I've been doing some thinking about the rifle and its operation in a domestic mass killing. There's lots to say - books could be written on this specialist sub-topic alone - but for now I'll keep it relatively brief.
Let's assume that Jeremy did it. That, for me, opens up the important question of how he managed the rifle and ammunition and how he planned this. That question doesn't arise for Sheila-as-killer, or at least isn't as critical to that scenario, because we generally assume that Sheila didn't plan things out much, since after all she was a suicide, so the calculus for her works differently. Jeremy, on the other hand, wanted to escape detection and so needed to plan out the whole thing from start to finish.
Did Jeremy re-load a magazine or did he ‘re-clip’? What’s probably needed is some sort of time-and-motion study comparing various alternate modal logic-based scenarios, as that might tell us:
- what a sophisticated perpetrator (i.e. Jeremy) would likely plan to do; and,
- what an impulsive/unsophisticated perpetrator (i.e. Sheila) would likely do.
In a hypothetical of Jeremy as guilty, he must have meta-planned the whole criminal scheme, and I think it follows that he would stage not just the bodies but the shooting itself in a way that suggests a naïve shooter, i.e. Sheila.
We are therefore looking at a sort of 'double bluff'.
At the same time, he has to be clinically efficient and ensure that he can kill everybody without anybody, especially Nevill, alerting the authorities or any other person.
He probably balances those paradoxical objectives this way:
He makes sure he has two or three clips full of ammunition that he can attach to the rifle, so that:
- he can quickly re-load; and,
- he can disperse cartridges all over the shop, to make it look like a naïve shooter.
Malcolm Fletcher’s report does not enumerate the magazine for the rifle or analyse much, if at all, the mechanical aspects of operating the magazine itself in relation to the rifle, the ammunition and the criminal scenario as supposed at that point in time. If you stop and consider it, that’s an interesting omission.
Why, in the early part of Fletcher’s report, is a magazine not listed? The magazine is not an integral part of the rifle, so this is not pedantry on my part. Fletcher also doesn’t discuss the time-and-motion aspects of operating that rifle, even in a rudimentary sense. That should be within his expertise.
I also note that Robert Boutflour mentions nothing about finding a clip/magazine in his search of the gun cupboard (though having also examined Boutflour's private notes, I confess I'm slightly confused about who found what and where).
