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A Corpus of Forensic Linguistics Cases

A Corpus of Forensic Linguistics Cases – Compiled by TFG STUDENTS AT THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT UGR

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The last letter written by Sylvia Plath

2 July, 2022 por corpusdelicti Leave a Comment

Sylvia Plath smiling with a rose in her right hand

Country: United Kingdom

Date: 11th of February 1963 (the letter examined was written on 4th of February 1963).

Sylvia Plath was an American poet born in 1932 who, after several breakdowns, committed suicide the 11th of February 1963 putting her head inside the oven of her kitchen. She wrote many letters to different people relevant for her. The most important ones are those written to her psychologist, the doctor Beuscher, who lived in The United States, while the poet lived in London. These letters show how the poet felt when her husband started having an affair with Assia Wevill and abandoned her and their children, making her feel so depressed that nothing made her happy. She began obsessing so much with her situation to the point that her life was a tremendous hole from which she couldn’t get out. The last letter publicly known is the one written just a week before she committed suicide. For this reason, it has never been considered as a suicide note nor as a case for Forensic Linguistics. Nevertheless, if it is compared to other genuine suicide notes, like the ones written by Kurt Cobain or Virginia Woolf, it can be said that the three share some aspects in common to be considered a suicide letter.

From a linguistic perspective, the letter shows a larger length than genuine suicide notes tend to , since they tend to be short letters stating how the person feels and why their final resolution is their death. These notes should have a median of 78 words (Gottschalk & Glesser, 1960). The letter by Plath is a three-page letter. However, lenght is not the only important thing to determine the genuineness of a suicide note. According to Olsson (2017), there are some words that co-occur concerning suicide. These words use to be “cowardice”, “mad(ness)”, “nuts”, and so on. And this is something found in this letter, in which the poet says that she feels “a cowardice & a wanting to give up”. In this study, the author also states that suicide notes are determined by the way the victim express themselves, as they are writing what they cannot express orally. For this reason, we are going to find some ambivalence in their words, because they are living in an insider war.

To determine, if the letter written by Sylvia Plath could be considered a kind of suicide note, it is necessary to compare it with some other genuine suicide notes. This study focuses on the expressions used by Kurt Cobain and Virginia Woolf in their last notes and compares them to the ones used by Plath.

Kurt Cobain (1967 – 1994) was a singer, composer, and leader of the Rock band Nirvana. He belongs to the known as the 27 club, which is an urban legend that musicians, actors, and artists in general, died at the age of 27. Other famous singers like Amy Winehouse, Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin belong to this same club.

The singer killed himself on the 5th of April 1994 shooting his head after several problems with drugs like heroin, and his difficult relationship with his wife. Before killing himself, he wrote his famous letter (Kurt Cobain, 1994) in which he confesses how he has felt during his life and the reasons why he does not want to continue living.

there are some statements in both letters which present the same ideas using different expressions:

  • –  ‘I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now.’; can be compared to ‘[…] the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on like me a cold, accusing wind.’ ‘Living on my wits, my writing—even partially, is very hard at this time.’
  • –  ‘I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.’ That is exactly what Sylvia suffered because her tremendous love for Ted had not finished when they got divorced, and she also expressed that in that letter: ‘[…] I have been guilty of what he calls ‘Idolatrous love’, that I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself.’; ‘[…] what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too.’
  • The last paragraph of the letter says, ‘I don’t have the passion anymore.’ Which can have a similar meaning as one of the sentences that Plath says in her last paragraph, too: ‘I’m incapable of being myself & loving myself.’ in terms that both sentences lack feelings: if you are incapable of being yourself, you are incapable of having any passion.

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was an essayist, play, and novel writer who committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse filling her pockets with stones. She suffered depression after her stepbrother sexually abused her, and the death of her mother and stepsister. She attempted on her life several times, one in 1904, then in 1913, and finally in 1941 (Inma Rodríguez, 2021). Before doing so, she left two letters addressed to her husband, Leonard Woolf, and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The note to be analyzed and compared to the one by Plath will be the suicide note written to Leonard Woolf.

Some excerpts of the letter written by Woolf and the letter written by Plath are the following:

  • –  ‘Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.’ is comparable to, ‘What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst.’ ‘I feel written on the edge of my madness.’ Both writers call ‘madness’ to their depression. Neither of them feels capable to resist it one more time, but none of them says explicitly what their purpose is about it.
  • –  ‘I can’t concentrate.’ This is a very short sentence, but it has a coincidence with the letter of Plath, ‘Living on my wits, my writing—even partially, is very hard at this time.’ Sylvia found it difficult to write is because it was difficult for her to get concentrated. Both writers felt the same when they talked about their depression.
  • –  Another sentence similar to the last one is the following, ‘I can’t read.’ and there is also another coincidence found in the Letter of Plath, ‘If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own.’ They are again driven to the same idea: the impossibility of going on because of the return of the depression episodes.
  • ‘So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.’ Here, the author does not explicitly say that ‘the best thing to do’ is to commit suicide, but it clearly is. On the other hand, in the letter of Sylvia, although it is not a suicide note, she mentions death as a solution: ‘let me just die & be done with it.’ Again, this quote suggests that the suicide was a real solution for Sylvia a week before she carried out the suicide.

In conclusion, it can be said that Sylvia Plath was writing an indirect suicide note when writing to her psychologist and what she did on the 11th of February 1963 was not a quick decision, but a possible solution to the problems that she had been premeditating a long time before she committed suicide, and thus, she was not killed or induced by anybody to attempt to her but herself.

 References
  • Jaafar, E. A., & Jaafar, E. A. (2022). “Studies on Linguistic Stylistic Analysis of Suicide Notes and Suicidal Thought Posts.” International Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, 12(01). https://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v12i01.006
  • Olsson, J. (2012). Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics (Reprint ed.). Continuum.
  • Plath, S (2018b). The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956-1963 (illustrated ed.). Harper & Row Pub.
  • Kurt Cobain’s letter https://historydaily.org/kurt-cobains-handwritten-suicide-note-1994
  • Virginia Woolf’s letter https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27316214

Filed Under: Suicide Letters

The Amerithrax Operation

30 June, 2022 por corpusdelicti Leave a Comment

 

BREAKING NEWS: TERRORIST ATTACK 🚨

09-11–01 

THIS IS NEXT 

TAKE PENACILIN NOW 

DEATH TO AMERICA 

DEATH TO ISRAEL 

ALLAH IS GREAT 

 

09-11-01 

YOU CAN NOT STOP US 

WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX 

YOU DIE NOW. 

ARE YOU AFRAID? 

DEATH TO AMERICA 

DEATH TO ISRAEL 

ALLAH IS GREAT 

 

These were the letters that Tom Brokaw, Tom Daschle, Patrick Leathy and the New York Post received almost a month after the terrorist attack against the Twin Tower, perpetuated by Al-Qaeda group. These letters were infected with anthrax, a biological agent able to kill all beings in a quick and silent way. Although the main victims were not infected, twenty-three people was, and just five of them died due to pulmonary anthrax.

The letters were anonymous, so it was necessary to do a linguistic analysis for a later profile in order to identify the author behind the messages. The FBI and James R. Fitzgerald were the heads of this analysis. So, the most remarkable features were:

  • The use of ”can not”
  • Use of punctuation in one letter and the non-use of it in the other one.
  • Ts and As highlighted: relationship with the three aminoacids of DNA.
  • Chronological change of R indicating unfamiliarity with this alphabet.

After the analysis the linguistic profile looked as follows:

As the letters were infected with anthrax, it had to be someone working with anthrax in that time. All the scientists working with it were male so the author had to be an adult male. In addition, the fact that he decided to send letters points that he was someone who cannot confront people face to face. The fact that he knew about the three aminoacids of DNA determines that he was someone related to medicina or science, so he had to be a doctor or scientist.

The FBI decided to focus on the anthrax and the people working with it, leaving aside the linguistic features of the letters.  So, the main suspect was Dr. Bruce E. Ivins. At that time, he was a recognized doctor working in the anthrax vaccine. Also, he had mental health problems like paranoid, anxiety and depression, said by himself to his colleagues via email. In these emails, there was a determining message in which he talks about Al-Qaeda and anthrax days before the letters were discovered.

“I just heard tonight that the Bin Laden terrorist for sure have anthrax and sarin gas’’ and ‘’Osama Bin Laden has just decreed death to all Jews”.  Bruce E. Ivins. 

Unfortunately, when the FBI presented charges against the doctor, he committed suicide so they decided to classify the case as there were not enough evidence to investigate another person. Nowadays, we do not even know if Dr. Bruce E. Ivins was the actual author of the letters or if there was another person or group behind them.

If this brief description of the case has awakened any interest in you, you can find more information watching the following TV serie: The Hot Zone: Anthrax. Also, there are some interesting videos about the linguistic analysis of the letters such as Anthrax letters handwriting analysis by Ed Lake.

Filed Under: Anonymous messages, Authorship attribution, Cases

Hummert case

28 June, 2022 por corpusdelicti Leave a Comment

ANALYSIS OF THE HUMMERT CASE

I’m going to explain in detail all the events of Charlene’s murder, the proofs that the police and the linguists found so that Brian Hummert was accused of being the killer of his wife, her children’s testimony, etc.

As it appears in the news by Miranda Knox, the victim, Charlene Hummert, “was a 48-year-old mother of three who had been married to her husband Brian for more than 20 years, was killed. She worked as an administrative assistant for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Her son, David Hummert, portrays her as a good mother, a caring and helpful woman with strong religious values in the forensic file episode”. (Knox M., 2019).

Then, we see that “Brian discovers an envelope on the windshield of his car in 2001, and inside they discover something surprising”. And also that “within the mail is a professional beauty shot of Charlene, similar to one she would have paid to have taken and shared, as well as a concerning note referring to Charlene as a “slut” and threatening with punishment”, (Knox M., 2019), which can be found here:

Here is the proof that your wife is a slut. Do what you will with it. Sorry it took so long. I only come occasionally back to the area on business. Merry Xmas. I will send you several copies of this so you get the information in case the slut intercepts one. Before I tell you how I got it, I want to tell you a little about myself. I played in a band back in the late seventies/early eighties. I had a one niter with your wife. She was a fine piece of ass that I enjoyed several times that night. Rumor had it that she occasionally took several guys at once and she sucked cock really well. I would have loved to have found out. A couple of days later she made sure my fiancée found out. She dumped me and then had an abortion. We have since patched things up and gotten married, but she can’t have any children. I blame your wife for that. The time is now right for payback. I hope to see your wife miserable the next time I am in the area. I ran into your wife back in September at Gabriel Brothers. I almost didn’t recognize her with her dyed hair. I have been following her around hoping she would mess up. On October 6, I followed your wife over to Capitol City Mall. She was dressed up more the usual for a Saturday of shopping. She went into the Picture People. This was around 10 AM. A couple of weeks later I went in and got copies of the pictures enclosed. On the negative holder she had written that the photo was a gift. There was no indication of which one she had printed up. I ask you who was it for? Also she does not have her wedding ring on. Why not? A red rose is a symbol of love. For who? I don’t think you know about these. Do you? Also she has purchased a lot of sexy bras and panties. Have you seen them or the red nightie? Were they brought for your enjoyment? You may also want to ask her about her Spencer Gift purchases. Do you love lubes with her? So you see once a slut always a slut. (Taken from: Forensic Miles, 2020).

“Charlene was taken aback because she said she had never had an affair and had no idea who had sent it. The letter was sent to the police, and the house was placed under surveillance, but it did not help. More letters were delivered. The family was understandably worried and always on edge. They thought they saw people on their property a couple occasions, according to David, but nothing happened”. (Knox M., 2019).

The police started investigating the letters, but found no fingerprints or evidence. They were confused. Until the next letter came. This letter was surprising since it stated:

“Hey dumbass, I know about the camera. Your kids’ friends have big mouths. I know someone’s house code is 7805. This is the third packet”. (Taken from Forensic Miles, 2020).

“At this time, she would be completely freaked out at this point, and I’m not sure she would be able to stay in the house. However, with three children, moving her family would have been extremely difficult. The marriage began to have troubles as a result of the stress and continual state of high alert, and disagreements became more common”. (Knox M., 2019).

One of these fights happened on the night of March 19th. “Charlene called after the fight finished, and her husband stated she left with the individual she had contacted about midnight. Her children were not at home that night, but they sensed something was wrong. David claimed he attempted to contact her several times but he was unsuccessful”. (Knox M., 2019).

Brian reported his wife missing later that night, and the police department put out an all-points bulletin for Charlene’s white Land Rover SUV. “It didn’t take them long to locate it. The automobile was discovered in a supermarket parking lot on March 20th. Charlene’s body was discovered lying under a blanket in the rear of the automobile”. “She died as a result of ligature strangulation. She had a distinctive mark on her neck, which authorities were unable to identify at the time”. (Knox M., 2019).

Charlene was chocked and strangled from behind, according to police, and there was nothing she could do. “They did assume, however, that it was someone she knew because he was able to approach so near”. (Knox M., 2019).

The family thought that they knew who was responsible, the person who had been sending her letters.

“The forensic pathologist discovered something fascinating during the autopsy: evidence that the murder scene had been manufactured. He discovered two key clues: first, Charlene’s pants were on backwards, implying that someone had put them on after she died. The second reason was that she was wet; nothing else in the car was wet, except her jacket. That is, she had gotten wet before getting in the automobile. He discovered a drag mark on her lower back with dirt and gravel lodged in it, but no proof that she was alive at the time”. (Knox M., 2019). Although forensic tests revealed nothing unusual in the mud and gravel, authorities did discover another clue.

Employees at the grocery shop mentioned seeing the SUV parked there early in the morning, and the investigators had an idea: “what if the driver of the automobile went into the grocery store to make it appear less obvious that they were up to something? They collected camera footage of the store and discovered a suspicious person”. (Knox M., 2019).

The images that they found were: “A man that appeared to be trying to get away from the cameras. He was dressed in crimson gloves, a parka, and a wool hat. And he just bought one thing. Biscuits for dogs. Now that we have dogs, we have to get up early on occasion to make emergency dog purchases, but I would never get up at dawn to buy dog biscuits! Unfortunately, due to the poor quality of the tape, they were unable to identify the man. They chose to send the image to a photo grammetrist, who converts a two-dimensional snapshot into a three-dimensional image”. (Knox M., 2019).

The grocery store sent the lengths of their floor tiles, “after which they snapped an image using the same camera and used a height chart to determine the mystery man’s height, which was 5 ft 5 inches”. (Knox M., 2019).

They weren’t going to give up on the dirt samples, though; “they were convinced it would reveal the murderer’s identity. So they sent it to a forensic microscopist to see if he could uncover anything that the forensic scientists couldn’t, which he did”. (Knox M., 2019). “The microscopist was able to extract evidence that was matched to soil found near Charlene’s home and elsewhere using a tuning fork, similar to the one used to tune instruments, and he found a match. The dirt was identical to that in the Hummerts’ yard. It was “a perfect match,” he said, and one of the best matches of his career”. (Knox M., 2019).

They now knew Charlene had been carried over her own driveway and put in her own car after being killed on or near her own driveway. Then, “the family home was searched after police obtained a search warrant. What they discovered did not disappoint them. They saw investigators found a piece of cable on the floor that the Hummert family had used as a dog leash. A metal piece connected to the cable matched the clear scar on Charlene’s neck perfectly. They came to the conclusion that Charlene was killed with a “dog leash” or something similar”. (Knox M., 2019).

Brian’s statements about his wife’s murder changed after this finding. He claimed that his son, David, was the murderer of Charlene, and he called his lawyers to do so.

“But the investigators weren’t stupid; they recognized that this accusation was false; in fact, one of the judges called the allegation “preposterous.” They realized this couldn’t be the case because of Charlene’s close relationship with all three children, but especially David”. (Knox M., 2019).

Her marriage to Brian, on the other hand, was not as happy. Charlene was preparing to divorce her husband. “This was not the first time she had done this, alleging Brian had abused the children”. (Knox M., 2019).

Then, out of nowhere, another letter arrives, claiming responsibility and addressed to the police department. It claimed responsibility for Charlene’s murder and stated that her husband was not involved:

I killed Charlene Hummert, not her husband. We had an affair for the past nine months. She wanted to break it off. So I broke her neck! I wrote letters to her husband and to Det. Loper. I used a white nylon rope to kill her they won’t find me I am leaving. I am writing because of Easter. I am sorry I killed her. They won’t find the cell phone she used to call me, it is in the river and not under my name. I carried her into the kitchen and then dragged her outside to her car. This is the fifth woman I killed. I am getting good at it. Cops have no idea how easy it is to pin husband when they only look there. She knew about pictures on PC. She told story to set up husband for the Divorce. Ha Ha ByeBye for now John. (Taken from: Forensic Miles, 2020).

The police agreed to send the letters to forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard, “who was a founder member of the rock band Sha Na Na. He stated his first experience with forensic linguistics was reading the contracts for this band, and that they often said one thing but meant something else”. (Knox M., 2019).

When Dr. Leonard compared the stalker letters to the letter that came at the police station, he discovered a clue, “a unique rhetorical indication in both letters: An Ironic Repetition, which is when the same verb is used in two consecutive sentences but the context is changed. According to Dr. Leonard, the letters were written by the same person”. (Knox M., 2019).

Dr. Leonard then examined writing samples identified as Brians and discovered something else: “negative contractions but no positive contractions. Many individuals use both, but Brian Hummert is the only person Dr. Leonard has ever encountered who only uses negative contractions”. (Knox M., 2019).

In addition, “Brian was also found with a blue parka and a receipt for dog treats in his residence, matching the height of the unknown male in the grocery store. Brian had written the letters on his computer, according to the evidence”. (Knox M., 2019).

The investigations took seven months before the arrest was made. “Brian was caught at his workplace and charged with criminal homicide, obstruction of justice, tampering with or falsifying physical evidence, and making false police reports”. (Knox M., 2019). Brian Hummert was apprehended and charged.

As we can see in the article by M. Knox: “Prosecutors said Brian saw his marriage deteriorating and hoped that by writing these letters to frighten his wife, he could become the hero and re-connect with her. The letters, on the other hand, just provoked conflicts, and authorities believe Charlene was aware that he was writing them. Brian snapped after an altercation, grabbed the nearest item he could find, strangled Charlene, clothed her, and left her car and body at the supermarket”. (Knox M., 2019).

After the investigation was finished, “Brian was given a life sentence without the chance of parole after being convicted of first-degree murder. David had never imagined that his father would do such a thing, but his opinion was quickly changed”. (Knox M., 2019).

David finally spoke up about his father on an episode of I Lived with a Killer in 2019.

Brian may have appeared to be a good father from the outside, but the truth was far from that. “Charlene was saving money to escape with her children at the time of her murder, according to David’s father, who was violent. David claimed that his father once fractured his nose by throwing a bike frame in his face”. (Knox M., 2019).

The following is a quote from The Sun: “But on the evening of March 19, 2004, David, then 18, and his teenage sister Tracey went out, leaving Brian and Charlene alone in the house David says: “I was out until approximately 4 am. When I came back my dad was up sitting in his computer room with all the lights off. “I asked him why he was still up and he said that he and my mother had got into a fight and she left and he was waiting for her to come home so they could talk about it. “I was pretty tired and just wanted to go to bed and figured if it was anything super serious, she would have called me or texted me or something.” But the following morning when Charlene still hadn’t returned home, David began to panic. David says: “It just did not feel right.”

(Taken from: Forensic Miles, 2020).

When his father stopped cooperating with the authorities, David sensed something was happening. As he claimed, “Brian began acting differently, he said, treating him well and offering to assist him if he needed anything – this wasn’t right”. (Knox M., 2019).

One of the most interesting aspects of the trial is that David’s sister sided with her father. “She refused to cooperate with the police, and while on the stand, she claimed that David was the murderer”. (Knox M., 2019).

The murder effectively ended the family, and David claims that he hasn’t spoken to either his sister or brother since the trial, which is a tragedy. These crimes also have too many consequences apart from both the victim and the murderer.

And then, I will provide details about Charlene’s murderer, Brian Hummert.

As I previously commented, he was Charlene’s husband, they had three children, one of them is David Hummert, who said that his father killed his mother. Brian and Charlene weren’t passing through a very good part of their relationship as a marriage, they didn’t understand each other and had a lot of confrontations and were going to divorce. Because of that Brian Hummert wanted to kill her wife, and tried not to be discovered by writing some letters that supposedly came from a stalker that was following her wife for a long time and from a serial killer that said that had killed 5 women including Charlene. He was very intelligent, because he tried to simulate two different ways of writing for not being discovered, the one of the stalker, and the one of the serial killer, obviously he tried that both were different from the way he writes daily on his e-mails, so that demonstrates that Brian had all planed, and a very cold mind to make a perfect plan for committing the murder. This means that the writer of the letters (Brian) had an extended knowledge of the language, it wasn’t someone without studies, it was someone that knew what he was doing and that had everything perfectly planned.

The police, and more concretely the linguists, had to analyse those letters and search details about the supposed author or authors of them. Luckily, the police had access to Brian’s computer and could compare how those letters were written with Brian’s way of writing in those e-mails. The letters by the stalker were very direct and menacing, telling all the events in detail and accusing her of having an affair with the supposed stalker. They were directed to Brian saying everything about the affair that Charlene and the stalker had, and the objective of Brian writing those letters was that the police thought that he wasn’t related to his wife’s murder and that the supposedly stalker was her killer or had very high possibilities of being the assassin.

There was also a letter that mysteriously was written by a serial killer and that said that he was guilty of Charlene’s murder and that Brian wasn’t related to her assassination. The serial killer in the letter also states that he had killed five women including Charlene. In this letter, the murderer confirms that he killer Mrs. Hummert and gives a detailed explanation of how the events happened and how he killed her.

Finally, as I said before, the linguists compare the letters by the stalker and the serial killers with some e-mails that they found on Brian Hummert’s computer, and discover some similarities between them that are the proof that the serial killer and the stalker didn’t exist, and those letters were written by Brian Hummert himself trying to write as if he was another person.

 

REFERENCES

-Forensic Miles, 2020, “The Murder of Charlene Hummert.” Forensic Myles LLC, The Sun. https://www.forensicmyles.com/blogs/forensic-myles/the.

-Knox, M. 2019, “My Dad Strangled My Mum to Death with a Dog Collar – but My Sister Stood up for Him in Court.” The Sun, 21 Aug. 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9736478/i-lived-with-a-killer-dad-stalked-strangled-mum-to-death-brian-hummert/.

-Arias, J. 2013, “Charlene Hummert, died at the hands of her husband: notorious murders” jarias@pennlive.com, Jeremy Arias |. “Charlene Hummert, Died at the Hands of Her Husband: Notorious Murders.” Pennlive, 28 May 2013, https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2013/05/notorious_murder_charlene_humm.html.

-Miller, M. 2013, “Court backs Brian Hummert’s conviction for wife’s 2004 murder in Fairview Township”, mmiller@pennlive.com, Matt Miller |. “Pa. Court Backs Brian Hummert’s Conviction for Wife’s 2004 Murder in Fairview Township.” Pennlive, 15 Oct. 2013, https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2013/10/pa_court_backs_brian_hummerts.html.

– Samuel, N. 2012, “Reading Between the Lines: Dr. Rob Leonard’s Forensic Linguistics Program is Attracting Students to a Fast-Growing and Intriguing Legal Field”, PROFILES2012 – Hofstra University. https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/academics/ce/professionaldevelopment/forensicstudies/ce_leonard_profile2012.pdf.

Filed Under: Authorship attribution, Cases Tagged With: Brian Hummert, Charlene Hummert, Dr. Leonard

Sandra Weddell’s Case

23 June, 2022 por corpusdelicti 1 Comment

Hi everyone!

I’m going to write about the case of Sandra Weddell, which, to me, was really interesting to investigate. 

Sandra Weddell was a 44-year-old nurse from Bedforshire, England. She was a kind and very religious woman. She was married to the police inspector Garry Weddell. Garry was a respected inspector who had been more than 25 years in the force. They had three children together, and they appeared to be a happy family (Wright, 2008).

One day everything changed when, apparently, she committed suicide and left a letter for her husband that said:

“Garry. 

I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn’t read it. 

I am so sorry for all the hurt I have caused you garry. I never meant to hurt you or to cause you so much pain. 

I made a stupid mistake and I betrayed your trust, and I betrayed my family at the same time. I don’t know what made me do what I did. I wish the whole thing had never happened. It all got out of hand. I have ended up with nothing. 

You are kind to want to forgive me. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. 

When you think of me, just try and think of the happier times. 

Sandra Jane Weddell”

Do you see anything out of context when you read this letter? At first, everything seems normal. But thank’s to the linguist John Olsson, it was known that Sandra was not the one who really wrote this letter. 

In 2006, Garry discovered that Sandra was having an affair and she wanted to divorce. Garry’s life fell apart, and he was really worried about losing his children, so he thought that the solution was committing the ‘perfect murder’ (Leafe, 2009).

In January 2007, Garry killed Sandra putting a cable tie around her neck, that is, strangling her. Later, he hung her body in the garage of their house, trying to make it look as if she had committed suicide. In addition, he tried to cover what he had done leaving a ‘suicide note’ nearby in a sheet of paper, as if Sandra had written it (Wright, 2008). 

As he was a police inspector, he knew about all the possible mistakes he could make and he tried to cover everything that could make him look guilty. He even wore gloves to make sure he was not leaving evidence on the paper (Wright, 2008). 

During the investigation, the police asked some neighbours and colleagues about the couple’s behaviour the day of the murder. Although at work Sandra was acting perfectly normal according to her colleages, that day there were some inconsistencies such as the fact that neither she nor her husband had picked the children up from school. Also, Garry asked his neighbour for help to find Sandra who,  according to him, had been missing for 24 hours (Wright, 2008). 

At first, police investigations pointed that it had been ‘probably suicide’ and Garry Weddell was not arrested. Some detectives disagreed with this and continued their investigation without him knowing. Some months later, Garry was suspended from his job and arrested as a suspect of murdering his wife.  However, after trial, he was free on bail and killed his mother-in-law before killing himself. 

As I previously said, John Olsson was the linguist who analyzed the letter and found three main relevant features in this letter that were odd:

  1. The full stop after the salutation.
  2. How she signed the letter with her full name and didn’t write only ‘Sandra’ but also the second name and surname. Also, it is centered and not left-sided.
  3. The use of very short sentences comparing to the other samples analyzed wrote by Sandra in which she used longer sentences. 

His testimony about this case was: at first he couldn’t believe that a police inspector could have killed his wife and at first he though there wasno linguistic value in the letter that could be admitted in court. (Olsson, 2020, “Garry Weddell’s case”)

He used the following technique: memorizing the letter with punctuation and line breaks and transcribing the letter over and over again until something emerges. Then he compared the features found in the alleged suicide note with Sandra’s previous written texts, and then with Garry’s. (Olsson, 2020, “Garry Weddell’s case”)

If we focus on the vocabulary there is not really anything relevant to point out. We should mainly focus on the structure of the sentences and the use of punctuation.  It is proved that Garry uses full stop after opening salutation, really short sentences and centered closing salutation.

Also, we can find some spelling mistakes and wrong use of the punctuation signs. This proves that he tried to write Sandra’s suicide note perfectly. However, he was not successful. All these characteristics pointed to an only suspect, Sandra’s husband. 

The end of this case was really tragic as Garry was arrested but he was immediately released and he killed his mother-in-law and took his own life. Also, investigations proved that he was planning to kill more people. 

 

 

 

 

References:

Leafe, D. (2009, Jul 3). “Dear Garry. I’ve decided to end it all”: How a full stop trapped a killer. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197187/Dear-Garry-Ive-decided-end-The-stop-trapped-killer.html 

Olsson, J. (2003). Fakers and Forgers. Forensic Linguistics Institute. Forensic Linguistics First Certificate Course.  https://www.thetext.co.uk/docs/course/Unit-2-FL-Course.pdf 

Olsson, J. (2009). Wordcrime – Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp 115-122.

Olsson, J. (2020). Garry Weddell’s Case. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSrJgE9hdFw

Filed Under: Authorship attribution, Cases Tagged With: Authorship attribution, Sandra Weddell

Danielle Jones’ kidnapping

21 June, 2022 por corpusdelicti Leave a Comment

 

Introduction to the case

Danielle Jones was a fifteen-year-old girl who disappeared on 18th of June in 2001 in East Tilbury, United Kingdom. She left her home that morning to go to school. She was last seen at the bus stop near her house waiting for the bus. She did not arrive her school, and no one knew where she could be. There were some witnesses who remembered seeing her talking with a man inside a blue van, but no one knew if she got in the car or not.

The police discovered that she had a close relationship with her uncle, Stuart Campbell. The police discovered that Campbell had a past related to the obsession with young girls. He had created a fake photography company called “Cinderella’s” to make photographs of young girls.

Few months before Danielle was kidnapped, Campbell approached two girls at the gym and proposed them to o some photoshoots at his house, showing the girls the card from his fake company. While the investigation, computer experts realized that Campbell had downloaded child porn pictures from some Internet sites, and they found some pictures of topless young girls in his computer. in 1989, Campbell finally received a 12-month sentence for retaining a 14-year- old girl in his house and taking topless pictures of her.

Another key aspect for considering him the principal suspect is that he had a blue van similar to the one which the witnesses had seen the day that Danielle was kidnapped.

It was found out that Stuart Campbell had a personal diary where he had a detailed record of his illegal conducts, including a daily record of his relationship with his niece Danielle. It was also found out that he left chilling notes to Danielle in her room while she and her family were out for holidays. In one note it said, “Hi princess, hope you have a lovely holiday. Text me when you get back – Love Stuart”. In the second note found in her room, it said, “Hi princess, in case you missed my last note I thought I’d pop in another to let you know I do miss your smile”.

A page from Stuart Campbell’s diary
Stuart Campbell’s chilling note to her niece

When the police went to talk to him, he assured to be far from the crime scene the day that Danielle disappeared, and that he had received some messages from his niece the same day, when Danielle was supposedly disappeared. The police investigated and they discovered that the signal of his phone and the signal of Danielle’s phone were located at the same place at the time the messages were sent. Both phones were exactly at the same place, so Campbell was supposed to be with her when she was already disappeared.

The linguistic point of the case

When the linguist of the case, Malcolm Coulthard (a linguist from the University of Birmingham), analyzed the messages, he discovered some inconsistencies in the way of writing; there were some things that did not concur with other messages that Danielle had sent days before her kidnap. The linguist started analyzing both messages and other messages written by Danielle in other moments, and he came to the conclusion that the messages that were supposedly sent by Danielle the day of her kidnapping and the other messages were written by two different persons.

The messages in question were the following:

  1. HI-YA STU WOT YOU UP I’M SO MUCH TROUBLE AT HOME AT MOMENT. EVEONE HATES ME EVEN YOU WOT THE HELL HAVE I DONE Y WON’T YOU JUST TELL ME. TEXT BCK PLEASE. DAN XXX
  2. HI STU THANKZ 4 BEIN SO NICE UR THE BEST UNCLE EVER! TELL MUM I’M SO SORRY LUVYA LOADZ DAN XXX

After Coulthard studied a huge amount of previous messages written by Danielle, he arrived to some undoubtful features from Danielle and, therefore, some doubtful features from Stuart:

  • She wrote in lowercase, never in uppercase. These messages were both written in uppercase
  • She used to write the word “why” completely, with no abbreviations or substitutions. In one of these messages, the writer uses the letter “y” as an abbreviation of the word “why”, but Danielle did not use any kind of abbreviation for this word
  • She wrote “every1” as a colloquial form. In one of these messages, it is used the word “eveone” instead of “everyone”, but Danielle used a numerical abbreviation
  • She used the abbreviation “at the mo”. The phrase “at moment” is used in these messages, but Danielle did never use this form
  • She used the form “wat” to refer to the word “what”. In these messages, “what” is replaced by “wot”, but Danielle did never write this word like this in any of her previous messages

According to a linguistic point of view, this case can be located in a specific field of Forensic Linguistic called Authorship Attribution. The linguist of this case had to take into account a lot of linguistic aspects, but lexis (spelling errors and morphological aspects) and punctuation are the basis of this case. The features studied in this case are the following:

  • Accent stylization –> the process of using phonetic spelling to convey a specific accent or to make the reader read the word as it is pronounced, as in this case. An example of this feature could be the use of “wat” and “wot”, of “thankz” and “loadz” to illustrate the final /z/ sound; and “luvya” to illustrate the pronunciation of the phrase “love you”.
  • Whole word letter homophone substitution –> replacing entire words with a single letter. For example “y” instead of “why” or “ur” instead of “you are”
  • Syllable number homophone substitution –> replacing syllables within words with a number in order to imitate their pronunciation. For example, “every1”, using the number 1 at the final syllable of the word to imitate the pronunciation of this final syllable
  • Shortening –> common words shortened to a few initial letters. A clear example is the use of the phrase “at the mo”, where the writer shortens the word “moment” to the first two initial letters and the result is the short word “mo”

The final decisions

Finally, Campbell was convicted of kidnap and murder of his niece Danielle Jones, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was convicted and sentenced on 19th December 2002. This is a fragment of the whole sentence document in which we can see all the evidence summed up (the highlighted parts). To see the complete document, click here: https://www.iclr.co.uk/document/2016076750/%5B2004%5D%20EWCA%20Crim%201130/html

In 2004, Campbell made an appeal against his sentence because he and his lawyer thought that the evidence of his obsession with her niece and his interest on teenage girls should have been excluded from his trial. The other reason of his appeal was that one of the jurors was closely “implicated” in the case: this juror was the neighbor of one of the police officers involved in the investigation. Campbell claimed that because of this, the juror should have been discharged. Campbell’s appeal was set aside in 2005 by the Court of Appeal.

 

These fragments are from the appeal that Stuart Campbell’s lawyer presented to the Court. In these fragments we can see the explanation of the lawyer about the grounds of appeal of his client. To see the complete document, click here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2005/248.html

 

Bibliography:

Coulthard, Malcolm and Alison Johnson. 2010. The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

Garayzábal, Elena, Sheila Queralt and Mercedes Reigosa. 2019. Fundamentos de la lingüística forense. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis

Grant, Tim and Nicci MacLeod. 2011. “Whose Tweet? Authorship analysis of micro-blogs and other short-form messages”. In Proceedings of The International Association of Forensic Linguists’ Tenth Biennial Conference. 2011: 210-24. Aston University, Birmingham, UK.

Myall, Steve. 15 May 2017. “The Irish Mirror” [Accessed April 20, 2022]

Queralt, Sheila. 2020. Atrapados por la lengua: 50 casos resueltos por la lingüística forense. Barcelona: Larousse

Stuart Campbell’s appeal. ICLR (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales). April 23, 2004. [Accessed March 12, 2022]

Stuart Campbell’s appeal dismission. ICLR (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales). December 09, 2005. [Accessed March 12, 2022]

Stuart Campbell’s appeal summary. BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute). February 09, 2005. [Accessed April 25, 2022]

 

Filed Under: Authorship attribution

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