Some people are prepared to believe in extremely unlikely scenarios rather than accepting the most probable explanations. Eddie was never shown to alert to coconuts imo.
'Human bone' at centre of Jersey children's home inquiry is actually a piece of wood or coconut shellBy DAVID ROSE
Last updated at 23:26 18 May 2008
The "remains of a child" discovered by police investigating allegations of abuse at a former children's home on Jersey is really a small piece of wood or broken coconut shell, The Mail on Sunday has learned.
The discovery of the fragment in February prompted police to open an inquiry into a possible murder at the Haut de la Garenne home; and this week detectives are set to announce further evidence which they believe shows that another two dead children were buried in the cellar.
But Jersey police were told almost six weeks ago that tests by Britain's top carbon-dating laboratory showed that the original evidence – supposedly a fragment of a child's skull – was not bone.
The island's controversial deputy police chief, Lenny Harper, who is heading the investigation, has consistently failed to mention the vital results in public statements since the tests were completed.
Interviewed in the home last Tuesday, he repeated: "It is a fragment of a human body...we don't know how, when or where that person died."
Last night Mr Harper admitted that his team had received emails reporting the test results on April 8, including a message that stated: "This one ain't bone."
But he insisted that had "never seen" a letter setting out the findings in more detail, which was addressed to him personally and dated May 1, until it was emailed to him yesterday.
Mr Harper also conceded that "clothing and other items" which he previously said had been found at the home – fuelling speculation that a child's grave had been unearthed – amounted to a piece of a button and a leather toggle.
However, he said he remained confident that the fragment was bone, based on the opinion of his forensic anthropologist, Julie Roberts, even though she had not been able to carry out detailed tests.
"As far as I am concerned, it was diagnosed as bone, and bone it remains," he said.
Scientists from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit spent weeks investigating the fragment with the world's most sophisticated equipment, whereas Ms Roberts had to reach her conclusion in a hurry – between the fragment's discovery at 9.30am on February 24 and Mr Harper's Press conference that afternoon.
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His murder inquiry began when Eddie, an "enhanced victim recovery dog", began barking in the cellar of Haut de la Garenne – the sign, according to its handler, that he had detected the scent of human remains.
By coincidence, the dog, from South Yorkshire Police, is the same animal that supposedly picked up "the scent of death" in the apartment where Madeleine McCann was last seen in Praia de Luz in Portugal.
According to Mr Harper, Eddie smelled the decades-old skull fragment through "several inches" of concrete, which police then smashed through. Eddie had the same reaction at another six locations at Haut de la Garenne but nothing was ever found."I don't believe a dog can pick up such a scent through a layer of concrete," said Mike Swindells, a former Lancashire officer who wrote the standard sniffer dog training manual.
"It's really very unlikely."
In his early media briefings, Mr Harper did not make clear that the first "human remains" consisted only of a single fragment the size of a 50p piece. Doubts were cast over the evidence when it first arrived at the Oxford lab early in March.
The first step in dating remains is to treat the bone with chemicals that separate its soft collagen protein from the harder mineral content. Only the collagen can be dated reliably.
However, the pre-treatment did not produce any collagen. The conclusion was unavoidable: the fragment was not bone.
At the time, a police Press statement admitted scientists had been unable to date the fragment because its collagen content was low. But Mr Harper said this was because it had been found in a "lime-rich environment", to which Ms Coupland added:
"The experts who tested it said that was why the collagen had degraded."
In fact, the Oxford scientists and Dr Jacobi say the opposite is true. "If it had been kept in a temperate, lime-rich environment and was actually bone, it would have been well preserved," Dr Jacobi said.
"It would very clearly be bone, which this is not.
"The Oxford scientist who did the pre-treatment has tested thousands of pieces of bone and she felt instinctively from the outset that this was not bone. She was right."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-567013/Human-bone-centre-Jersey-childrens-home-inquiry-actually-piece-wood-coconut-shell.html
