Science and CCTV film make sleuths obsolete
THE MORE you read about the unmasking of Wayne Couzens as the killer of Sarah Everard the more one thing becomes very plain. With the onward march of science the police now have a truly formidable armoury at their disposal. In this case the now self-admitted killer, himself a policeman concealing a perverted mind behind the façade of a public servant and family man, thought he had taken ample precautions to avoid detection.
We know about finger prints, but he left none behind. We know about blood groups – same thing. But the microscope and the bewildering advances of DNA enable the police boffins to isolate and identify the most minute traces of human contact. In short, every criminal act leaves some minuscule traces behind.
A single touch may leave the tiniest residue of human sweat – now detectable and identifiable to one single human being.A trace of fabric, invisible to the human eye, can be found and matched to one single sweater or jacket. Every contact leaves something behind. In the case of Sarah Everard it was the hidden cameras, the CCTV.
The victim had spent two hours visiting friends near Clapham Common and about 9pm decided to walk the three miles back to her home in Brixton.
To be safe she stuck to the main roads, well-lit highways, rather than the darkness of the shorter route across the park.
But it was not the lights that led the detectives to her killer but a careful trawl through miles of CCTV film that Ms Everard never knew had caught her passing.
WE HARDLY ever see them but they are now a fixture in the urban landscape. Embedded in doorbells, hidden under the eaves of banks, shops and stores; dashcams in passing cars whose drivers came forward to offer help and mostly cameras on two passing buses that recorded the figure on the pavement walking along the South Circular Road. One of these also picked up a stationary white Vauxhall Astra with its doors open. Cars have numbers; this one was traced to a car-hire firm in Dover. It had been rented to Couzens.
But he had a car. Though he worked with the Met in London his residential home was with his wife and children in Deal. On the night of the murder he was not even on duty. The clock began to run down. An interrogation followed, then a charge and finally a confession.
Bad news for Morse, Barnaby and other TV detectives and puzzle-solvers but the days are already upon us when crime detection takes place on camera or down the lens of a microscope, in a tiny sample on a glass slide, and only leaves the laboratory in the form of a warrant.
Sherlock, time for a nice fugue on your violin.