A team of Scotland Yard detectives will travel to Jamaica next week to conduct a review of the Bob Woolmer murder investigation, amid fears that local police may have missed vital clues. Mark Shields, the Deputy Commissioner of Jamaica Police and a former Scotland Yard detective, told The Times that he will ask for a team of British murder investigators to assist in the investigation, because “sometimes you can miss the blindingly obvious”. Mr Shields emphasised that an outside review of murder investigations was normal procedure in British investigations after seven to fourteen days. He added that he would expect the Scotland Yard team, probably a six-man force from the Specialist Crime Directorate, “early next week”, but that the exact date of arrival had to be confirmed.
Mr Shields said that he remained confident in his investigation but added: “If we have missed something it’s an ideal time to find out.” He said that the Scotland Yard team will look at the most significant lines of inquiry and conduct a review of the forensic evidence. Mr Shields said that he is also considering bringing the FBI into the investigation, possibly by sending forensic evidence to an FBI expert at the bureau’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia.
The move comes amid a growing realisation that behind Mr Shields lies a creaky and antiquated Jamaican infrastruc-ture poorly equipped to deal with such a high-profile and complex case. Allegations are already mounting that the investigation has been bungled. When Mr Shields arrived in Jamaica in 2005, a country of three million with more than 1,300 murders a year — a rate higher than Colombia’s — there was no routine fingerprinting of suspects, no use of DNA evidence and no closed-circuit television cameras. He has prided himself in bringing modern investigative technology and techniques to the Jamaican force, and has produced results. Murders are down by 20 per cent, from 1,680 in 2005 to 1,340 last year.
But The Times has witnessed some extraordinarily antediluvian scenes within crucial areas of the Woolmer enquiry. Mr Shields himself, while trying not to offend Jamaicans, has had to concede that it took almost a week to transfer the VHS video CCTV film taken from Woolmer’s 12th-floor hotel corridor on to a digitally enhanced format because there was only one laboratory in Jamaica with the technology to do it. He also conceded yesterday that he had still not yet received the toxicology results from Woolmer’s body, or a report on his body tissue, nearly two weeks after the murder. Without those Mr Shields cannot know Woolmer’s time of death, which he says is key to the investigation. “I wish I did [have the results],” he said. “But I don’t want to pressure them.”
In addition to giving him a time of death, Mr Shields said that the toxicology result would reveal if Woolmer was drugged “so it was easier to strangle and asphyxiate a man who was 6ft 1in and 250lb”.