again.
It soon became clear that the twenty-three-year-old biochemistry students had been bound, gagged and tortured for three hours, then killed by frenzied knife attack. A post-mortem at Greenwich mortuary revealed that both died from stab wounds to the head, neck and chest. Bonomo had been stabbed 196 times; Ferez forty-seven. They had then been doused with flammable liquid and set on fire. The ferocity of the attack led them to be described at the “Tarantino murders”.
“This attack was horrific,” said Detective Chief Inspector Mick Duthie. “Everyone working on this case, including myself, has been deeply shocked by what we’ve seen . . . We believe that anyone involved in this scene would have been bloodstained when they left the area.”