The two members of the ambulance crew who arrived at the scene were also surprised at Hutton’s conclusion because the small amount of blood they saw around the body was inconsistent with the cut on his wrist being the cause of death.
“I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw,” said paramedic Vanessa Hunt. “There just wasn’t a lot of blood. When someone cuts an artery, whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps everywhere. I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw.”
“Everyone was surprised at the outcome of the Hutton Inquiry,” said fellow paramedic Dave Bartlett. “I would have thought there would have been more blood over the body if someone had bled to death.”
Outside in the cold, vasoconstriction would slow the blood loss, it has been argued. But it has never been made public how much blood Dr Kelly had actually lost.
Over the years, Hunt and Bartlett have been to the scenes of dozens of attempted suicides where somebody has cut their wrists. In only one case has the victim been successful.
“That was like a slaughterhouse,” said Hunt. “Just think what it would be like with five or six pints of milk splashed everywhere.” If you slit your wrists, that is the amount of blood you would have to lose if you are going to die.”
They were also amazed by the number of policemen at the scene.
“Some were in civilian clothes and others in black jackets and army fatigues,” said Hunt. “I thought it might have been a firearms incident as there were the guys from the special armed response units.”
When they first saw the body, Bartlett assumed that the man had hanged himself. It was only after they had checked for a pulse, shone light in the eyes and put electrodes on the chest to check for heart activity, that he noticed that the left sleeves of his jacket and shirt had been pulled up to just below the elbow and there was dried blood around his left wrist.
“There was no gaping wound,” said Hunt. “There wasn’t a puddle of blood around. There was a little bit of blood on the nettles to the left of his left arm. But there was no real blood on the body of the shirt. The only other bit of blood I saw was on his clothing. It was the size of a 50p piece above the right knee on his trousers.”
Hunt found this strange.
“If you manage to cut a wrist and catch an artery you would get a spraying of blood, regardless of whether it’s an accident,” she said. “Because of the nature of an arterial cut, you get a pumping action. I would certainly expect a lot more blood on his clothing, on his shirt. If you choose to cut your wrists, you don’t worry about getting blood on your clothes. I didn’t see any blood on his right hand . . . If he used his right hand to cut his wrist, from an arterial wound you would expect some spray.”
Bartlett agreed.
“I remember saying to one of the policemen it didn’t look like he died from that [the wrist wound] and suggesting he must have taken an overdose or something else,” he said.
He recalled being called to one attempted suicide where the blood had spurted so high it hit the ceiling.
“Even in this incident, the victim survived. It was like
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and the guy walked out alive. We have been to a vast amount of incidents where people who have slashed their wrists, intentionally or not. Most of them are taken down the hospital and given a few stitches then sent straight back home. But there is a lot of blood. It’s all over them.”
Bartlett does not buy the overdose theory either.
“If they showed me photos showing a lot of blood and said he had massive amounts of drugs or another substance in his body and that killed him, I would accept it,” he said. “But until then there has to be some doubt.”
The reaction of the paramedics was matched by the experts. Professor of intensive care medicine, Julian Blon, joined Dr Powers in a letter to
The Times
, saying: “Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life. Absent a quantitative assessment of the blood lost and of the blood remaining in the great vessels, the conclusion that death occurred as a consequence of haemorrhage is unsafe.”
The ulnar artery is not the main artery in the wrist where the pulse is taken, but a small artery below the little finger, which is hard to locate and lies deep within the wrist.
Martin Birnstingl, former president of the Vascular Surgical Society of Great Britain, consultant at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and one of the country’s most respected vascular surgeons, said he believed it was “extremely unlikely” for Kelly to have died by simply severing the ulnar artery. He explained that arteries have muscles around them that will constrict when severed to prevent life-threatening loss of blood.
“It would spray blood around and make a mess,” he said. “But after the blood pressure started to fall, the artery would contract and stop bleeding.”
This view is supported by Dr Bill McQuillan, a former consultant at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary who for twenty years has dealt with hundreds of wrist accidents.
“I have never seen one death of somebody from cutting an ulnar artery,” he said. He pointed out that lying in a warm bath might encourage more bleeding, but in the open air the artery would simply close down. “I can’t see how he would lose more than a pint of blood.”
The two paramedics are concerned by something else they read in the Hutton report. Dr Kelly’s body, it said, was found with his head and shoulders “slumped against a tree”. Lord Hutton said he had seen a photograph showing his body in that position. The first person to find Dr Kelly, Louise Holmes, agreed that he was resting against a tree. But when Hunt and Bartlett arrived, Kelly was lying flat, some feet from the tree. Had someone moved him? Had his body been searched? None of the police officers at the scene admitted touching the body.
Norman Baker said that the Hutton Inquiry had “blatantly failed to get to the bottom of matters”.
“The most important unanswered question is why he would have wanted to commit suicide, which still hasn’t been addressed,” said Baker.
Baker pointed out that it is unlikely the scientist would have decided to kill himself by “slitting a rather hidden artery in his hand”. According to Dr Rouse, committing suicide by slitting the wrists in a fifty-nine-year-old man with no previous psychiatric history is extremely rare. Only one person is thought to have killed themselves this way in 2003 – Dr Kelly himself.
One witness told the
Observer
that, even if you accepted that Kelly’s mental state was desperate enough for him to take his own life, it is inconceivable he would have chosen such an uncertain method.
“He was a scientist, a highly intelligent man. If he had chosen to kill himself, he would have opted for something certain, like hanging himself or throwing himself under a train. He would not have risked surviving. I can’t believe he would have chosen to cut one small artery and take some pills. The outcome would be too uncertain.”
Baker is also puzzled by the fact that, while Dr Kelly supposedly took twenty-nine Coproxamol tablets, only “a quarter of one tablet” was found in his stomach. Mai Pedersen, Dr Kelly’s former US Air Force interpreter in Iraq and a close friend, said that he could not have swallowed twenty-nine tablets because, due to a disorder, he “had difficulty swallowing pills”. She also said he could not have cut his wrist because an injury to his elbow had left his arm too weak to cut steak. He would have to have been a “contortionist” to have killed himself in the way the Hutton Inquiry claimed, she said.
Dr Powers is even more perplexed that the written records of the Hutton Inquiry, including witness statements, were to be kept secret for thirty years, while all medical records, including the post-mortem report and the photographs, would remain closed for seventy years.
“Supposedly all evidence relevant to the cause of death has been heard in public at the time of Lord Hutton’s inquiry,” said Dr Powers. “If these secret reports support the suicide finding, what could they contain that could be so sensitive?”
However, Dr Andrew Falzon, a consultant forensic pathologist with the Forensic Science Service, warned that the views of those who have not studied forensic pathology, even if they are medically trained, needed to be treated with caution.
“People who are not trained to look at causes of death will perceive things differently,” he said. “It’s hard for them to believe certain things can happen.”
Kelly’s heart disease and overdose meant a smaller loss of blood could kill him than that required to kill a healthy person: “You are going to succumb to a smaller volume of blood loss than if you were a twenty-year-old with a healthy heart. The heart vessel is already deprived of oxygen because of the blockage of the vessels. With the loss of blood, there is less oxygen to the heart. Throw in the toxic level of drug, that makes the heart more sensitive to cardiac arrhythmia [an electrical disturbance] which causes sudden death. I’m sure bleeding from the ulnar artery can kill you.”
Dr Andrew Davison, a forensic pathologist with Cardiff University, agreed.
“You only have so much blood going around,” he said. “If you have a heart condition you can’t afford to lose as much blood as a healthy person.”
According to Professor Derrick Pounder, head of forensic medicine and a forensic pathologist at the University of Dundee: “It may be that there are several factors in a death. In this case, we know he had taken more than a therapeutic dose of drugs, and that he had some pre-existing heart disease. We have three factors in the death that are known to the public. The cause of death is likely an interplay between the three.”
Professor Peter Vanezis, senior consultant in forensic medicine to the armed forces, also attacked Hutton’s critics.
“These people are more clinicians and are obviously surprised that a person can kill themselves like that,” he said.
He also said the lack of large amounts of blood in the wood where Kelly was discovered could also be easily explained: “It was outside, it could have gone into the soil.”
Forensic pathologists Chris Milroy of Sheffield University and Guy Rutty of Leicester University say that it is hard to judge blood loss at the scene of a death as some blood may have seeped into the ground. Milroy also said that Kelly’s heart condition may have made it hard for him to sustain any significant degree of blood loss.
The Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, who had adjourned the inquest when the Hutton Inquiry was announced, considered the issue again in 2004. After reviewing evidence not presented to the Hutton Inquiry, Gardiner decided there was no need for further investigation. However, a public inquiry has only replaced an inquest in three other cases. In each of them multiple deaths had occurred. The incidents were the Ladbroke Grove rail crash in 2000 where thirty-one people died; the 311 deaths connected with Dr Harold Shipman; and the thirty-six lives lost when the Hull trawler
Gaul
sank in the Barents Sea in 1974. And that case was reopened in 2004.
The mystery deepened in August 2010, when Dr Richard Spertzel, the former head of the UN Biological Section who worked closely with Dr Kelly in Iraq in the 1990s, wrote to Attorney General Dominic Grieve saying that Dr Kelly was on a hit list in the final years of his life.
“I know that David, as well as myself and a couple of others, were on an Iraqi hit list,” he said. “In late 1997, we were told by the Russian embassy in Baghdad. I had no idea what it meant but apparently David and I were high on the priority list.”
He and Dr Kelly were told that they were “numbers three and four” on the list during an inspection trip in Iraq.
“David just being associated with the work he’d been doing for the UK government would have made him a high target,” Dr Spertzel said.
He also agreed with the doctors who said that it was almost impossible to kill yourself in the way described in the Hutton report.
“My concern about David Kelly’s death is exactly what the doctors are saying now – that is, it’s virtually impossible to commit suicide by slashing your wrist in that way,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense. It seems to me that they [the British authorities] are intentionally ignoring all this. Something’s fishy.”
Some forensic pathologists back this view. Sir Barry Jackson, past president of the British Academy of Forensic Science and one of the doctors who wrote to ministers, said: “In my experience from thirty years as a practising surgeon I find it difficult to agree with the cause of death as listed on his death certificate.”
Dr Elizabeth Driver, a solicitor and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, agreed.
“As a pathologist I cannot understand how Dr Kelly could have died from blood loss of a severed ulnar artery,” she said. “It makes no medical sense. Little is known about the medical facts because the post-mortem has been kept secret. There are obvious questions which were not addressed in the inquiry.”
In his book,
The End of the Party
, political commentator Anthony Rawnsley claimed that Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time of Dr Kelly’s death, “planned to make a speech about the Kelly affair that he told friends could trigger the instant downfall of the prime minister”, after he was unceremoniously dumped from office in 2006. Hoon visited Dr Kelly’s widow shortly after his death.
There were also extraordinary claims that the Thames Valley Police had stripped the wallpaper from the sitting room in Dr Kelly’s home after he was reported missing, but before his body was found. Meanwhile, Janice Kelly and her daughters were forced to wait in the garden. There is speculation that they were sweeping the room for listening devices. The police refused to comment.
Dr Halpin received an anonymous and carefully worded letter from someone claiming to be a relative of a former colleague of David Kelly at the Ministry of Defence, saying that Kelly’s colleagues had been “warned off” attending his funeral.
The doctors seeking to reopen the coroner’s inquest managed to obtain a copy of Dr Kelly’s death certificate. Near the top of all British death certificates is a box headed “Date and place of death”, where the doctor or coroner should enter the exact location of a death, if it has been established. Dr Kelly’s certificate gives his date of death as 18 July 2003. Then, instead of giving place of death, it says: “Found dead at Harrowdown Hill, Longworth, Oxon” – implying that he might have died elsewhere and his body merely found on Harrowdown Hill. Strangely, the death certificate was completed five weeks before the end of the Hutton Inquiry. Nor is it signed by a doctor or coroner as it should be.