Forensic News
Law Faculty attends historic lecture
The Director of the Forensic Linguistics Institute gives historic lecture at the University of Zagreb
The historic Law Faculty of the University in Zagreb, founded in the same year as the American War of Independence, was the scene of the first forensic linguistics lecture in Croatia. John Olsson presented the faculty with his latest research on authorship. Olsson gave the faculty information on a recent mobile phone text study which examined the extent to which the individual mobile phone texter varies with regard to style. The faculty were interested to hear that the age range of the participants in the study was from 12 to 72 years of age. After the lecture, Olsson was invited to be a visiting professor of the University at the Law Faculty, and to become a board member of the Language and Law Centre, an EU Tempus program project.
Forensic News
Murder or suicide
About four years ago Walter, a young man in one of the southern states of the USA, died from gunshot wounds. According to the girl he was with on the Friday evening in question, he had pulled a gun out of his pocket, inserted the barrel into his mouth and shot himself in front of her. He was 19 years of age. One evening, several weeks before the shooting, the boy had come home and told his mother he didn’t want to see Tracy anymore. Asked why he wanted to end a relationship that had lasted nearly three years, Walter replied that her family was mixed up in ‘something bad’ and wanted him to be involved as well. He had refused. After this Tracy kept phoning and texting Walter to re-consider being with her. Because Walter’s mother thought the girl and her parents had been pressuring her son so much just before his death, she found it difficult to believe that Walter had killed himself. To her mind, it was much more likely that Walter had been killed by the girl’s family. The mother’s suspicions were raised when the local county sheriff refused to open an investigation, stating that in his view – backed up by the county coroner’s post mortem – that the death was clearly suicide. What was more, a letter had been found in the boy’s jeans pocket, and in the sheriff’s view it was a suicide note.
The Forensic Linguistics Institute analyzed the text and concluded that it was probably a suicide note. Details of this case, and a selection of the many hundreds of forensic linguistics cases handled by the Institute, are available in our latest publication, 'Wordcrime', published by Continuum, and available from all booksellers, whether local to you or online.
Forensic News
Coroner rules suicide
Sandra Weddell was a popular mother of three young children. She was well liked in her community, where she belonged to a number of voluntary organisations. A highly qualified nurse, and a person with strong religious beliefs who was widely known for her kindness to others, it came as a shock to her local community to learn that she had, apparently, killed herself. But had she?
On the last day in January 2007 in suburban Bedfordshire, not far from London, Garry Weddell, a police inspector, knocked on his neighbour’s door and asked him to help find his wife, Sandra. He told the neighbour his wife had been missing since the previous day. After a short time Sandra Weddell was found dead in the garage of the family home. She had apparently died of asphyxia. A cable tie was found around her neck. Near to the victim’s body was a single A4 printed sheet with the above note. On examining the national records on types of murders, police found that all previous deaths involving a cable tie had been murder – there were no suicides. This in itself was not necessarily conclusive, but when the circumstances of the discovery of the body were taken into account, police started to become suspicious.
Later, Sandra Weddell's husband, Garry Weddell, a police inspector, was arrested and charged with her murder. Against the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service, the court allowed Mr Weddell bail. Later, his mother-in-law was found dead from gunshot wounds, and Mr Weddell was found to have committed suicide. The Luton Coroner ruled that there had been two murders and one suicide.
Forensic News
Gay hate mail 'pest' guilty
John McCubbin, 47, of the Stevenston area in Ayrshire, Scotland, wrote hate mail to a teenager in an unsuccessful attempt to force the youngster to have a gay relationship with him. He also sent hate mail to the boy's family members claiming that the youth was having sex with a 15 year-old girl. On another occasion he wrote to a young man's employer alleging that this individual was using his job to pick up young boys.
Authorship analysis carried out by the Forensic Linguistics Institute proved crucial in obtaining a verdict in this case. A court at Kilmarnock has found Mr McCubbin guilty of five breaches of the peace having posted "malicious and unsolicited items, sending e-mails and placing his victims in a state of fear, alarm and distress".