The Menstrual Blood

[Erik Narramore]

Leslie, what we can say is as follows:

(i). If SOCO officers found clothes bearing significant blood-staining, this would normally be treated as evidence and logged, not simply placed in buckets and forgotten about.

(ii). If we suppose that Sheila did have blood-stained clothes due to a period, this clothing would not be in her bedroom, it would be in the laundry, which is in the scullery.  This is because if it was found in the bedroom, it would have been treated as evidence.  If it was found in the scullery, officers might well have concluded the stains were due to menstruation and left them; in any event, they would not be expected to transfer those clothes to buckets in the kitchen.

(iii). However, we are engaged here in logical guesswork.  Even expert and experienced people sometimes act illogically and make mistakes and slips that seem puzzling to outsiders, like us, who have the luxury of hindsight.  For instance, it is possible the officers found blood-stained clothes in the laundry, decided to examine those clothes, then realised the blood was probably due to menstruation; they might then have accidentally left the clothes in the buckets in the kitchen, perhaps intending to log these articles and take them away, purely for form purposes.  Even when officers decide a piece of evidence is not particularly relevant, it's normally still a good idea to record it and seize it because you never know if it might later become more relevant as the investigation progresses.  It could be that somebody forgot to do this.  This could have happened after the crime scene photography was completed and it could be explained by the prevailing belief that Sheila had committed murder-suicide anyway, so the bloodied clothes were perceived, at least at that stage, as having no evidential value and were forgotten about for this reason. 

(iv). If we reject my supposition in (iii) above (I accept it is supposition), then we have to conclude it is unlikely the SOCO officers tampered with the buckets by putting clothes in them after the crime scene photography.  They simply had no reason to do this otherwise.

(v). It is not unreasonable to proceed on an assumption that the buckets must have been checked if they were in situ at the time the crime scene was being searched by officers - and we must assume they were in situ, given the evidence in the photographs.  However, I am not sure we have to treat that as axiomatic, as I also must concede there is a small possibility the officers simply didn't check the buckets - and that could well be the mundane explanation for it all.  We can't be sure the buckets in the photograph are empty, and it is possible there were clothes in there but it was not obvious they were blood-stained, or it may not have been obvious the items were clothing.  That sounds crazily unlikely, but it actually is possible.

(vi). A final observation is that it appears that Ann Eaton made no mention of the buckets in her contemporaneous witness statements.  I will re-read those statements more carefully and must check her evidence at trial to be sure. I must also re-read her statements to both the Dickinson Inquiry and the Bamber Inquiry, and possibly also the Stokenchurch Inquiry.  If it did not come up at trial, this may help answer one possible objection to my supposition in (iii) above, which is that surely a police officer would make an additional statement explaining the mistake in order to put Ann Eaton's evidence into context and validate and reinforce it.  In other words, what the objector is saying is that the police had no motive to conceal their mistake.  Quite the opposite: they had a clear motive to admit to it!  And if A/DCI Ainsley was aware of the blood (having asked Ann Eaton about it), why not raise it at trial?  The answer to this is in the fact that Ann Eaton did not include it in any of her contemporaneous statements: it either wasn't considered important in the scheme of things, or it was considered important and it was omitted for that reason.  Either way, a decision has been made to exclude this from the defence, which I find disturbing in itself.

In closing, I'd like to focus on point (iii) above in particular.  If we take an Occam's razor approach to this and assume mistake is the explanation for the police not noticing the blood-soaked clothing, this does open up the possibility that Sheila was downstairs that night in order to deposit her clothes in the laundry and that is when she saw the rifle, on the bench in the back corridor area.  Weren't tampons also found in the living room?  Of course, I appreciate that we may only have Ann Eaton's word that the blood was menstrual in origin, and it is unclear why A/DCI Ainsley raised the issue with her and came to know about it in the first place, especially given that she did not trouble to mention it in her contemporaneous statements. 

It's one of those topics that could be everything or nothing because there is, we must admit, a mundane explanation for it all - i.e. they just missed the evidence by mistake - but at the same time, great reliance is placed on Ann Eaton in the assertion that it was period blood, and as you say, why raise it at all?  Was that just honesty and integrity on her part?  Sometimes when people do wrong, their consciences can't help but 'speak'.  Yet, I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraph that Ann Eaton's evidence in regard to the blood-soaked clothing could be seen as consistent with a Sheila scenario.