The Cutter - It started as an obsession with hacking hair from women's heads. It ended with murder. Michael Litchfield
to the patio door and the sewing desk. Fine spray patterns are usually associated with high-velocity, blunt force trauma. As a general rule, the harder and faster someone is hit with an implement, the finer the spray pattern in blood is produced.
Within the sewing room and the lounge, there was a long contact smear, stretching from the area of the patio door threshold of the hallway to the bathroom. These stripes were consistent with that of a body, which was bleeding, gently being dragged from the sewing room to the bathroom.
There were several footwear marks developed using Luminol in the lounge and sewing room, and there was a visible footwear mark in blood-staining, located on the wooden floorboards in the small hallway, between the bathroom and the lounge. All the footwear marks developed or observed were from a similar type of trainer.
The strongest marks developed or observed were located at the bathroom end of the lounge and in the small hallway. The closer the footwear marks got to the patio door in the sewing room, the weaker the marks developed became and the more fragmentary the footwear impressions became.
This general trend of footwear strength and fragmentation was consistent with the killer’s shoes becoming contaminated with blood while in the bathroom. This area was a strong source of floor-based blood. The marks developed were consistent with a person walking towards the patio door in the sewing room. Each mark is made sequentially and consequently each one becomes weaker as some of the blood contaminate is deposited on the carpet.
In the sewing room, several weaker fragmentary footwear marks were developed in Luminol. The marks developed were located from the entrance of the lounge and on to the area adjacent to the sewing table and work desk. The footwear fragments lead in a short trail, continuing from the lounge area and up towards the patio door. Once opposite the work desk, the footwear fragments developed orientate towards the table. It appears that a few steps were taken in the sewing room away from the patio door and they appear to terminate next to the sewing-machine table.
There were no further traces of footwear marks developed in blood within the property. There were no traces of any Luminol development at the threshold of the door leading from the lounge to the hallway.
The hallway leading from the lounge to the main front door developed no footwear marks at all in Luminol. No bloodstains of any type were detected using Luminol on the hallway carpet.
This was significant because if the killer left the flat by the front-door – there was no other way out because the patio door was locked from the inside – and was still wearing bloodstained footwear, Mr Webster would have expected to have seen illuminated Luminol reactions. Bloody footmarks were also conspicuously absent from the area adjacent to the rear patio door. The strange ending of the footwear blood trail in the middle of the flat was to become one of the most baffling features of the investigation for the police.
Further scientific tests later in the investigation would establish that the killer had been wearing distinctive Nike trainers. Along with much else, the footprints were photographed with a digital camera from every conceivable angle, some of the shots delineating the general traction, while others were individual close-ups.
As soon as the photographing was complete, a powder was applied to the coagulated footprints, which could be ‘lifted’, in a similar way to fingerprints, by fabric smeared with a sticky gel. This job could be achieved equally well with an electrostatic device. Detective Superintendent Phil James, who had taken charge, had the footprint images sent to the Forensic Science Service, a highly-skilled organisation that supports every police force throughout England and Wales. However, it was not until 2007, five years after Heather’s murder, that the Footwear Intelligence Technology System (FITS) was introduced. Stored within the FITS system were at least 13,000 images of footwear types for identification purposes. But even before that innovation, the technicians were able to determine definitively that Heather’s killer had arrived in distinctive Nike trainers, and had killed and mutilated in that particular brand of footwear. But, bizarrely, they were unable to shed any light on what the perpetrator was wearing on his feet when making his getaway. Here we come to yet another enigmatic feature of this case.
Although the network of crimson footprints made a trail that was childishly easy to follow and record photographically, there was one incomprehensible feature to them – they did not lead to any exit; they simply went in circles; the blood trail in Heather’s home ended abruptly in the front room. This made no sense, unless … for Supt James, there seemed only one reasonable answer, a solution that was almost as unthinkable as the crime was unspeakable: the perpetrator had pre-planned all this butchery meticulously to the extent of taking with him a change of clothing.
Certainly most of his clothes, not just his shoes, would have been heavily bloodstained. After such brutal, ritualistic mutilation of his victim, was it possible that he had calmly undressed, put on a change of clothes, bagged everything soaked in Heather’s blood and then let himself out into the morning rush hour? Looking around him that bleak day, Supt James believed that anything was possible, no matter how sickeningly unlikely.
Working closely with the forensic examiners, Supt James and his hand-picked team, with the help of diagrams, plus some plausible speculation, put together a provisional reconstruction of the last frenetic moments in Heather’s life. Without a doubt, she confronted her killer on the front doorstep, which was only a few yards from the well-trodden pavement. The stone wall at the front was low and did not afford privacy, so any caller would have been clearly visible to passers-by or, indeed, residents in a number of houses opposite, should anyone have been looking from their windows at that exact time. Was he just lucky or had he timed his visit to military precision? Maybe Heather was enticed to the door by a demanding knock or the ringing of the doorbell. Conversely, Heather’s lost keys could have been in the murderer’s hands, and he simply let himself in.
On hearing someone turning the lock and entering, Heather would have headed for the front door, quite possibly imagining that it was one of her children, returning from school to collect something forgotten or because he or she was unwell. However, the latter possibility was unlikely because someone from the school’s admin office would have phoned, asking Heather to collect the child. No matter how implausible, the police had to consider every possible scenario.
Supt James believed that Heather realised she was in deadly danger from the moment she came face to face with her killer. Scuff marks and superficial damage to the property revealed that Heather had run for her life through her home, knocking over furniture as, almost certainly in blind panic, she made a last-gasp dash for the patio door at the rear, her only hope of escape, however forlorn. Any other season of the year and those doors might have already been open, but this was the beginning of winter and luck was not on her side.
She got no further before being felled from behind by a blunt instrument, believed to be a hammer, due to the shattering of her skull. The initial blow, delivered with immense ferocity, landed on the rear of her head, splintering the bone. As she was falling, and while crumpled on the carpet, already fatally wounded, a frenzy of blows were rained on her skull, as if her assailant was intent on destroying her entire facial features. Marks on the floor, plus the trail of blood, proved that she had been dragged into the bathroom, where her breasts had been cut off.
The position of her body in the bathroom and the lividity indicated to the pathologist that she had been moved after death. In other words, she had died from the hammer blows. The wounds left by the breast amputations also provided useful clues about the cutting tool. The killer had been in possession of a very sharp knife, maybe even a scalpel. Was he someone in the medical profession? A doctor, a nurse, or even a path lab assistant? Perhaps this wasn’t so far-fetched, as most of the Victorian Jack the Ripper theories have revolved around his having had considerable medical knowledge and surgical expertise. But this was only one of many possibilities that the detectives gradually started to consider.
At that early stage, the strands of hair clutched in Heather’s right hand still seemed pivotal. If there had been a struggle and she had wrenched hair from her attacker’s head,