Ingold Wood - 22nd December 2021
If she was tied up after death that would explain why very little blood was found on the trousers. It’s possible she was tied for the purpose of making it easier to move her body.
So the tying isn’t a fetishised behaviour and is just a practicality in this scenario.
Jodi was 5ft7 and well-built. It would have been difficult for one person alone to move her
Dani Justice - 11th January 2022
Articles from newspaper Daily Record from July 1st 2003 through to around April 2004
Will be adding more from 2004 onwards soon.
#justiceforjodiandluke
#trialbymedia
#fromthearchives
Ingold Wood
Amazing work with compiling this archive. I'm guessing you ordered the old copies?
I think it's so important to have a record of how the investigation progressed in real time. All the way through you can plainly see the press leading the narrative and I think exerting pressure on police for an outcome.
It seems like then, as now, they were struggling for a motive for Jodi's murder.
I'm not sure why they used the younger photo of her- very misleading to put that on posters.
I'm looking at the article about a dispute at the school. What was happening there?
Dani Justice
Ingold Wood Anyone can access these and any other scottish newspapers at library....i have every daily rag article up to the most recent ( posting more soon) and articles from other papers from 1st July onwards ....it"s a daunting job sitting through each daily paper but for me it is important to have it all there. Can't hide the mess when they printed it at the time!
That wasn't regarding the murder it was about the two schools being separated due to religion....would not be in there if not for all the talk about Jodi's murder so i just snapped a pic to show how much they where printing around the case x
Ingold Wood
Dani Justice your library is definitely better than mine! I was looking for some local stuff a while back and they directed me to newspaper archives online that I would have to pay a subscription for.
I’m just imagining you sitting there all day going through the articles…..true detective! For those of us who can’t get hold of them it’s such a great resource.
There’s one I noticed about police and the “fiscal” allegedly having a disagreement about taking the case to prosecution. That was interesting because I wonder if there was some reluctance to proceed based on the evidence they had. Seems the police were pushing for the prosecution to go ahead. They denied any falling out but it looks like there was some tension over the issue. The fiscal would be a government organisation? We don’t have that here.
I think they would look for any local story in the area following Jodi’s murder. Especially if it involved religion. They probably allocated reporters to sniff out every bit of local gossip.
It must have been traumatic for the kids at their school.
The coverage is very polarising too- we’ve got the tragedy of Jodi’s murder presented as though she was a small child rather than a teenager. They seem to have a very unrealistic view of young people. Jodi aged 14 was a young child but Luke at the same age was reported on like a criminal adult. Readers don’t understand the level of manipulation occurring here.
I now have the words “violent wee laddie” stuck in my head as it’s just so inappropriate but also I’m English so I don’t hear that expression often, fortunately.
Mind you, I’m reading some West Memphis 3 case files at the moment and the media coverage directed at teen boys in Arkansas is just as concerning. Early on the media got hold of that case and police leaked a “confession” by one of the accused to the press.
Sandra Lean
Ingold Wood I'm not convinced the media was putting pressure on the police for an outcome - I think the two organisations were working hand in hand to ensure a specific outcome. When you look back, so much of the information being printed by the media could only have been coming from the police - the media were there in droves for both of the raids on Luke's home - the only way they could possibly have known to be there was if the information was leaked to them - and there's only one place that could have come from.
Likewise, the photos of Luke's bedroom - the only people with photos of the inside of the house were the police themselves, so how did the media get a hold of them?
It might just be a stunning coincidence that the media reported Jodi's aunts specifically talking about Jodi borrowing her sister's clothes on the very day the police were handing exactly that "possible explanation" to SK about his DNA on Jodi's t-shirt - what are the chances???
Ingold Wood
Sandra Lean you know, I wondered about those photos of his bedroom. They are on Getty Images I think. What’s interesting there is who would own the copyright? Not just leaked them but sold them. Legally how does that stand?
Sorry to bang on about WM3 but the famous lake knife recovered from the lake behind Baldwin’s home was also a prime photo opportunity. After searching for half an hour the diver surfaced and triumphantly held up the suspicious object for the waiting cameras.
I’ve missed the stuff regarding the aunts but did find it recently in your book. Their press conference is online in archived video and it looks like they did some print interviews around the same time. They appeared to have become the spokespersons for her family at the time.
Why would it even be necessary to mention she borrowed JaJ’s clothes? I mean what relevance would it even have to the public?
Folks must have been in and out of AW’s house daily, swapping clothes and sharing washing machines.
It really is very peculiar.
Ingold Wood
Rachel Roll Luke was intelligent and asserted himself in the interviews. They read this as arrogant and confrontational. He was questioning the authority of the police rather than bending to it.
But you have to remember most of their contact with young people involved seeing them as criminals. They don’t seem to have been big on outreach or educational programmes.
Even for 2003 their approach was outdated and authoritarian. But that might have something to do with having middle aged men in charge. And to an extent they were thrown by the crime itself- offences against young girls and children tend to heighten emotions.
The utter lack of awareness of youth culture is shown in CD’s insistence that they look for suspicious material in Luke’s home such as anything by Marilyn Manson.
Where the Dahlia link came from is still beyond me.
Who would look at a crime scene such as this one and make that connection?
Oh the evils of popular music.
I can’t help thinking that if Jodi’s body had been discovered in the middle of Holyrood Park by a city police team the outcome would have been very different.
The apparent lack of motive drove them to fantastical conclusions. They were stymied in the investigation by their natural desire to make sense out of something that may never make sense.
What happened to Jodi was the product of someone’s violent imagination but we don’t need to go to Goth culture to find a perpetrator.
Anyone with a knife and bad intentions is more than capable.
The reality is much more mundane than anything CD could dream up.
Dani Justice
Ingold Wood The Mitchell library is my haunt haha i sit in 2-3 times a week researching....i have lots of notes on other scottish crimes i didn't know about but where printed about at the time. At one point in 2004 a 17 year old killer escaped from being held and was on the run...then after that a few others got away by mistake...crazy times. Lots and lots to look into now thanks to the archives available. I noticed the criminal justice in Scotland 2003 onwards was (still is) broke and a mess. Really is telling tbh when it comes to Luke's case and the people involved just by the amount was printed and lothian and borders/midloathian was really busy in the papers too...Mr Nimmo was in an article about a woman who committed a crime but didnt sentence due to trial drug she was to take....very strange! i have so much to sort and can post more regularly :) here's me being super serious reading every single day of the rag 🤣🤣😒🤓😨🤦♀️
Ingold Wood
Dani Justice oh love it! You need to start a blog or a podcast to cover all the stuff you’re discovering.
Most of my research isn’t local although where I live we have our own crime stories but nothing that ever really hit the headlines. Back in the 1960s we’ve got Mary Bell the 10 year old “Tyneside strangler” who murdered several children along with her friend Norma Bell. That’s our most famous and long before the Jamie Bulger case. She got a similar sentence and was released a few years later.
We’ve had quite a lot of organised crime related to the nightclub scene.
About 10 years ago we also had the case of Raul Moat who killed a police officer and became a sort of folk hero after an extensive search and chase.
Our next crime meeting on Zoom is about Damien Nettles who disappeared from the Isle of Wight in 1996. His mother thinks he was killed by a drug dealer but he was either drunk or using drugs on the night he disappeared and some suspect he fell into the sea.
Ingood Wood - 2nd December 2021
Michele Scott is this from Sandra’s book regarding the DNA sample found in a condom in the cave?
So if I have this right we can identify SK and JaF as donors but not the other three. SK is mixed with an unknown donor?
So SK’s semen survives a washing cycle to end up on Jodi’s T-shirt then by inappropriate management of the crime scene becomes mixed with some unknown person’s semen? If this is accurate then what are the chances?
So we have SK potentially by innocent transfer. Then we have conform man which may have an innocent explanation such as a condom fetish. Strange I know but possible.
However what about the other 3? In that location on that night we have 3 other people depositing semen.
Semen doesn’t have much of a shelf life and of all the places it is found close to her body?
I’d need to know if any of those samples were found directly on her body or on her clothing.
We have no evidence of sexual assault to Jodi and I’m assuming no DNA was found inside her body.
Lianna Mackie
Ingold Wood no dna inside her body.
Yes, the information about the cave is in Sandra’s book. We will get a post up covering more about the DNA, hopefully tomorrow.
Ingold Wood
Lianna Mackie that’s great thanks.
Ingold Wood - 17th January 2022
What seems to have thrown everywhere off is how they perceived the crime. It was reported as a “frenzied knife attack” but never any suggestion of a sexual element despite finding a naked and bound teenage girl. If we went through the archived press reports would we find any reference to a possible sex crime? I don’t know why that wasn’t considered in view of the various semen results recovered.
Did they pass on the full DNA results to the FBI?
They had nothing of real evidence to support their suspicions of Luke and I think they were hoping for a behavioural profile of killer/s that would rule him in and justify further investigation of him.
But the profile can only be based on supposition eg what the crime scene behaviour tells us about the offender in terms of age, social demographics, sexuality etc.
None of this provided a link to Luke but it would be interesting to know what it did say.
They would also look at Jodi as a victim and the location.
It’s known that younger and more inexperienced offenders choose younger victims. Was Jodi “selected” or just a victim of opportunity?
Who would be in that area at that time?
Those are the behavioural questions.
And who could disappear quickly, unnoticed, to then clean themselves up?
There was nothing nearby except the school.
Do we have an approximate distance to the school building from the area where the body was found?
What would be interesting to know, and maybe someone could research, is whether there were any acts of vandalism reported locally around the time of the murder.
I think they were looking for “similar offences” in terms of violent assaults to young girls, which did not occur, but other senseless acts involving violence to property could be a gateway to how this crime came about and why nothing similar happened again.
Ingold Wood
Rachel Roll thanks for checking that out. I didn’t know they’d made any reference to a possible sexual motive and it’s interesting that the theory changed so quickly without any developments in the investigation.
The only development appears to be that they said, out of nowhere, they couldn’t “rule Luke out”. I believe CD said that. But on what basis because there were so many others they couldn’t rule out either who were seen right at the crime scene. Also what about interviewing known sex offenders? Questioning anyone from the school?
That takes time yet only a few days after the murder they had Luke in for questioning. At that point they wouldn’t have had any results back from other enquiries.
I’ll have to check but I think that was an early article online with CD speaking.
As they were interviewing Luke they were also searching for cave man who abandoned burned items in a nearby cave. Until they located him he was surely suspicious.
So they had these parallel lines of enquiry which were just that- an enquiry to produce evidence of who was responsible, not to confirm an assumption of guilt.
And 5-6 minutes to walk from the school to the scene.
Do you know if the school shows up on Google maps?
Ingold Wood
Danielle Bbarclay thanks so much. I knew I’d seen something like this before but didn’t realise it was so close. If you were a kid at that school the woods would be a perfect place for a sly smoke.
Sandra Lean
Ingold Wood We don't know what information the FBI was shown (or, indeed, what was withheld from them), any more than we know what was in the final report. That that is considered "acceptable" in this day and age is totally beyond me. We now know that there were far more people around that afternoon/evening than the case files would suggest and that there were other people brought to the attention of the police because members of the public were concerned about their behaviours, etc - that information, for sure, would not have been available to the FBI back in 2004 and would surely have had an impact on their findings?
However, the points made in the original post and those afterwards is the selectiveness of Scottish police about when they would rely on the FBI's findings and when they would ignore them. Because FBI profiles are not admissible in our courts (to my knowledge), once again, investigators are off the hook. If it was standardised (for example, any FBI involvement has to be disclosed to the court, whether the report supports or undermines the prosecution case, then this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen.
Ingold Wood
Sandra Lean (Sorry long reply. I’ve been reading through all the new posts and finding so much I didn’t know or hadn’t thought of before.)
yes I agree there was a need for transparency and accountability in how the investigation was conducted. This is after all public money. Selective perception and rejection of expert opinions runs through the case- the “ritual crimes” academic seemed to be of the opinion there was no ritual basis but has stated in his own book that he was repeatedly phoned at home by CD who was behaving obsessively. That comes across strongly- pressure was being placed on individuals identified as experts to produce the desired result. This is the point where someone should have stepped in and reorganised the investigation team. The crucial flaw is lack of independent oversight. In academia your supporting research is peer reviewed to ensure validity and quality. It should also be the case with an investigation. When things go off course they often bring in another force to review their practices and this should have happened very early on. No qualified independent source was backing their theory of the crime or motive. There’s a terrible sort of arrogance and complacency and as we know out of this grows the capacity for negligence.
True we don’t know what information was given to the FBI but as part of the behavioural profile they would absolutely need to know about the footfall in the area, proximity to the school and the fact the school was open and busy when it usually wouldn’t be.
Also I didn’t realise it was so close to where the body was found. Is it our Blue Beacon Truck Wash? When I talk about WM3 people say oh they went into an isolated forest and were murdered, not realising that they were found a very short distance from one of the busiest road stops in the United States. I can always predict the response when I show them a photo of the truck wash a few hundred yards away.
Not that we can reliably form any connection to the nearby school but wouldn’t it raise some questions with that extra footfall? And the fact kids might be mingling in the area, maybe having a smoke in the woods? Even in the sense that they could have been witnesses.
Behaviours related to that location are so important and would form part of the analysis just as forensics would.
We’ve also heard from a girl who claimed they were chased in the woods that night, although this may not have been known at the time or disclosed.
In the trial there was a witness to a man behaving strangely behind some houses and I think the girl posted in one of the groups about what she saw.
Thanks again for your thoughts. Look forward to your posts when you have some free time.
