Morgan: ‘And what was the outcome?’
‘His observations were correct.’
Du Plessis was a very direct witness. He explained complex methodology in a simple and authoritative manner. He said, ‘I was impressed by the quality of [Miller’s] tests. I made the same observations as he did. All the boxes you expect to be positive for central nervous system tissue were ticked. None of the results were dubious or ambivalent.’
There you had it. It was all over bar the pretty pictures. Beautiful images of the staining techniques filled the big screens in the courtroom. They were psychedelic abstracts, in deep purples and feminine pinks, magnified 200,000 times — one was shaped like a map of the North Cape, another was like a pencil drawing. Du Plessis took the role of art historian, helpfully pointing out salient features: ‘Here, we see the fine meshwork of nerve fibres . . . Here, we can see layered stacks of myelin. It looks like a stack of pancakes.’ He explained that myelin was a fatty sheath, or membrane, which insulates nerve fibres in the brain.
The whole question of the degraded quality of the stain, said du Plessis, was a nonsense. He compared dried brain tissue to the wonderful preservation of Egyptian mummies, and the tasty preservation of biltong, those dried strips of leather which in South Africa are considered to be food.
When his exhibition of slides came to an end, Morgan asked him, ‘In your opinion, what was found on the shirt?’
The next PowerPoint slide came up on the screen. It had words on it. It was headlined, CONCLUSION. Du Plessis read it out: ‘Incontrovertible evidence of tissue of central nervous system origin (brain or spinal cord).’
The punchline was much the same as his opening statement, but it felt even more damning to see it written on a screen. And then du Plessis, unequivocal to the end, told the jury: ‘The evidence is overwhelming and incontestable.’
What are you left with after ‘overwhelming and incontestable’? It was all down to the shirt, and the shirt was like a noose around Lundy’s neck. But I had forgotten a small detail. It was something Levick had come up with way back in 2003, not long after he’d taken an interest in the whole saga. He’d read up on Miller’s immunostains, and wrote in an email to Lundy’s closest friend, ‘The chemical markers used to test positive for brain signals only recognise mammalian tissue . . . There is no differentiation between human, dog, horse, sheep etc.’
Hislop slowly got to his feet to begin cross-examination. He looked away — he rarely made eye contact with witnesses — and appeared lost in thought. ‘Dr du Plessis,’ he said after a while, ‘you can’t say, can you, if the central nervous system tissue that you say you found is human, or non-human?’
Du Plessis: ‘No.’
Human, or animal? Christine, or food? I looked again at my filched photocopy of Miller’s immunostained image of C3003/3. What was I looking at? What was the true nature of the cells on the sleeve of Lundy’s stupid polo shirt? Police searching Lundy’s car found a wrapper for a beef and chilli pie. Was all of that testing — ‘it’s extremely labour-intensive work’, du Plessis remarked — conducted on the spilled remains of a meat pie? Did Lundy kill his own wife and daughter, or was he just a fat slob with pie down his shirt?
9
Police saw the vexed question coming. Just as they had scoured the world back in 2001 to find someone who could test whether the stains on Lundy’s shirt were tissue fragments from Christine’s brain, and their prayers were answered in the shape of Dr Rodney Miller and his amazing dancing immunostains, which were criticised as ‘novel . . . innovative’, so they scoured the world in 2014 to find someone who could test whether the stains were human, and their prayers were answered in the shape of Netherlands Forensic Institute head Dr Laetitia Sijen and her amazing dancing RNA molecular experiments, which were criticised as ‘novel . . . innovative’.
It was imperative for Lundy’s defence to stop Sijen in her tracks. Hislop had tried, and failed, to convince a pre-trial hearing and the Court of Appeal that Sijen’s evidence should be ruled inadmissable. A third attempt was made during the trial at a closed hearing in front of Justice France. Hislop once again referred to Professor Stephen Bustin’s considered opinion that Sijen’s testing was ‘novel’, invalid, no better than a ‘pseudo-science’. It shouldn’t be put in front of a jury, Hislop argued; it was prejudicial to a fair trial. The appeal failed. In his ruling, France duly noted that one of the three judges at the Court of Appeal hearing had voted to rule out Sijen’s evidence: ‘The novelty of the work was a matter that influenced Ellen France in her dissent.’ He meant his wife. No doubt Mr and Mrs France have many differences of opinion. ‘In my view,’ France ruled, ‘Professor Bustin’s evidence is simply another opinion.’
The genie was out of the bottle. Sijen had her day — several days — in court. Like Leak with the Yorkshire Ripper, Sijen began by talking of her encounters with human depravity. She had investigated war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. There was something fragile about Sijen. She had slightly pleading eyes, and a nervous disposition. She brought along a colleague from the Netherlands Forensic Institute to support her in court.
It sounded like a fun place to work. There were 700 people in its offices in The Hague, working across a range of forensic disciplines; Sijen was head of research and development in the department of human biological traces. She explained that RNA was a molecular material found in human and animal tissue cells. That was about
