In Andrew Hunter's book draft it mentions hand swabs in the plural.
In the court transcript from the 2002 appeal hearing, Michael Turner QC, told the court that he thought the hand swab exhibit DRH/33, lab' 75, and the one submitted and rejected at the lab (under item 17) on 9th August 1985, were in fact two different sets of swabs. It is funny that there is no mention of this in the official judgement from that appeal - which only goes to show how selective the judges can be when turning an appeal down. They can choose bits of the arguments which suit the purpose for whichever way the judgement needs to go. Anyway, as I have said, There exists police records which give the hand swab taken from Sheila's left hand by the identifying mark of DRH/33, another swab taken from her right hand as DRH/34, another swab taken from her head as DRH/35, etc...
All of these swabs have the lab' identifying item number allocated to them as 17, so there can be very little doubt that these individual exhibit references for all these different hand swabs, were sent to the lab' and rejected on 9th August 1985. Now, the hand swabs which were later sent to the lab' under DRH/33, lab' item 75, must be reference to the hand swab taken from Sheila's left hand, not her right one? The other thing worthy of consideration, is the fact that on the occasion the hand swabs were rejected at the lab' on 9th August 1985, the case was being treated as four murders and a suicide (SC/688/85), and this caused the police to make all the swabs taken as the same exhibit (DRH/33, Lab' item 17), so that it vacated certain exhibit references for inclusion of other articles / items as part of the new investigation under SC/786/85...
Also...
According to the transcript from the 2002 appeal, police sent the hand swabs to the lab' later on under an exhibit mark of DRH/44. It was Michael Turners contention during the 2002 appeal hearing that the hand swabs sent to the lab' under identifying marks DRH/33 and DRH/44 were different sets of hand swabs, even though both had the lab' identifying mark of 75?
There is definitely something very dodgy about this hand swab evidence, and if the documentation had been made available at the time of the original trial, I feel certain that such evidence would have been capable of rendering the hand swab evidence as worthless...
