The Price of Justice – Part One:

The Case of Neil Sayers

Introduction:

It is difficult to establish precisely what happened on the night of May 13th-14th 1998. A young man, Russell Crookes - a student at Hadlow Agricultural College - was never seen alive after that night. His ‘best’ friends Neil Sayers and Graham Wallis - also students at the college - would admit to being the last people to see Russell alive. Nearly two weeks later Crookes’ mutilated, partially burned and decomposing body would be discovered in a shallow grave in woods that belonged to the college.

According to the first accounts of both Wallis and Sayers, the three young men had gone out after dusk on May 13th to different woods that were also owned by the college as they had often done before. This time they were keen to avoid a ball at the college. They said that they stayed there hanging out together until well after the ball had ended. Both Sayers and Wallis then said that after an argument they all returned to their student accommodation at Hadlow Agricultural College. At about 4.00 in the morning they saw the lights go on in Crookes’ room. They never saw him alive again. Nor did anyone else. For seven years Sayers has never deviated from that account. The same cannot be said for Wallis.

But these were friendships that would prove the adage: with friends like these who needs enemies? Either, both Sayers and Wallis cynically betrayed Crookes’ friendship at the cost of his life, or Wallis maliciously betrayed both his so-called friends, killing one and framing the other for the murder.

Two days after Crookes’ disappearance a missing person’s inquiry initiated by Crookes’ father Malcolm began. Both Sayers and Wallis took part in searches and appealed for Crookes’ safe return in the media. Both participating in the searches and the appeals for Crookes’ safe return would later be used as evidence of Sayers’ hypocrisy and lies. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine all the evidence that was presented to the jury at Maidstone Crown Court in 1999. The aim of this article is to examine the scientific evidence in this case. That includes what the jury was told and also what it was not informed about. It will also demonstrate how evidence that could have been important was missed and outline some possibilities for retrieving the situation even now.

The Murder Inquiry Begins:

In the morning of May 26th 1998 Graham Hilton was walking his dog. He saw human remains buried in a shallow grave in a depression. He went home and called the police. The copse that contained the grave would come to be referred to as Scene One. The cadaver was teeming with maggots – an issue we shall return to later. It had been partially burned and it had been mutilated. There was also decomposition damage. Two hundred metres away, across a field, was another woods of significance. Referred to as Scene Two, this was where the murder occurred and also the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the body by burning it.

The remains would be identified as those of Russell Crookes through DNA testing. This consisted of testing the toothbrush from his room and obtaining that of his parents and brother. DNA was subsequently obtained from the body and compared with those samples. It established that subject to a random match statistic of 1:23 million, the remains were those of Russell Crookes. Fingerprints taken from the body were matched with prints from items in Crookes’ room as well. The inquiry proceeded on the basis that the remains that had been discovered in the makeshift grave were indeed those of Russell Crookes.

Sayers and Wallis were the last people to admit to having seen Crookes alive. It was natural that the murder inquiry would begin with them. Both Sayers and Wallis were arrested the day after the body was discovered. Wallis quickly confessed, but it was more an accusation against Sayers than an admission of his own guilt. Wallis’ credibility was clearly going to be an important issue at trial. This was acknowledged by lead counsel for the Crown, Charles Miskin QC in his opening address to the jury at Sayers’ trial. It was a case where some scientific evidence was obtained, but there were other validated techniques that were never utilised. Perhaps difficulties in the adversarial system could explain why some of that evidence was not obtained, but the result was that evidence that could have resolved important issues was never obtained.

Budgetary concerns may also have played a part in the police’s failure to secure such evidence. In 1998 it was not standard practice for experts to do anything more than follow the instructions that they were given by police. Now experts would suggest other courses of action that may assist. This is a development that must be welcomed. It should also be pointed out that while seven years may not seem like a long time, in terms of recent developments in forensic science it is almost an entirely different era. As will be shown below reconstructing the fire was difficult, but possible in 1998. In 2005 it is still difficult, but not as difficult and it would now involve techniques that were not available at the time. This is a key issue as it was in practice the only means of testing Wallis’ account of the fire against scientific evidence. Today this would involve new evidence that could not have been obtained back in 1998, but it would be quite wrong to presume that it was not possible to obtain useful evidence from a reconstruction in 1998.

But these problems were not confined to fire-related issues. There were other techniques such as forensic entomology that was not allowed realise their potential as neither Kent Police, nor Sayers’ defence lawyers at trial saw fit to instruct a forensic entomologist. This was a major failing as in 1998 entomology offered the best prospect of establishing the post-mortem interval. Nevertheless, the decision on whether to instruct such an expert was a matter for Kent Police to decide.