On 8th August 1985, SOCO used a metal detector in the kitchen provisionally in pursuit of discovering missing bullet cases! By this stage cops knew that at least 25 shots had been fired during the shooting spree, plus one round from a police weapon! The discharge of the police round downstairs in the kitchen is subject of 'an officers report', into the shooting incident (1612) that occurred in the kitchen during entry! That shot wounded Sheila Caffell in he neck, and as a result of that shot she was mistakenly presumed to have died! (7.35am), Her death being reported as a suicide at that stage 7.37am /7.45am, she supposedly having drawn the muzzle of the police weapon in toward her own throat as if to signify that she had wanted to be shot and killed! Not 25 shots then during the shooting tragedies, but 26. Provisionally, the metal detector had been taken to the scene on 8 August 1985 to try and locate the bullet case from the piece of police issue ammunition which had ejected from the firearm drivers weapon at the time Sheila got shot by the cop! However, something rather more dramatic was found which changes the whole concept of a silencer ever being used at all during the shooting of the victims!
Under the kitchen table on the kitchen floor in front of the red painted aga surround was found a metal end cap (thread protector) which normally fitted onto the external thread on the end of the anshuzt rifles barrel! More significantly, some red paint believed to have come from a scratch on the kitchen aga surround / mantelpiece was found to have become ingrained into the pattern of the circumference of the (thread protector) cap! His paint contaminated metal cap had an internal thread which enabled the cap to be threaded onto the end of the rifles barrel! When it was found using the metal detector, and it was noted that it had crushed paint upon it, DI 'Ron' Cook took a paint sample (RC/1) from beneath the red painted mantelpiece shelf and he gave it to DS Davidson (exhibits officer), provisionally this item became lab' item number 23...
There was no blood found on the internal thread of this metal end cap, and similarly, there was no blood upon the external thread at the end of the rifles barrel! To all intents and purposes, the police were satisfied by that stage that the metal end cap with paint ingrained into its knurled patterned for inference had been fitted onto the barrel of the anshuzt rifle believed to have been the predominant weapon used in the shootings, which had caught the underside of the red painted kitchen aga mantelpiece making a scratch, leaving in its wake a curved scratch type mark identical to the radius / cur inference of the end cap in question! When DS Davidson was interviewed by COLP in 1991, it was this metal end cap which he was referring to when he told them that 'Ron' Cook had given him paint sample 'RC/1' at the scene on 8 August 1985! He was making specific reference to this metal end cap, or in other words the end part of the rifles barrel! Now, Cook denied giving that paint sample (RC/1) to DS Davidson at the scene on that date, but there is reason to suspect that Cook deliberately lied about that fact, because by the time Cook was interviewed in 1991 by COLP he was already deeply implicated in the silencer conspiracy involving the relatives!
Cook was head of SOCO at the time of the investigation into these five deaths, and he deliberately falsified the Scenes of Crime Register to omit the discovery of the aforementioned metal end cap at the s Ene on 8 August 1985, because by that stage there had only been the one scratch (albeit achieved scratch) on the underside of the mantle shelf! Cops were satisfied that the edge of the metal end cap had caused that scratch mark, and that paint from the underside of the mantelpiece had become deposited upon it at the time the aforementioned scratch was made!
This now has some bearing on the later claim which did not receive any merit until a month later, with the introduction of the Parker hale silencer, with red paint also crushed into he knurled end of the silencer!
Rather worryingly, on 8th August 1985, there had only been one curved scratch mark on the underside of the red painted aga mantelpiece shelf, but by 14 September, a second scratch mysteriously appeared on the front facia of the suround, close to where a month previously there had been none!
