The Real Silent Witnesses by Wensley Clarkson

Author:Wensley Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing Group Limited

THE RANGE ROVER KILLINGS

Preserving a crime scene is of paramount importance to forensic scientists, as has already been clearly outlined in this book. But occasionally, the breakthrough evidence that investigators expect to be forthcoming is nowhere to be found – and that can sometimes lead to questionable convictions.

In December 1996, a Range Rover was discovered parked down an isolated farm track in the Essex countryside by two passing farmers in the early hours of the morning. Two bodies were slumped in the front of the vehicle and another one in the nearside back. One of the windows had been shot out from the outside.

Within hours, forensic scientists and police officers were meticulously combing the track and surrounding area for any clues. Overhead, a helicopter swept over nearby fields with a heat-seeking camera looking for any other evidence of what had happened. Police believed notorious Essex criminals Craig Rolfe, Pat Tate and Tony Tucker had been lured to their deaths by the promise of a massive drug deal.

Having completed their on-the-ground examination, forensic scientists arranged for a transport lorry to carefully lift the entire vehicle with the three corpses still inside onto the truck’s flatbed. This meant the bodies would remain untouched inside the Range Rover exactly as they’d died during the mass shooting near the country village of Rettendon. The transport lorry was driven under a police escort one hundred miles north to Leicester University’s prestigious forensic laboratory, whose renowned facilities feature regularly in so many of the cases covered in this book.

Over the following days, the Range Rover, complete with the victims, was minutely examined, before the bodies of the three criminals were finally removed and given individual post-mortems. Clearly, gangsters Craig Rolfe, Tony Tucker and Pat Tate had all been targeted from close range. All three had been shot a total of eight times. Forensic examiners were able to ascertain that Tate had had time to put up his hands and hunch down while Tucker and Rolfe had been killed instantly. After what appeared to be two killers reloaded, one of the two shooters appeared to have taken the gun from his associate and shot each of the men behind their ears just to make sure they were dead. Forensics could tell this from the different type of bullets used on those fatal final shots.

But despite having this intact death scene, forensic investigators failed to find any significant clues as to who actually carried out the triple murder. They even struggled to ascertain the exact time that the three men had been shot. One veteran forensic scientist explained: “That Range Rover should have been the perfect crime scene in a sense, but even with the vehicle parked in a secure location for forensic examination, scientists couldn’t find any really significant clues which might help the police to identify the killers.”

The case went ominously quiet after that, until a police informant stepped forward and told detectives that he had driven the killers to and from the murder scene. With

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