How was it that the police and the Crown looked past Robin's busted up hands?

Imagine the first police coming on the Bain household the morning of the murders. To their, credit unlike their modern day counterparts, they went straight into the house. No doubt they knew the danger, a house full of victims. Their adrenalin would have been racked off the scale knowing that the gunman might still be there. David had made little sense on the phone and was in shock. The thing he most wanted was the police there, and as soon as possible, the ordinary reaction for a young man in an extraordinary situation.

The 'find' for the police must have been truely shocking, but they kept to their work, isolating and guarding David as they searched the house. Finding the rifle beside the dead body of Robin must have been some relief but there was no certainty about the scene until they had in total control. What they saw in the lounge completed the inquiry on any other day, the dead father, the wound to his head and the rifle nearby. As other investigators arrived and took over the scene, the pathologist was kept outside even though he had arrived promptly as was his job. The public would later learn that police wanted to contain the scene before letting him in, a man with a long history of meticulously gathering forensic proof, in essence as it prevails with more experience that the investigating officers and measurably more common sense.

Fast forward to the 2009 retrial and the following....Well, the police took their own photos at the morgue and used those. They didn’t bother to photograph the blood smears and so-on. But the pathologists take their own photographs too, and the thumb was one of the lab photos. In the retrial, when Dempster produced it, he said “These are prints that I discovered recently that I thought were part of the police record, I had them along with a large number of other photographs that had been copied from the police record into colour transparencies, and it was only very recently that I realised that these were – this was a photograph that had been taken by our mortuary technician using our mortuary camera. I can't understand why we didn’t have a police –“ and at that he got rapidly cut off by the crown counsel!


We learn f Dempster only becoming aware that his photos and that of his staff had not been produced at the first trial. Photos, which to anybody of any wit, were possibly the strongest evidence that the investigation had gone right off track. The photos showed what any investigator would be looking for on both the suspects that morning - busted up or bloody hands. The chances of the killer having got through his killing spree, that included a quite violent struggle, without damage to his hands was slim going on improbable. But we need to go further with the hands because Robin's hands were not only bruised and showing cuts but they had blood wash 'inside' the hands on the palms. It's totally inconceivable to me that even on the evidence of Robin's hands alone that David was ever charged. Remember David was stripped searched and subjected to invasive procedures on the morning of the murders by the police doctor Pryde. Imagining even for a moment that if David had been the killer he'd somehow escaped injury to his hands, what explanation could there be for the dead father, found lying beside the rifle, with not only damage to his hands but blood on his palms?

There can be no explanation, absolutely none. Then trace that blood (which wasn't spatter, but rather 'wash' or wipe,' to the laundry and we find Robin's blood on the towel there. So were the particular police responsible for 'ignoring' this evidence just dumb? Apparently not, they in fact were very calculating. They ensured that the photos showing the blood wash on Robin's hands taken by the pathologists staff were not entered into evidence, they ensured that the pathologists didn't know about that, replacing his photos with their own that showed no blood.

No person in their right mind can walk away from the fact that the police fully understood the importance of Robin's bloody hands because they hid the fact. It remained hidden for more than a dozen years. Not one of those homicide squad detectives, who would have learnt in early in their careers the importance of observing a suspected offenders hands, set himself apart from the corruption of the hiding of the truth about Robin's hands while his son languished in prison. Not one of them. It became the task of Dr Dempster when reviewing his file for the prospect of a re-trial that discovered the hidden evidence. He raised it, as we see above, during the retrail. Having wrote earlier to Crown Law telling them that he couldn't exclude the possibility that David had heard his sister gurgle because of his experience in a more recent case.

I think, reading between the lines, that Dempster was never resolved to the fact of David's guilt. I suspect for a number of reasons, none less than the condition of Robin's hands. While Dempster was kept outside on the morning of the killings, a host of inexperienced staff and observers trudged through the house, some moving exhibits for photographing in different positions. We are asked to believe these actions were to ensure the integrity of the scene from the entry of the most experienced crime scene investigator there that day, Dr Dempster.

It's wholly rotten folks.