get Chang to stop. When Sef Gonzales, a student, murdered his family in Sydney in 2001 and painted “Fuck Off Asians KKK” in blue paint on a wall of the house, to turn suspicion elsewhere, a faint smear of blue paint was deposited on his jumper. There was other evidence to convict him. The blue paint was just another piece, to wit strong evidence. Scientific evidence can play a vital role when police have a great deal of evidence but just cannot get the piece that seals it. In Crows Nest on Sydney’s north shore in 1983, John Robert Adams gave a lift to an intoxicated Mary Louise Wallace. His story was that they had had sex in the car, he had then gone to sleep and when he woke, she was gone. She was never seen again. Adams maintained his innocence for decades, but in 2013, police founds strands of hair in the boot of his car which could be linked to Mary Wallace. That confirmed what police had always thought, that he had killed her and put her body in the boot of his car. The hairs had remained even though it was on record that Adams had been seen carefully cleaning his car soon after Wallace disappeared. Adams was charged with murder and in 2017 he was convicted.
Popular television series, such as Crime Scene Investigation focus on the seeming infallibility of forensic science. Television’s Detective Columbo burrowing away at what has been left behind seems to always get his man. Such has been the enthusiasm for forensic science that juries have sometimes been inclined to overlook deficiencies in primary evidence, questions of motive and whatever else, and rely on the what they see as cold, hard facts, or supposed facts, coming from scientific observation. In the London Hospital Medical College, Professor James Cameron told his students the forensic laboratory was the “Temple of Truth”. Tipple said later: “The way I see it is that people are quite willing to accept that other people make mistakes. However, they see every bit of scientific evidenced as infallible. It is a big problem. What people don’t realise is that even fingerprint evidence is subjective.”
Occasions when convictions obtained largely on scientific evidence had left people unsettled and there were convictions that had been, or were to be, overturned because of changing views on the scientific evidence. On 15th September 1964, a hotel waiter, Alexander McLeod-Lindsay, returned home in Sylvania, in southern Sydney, in the early hours to find his wife, Pamela, and son, Bruce, had been savagely assaulted by someone wielding a jack pick. McLeod was charged with attempted murder because the pattern of blood spatter on the wall of his bedroom apparently matched blood spatter on his jacket. McLeod-Lindsay said the blood had got there when he picked his wife up. He was convicted, though there was no evidence of motive, and the sighting of him that night by work colleagues, together with his seemingly untroubled demeanor at work, suggested he was totally innocent. McLeod-Lindsay was sentenced to 18 years gaol for attempted murder. There were protests about the conviction but McLeod-Lindsay failed in his appeals. He was released on parole in 1973 and set out to rebuild his life as best he could.
In Adelaide, a spray-painter, Edward Charles Splatt, was convicted of the murder of Rosa Amelia Simper, 77, killed violently in her home in the early hours of 3rd December 1977, because trace elements such as paint, metal and timber fragments found at the home matched trace elements found at Splatt’s home and on his clothes. The case had some worrying problems. There was no primary evidence, no apparent motive, no evidence that Splatt even knew Rosa Simper, and no evidence that he had tendency towards violent homicide. The police, at the start of their investigation, had only the trace elements to work on. They decided that the obvious source of the paint and metal fragments was a structural steel manufacturing factory, W.E. Wilson and Sons, Pty Ltd, diagonally opposite Simper’s house. In their investigation of W.E. Wilson employees, police singled out men who worked at the factory, did a forensic search of their homes and settled on Splatt, where it was alleged there were so many trace elements matching those in Simper home it had to be Splatt. On 24th September 1978, Splatt was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeals failed and police said proudly that it was “all done on forensics”. One of the forensic investigators, was Sergeant 1st Class Barry Cocks, of the South Australian Police Technical Services Division, was to become involved in the Chamberlain case. But as at September 1981, there was a challenge to Splatt’s conviction, led by an Adelaide Advertiser journalist, Stewart Cockburn, whose articles the previous May had annoyed officialdom and prompted a review of the case, led by the very man who had been the prosecutor, and together with a colleague from the SA Law Society, had rejected the need for a review. However, that was not going to be the end of the matter.
James Malcolm Cameron, on whose opinion the entire Chamberlain inquiry would reopen, was a graduate of Glasgow University. He had joined the London Hospital Medical College in 1963. Cameron was described as having an “extraordinary insight into casework” and a “low threshold of suspicion when confronted with sudden death”. He was unafraid to speak his mind. In the 1960s and 1970s he took those qualities into what had been regarded as “taboo” areas of forensic medicine, child abuse. He was co-author of a paper on battered children in 1975, Guide to Baby Battering, which had been circulated to hospital staff, instructing them how to recognise signs of baby battering. It became a standard text. When it came to offences against children, naturally the community was outraged, even the prison community who would usually exact their own revenge, and the forensic scientist who exposed the perpetrator tended to be a hero.
Cameron had developed forensic techniques which had brought him fame because of his ability to crack cases that might have escaped traditional investigative work. In 1977, he had worked on the case of a murder victim whose head and hands had been removed. Working on what was left, he identified the victim through the curvature of the spine, and as a result, two men were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the late 1970s, according to author Colin Evans in his book, A Question of Evidence, the British Society for the Turin Shroud invited Cameron to examine the shroud. In his report, Cameron said: “The image of the face is of one who has suffered death by crucifixion.” He found “deep bruising of the shoulder blades, indicating the angle at which the beam of the Cross might have been carried” and the scourge marks on the body would be “consistent with the flagrum, a short-handed Roman whip with pellets of lead or bone attached to its thongs …The image indicates to me that its owner – whoever it might have been – died on the cross, and was in a state of rigor when placed in it”. Cameron did pull back from saying that this was definitely evidence that it had been the shroud of Christ. How was it possible that so much could be read into stains on a piece of cloth which was at least centuries old, if not millennia? One theory was that the Turin Shroud was a medieval forgery, in which the vague Christ-like image had been painted. But he was proud of his interpretation of the Shroud. Was Cameron even then showing a tendency to go well beyond the bounds of what he could reasonably deduce?
Serious problems relating to forensic science had arisen in Britain when forensic science gurus were shown to be all too fallible. Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877 – 1947) had been a profoundly influential British forensic scientist. His authority filled the courtroom. Regarded as a virtuoso in the witness box, he was skilled in persuading juries of his viewpoint. Knighted in early 1923, he had been approved by the Home Office and had lectured in pathology at the London Hospital Medical College, which was to become the base for James Cameron. However, he became dogmatic and inflexible, conveying the impression that he was infallible, and causing concern within the judiciary. Doubts were being expressed publicly by 1925, and later these doubts were emphasized and the opinion was expressed in some of the major cases in which he was involved that his unwillingness to engage in academic research or peer review, might mean there was sufficient doubt as to produce an acquittal. His domination of the courtroom threw doubts on the jury system.
Further material was to come to light that Cameron himself had had a significant failure. In October 1975, the Appeal Court in Britain quashed the convictions of a youth and two boys for the murder of a homosexual prostitute, Maxwell Confait. Confait’s body had been found after a fire in a house in Catford, in south-east London, in April 1972. The three were gaoled, the youth for life, one of the boys for four years and the other detained under the Mental Health Act. But it became clear in later inquiries there were large discrepancies in the evidence that convicted them. The three had allegedly confessed to the crime, never a good look for someone claiming to have been wrongly convicted. In the light of the facts that became known, it did not appear possible for them to have carried out the killings at the time alleged. Cameron, it turned out, had