Caught Out - Shocking Revelations of Corruption in International Cricket. Brian Radford
was generally assumed that those highly emotive words referred to Pakistan’s appalling defeat.
Exactly what Woolmer said in those private e-mails to his wife that night has mostly remained confidential to the family, and it is highly unlikely that their intimate details will ever be put in the public domain, in which case there will be no definite way of knowing his exact state of mind while he sat alone in his hotel room pondering his present position, and the future.
It was around 10.45 next morning when hotel staff found Woolmer lying unconscious on his bathroom floor. He was rushed to hospital but died an hour later. Police chiefs quickly stressed that there was no sign that anyone had made a forced entry into Woolmer’s room, or of a physical struggle, and that his possessions seemed to be undisturbed.
Consent for a post-mortem came immediately from Woolmer’s family, who said that he had been suffering from stress, and they thought it was this that might have caused a heart attack and killed him. The first post-mortem was deemed to be ‘inconclusive’, so extra tests were ordered, followed by Jamaica’s deputy police commissioner Mark Shields (who had been recruited from Scotland Yard in 2005) announcing that Woolmer’s death was being treated as suspicious, although there was nothing to suggest murder at that stage.
As many as ten forensic science officers were soon on the scene, and they meticulously combed Woolmer’s hotel room amid rumours that traces of blood and vomit had been found on the floor and walls, and that a blood-testing device for diabetes had been discovered.
Further speculation suggested that scratches were found on Woolmer’s neck, as well as blood on his cheek. All this escalating gossip was putting huge pressure on the police to admit, or deny, what was being alleged, but a wall of silence was being built up, and lips were suspiciously sealed.
Suicide was another inevitable consideration, bearing in mind Woolmer’s apparently profound distress, but his distraught wife, Gill, who knew him better than anyone else, completely rejected this possibility, although she would not rule out murder.
Fingerprints and statements were taken from every member of the Pakistan playing squad, plus officials and backroom staff, although the police carefully emphasised that no one in the party was a suspect in their inquiries, and that they were free to leave at any time. CCTV footage from the Pegasus Hotel was flown to Scotland Yard in London for examination by technical experts with the help of the most up-to-date analytical equipment.
Then, four days after Woolmer’s death, and completely out of the blue, the police suddenly announced that further post-mortem tests had shown that the popular Pakistan coach, and former England Test batsman, had been strangled.
But by whom? And how? And why? The media erupted, a major guessing game began, and conspiracy theorists conjured up all sorts of frightening possibilities – so it was no surprise when the Woolmer family leapt in to stress that they knew of no threat that had been made on his life, and that they had no knowledge of him being involved in match-fixing.
A number of Scotland Yard detectives then arrived in Jamaica just as several reliable media outlets were reporting that Woolmer had actually been poisoned by a deadly plant, or even snake venom, before he was strangled. Another gruesome rumour was that Woolmer had visited a player’s hotel room and had innocently picked up a bottle of champagne that had been spiked with poison. Even Panorama, the BBC’s foremost television documentary programme, claimed that a powerful drug had been found in Woolmer’s body that would have rendered him helpless.
Woolmer’s remains were flown to Cape Town, where he was cremated privately at a family service in a funeral parlour close to his home, but a large number of incredulous journalists were still not satisfied that the entire truth had been disclosed to the public. Britain’s largest-circulation daily tabloid, The Sun, even claimed in a startling headline that ‘Potter drug did kill Woolmer’.
The newspaper maintained that Woolmer had been poisoned by the drug aconite, also known as wolfsbane, which is mentioned in the bestselling J K Rowling book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
‘Toxicology tests have confirmed “significant” traces of it in the Pakistan coach’s body,’ alleged The Sun. ‘The tests were ordered following an anonymous tip to Jamaican police eight days after Woolmer died that aconite had been used. Aconite, which paralyses the nerves, normally takes only 30 minutes to kill. Victims suffer vomiting and diarrhoea before collapsing, unable to breathe, to die in agony. A neck injury which caused police to say Woolmer had been strangled is now thought to have followed a fall when he collapsed.’
The newspaper continued: ‘Detectives believe the drug, in the form of white powder, could have been tipped into whisky Woolmer was drinking in his room, or sprinkled over sleeping tablets and diabetes tablets that he was taking. The ancient poison, also known as wolfsbane, is said to be perfect for concealing murder, and has been used in several high-profile assassinations in Pakistan. Its use fuels suspicion that Woolmer was murdered to stop him exposing match-fixing.’
Nothing came of the tabloid’s claims, but Home Office pathologist Dr Nathaniel Carey, who had flown in from London to examine autopsy ‘material’, agreed that Woolmer had not been strangled – leading to confusion and widespread frantic cries of ‘cover-up’.
Dr Carey was aided by pathologists Dr Michael Pollanen from Canada and Professor Lorna Jean Martin from South Africa, and a short time later a Scotland Yard spokesman announced that Woolmer had died from natural causes. He explained that this conclusion, which was totally different from the original official post-mortem report by Dr Sheshiah, was based on what Dr Carey and his colleagues had discovered. No specific medical definition of ‘natural causes’ accompanied this conclusion.
It was then left to police chief Lucius Thomas to make an official statement on 12 June that the Jamaican police force had accepted the findings of the three overseas pathologists, and bluntly added that it had ‘closed its investigation into the death of Mr Bob Woolmer’.
Although this terse statement brought a sharp and official conclusion to the complex mystery of Bob Woolmer’s demise, sceptics around the world would be seeking a more detailed explanation for this sudden, and what some regarded as suspicious, verdict.
A highly experienced government pathologist had originally reported that Woolmer had died from asphyxia caused by manual strangulation, but now we were being asked to believe that he got it wrong, and that Woolmer’s death was really due to natural causes.
A series of extraordinary allegations later came from more than 50 witnesses at the coroner’s inquest into Woolmer’s death, which opened in front of an 11-member jury in the Jamaican Conference Centre in Kingston on 16 October. The inquest was originally arranged for 23 March, five days after Woolmer was pronounced dead at the University Hospital of the West Indies, but inquiries and conflicting theories had forced the seven-month delay.
Over the next three months, witnesses would tell the inquest jury that Woolmer was seen with a stranger putting bundles of money in a bag shortly before he died; of pesticides being found in his system during the autopsy; and of an admission to his wife in an e-mail that he was depressed.
The first witness, hotel maid Bernice Robinson, recalled seeing blood on a pillow and smelling alcohol and vomit when she entered Woolmer’s hotel room to clean it, before finding him unconscious on the bathroom floor. Yet another major twist in this incredible case came when a janitor stepped into the witness box and alleged that she saw Woolmer counting ‘coils of United States dollars’ in the company of another man inside a private area of the dressing room at the Sabina Park cricket ground.
She told the jury: ‘Mr Woolmer was checking it [the money] and putting it away in a big bag, similar to bags carried by cricketers. The money was in a thick coil. I saw lots of money on the table.’ The janitor worked as a senior superintendent for a maintenance company and, although she did not know the man who was with Woolmer, she believed that ‘the person was an Indian’ but couldn’t explain how she came to that conclusion.
She said that the incident happened on 12 March, six days before Woolmer was found