When the Rope Breaks

On Friday 4 June 1999, a dreadful crime took place in Westbury, Wiltshire. At about 12.30pm, two women, a 74-year-old woman and her 93-year-old mother, were duped into allowing a bogus telecommunications engineer into their home.

Probably the man believed that they were wealthy. When he found out that there was little of value in the house, he blindfolded the mother and tied her to a chair upstairs. Then he taped a pillowcase round the daughter’s head and forced her downstairs before raping her. While she was tied up, she heard him making what appeared to be a mobile phone call.

Fortunately, vital forensic evidence was recovered straightaway. There were a number of pubic hairs, which in this age of DNA technology meant there was a strong likelihood of the attacker being identified and brought to justice. There was fingerprint evidence from the crime scene (according to the victims, the attacker was not wearing gloves). There was also significant additional evidence. As the attack took place in the middle of the day, there were several eye-witnesses. The intruder was described as 5’10”-6’ tall, with dark or black hair and aged 25-35. He had a broad Wiltshire accent.

Witnesses also reported seeing both a hatchback car and a white van.

The intruder knew the women’s names (which were unusual) and seemed to know the layout of the house. Also, he had phoned the day before to arrange the appointment; and again, early on the morning of the attack, to confirm the arrangement. So he obviously knew the telephone number. His calls were made from a public call-box in Westbury.

Three years later, Tony Joyce stood trial for the offence at Bristol Crown Court. He didn’t fit the description of the intruder. He was 5’8”, in his late ‘40s, and nearly bald but with silver/grey hair at the sides. He has a northern accent. The victims did not pick him out at an identity parade. No fingerprints from the scene matched his.

He didn’t own a hatchback or a van, but a four-door car with a boot.

He didn’t own a mobile phone. He also had what many would have considered a watertight alibi. At the time, Joyce was at work 40 miles away. He was a painter and decorator working for a large building company in Salisbury and at the time was employed on a site in Donhead St Andrew, a village to the east of Shaftesbury in Dorset. He had been given a month to complete his job, and indeed had to finish on time because he had another lined up on the following Monday (7 June). Joyce said that on those last two days, he worked 12-hour days, without a lunch-break, in order to finish. Certainly his job was finished on schedule.

A colleague gave evidence for him at trial. He confirmed that Joyce had worked in the next room and had not left. They shared the radio, and their tea-breaks. They chatted during the day. Many others on the site were aware that Joyce was working there. One builder remembered having his lunch that day next to Joyce’s car. The foreman came round regularly. No one would have wanted to miss him on Friday, when he delivered the wage-slips.

And the absolutely key piece of evidence – the pubic hairs? Those didn’t match Joyce. The prosecution’s case rested on a tip of latex glove attached to duct tape used by the attacker to hold the pillowcase in place. In other words, it was a fragment of a latex glove that had become stuck to the very adhesive duct tape. When this was first examined, no results were obtained. However, by the time of the trial in 2002, the prosecution claimed to have obtained a DNA profile from sweat extracted from a partial fingerprint found on this glove tip.

They said that it provided “extremely strong support” for the suggestion that Joyce was the assailant.

And the pubic hairs that didn’t match Joyce? In one of the most bizarre developments to have taken place in recent years in an English courtroom, the prosecution told the jury that the rapist had taken the pubic hairs with him and planted them on the victim.

This probably wouldn’t pass muster in the tackiest crime fiction, but unfortunately the jury fell for it. Like the rest of the populace, juries are frequently befuddled by science and statistics. As DNA combines both, it is perhaps not surprising that unlikely verdicts are sometimes reached.

Joyce’s solicitor, Bill Bache, commissioned a fresh forensic report on the DNA profile from the latex glove. This report has identified “a lack of clarity relating to exactly what was being tested, along with a lack of critical comment about the strength of the evidence”. The report raised the possibility that the DNA may have come from more than one person, and so the result could have been misleading.

Certainly, this seems another in the litany of cases in which convictions have been obtained on the basis of narrow and highly-disputed scientific evidence. Scientific evidence should be the rope that binds the various parts of a case together and fixes them all in position. When the rest of the case is non-existent – or, as in this case, where it points to complete innocence then one is entitled to start wondering whether too little science has been stretched far too far in the courtroom.

* Bob Woffinden has taken up and helped to rectify a number of high-profile cases of miscarriage of justice and has written books on miscarriages of justice and the case of James Hanratty, whose innocence he still hopes, one day, to be able to prove.

Unfortunately, neither Bob Woffinden nor Inside Time are able to enter into any individual correspondence regarding this column.