How to Solve a Crime by Angela Gallop

How to Solve a Crime by Angela Gallop

Author:Angela Gallop [Gallop, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529331363
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2022-02-17T05:00:00+00:00


The whole digital revolution has happened since the start of my career as a forensic scientist in the 1970s. Today, digital forensics is one of the three most requested forms of forensic testing, along with DNA and fingerprints.

15

Forgery and fraud

After 55-year-old David Napier Hamilton disappeared one day in November 1985, his lover, Kingsley Rotardier, explained his absence by telling people he was suffering from AIDS and had gone abroad. Over the next few months, David Napier Hamilton’s credit card was used and various letters were received by his friends, supposedly from him, explaining that he had gone away for treatment. But in January 1986, Rotardier was tried and found guilty of fraudulent use of David Napier Hamilton’s credit card and sentenced to nine months in prison. As soon as the trial was over, he was re-arrested and charged with murder.

The various letters, together with some examples of business writing of David Napier Hamilton’s taken from his work, were submitted for analysis at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory. When the items were examined by ‘questioned document’ examiner Chris Davies, he found that although the handwriting of the letters was pictorially similar to David Napier Hamilton’s, it was of much poorer quality – which would be expected if it was a copy.

The complicating factor was that if David Napier Hamilton did have AIDS, as claimed by Rotardier, there was no information about the effect this might have on his handwriting, and whether it could account for the poorer quality. However, there were some clear structural differences in character forms, and even if the quality of someone’s writing might be affected by AIDS, there was no reason to believe that it would change the structure of only certain characters. The evidence therefore indicated that all the letters were copied handwriting. And although it wasn’t possible to say by whom, there was other evidence that seemed to implicate Rotardier.

Among the items Rotardier had bought with David Napier Hamilton’s credit card were a butcher’s saw and cleaver, which the police began to suspect he might have used to cut up the body before burning it, bit by bit, in the garden. Indeed, neighbours had reported noxious smoke at around the relevant time. Also, some of David Napier Hamilton’s friends who had received letters from him, in which he wrote of his shame about having AIDS, claimed that the phraseology seemed wrong and that he said things they were certain he would never have said, however ill he was.

At his trial for murder in January 1988, Kingsley Rotardier insisted that David Napier Hamilton was still alive and continuing to battle his illness in Malaysia. But although a body has never been found, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Something that only came out after his trial was the fact that Rotardier had previously been suspected of murder while living in the US. When police had searched his house there, they had found clothing in the boot of his car that was soaked with blood, which turned out to match the blood of the victim.



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