In 1998, Angela Woodruff, a lawyer living in Hyde, a town close to Manchester, England, became concerned when a colleague contacted her. He had doubts about the authenticity of the last will and testament of Woodruffâs recently deceased mother, Kathleen Grundy. Woodruff and her children had been excluded from the will. The local General Medical Practitioner (GP) who had attended Mrs Grundy, had been left everything (some ÂŁ386,000). Confident that her mother would never have signed such a will, Angela Woodruff reported the matter to the police, who began an investigation into the surprise beneficiary.
This was not the first time police attention had been drawn to the GP beneficiary. In March 1998, Dr Linda Reynolds, a fellow GP in Hyde, prompted by a local funeral director, had expressed her concerns to the local coroner about the high death rate amongst the patients of the GP beneficiary. Of most concern had been the large number of cremation forms for elderly women that the GP had needed to be countersigned by Dr. Reynolds,1 which seemed excessive given the demography of the local population and her own experience as a GP serving the same community. The police found insufficient evidence to bring charges, although a later inquiry http://âwww.âask.âcom/âwiki/âThe_âShipman_âInquiry?âqsrc=â3044 criticized police handling of the matter, by assigning an inexperienced officer to the original inquiry. 2 The unfortunate officer lacked expertise in determining which deaths were suspicious and how to determine expected death rates. He had no doubt been influenced by the commonly held perception, that âDoctors do not intentionally kill their patientsâ. Indeed, a colleague of the writers whose family had been patients of the GP under scrutiny had nothing but praise for his competence and willingness to make home visits. This seems to have been the consensus in the town.
Kathleen Grundy had been found dead at her home on 24 June 1998. Her GP had been the last person to see her alive. He signed her death certificate, recording âold ageâ as the cause of death. When her body was exhumed, it was found to contain significant traces of diamorphine, a drug often used to control pain in terminal cancer patients. To her daughterâs knowledge, Kathleen Grundy had not been suffering from cancer. Her GP was arrested on 7 September 1998. He was found to own a typewriter of the kind used to write what was now considered to be a forged will. 3
On 31 January 2000, a jury found the Hyde GP, Dr Harold Frederick Shipman, guilty on 15 counts of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentencing judge recommended that he never be released. Shipman is now believed to have killed in excess of 250 people between 1975 and 1998, making him Britainâs most prolific murderer. He hanged himself in prison in 2004.
It is highly likely that the police would have eventually identified Shipman as the prolific killer he was, yet there can be no doubt that the commission of the lesser offence of fraud hastened the detection process. It is probable that Shipman killed three of his patients in the period between the original investigation in early 1998 and the investigation of Kathleen Grundyâs will in September 1998.
The task of the detective can be reduced to one of selecting those people who had a prima facie case to answer from the general population. In order to succeed, the investigator must answer two fundamental questions: (i) What happened? (i.e. was there a crime committed?) and if so (ii) Who committed it? (Milne and Bull 2006; Stelfox 2009). If we take the example of homicide,4 most cases are solved quickly and with relative ease as the killer is often an immediate relative of the victim, such as an intimate (or formerly intimate) partner (Brookman 2005), or is readily identified by a reliable witness. Only about 10 % of homicides have any real claim to being âwhodunnitsâ, despite their over-representation in many a popular crime/detective novel or police drama media representation. Most homicides thus do not require extraordinary sleuthing to crack the case. For less serious and less dramatic crimes, such as drug possession and public indecency, detection follows almost automatically from the discovery of the offence (Stelfox 2008).
This is not in any sense meant to belittle the task faced by criminal investigators. A case still needs to be built. Although there is still a danger that investigators will jump to building a case against a suspect prematurely by favouring evidence against him, rather than seeking evidence which would establish innocence (Stelfox and Pease 2005). Nevertheless, the fact that the likely offender is commonly identified early in the investigative process, makes the overall task of identifying the right man (as it usually is) considerably easier than where there are no immediate suspects at all.
In those cases where detection of a crime is not swift and relatively easy, most police officers would agree that the identification of offenders relies primarily upon information provided by the public in the form of witness accounts (Kebbell and Milne 1998; Stelfox 2009). Where investigators have little or no forensic evidence to guide them, the primary source of information is usually that provided by victims and other witnesses (Milne and Bull 2006).
Failing these swift routes to detection, the investigative net is widened by reverting to the targeting of those already known (commonly referred to as the âusual suspectsâ) and the obtaining of accurate intelligence about offending patterns that can be matched to the facts of an individual case (Townsley and Pease 2003). Thereby, for example, the modus operandi of known individuals matches a specific crime being investigated (e.g. the use of a suction-cup to cut a hole in a basement window), or where the geographic and temporal aspects of a crime (e.g. Rossmo 2006) match others committed previously (e.g. Ratcliffe 2008). Detection however, is often abandoned in all but the most serious cases, where a crimeâs âsolvability criteriaâ are not met. The implications of this for self-selection policing are explored in Chap. 7.
The conventional approaches to offender detection are not contested here. There is, however, a case to be made that serious criminals can elude justice because more minor offending, which is a part of their lifestyle, is not investigated rigorously. The most serious offenders are often apprehended because they are detected committing lesser offences. Something has led an alert police officer to ask questions and make checks which reveal the bigger picture. Famous examples include the detections of the serial murderers Peter Sutcliffe (aka the Yorkshire Ripper) because he drove a car displaying false number (registration) plates, and David âSon of Samâ Berkowitz, identified because he parked illegally next to a fire hydrant.
1 About This Book
The danger of riding two horses is that you are more likely to end up on your backside. There is a danger that we are trying to ride two horses by trying to appeal to both students and operational police officers (and those busy people, increasingly numerous, with a foot in both camps). We have structured each chapter as a series of sections which allow the time-strapped reader to choose whether to concentrate on theory and research or skip to what we see as the practical implications. We do hope of course that our time-strapped reader will return to complete the book when time is less pressing (or when they are mounting their own self-selection policing initiative).
Over the past ten years we have produced a number of research papers and written and run a number of courses for different audiences (including police officers) which have sought to show how active, serious offenders might be identified using non-traditional investigative means. This was not simply to increase probability of conviction, but to change perceptions of the consequences of offending across a wide range of offence types. The approach we advocate in this book seeks to apply similar principles of context-tweaking in respect of those settings with which chronic offenders are uniquely familiar, namely the settings in which they have been wont to commit crime. Some of these involve the commission of minor rather than major crimes. Minor crime and rule-breaking will always (think about it) be more frequent in the chronic offenderâs life than serious offending.
This bookâs focus is on an emergent complement to traditional detection methods. We label it âSelf-Selection Policingâ (SSP) an approach whereby active, serious criminals are identified by the investigation of the minor often âroutineâ offences that they commit. A more systematic analysis and scrutiny of specific minor infractions of the law can point up âtrigger crimesâ which merit attention in their own right, but also crucially direct attention towards those engaged in more serious concurrent criminality. âSelf-selectionâ is the appropriate term by virtue of the fact that if serious criminals tend to commit minor offences more frequently than they do serious ones, or do so in ways which are more transparent and easier to detect, then an increased scrutiny of such minor offences is likely to yield dividends in exposing them as active serious offenders. This book represents our research and speculation on the utility of SSP over the last ten years, and will doubtless command our continuing, often reluctant, attention in the same way a loose tooth attracts the tongue.
2 The Structure of the Book
This book is short. Although our other books are short, this one is intentionally so for one main reason. It has always been our intention for this book to represent merely a beginning. In one of his more famous speeches, as the tide of World War II turned, he opined âNow this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginningâ.5 In its infinitely humbler way, we see this book as the end of the beginning, offered in the hope of stimulating the readerâs inte...