Mark of innocence
In 1997, a smudged print from one of PC Shirley McKie's thumbs was
found at a murder scene in Kilmarnock. When she denied it was hers,
no one believed her - after all, fingerprints don't lie. Then the truth
emerged - it wasn't her print after all. Now she has been awarded
£750,000 compensation but calls for a public inquiry are mounting.
On January 8 1997, a 51-year-old woman named Marion Ross was found
stabbed to death in her home in Kilmarnock, a town 30 miles south of
Glasgow. The police went in, took photographs and dusted for prints. They
made their inquiries. Then came an odd development: on January 14, police
found a "mark" on a bathroom doorframe inside the victim's house - a mark
made since the murder. It was later formally identified as the thumbprint of
police officer Shirley McKie.
McKie was part of the team investigating Ross's murder. She had stood
outside the house, but she had not been part of the unit that entered the
crime scene. The fingerprint could only mean one thing: that McKie had
illegally entered the house some time after the killing.
McKie, who was then 35, denied that it was her print. She also denied ever
having set foot inside the victim's house. But no one, of course, believed a
word of it: they all knew that fingerprints do not lie.
That one fingerprint from Ross's house went on to cause an awful lot of
trouble, for an awful lot of people. It destroyed McKie's promising career in
the police, it threw doubt upon the investigation into Ross's murder, and it
has now very seriously undermined the reputation of fingerprint science in
Scotland.
Because, it seems, it was not actually McKie's fingerprint. In February this
year, McKie, now 43, was awarded a compensation payout of £750,000 from
the Scottish Executive after she was wrongly accused of leaving the print.
Calls for a public inquiry into the case are now mounting by the day.
"I was in the police for 36 years," says Iain McKie, Shirley's father. "I always
believed fingerprints didn't lie. Now ... I know different."
Iain, who is 67, lives in a flat in Ayr, on Scotland's south-west coast,
overlooking the Irish Sea. He used to serve with the CID so he "knew what
happened in the police", and initially, although he says that his daughter
"wouldn't tell lies", he questioned her denial of having been inside Ross's
house. "I was saying to her, 'Look, Shirley, if they say your fingerprint was
found in there then it must be your fingerprint ...' They had it checked and
they had it checked. You never argue with that - people have been hung on a
fingerprint."
Iain McKie says that it is normal practice to rule out any "innocent" prints
from officers involved in a case simply by comparing prints at the scene to
photographic records kept of officers' prints. In this case, Shirley's prints
turned out not to have been taken earlier on in her career, so investigating
officers asked her to give her prints for elimination purposes. She duly gave
her prints - and one of them ended up matching the print on the doorframe.
But McKie stuck to her story. She had never been inside the victim's house
and therefore hadn't left that print.
In May 1997, Shirley repeated this story at the trial of a 20-year-old joiner
named David Asbury, who had been accused of murdering Ross. But despite
her throwing doubt on to the whole issue of fingerprints at the scene - and
despite the fact that fingerprints were used as evidence against Asbury - he
was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
McKie had stuck to her guns but, as it turned out, her troubles were only just
beginning. Within a month, she was off work, suffering from anxiety and
depression. The police, she says, wanted her to change her story and admit
that she had entered the murder victim's house and accidentally left a print,
and they were piling on the pressure. Challenging the Scottish Fingerprint
Service, a branch of the Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO), was simply
unheard of.
McKie was sick and off duty until the following March, when she was
suddenly arrested, taken to a station, strip searched, and then charged with
perjury for her part in the Asbury trial. "They got the dawn chorus organised:
they phoned her up, she answered the phone and there was nobody there so
she hung up, and then they went around and got her there," says her father.
"Then they took her into the police office where, in 1992, I had been in
charge ... She got bail and came home and lay on the floor weeping. You'll
understand that I became very, very protective of my daughter at that
stage."
Iain and the family began fighting back. But the first QC hired by the family
simply did not seem to believe the fingerprint service could be wrong. The
second QC, Donald Findlay, also initially had his doubts, but took on the
case.
Crucially, at this stage, everyone - including Iain and Shirley McKie - still
believed that the print found at the murder was hers: the issue for them was,
how did it get there? Had McKie, either before or after the murder, without
any recollection, once been inside the premises? Or had she touched a
doorframe - again without any memory of it - that had ended up inside the
house?
"We wondered if she'd once visited a joiner's yard and touched a plank of
wood that ended up inside Marion Ross's house," says Iain. "Or maybe she'd
sleepwalked herself there? Except that meant dodging the 54 police who had
guarded the place [after the murder] and never seen her inside. Or - believe
it or not - she wondered herself if she had been abducted by aliens or
something. I mean, nothing was out of the question."
Out of the blue, when McKie was surfing the internet looking for fingerprint
experts to help her with her case, she came across an American expert
named Pat Wertheim, a respected professional who had trained FBI
personnel.
Within a few months he was in the UK with a colleague named David Grieve, inspecting the McKie print that had been found inside Ross's home. He reached a shocking conclusion: the print was not Shirley McKie's.
Later on, when McKie stood trial in 1999 for perjury, three SCRO experts
claimed that her print had indeed been found inside the victim's home. Iain
says: "The two Americans - Wertheim and Grieve - came in and showed the
court that it wasn't Shirley's print at the murder scene.
They won the day and Shirley was found unanimously not guilty and she was congratulated by the judge for the way she comported herself, which was almost unheard of."
The two US experts brought in by McKie's defence team argued that the
"mark" found on January 14 1997 inside Ross's house and then identified by
SCRO experts on February 10 as belonging to McKie bore no resemblance to
McKie's actual fingerprint, with one saying the "obvious" differences took only
"seconds to see".
In television dramas there is often a scene where a computer is fed a print
and then spits out a name. In reality, the fingerprint identification process is
a lot clumsier. Forensic police officers attend a crime scene and use fine
black powder to dust surfaces for prints. When they find a mark, it is usually
quite clearly visible to the naked eye. This mark, when finally identified as a
human print, is then compared to a print from whoever is being checked out
or investigated. The prints are photographed and placed side by side for
visual inspection by experts. Experts try to identify 16 points of similarity in
each print.
Computers sometimes play their part - the Automatic Fingerprint
Identification System does help police authorities worldwide to narrow down
their search by eliminating hordes of unlikely matches - but eventually, in
nearly all cases, final identification will still come from a human expert
visually inspecting two sets of prints. According to the Americans, whoever
matched up the print at Ross's house with McKie's prints was simply wrong.
Later, in 2002, it was alleged that there had, in fact, been a fundamental and
significant division of opinion about the identification among the SCRO's own
experts in February 1997 - at the same time as the SCRO were telling the
murder squad detectives that the print was definitely McKie's.
Following McKie's acquittal for perjury in 1999, the family hoped for an
apology from the chief constable, but it did not come. "That really, really got
her down and she became more ill after that," says Iain. "There was anxiety
and pressure because of the stress of it all. She was at [the] stage where if
she saw a police car she'd start to physically shake. She even planned her
own suicide."
After talking to Iain McKie, he and I travel across Ayrshire to meet Shirley
herself. She lives in the nearby coastal town of Troon and works in a little gift
shop there. He warns me that she is strict about timekeeping and, indeed,
when we meet Shirley, she seems angry that we are late.
I ask her what her reaction was to a parliamentary statement made recently
by Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell, who claimed that the SCRO's
identification of her print had been an "honest mistake" and "that [it] was
accepted by all the [parties] involved" and everyone had "moved on".
"I was amused at how the most senior minister in Scotland can stand up,
knowing what there is to know about the case, and say what he said," she
says. "It bemuses me and that's turned to disgust."
In the same week as that McConnell statement, McKie, who was about to go
to court to sue the police for damages, had accepted a £750,000 settlement
from the Scottish Executive.
McKie says she detests anyone thinking that she has "won" anything. She
says that accepting the offer felt like "copping out".
"You see, as big as this has become, the worse I seem to feel. The more
people who say, 'It's fantastic and you're so powerful', then the more my
self-esteem gets lower and I become more and more drained."
For a long time she hoped to resume her police career, but that dream has
been destroyed. Even when she was cleared of perjury, she never got an
official apology from any superior in the force. "They were basically saying
that I'd lied," she says.
It may well be that someone lied here - but it was not McKie. In 2000, an
independent report reached the conclusion that possible criminal
prosecutions should be considered against certain SCRO personnel.
The author of that report was James Mackay, a much-respected former deputy
chief constable of the police force in Tayside. In a statement to McKie's
lawayers in August 2003, he said, "It is my view and that of the inquiry team
that there was criminality involved in the actings of the SCRO experts and
that that criminality first reared its head in February 1997 ... It should have
been patently obvious to those involved that a mistake had been made and
there were opportunities then for the mistake to be acknowledged and dealt
with. The fact that it was not so dealt with led to 'cover-up' and criminality."
But nothing, apparently, was done about these allegations. Earlier in the
same year, a letter signed by 14 fingerprint experts from Lothian and
Borders police, sent to the then justice minister Jim Wallace and the Lord
Advocate, the senior legal officer in Scotland, concluded: "At best the
misidentification is a display of gross incompetence by not one but several
experts within that bureau [SCRO]. At worst it bears all the hallmarks of a
conspiracy of a nature unparalleled in the history of fingerprints." But again,
that had led nowhere.
Still, no one at the SCRO has yet lost their jobs or apologised. The same
goes for the police.
To make matters worse, David Asbury, the man originally convicted of
murdering Marion Ross in 1997, was sensationally acquitted in August 2002 -
because of faulty fingerprint evidence. The SCRO experts had got it wrong
again. They had claimed that a tin found in his flat during the investigation
bore a "mark" - later classed as a "print" - which belonged to the murder
victim, Marion Ross. This was incorrect and his conviction was duly quashed.
Still no one from the SCRO was sacked. Indeed, to date the SCRO has not
admitted that it wrongly identified McKie's print. Despite the First Minister's
claim of an "honest mistake", this is not the story that the SCRO tells. In
fact, the office still refuses to accept that it got it wrong. In a statement, it
tells me that, "There is a great division of opinion as to whether the print is
Ms McKie's."
Yet it is difficult to find any "great division" at all. Scores of fingerprint
experts from around the world say that the SCRO is plain wrong. The SCRO
is merely backed by a tiny handful of increasingly isolated dissenters who say
that they could be right. Britain's fingerprint community has been shattered
by the SCRO's stance; the McKie case is referred to as "the Scotch Botch".
It has also recently been alleged that the prints presented by the SCRO in
1999 at the McKie perjury trial had been cropped. This meant that whole
prints were not being shown, only parts of them, blown up and cropped
advantageously. McKie's claims of innocence still won the day, but the
cropping allegation would probably have gone down badly in court if McKie
had not settled. Speaking from Tuscon, Arizona, Wertheim says, "I first
looked at the images in March 1999 and knew in seconds that they'd been
cropped. It's like looking at a snap of your wife and knowing immediately
that her head's been cropped. Anywhere in the world would require you to
present the whole image, so this was highly irregular."
Michael Mansfield QC is one of those calling for a public inquiry. He believes
that the McKie case is a "hugely important and damaging case for the UK
justice system as a whole. I don't think the McKie case should ever have
been prosecuted in the first place. I know from past experiences in disputed
IRA cases, such as the Danny McNamee bombing case, that the whole socalled
'science' of fingerprinting needs to be re-examined. It's a science in
the loosest terms - it's more of an art. More quality control is needed. Fingerprint science isn't infallible.
"The SCRO experts who wrongly identified that McKie print should have all
their prior cases reviewed. In fact, I am writing a letter to England's Attorney
General asking for a review of cases where fingerprints have been pivotal.
Public confidence in this process needs to be reassured. The Mckie case is
potentially explosive for the English legal system. That's why it deserves a
full Scottish public inquiry as fast as possible."
In her flat in Troon, McKie says she is beginning to see a future for herself,
but it's "in another country. But maybe that's because I feel like running
away at the moment".
