The term "hacking off his hair" is not mine - it was the phrase used by witnesses in their statements - to be precise - he was cutting chunks out of his hair at the back, hacking away at it.
For ease of understanding for those who don't see where I'm coming from:
Imaginary murder investigation. Police find a condom just over 19 yards from the body - they are able to tell the semen is "fresh" (as in, it hasn't begun to degrade in the ways they would expect if it was, say more than 24 hours old.) What do they do with this information?
(a) try to find the owner - after all, he could be a crucial witness?
(b) change the location of the condom first to "within a 20 yard radius" then to "within a 50 yard radius" to distance it from their crime scene, because the DNA does not match their "person of interest"?
Witnesses come forward imediately to say two lads on a moped were acting strangely at 5pm on the evening of the murder. Two witnesses see the bike propped against the V break in the wall at 5.15pm - they can be sure of the time because it is connected with closing time at work, leaving something in the office and having to go back for it, and timing the drive from that point to the point in their journey where they saw the bike at the V. The police, and only the police, know 5.15pm is the time of death, as this information hasn't yet been made public. Do they
(a) Assume they have absolutely critical witnesses here, and try to trace them immediately
(b) Wait two months to take statements from the witnesses who came forward immediately
(c) Trace the youths a week later, take statements about their knowledge of Luke, and eliminate them from the enquiry within 48 hours before they find out both lied about the time they were on the path (if they'd had the statements from the others, this would have been obvious straight away), one cut off his own hair, and no DNA results have been returned?
Eight crucial witnesses give a number of statements in the early part of the investigation. They were, at the time of the murder, in three separate houses. All give timings of events that evening 20 - 30 minutes earlier than those events actually happened (as proven by, for example, phone records.)
Do the police
(a) recognise that these statements are unreliable in terms of timing, and try to find out how all of these people, in three separate locations, all came to give the same wrong timings
(b) accept the information at face value, then try to explain away other, concrete evidence that the timings are wrong by making the concrete evidence "wrong?"
And so it goes, on and on throughout this entire case.
