Pathologists generally give explanations assuming that information given to them by the police is honest and accurate. In this case the police are involved in a cover up of the real truth, so a pathologist might come to wrong conclusions through having been mislead.
Bernard Knight said that Sheila could not have fallen back immediately after the first wound, because the blood running down her arms indicated that she had remained in a sitting position for a few minutes after the first shot.
But what if she had fallen back immediately and lay unconscious for a while before getting up again? Suppose she put her right hand to the wound straight after getting up and kept it there for a while as she made her way upstairs. That would answer the question as to why the blood trails on her arm are consistent with the arm remaining in the same position. There might be an absence of blood on the front of her dress because the blood ran down her right arm.
It's notable that the blobs at the end of the trails are higher up the arm than where the trails seem to originate. That proves that the hand must have been raised. It does not merely suggest that it might have been. The law of gravity doesn't allow for exceptions like rivers flowing up hills instead of down. Sheila's hand must have been raised while the blood was flowing "down" her wrist towards her elbow.
Peter Vanezis said that a person with such an injury might be able to get up and move around. He had only one objection to that possibility, which was the lack of blood down the front of the nightdress.
Q. Can I ask you this: The non-
fatal wound - the lower one - you have told us lacerated the external jugular
vein; how freely would you expect that wound and how rapidly, would you expect
it to bleed?
A. It would start to bleed immediately. It is venous blood,
rather than arterial blood, so it would not be pumping blood out. The size of
the wound, which is fairly small, compared with some of the larger missiles, would
also tend to cause external signs of bleeding to occur that bit less fast, shall
we say, than if it was a larger wound, but then one would see the haemorrhage
tracking on the inside of the neck. There would be quite a big build up there,
as there was in the hemorrhage on that side of the neck.
Q. Looking at the amount of blood staining that you saw there and the wound that you
saw that accounted for it, are you able to give any view as to whether the victim
could, for instance, have got up between the two, walked around -
A. Sorry, are you finishing there?
Q. Yes, I will finish there for the moment?
A. Well, a wound like that, as I said,
has not hit any vital organ as such, although it has caused hemorrhage. There
is no reason why the person ...... that is why some people in fact: do get up and
walk around with such injuries, but quite clearly if one walks around with such
injuries, then one would see quite a lot of blood distributed or coming from that
wound, unless the person held the hand to the actual entry wound itself and tried
to stop the blood coming out.
Too much depends on one fact. The lack of blood down the front of the dress. There could be a rational explanation for that, but one which conflicts with the opinion that both shots were fired within 10 seconds
