Unravelling complex cases

It was a scene unlike anything the village of Fleet in Hampshire had ever known. In 1995, police were called to a bizarre crime scene. Arriving at an expensively converted barn, officers were led across a well-manicured garden and then down a manhole into an underground storage tank. Inside, stripped of his clothes and hanging upside-down from his ankles, with his wrists tied behind his back and his head immersed in a pool of stagnant water a few inches deep, was the body of a middle-aged man. The victim was wealthy advertising executive Christopher Martin, one of the founders of Saatchi and Saatchi, and friends and family were convinced that he had been murdered, possibly after being tortured. There were also, however, rumours that Mr Martin had been a fan of bondage. Had his death been the result of an autoerotic accident, or had the crime scene been staged that way to allow the killers to cover their tracks? The type of knot used in a particular incident and the way in which it has been tied can help establish if someone is a murder victim, been held captive during a robbery, or has deliberately bound themselves, or even taken their own life. To find out which, the police called on the services of a forensic knot expert to examine the way Mr Martin had been tied. Mike Lucas is one of a small number of specialists in this field who, thanks to a vast knowledge of knots and cordage, can discern information that might easily be missed by other investigators. The knots used to bind Mr Martin were elaborate, so the first question Mr Lucas had to answer was whether it would have been possible for the deceased to tie himself up without help. Being a sailor, Mr Martin had expert knowledge of tying knots and all the evidence pointed to the fact that his predicament had been entirely self-generated. After carefully examining the sequence in which the individual knots had been tied, Mr Lucas was able to help the police to reconstruct the full sequence of events leading to the tragedy. After a telephone conversation with his wife, who was away on holiday with his children, it appeared Mr Martin stripped down to his boxer shorts and began constructing his intricate bondage rigging. He first attached a rope to the heavy garden roller near the back wall of his house. He used a stick to stop it moving forward and then fed the rope 9ft across the lawn to the entrance of the underground tank. He then tied his ankles together and descended the ladder into the gloom of the 10ft deep tank. The final stage of this bizarre incident was to tie – behind his back – the long rope from the roller to the one binding his ankles, and fashion a noose through which he slipped his wrists. In this position with his hands and ankles tied behind his back and joined by the main rope leading out of the hole, Mr Martin would have been able to launch himself from the ladder, suspending himself face down in mid-air, 5ft above the water to enjoy what the coroner James Kenroy would later describe as a “high-risk erotic adventure”. Tragedy had struck when the wooden stake, that Mr Martin had stuck into the ground to ensure that the heavy roller to which the rigging was secured did not move, became dislodged. This caused the roller to edge closer to the manhole, lowering Mr Martin in the process, until his face was immersed in the water. From the pathology reports it appeared that Mr Martin had tried in vain for 16 hours to keep his head out of the water, but eventually succumbed to exhaustion and drowned. The inquest – which recorded a verdict of death by misadventure – also heard it was not the first time Mr Martin had tried bondage. Several years earlier, a previous neighbour had heard him crying for help one night. Breaking into his cottage, he had found Mr Martin dangling from the beams of his attic with his wrists and ankles tied. Knot forensics Knot forensics first came to policing’s attention in the early 1980s, when keen sailor Geoffrey Budworth, an inspector with the Metropolitan Police Service’s (MPS)