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You would think that the easiest crimes to solve would be the ones where you have several eyewitnesses who saw what happened and are willing to tell the police about it. However, often they can be the trickiest of all, because people can be amazingly bad at seeing what’s really going on and at remembering what they saw. Sometimes when you read different eye-witness accounts of an incident and compare them you are tempted to believe that they must be taking about completely different events.
This is an example of the sort of thing I mean. It took place not long before I retired from the police. I didn’t get called in to lead the investigation until after half a dozen or so witnesses had already come down to the station and given their statements. It had all seemed very straightforward initially – quite within the capability of an experienced detective sergeant such as Anna Davenport – until she started comparing the statements taken by different officers on the team. She soon realised that any half-decent defence lawyer would soon tear the prosecution case apart if we were to go ahead with charging the man we currently had in custody based solely on the eye-witness evidence.
On the face of it, we had a very straightforward mugging. A young woman is walking across the University Parks on a Sunday afternoon. A man – homeless and known to the police for having caused a nuisance by being drunk in public on more than one occasion – trips her up, pounces on her, steals her purse from her bag and runs off. Members of the public come to her aid. Two young men – members of a college rowing team – pursue her attacker and bring him down with a rugger tackle. The purse is found later, abandoned in amongst some bushes along the path that the man took when he ran away.
As you can imagine, we were all feeling quite pleased with ourselves at first. PC Gavin Hughes, not one of our more dynamic officers, made the arrest. This was an unusually occurrence for him and we were all pleased for him because there had been murmurings on high that he needed to up his game in that respect. For that matter, the whole division had been under pressure to improve our clear-up statistics and this was a very welcome addition to a not over-long list of solved crimes that quarter. However, it turned out to be a good thing we looked into things more carefully, as you’ll see. I’ve written down the Statements as best I can remember them – but of course I’ve changed the names of the witnesses, suspects and victim. Read them for yourself and see what you make of them.