FRAMED! - part 21

41

28 January 2008

Having encountered the ‘girl’ in a chatroom on the Faceparty.com website, Brian Pead added ‘her’ to his MSN contact list in order to smoke this person out. Claiming to be a girl aged fourteen, this person had entered an adult social networking website and was asking for money in return for sex. This had immediately not made sense to Brian.

It was even more obvious to him as the conversation progressed that it was not a fourteen-year-old girl at all. He looked at ‘her’ profile again. It contained just one photograph – of someone looking about fourteen and dressed in hockey kit. Again, this did not make sense because it was clear that the poor quality photograph (it looked like a copy of a copy) had been cropped from a team photograph so that just this one girl was visible. Other girls’ shoulders and hair could just be seen. Brian felt that this was extremely odd. He had taught pupils for some twenty years by this stage. He had a very good understanding of fourteen year old girls and boys. In respect of girls, he knew that they liked to put up photographs which showed all their friends or team-mates. He also knew that they liked to put up photos which showed many aspects of their lives. And that you usually couldn’t shut them up!

Yet this profile contained only the one poor quality photograph and no information at all about the ‘girl’. Instinctively, Brian knew this was odd. Odd things always draw his attention.

His initial hypothesis when he encountered this person was that this was not a girl. He was clear about that.

As they moved to MSN to chat there, he was determined to use all of his counselling skills in order to smoke out this person. Although he felt it was an adult, possibly with paedophilic tendencies, in order to exploit teenagers by posing as a teenager, he suspended this hypothesis just as he would with a real client in his counselling room.

Within two or three opening sentences of their conversation it became obvious to him – despite having suspended his hypothesis – that this was not a teenaged girl at all but an adult posing as one. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the person’s use of language did not match that of the average fourteen-year-old. Brian had taught literally thousands of teenagers in his twenty-five year career and he had a very good idea of the language skills of the average teen – both boys and girls. Should the reader be minded to undertake even the most basic research on the internet, such research would show that by the age of fourteen, girls in general have a wider vocabulary than boys.

Secondly, this ‘teen’ was omitting the use of vowels in the conversation. As an author of nine books and with a first class honours degree in English, Brian has a good understanding of linguistics and linguistic devices. When he received speech therapy as a five-year-old after suffering the trauma of sexual abuse in a children’s home, he had learnt a great deal about speech patterns and words. He knew that many people, when texting or ‘speaking’ online, will often use a form of short-hand and omit occasional vowels or consonants. However, this person was omitting almost all of the vowels and hardly any of the consonants. It was a particularly strange use of language.

Thus, he had already formed an opinion that this person’s vocabulary was not that of a teenager and that the ‘teenager’ was not actually writing as a teenager. As a teacher, he had encountered thousands of teenagers and it was clear to him that this was not.

But Brian did not jump to conclusions. His first book took him twenty years to research – he is not a man usually given to rash judgments or hasty decisions. He resolved to continue to investigate this person.

Another counselling skill that he was able to bring to bear was that of transference and counter-transference. These can be difficult concepts to even experienced counsellors, but Brian was conscious of them. He had been praised for his understanding and use of transference and counter-transference in his counselling work.

There were two main themes on the Advanced Diploma course he was completing in March 2008: transference and counter-transference and psychosexual issues. There was a great deal of reading around these subjects. Brian was fascinated by both themes. From an early age, he had been part of groups in a children’s home, as a manager and within his dysfunctional family and marriage. He had been particularly interested in the interaction between the different members of whichever group he was involved in. He was acutely aware not only of his own role within each group, but he also gained increasing awareness of the transferential and counter-transferential issues between members of the group. And having been abused between the ages of 5 and 11, he naturally had a deep interest in psychosexual matters.

Brian was particularly adept at sorting out what was ‘his stuff’ or ‘the other person’s stuff’ in encounters he had, both in and out of the therapy room. He has a significant level of awareness of his own ‘stuff’ and, as a peer was later to point out, was emotionally intelligent enough to differentiate ‘his stuff’ from the ‘other person’s stuff’ in most encounters. This ability had been honed through years of management, years of reading about psychology and years of attending psychology and philosophy talks at Inner Space in London. His counselling supervisor, Clare Manifold, was impressed with the level of awareness that Brian had around these concepts, writing in his end-of-year report that he “...is able to perceive transferential issues...”

She also wrote that he “...is open to self-exploration, uses his journal well and is happy to look at issues raised in our sessions. [...] he is open to both give, which he does with sensitivity, and receive. [...] He is willing and interested in examining the cultural heritage (of people he encounters). [...] His strengths are good boundaries, evident intelligence and a serious commitment to the work. He forms trusting relationships, gives insightful feedback and is a generous contributor...”

Whilst engaging with this person online, Brian Pead was fully aware of his own feelings in the process and did not merely focus on the conversation itself.

He felt that this was an adult, and an adult male. He felt that this was a middle-aged male. And he felt that this adult had an interest in paedophilia. He had gleaned all this from the first conversation online on 28 January 2008.

As a result of these feelings – which he committed to his personal learning journal which he had to complete as part of his Advanced Diploma counselling course – he decided to make notes and keep a watching brief. If it did, indeed, turn out to be a sex offender, he would report this person to the management of Faceparty.com.

Thus, by the time the first online conversation had concluded, Brian had gathered information that the ‘girl’ was using a particularly strange form of shorthand when typing, that ‘she’ used a form of vocabulary not usually associated with a fourteen-year-old and that he had intuited that the person was a middle-aged adult with paedophilic tendencies.

He had also read a good deal about the work of Dr John Olsson, a linguist, and founder of a world-renowned forensic linguistics consultancy. Olsson is a world-leading expert in forensic linguistics, a science where linguistics techniques are applied to legal processes to solve cases and provide new angles on evidence.

With kind permission from Dr Olsson, we have reproduced the introduction from his book Word Crime (Continuum, 2009):

“...What is forensic linguistics? If you have gotten this far, it is a question you may have some answers to already. On the other hand, forensic linguistics might be a subject that you have heard nothing on, but want to know more about.

My name is John Olsson, and for the past 15 years I have been (and still am) the world’s only full-time forensic linguist. This book concerns my work, and is designed in part to illustrate how forensic linguistics can solve crime. Before I move onto this though, I would like to go over some background information. Let me detail in brief how the science of forensic linguistics came into being.

In 1968 a Swedish linguist working at the University of London heard about a case which had occurred a number of years previously. It concerned the murder of several women and a baby at an infamous London address, 10 Rillington Place, Kensington. Rillington Place became so notorious that the authorities were eventually forced to change its name to Ruston Close at the request of the people who lived there. However, the bad associations remained and eventually the local council demolished the entire street and a new development of houses was constructed there in the 1970s.

The ground-floor tenant of 10 Rillington Place was one John Christie, a quiet perhaps even shy man, apparently contentedly married. Above him lived Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl and their baby daughter. Evans disappeared from Rillington Place in 1949 and questions began to be asked about the whereabouts of his wife and baby. In November of that year, Evans handed himself into police in South Wales where he had been living with his uncle at Merthyr Tydfil. Forensic linguistics comes into the story at this point because Evans was supposed to have given several statements to the police confessing to the crime. Evans was found guilty partly on the basis of the statements and partly on the basis of evidence given by John Christie. Evans was hanged in 1950. Later Christie’s wife disappeared and neighbours began asking questions about his odd behaviour. After Christie moved out another tenant occupied his flat and, while attempting to put up a shelf made a gruesome discovery: a partly clothed woman’s body. When police arrived at the house they found evidence of several other murders. Christie was eventually tracked down, charged, found guilty and later hanged. Not long before he died he confessed to the murder of Evans’ wife and ‘probably’ of their baby. Despite urgent requests to investigate these claims before Christie’s execution date the Home Secretary refused to halt the hanging and Christie was put to death in July 1953. The crimes he had confessed to for which Evans had been hanged continued to be attributed to Evans for over a decade until journalist Ludovic Kennedy became interested in the case in the 1960s and the statements also drew the attention of a Swedish professor working at the University of London, Jan Svartvik examined the statements and concluded that they contained not one but several styles of language, most of which were written in what is known as ‘policeman’s register’. Svartvik’s analysis and the unwavering campaign by Kennedy caused the Home Secretary to reverse the conviction and Evans was posthumously pardoned. This was probably the first murder appeal in the world in which linguistics played a prominent part. Because Svartvik used the term ‘forensic linguistics’ in his report on the statements he is credited with being the ‘father’ of the discipline.

In the 1990s the case of Derek Bentley drew the attention of linguists at Birmingham University where I was doing postgraduate research in linguistics. Several anomalies appeared in the statement Bentley is supposed to have dictated to police officers after the shooting of Police Constable Sidney Miles at a burglary in South London by Bentley’s co-burglar, Chris Craig. A number of other previously accepted confessions now fell under suspicion and one after another several convictions were quashed, largely on the basis of evidence provided by ESDA trace, an electrostatic procedure which has certain elements in common with photocopying and reveals indentations from other sheets if several sheets were placed on top of each other in the course of writing.

In 1994 I founded the Forensic Linguistics Institute in the United Kingdom which has since become one of the leading linguistics laboratories in the world. Along with my colleagues I examine texts of all types for authorship, authenticity, interpretation of meaning, disputed language and other forensic processes. An early case involved the analysis of an alleged terrorist’s statement to police at Paddington Green Police Station in the mid-1980s. Since that time I have handled nearly 300 forensic linguistics investigations. These have ranged from examining the language of suicide letters for genuineness, assessing threat in extortion demands, evaluating police interview tapes for alleged oppressive interviewing (a rare occurrence these days), and the authorship identification of many hundreds of letters, emails and mobile phone texts in a range of inquiries from murder to extortion to witness intimidation, sexual assault and internet child pornography. I get commissioned by police forces, solicitors, international companies and organizations, and even private clients who have received hate mail from someone who might live just down the road or even next door.

In an early case I was asked by the president of a dog club in the mid-west of the United States to see whether a spate of hate mail letters the club had received came from one of their own members. The most likely author turned out to be an elderly mild-mannered lady who had devotedly carried out the club’s administrative affairs for many years, but who had been disappointed by the failure of one of her pets to win a prize at the club’s annual dog show. It may come as something of a surprise, but hate mail also occurs within families: in one case a disgruntled woman had become infuriated at the success of her younger brother in his hotel business and wrote a spate of poison letters to the local chamber of commerce not only denigrating his efforts but insulting his wife, accusing him of nazism and claiming that the hotel often hosted white supremacist weekends. In another case a teenage girl grew jealous of her sister’s impending marriage and tried to poison her against the bridegroom. On the other hand, not all hate mail is from family members: I recently had to attempt an identification in which a middle-aged male, having been sexually rebuffed by a teenage boy, then wrote to the boy’s parents accusing their son of being a child molester. The boy’s father - perhaps as a result of this accusation against what he perceived to be his family’s honour - then committed suicide.

However, there is something you the reader should know, in case you are ever the victim of hate mail, or in case you receive hate mail which denigrates a friend, relative or colleague: in every hate mail case I have dealt with the accusation has turned out to be pure malice - a complete invention. Yet these inventions are capable of wrecking lives, as I have seen all too often. A businessman of my acquaintance received several such letters and it nearly destroyed him, even though he - and everyone around him - knew that the accusations contained in those letters were completely false. It was only through strong family support that he was eventually able to recover. The perpetrator of this terrible crime - and you only have to see the effect on people’s lives to realize how serious a crime it is - has never been found.

Nor should anyone imagine, as per those dark 1940s and 1950s films, that all hate mail writers are women. Far from it: rancour and spite know no gender boundaries, no age limits and no social divisions. I have seen hate mail from young teenagers, old aristocrats and middle-aged artisans, from highly successful executives, doctors, and respectable grandparents. The internet has enabled the genre to flourish: anybody can access a free email address under a pseudonym and post the vilest slander about another person on public forums or communicate it privately in emails. However, despite the advent of technology, the Royal Mail and other postal services around the world still deliver thousands of traditionally written paper missives every day, each designed to destroy a happy life, wreck a worthy reputation or sow the seeds of hatred between formerly devoted couples or other family members. The motive is not always hatred either: it is often a combination of boredom and a failure to foresee the inevitable devastation which can occur.

Fortunately, forensic linguistics is not all hate mail cases. Every day brings a unique inquiry: the father who wants to know if the letter he has received from his daughter is really in her style, the mother who is concerned her teenager’s writing is becoming influenced by ‘gang speak’, the insurance company trying to identify a fraudster’s voice from among several possible clients, the police detective trying to interpret a coded letter from a prisoner to an accomplice, the prisoner who claims innocence, the solicitor working on an appeal for her client, the employee who feels his bosses are trying to frame him by saying he wrote an anonymous email - the list is seemingly endless.

In the 15 years I have been doing this work I have analysed literally thousands of texts by hundreds of different writers implicated in scores of types of crime. In that time forensic linguistics has grown from being a marginal discipline which only a few people were passionate about to an internationally recognized practice which can be of real service to law enforcement and the legal profession.

In this book I will show you the details of some of the many cases I have been privileged to work on. Wherever possible I have avoided identifying victims, where they live or what their occupations are or were. This has sometimes also meant that I could not identify the perpetrators of some of these crimes either. Unfortunately, some cases are well-known to the public and could not be anonymized, and the reader who follows the daily news will recognize these cases quite easily. Some cases are too recent to write about, but I hope to be able to do so in years to come when memories of certain crimes and events are no longer fresh in the public memory.

I hope that this book, which tells the stories of many lives, mostly of ordinary people often faced with extraordinary circumstances through no choice of their own, will show you the power of language analysis in the solving of crime. In telling you about these lives in a simple narrative format I have tried to do so in a straightforward, down-to-earth way. My aim is not primarily to tell a ‘good story’, but to illustrate how interesting and complex language is, and how powerful a resource it can be when it enters the arena of the law. If the stories are worth reading I hope this will not be seen as in any way lessening the importance or the tragedy of the events they seek to describe. I am always conscious of the fact that the work is about people above all, and not just language, and I have found this to be both a privilege and a responsibility over the years.

Forensic linguistics began life as an instrument to correct miscarriages of justice. It now plays an active day-to-day role in our courts. The common law system which has evolved in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the last millennium should be treasured by all who live in these islands, despite its undoubted errors over the years. This is why forensic science is so important. In an age when the erosion of civil rights and liberties has once again become a topic to rouse the passions, and rightly so, forensic science stands as one of the guardians of justice and liberty. From small beginnings just 40 years ago, forensic linguistics is now an important, and I believe, permanent component in this process...”

The eminent forensic scientist Dr John Olsson describes forensic linguistics as being one of the guardians of justice and liberty. Since he was passionate about psychology and linguistics and had been all his life, Brian Pead was aware of Olsson’s work. For this reason, he instructed his barrister, Dominic Bell, then of Charter Chambers, 21 John Street, London, to call Dr Olsson as a witness for the defence. Bell refused. There was no valid reason for such a refusal. In fact, the refusal itself flouted several legal principles.

Firstly, if a client makes such a legitimate request, as Brian did here, a barrister has to comply with that request. Bell, therefore, is guilty of failing to act upon his client’s clear and specific instructions.

Secondly, it is a defendant’s duty to put forward as cogent and as powerful a defence to an allegation as possible. Rule 22.4 of the Criminal Procedure Rules states:

“...Under section 6A of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996, you must:

(a) set out the nature of your defence, including any particular defences on which you intend to rely;

(b) indicate the matters of fact on which you take issue with the prosecutor, and in respect of each explain why;

(c) set out particulars of the matters of fact on which you intend to rely for the purposes of your defence;

(d) indicate any point of law that you wish to take, including any point about the admissibility of evidence or about abuse of process, and any authority relied on;

and

(e) if your defence statement includes an alibi (i.e. an assertion that you were in a place, at a time, inconsistent with you having committed the offence), give particulars, including –

(i) the name, address and date of birth of any witness who you believe can

give evidence in support of that alibi,

(ii) if you do not know all of those details, any information that might help identify or find that witness...”  

There was no legitimate reason for not calling the expert witness. In his book The Art of Persuasion, Sir David Napley writes:

“...In legal aid cases you [the barrister] may be uncertain whether the expense of obtaining expert opinion or calling expert witnesses will be allowed by the Taxing officer or the Legal Aid Area Committee, and, if allowed, at the amount which the expert will require as his fee. You can obtain guidance in advance from the Chief Clerk of the Crown Court in respect of trials on indictment, or from the Area Secretary in magistrates’ court cases. It is important, however, not to allow these gentlemen, who are uniformly helpful, to usurp your function. You are in control of your own case and have the sole responsibility for conducting it, and even if, exceptionally, they are unwilling to authorise an expert you may feel constrained to take the risk, and hope to justify your decision later. In most cases, however, no difficulty of this sort is likely to arise...”

It is evident that calling expert witnesses is a run-of-the-mill exercise in most cases. Yet Bell refused to take instructions from his client. Apart from being a breach of the code of conduct that barristers are required to uphold, Bell’s refusal was also a breach of the Criminal Procedure Rules, or CPR.

The CPR are, in effect, a handbook for conducting a criminal trial and set down the procedure that all parties in a criminal trial are supposed to adhere to. Each component part of a trial has a number of rules that must be followed if a trial is to be fair. The elements of a trial include, for example, disclosure, witness statements, evidence and expert witnesses. The rules are numbered and consisted (in 2005) of some 211 pages.

The Criminal Procedure Rules 2005 were finalised on 18 February 2005, laid before Parliament on 4 March 2005 and came into force on 4 April 2005. It was this set of rules that was in effect at the time of Brian Pead’s trial in December 2009.

Expert evidence is dealt with by Part 33 of the CPR. However, there were no rules in this Part of the 2005 rules and the obligation to disclose expert evidence was referred to in Part 24.

Rule 24.1 imposes an obligation upon either party in a criminal trial – where the Defendant has issued a plea of ‘Not Guilty’ - to adduce expert evidence (whether of fact or opinion) in the proceedings as soon as practicable.