if you go to the search button you can enter fletcher - and sort by relevance. Mike says he has his working notes. On thing I don't understand is why if they swabbed the baffles and there was considerable blood did they only test one flake - and how was the flake there when fletcher had already taken the silencer apart.
"Grounds 14 and 15 – blood in the sound moderator 452. Grounds 14 and 15 each relate to different aspects of the evidence relating to the blood in the sound moderator. They are distinct matters but clearly need to be considered together because they relate to the same important aspect of the prosecution case. Ground 14 is an attack upon the blood testing evidence called at trial based upon fresh evidence which it is suggested would have cast doubt upon the prosecution evidence in this regard if it had been available to the jury. Ground 15 is the sole ground upon which this case was referred to the Court by the CCRC. It is based upon the testing of the sound moderator for DNA, a technique that was not available at trial.
453. We have set out at paragraphs 75 to 80 a summary of the evidence at trial relating to the scientific examination of the moderator. The critical part of that evidence was the analysis of the flake of dried blood found inside the sound moderator. The evidence was given by Mr Hayward, a biologist who was working at the Forensic Science Laboratory at the time of the examination although he was in private practice by the date of trial. In his evidence he described how he had found "a considerable amount of blood" inside the moderator deposited in the spaces to the sides of the baffles around the edge of the silencer. He was asked if he had tested "any" of that blood. He said that he had and that it was human blood. He said that he had obtained grouping reactions for group A, EAP BA, AK I, Hp 2-1. He had done a PGM grouping test but it gave negative results. He said that these grouping results were consistent with the blood coming from Sheila Caffell but not solely from any of the others who had been shot.
454. Mr Hayward then said that you could get different reactions if there was more than one person's blood present and he said that it was "a remote possibility" that the blood that he had tested was a mixture of blood from Mr and Mrs Bamber. Mr Bamber's blood was group O, PGM 1+, BAP BA AK1, Hp2-1. Mrs Bamber's blood was group A, PGM 1+, EAP BA, AK2-1, Hp2-1. If these bloods were mixed together, you could get the results recorded from the blood tested from the moderator. However, if there was sufficient of Mrs Bamber's blood present to give the clear cut group A result, he would have "stood a good chance of detecting the AK2-1 which would have gone with it". He said that there was nothing to suggest to him that there was blood from more than one person present.
455. Mr Hayward said that the conclusions of Dr Vanezis, the pathologist, and Mr Fletcher, the firearms expert, supported his view that the blood was from Sheila Caffell alone because their findings suggested that only Sheila Caffell had been shot with the gun in contact with her skin or from "very close range" and he would have been very surprised to find blood within the moderator from a person who had not been shot with the end of the moderator in contact with that person or at least very close to it. He was asked what very close meant and he said that that was a matter for Mr Fletcher, the firearms expert.
456. Mr Hayward also gave evidence about examining a pull through used to examine the inside of the barrel of the rifle itself. He said that there was no blood at all on it. He expressed his conclusion as (Transcript PMS/2 page 18B):
"Since the blood from inside the sound moderator belonged to the same group as Sheila Caffell, and since there was no blood inside the barrel of the rifle, I was led to the conclusion that Sheila Caffell had been shot whilst the sound moderator was fitted to the rifle."
457. Mr Fletcher, the firearms expert, gave evidence to explain how blood got into the moderator if it was attached, or into the barrel if there was no moderator attached. He said that the mechanism was complicated and not then fully appreciated. However, the expanding gas when the bullet left the muzzle was under normal circumstances distributed into the atmosphere. However with a contact shot there was no opportunity for this escape and the gas would follow the bullet into the wound as it expanded. Back pressure would then build up forcing the gas back out of the wound taking with it blood and tissue which would in effect be blasted back into the barrel if there was no moderator or into the moderator if one was attached. He said that even without direct contact, the same effect might occur but only if the gap between the end of the barrel, or the moderator if attached, and the skin was less than one millimetre. He said that the likelihood of such an occurrence was to an extent dependent on the part of the body to which the shot was delivered and the amount of blood present at that point.
458. If the shot to Shelia Caffell, which was a contact shot to the throat, had been fired without the moderator in place, he would have expected to find blood in the barrel of the gun. If the moderator was attached it was "virtually certain" that Sheila Caffell's blood would get into the moderator. There was, he said "a very slight possibility of it not happening, but very slight".
459. Mr Fletcher was asked about the wounds to Mr and Mrs Bamber and whether they could have been contact wounds or wounds at such proximity that blood might have been propelled back into the moderator. He said that Mr Bamber had a wound that could have been a contact wound and that Mrs Bamber had one wound where there was a slight possibility that it was a contact wound. He concluded by saying (Transcript PMS/10 page 58):
"The most likely explanation for the blood being in the sound moderator is that it was fitted to the gun at the time the contact wound to Sheila Caffell's neck was fired. There is a very very slight possibility that I am wrong in my opinion, but I don't think so."
460. In dealing with this evidence, the defence were limited by the evidence available from their own expert. They called no such evidence at trial but the material that they had obtained pre-trial has been disclosed in the course of this appeal. The defence had instructed Dr Patrick Lincoln, whose expertise in such matters was well known. On 29 April 1986, he visited the forensic science laboratory and examined the relevant material. He carried out tests on all seventeen baffles. The first eight plates all gave weak or very weak positive reactions for blood. There was no blood clearly visible to the naked eye and Dr Lincoln concluded that "such findings could be consistent with an item having been previously swabbed by a forensic scientist to remove blood stains for testing". The other nine plates "did not produce any evidence for the presence of blood". He agreed with Mr Hayward's conclusion that the combination of blood groups revealed in his testing of the inside of the moderator could have come solely from Sheila Caffell but did not come from any one of the other individuals. He said that it was not clear from Mr Hayward's statement that he had obtained the blood from which the different group testings had been done from the same area of the moderator. If they were not from the same area, then the results could have originated from more than one individual.
461. On 8 September 1986, Dr Lincoln again went to the laboratory and this time met and discussed the matter with Mr Hayward. As a result of this meeting, Dr Lincoln appreciated that the blood tested all came from a single flake trapped under the first or second baffle. In a letter to the defence solicitors, Dr Lincoln said that Mr Hayward "used this single flake to produce a solution from which he was able to determine the groups". He said that this meant that the possible explanation he had earlier suggested as to a combination of more than one persons blood no longer applied.
462. In one respect Dr Lincoln was in error. Whether that error was from something said by Mr Hayward or simply from an assumption made by Dr Lincoln cannot now be ascertained and matters not. The error was to suggest that the whole of the blood flake was dissolved and the resulting solution was used for all the tests. In fact what had happened was that the flake had been divided into a number of parts and each part had then been used for a separate group test. Thus the tests were not done on liquid drawn from the same solution made from the whole flake but on separate solutions each made from distinct parts of the flake. We have no means of knowing whether correction of this error would in any way have altered Dr Lincoln's view.
463. Ground 14 is based upon evidence from a fresh expert instructed by the defence (Dr Lincoln no longer being available to them), Mr Mark Webster, a forensic scientist in independent practice. He was asked to consider the possibility that the blood tested by Mr Hayward might have been a combination of the blood of Mr Bamber and Mrs Bamber.
464. Mr Webster made a number of points:
i) He suggested that the flake, which was a quarter of an inch across, might not have been a flake of blood but a flake of soot splattered with blood that had been mistaken by Mr Hayward for a flake of blood. His one basis for this rather surprising suggestion was that he had noted a flake of soot on one of the baffles.
ii) He accepted that if the blood from Mr and Mrs Bamber had become "intimately mixed", the results certainly could not have been mistaken for Sheila Caffell's blood alone.
iii) However, "if the blood from the two sources did not become completely intimately mixed, then the test could not be guaranteed to detect the mixture".
iv) If the sample tested was a blood stained flake of soot, this increased the chance that the two different sources of blood might not have been completely intimately mixed.
v) If the sample was not completely intimately mixed, the grouping test might be carried out on different portions of the sample and hence each might detect only the blood of one of the persons responsible for the mixture.
vi) Whilst he accepted that the method of testing was the standard approach to blood grouping at the time, it was only applicable to "a run of the mill" case where it was known that each bloodstain was from a single individual. When there was a risk that it might be from more than one blood source, as here, Mr Hayward should have taken steps to ensure that the different group tests were carried out on the same material. This could have been achieved either by dissolving the whole flake and forming a single solution or by crushing the flake and pulverising it to ensure that all parts were completely mixed.
