The Mathematical Murder of Innocence

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

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  Copyright © 2020 Michael Carter

  The right of Michael Carter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ISBN 978 1913913 014

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Contents

  Author’s note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Appendix 4

  Appendix 5

  About the Author

  Author’s note

  I have set this story today; but it is an idea that has been in my mind for some years.

  It is inspired by true events from 1998-2003. There were many newspaper articles about how a mother had at last been acquitted on her second appeal for the double murder of her baby sons. At her original trial an ‘expert’ witness had convinced the jury to convict her due to his incorrect statistical analysis of the probability of double cot deaths. When I read the details, I was outraged. I told myself that anyone with a basic maths education could have seen through this assassination of statistics. Yet nobody did, at the time. Then I thought to myself, if I had been there, at the trial, maybe as a juror, what could I have done...?

  This story is largely fiction, but many of the arguments used by the prosecution are taken both from this true landmark trial, as well as from a very similar, and parallel, miscarriage of justice due to testimony from the same expert witness about another case of double cot deaths. Just about every argument used to defend against the prosecution is also true, except in real life they took a lot longer to come out. Too long.

  Prologue

  It was 8pm when the street doorbell rang. Daniel pushed the intercom. “Hello?”

  “Metropolitan Police here, sir. Is Sarah Richardson there?”

  “Yes, she is. What can she do for you?”

  “Can we just come in, please, sir?”

  “OK, first floor.” Daniel pushed the buzzer to open the street door.

  “Darling, the police want you! You been cooking your clients’ books or something?”

  Sarah gave a weak smile. It was good that Daniel kept a sense of humour despite the weight of their tragedies. They heard the footsteps coming up the stairs, and then the flat’s inner doorbell rang.

  Daniel opened the door. “Good evening, officers. Please come in. What’s up?”

  Two men entered, one in plain clothes and the other a constable in uniform. Plain clothes spoke, turning to Sarah, who had come out onto the landing. “Mrs Sarah Richardson?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “that’s me.”

  “I am D.S. Tooley and this is Constable Harris. I have to inform you that you are under arrest for the murder of your son George. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  Sarah collapsed, sobbing and bewildered, into her husband’s arms.

  An hour later they were at Clapham police station. Sarah hadn’t stopped sobbing all the way there in the Dacia police car. Despite her shock, in the back of her consultant’s brain she still registered her analysis about how budget cuts must be cutting into the Metropolitan Police. A Dacia?

  D.S. Tooley started the recording in the interview room. He stated his rank, name, the date and time, and the persons present. “You are entitled to have a lawyer present, ma’am. Would you like to call one?” he asked.

  “I don’t need a lawyer!” cried Sarah. “It’s obvious I didn’t do this; how can you accuse me, a mother, of murdering my own babies? You’ve made some enormous mistake.”

  “Then please take us over the events of April 14th last, ma’am,” said Tooley.

  An innocent person does not need a lawyer, or so they think. This is a mistake. If the police are convinced that the person is guilty, they might take any single statement out of context to support their narrative; and they might be convinced they are right. No person charged with a crime, even if innocent, should talk to the police without first having gone through their story with a criminal lawyer, and to have that lawyer present for all questioning.

  There is a risk that refusing to talk without a lawyer might give the impression of guilt. But to avoid miscarriages of justice it is the least bad decision to take.

  For Sarah, that evening was indelibly engraved in her memory, as she took the police through what had happened.

  She had got back to her Battersea flat at 7pm. The tube to Waterloo had been bad enough, but the crush on the overground to Clapham Junction had been a real nightmare. She’d had ten minutes’ walk to clear her head and breathe in the mixture of cool night air and car fumes from the station to her flat, to reflect on whether she really was doing the right thing by being a mother of a young child, while keeping her career as a junior management consultant in one of the big four accountancy firms. Most of her university friends took the micky out of her for becoming an accountant, although she explained as often as she could that what she did – consulting in strategy, marketing and operations to different business clients in the consumer goods sector – was very different from financial auditing. Or was it? Was she wasting her Oxford degree with what she was doing? Or was she trying to prove to herself that she was as good as her degree suggested and wasting her time as a young mother? She needed both, she concluded. Above all, after what had happened two years ago…

  She had unlocked the outside door and climbed the steps two at a time to her first floor flat in the three-storey house, dating to when in the 1930s they had built this suburb north of Clapham Common. She desperately wanted to see her little George. As she opened her front door she called out: “Julia, I’m home.”

  Her Polish au pair came out of the kitchen. “Evening, Sarah,” she said. “George has finished his bottle, I changed his nappy, and he seems to have settled down to sleep.”

  “On his back?” asked Sarah.

  “Of course!” replied Julia. There was no question of his being allowed to sleep on his tummy, not after what happened last time.

  Sarah gently opened the door to the baby’s room and went up to the cot. George
seemed to sense her presence and wiggled slightly in his sleep, before peacefully continuing his dreams.

  “He looks so content,” she said. “Are you eating in tonight?”

  “No,” replied Julia, “I’m meeting a couple of girlfriends down the pub, and we’ll probably grab a curry afterwards. When in Rome, do as the Romans do… you English with your beer and your national dish of Indian curry…! I’ll be off if you don’t need me?”

  “Off you go,” encouraged Sarah. “Daniel is dining out with clients, so I’ll just microwave something from the freezer.”

  One hour later, having eaten an aubergine gratin, she decided to check up on George. She opened the door and crept up on him. He seemed so peaceful. So very peaceful. Too peaceful. She stroked his cheek. There was no reaction, no movement. A slow but clear feeling of panic began to take hold in the pit of Sarah’s stomach. No! Don’t be silly. He’s just in a deep sleep. Sarah rushed to turn on the main light. There was no sign of breathing. No, she must be imagining it. She picked him up. No sign at all. He wasn’t that warm either, not cold, but not the usual feeling of heat coming from his smooth skin.

  “Don’t do this to me, darling!” she cried. She tried to feel for a pulse on his little wrist, but she had always found this difficult to find even on herself, let alone on a baby. She couldn’t find it. So, she tried to the side under the chin. Still nothing. “No! No!” she was screaming. The panic had really set in. He’s not breathing! She laid him on the floor and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. One then two breaths. Then she pushed hard down on his chest as she remembered from her Duke of Edinburgh community service courses in first aid. Except that all those exercises had been on a dummy of a grown adult; so, she tried to scale everything down to this four-week-old baby. One, two, three, four… all the way up to thirty pushes onto his little breastbone, at almost two a second, pushing down as hard as she dared. ‘Better a broken breastbone than a dead person,’ they had said. She then followed this by two more breaths over the little mouth, and repeated the cycle over and over.

  It wasn’t working. Not again! Not again! Why my baby? Why me? Oh, George, come back to me! Come back. After twenty minutes of frantic effort, she just collapsed onto the floor sobbing her heart out. He was dead.

  She groped for her phone in her handbag in the hall. She went to her recently dialled phone list and tapped on Daniel’s number. After three rings he answered. “Hi, Sarah. We’re just finishing dinner here. What’s up?”

  “It’s George. He’s dead. He’s dead, Daniel! I can’t resuscitate him. It’s happened again!”

  It was plain clothes again. The Tooley guy. “Why didn’t you first call 999 for an ambulance, Mrs Richardson? Why was your first call to your husband?”

  “Because I knew he was dead. I knew even before I tried the resuscitation. But I had to try.”

  “Are you sure that’s the real story, Mrs Richardson? Perhaps you knew he was dead for another reason. Because it was you who had killed him.”

  “How can you accuse me of that? It was my baby. Our baby. The one we had so longed for. The one we already had once, but then lost him too. We’re just cursed!”

  “I have to inform you that we’ve looked into the results of the autopsy,” continued Tooley. “They include a possibility of death by deliberate smothering and suffocation. It would be much better for you to come clean, love. We all know what it’s like to have small children. I’d have smothered my blighters several times given half a chance!”

  Sarah just stared at him, shaking her head.

  There was a knock on the door. The desk officer put his head round. “A Mr Richardson has just arrived. In quite a state. He’s double parked his BMW outside the station.”

  “Better show him in then, put him in room 2 and I’ll talk to him separately later,” said Tooley. “Take his keys and put the car around the back. Looks like we’re in for a long night.”

  Tooley turned back to Sarah. “Take us through the challenges of having a career and of being a young mother,” he said.

  Chapter One

  How had I got myself into this position? Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut? But no, I could not stand idly by while one of the most erudite expert witnesses assassinated basic mathematics in order to accuse a mother of murder.

  Standing up in the jury box, I very nervously cleared my throat. I looked around me. If looks could kill, I was already dead under the triple assault of the two prosecution barristers’ and the expert witness’ scowls. The judge was looking at me expectantly; the lead defence counsel had a hopeful look of invitation; the defendant was searching my face with pleading eyes. Many of the people in court seemed to have an expression of genuine curiosity, they were witnessing a legal precedent in real time – the judge had invited a member of the jury to cross examine a key witness! Doubtless he did this just to shut me up, but you could feel their unspoken question: whatever could this young jury member possibly say to challenge such an erudite expert witness? And what on earth did the judge think he was doing?

  With all eyes looking at me, I stammered out my first question. “Pr-Professor Goodwin, you say that there is only a one in seventy-two million chance that Mrs Richardson’s children died of natural causes?”

  “Yes, that is exactly what I said. Very clearly and several times.”

  “So, if I am to understand from your statement,” I continued a little more confidently, “the defendant was chosen purely at random, pulled in off the street if you like, and only then was it discovered that two of her babies had died in succession?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, young man!” retorted Goodwin. “We all know Mrs Richardson was arrested for murder precisely because her baby boys had died.”

  “I agree with the witness, my Lord,” said the prosecution. “This is ridiculous. Must we really go on?”

  “Mr Fielding,” interrupted the judge, “please get to the point and do not treat the court to facetious remarks.”

  “My Lord. From a mathematical point of view, Professor Goodwin’s statement is exactly as if she were pulled in off the street at random,” I replied.

  “Well, you had better get on with it and explain yourself, then.”

  “Professor, please explain again how you reached your calculation.”

  “I repeat, again: there is a one in 8,500 chance of the first death being a cot death, multiplied by one in 8,500 for the second, thus one in 72 million. Statistically impossible to happen by accident. It had to be murder.”

  “But how many births are there in the UK every year?” I asked.

  “About 800,000,” he replied.

  I was beginning to enjoy this. “So, within a time frame of, say, ten years – since fortunately we don’t often hear about double baby murders – we could, conceptually, have pulled in from the streets ten times 800,000, that’s 8 million women, who have recently given birth. Let’s say half of them, 4 million, had had second or third births. Then we ask them if two of their babies had died in a row? And yes, it so happens that one of them, Mrs Richardson, fits that profile. My point is that we had 4 million different chances to find someone guilty. So, Professor Goodwin, your probability is not one in 72 million, it’s one in 72 million divided by 4 million which is exactly one in eighteen. Not one in eighteen hundred or one in eighteen thousand, but one in eighteen!”

  And I had hardly started to dismantle his arguments…

  My name is Martin Fielding. It had all started when I received a summons for jury duty. Normally jury duty is for two weeks, but I was advised to reserve a three-to-four-week period starting mid-November. I discussed it with my HR manager and with my immediate boss at work. They were not particularly pleased about this upcoming absence, but then my boss said something really reassuring, along the lines that the cemetery was full of indispensable people, so he guessed they could spare me for this period. However, I was fortunate in that
the company had a policy of paying full salary to anyone doing jury service.

  I had been in my job with an offshore design consultancy for just over three years since finishing my MSc in ocean engineering at UCL. I really enjoyed the work, with a mixture of office design work, trips to construction sites, and the odd helicopter ride to oil or gas platforms out at sea. We were designing floating oil and gas platforms for water up to a 1,000 metres deep, and I was using to the full all I had learned from my studies in hydrodynamic wave analyses in the frequency domain. Sorry for the technical terms, but the point is that this includes a large amount of mathematical statistical and probabilistic analysis of random wave properties. Little did I know I would soon be applying these statistics in a completely different domain.

  I also learned the limits of statistics. We had the ‘hundred-year wave’ that was the ‘big one’ which, as the name suggests, was only supposed to arrive once every one hundred years. The height of this wave was extrapolated from past statistics, so we designed our platforms to withstand it. Well, my boss told me a platform he had designed and installed some years back had no less than two different one-hundred-year waves hitting it in the first five years of its life. Spot the error! He invited me to read a book called The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, which talks about how unlikely events are much more likely to happen than we realise.

  This is because the real-life probability distributions of rare events do not follow the ‘normal curve’, but have fat tails at the extremes that increases their probabilities, which Taleb calls Black Swans (since everybody thought swans are white – until somebody discovered a black one). He wrote the book in 2006 and basically predicted the financial crisis two years later, since all the banks’ risk models made the mistake of using the ‘normal curve’, which underestimated the risk of rare events. Apparently once the crisis was upon us, it turned out that the banks’ models had said such a financial crisis could not happen in a billion years. Yet it did happen, and it seems crises like this regularly happen every ten years or so. I adored this book, and then promptly devoured Nassim Taleb’s other three books on various misunderstandings of statistics.