The prosecution’s case rested on seven tiny particles found on a van seat and on a murdered girl’s skirt. Barry White had spent six years in prison for Rachel Manning’s death, and his friend Keith Hyatt had been convicted of helping dispose of her body. Both men always said they were innocent. It was 2000 when 19-year-old Rachel enjoyed a night out at a fancy dress party in Milton Keynes.
Hours later, her body was found in undergrowth near Woburn Golf Course. She had been strangled and beaten with a car steering lock. Barry was her boyfriend. Keith was his friend.
The police said the two men used Keith’s van to dump Rachel’s body on a muddy bank. But when investigative journalist Louise Shorter looked at the case, things didn’t add up. “We were left with a really short window of opportunity for them to have got out to Milton Keynes, dumped Rachel’s body, and cleaned up all the rest of it,” she said. Louise asked expert witness Andrew Moncrieff to reassess the forensic evidence.
He spotted a problem immediately. The prosecution claimed the men carried Rachel’s body to the muddy bank in the dark. If you carry a body on muddy ground, you will almost certainly transfer mud back into your vehicle. The van had never been cleaned, yet no mud from the bank was found inside.
Instead, the prosecution relied on a combination of trace particles found on the van seat and on Rachel’s skirt. One of these was cerium. The prosecution argued the substance was so unique, it could only have come from that van seat. Andrew knew something important about cerium.
The flint in a cigarette lighter isn’t made of flint at all. It’s a mixture of cerium and iron. When you flick a lighter, you produce a cloud of molten metallic particles. During the trial, the prosecution had said these particles came from cigarette lighters but that only a small number were produced.
Andrew tested it. Each lighter strike produced up to 4,000 microscopic particles. Everyone in this case smoked. Keith smoked in his van all day.
Barry smoked. Their friends and family smoked. Rachel smoked. Smoking was still allowed indoors, in restaurants, and in nightclubs.
The cerium particles were as unusual as a cigarette lighter. But Andrew still needed to show that the combination of all seven particles could have come from elsewhere. He tested seats from other vans, including a plumbing company’s work vehicles. His research revealed that the same combination of particles could be found in other vans.
In fact, some random vans matched Rachel’s skirt better than Keith’s van seat did. The data showed she hadn’t sat in that van at all. The families launched an appeal. In 2007, the convictions were quashed.
Barry, still in prison, was finally released. “I lost a life. I lost a good life,” he said. But the shadow of suspicion never fully lifted.
People still whispered, “No smoke without fire. ” It would take a new team of experts to finally find the real killer. Tracy Alexander headed a cold case team at a private laboratory. Thames Valley Police had kept all the exhibits from the original investigation, properly preserved and fit for reinvestigation.
One piece of evidence in particular caught her attention: the steering lock. Someone had held it so tightly during the attack that a piece of it broke off inside Rachel’s head. The other end, the part where the killer’s hand had gripped, could carry genetic material. Roy Green was the expert brought in to examine it.
He targeted the area where someone might have held the weapon and swabbed it for touch DNA. Every contact leaves a trace. It took weeks of analysis, but eventually Roy identified a DNA profile and matched it to a name on the national police database. Shahid Ahmed, a 41-year-old restaurateur from Bletchley.
He had been convicted in 2010 for sexually assaulting another young woman. But he insisted he wasn’t Rachel’s killer. He claimed he had been in various cars and taxis and might have touched such an item, which could explain why his DNA was on it. The team needed more evidence.
There was one exhibit that could help: a single hair found on Rachel’s clothing. Hairs are not always discriminating in terms of DNA, but mitochondrial DNA gives a huge amount of information, and it is only maternally inherited. The DNA from that hair definitely came from Shahid Ahmed’s family. He had three brothers.
The investigation eliminated two of them and his mother. The hair could only have come from Shahid or his third brother. A statistician calculated that the results were 350,000 times more likely if the hair came from Shahid rather than his brother. Scientists had identified Shahid Ahmed’s DNA on the murder weapon and shown one of his hairs was on Rachel’s clothes.
They believed he had picked her up when she left the club alone. A jury found him guilty of murder. Barry White and Keith Hyatt were in court to hear the conviction. “There’s an impact to the victim’s family but also to these poor two that got put away for something they hadn’t done,” Roy Green said.
For some, the question remained: were Barry and Keith let off on a technicality? If the particles weren’t unique, did that really mean they hadn’t done it? Actually, yes. It did.
And now they could finally say so. Louise Shorter remembered the day the conviction was quashed. “I remember Barry bursting into tears. It was huge, life-changing.
But it was also tears of anger and frustration. Why should the system take as long as it does? ”
It took six years of Barry’s life, and it was only when the truly guilty person was convicted that they really got their reputations back. For Rachel Manning’s family, after 11 years of trials, appeals, and retrials, they finally had justice for their daughter.
“This case has been about Rachel, who was killed at the young age of 19 with her whole adult life before her. This has been denied not only to her and us, her family, but also her friends, who still miss her deeply,” her family said. In August 2016, Leeds was enjoying its carnival. On Chapeltown Road, the Night Trucks nightclub was packed with revelers.
Outside, a violent crime was about to unfold. Criminal psychologist Ruth Tully had seen many cases like this. “Outside the nightclub is where a brutal attack took place, which involved three perpetrators honing in on their victim, shooting him at very close range with a sawn-off shotgun, and even injuring him as well with a machete. ”
What the attackers didn’t know was that it was all caught on CCTV.
The footage showed three men approaching the victim. One brandished a machete while two punched and stabbed at him. A third pulled out a sawn-off shotgun and fired from close range. Then all three fled.
The victim suffered a serious shotgun wound to his left shoulder and upper torso, plus stab wounds. He needed urgent life-saving surgery but survived. Police arrested three suspects: Shakeel Liddy, Kemar Ricketts, and Seon Allen. All three refused to comment in interviews.
Detectives appealed for eyewitnesses to provide on-the-record statements, but nobody came forward. People may not come forward because they’re traumatized or because they fear repercussions. Detectives needed more evidence, so they turned to the CCTV. The footage clearly showed a crime, but the images were too grainy to prove who carried out the attack.
Detectives turned to facial recognition expert Shelina Gillani. “Identification evidence is almost at the forefront of a lot of criminal proceedings,” she said. Detectives asked Shelina to study all the CCTV footage from inside and outside the club and build a visual profile for each attacker. At this stage, key to her analysis, she based her assessment on the footage alone.
“The material that I look at is a blind assessment,” she said. “When you have impartiality in your mind, you’re not looking for face features or answers. You’re looking to solve the mystery. ”
The image quality was low resolution, poorly lit, and subject to pixelation.
But by using visual clues from the suspects’ clothing, Shelina tracked each individual’s movements inside the club. Suspect one was quite distinct, wearing his hood up inside the nightclub with light-toned bottoms and a beverage in his hand. Shelina followed his movement from the dance hall to another area, noting his nasal anatomy and the bridge of his nose. Suspect two was the man who fired the gun.
The CCTV quality didn’t allow her to comment on fine feature detail, but she could make out general features. He wore a large, fur-lined hood jacket and had dark facial hair extending from the sides of his face onto his jawline and upper lip. Suspect three drew the machete and also stabbed at the victim. He had glasses or some form of eyewear on top of his head and facial hair styled like a goatee beard.
The footage showed the men walking together, as if looking for someone. It was beginning to look like the attack was premeditated. Shelina watched as subject two walked in through a fire door, accompanied by subject one, both appearing to have a conversation as they waited for their third associate. As they walked past another camera, it gave Shelina one more opportunity to assess their appearance.
She could now comment more clearly on facial hair placement and nose anatomy for subject one. Subject two covered part of his face but wore glasses with dark temples and had facial hair. Subject three still had glasses on his head, short dark hair, pronounced deep-set eyebrows, and dark-toned facial hair. Only when her analysis was complete did Shelina finally look at the images of the men in custody: Shakeel Liddy, Kemar Ricketts, and Seon Allen.
She began a direct comparison. For Seon Allen, she saw similarities in the shape of the head and eyebrow positioning and placement. For Kemar Ricketts, the placement of the eyebrows, nasal morphology, wide nasal bridge and nostrils, and a very particular style of facial hair on his upper lip, philtrum area, and chin. For Shakeel Liddy, the facial hair design was ubiquitous and universal, but still very specific to this individual.
“The conclusions of my analyses were that all the three subjects seen in the CCTV footage were the individuals that were arrested,” Shelina said. At last, detectives had an independent expert opinion confirming they had arrested the guilty men. Shelina confirmed that Kemar Ricketts brandished the machete, Seon Allen stabbed at the victim, and Shakeel Liddy fired the shotgun. When Shelina’s expert evidence was presented at trial, Liddy pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years for attempted murder.
Ricketts and Allen admitted nothing but were found guilty and each sentenced to 19 years. Ruth Tully reflected on the case. “Multiple perpetrator offenses are always very interesting to me because each individual involved may have had a unique motivation for being there. There may have been a leader within the group, there may have been a follower, but ultimately, as is clear from these convictions, all played a role in this very serious offense.
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For Shelina, the job itself was the reward. “With video analysis and facial image comparison, every single case is specific, and that’s what I thrive off. Once that job is done, once that analysis is conducted and the case is closed, then I know that I’ve played an active role in assisting the criminal justice system.
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