Case Log #1: The Chatham Case

Trigger warning: This entry contains discussion about suicide. Some of the details might be considered disturbing.

"The police only see what they look for". I can not credit where I heard this phrase exactly, but it came from what I have been learning about law enforcement in Ontario, trying to answer questions that remain in the case of Robyn McCall. Robyn was a 33-year-old woman found dead of an apparent suicide in Chatham Ontario, exactly one year ago. Sidney Black Investigations is supporting the family in their efforts to have the case reopened.

We conducted a comprehensive investigation over six months, and produced a report.

We conducted a Psychological Autopsy, and interviewed seven witnesses in addition i.e., two friends with whom she was close over many years, since she moved to Chatham the year previous, and several years before. We interviewed two individuals that were able to provide and corroborate contextual information and history for the relationships relevant to the night in question. Then we interviewed the last three people to have seen Robyn alive.

We also examined her medical records (appointments and prescriptions), examined the scene (compromised, but some findings were still valuable), and analyzed the data from all three of Robyn's devices; her phone, tablet, and most notably, the telemetry data collected by her Apple Watch.

When we took the case, the family explained that they felt police were jumping to a potentially wrong conclusion by ruling the case a suicide. It didn't seem to them that there had been much of an investigation. It had only been two weeks since the day she died when the police advised that they were closing the case, as they "saw no reason to investigate further", but the account of what happened communicated to the family simply did not make sense. They were told that a fight at the bar between Robyn and her boyfriend (that, as it turned out, was over a misunderstanding) was the catalyst leading to her death - but she had no history of mental illness to predict so extreme a response to something so relatively small. Were they really supposed to believe that she suddenly decided to hang herself over a bar fight? The last text message that she sent to her boyfriend was presented as supporting evidence - it said, "all that I wanted was you" - but that didn't make sense either. The two had not broken up, they had a fight; it was her death that ended their relationship, not vice versa. So what did she mean by "All that I wanted was you"? We found an explanation for the text from the details of their argument. In context, it became an obvious red herring, but neither the coroner charged with the review of the case requested by the family, nor the Head of Major Crimes for Chatham-Kent (HMC-CK) learned this from our report. Ignoring the context that makes sense of what is otherwise incoherent, the text remains evidence supporting suicide on the record, in the second coroner's decision not to change the cause death, and also in the Supplement Report (SR) submitted by the HMC-CK, supporting their decision to leave the case closed.

Her mother also pressed the original coroner for a better explanation, after an autopsy had been completed, and she thought that an investigation was underway. She reached him on the phone. He offered her conjecture, but without reference to his expertise. Instead he referred to what he took from conversations with three people i.e., "witnesses" whose information was passed to the coroner's office by the police, for a process that remains undefined, the purpose unclear.

The names and information for these "interviews" were provided to police at the scene by family when asked what Robyn was doing the night before, and who was there. She had gone to a tractor pull with friends, and so: what a more or less random group of three people in her life had to say, selected like bingo balls, has become the official accounting of why she might have chosen to end her own life. Had police asked for who was best to consult for an educated opinion of Robyn's mental state, the coroner would have had an entirely different list of names.

If you are reading this having listened to our conversation about the case on The OSINT Output, I am glad to have you back. This post is a continuation of the story. The family has finally received the original case notes from officers on the scene, and the original police report, per their Freedom of Information request. They have also received the statement submitted by the HMC-CK and SR.

We have carefully read and considered everything in all of these documents, and found overwhelming evidence that the manner and cause of death have been conflated in this case from the beginning. For the Sudden Death Report, we see entered into the system at 22:23 PM on Sept. 14th, immediately upon leaving the scene, that the cause of death is plainly declared "SUICIDE". Then, the next day, on September 15th, it was submitted to the coroner marked "Final" at 19:01 PM.

In photographs of notes written in pen by officers on the scene, we see a word has been redacted after the word "obvious", in two places from notes by one officer, and once again in notes by the other. The redactions look something like this: "Attended spoke with Robyn outside (I assume they meant her sister Christine - ?) - did not enter residence or Garage. EMS confirmed obvious [redacted]".

In the SR, the HMC-CK states that officers came on the scene of an "obvious death". I get the sense that this choice of phrasing was deliberate. It could be that the word they are redacting is "death", except that the word "deceased" is otherwise left unredacted in the margins, on both sets of notes. I can't think of a word aside from "suicide" EMS or the police would "confirm" or call "obvious" here, that makes sense in context, and that the police department would have a reason to redact.

The physical evidence, on it's own, gives us the cause of death, but not the manner of death. No one disputes that Robyn died by strangulation with a ligature, or that it looks, in the strictest sense of the word, like suicide. But the display of an apparent hanging doesn't tell us how she got there, it only tells us where she ended up. "Suicide" has not been confirmed (as opposed to a ligature strangulation, followed by careful staging). It is not obvious. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have been told that her devices were examined by the digital forensics unit, and that nothing was found of any evidentiary value, but if what that implies is true, their experts should have found the same telemetry data that we did, and realized that another device was on her person that they missed i.e., her smart watch. The data captured by it was synchronized for viewing with the companion app on her phone.

Device forensics may be new to police investigations, but to repeat an admission I made in my interview on The OSINT Output; It first occurred to me that we should check her devices for a record of her telemetry, recalling the actors determining time of death this way on an episode of Brooklyn 99 (Season 6, Episode 5). Surely the digital forensics unit would have thought to do this without needing a Netflix subscription, were the devices truly given more than a cursory examination.

When the police closed the case, an estimate for time of death was not provided for the record. However, Robyn's sister was told by the detective at the scene that based on lividity, her time of death was between 9:30 and 11:30 AM i.e., between one to as much as three hours after she was last seen alive. However, we have since learned from her telemetry that she died much sooner, between 8:45 and 8:50 AM. There has been no accounting for this discrepancy, or others for which the HMC-CK provided no reason to dismiss. The findings in our report that were not dismissed appear to have been simply ignored, though the difference that even just this one example makes matters. It detracts from the plausibility of suicide considerably, that as of 8:00 AM, her expressed desire was to leave the house for plans that had been made the night before (per the statement from the witness they missed). That fact, and the much earlier time of death, give her only 45 minutes to pivot her state of mind to wanting to kill herself (if she couldn't go to her mom's - ?), and then to get it done.

The telemetry data we reference was extracted and handled by a third-party independent agency, at considerable additional expense to the family, to ensure that our findings were based on data that reliably means what it appears to. We went with Digistream, specialists in Digital and Device Forensics. We did not conduct any interpretation until after this initial determination of integrity. What's more, is that the phone and the watch, which were both on or near her person for the last few hours of her life, each corroborate that the other was functioning as intended. 

Our interpretations carefully account for both the strengths and limitations of the devices and the data they produce, in addition to being vetted for functionality and integrity by independent specialists. The data has been used appropriately, and is reliable, and our findings represent a sound interpretation of the facts.

In a September 2017 article from the McGill University Law Journal, i.e., Drawing the Line Between Lay and Expert Opinion Evidence, the authors identify and examine what they call, "...the vanishingly thin line between lay and expert opinion evidence in Canada." Their discussion concerns evidence submitted in court, but they point to a problem that is arguably of greater consequence where the system begins than where it ends; at the scene where police make the determination of whether a crime has been committed in the first place. The opinions of law enforcement only become assailable after the story of a crime has been told as written by them, subject only to the review of their direct superiors (who themselves are also police). When the local precinct dispatches officers to attend an occurrence, those officers arrive and assume authority not only over the scene and any evidence, but over the truth of what happened there. This is despite the fact that, ultimately, police are not themselves attending the scene as "experts" in anything other than law enforcement.

The authors of the aforementioned article describe the problem like this: "...police officers with some superficial investigative experience in the areas on which they are opining-for instance, an expert in police dog behaviour opining on the significance of a pattern of shoe-prints in the snow...can be expected to hold sway over the trier of fact, but they are not required to prove that they are properly qualified or that their methods are reliable. [emphasis mine]"

In the SR by the HMC-CK, they point to the telemetry record of Robyn's heart rate immediately before her heart stops, calling it proof that there wasn't a struggle (despite earlier dismissing the telemetry evidence as "unreliable"). They assert that if there had been a struggle with an attacker, we would see a concomitant spike in her heart rate. We made a conscious decision not to consider the record we have of her heart rate as evidence of anything other than time of death, because the gaps between one reading and the next are too wide for what's left to be meaningfully informative. The last two readings i.e., the readings referenced in the officer's statement, are a full ten minutes apart (106 bpm at 8:35 AM then 45 bpm at 8:45 AM). There is no way of knowing whether there was a spike in her heart rate - say, between 8:35 and 8:40 AM - where a struggle may or may not have occurred.

More to the point; even if the data was there, neither of us are qualified to comment on what it might mean. Another reason we did not offer more interpretation of what the heart rate data might mean, for the benefit of the report, is that we couldn't find a consulting Forensic Pathologist willing to venture an opinion, nor could we find any peer-reviewed research on the subject of fluctuating heart-rate perimortem. Without that third-party confirmation that our understanding and interpretation of the data is sound, we couldn't use it. What this case appears to demonstrate is that, in practice, higher investigative standards apply to Private Investigators in Ontario than to police departments. We have a short list of unanswered questions to conclude. These all remain unanswered either because we are ourselves not in a position to pursue the answers safely, or because the expertise required is beyond our resources to access. Fundraising for the fees to pay the needed professionals is a possibility, but our position is this: Robyn McCall's family has paid their taxes. The Department of Major Crimes for Chatham-Kent has a responsibility to step up. The private investigation may not "prove homicide", but we have found more than enough factual discrepancies from the accepted account of what happened, and why, to justify reopening of the case. Questions that Remain:

• The witness statements relied upon for the official account of what happened are contradicted by evidence from multiple separate, verified sources, all pointing to the same problems. Why are there discrepancies? Do one or more of the witnesses have a reason to be dishonest?
  

• Certain statements remain the source for the currently accepted account of what happened to Robyn and why, though we submitted proof that these statements were compromised by a strong preference, in each case, that police rule the case a suicide. How else to correct the record, as a factual account of history, than by reopening the investigation to obtain a more objective account?
  

• The time of death estimate based on lividity at the scene is dramatically different than what we have shown it actually was. What accounts for the one to three hour difference? Might moving the body after the time of death, from a prone position to a vertical one, account for the later estimate, given the basis?

  
  

• Do the police still consider suicide the most plausible explanation, knowing that Robyn was intent on following through with plans she had for that morning, as recently as just 45 minutes before her time of death?
  

• If the manner of death is suicide, what happened after friends left at 8:00 AM to provoke so extreme a pivot, from wanting to get on with the day, to suicide by hanging, in under 45 minutes?
  

P.S. We have additional evidence. We can't be more specific here, but if someone with the authority or reach to assist is reading, please be in touch.