‘Exactly.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She went on to describe the method of RNA analysis which she’d developed at her laboratory. It was used, she said, to identify the origin of organ tissue — whether it came from the liver, lung, brain, etc. When she was contacted by the New Zealand police to identify whether the tissue on Lundy’s shirt came from the human brain, she developed a new model. Sijen introduced four markers that would signal the presence of RNA molecules found exclusively in the human brain. She tested them on the Lundy shirt sample, as well as brain tissue taken from a cow, a sheep, a chicken, a cat, a dog, a rabbit, a pig and a guinea pig. ‘You can order their brains online,’ she pointed out.
Her initial tests showed no sign of human brain RNA in the sheep, cat, dog and guinea pig. Interestingly, though, signals were picked up in samples taken from the cow, the rabbit and the pig. Another test was taken. This time the temperature was raised from 64 to 68 degrees, and the signals disappeared. There you have it: the difference between the human race and the cow, rabbit and pig is four degrees of separation.
The four markers were used on the C3003/3 tissue on Lundy’s sleeve, and the test was repeated three times. This was the moment of truth. What would the test reveal from a possible 12 positive reactions to human brain? The score: seven reactions out of 12, or 58 per cent. ‘From the results,’ said Sijen, ‘we infer that human central nervous system tissue was present.’ Sijen had arbitrarily decided that 50 per cent was a pass rate. Her tests had only narrowly passed. The evidence, then, was that Lundy wore his wife’s brain on his shirt.
Hislop roared at Sijen that her tests were unreliable, prone to error, ‘greatly flawed’, B-grade forensic science, and a work in progress that had never actually been performed before. Why hadn’t the Crown found anyone to support her work, like du Plessis had with Miller? Could it be that no one was prepared to be seen with her in public? How dared she pass off her tests as valid? There was a sense that she copped the kind of attack meant for Miller until it seemed apparent that his immunostaining tests were vindicated and Hislop felt he had to back off. He said to me in the wait for the verdict, ‘Taking on Miller would have done us all sorts of credibility damage, especially when we had to fight Sijen’s testing as well. We needed credibility for that fight.’
After her long mauling on the witness stand, Sijen could be seen weeping as she was led away by her colleague. No doubt it was brutal. But a greater damage had been inflicted on Lundy’s defence. The science did for him. The shirt did for him. It had Christine’s DNA on it, although that was to be expected, and no one knew whether it originated from the tissue or had arrived independently — a cough, a sneeze. It had central nervous system origin (brain or spinal cord) on it, according to Miller, backed up by du Plessis as well as the defence’s own expert witness, the coughing Scotsman Dr Colin Smith. And now, according to the nervous, weepy Sijen — although the defence later called two scientists of obvious genius who tore her work to sheds, and although the Crown had no one to back her up, no one to agree with her, no one who sided with her in the slightest — it had human brain on it. One, two, three. Gotcha.
10
The myth of scientific fact got a terrible battering at the trial. It was a parade of brilliant minds, and there were times when the mere appearance of an expert lifted the ambient IQ in the courtroom. But everywhere you looked there was dispute, rancour, denial, bitter attack, weary acceptance, name-calling, tears — everywhere you looked was mere opinion. Or not even that. The forensic nadir of the trial looked as though it had been reached early on when police computer ‘expert’ Maarten Kleintjes tried to distance himself from the crackpot theory that Lundy had fiendishly manipulated the clock on his home computer. But in the second week of March, one of the strangest characters in the Lundy saga arrived on the witness stand.
Dr James Pang conducted the autopsies on the bodies of Christine and Amber. It was his crackpot theory that their stomach contents, and the absence of the tell-tale smell of gastric juices, meant that they had died pretty much exactly one hour after their last meal. The whole charade of trying to prove they were killed at around 7pm began with Pang’s nose. When Lundy’s conviction was quashed by the Privy Council, one of the main reasons was its rejection of the time of death: ‘New evidence eradicates scientific support for the claim.’
Its origins were recorded by a witness who preceded Pang on the stand. In 2000, Inspector Brett Calkin was put in charge of Amber’s body. He talked about going to the house and putting on paper overalls. Amber’s body lay in the hallway. Calkin and two other officers approached her. The winter’s day, the police caravan parked outside; the silent house, the murdered seven-year-old girl, the big footsteps of strangers in the Lundy hallway; there was such kindness in the way Calkin said her name.
‘We placed Amber in the back of a hearse . . . Her body was stored in a refrigerator, and I locked the door and used a padlock which only has one key that I held on to . . . I removed Amber from the fridge and took her to the main room.’
She was weighed at 9.25pm.
