Monday, December 5, 2011

Robin Bain - how was it they charged his son?

Somebody recently wrote to myself and 3 others with the question:
What do you think is the most serious issue with the investigation and history of the Bain case?

The 4 people asked comprised an informed (as to the case) lay person, and equally informed Scientist and Psychologist and of course myself. The question was actually for 10 answers on a level of importance 1 to 10 and was qualified that the question(s) should be 'That is, one thing had it been done differently might have changed the whole thing and found the truth.'

Here are the answers which ironically were contained to a single answer rather than the need for a graduated 10.

1 says...A full investigation into Robin.

Answered by questionnaire: Mmm - that's what I think to.
My feeling is that everything else over the years is just built on that foundation.

2 says...In my opinion, it would be treating the crime scene as such from the start, and extensive photos taken before it was treated as a scenic tour by so many Police and personnel. If I can have 2, the second which is as important as the first was to let the pathologist into the house as early as possible.

Answered by the questionnaire: There might have been extensive photos taken before the scenic tours. No-one knows when the photos were taken. Some were obviously taken before 10.30; the video was started at 10:30 then more photos later. Trouble is no-one made any record of the photos. Weir should have done, and possibly the photographers too, but when the records were kept they have disappeared. That's what Schollum's stuff was trying to do - trying to stop it looking as slack as it was. Oh, and trying to  make it look like Weir was right about the lens. Schollum did the work for an earlier investigation and - get this - the police dismissed it as rubbish then.

3 says...Hi all. I reckon the most serious issue was that very early they allowed a theory to become a creed, at which point they started to only focus on anything, no matter how insignificant, that put David in a bad light. At the same time the ignored the glaring evidence against Robin - in fact they not only ignored it they threw it out.
So the one thing they could have done different, as 1 says, they should have investigated Robin.

Answered by questionnaire...Reassuring.

3 adds....The police got caught up in some kind of confirmation bias trap. It effectively gin-trapped their ability to properly investigate the tragedy. You would think they would learn to watch out for this sort of thing when they train to become a detective.

Answered by questionnaire.....According toan ex-senior detective I know, they are taught the opposite - to go with their gut feeling and set out to prove it.

1 says...Actually I'm probably too generous with my #1. Perhaps should be 'final death scene' as I use to call it. Blood on his hands, including his palms, damaged hands, the scene looking like suicide, the family difficulties, upward trajectory, no spatter shielding, the blood inside the barrel = suicide. They were actually down that track, had information coming in about incest - the changed course, why?

Answered by questionnaire.....That 'why' is something that has bugged me all along, and I think I have found the answer. I thought the answer was more likely to be something banal, because life tends to governed by the banal!
You listen to the 111 call: the way when David says 'hurry up' Dempsey (call centre) replies 'alright' in a very aggrieved tone. That tone of voice has always worried me: It's not not an appropriate response. Anyway, turns out Dempsey, at the end of the long shift, tired and wanting to get home, was convinced David's call was fake. He told his bosses and the other emergency staff so. Then the get to the scene and it's not. So I think they (the ambos) were primed by that to thinking it was   a fake. And because of that mindset, they saw fakes everywhere the looked - David's faint wasn't recognised as a faint but seen as fake fit. His distress was seen as fake because he was so hyper-alert (as he would be, but they were clearly not great psychologists). The cops not on the scene much - Robinson and the others - take the scene at face value: murder suicide. But Weir and Doyle, on the scene, talking to the ambos...they get infected with the fake mindset. Once that has happened, the rest is just a domino cascade.

Finish

To summarise the above, all four including the questionnaire agree in two different ways, the key is the non-investigation of Robin, person 2 confirming this by raising the death scene integrity which clearly to this day confirms Robin as the killer.

Before continuing I must make it clear that the Crown were never able to reduce or delete any of the following recorded above...Blood on his hands, including his palms, damaged hands, the scene looking like suicide, the family difficulties, upward trajectory, no spatter shielding, the blood inside the barrel = suicide. They were actually down that track, had information coming in about incest - the changed course, why?
None of these points of evidence were able to be reduced or deleted by the Crown or investigating officers, there was an attempt to distance the rifle from Robin's head at the 2nd trial, with 3 different Pathologists increasing the distance, but the original pathologist, Dempster,  who was at the scene maintaining the distance as contact or close contact. On that point, distancing the silencer tip from Robin's head was counter productive to his blood and dna found deep inside the barrel and counter productive to the evidence of an upward trajectory shot. All the evidence in the world could not delete from murder-suicide. Equally, the lack of spatter shield signified that there was no one else in the room at the time of Robin's death. The damage to Robin's hands, including the smears inside his palms corroborated his involvement in the murders, passive victims to homicide do not have bloody and bruised hands, certainly not smears on their palms, nor do they rest their heads against the barrel. For me this is one of the most disturbing issues of the Bain case - that the evidence always indicated suicide, indeed the investigation was heading down that track. Equally disturbing is the fact that David Bain need go through this Royal Prerogative nonsense despite being found not guilty.

Anyway, as to two points recorded in the dialogue between those above which bear examination.
The direction to go with 'gut feeling.' Really, this can have no place in modern policing. 'Gut feeling,' doesn't even have a scientific or any other realistic basis and when you consider it - there is an introduction of immediate bias. For example their was a 'gut feeling' about Scott Watson's guilt that has also resulted in a conviction the basis of which is eroded. 'Gut feeling' in my opinion is an open invitation that allows a prejudice against the way a suspect looks, what record they may or may not have, the 'feeling' an investigating officer might have about the suspect - none of these evaluations are evidence, but what follows from them is the 'opportunity' to exclude evidence that doesn't fit the 'gut feeling' and to look only for evidence compatible with that 'feeling.'

One thing these mojs are teaching the public, and hopefully the police alike, is that 'gut feeling' has no place in modern policing, and additionally, they lead to a closed mind situation which isn't even a poor substitute for Justice. Additionally, within the prosecuting authorities and the Courts there should be eternal shame that there are efforts to uphold 'gut feelings' when the so obviously result in mojs, and that looking for 'other' evidence, when critical evidence is proven as failed, provides a 'second bite at the cherry' that true Justice would never allow. If it sucks and stinks, throw the whole case out and don't waste millions on dollars on a pile of shit that began as a 'gut feeling.'

The second point of interest from the dialogue above, 'the priming' for the 'fake' call that turned out not to be fake. It might surprise some but I found some relief in this answer, something which I had long thought about, and which had me at times reaching for conspiracy theories. One of which included the fact that Robin Bain was a Freemason and my suspicions that the murder suicide was 'dissolved' as a protection of  'ones' own. I think now that it is far more likely that the priming for the 'fake' instigated the bias mindset, and although there might have been 'brothers' concerned that one of their own was accused of not only murder but of incest or worse, that it was not necessarily an influence in a poorly investigated murder-suicide.

Finally, I didn't know until yesterday the Police themselves rejected the efforts to 'place' the dusty lens in the relevant photo as anything more that a trick of light - how desperate of the Crown to revisit that at trial 2 and try to give it credibility.


2 comments:

  1. You've brought the argument to a conclusion that David shouldn't have been charged, I'd like to see somebody try to counter that in a constructive way.

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  2. I don't see how they can.
    The answer was always available from the forensic evidence, it seems like a type of madness that the police went beyond that in an effort to cover up that Robin killed his family, when it was plain that he had. Some of them were going with their 'gut feeling,' despite that senior Police had already decided that it was murder-suicide - how much they must regret not only ignoring basic evidence but also by turn trying to achieve a conviction based on ignoring, and 'altering' the basic and obvious forensic material available.

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