Witness for the prosecution

for murder is innocent; the friends want to know how he knows, and the narrator says his uncle, the presiding judge, said so. The mind of the judge in the book is made up about the innocence of the accused in a trial in progress.

In his essay collection "The Last Colonial", Sir Christopher Ondaatje devotes a chapter to Prof. Ravindra Fernando's book. The author recalls his last meeting with his uncle, the judge, in London at the end of the Sixties. The Sathasivam case entered the conversation. The Attorney-General's Department made a big mistake in pardoning the servant boy, said Noel Gratiaen. "It was irreversible. . . . There is little doubt that Sathasivam was innocent. He was a scoundrel, but not a murderer."

A nightmare-fantasy drawing illustrates Sir Christopher's essay-review; a leering, evil-looking, incubus-like creature, in a sarong and naked from the waist up, bends over the body of a sleeping or dead woman. The guilt of the servant boy in the case is assumed and given grotesque form.

The early hours

The early hours are good for a clear head. During the day you have been reading and thinking about something, and this something continues to murmur and mutter away even when you aren't consciously thinking about it. Sometimes details don't quite add up and start to niggle at a subliminal level. You go to bed and fall asleep only to sit up two hours later with flutters of lightning inside your skull. Some nights the lightning is real, outside your skull, outside the room. Thunder, lightning, rain. You think "Macbeth." Three hags. The room is cold. Turn off the fan. Like black witches capes, queries flap for attention. An oddly shaped jigsaw piece isn't fitting.

For a week, after a first reading of Prof. Ravindra Fernando's book, we would wake up around two in the morning to ask no one in particular Sathasivam trialrelated questions.

One question had to do with the forensic experts' calculations to ascertain Ananda Sathasivam's time of death. That was a deciding factor. The case seesawed on the fact of 10.30 am, the time Mahadeva Sathasivam said he left the house, with Ms. Sathasivam remaining at home, alive and in good health.

The three main considerations were the falling rate of body heat, rigor mortis, and the status of solid and liquid content in the dead person's digestive tract. Body heat loss is considered the most reliable indicator of the three. Forensic expert Prof. G. S. W. de Saram took into consideration the victim's body temperature at the time he examined it (it was 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit, at 6.55 pm), the general atmospheric temperature that day, and the air temperature inside the closed garage where the body was found.

But what about the cold cement floor? How come that wasn't brought up?

We are talking about the concrete surface on which Ananda Sathasivam's body had been lying for up to seven or eight hours. Shouldn't that have counted for something? How come the garage floor temperature was not factored into the forensic specialist's calculations for body cooling rate?

The professor had thought of everything. Along with the rate a body starts to cool after death, he considered body weight, clothing on the body, ambient temperature (air temperature outside and inside the house), and comparable body temperatures of executed prisoners, but nothing to indicate he had considered the garage floor temperature.

Mobile phone messages about the relevance of the garage floor temperature are sent out at 3 am to half a dozen persons who can be depended on for an educated reply: Wouldn't the body lose heat to the floor, and absorb some of the coolness within the floor?

Replies come in later in the morning to confirm the query's relevance. Good friend and former Form 1 classmate Dr. Susirith Mendis, Senior Professor of Physiology, SMSes back to endorse the query. The former ViceChancellor, University of Ruhuna, and former Deputy ViceChancellor, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, adds:

"Furthermore, if the temperature of the cement floor is cooler than the ambient temperature, there could be an additional loss of heat from body to floor, through conduction, even though both the cement floor and the body are poor conductors of heat."

The only reference to the garage floor came from Sir Sydney Smith, Prof. G. S. W. de Saram's mentor, who mentioned the garage floor in a by-the-way listing of other factors that may have influenced the victim's body temperature. As quoted in "A Murder in Ceylon," Sir Sydney said the victim "weighed 90 pounds, was poorly nourished, clad only in a petticoat and saree, and part of her body was in contact with the concrete floor of the garage."

The Government Analyst's photograph of the scene of the crime shows the body of Ananda Sathasivam lying on its back, stretched out on the garage floor. Much of the surface of the back of the body would have been in contact with the concrete floor for all the hours the corpse had been left lying there and kept waiting until its removal late that evening.

If the cement floor temperature of the garage of No. 7 St. Alban's Place on October 9, 1951 is relevant, as relevant as was the atmospheric reading of 81 degrees Fahrenheit recorded that day, then the professor's conclusion that death occurred between 10 am and 11.15 am could be considered incomplete, inconclusive.

If the garage floor temperature is significant enough to merit being in the equation, why was it left out of the professor's meticulous calculations?

And why did Prof. de Saram's mentor, the world-famous forensic expert Sir Sydney Smith, not make more of the garage floor temperature as an influencing factor?

Establishing time of death was essential in determining the innocence or guilt of servant or master.

Drag mark on kitchen floor

Much was made at the trial of a wavy drag mark on the kitchen floor, near the narrow doorway opening into the garage. The mark was 1 ½ to 2 ½ inches wide and 18 inches long. It was not photographed as evidence because the police officer in charge did not think it was important, especially after dozens of police officers and others had tracked through the kitchen that day.

Sir Sydney gave his views on the drag mark, which the defence believed was caused by one of Ms. Sathasivam's feet touching the floor as her body was being taken to the garage.

Now, if the body had been carried by two persons, it may be supposed that the person who was holding the body's lower half let go of one leg, which dragged along the floor and left a trace. But if one person had transferred the body to the garage, as the defence made out, that single drag mark becomes a poser.

It was suggested that the wavy drag mark could have been caused by a human heel rubbing the floor. If so, where was the wavy mark that should have been left by the heel of the other foot? The only way you can drag a body across a grimy floor and leave a single wavy drag mark is to cross one dead foot over the other, leaving one foot clear of the floor. Awkward, granted, especially if you are in a hurry to dispose of a corpse.

Now picture a single person attempting to transport a dead body from point A to point B. There are many ways a single person can drag a body: 1.By holding the body's upper half against your chest, facing away from you, while you walk backwards; that would result in both heels of the body dragging, and would leave not one but two parallel drag marks; 2. By dragging a body with its upper half against your chest, its head against your face; that would result in the tops of the bare feet and toes grazing the floor; 3. By dragging a body by its arms, or by one arm, in which case much of the body surface from the waist down would touch the floor and leave a swathe of a mark; 4. By dragging a body by the hair, face up or face down, in which case even more of the body surface and clothes would sweep the floor.

If the body is light enough, you acting alone can carry the body, one arm round the dead person's shoulders, the other supporting the dangling legs from under the knee joints. If one leg of the dead person were to slip out from the carrying person's grip, the loose leg could hang low enough to graze the floor. That was what Sir Sydney Smith suggested.

It was essential for the defence to establish that the murder took place in the kitchen and that it was entirely the work of the servant boy.

A big puzzler (big in size and big at generating conjecture) was found in the garage: the wood mortar that had been placed on the victim's neck. What purpose did that serve? Even Justice Noel Gratiaen was at a loss to explain the mortar's presence.

The mortar ceases to be a puzzle if you look at it not as a clue or an instrument of attack but as a prop at the crime scene. It was an artistic, theatrical touch, a heavy, cumbrous detail to reinforce the look of the murder as having been committed by someone confined to the narrow world of kitchen and pantry.

To be continued