It may seem trivial, but it may be important. I'd like to try to get to the truth about what David Boutflour was referring to in a documentary interview when he said the silencer was sticky to touch.
Do we have a full version of David Boutflour's trial evidence, please? At the moment, the archive only has part of his cross-examination by Rivlin and we're missing the whole of his evidence-in-chief.
I'd like to know if he mentioned about the silencer being 'sticky' at trial. He doesn't mention it in his police statements, from what I can see.
To recap, below is what I said about it on the other thread, which summarises my concerns and gives briefly a theory as to why Mr Boutflour may have got himself confused:
Just going back to my comment earlier about how David Boutflour had described the silencer as 'sticky' to the touch. He gave this description in a TV documentary but there appears to be nothing about it in his police statements. We don't have his trial evidence (though a Hibbit & Sanders transcript exists somewhere), so we don't at the moment know whether he disclosed this elaboration at trial.
The point intrigues me, first because I can't imagine why he would not bring the observation up in his statements to the police, who would certainly be sure to note it due to its significance; second, because the silencer was steel housed and blood is not sticky on such a surface (or really any surface) in the way that say molasses or treacle is, which is what comes to mind from the description.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think of blood as sticky or producing that effect. To me, blood just dries. At any rate, that is my experience.
Thus, the description he gives in the documentary doesn't seem to cohere.
Furthermore, I note the behavioural 'tell' as he gives the description to the interviewer, in that he uses an overly-affirmative gesture of the hands to signify what he means, miming a visual pun to signify 'sticky' as if he is having a game of charades with the relatives on Boxing Day. That's interesting. Why would he need to do that?
Could something else explain David Boutflour’s strange comment about the silencer being ‘sticky’? I'm thinking in particular of the possibility that the police treated the silencer chemically during examination with, say, superglue residue.
Could it be that he had handled a silencer after police examination of it because the police had rejected that silencer and handed it back?
