In the next episode Miles and Sam explore the scene where Dr Kelly was found. And with conflicting eyewitness accounts further confusion is thrown on the idea that Dr Kelly had indeed taken his own life on Harrowdown Hill.
In the next episode Miles and Sam explore the scene where Dr Kelly was found. And with conflicting eyewitness accounts further confusion is thrown on the idea that Dr Kelly had indeed taken his own life on Harrowdown Hill.
An Inconvenient Death – Podcast Episode 7 script
Sam - Welcome back to the series examining the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly with me Sam Eastall and the journalist and author Miles Goslett.
SAM – So Miles I know from your book you’ve looked in great detail into the Hutton Inquiry. Apart from what we’ve already talked about, what other areas have you identified as insufficient?
MILES – Well, to take a small example, it’s still not clear who in the Kelly family took the decision on the night of 17 July 2003 to wait almost nine hours to ring the police to report Dr Kelly missing. Bearing in mind he had gone for a 30-minute walk, this might have been illuminating. But such details were, seemingly, of no interest to the Hutton Inquiry. Neither did Hutton establish which of Dr Kelly’s daughters in Oxfordshire on the night of his disappearance rang the police to report their father missing. Sgt Simon Morris of Thames Valley Police would have been perfectly placed to shed some light on these and many other unclarified matters.
SAM – Just remind us who Sgt Morris is again?
MILES - He took the lead role at the very beginning of the police search for Dr Kelly, and spent a significant amount of time with the Kelly family that night. Bizarrely, however, Hutton decided not to call him as a witness to his inquiry.
SAM – Did Morris even a witness statement?
MILES – No.
SAM – How many people from Thames Valley Police were called to give evidence in person?
MILES – Seven. But in an equally odd oversight, the officer who was eventually put in charge of Thames Valley Police’s overall investigation into Dr Kelly’s death, Chief Inspector Alan Young, was not called to give evidence either.
SAM – What was the consequence of this?
MILES – Well one consequence concerns two communications masts which were put in place by the police outside the Kellys’ house shortly after Dr Kelly was reported missing. It was Mrs Kelly, in her evidence, who first mentioned these masts during the Hutton Inquiry and who, absurdly, was then asked by James Dingemans to explain their purpose. Of course, she should not have been expected to fulfil this technical role, even if she had been qualified to do so. A police officer should have had to tell the Hutton Inquiry about the masts – not least since Thames Valley Police began giving evidence to the inquiry the day after Mrs Kelly. Yet surprisingly, no police officer was asked about the masts at the Inquiry, so the exact time that they arrived, their precise purpose, and the individual who requested them remain unknown.
SAM – And what do we know about these masts?
MILES - The first mast was 35-feet tall but was found not to be strong enough so it was soon replaced by an 85-foot tall mast, whose strength was significantly greater. Apparently they allowed police to communicate via their radios more easily as the area was in a bit of a communications black spot but it has been speculated that the bigger mast would have been strong enough to communicate with an aeroplane and might therefore have allowed contact with either Tony Blair, who was at that time flying between Washington DC and Tokyo; or with Alastair Campbell, who was returning to London from the US capital. Hutton did not ask about the masts at all.
SAM – If Sgt Morris didn’t give evidence to the inquiry who did?
MILES - Another senior officer involved in the search for Dr Kelly, ACC Michael Page. He appeared at the inquiry on two separate occasions and both times was examined by Dingemans.
SAM – And what have you found about his evidence?
MILES- Well one example of how ill-advised Hutton was in excluding Morris and using Page instead concerns incorrectly the helicopter ordered by Morris to search for Dr Kelly on the night he was reported missing. Page said this helicopter came from RAF Benson, the Oxfordshire air base close to where Dr Kelly lived. In fact, it came from Luton. Morris had called this helicopter in the first place, and would therefore have known this.
SAM – You say the helicopter was brought up, wasn’t that another part of the investigation that Hutton failed to properly explore.
MILES – Well almost nothing else was said by anybody throughout the Hutton Inquiry about the helicopter’s activity that night but you’re right that it turns out to have been an important piece of the jigsaw if, as the official account has it, Dr Kelly really did take his own life on Harrowdown Hill sometime between 4.15pm on Thursday 17 July and 1.15am on Friday 18 July.
SAM – The period of time Hutton concluded when he believed Dr Kelly had taken his life.
MILES - Yes.
SAM - So what do you think should have been raised about the helicopter at the Inquiry?
MILES – Records show the helicopter, which had special heat-seeking equipment on board, was on the scene by 3.20am. Police on the ground outside the Kellys’ house switched on their cars’ emergency flashing lights to guide it to the place from where Dr Kelly began his walk and indicate the start of the search area. There were three people on board, a pilot and two observers, and they spent 45 minutes flying over the area surrounding Southmoor and Kingston Bagpuize where Dr Kelly lived. The task report shows that the areas searched included bridle paths from Longworth north to the River Thames; that it then flew east to Newbridge; and then went south back to Kingston Bagpuize.
The Longworth to River Thames leg of the search meant that the helicopter flew directly over Harrowdown Hill, where Dr Kelly’s body was found less than six hours later – but despite its perfect position and heat-seeking equipment, it did not detect him.
All of the equipment was working properly, and the police have said the thermal-imaging device is so powerful it would have been “capable of reading a car number plate three-quarters of a mile away from a height of 1,000ft.”
SAM – Do you have any idea what Dr Kelly’s body temperature would have been at this point?
MILES – We cannot know that but what we do know is that when it was taken by the forensic pathologist, Dr Nicholas Hunt, 14 hours after the helicopter flew over Harrowdon Hill – so that would be at 7.15pm on Friday the 18th of July - it was still 24 celsius or 75 Farenheit.
SAM – So it would have been warm enough to be detected by the helicopter’s thermal imaging equipment?
MILES – Easily. To put this in perspective, by 7.15pm on Friday the 18th of July it was estimated that Dr Kelly may have been dead for as long as 27 hours. So when the helicopter flew over Harrowdon Hill it would easily have been warm enough to be picked up by the equipment. Yet this basic discrepancy was not even mentioned at the Hutton Inquiry, the helicopter was brought up but then left completely unexplored.
SAM – What other things do you think Hutton missed?
MILES – Well we know there was a big overnight police search operation for Dr Kelly but it is strange to me that there was no mention that anybody had been trying to contact Dr Kelly by mobile phone. It is known that Dr Kelly’s Ministry of Defence colleagues did try to ring his phone the afternoon before. But Hutton didn’t go to any lengths in his inquiry to establish Dr Kelly’s mobile phone use.
SAM – What have you been able to find out?
MILES – We’ve talked before about an official review into the case conducted by the attorney general at the time Dominic Grieve in 2010-11. From that, we know that Thames Valley Police tried to carry out checks on Dr Kelly’s mobile phone from about 5am.
At that time in 2003, technology existed which would allow details of a person's whereabouts to be found by searching a central mobile phone database called the Home Location Register. This shows a wide range of data, including a geographical position at the point in time when the telephone was switched off or ran out of batteries, plus the time it was last used.
But in the case of Dr Kelly, whose telephone was in his coat pocket when his body was discovered, these details were never established because, the police said, his phone was switched off.
SAM – Is that end of the matter?
MILES – No. Under the Freedom of Information Act Thames Valley Police has provided what it knows about Dr Kelly's phone, including at what time it was last working and whether it was switched off deliberately as opposed to being damaged by a third party.
Officers admitted that they could not state where the weapons inspector was when his phone was switched off because they don’t know when Dr Kelly's phone was last operating.
They were also asked to state at what time and from where the last call from the mobile was made, and when and where a call was last received.
SAM – Did they have this information?
MILES - They were able to provide times but not locations, which also suggests they carried out only a partial inquiry. They said there were “no signs of damage” to the phone.
According to their records, Dr Kelly last answered his phone to receive a call on it at 7.18pm on Wednesday 16 July and last made a call on it at 12.58pm on Thursday 17 July, roughly two hours before he was last seen alive.
It is known that Dr Kelly’s phone was still working because while the Hutton Inquiry was under way, on 17 September 2003, the police made the effort to go to Harrowdown Hill to check it. They found it to be in perfect working order at that location.
SAM - so again the Inquiry goes to some lengths to project an image of thoroughness and yet very little is being disclosed or demanded for by Hutton.
MILES - Exactly.
SAM – Miles I remember in your book you go into some detail about one of the most contentious areas relating to this case and how it was covered by the Hutton Inquiry - the discovery of Dr Kelly’s body. Specifically, the position it was in when it was found, whether it might have been moved subsequently, and how much blood was visible on it and around it. Can you just explain a bit more.
MILES – Yes, it’s clear that the public has effectively been asked to accept at least two different stories at the same time when it comes to the discovery of Dr Kelly’s body. Louise Holmes, the volunteer searcher who, officially, first found Dr Kelly’s body at 9.20am on Friday 18 July told the Hutton Inquiry that when she went within a few feet of it: “He was at the base of the tree with almost his head and his shoulders just slumped back against the tree…She said his legs were straight in front of him. His right arm was to the side of him. His left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a funny position.
But what’s odd is that at 1pm on the same day as Miss Holmes’s discovery – almost four hours later - Thames Valley Police released a public statement saying that the body at Harrowdown Hill was lying “face down” when it was found.
SAM – What do you make of it?
MILES - Both accounts cannot be correct.
SAM – OK so, to recap, Louise Holmes is the volunteer searcher who was out searching Harrowdown Hill with another searcher called Paul Chapman and her dog Brock. And it was Louise who found Dr Kelly’s body.
MILES – Yes.
SAM – And I can see from the transcript, when recalling at the Hutton Inquiry what she first saw in the woods that day, Miss Holmes told James Dingemans QC, who examined her: “I could see a body slumped against the bottom of a tree, so I turned around and shouted to Paul [Chapman] to ring Control and tell them that we had found something and then went closer to just see whether there was any first aid that I needed to administer.”
MILES – That’s right. Holmes said she went within “a few feet” of the body and noticed it slumped back against the tree.
SAM – And I know you’ve spoken to her about this.
MILES – I have. She has certainly never said anything about the body being “face down”. In fact she’s told me she would not change a word of the evidence she gave to the Hutton Inquiry.
SAM – And to be clear: she said she saw no blood anywhere else other than on Dr Kelly’s left arm but because the body looked like Dr Kelly, she concentrated on getting help.
MILES - Correct.
SAM - And crucially she made no mention of seeing any other items - such as the knife and water bottle later found with Dr Kelly – nor was she asked about them.
MILES – Yes.
SAM – What did Paul Chapman, her co-searcher, say at the Hutton Inquiry?
MILES - He said that when he got to within 30 or 40 feet of the scene he saw: “The body of a gentleman sitting up against a tree.”
SAM - So, like Holmes, his view was also that Dr Kelly’s body was touching the tree.
MILES – Yes.
SAM - And again, like Holmes, Chapman said nothing to the Hutton Inquiry about having seen a knife or water bottle beside Dr Kelly’s body?
MILES – Yes.
SAM – OK. Let’s now focus on the testimony of DC Graham Coe, the police officer who turned up at the scene just after Holmes found the body.
MILES - Having rung the police, Holmes and Chapman were asked by the police to stay in the area and told that two officers were on their way to meet them.
Before that happened, Chapman and Holmes met three other police officers: DC Graham Coe, who was in plain clothes; his colleague DC Colin Shields; and a third man whose identity the police and Lord Hutton have ensured has always remained secret.
Of these three officers, only Graham Coe was required to give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.
Paul Chapman said these three officers told him they were CID officers.
Graham Coe had apparently been making house-to-house inquiries in the villages of Southmoor and Longworth on the morning of the 18th of July.
SAM – Is this the kind of work expected of a senior officer?
MILES – Not necessarily, no. In his evidence to Hutton, Coe said he and a colleague knocked on the door of Ruth Absalom – the last person known to have seen David Kelly alive the previous afternoon - hers was one of the doors they knocked on that morning.
SAM – That was certainly a lucky break. What did Ruth Absolom tell them?
MILES - She apparently told Coe about her brief meeting with Dr Kelly though, interestingly, during her evidence to Hutton – two weeks before Coe gave his evidence – Mrs Absalom said nothing about having met Coe and was not asked about it either.
SAM – What did Coe say happened next?
MILES - After Coe saw Mrs Absalom, he and his “colleague” walked to the river near Harrowdown Hill.
SAM – Which I know is a detail you find curious?
MILES – Well, only because Dr Kelly had last been seen by Ruth Absalom walking east towards the Appleton Road, not north towards Harrowdown Hill. So I don’t know why they went that way. And the helicopter had searched over Harrowdown Hill overnight and found nothing. Plus of course, the two volunteer searchers, Chapman and Holmes, had already been sent to that area by Thames Valley Police that morning. So for all of these reasons, yes – you could say this was curious.
SAM – Looking at the Hutton Inquiry transcript, I can see that Coe spoke to Chapman and Holmes as soon as he bumped into them. At this point he apparently had no idea that they had just found a body. He also specifically stated to the Hutton Inquiry when asked that he was with just one other police colleague at the time, a man called Detective Constable Shields. What do you make of this?
MILES - Coe said Chapman led him to the wood and showed him where the body was and then returned to his co-searcher Louise Holmes. But Coe’s testimony on at least one point was faulty. Because both Chapman and Holmes said that Coe had been with two other officers, yet he categorically told Hutton that he was with only one other officer – DC Shields. What is telling is that Coe was never asked to explain this discrepancy, even though he gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry two weeks after the volunteer searchers.
SAM – So has Coe ever had to explain himself?
MILES Well in 2010, seven years after giving evidence to Hutton and when he was safely in retirement, Coe did admit to a journalist that he had been accompanied by another man – who has come to be known colloquially as “the third man” – as well as DC Shields that morning, but he refused to name him. He claimed that the “third man” was a police constable who had not yet completed his two-year probation period and who was at the time on secondment to the CID team.
SAM – Has that been verified?
MILES – There’s no way of testing this but subsequently a businessman from Oxfordshire called Bruce Hay, who described himself as a “distant friend” of Dr Kelly, wrote to me out of the blue and confirmed Coe’s story. He said that he personally knew the “third man” well.
SAM – So who is the third man?
MILES – Bruce Hay didn’t name him. He said he was a young man who was a “probationary constable”. He told me his initials were ‘SB’. Hay told me this young man believed the scene where Dr Kelly’s body was found to be QUOTE “extraordinarily contrived”, and that it looked as though Dr Kelly’s body had been QUOTE “propped” against the tree. Sadly, Mr Hay made no further communication with me and died in the spring of 2015. The “third man” is understood to have left the police force.
SAM - Why Graham Coe should have felt the need to conceal the seemingly innocuous fact that he was accompanied by a third person is itself a mystery unless, as Mr Hay claimed, the “third man” really did have suspicions about the scene. Have you ever spoken to Graham Coe?
MILES - Whenever I have rung Coe he has put down the phone. What we can say about the third man is that whoever he is or was, Coe concealed his presence under questioning at Hutton. That allows us to wonder if any other aspects of his evidence were inaccurate.
SAM – So what did Coe say happened next after he got to the wood where Dr Kelly’s body was?
MILES – Coe said he elected to stand guard, alone, over Dr Kelly’s body until a back-up team arrived. He stayed there for about 25 minutes on his own. He has always insisted that during this time he did not touch the body. He told the Hutton Inquiry that he saw QUOTE “a knife, like a pruning knife, and a watch” beside the body, so he was the first person to notice these items.
SAM – Has Coe said anything else of note?
MILES - The other important admission Coe made in 2010 – so that’s seven years after he gave evidence to Hutton - related to the amount of blood he observed at the scene during the 25 minutes he was there. Coe said: QUOTE “I certainly didn’t see a lot of blood anywhere. There was some on his left wrist but it wasn’t on his clothes. On the ground, there wasn’t much blood about, if any.”
A wrist injury is said to have been the primary cause of Dr Kelly’s death. Wrist injuries normally produce a large volume of blood – known as ‘arterial rain’. So this was a comment which Coe should have shared during the Hutton Inquiry. I cannot imagine why he didn’t take up this opportunity. He did mention blood twice during his evidence, though only in passing. He was not explicitly at the Hutton Inquiry how much blood he saw at the scene.
SAM – Just to remind everyone about the relevance of all this, there have always been questions about the position Dr Kelly’s body was in when it was found. The police said on the day in a statement that the body was found “face down”. The two volunteer searchers said it was “slumped against the tree” and “touching the tree”. And there are others with a different recollection altogether, aren’t there?
MILES – First, I think it’s relevant to say that when Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page heard of Chapman’s and Coe’s discovery at Harrowdown Hill, he told colleagues that the case was a potential murder inquiry even if it was not one officially.
Page then instructed Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers who had already carried out searches for Dr Kelly in three government offices in London earlier that morning to return to them and remove anything they deemed to be “relevant”.
And Page also appointed Chief Inspector Alan Young to formally open a case file on the official investigation into Dr Kelly’s death. It was assigned the name Operation Mason.
Two police constables, PCs Franklin and Sawyer, arrived at Harrowdown Hill at about 10am to meet the volunteer searchers Chapman and Holmes, who were waiting for them. Franklin and Sawyer were with Sgt Alan Dadd, an officer with the Thames Valley Police protection unit, based at Reading. They had expected to be the first policemen at the scene so they were surprised to find DC Coe had beaten them to it.
Having been alone with Dr Kelly’s body for at least 25 minutes, Graham Coe led his fellow officers to it, whereupon PC Sawyer began photographing it with a digital camera. Sawyer knew he had only a few moments to capture the scene untouched before the ambulance crew arrived.
SAM – have these photographs ever been seen?
MILES – No, they remain under embargo so have never been seen by any member of the public.
SAM – What happened next?
MILES - The paramedic team arrived. On entering the wood they soon saw Dr Kelly’s body. Vanessa Hunt said she saw QUOTE “a male on his back”. This is in contrast to the earlier descriptions of the volunteer searchers Chapman and Holmes, who described Dr Kelly as lying with his head and shoulders against a tree.
Vanessa Hunt also said she noticed QUOTE “dry blood on his left arm, which was outstretched to his left.”
Now, these paramedics, Hunt and Bartlett, stood behind the police officers while Sawyer continued to take photographs of the body.
When he had finished taking photos, the paramedics examined Dr Kelly’s body. They placed heart monitor paddles on to the chest over the top of his shirt to check for signs of life. Hunt then wanted to put four electrode pads onto Dr Kelly’s chest. The police apparently took more pictures before this hapenned.
SAM – So there are a lot of pictures of Dr Kelly’s body at various stages of its discovery in existence.
MILES – Undoubtedly.
The paramedics declared Dr Kelly dead at 10.07am. They were apparently asked by the policemen to leave the pads on Dr Kelly’s chest and to leave the shirt unbuttoned, which they did.
By this point they were aware of the items found next to the body: a watch which had been removed (it was assumed that Dr Kelly had removed it himself); a knife; and a 500ml bottle of Evian water. The bottle was positioned upright parallel with Dr Kelly’s head, and still contained some water. Its lid had been removed.
All three items were placed on the left side of Dr Kelly’s body.
SAM – Tell us why you think this is significant?
MILES – Dr Kelly was right-handed. I wonder if he might have been expected to place the knife he had allegedly used to his right side when he had finished using it rather than, effectively, reaching over his own body - having cut his wrist and been bleeding to death - and putting the knife down on his left side.
SAM – What else did the paramedics see?
MILES – They saw pouch clipped to Dr Kelly’s belt which looked as though it would hold a mobile phone. It was empty.
SAM – It sounds as though the paramedics were very observant. Did they touch the body?
MILES – They were observant. Vanessa Hunt told the Hutton Inquiry: The only part of the body they moved was Dr Kelly's right arm, which was over the chest, to allow them to place the fourth lead on to the chest. She said it was just lifted slightly from the body.
She also said she observed that the amount of blood that was around the scene seemed QUOTE “relatively minimal and there was a small patch on his right knee, but no obvious arterial bleeding. There was no spraying of blood or huge blood loss or any obvious loss on the clothing…I could see some [blood] on - there were some stinging nettles to the left of the body. As to on the ground, I do not remember seeing a sort of huge puddle or anything like that. There was dried blood on the left wrist. His jacket was pulled to sort of mid forearm area and from that area down towards the hand there was dried blood, but no obvious sign of a wound or anything, it was just dried blood…as I say, there was dried blood from the edge of the jacket down towards the hand but no gaping wound or anything obvious that I could see from the position I was in.”
SAM – And what about the other paramedic, Mr Bartlett?
MILES – He has said repeatedly in public that, based on the account of Dr Kelly’s body position given by Chapman and Holmes, the two volunteer searchers – namely that it was touching the tree - he is convinced that the body must have been moved between the time Chapman and Holmes first saw it and when he and his colleague arrived at the scene.
SAM – What reasons has he given?
MILES – He once told me when I spoke to him about the case that the body was far from the tree, perhaps as much as two feet, and he was able to stand behind it. He even suspected initially that the body had fallen outof the tree, because there was such a gap between the two.
SAM – SO let’s go over the different recollections of the body position again.
Louise Holmes, the volunteer searcher who first found the body, told the Hutton Inquiry: QUOTE “He was at the base of the tree with almost his head on his shoulders, just slumped back against the tree.”
Her co-searcher Paul Chapman also told the inquiry he saw QUOTE “the body of a gentleman sitting up against a tree.” And: “He was sitting with his back up against a tree.”
The next person to see it – Graham Coe – told the inquiry: QUOTE: “The body was laying on its back by a large tree, the head towards the trunk of the tree.”
And the next two people to see it, PCs Franklin and Sawyer, both said that when they arrived – just before the paramedics and after DC Coe had guarded the body alone for 25 minutes – that Dr Kelly was on his back.
MILES – Yes, and Sawyer also said: His jeans…were pulled up slightly, exposing the lower half of his leg or his ankle. It looked as if he had slid down and his trousers had ridden up.
This could be consistent with somebody moving his body from an upright position to a lying position.
SAM – What have Thames Valley Police said about this?
MILES – Well, as previously mentioned, their statement on the day Dr Kelly’s body was found was that it was lying “face down”. So it’s all very confusing. But the point is this: despite these discrepancies, none of the three police officers was asked at the inquiry whether they touched or moved the body. Hutton made no mention of the contradictory evidence in his report’s conclusions.
SAM – Has this matter ever been resolved?
MILES – The review I mentioned of the case in 2011 tried to settle this question – and failed.
A forensic pathologist called Dr Richard Shepherd was commissioned to review certain aspects of the evidence. Shepherd wrote in his report: “It is quite clear from consideration of the photographs of the scene that, at the time they were taken, the body of David Kelly lay with his feet pointing away from the tree and that there was a significant gap between the base of the tree and the top of the head.”
But this conflicted with Louise Holmes’s recollection of the scene and that of the paramedics.
And there the matter has remained.
SAM – I remember from your book, because Hutton secretly recommended in January 2004 that all photographs of Dr Kelly’s body be classified for 70 years, along with all medical and scientific evidence, it is not likely that anybody alive today with an interest in the case will ever know the truth about the body position via these photographs.
MILES – Yes, and the significance of these questions are twofold. Firstly, they point once again to a lack of rigour at the Hutton Inquiry. Secondly, these discrepancies, which lead to the possibility that the body wasmoved, prompt examination of what might have been gained by doing so.
SAM – Do you really think it’s possible that the body was moved?
MILES – Well in 2010 I spoke to a man called Robert Jackson, who was Dr Kelly’s Member of Parliament back in 2003. He told me a curious story that adds a further layer of questions as to who might have had anything to do with Dr Kelly’s body on the morning it was found.
Jackson told me he believed Dr Kelly had taken his own life and said he was sure of this because Dr Kelly’s medical doctor, a man called Dr Malcolm Warner, had seen his body on the day it was found.
SAM – How did Jackson know this?
MILES – He told me with total certainty that he had had a medical appointment with Dr Warner at his surgery some weeks after Dr Kelly’s death and Warner explained that he had been called by the police to look at the body on the day it was found at Harrowdown Hill and that was how he “knew” Dr Kelly had taken his own life.
Jackson told me Dr Warner was Dr Kelly’s doctor and he was called to “examine” him. Jackson also told me Warner prescribed the painkillers which Kelly used.
SAM – What does Dr Malcolm Warner say about this?
MILES – Dr Warner has always been reluctant to speak to me. I did ring him a few times and he refused to comment and then gave a rather indefinite denial. So it’s a slightly strange situation. Of course, it would make perfect sense to me if the police HAD called Dr Warner to Harrowdown Hill that morning if nothing else than to unofficially identify the body that was found there. He was Dr Kelly’s doctor, after all.
SAM – Did Dr Warner give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry?
MILES – Yes, but he didn’t mention this alleged unofficial identification and he wasn’t asked about it. But his reluctance to talk to me mirrored his performance at the Hutton Inquiry, in a way. Because he was one of the least forthcoming witnesses to appear there. He spoke only 77 words throughout his testimony. I’ve found out that the police did contact him so they could view Dr Kelly’s medical records but again, this is not something he was asked about at the Hutton Inquiry and he didn’t volunteer it either.
SAM - It seems logical that the police should have visited Dr Warner during their search for Dr Kelly to establish some basic medical facts about him in case he took certain medication or had a serious condition like diabetes.
MILES – I agree.
SAM – But it sounds as though Dr Warner has been quite defensive about this case.
MILES – Yes, but there’s no doubt that Dr Warner was considered an important Hutton Inquiry witness. He submitted 16 separate written documents to the inquiry, none of which has ever been made public. These comprised 13 doctor’s letters stretching back to 1979, two letters to the coroner’s office written after Dr Kelly’s death, plus a police witness statement.
Also, a notebook belonging to Dr Kelly which was recovered by police after his death contained a handwritten note of Warner’s name and contact details. This notebook was used by Dr Kelly immediately before he died, so for some unknown reason Dr Warner was at the front of Dr Kelly’s mind at the very end of his life.
SAM – And you think all of this is relevant bearing in mind the speed with which Tony Blair set up the Hutton Inquiry without having any idea how Dr Kelly had died – or indeed knowing that the body found at Harrowdown Hill was Dr Kelly?
MILES – I do. If you look at the evidence of Dr Warner at the Hutton Inquiry he said virtually nothing and was asked virtually nothing. Basic points about Dr Kelly were not even addressed. So the question is: if Robert Jackson is wrong, and Warner didn’t in fact tell him shortly after Dr Kelly’s death that he personally saw Dr Kelly’s body immediately after it was found, who DID see the body? If we can't rely on who did see the body, what actually can we rely on when it comes to the matter of Dr Kelly’s death?
SAM - In the next episode we hear about a group of medical professionals who came forward to dispute Hutton’s findings. And testimony from an old friend of Dr Kelly’s brings into question whether he was physically capable of ending his life in the way the authorities would have us believe.