The first time I ever saw Annie’s face was in a photograph taken at Prestwick Airport. She had long, thick blonde hair that fell all the way down her back, and she was smiling. She looked like a Viking princess, her friends said. She was the kind of girl who didn’t feel lonely even when she was alone.
She was independent. She was strong. If she wanted to do something, she did it. She wanted to come home to Sweden.
She had plans to visit her best friend, go to IKEA, her favorite place, and book an appointment at her hairdresser’s for the Monday. She had paid her rent for the entire month. She had recently bought a leisure card at the swim center. She had two library books she intended to return.
She had her passport on her. Then the terrible phone call came. Her sister’s voice on the line, not Annie’s. Annie had been found dead on a beach in Scotland.
Annie was only 30 years old. The story of her death has stayed with me for 18 years. It feels like a story we could have heard yesterday. Her friends and family believe she was murdered.
The question is, could they be right? I wanted to find out what really happened to Annie. The best place to start was the day she was found, right there on Prestwick Beach. It was a Sunday morning.
A report came in of a female body discovered on the beach. Detective Michael Neill was the detective on duty that morning. A young female was dead on the sand. To err on the side of caution, it was treated as a crime scene.
The crime scene manager attended along with the officers who were going to photograph it. But they were in a race against time to get Annie’s body off the beach before the tide came in. A bag was sitting beside her. Her jacket was beside her.
Her wallet was still there. Her passport was still there. Annie was a Swedish foreign national. The police contacted the Swedish authorities to pass on a death message.
I managed to track down a document from the Swedish authorities, translated from Swedish. It said that Annie Borgusen was found drowned in the water at Prestwick, and that the Scottish police suspected suicide. But look at the date. The letter was from the 5th of December 2005.
That’s only one day after Annie’s body was discovered. There had been no postmortem. There had been no investigation into her death. Yet the Scottish police were already telling the Swedish authorities that they suspected suicide.
When the Scottish police said suicide, it was a devastating time. First thoughts were, no, this must be a mistake. Not Annie. The Scottish police said it was suicide within just some hours.
But I knew her for 20 years. No, definitely not. I got my hands on Annie’s postmortem. There were loads of details in it, and some of them were pretty graphic.
I’m not an expert on this kind of stuff, so I found a forensic pathologist, Dr. Stuart Hamilton, who literally wrote the book on death by drowning. In Annie’s case, there were no significant injuries present. There was no evidence of trauma.
The vast majority of the examination was recorded as normal. The doctor concluded that death was due to drowning. Having read that report, I would agree that she drowned. But as a forensic pathologist, that raises the question of how she came to drown.
Anytime the police are asked about Annie’s case, they insist that they did everything right. So you’d think they’d be happy to talk about it. But I contacted a dozen police officers involved in this case, and pretty much nobody wanted to speak about it. One man who was prepared to was retired detective McNeil.
He wasn’t in charge of the investigation, but he was willing to talk about his role. Part of the investigation established a timeline to try and get a picture of what happened leading up to Annie’s death on the beach that day. They reviewed hours and hours of CCTV at Prestwick Airport. Eventually, they got her on the walkway over into the airport, and she was alone.
They lost her at a camera. Then she appeared back, went out one of the doors for a matter of minutes, then came back in, came back across the walkway still alone, and then she went out of the airport. She was seen heading down towards the beach area. It’s so common when people take their own life that it’s a snap decision, a decision made in a second that changes everybody’s life around them.
That is definitely Annie on the CCTV. She’s got her passport on her. But instead of catching that flight back home, police believe that Annie then left the airport, walked to the beach, and drowned herself. But is that credible?
And does it fit with the evidence? When the family saw Annie’s body, they were horrified. It looked like someone had pressed their thumbs standing in front of Annie, with matching finger bruising on her back, like someone had grabbed her around the throat. The family saw this big, big bruising from the temple, falling over her nose and down to her cheek.
It was a huge bruising. All these were not mentioned in the Scottish autopsy. We got angry, upset, devastated. I think that something very terrible happened to Annie, and that she was murdered.
Now, if what the family is saying is true, then the implications of this are massive. You’re talking about a botched police investigation and a potential cover up. Could it actually be true? How likely is it really that Annie’s body was discovered with the injuries the family described?
Could they be mistaken? I dug a little deeper and found evidence that on her way back home to Sweden, Annie’s body was handled by another undertaker in London. I got my hands on a letter from the person who picked Annie’s body up. The deceased was collected from the hospital mortuary, and her condition was extremely poor.
In respect to her bruises, I can verify that she did have significant bruising to her body, which for reasons I cannot explain, I believe were not included in the autopsy report. I find this to be quite unusual considering the circumstances of her death. This was really significant. It meant that two separate undertakers in two different countries think that the marks they saw on Annie’s body were bruises.
So it does seem like there were marks on her body. I wondered what they were. A bruise is caused by damage to the small blood vessels just under the skin, which leak. The pressure in your blood vessels from your heart beating pushes the blood into the tissue around the damaged vessels, and that produces a bruise.
Dead people do not bruise. The family took a photograph of Annie when she was repatriated to Sweden. There was a limited view, but there was certainly bluish discoloration around the face and down onto the cheek, a more dense purplish type discoloration. Simply looking at it, it looks like a bruise.
A bruise is blunt trauma. It’s not recorded in the first postmortem report. I would have expected that to be recorded, and it’s not. That needs to be explained.
There’s pretty convincing evidence that the family are right when they say the marks on Annie’s body were bruises. But there’s one piece of evidence that could determine once and for all whether that’s the case. During Annie’s postmortem, multiple photographs were taken by a police photographer at the time. These photos could hold the answer.
I submitted a freedom of information request for the photos. One shock led to another. The family started to clean Annie and prepare her for her own clothes. Then they discovered her hair had been hacked off.
It felt so wrong, so bad. Somebody had desecrated Annie. Her hair was a part of her personality. Where’s the rest of her 80 cm of hair?
At one point, the police said she hacked it off herself. Depressed people do. So the police were telling Annie’s loved ones that she could have been depressed at the time she died. But she didn’t have a history of depression.
What do we know about Annie? Her full name is Annie Christina Borusen. She was born near Malmo in Sweden in 1975. She was a really talented linguist, speaking six languages, which is pretty unbelievable.
One of the things Annie loved most in the whole world was music. She was a music college graduate. She played in a band, Annie and the Wolves. Mickey Parson was an old friend of Annie and her family since the late 80s.
They had a little fling, a small relationship to see if it would fit together. But it didn’t. Still, they were really good friends. Annie could really look after herself, and she was a strong individual.
Annie didn’t take her life. Definitely not. Not a chance. The people who knew Annie back in Sweden didn’t believe that she was depressed.
But they were hundreds of miles away and hadn’t seen her for months. What about someone who knew her in Scotland? I started working at the Scotch Whiskey Experience. That’s where I met Annie.
I remember her as a very happy, very lively girl. She wasn’t shy in voicing her opinion about things. It’s very strange to have been one of the last people who saw and spoke to Annie. On the Friday, I was working an evening shift.
I sat down in the staff room and there was a knock on the door. It was Annie standing there smiling. She was in a good mood. She didn’t seem depressed at all.
She was very happy and everything seemed to be just normal. Hearing that the police concluded very quickly that Annie committed suicide just doesn’t add up in my mind. The friend who spoke to Annie said she was behaving normally and seemed happy. This was the day before she died.
But one of the things the police said to Annie’s family was that she could have been depressed, and that might have been a reason she cut her hair. This is the last CCTV image of Annie at Prestwick Airport. The police say this was taken just a few hours before she died. You can clearly see that her hair is all the way down her back.
Is it really credible that Annie cut off 80 cm of her hair between leaving the airport and arriving at the beach just a few hours later? A forensic psychologist, Dr. Kerry Nixon, works on profiles of suspects and victims. The police put forward a potential explanation that Annie could have cut her own hair as an act of self harm.
There’s footage of her at the airport that shows her hair is long. So at some point from leaving the airport to going into the water, she gets out scissors and cuts her hair. I’ve worked with people in my clinic who have severe anxiety. It can include pulling at the hair and pulling hair out.
It can include taking out your own eyelashes. This is a known anxiety response, particularly in females. But to apply that to those few hours at the point that the police say she’s going from the airport to the beach just doesn’t make any sense to me. If Annie didn’t cut her hair, then who did?
And why did the police say that she might have been depressed in the first place? There are so many unanswered questions. I wondered how thorough the police really were. I tracked down the person who first found Annie’s body.
David was just walking along Prestwick Beach on a typical December day. When he got to about the curve coming up, he saw legs. He looked over and there was the body. She was lying, head against the wall and legs pointing outwards.
I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do. I just slumped down onto the wall and phoned the police. Ten minutes later, there was a constable here.
He took all my details and said they would get in touch with me if they needed me. I never heard from them again. I thought I would hear something. I thought they would contact me to get a bit more detail.
But it was surprising. The first time I heard about it again was when it was in the newspaper. On the day Annie was found dead, David was the only witness the police had. So why didn’t they speak to him again?
Had they already made up their mind about what happened to Annie? The police insisted they did hours and hours of work. “There was nothing to indicate that I was dealing with a potential murder. We didn’t find anything because there was nothing to find.
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I submitted a Freedom of Information request for the photos taken during Annie’s postmortem so they could be looked at by an independent expert. I just had a response, and the answer is no. The reason they gave is that it’s not in the public interest to release these photos. I’m not the first person to get a knock back like this.
Time and time again, Annie’s family have requested these photos, and each time they’ve been refused as well. The authorities say the reason for this refusal is because it’s not in the family’s interest, even though they’re the ones requesting them. It’s just like they’re being gaslighted, really. I don’t understand the decision-making around that, and that could be easily rectified.
Just show those photographs. It makes it look like there’s something to hide, and that’s either poor decision making or there’s something to hide. Annie seemed to love Edinburgh. She fell in love with the architecture.
Walking from where she lived, she’d have a nice walk into town. She applied for a job as a tour guide at the Whiskey Center, and that’s where she met people. Many of them were students working at the weekends, and many came from other countries. Annie’s reason to move to Scotland was to explore the world, meet new people, have fun.
She didn’t have so much responsibility. The last time Annie was speaking over the phone, she told her friend she was coming to visit and stay for a couple of days. She wanted to go to IKEA, her favorite place, and she was booking an appointment at her hairdresser’s on the Monday. What they learned afterwards from the police was that she had her passport, she had paid the rent for the entire month, and she had recently bought a leisure card at the swim center.
It was clear that she had been on her way home, just as she had told her friend. The police established that she traveled from Edinburgh to Glasgow Central Station. She got the train to Prestwick Airport to get a flight. They understood there was a flight that night to Sweden.
They established from her bank statement that she tried to take money out at Central Station. She first tried for £100, but she got knocked back. She didn’t have enough money in her account. She then tried to get £50 out, but she got knocked back as well.
And there’s something else. There were no records showing that Annie had booked a flight yet. And with no money, how was she going to fly home? There was no CCTV footage of this journey.
So they didn’t know if she spoke to anyone or met anyone while she was on the train. The journey takes just under an hour, and frustratingly, she was completely off grid. A detective was given the walkway to the airport CCTV. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
There’s nobody crossing that bridge unless there’s a train. So he was looking at every group of people coming off after every train. It’s a difficult job and it takes a lot of time to sit and eliminate everybody you see until you find somebody that fits her description. Then, there she was.
The first sighting was somebody with long hair fitting the description of Annie, at 15:14 and 45 seconds. She doesn’t look as if she’s in a hurry. She doesn’t look troubled. She’s on her own, and there appears to be nobody with her.
Two minutes later, at 15:15, she’s leaving the terminal immediately. When she leaves the airport, she comes out into this car park. There’s no CCTV footage out here. So they have no idea what she’s doing.
Is she looking for another cash point? Is she meeting someone? Is she smoking another cigarette? They just don’t know.
She was out there for, I think, three minutes, which they were unable to see because there was no CCTV. Then they see her entering the building again, and she’s frowning. It was like if Annie was meeting someone out on the parking lot, and that person didn’t show up. Psychologist Kerry Nixon builds personality profiles for police investigations.
There’s a reason she went to that airport, and the likely reason is that she was planning to get on the flight because she had her passport. But something changed her mind. We can see on CCTV that she leaves the airport and she’s outside for three minutes, and we don’t know what’s happening there. When she comes back into the airport, she looks distressed.
What happened at the airport? If you have made the decision to take your life and you have a plan, sometimes a person will have a particular place. But if that was the case, you would expect her to travel directly to the beach, not go to the airport, be seen in the airport, then leave and go to the beach. She’s out of the airport and they see her back on the tunnel going the opposite direction at 15:19 and 38 seconds.
To get to the beach from the airport would involve walking into Prestwick and turning right into Station Road. They had council CCTV on Station Road, and they found somebody on that at 15:40. It was likely her because she had white shoes, dark trousers, and she was carrying a bag. The crucial part was that it fitted with probably the only route she could have taken to get to the beach.
They put officers down there at the same time in subsequent days, appealing for witnesses. They found a witness who saw someone on the beach. They thought from the witness that it was likely to be Annie at that time. The witness spoke to them being quite far out, and he thought that was quite unusual.
This is Station Road. Just down there is the beach where Annie’s body was discovered. Police believe they can trace Annie’s route from the airport to the beach to this exact spot. They say she was picked up on CCTV from a camera just up there.
But I’ve got some big questions about what those images show. I managed to get my hands on the CCTV images that the police used to positively identify Annie on the walk that they say she made between the airport down Station Road and to the beach. When you look at them, I think they raise more questions than answers. The quality is just so poor.
Zoomed right in, the picture’s really grainy. I don’t think you can actually tell whether that’s a man or a woman, let alone if that’s Annie. Amir Anoir is a civil rights lawyer who is an expert at analyzing evidence presented in court. He agreed to look at Annie’s case.
I would have to say that taking the image at face value, it’s extremely blurry. You couldn’t make out, for instance, whether the person was male or female. In terms of the build being similar, it’s very difficult to assess from that image. You can’t really tell.
Is that hair long? Is it short? Is it blonde? Is it black?
Is it purple? If somebody tried to present this in court, then we would argue quite robustly that that’s not acceptable evidence. It’s not credible. You can see a person walking down the street.
Beyond that, what have they got? A bag? Is it a man? If you can’t even tell if somebody’s a man or a woman, then you’ve got problems.
The other reason the police are so confident that Annie went straight from the airport to the beach is because they believe they have a witness who saw her there. I tracked him down. It was late afternoon, the day before the body was discovered. A friend of mine and I were out for a walk.
Just when we got about here, he said to me, “There’s someone out on the sea edge there. ” In the gathering gloom, the figure was standing by the water’s edge looking out to sea, not really moving. I think the unusual thing about it was the fact that the person was the only one on the beach. Night was coming on.
We just walked on. That was about the extent of what I could bear witness to. It was not possible that I could have identified in that light, at that distance, that it was a man or a woman. They were really quite indistinguishable.
There is no way that I could have said that was definitely Annie. This is really interesting. A letter from the Scottish authorities to the Swedish embassy discussing Annie’s case. There’s something here that jumps out immediately, and it’s really significant.
It’s the part of this letter that says that a witness statement indicated that someone fitting her description was seen standing at the water’s edge looking out to sea at about 4:30. But the witness says he never said that. The Scottish police said they were content with the investigation and that the person with similar build, similar clothes, and looked like Annie had been spotted. “It is frustrating when somebody suggests that you didn’t investigate it properly, because we did.
The hours that I spent looking at CCTV to find her on the camera alone… we maybe didn’t find the answer, but we put the hours in and we tried. We established where she ended up and that she drowned, but we don’t know why she did it, and we’ll never know. ”
The family believed that in the days leading up to Annie’s death, something was bothering her. They think the police didn’t take this seriously.
Annie spoke with her brother and her father. She expressed concern about being traced. Something was worrying her about computers, something about web page addresses. They didn’t really know why she posed these questions.
The police suggested that their investigation wasn’t rigorous or thorough. “We did speak to 40 to 50 witnesses. We wanted to assure the family that we were doing everything we could. We were following all lines of inquiry.
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Annie’s family was also concerned that any physical evidence that could tell them more about what was going on in her life wasn’t being looked at properly by the police. The police had asked Goya, Annie’s mother, if she wanted to have some of Annie’s belongings sent back. Goya said, “Of course not. It’s evidence.
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When they went back home, they opened this parcel sitting in the kitchen. They discovered it was Annie’s clothes, turned inside out, still wet and sandy. The library books. Her mobile phone.
Her brother took her mobile phone, held it, and opened it. It was filled with pressed sand. They could see that nobody had examined Annie’s phone. The police sent all the stuff back at the same time as they returned her body.
At that point, the police were telling Annie’s family that they were still investigating her death. If that’s the case, why would they return her belongings to the family? That’s potential evidence from a crime scene. I needed an expert in phone systems to look into this.
Kinga is a cyber security and digital forensics professional. Like Annie, she studied and worked in Edinburgh. From the very start of the investigation, it seems like the phone was not properly investigated. In Annie’s case, she only had an old-fashioned phone.
You use them mostly for calling and texting your friends, not much more. The SIM card is basically the heart of it. The SIM card would have held information such as a contact list, a record of calls, and messages. Probably the SIM card was never taken out, was never examined, which is really a shame because the data was stored on the SIM card on the phone, not in the cloud.
I managed to get a hold of the Swedish police report that looks into the Scottish investigation. It mentions that the Scottish police requested Annie’s call history from a mobile provider. It reveals something really strange. In the 4 days leading up to Annie’s death, she made no calls.
What’s even weirder is that it also said that she received no calls. What is going on here? A friend who saw Annie just before she died heard her get a phone call. It was from Annie’s mom.
She could hear Annie’s side of it. Towards the end of the conversation, Annie said something along the lines of, “Mom, you have to trust me on this one. I have to sort this out by myself. ” She didn’t explain the context of it.
She said she was fine. Nothing for me to worry about. Then she left, and that was the last I saw of her. There’s no record of any call at all in this call history.
But we now know for certain that Annie did receive a call the day before she died from her mom, because her friend was there and witnessed it. So something is wrong because this just doesn’t add up. Someone or Annie could have deleted the history of calls in her phone. However, that would not alter the records that the service provider would have.
So either she had a second phone that no one knew about, or the records were destroyed, and that would require a higher authority to command something like that. That’s where you start to think, what is going on here? Who’s taken that step to delete phone records? That is worrying.
You can’t do that if you’re a member of the public. It’s difficult for the police to do that. The people who can do that, of course, are the security services. Why on earth would security services be interested in Annie Borusen?
To me, it seems totally bizarre. Well, it turns out there are other people out there who think it’s possible that something really strange could have been going on. A journalist with Sky News said there are elements that just make you feel uneasy. Annie Christina Borusen shares her name with an Emmy award-winning US journalist called Christina Borusen, who built a reputation on investigating the secret services in America.
She was a thorn in the side of the CIA, to the point that she was run out of really high-profile jobs. At the time that Annie Borusen is found dead, the American government are relocating prisoners from the Middle East through Prestwick Airport to prisons like Guantanamo Bay. Obviously, it was extremely confidential at the time. There’s lots of talk about rendition.
It’s an open secret that CIA flights land at Prestwick. If there’s a journalist who’s based here and investigating, then yeah, they’ll keep a watchful eye, probably in conjunction with the local security services too. People have put two and two together, or four, and thought she’s killed in a case of mistaken identity by agents of the US state. As a theory, it seems totally bizarre.
But there are so many unanswered questions surrounding Annie’s death. You can see why people might start to look for answers in unusual places. It’s been 2 years since Annie died, and her mom, Goya, returns to the beach where Annie’s body was discovered, looking for answers. She thinks the area was never properly investigated.
If you want to find out what happened to Annie, she thinks the answers might lie on the beach at Prestwick. The detective sergeant tried to establish the facts. The facts were that Annie traveled by train to Prestwick Airport, walked to Prestwick Beach, and was seen by a witness quite far out on the beach. She found herself in the sea of her own free will, apparently, because there was no evidence that there was foul play.
That was the police view of what happened to Annie at the beach. But is it credible? According to the police, an eyewitness places Annie standing on the shoreline in front of the sailing club at about 4:00 in the afternoon. 16 hours later, her body is found in front of two abandoned cottages, about 400 meters along the beach at the top end.
During that time, the tide has come in and gone out. Is it possible that someone could enter the water at this point, die by drowning, and then the next day wash up at this end of the beach? There are so many variables at play here. Understanding the tidal conditions and the geography of the beach are crucial.
I needed some specialist help. Jack Gregorius is an oceanographer and trained lifeguard. He’s an expert in how currents behave along the coast and how people get into trouble in the sea. I was really fascinated by the story of Annie just because of how odd it all sounded.
The reason we’re at this particular spot is because this is where the police say the eyewitness thought they saw Annie standing at the water’s edge. She would have walked down from the top of the beach down to the shoreline here. We need to make sure that the tidal conditions are exactly the same as what they were on the evening Annie entered the water. Jack paddled out for a while, a long way out to sea.
It took a bit of effort to get there. He was intrigued to see how deep it actually was. Despite paddling for all that distance, he was still not even waist deep. If you were to take your own life on a beach like this, you would have had to have been so determined, because you’d have to go so far out to sea to get to a point where you can’t touch the bottom.
Just doesn’t feel right that someone would try and take their own life by swimming out into the sea here. For Annie to get out of her depth in the bay, she’d have had to walk nearly half a mile out into the bay. That’s a huge distance walking through water. What kind of swimmer was Annie?
Annie had recently bought a leisure card at the Dalai Swim Center. She went on a regular basis where she was swimming. She was a strong swimmer. Annie didn’t take her life.
Definitely not. Not a chance. And definitely not in that way they have described it. That she had been drowning, it’s impossible.
Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton has seen cases of people walking into the sea. Walking into the sea in December is a very serious situation. I’ve had experience of people being in for 10 or 15 minutes walking out into the sea, and they have to go to hospital because it is very cold. They don’t last long in December without getting hypothermia.
It can sometimes be a cry for help. To be able to hold your head underwater for long enough for you to drown simply voluntarily would be almost impossible. I can’t recall seeing a case, particularly of a woman deliberately drowning herself in order to end her life, in all my career. When Annie’s family first came back to Prestwick, there was one big question that they felt the police had failed to consider.
When her body was found, she was discovered right next to the sea wall, and right next to it, meters away, were her jacket and her bag. If you think about it, Annie and her possessions have been out floating in the sea potentially all night, and they’ve all come back in and landed at the exact same spot. Is that even possible? It’s just really easy to understand why her family find that really difficult to accept.
They think it means that instead, Annie was murdered elsewhere and then placed on the beach with her belongings to make it look as though she drowned there. It’s just awful that they live with that thought every day. Nobody’s ever fully investigated whether or not it’s possible that Annie and her possessions could have washed up so close together. Until now.
We went to the exact spot where Annie’s body was found by the eyewitness. We had a replica of Annie’s body and her belongings. Her coat was found approximately here, and a bag was found here. The official police line is that she entered the water 400 yards down the beach over that way.
The big question has always been whether it’s credible that three objects of different shapes and sizes, different weights, could all wash up in such close proximity. We came up with a way to test it. We got a weighted dry suit designed to mimic a floating body in the water, made to be the same weight as Annie, made so it floats face down just like a dead body would. We got her jacket here and a bag.
We attached GPS tracking devices to them so we could track them after we launched them into the sea. We were going to watch where the items ended up as the tide turned. In order to make the experiment as accurate as possible, we needed to replicate the tidal conditions of the evening as best as we could. According to the police, Annie was last seen at the water’s edge at 4:30 that evening, which was exactly two hours before low tide.
So we launched the objects exactly two hours before low tide as well. We were on the observation boat at a depth of 2 meters. It’s this sort of depth where she’d be unable to touch the bottom. This would be where she would start to get into trouble.
GPS tracking was on, the lights were on. There was the body, coat, and the bag. They were all together right now. The observation boat kept a constant eye on them.
We launched the objects about an hour ago off the boat. We were able to track them using GPS. However, something happened which has really surprised me. High tide’s in another 5 hours from now, and that’s when I would have expected the items to have got washed up.
However, all three of the objects have already hit the shore. Here we are with the replica of Annie’s body. It was only launched an hour ago, and it’s already hit the shore. Got the bag behind me over here, and then Annie’s coat is just down the beach over there.
Clearly they’re not together, but it’s not yet high tide. So we’re not sure what’s going to happen and where they’re going to end up. I’ll keep monitoring. Something that’s important to note here is that the police believe that on the night Annie entered the water at approximately 4:30 in the evening.
If the same thing had happened to her as what has happened to the replicas, she would have been washed up on the shoreline at 5:30, an hour later. The tides finally started to drop out. This is incredible. We’ve got the replica of Annie’s body right in front of me here.
We’ve got the coat a couple feet to the side, a bag a couple feet to the other side. We launched the items approximately half a mile down to sea, and they’ve all come together in the same formation that Annie was found relative to her items on the morning. I would never have expected all of these items to be washed up together in the same spot. You can see that all the other debris also come to this spot as well.
Clearly the currents at this beach are unique in the way that they funnel all the debris and floating objects into this one location on the beach. Normally, on a beach with less defined currents, you’d end up with items getting scattered all over the place. Clearly the currents are a lot stronger than what they look when you just look at this calm beach. It’s remarkable.
The even more crazy thing is that this is just within a couple of feet of where Annie was actually found that morning. So the tidal conditions at Prestwick Beach do make it possible for different objects to wash up all together in exactly the same spot where Annie was found. This totally contradicts the family’s belief that the three things couldn’t have drifted in together, and that she was put there by the person that killed her. Despite all this, one thing that we do know is that Annie died by drowning.
Her postmortem, the police, and her family all seem to agree. But the question is, how did Annie drown? In 2007, a possible answer appeared because her family decided to pay for private tests from tissue samples from Annie’s body. The results talked about something called diatoms, some of the smallest things imaginable.
This was way out of the field of expertise of the journalist. He got advice from Dr. Kirsty Scott, an expert in environmental forensic analysis whose research looks at diatoms as a form of forensic evidence. Diatoms are microscopic algae, approximately four times thinner than a human hair.
We can’t see them with the naked eye, and they’re extremely important biologically and ecologically. They produce about 20 to 40% of the oxygen that we breathe. We find them in rivers, ponds, lakes, and any surfaces that are exposed to water. The presence of diatoms in Annie’s bone marrow is an important indicator of death by drowning.
If somebody was in the water and struggling, they would breathe in quite a lot of the water which contains diatoms, and that will transfer into the bloodstream. In Annie’s case, she must have been breathing, or she must have been alive for quite a long time, for the diatoms to reach the bone marrow. There are certain species we find in freshwater environments and certain species we find in marine environments. Dr.
Scott was provided with a sample from Prestwick Beach. What they could see were some classic marine diatom species with broad characteristics that they’re quite rounded. She would expect to see in Annie’s tissue sample the same diatom species as at Prestwick Beach. But looking at them side by side, the diatom species in Annie’s bone marrow had an elongated shape.
They were completely different to the diatom species found in Prestwick Beach. What they were seeing was a diatom species that they typically find in freshwater environments. If Annie had died by drowning in Prestwick Bay, why were freshwater diatoms in her body rather than marine ones? Since Annie didn’t have any saltwater diatoms within her system, I think something very terrible happened to her.
It was a fight of some kind. I strongly believe that someone knew Prestwick Beach very well and placed her there so that she would be found. I wouldn’t have put myself through this if I wasn’t convinced that Annie was murdered. Annie’s family think that the fact that she has freshwater diatoms in her system and not saltwater ones is hard evidence that she’d been drowned somewhere else and then moved to Prestwick to make it look like suicide.
If that’s true, then that’s just incredible. But are diatoms really that reliable as evidence in this kind of case? There are innocent explanations for diatoms being there which don’t involve a nefarious act. They could have been there as a result of inhaling water at some other point in life, and indeed the potential for contamination as the sample was obtained.
The logical thing to do if there are other samples that could be analyzed would be to analyze them to come to a robust conclusion. To be absolutely sure, Annie’s family need to do further testing. They were really excited about this. They contacted the Swedish authorities to arrange more tests.
But this is the response that they got. They got knocked back. The Swedish authorities blocked it. They refused to release any more samples of Annie’s body tissue.
Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they want to help get a definitive answer? They even had a professor in Stockholm who was willing to make an additional test, pro bono, with her entire department, for their sake, for Annie’s sake, to make an extended test. However, the Swedish authorities refused.
The forensic tests showed that the microbes found in Annie’s body indicated that she could have drowned in fresh water. The nearest freshwater source is about 2 miles in either direction from this spot. How on earth could freshwater microbes turn up in her body and not saltwater ones? There are ramps down onto the beach.
It is possible to get a car along here. Someone was really determined to get a body down here without being seen. You could have done it. So, if Annie really was murdered, the big question is who did it?
Most victims of murder are killed by someone they know, someone they already have a relationship with. Had Annie met someone who could have harmed her? Annie loved the opportunities of Edinburgh. It was easy for her to talk to other people.
I don’t know if it was that easy for her to make close friends. I think she made a lot of acquaintances. Annie could have quite a strong personality, and she wasn’t shy voicing her opinion about things. Sometimes that didn’t click well with everyone.
Annie was really open in meeting people, whether it was on the street or in a shop or in a pub. It’s a good thing to see the good in people, but sometimes they can use you. It’s a thin line between being naive or stupid. We know Annie enjoys being out in the town, meeting people, doing new things.
We also know that for young women, through no fault of their own, that can come with risks. I’ve been chasing the Scottish police for information for months now, and they’ve always told me that there’s no crime to be investigated. Basically, there’s nothing to see here. To help find answers, Annie’s family asked the Swedish police to get involved.
On request, the Scottish police gave them access to their investigation. And this is the Swedish report into Annie’s case. It was like Christmas morning, honestly. Bank statements, pathology reports, embassy correspondence, press cuttings, but crucially, witness statements.
Basically, everything. While digging through all the statements, there were loads of references to Annie meeting with a rugby player. And there’s a name: Martin Leslie. A guy came forward to her with a drink.
They started to speak and they really hit it off. He was very charming and he was interested in Annie while she was in Scotland. He spoke about his rugby career, and he said they almost spoke three and a half hours. She also mentioned that he repeatedly said to her, “Oh, well, please have a glass and please drink.
” Annie was careful with accepting anything, and she thought everything was nice, and she of course hoped to meet him again. According to Annie, this guy Martin Leslie tells her he’s a Scottish international rugby player. Here he is. Martin Leslie is originally from New Zealand, but he played for Scotland 37 times.
He’s a proper famous sportsman. Totally her type. Annie loves rugby. She goes to matches and nights out at the local rugby club.
And actually, she had a ticket from the last game that she ever went to. I went to the rugby club she used to go to. Bill Fel, president of the club, said they have a history of welcoming people who came to Edinburgh for their jobs. The night he met Annie was on a Friday night in 2005.
She turned up alone and sat at the side of the room entirely on her own. Because she was on her own, he had approached her and asked, “Was she meeting a club member or something specific there? ” But she said she was expecting somebody to arrive. So he just left her to it and said, “Hope you enjoy the evening.
” And he went back to the bar. The police did phone him and ask if she had attended these functions, which all he could do was confirm. She’s hanging out at the rugby clubhouse on her own. So who is it she’s expecting to see?
Maria said that Annie was hoping that she’d meet up with Martin Leslie again. Annie went to the rugby clubhouse. She didn’t expect to meet this man, but she of course hoped he was there. And he just passed her.
He didn’t look at her. Annie didn’t think so much about it. Maybe he didn’t recognize her. Suddenly he stopped and turned, and he gave her a mean look, and then he just turned away and walked away.
Annie told her friend she felt scared. It was really strange. In the last conversation they had, Annie felt that he wasn’t the guy for her. Even if she thought that they truly connected, something was wrong with him.
It says here in the Swedish documents that the police did track down and did question Martin Leslie. This is huge. It says here that when they finally got hold of Martin Leslie, he said that he hadn’t been in Scotland since 2003 and he had no idea who Annie Borusen was. Look at this bio of Martin Leslie that I’ve just found online.
Martin Leslie returned home to New Zealand in 2003 and never came back. That’s 2 years before Annie said that they’d met. So whoever Annie thought that she was speaking to, it absolutely wasn’t Martin Leslie, because he was 11,000 miles away. So who is Annie speaking to?
Is it some kind of impostor? A fraud? Forensic psychologist Dr. Kerry Nixon thinks one of the most peculiar parts of this case is the Martin Leslie character.
The fact that she seemed to have an interest in rugby makes her vulnerable to this man who’s pretending to be a rugby player. If there was somebody impersonating him, they’re impersonating somebody who’s well known. If somebody looks like somebody who’s famous, they can manipulate that. That’s a way of trying to lure women, for example.
There could be some quite devious, predatory reasons why somebody would be doing that. There don’t seem to be any witnesses to these encounters other than Annie herself. There’s no independent record of her being seen with this man. And if you think about it, why would someone pretending to be a famous rugby player go to a rugby club?
That’s the last place he would go. On international days, it wasn’t uncommon for internationalists to pop in who would visit the clubhouse for a pint after the game. But I don’t recall Martin Leslie ever visiting our clubhouse. If Martin Leslie had visited our clubhouse, I think we would have known about it, or somebody would have recognized him and mentioned it.
The retired detectives involved in the original investigation said there was a suggestion there was an impostor pretending to be Martin Leslie, but they understood that she knew who Martin Leslie was. The things that she was describing happening in Edinburgh to her mother weren’t in fact happening. There was no evidence that she’d been with Martin Leslie, and there were no witnesses who talked about an impostor. Once they proved that Martin Leslie wasn’t in the country at the time, they thought it’s far more realistic to think that there was no relationship with Martin Leslie, and that was a figment of Annie’s imagination.
The police think the Martin Leslie story was a fantasy and there was no impostor. Going through more of the Swedish files, Annie’s work placement at the whiskey center had finished. So she was unemployed and looking for work. There’s a statement from a flatmate of Annie’s, and it says they got the impression Annie was depressed because she couldn’t get a job, and they describe Annie as being very lonely.
This one’s interesting. It’s from a flatmate of Annie’s who, by coincidence, was Swedish. She said she had to move out because Annie just became too much. It became stressful to be with Annie when Annie was so pushy and intense.
Another flatmate says Annie told her she had made a decision that would change her life. This was 3 days before she was found dead. The picture that they were getting from the people they were speaking to was that Annie’s life in Scotland was completely different to the life her family were led to believe she was leading. She was depressive.
She had low mood. She was obsessive at times, with people saying that she was obsessed with them. Her lifestyle was kind of leading them down that path that she potentially had mental health issues. It definitely wasn’t the happy-go-lucky life that her family thought she was living in Edinburgh.
Out of all these witness statements, there seems to be one that really stands out. It’s from someone who owned a shop near to where Annie lived. Annie started dropping by regularly, talking to him for hours at a time. He describes Annie as unconventional and that she seemed lost in life.
He says to police that he’s at home one night, and Annie suddenly came in without knocking. He asked Annie how she found his house, and he says that she replied that she’d followed him home. It’s really hard to read through all that, because these statements paint a picture of somebody who’s obviously not happy. If you think about it, Annie’s a young woman, a long way from home with dreams of making a life for herself in a city that she loves.
Maybe those dreams just weren’t going as well for her as she’d hoped. It’s possible to imagine a situation where she didn’t want to talk about any of this with her friends and family back home. A forensic psychologist said there could be two explanations. It could indicate that she had instability of mood and she was entering some kind of episode of ill mental health.
But it also could indicate that she was under threat and something was going on, and she felt scared, and that was impacting on her behavior. It’s important to remember that Annie’s family and friends have a deep mistrust of the Scottish investigation. They have even said that the police used these interviews selectively to paint an unfair picture of Annie, to back up their original theory of suicide. Even if Annie was struggling with parts of her life, it doesn’t automatically mean that she was planning to take her own life.
There are friends that we spoke to who met Annie the day before she died who said that she was acting normally. All these things we identify as strange behaviors that seem to indicate that she might have been distressed could also be behaviors that make her more vulnerable and could have gotten her into trouble with someone. “I’d love back then to have given Annie’s mother a reason for Annie’s death. There was never anything at all in the whole investigation to indicate that there was any criminality involved in Annie’s death.
There was nothing from that crime scene to prove anything other than a suicide or a tragic accident. ”
With a case like this, there is so much detail. There’s a huge amount of documents, photographs, and expert analysis, and the files from the Swedish authorities that opened new information. I still can’t definitively say if Annie was murdered, or that sadly she did take her own life.
But what I’m certain of is there are a whole load of questions about this case which I still find completely inexplicable. Annie was found on Prestwick Beach on the west coast of Scotland at 8:23 a. m. on Sunday the 5th of December 2005.
Three days after Annie’s body was found, a postmortem was carried out. According to this report, there is no evidence of violence or that she has been beaten. Annie’s body is then flown back to Sweden, and this is when the entire case explodes. When the coffin is opened, the people who see Annie’s body report bruising.
The expert we spoke to says this could only have happened while she’s alive. Dead people do not bruise, and that needs to be explained. The bruising the family say they witnessed on Annie wasn’t mentioned in the Scottish postmortem. The authorities’ explanation is that these marks might have been faint before becoming more pronounced over time.
There would be one way to clear this all up. A police photographer was present at the postmortem, but the authorities refused to release these photos. It makes it look like there’s something to hide. In the days leading up to her death, Annie told her family that she thought someone might be listening into her calls.
When the police looked into her call records, there are no records of Annie using her phone in the 4 days leading up to her death. But we know that’s not true. “It’s very strange to hear that they don’t have a record of that phone call ever happening. That call definitely did happen.
I was in the room. ”
The police acknowledge that these call records are missing, but there’s still no explanation for that. They say the investigation has not been able to show why the telephone call in question is not registered. And just when you think you’ve seen and heard all there is in the Annie Borusen case, unbelievably, there’s one last twist.
Rob Milhern, another journalist looking into Annie’s case, wanted to find out about what the Swedish government knew about Annie. There were communications being passed between the Swedish embassy, so they would definitely have material. He put in a request for information at the highest level. He asked to see private correspondence between the Scottish and Swedish governments regarding Annie’s death.
Here’s the reply he got. They refused. The reason they say is that releasing any material relating to Annie could harm their relations with a foreign state. The Swedish government, this is not the police, but the government, have marked Annie’s case as a classified state secret.
Classifying documents in relation to a straightforward drowning, that doesn’t add up. Why mark them top secret? If you lost a relative in these circumstances, would you be happy if the state decided their secrets were more important than your search for answers? If there’s nothing to hide here, then show us everything you have.
But there obviously is something to hide in this case. The police have always said that there were no flaws in the investigation and that they keep an open mind. There’s a new department in Scotland called the Fatalities Investigation Unit, established specifically to investigate suspicious and unexplained deaths. There’s plenty of material here they should be looking at.
I’ll be making sure that they receive a copy of this. It’s the least we can do for Annie’s family. My heart is crying. The family had to bury Annie without knowing what happened.
It’s very hard to go on with your life. How can I rest my head before I know what happened? I have to go on until I find the answers. I found another one of Annie’s songs.
It’s nice to hear her voice again. I’ve been concentrating on the story of Annie Borusen for longer than I ever thought that I would. The really upsetting thing for me is that if Annie was the victim of a crime, it’s just awful that the person or people responsible could still be out there walking the streets. And if she did take her own life by walking into the sea of her own free will, well, at that moment, she must have believed that things were so bad, so bad that they couldn’t be fixed, and that no one cared about her.
And nothing could be further from the truth.
