In episode 8 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.
In episode 8 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.
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, let’s move on to another peculiarity which we’ve touched on in a previous episode that relates to Dr Kelly’s dentist, Dr Bozena Kanas.
As we’ve discussed, Dr Kanas arrived for work at her dental practice in Abingdon on the Friday morning when it was announced that Dr Kelly was missing. And before midday on that day she made the bizarre discovery that Dr Kelly’s dental notes seemed to have been taken.
I understand very little has ever been known about this alleged theft, because Dr Kanas quite rightly refuses to discuss it owing to patient confidentiality, but Miles - you have made some important headway with this part of the jigsaw.
MILES – Yes, with the help of Freedom of Information requests made to Thames Valley Police, plus the recollections of a former member of staff who wishes to remain anonymous, I’ve pieced together some of the puzzle.
I visited the practice unannounced in 2013 and spoke to its manager, Nick Barnes. He was happy enough to chat to me but refused to confirm or deny whether his was the surgery in question. But by tracing former staff who worked there, it was soon clear that this practice, fairly close to Dr Kelly’s house, was where Dr Kelly had been a patient.
SAM – Right, so going back to the beginning. How did it come out that the dental records had disappeared in the first place?
MILES – It was at the Hutton Inquiry itself. On 23 September 2003 - one of the final days evidence was taken - Hutton asked Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page to give evidence for a second time.
Page began by telling the inquiry that he had ruled out the possibility that Dr Kelly was murdered, either at Harrowdown Hill or elsewhere. He said this left only the possibility that Dr Kelly had killed himself and he believed there was no “criminal dimension” to his death.
He was then asked a series of questions about loose ends relating to Dr Kelly’s death which he had not been able to tie up during his previous visit to the inquiry, on 3 September.
During this part of his questioning by James Dingemans, he was asked out of the blue and apropos of nothing: “Were you ever contacted by Dr Kelly’s dentist?”
SAM – And what did he say?
MILES - Page explained that Thames Valley Police had indeed been rung by Dr Kelly’s dentist – he was unable to specify on what date – because of worries she had about the whereabouts of his dental records.
When asked what he did about this, Page said: “We carried out a full examination of the surgery and, in particular, one window which the dentist was concerned may not have been secure. We found no trace of anything untoward either in the surgery or on the window.”
He was asked by Dingemans whether any further examinations of the surgery were conducted. He said that the police had received a second call from Dr Kelly’s dentist on Sunday 20 July informing them that the records QUOTE “had reappeared on the Sunday in the place in the filing cabinet where they should have been.”
SAM – And so what did he say about that?
MILES - He said the records were forensically examined and the laboratory where this had taken place could find no evidence of what he called “extraneous fingerprints” on the file.
SAM – OK, so he essentially said there was nothing noteworthy or suspicious about the forensic results.
MILES – Yes, that’s the clear inference of what he said.
Page then volunteered he took the extra precaution of having DNA checks carried out to confirm that the body he had was the body of Dr Kelly, even though it had been identified by his family, and these DNA tests confirmed it was indeed the body of Dr Kelly.
SAM – And in terms of the matter of the dental records, was that it?
MILES – Yes, nothing else was said at the Hutton Inquiry. Page was asked only four questions about Dr Kelly’s dental records and the suggestion of a break-in at the surgery where they were kept. Dr Kanas’s name was not revealed. Nothing more was said about it and hardly anything was picked up in news reports. The matter was therefore effectively opened and closed within a couple of minutes.
SAM – But its an aspect of the story that obviously captured your attention. Previously, you mentioned there was some building work going on at the surgery at the time. What else have you found out?
MILES –Well I know it’s not immediately clear why anybody would have wanted to steal Dr Kelly’s dental records around the time of his death, but the more I have thought about it, the more it appears this is what happened.
Before examining what purpose the records could have served to a thief, it is vital to ask the questions which Hutton, for whatever reason, did not.
SAM – Go on…
MILES - On Monday 21 July – 72 hours after the body was found - all the dental surgery staff plus the builders who were refurbishing the surgery had to have their fingerprints taken by police. The only identified prints left on the records belonged to Dr Kelly’s hygienist.
Despite the fact that Dr Kanas believed the records had been missing, the police concluded there was no sign of a break-in at the surgery.
In April 2011, I lodged a Freedom of Information request with Thames Valley Police, despite not knowing at the time who Dr Kelly’s dentist was or where her surgery was. The police responded openly, saying that Dr Kelly’s dentist, whom they did not name, had rung them once - not twice as ACC Page claimed at the Hutton Inquiry.
SAM – So in effect Dr Kanas rang the police to report a non-crime: to tell them she’d been under the impression that Dr Kelly’s records were missing on the Friday and Saturday, but that they’d turned up in the filing cabinet where they should have been all along on the Sunday?
MILES – That’s right.
And yet the fact that she rang them so late on the Sunday night suggests she felt uneasy about the situation and saw its potential urgency - otherwise she could presumably have waited until the Monday morning to report this non-crime.
She must have been extremely concerned about where the records had been and clearly thought this apparent theft or borrowing by persons unknown was significant to the police investigation into Dr Kelly’s death.
SAM – So what did the Freedom of Information response you got say?
MILES – Well - a lot more than ACC Page had been able to do at the Hutton Inquiry.
It said Dr Kelly’s records were examined for fingerprints, as were the covers of the records positioned either side of his. These tests took place between 15 and 18 August 2003 – two weeks before Page’s first appearance at the Hutton Inquiry and five weeks before his second appearance.
SAM - In other words, on both the occasions he gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, the tests had been completed and so he should have known about them?
MILES – The police told me that, contrary to what Page told the Hutton Inquiry, there were six unidentified prints on Dr Kelly’s dental records.
SAM - Why had Page told the Hutton Inquiry that there were no unidentified marks?
MILES – Impossible to say.
But a month after the police had replied to my Freedom of Information request, the official review of the David Kelly affair yielded more results about this.
Thames Valley Police revealed that Dr Kanas returned to her surgery on the afternoon of Sunday 20 July because she was still concerned that she could not find Dr Kelly’s notes. The records were not in their rightful place, remember by this point she had not contacted the police. All that was going on was that she was aware all the notes were not in the filing cabinet.
Dr Kanas waited several hours before reporting her find to the police. It now seems likely that she was wrestling with the situation. Had she imagined the apparent disappearance? Had losing the records – if they had been stolen - made her appear unprofessional? Would there be consequences for her? I’m sure these were the thoughts racing through her mind.
It seems most likely that a debate lasting some hours took place between her and the practice manager, her boyfriend Nick Barnes. I don’t know how else to explain her finding the records on the Sunday afternoon but waiting until almost 10.30 on the Sunday night to alert the police to her concerns but that is what I believe.
SAM – And when she made the call, what did the police make of her report?
MILES – They said there were four possible explanations. The notes were either in the filing cabinet all the time; or they were misfiled and then refiled; or a member of staff took them for some reason and then replaced them; or the surgery was broken into, the notes were stolen, and then returned. The police admitted that they have never been able to solve the mystery.
SAM – Which do you think is the most likely explanation?
MILES – Well it’s relevant to say that a former member of staff has revealed there was no burglar alarm at the surgery at that time, so it would have been perfectly possible for someone to have accessed the building and removed the records without attracting attention.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Some might say that the matter of the dentist needn’t have been raised at Hutton at all, and the fact it was shows it was open an honest inquiry.
But on closer inspection, it seems entirely possible that a decision was taken late on to disclose the apparent theft of the dental records at the inquiry as some kind of an insurance policy against anybody else - such a member of staff, or one of the builders, or perhaps a police officer - doing so. It is almost as though a calculation was made that because ACC Page could not be certain that the apparent theft wouldn’t be disclosed some other way, he needed to volunteer it by arrangement.
So, Page opened up the dentist story, at the prompting of Dingemans, but no sooner had he done so he closed it down again by saying that nothing untoward had happened. He then said that, because he is “inherently suspicious”, he ordered DNA tests to confirm the identity of the body.
This now looks like a deliberate over-reaction, designed to divert attention away from an apparent theft which the police admit might well have taken place and onto the rather more dramatic matter of having DNA checks carried out on Dr Kelly’s body.
SAM – And you think if this was the tactic they used, it seems to have worked, because nobody ever asked again about the apparent break-in at Dr Kelly’s dentist.
MILES – Yes. And I don’t understand why Page failed to reveal the existence of the six unidentified prints on Dr Kelly’s file because the fact there were 6 unidentified prints was known to the police both times he appeared at the Hutton inquiry.
SAM – So if they were taken, why do you think somebody might have wanted Dr Kelly’s dental records?
MILES – Well, they may have provided information about his medical history which was considered useful to somebody with an interest in him, perhaps revealing whether he took a particular medicine or had a health condition.
Maybe someone thought it necessary for some reason to “borrow” the records for several hours to photograph them.
Again I find myself asking: Was Dr Kelly known to be dead far earlier than 9.20am on the 18th of July when his body was officially found and did somebody need his dental records to identify him?
Or did somebody take the records with a view to preventing somebody else from identifying him, and then perhaps changed their mind?
SAM – So from what you’ve said, it’s clear that a very thorough search of the dental surgery was made during the weekend after Dr Kelly’s death by Dr Kanas and her staff and they found no trace of the records. And this was known by the police before the Hutton Inquiry even began.
MILES – Exactly. So surely it would have been vital for Hutton to consider this in open court and to get to the bottom of what had happened? But apparently not. Dr Kanas wasn’t even called by Hutton to give evidence.
SAM – OK so Miles, let’s move on to another startling aspect of this case and go through some of the concerns that various medical professionals have raised about the manner of Dr Kelly’s death.
First of all, let’s remind ourselves about the official finding.
Dr Kelly’s death certificate, which was produced in August 2003, states the cause of his death as haemorrhage as a result of the wounds on his left wrist; coproxamol ingestion; and coronary artery atherosclerosis (or heart disease).
Hutton’s report, published in January 2004, echoed this.
MILES – That’s right.
SAM - Yet ever since then, various people who are themselves medically trained have raised doubts about this. I believe there was even a group of doctors who worked together for several years to try to disprove Hutton’s finding. What motivated them?
MILES – Many things, obviously, but they did wonder why Dr Kelly - a learned man of science whose work meant he was essentially an expert in death - really did intend to end his own life this way. Their view was that as a method, cutting a wrist a swallowing up to 29 painkillers would have been a slow, painful and uncertain way to die. And of course they lacked confidence in the way the Hutton inquiry was set up and the manner it was run, as well as in what it concluded.
SAM – And also haven't there been legal experts as well who’ve voiced doubts about why the coroner’s inquest, which was opened as a matter of routine three days after Dr Kelly’s body was found, was quickly closed down on the order of Lord Falconer, and replaced by the Hutton Inquiry.
MILES – Certainly, there was no reason why the Hutton Inquiry and the coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death couldn’t run in tandem. After all, it’s obvious they were investigations with different aims and powers: the coroner’s job was to find out how, when and where Dr Kelly died while Hutton’s remit was to conduct a more general inquiry into the circumstances of his death.
SAM – You’ve said previously that the coroner’s inquest was adjourned. Did it ever resume?
MILES – Yes. On 16 March 2004, seven weeks after Hutton published his report, Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner, did hold a further hearing to see whether there was any reason why he should resume the inquest into Dr Kelly’s death. This was in keeping with the law. He had the option to continue with his inquest if he believed there was an “exceptional” reason to do so. But Gardiner said he found none.
SAM – And what do you make of that decision?
MILES - It was hardly surprising. Hutton had already delivered his report and findings, and Falconer’s office had made it abundantly clear to Gardiner that it did not welcome Dr Kelly’s death being the subject of a full coroner’s inquest.
SAM –Did Dr Kelly’s family comment on this decision?
MILES – Their lawyer told the coroner’s court that they accepted Hutton’s suicide finding.
SAM – And yet even so, the doctors were spurred to carry on with their campaign?
MILES – Yes. For medical, legal, scientific and practical reasons the concerns of medical and legal professionals intensified.
SAM – What sort of things worried them?
MILES – They felt Hutton was a bad choice of chairman owing to his complete lack of coronial experience. None of the five barristers who appeared at his inquiry had any qualifications for questioning any witness on the forensic elements of Dr Kelly’s death. And witnesses giving evidence were not cross-examined, they were merely walked through prepared evidence.
SAM – So what sort of lines of enquiry did the doctors pursue?
MILES – Well there is a retired orthopaedic and trauma surgeon called David Halpin who publicly voiced doubts about the probability that Dr Kelly had bled to death as a result of cutting his ulnar artery, which is a blood vessel in the forearm which is in line with the little finger.
Dr Halpin said the ulnar artery is the size of a matchstick and would have quickly shut down and clotted, so in his opinion the primary cause of death could not have been haemorrhage.
And this view is consistent with the lack of blood reported by people who attended the scene where Dr Kelly’s body was found.
The fact is that no tests ever took place to establish exactly how much blood Dr Kelly’s body lost, and no tests were conducted on the soil in the wood where his body was found to see how much blood might have seeped into the ground, so Halpin’s opinion can hardly be dismissed.
SAM – And didn’t the medical professionals pick up on another odd detail concerning Dr Kelly’s wounded wrist?
MILES - Based on Hunt’s description of the wound, each of the cuts was made across Dr Kelly’s wrist. Yet it's commonly thought those truly intent on taking their life with a knife or sharp object usually ensure the cuts run upwards towards the body - in other words moving from the wrist area up towards the elbow – because this has a higher guarantee of fatal blood loss.
SAM - A fact we can presume Dr Kelly would have been aware of.
MILES - As a scientist with knowledge of anatomy, yes.
SAM - And tell us about the actual knife Dr Kelly apparently used.
MILES - The knife which Dr Kelly allegedly used has never been seen in public and its sharpness never tested. All that is known of it is that it had a curved blade and he had owned it since boyhood.
SAM - What did Halpin and the other medics make of this?
MILES - As an orthopaedic surgeon, Halpin obviously has extensive professional experience of amputating limbs. He has said publicly many times that the knife attributed to Dr Kelly’s death was about the worst possible for cutting tough tissues - starting with the skin. It was the wrong shape and it was very probably too blunt. Halpin and his medical colleagues all agreed that without specialist surgical equipment this sort of action is actually very difficult.
SAM – So aside from this I remember from your book you quote a rather startling statistic about the number of people who died in Britain in 2003 by severing their ulnar artery.
MILES – Yes, according to the Office for National Statistics, there was only death that year as a result of someone severing their ulnar artery. So that must have been Dr Kelly himself.
SAM – And these doctors weren’t alone in raising concerns about Dr Kelly’s death. One close friend of his in particular warrants attention, doesn’t she?
MILES – Yes. Mai Pederson is a linguist and former member of the US military who was assigned to work as a UN translator in Iraq in 1998. While there, she met Dr Kelly and they formed a close friendship which culminated in him joining her to become a member of the Baha’i Faith, a spiritual movement founded in 19th century Persia. She has always insisted he was nothing more than a “big brother” figure in her life.
SAM – Did Dr Kelly’s wife know Mai Pederson?
MILES – Yes, however unorthodox all of this may seem to others, Janice Kelly knew about it and has even described Mai Pederson as a family friend.
SAM – I know that Mai Pederson is one person connected to this who has publicly provided some details that counters the official narrative.
MILES – Well she didn’t give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry but she did give an interview to a British newspaper five years after Dr Kelly’s death and in it she presented some fascinating insights.
She said that during the five years she knew Dr Kelly, he was unable to use his right hand to perform tasks requiring basic strength such as carrying a briefcase or opening a door. Dr Kelly had told Pederson the reason for this was that he had fractured his right elbow some years earlier, and his arm therefore caused him pain. Not only that, but the last time she saw him, in spring 2003, just a few months before he died, they visited a Washington DC restaurant together. She said his right arm had been so weak on that occasion that he had had difficulty cutting the steak which he had ordered because he could not hold his knife normally.
She provided more evidence about this. She said Dr Kelly would have had to have been a “contortionist” to kill himself the way it was claimed. When he embraced friends at the beginning and end of Baha’i meetings, he did so with his left arm and you could tell his right arm hurt him because he rubbed the elbow a lot. She said when she last saw him he had ordered steak he held his knife very oddly in the palm of his right hand, with his wrist crooked, trying to cut the meat. Apparently he said his broken right elbow was never fixed properly, so it was sore and never regained its strength.
SAM – Did she reveal anything else?
MILES – She did, she said the knife which she assumed Hutton believed Dr Kelly had used to injure his wrist had what she called “a dull blade”. She said it had a folding blade and he actually told her he couldn’t sharpen it because his right hand didn’t have the strength to hold a sharpener.
She said she didn’t understand why the British Government didn’t investigate this properly and said logically Dr Kelly cannot have committed suicide.
SAM – She was obviously very sceptical about the manner of his death from the word go. It’s surprising she didn’t speak up earlier. Did she have any other observations to share?
MILES – Yes, she also mentioned something never previously realised and not mentioned by anybody at the Hutton Inquiry: Dr Kelly had great difficulty in swallowing pills. This is a medically recognised condition known as “unexplained dysphagia”. As a result of this, he never even took a paracetamol tablet if, say, he had a headache. And in 2011, during the official review of the case, Mrs Kelly confirmed this.
SAM – So there are some very real questions here about whether Dr Kelly was in fact physically capable of cutting his own wrist and of swallowing the – possibly - 29 painkillers that have been attributed to his death? But you’re saying Hutton never raised this at his inquiry?
MILES –yes. And this point about his pill swallowing difficulty is particularly important in view of a Freedom of Information response provided by Thames Valley Police in 2010. It confirmed that 111 ml of water remained in the 500 ml Evian bottle found with Dr Kelly at Harrowdown Hill.
So this means that he apparently drank only 389 ml of water – which is about half a pint – to aid him in swallowing 29 pills while bleeding to death. And bleeding to death, by the way, apparently triggers profound thirst.
SAM – What do we know about where that bottle of water came from, out of interest?
MILES – It’s unclear where this bottle of water came from. The last person to see him alive, Ruth Absalom, didn’t mention having seen him holding it. So - did he buy it somewhere? Did he take it from home? Again, Hutton did not ascertain these basic facts.
SAM – So obviously none of this evidence was included in Hutton’s report. Why wasn’t Mai Pederson called as a witness?
MILES - Pederson has revealed that in August 2003, just after Dr Kelly’s death, some Thames Valley Police officers flew to America and questioned her over a period of two days. She told them of all her concerns and doubts.
A 10-page statement attributed to Pederson was completed on 1 September 2003 – so that’s three and a half weeks before Hutton concluded the hearings relating to his inquiry.
The police have always implied that Pederson did not give her permission for her statement to be used at the Hutton inquiry. But in fact with the help of her lawyer she stipulated that if anything she had told Thames Valley Police was relevant to the coroner’s inquiry into the death of David Kelly, she was happy for Thames Valley Police to reveal the information in a non-attributable way.
Now this sense of secrecy on her part possibly reflects her high level security clearance. I’m sure she had her reasons.
Yet the contents of Pederson’s statement were never formally lodged with the inquiry team and therefore never quoted from during the inquiry.
Hutton has also confirmed that he knew what Pederson told the police, he confirmed this some years later, this means nothing would have prevented him from exploring Pederson’s points about, say, Dr Kelly’s arm injury but for whatever reason he chose not to.
Let’s not forget, another witness who gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry did so from another room while using a pseudonym – so Pederson’s statement could easily have been referred to while disguising her identity.
But Hutton, apparently, was having none of it.
SAM – So was there anything about Mai Pederson at the Hutton Inquiry? Was her name even mentioned?
MILES – Yes, on 23 September Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page was asked by Dingemans about Pederson’s contact with the police regarding Dr Kelly. Page said his officers had interviewed her and she declined to give a statement “as such” as he put it but he had a record of the interviews that took place. He said the conversation with Mai Pederson added “nothing that was of relevance to my inquiry at all.”
SAM – So Page meant that the arm injury and Dr Kelly’s swallowing difficulty was not worthy of public comment?
MILES – Either that, or a decision was taken at a higher level that Pederson’s recollections about Dr Kelly’s arm injury somehow interrupted the official account that was being advanced.
SAM – And what about Hutton? What did he think?
MILES – The government review of the case in 2011 revealed Hutton’s belief was that Pederson’s statement offered nothing QUOTE “that could not be adduced from [Dr Kelly’s] family members”.
SAM – But none of them mentioned any of this in the High Court?
MILES – No. Nothing was said in verbal evidence anyway.
SAM - So how did Dr Kelly injure his right elbow?
MILES – Apparently it was a fracture that occurred in December 1991 while Dr Kelly was riding a horse. A friend and colleague of his called Dr Andrew Shuttleworth backed up Mai Pederson’s story.
SAM – So there are at least two sources for this part of the story.
MILES – Yeah there are.
SAM - And is there any more detail known about the knife he apparently used?
MILES - At the Hutton Inquiry it was described as a Sandvik knife which Dr Kelly had owned since boyhood. Hutton claimed it was kept in Dr Kelly’s desk drawer at home along with some other penknives. The knife found next to his body was never physically shown to his family or presented at the Hutton Inquiry. A photo of it was shown by Thames Valley Police to two of his daughters for identification purposes.
SAM - Who, therefore, knows for certain where the knife came from?
MILES – Who indeed?
It was apparently “a stainless steel pen-knife” with a single, curved 7.5cm blade.
Its sharpness was never debated or discussed at the Hutton Inquiry but tests were conducted on it by the forensic biologist Roy Green. Now these results were revealed only in 2011. This was another strange thing. They showed the presence of 12 animal hairs on the blade. Green decided these were probably rabbit hairs. Yet Dr Kelly was not a man known to go around skinning rabbits, or indeed any animal. Nobody associated with the Hutton Inquiry raised this.
Green said he also found what he concluded were six human hairs which, in his opinion, “could” have come from Dr Kelly's wrist.
On this basis, he determined that the knife found beside Dr Kelly’s body was used to cut his wrist. DNA tests showed his blood on its blade and handle.
SAM – Some of these things change the complexion of this case, how do you summarise it?
MILES – First: Dr Kelly had an injury to his right arm that was apparently painful enough to prevent him from cutting a steak shortly before his death, though this injury was not disclosed at the Hutton Inquiry;
Second: he used a knife which highly experienced surgeons believe would have been too blunt to cut through the skin and tendons in his wrist, yet whose sharpness was never discussed at the Hutton Inquiry;
Third: he managed to sever an artery in his wrist which is so difficult to locate that according to official statistics he was the only person in Britain to die of such an injury in the year 2003.
SAM – So, let’s now move on to matters relating to the amount of blood at the scene and the pills Dr Kelly allegedly swallowed.
It’s striking that the two paramedics who attended Harrowdown Hill about 30 minutes after the volunteer searchers found Dr Kelly’s body on the 18thof July have always been extremely concerned about the small amount of blood they saw there. Is that right?
MILES - In her evidence to Hutton, one of them, Vanessa Hunt, was offered the chance to make any observations she wanted to about the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death. She used that opportunity to say the amount of blood that was around the scene [at Harrowdown Hill] seemed relatively minimal and said 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…There was dried blood on the left wrist...but no obvious sign of a wound or anything, there was just dried blood.”
Now this is a woman who had worked as a paramedic for years and had experience of dealing with suicide attempts. She was clearly speaking from a position of experience when she said this. She had expected to see a considerable amount of blood.
SAM – And what about her colleague, Dave Bartlett?
MILES - He was asked for his observations and he said he noticed no stains on Dr Kelly's clothes other than a bloodstain about a quarter of an inch across on the right knee of Dr Kelly’s jeans. At the end of his evidence he was asked if he would like to make any other comments and he volunteered that he and Ms Hunt were both “surprised there was not more blood on the body if it was an arterial bleed.”
They’ve repeated their views publicly since. They just didn’t believe there was much blood at the scene and didn’t believe he had died from a wrist wound.
SAM - What about the forensic biologist who attended the scene, and who later gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, Roy Green?
MILES - He told Hutton he observed what’s known as “arterial rain” at Harrowdown Hill. This occurs when an artery is severed and blood leaves the body under high pressure in small droplets of similar size. Green said some nettles beside Dr Kelly’s body were covered in such droplets. He also said he believed that the stain on the knee of Dr Kelly’s jeans had been caused by him kneeling down and coming into contact with a pool of blood. But there was no mention of blood on, for example, Dr Kelly’s hair, as might have been expected as a result of arterial rain.
SAM – And what about the forensic pathologist who examined Dr Kelly’s body at the scene and then performed the post mortem, Dr Nicholas Hunt?
MILES – He told the Hutton Inquiry that Dr Kelly showed signs of what he termed a “vital reaction”. This is described as a reddening and swelling around the area of injury. Hunt took this as proof that the cuts were inflicted “over a reasonable period of time, minutes before death.”
SAM – So Hunt believed that Dr Kelly bled so profusely as a result of the cut to his ulnar artery that he died quickly?
MILES – It seems so. Which sits uncomfortably with the paramedics’ view that there was little blood at the scene and the doctors who say it’s not possible to bleed to death by severing the ulnar artery.
SAM – And what about the pills?
MILES – Well these are also the subject of much debate for practical, medical and scientific reasons.
Coproxamol was a prescription-only painkiller. It was withdrawn in 2007 because it was associated with 300 to 400 deaths per year in Britain and was considered too toxic for the open market.
Its active ingredients were paracetamol and dextropropoxyphene.
SAM – So what do we know about the pills in this case?
MILES Well, three blister packs of coproxamol were found in Dr Kelly’s coat pocket when his body was found. Straight away I find it peculiar that a dying man would go to the trouble of carefully replacing all three packets in his coat pocket instead of merely discarding them. I also find it odd that – to the best of my knowledge – no pieces of foil from these blister packs were found at the scene despite the police doing a fingertip search of the area.
What we know is each pack held 10 pills. Two packs were empty. The third pack had only one tablet remaining.
SAM - So the immediate assumption was that Dr Kelly had swallowed 29 of the 30 tablets?
MILES – Yes. Now, it was known that Janice Kelly took coporoxamol for her arthritis, but it was never established where the pills found with Dr Kelly came from.
Janice Kelly kept her tablets in the kitchen and in the bedroom and had last replenished her stock eight weeks earlier via her GP - who was also Dr Kelly’s GP - the previously mentioned Dr Malcolm Warner. He had most recently given her a prescription on 20 May 2003.
When the Kellys’ house was searched on 18 July 2003, the day Dr Kelly was found, Mrs Kelly had 14 packets left out of a possible 20.
The manufacturer of the pills found with Dr Kelly’s body was asked by Police if the packs found with Dr Kelly’s body could be traced to match them with Mrs Kelly’s supply but apparently for logistical reasons this would be impossible.
SAM – So it was just assumed at the Hutton Inquiry that Dr Kelly had stolen his wife’s painkillers?
MILES Yes. And remember he had an aversion to swallowing tablets.
SAM – Was Mrs Kelly not asked whether the pills belonged to her, whether she noticed any missing from her supply, or how often she took them?
MILES – No. She did say she took coproxamol for her arthritis but that was as far as it went.
Dr Kelly’s GP, Dr Malcolm Warner, was asked whether he prescribed coproxamol to Dr Kelly. He said “No.”
SAM - Why was the Hutton Inquiry so reluctant to ask Mrs Kelly about her pills?
MILES – I don’t know but there is no evidence that the coproxamol found with Dr Kelly was his wife’s, or that it was Dr Kelly who removed it from the Kellys’ house. So this leaves open the possibility that the pills were removed from the Kellys’ house by a third party or came from another source altogether.
SAM – And what about the amount of pills Dr Kelly allegedly swallowed?
MILES - The amount of pills was never established either. Medical tests carried out on 19 July 2003 to detect the presence of alcohol or drugs in Dr Kelly’s body revealed that in his stomach was the equivalent of just a fifth of one coproxamol pill.
The forensic toxicologist who worked on the Dr Kelly case and then gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, Alexander Allan, stated that he found one active ingredient, paracetamol, and another, dextropropoxyphene, at concentrations in Dr Kelly’s blood that were “much higher than therapeutic use…They clearly represent an overdose.” But he also said – rather confusingly – “they were somewhat lower than what he would normally expect to encounter in cases of death due to an overdose of coproxamol.”
He then said he would expect there to be “two, three, four times as much paracetamol and two, three, four times as much dextropropoxyphene in the average overdose case which results in fatalities.”
And he also said it wasn’t possible to determine how many pills Dr Kelly allegedly took “because of the complex nature of the behaviour of the drugs in the body.” He said his test results were “consistent with, say, 29 or 30 tablets but it could be consistent with other scenarios as well.”
SAM - This seems like a very long-winded way of saying that he could make the tests fit in with the notion that Dr Kelly had swallowed 29 pills, but that his results were not conclusive.
MILES – Yes, at the very least he seemed to say the results were open to interpretation, and it was in fact debatable as to how many pills Dr Kelly actually swallowed.
SAM – So Dr Kelly might very well not have swallowed 29 pills as assumed?
MILES – Yes. And the most significant point he did confirm was that neither dose alone would necessarily have been enough to kill him.
SAM – Is there anything else that you’ve found out about this?
MILES – Two vomit trails ran down either side of Dr Kelly’s face from the corner of his mouth to his ear. But this “vomit” wasn’t analysed. Its content remains unknown. And this oversight is significant if you conclude someone has died by overdose.
It’s worth adding that anyone who took coproxamol was warned one of its side effects was drowsiness. You have to ask: is it likely that Dr Kelly took 29 pills, left one pill because he was drowsy, but then found the strength to start cutting into his wrist – potentially, given that he may have died as late as 1.15am when it was pitch black?
SAM - In the next episode we concentrate on how public pressure led to a government review of the case in 2010, 7 years after Dr Kelly’s death. Would the review lead to a proper inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death or would it become another establishment whitewash?