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What next?
This was the point at which Anna asked for my advice.
She had about a dozen witnesses whose testimonies were consistent and all pointed towards Michael Lambert having deliberately tripped up Joanne Rowland as she walked past him and then stolen her purse and subsequently thrown it away for fear of being caught with it on him. Against that she had PC Gavin Hughes’ gut feeling that Lambert was not the sort to assault a woman or even to steal her purse after she had fallen down fortuitously in front of him and dropped her bag, and no the evidence of Dr Anastasia Mortlake who was adamant that, whatever else Lambert may have done, he did not trip up Ms Rowland.
Dr Mortlake’s statement had several interesting features. The story of the dog and the branch was entirely new to us and provided the first alternative explanation for Ms Rowland having tripped over. Ms Rowland had given us the impression that her bag had remained over her shoulder throughout the incident including when she got up and sat down on the bench. Dr Mortlake, however, described it having been left lying on the ground and begin picked up by a passer-by. This opened up the possibility that someone other than Lambert could have purloined the purse. Dr Mortlake was the only witness – other than Lambert himself – to have watched the scene unfold from in front of Ms Rowland. This meant that she was the only person able to corroborate Lambert’s statement that Rowland had been busy with her phone and not looking where she was going.
On the face of it, I was inclined to give more credence to Dr Mortlake’s testimony than to that of the other witnesses. She was a trained observer with nothing to gain by lying or embellishing. She had witnessed the incident from close to where the main actions had taken place and she had been sitting in a known location and not running or walking along at an indeterminate pace and unknown distance away. The dog story was new but plausible; there could be no reason for her to make it up and it was unlikely that she could have imagined it.
On the other hand, she was elderly and her sight might not be as good as she believed it to be. She admitted that she was reading a book when the events started unfolding before her, so had she really seen everything that she said she had seen? She had come forward only after she realised that Lambert was accused of assault and robbery, and she came with the stated aim of exonerating him. Was there some unknown link between them that had prompted her to make up a story in his defence?
We sat down together and went through each of the witness statements in turn, noting down similarities and differences and trying to decide which were the most reliable.
Joanne Rowland clearly believed that Lambert had tripped her up – and done it deliberately. However, on re-reading what she had said, I came to the conclusion that in fact she had inferred that Lambert had tripped her from having felt something catching her foot and assuming that it must have been Lambert’s own foot because she was not aware of anything else being present. We dispatched PC Gavin Hughes and DC Andrew Lepage to search the area around the bench for tree branches, especially any with canine tooth-marks on them!
Ms Rowland clearly also believed that Lambert had got down on the ground beside her with the intention of attacking her. However, it was not clear that she had any evidence for this. She was upset and frightened and Lambert’s unkempt appearance and smell of booze did not help to give her confidence that he had her best interests at heart. Moreover, she had evidently been talking with other witnesses before giving her statement and had been told that Lambert was a suspicious character and not to be trusted.
We concluded that there was nothing in Ms Rowland’s statement to make us doubt what Dr Mortlake had told us. To double check on this, I interviewed Ms Rowland myself. I didn’t find out much from that, but there was one thing that I thought was significant. One thing that counted against the idea that someone else had stolen the purse and thrown it in the bushes was that it seemed pointless to take it and then get rid of it immediately unless it was because the thief was afraid of being caught with it in his person. I pressed Ms Rowland to try to remember exactly what had been in her purse before it was taken from her. Eventually she admitted that she had thought that she had about thirty pounds in notes as well as the small change that we found in it when it was recovered. She went on to say that she had not said anything about this before because she assumed that she had been mistaken and that she had left the money locked in the desk in her room where she kept her valuables such as credit cards and passport. I asked her whether she had found the cash when she returned to her room and she admitted that she had not.
Caldwell and Sanders, the two runners, had given statements that were almost identical. This was to be expected, since that had been allowed ample opportunity to compare notes before making them. They neither of them noticed the dog or the stick, but that is not surprising. The dog could have dropped its stick before they came within sight of the bench; or they could simply have not been looking that way when it happened. Caldwell reported having seen Lambert put out his foot to trip Rowland up, but this could easily have been his interpretation of what must have happened after hearing Rowland’s own account. The fact that Sanders does not mention what it was that made Rowland fall over supports this theory.
The two schoolgirls, Katie and Aimee, had even longer to discuss together what they had seen. It is greatly to their credit that neither of them said that they saw Lambert throw a purse into the bushes. Instead, they described what he threw as “something small”. When I said this to Anna, she told me that she and Monica Philipson had made a particular point of telling the girls before the start of the interview how important it was only to say what they were sure they remembered. They’d done this because they were afraid that the girls might allow their imaginations to run wild. I wondered whether perhaps this is something that ought to have been emphasised to the adult witnesses as well.
What Lambert told us in his interview fitted pretty well with what Dr Mortlake said in her statement, but there was something suspicious about his refusal to tell us what he had thrown into the bushes. Fortunately for him – or possibly unfortunately, depending on how you look at it – our team of searchers did eventually find the mysterious object (and a whole lot of other spurious items dropped into the bushes by visitors to the parks over a period of several months by the look of some of them!). Even more lucky for him was the discovery of a large stick – a small branch, one might describe it – with the unmistakable marks of the teeth of a fox terrier impressed upon it. (In case you’re wondering: no, our forensics team weren’t able to identify the breed solely from the tooth marks. However, those gave them a good idea of the size of dog concerned and an appeal for dog walkers who had been in the parks on the day in question produced the owner of Sam, a fox terrier with a penchant for stick-collecting.)