Well Schooled in the Black Arts?

One of Ray Adams' colleagues at NDS, during the company's worldwide pay-TV hacking campaign (circa 1997 to 2002) was Reuven Hasak, former deputy chairman of the Israeli Security Service, the Shin Bet. (Mr Adams was head of criminal intelligence at the Metropolitan Police Service, which makes them close colleagues even before they took the Murdoch shilling, assuming that Mr Murdoch was not paying them anything while they were both on the public payroll, which does seem to be an assumption that Surrey Police at least are willing to question!)

See post below, about the possible links between the Gareth Williams murder and NDS. And this post, about how the killer may have planned to remove the body from the flat, once forensic evidence had been destroyed by decomposition.

There's apparently a law against publishing photographs of Israeli intelligence chiefs. So here's an oil painting, of the three founding directors of an Israeli security consultancy, including Reuvan Hasak, Medawar assumes that Mr Hasak is front centre, but would be interested if anyone is able to offer (possibly anonymous) correction.

Residents of Alderney Street, or friends and colleagues of Mr Gareth Williams, might want to scrutinize this magnificent group portrait and see if it jogs their memory at all.

Irene Silverman: Another Murder Victim in a Bag

There are two sides to the fact that the body of Gareth Williams was found in a large sports holdall, in the bath of his flat in Alderney Street in London. (Picture source: Daily Mail.)

There is a consensus that being placed in the bag was probably involved with the cause of death: slow suffocation either by CO2 buildup, or by the cramped position preventing Mr Williams from being able to breathe properly, which is like a crucifixion in reverse: the chest cannot move because of a compressed position rather than an extended one: the same slow death results.

However, it's also believed that the killer's plan was to leave the body in the holdall, in the bath, until it had decayed enough to obliterate any forensics inside the bag, the outside being easily washable. Then, of course, the body could have been removed in the bag without looking too much like a body. (If a body is not to look like a body, it really needs to be folded up before rigor mortis sets in, and that's obviously the case if the body is folded into the foetal position before death.) The flat heating was turned on, despite warm weather, to accelerate the composting of evidence.

There is a precedent for this: a wealthy former ballerina, Irene Silverman, had converted her multi-storey townhouse in New York City into a residential hotel, where tenants would rent rooms, usually for an extended period. The fraudster and murderess, Sante Kimes and her son, Kenneth, moved in, with the intent of defrauding Ms Silverman of the entire property and anything else of value that she might have had. (They had committed similar crimes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and possibly Louisiana, too.)

This article contains the gist of Kenneth Kimes' description of how he and his mother bashed and strangled Ms Silverman to death, wrapped her in several plastic rubbish bags, and then placed her in a large duffle bag. It omits a telling detail, reported in the TV Documentary "Couples who Kill" that Kenneth Kimes then used a two-wheel sack trolley to get Ms Silverman down to the lobby of a quite tall building, and along the pavement to his car, under the gaze of several other residents and passers-by, without any of them noticing anything odd.

The main difference between Ms Silverman's murder and that of Mr Williams, was that in his case the holdall was of a rubberised material rather than heavy canvas, and therefore there was no need for plastic bags to contain odours and body fluids. The handles of a sports holdall would also make it easier for two men to share the load than would be the case with a duffle bag, especially as the body was was going to have to be lifted out of the bath.

It is probable that if the alarm had not been raised about Mr Williams when it was, his already meticulously clean flat would not have contained a body, and with all remaining forensic traces confined to the bath, the final stage of the cleanup would have taken a few minutes and a few squirts of "Flash" or "Mr Muscle." A sack trolley might have left a pressed track over the carpet, but so would the shoes of men carrying him. Probably, a small cordless vacuum cleaner would have been used to suck the carpet back into pristine shape by whoever was last out of the door.

The ultimate aim must have been to leave the flat looking as if Mr Williams had simply left without any clues, because otherwise it's very strange to remove all forensic clues- -except a dead body in a large holdall! As one of the least scrupulous defence attorneys in Texas has boasted in his cups, it's so much easier to successfully defend a client who manages to make the victim's body disappear!

The thing is, with decay inside and the outside washable, the holdall effectively became a sealed and removable crime scene in a bag.

It is also true that sewing a victim into a canvas bag, to slowly suffocate, was a means of exemplary execution for dissenting Nazi party members. And this may have informed the murderer about the refinement of using the holdall as the murder weapon as well as a forensically hygienic means of body removal. The modus operandi in the Williams case is an intriguing combination of Kenneth Kimes and Adolf Hitler.

PS: if the cleanup operation missed any forensic evidence, anywhere, then the gap between the toilet pedestal and the bath would be it.

Money, Global Power and Gareth Williams

After a preliminary hearing by the Westminster Coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, to prepare for this month's inquest into the death of Gareth Williams, a mathematician and GCHQ technician on secondment to MI6, Counsel for the Williams family said that they feared he had been murdered by someone "schooled in the black arts", possibly MI6 or some other intelligence service.

It's beyond question that not only was the scene of death systematically cleaned of evidence, possibly over a period of days, but also that the subsequent police investigation, and those of any newspapers showing a non-prurient interest, was systematically and very persistently subverted amidst a barrage of smears about the deceased and his supposed lifestyle. The smears were not trivial things: investigating officers were following theories based on Mr Williams being a gay bondage fetishist, when in fact he had a girlfriend. They managed not to be aware of the girlfriend, because in the course of recording evidence and statements volunteered by witnesses, including the girlfriend, other officers had mis-recorded her name, so she seemed to the coroner to be three different people, and also mis-recorded and evidently mis-represented what she had said. Strangely enough, this interference helps Medawar part the mists on who is behind the cover-up, and who, therefore, might reasonably be a suspect in Mr Williams' murder, for that is almost certainly what his death was.

Just like serial killers, individuals who organise a succession of cover-ups and miscarriages of justice, develop a signature. A highly distinctive signature in the matter of the cover-up would tend to suggest someone whose mastery of the black arts is self-taught, perhaps over many years, with increasing sophistication mingling with one or two tell-tale bad habits.

The first thing to note when analysing the cover-up, is that the Russian intelligence services, the FSB and the SVR, usually kill people in order to frighten others into line, and a cover-up would be self-defeating. They try not to leave evidence that would implicate any individual operative, but they usually like the world to know it was their work, hence the frequent employment of high-technology methods of murder not available to anybody else. There is evidence of a Russian surveillance operation around Mr William's flat in Alderney street. However, Mr Williams died in the interval between an SVR general going missing whilst swimming near Tartrus in Syria, and his body being found on a beach in Turkey. The building that Mr Williams' flat is in, is owned by an apparent MI6 front company "Rodinia" registered in the Caribbean, and whilst the SVR general was officially "missing", the SVR and FSB would have been watching anxiously in case he appeared at some such species of MI6 safehouse. They might even have been relieved when his death was confirmed.

The cover-up was also very well-informed, not just in the black arts of murder, but in the methods used by the Metropolitan Police Service to investigate murder. Many aspects, such as mis-recording the girlfriend's name and her testimony, required ongoing access to the police inquiry, from within the police rather than from outside or above. This would have been very problematic for the FSB and SVR, in terms of political and diplomatic risk as well as operational difficulty. It would have been tricky for MI6 and MI5, too: Medawar would expect them to try and get a target to go to a foreign country before doing them in, rather than have to risk dabbling in an UK police investigation with the power to arrest even their respective directors general. Investigations with a genuine national security aspect tend to be suppressed with D Notices and Public Interest Immunity Certificates (signed by Secretaries of State), rather than subverted, too.

Systematic mis-recording and mis-filing of evidence, witnesses statements and even the names and address of volunteering witnesses, is precisely what happened to make the Stephen Lawerence murder inquiry go so badly wrong. It's also what happened to allow the gangster Kenneth Noye, to get away with a plea of self-defence after he'd killed the police officer, John Fordham, who was investigating Noye's part in the Brinks-Mat bullion robbery. (The police simply couldn't give prosecutors enough properly-correlated evidence to rebut Noye's claim, despite the obvious convenience to Noye of killing an officer, in self-defence, who was trying to discover where Noye had hidden millions of pounds worth of gold.) Interestingly, Kenneth Noye was a friend and colleague of gangster Clifford Norris, the father of one of those very belatedly convicted for the murder of Stephen Lawerence.

Much, much more of the same technique was used to frustrate successive police investigations into the murder of the private investigator, Daniel Morgan, culminating in the collapse of the prosecution of former police officer, Jonathan Rees, and others, for this murder. Key evidence, which should have been shown to the defence (but was not necessarily of any value to the defence) went missing, and this allowed the defendants to claim they could not have a fair trial. Since they seemed to know a lot more about the missing evidence than the prosecution did, one wonders precisely by what agency did it disappear? (A remarkably similar thing happened at the trial, in Cardiff, of several former police officers accused of perverting the course of justice, leading to the false conviction of three men for the murder of a prostitute. Within weeks of their acquittal, the "destroyed" evidence was found to be safe and well in a police evidence room, but by then it was too late.)

Throughout the investigation into the death of Gareth Williams, every bit of progress, appeal for information, or even newspaper stories taking his death seriously, have provoked a tide of defamation against Mr Williams, all suggesting that his death was the direct result of bizarre and demeaning sexual perversions on his part. These smears have been launched predominantly through the Rupert-Murdoch-owned News International Group newspapers, and have all been attributed to "senior" police sources. They have also caused great anger and frustration to those senior police officers actually on the inquiry team.

A very similar thing has happened throughout the quarter of a century-long investigation into the disappearance and probable murder of Miss Suzy Lamplugh. Every time anyone tries to actually solve this, the "senior police source" dines with a News International Journalist and suddenly we're being told that Miss Lamplugh "may have had an affair with the sex-killer and gangster John Canaan" or some other fairy story, usually involving a burial site on the opposite side of the country to where she was last seen. Why the senior police source would not want her abduction to be solved is a matter of speculation, but might be similar to why a senior police source wouldn't want the Stephen Lawerence murder to be solved.

The commonality here, is a senior police officer, or perhaps a now-retired senior officer with a lot of loyal stooges still within the MPS, who has certain tried and trusted methods of frustrating a murder inquiry, and links to the sort of gangster who might want this to happen, and to the sort of media organization which might cheerfully publish the necessary smears and disinformation.

Now let us go on a completely different journey, and see if we end up anywhere near the same place...

What was it that made GCHQ technician turned MI6 officer, Gareth Williams, worth murdering? Obviously, most would think, his top-secret work for the intelligence agencies.

Except that, for nearly all of his intelligence work, he was a junior-middle ranking part of a team. He had, supposedly, started to take the lead on some matters, but however "brainy" he might seem to tabloid journalists, he does not seem to have been an exceptional talent by GCHQ standards. In addition, the technical experts at GCHQ and MI6 are not very visible at all to anyone outside the organizations. He had some recent contact with American counterparts, who tend to underestimate the importance and worth of any British person they meet. It's possible that a foriegn agency, such as the FSB or SVR, formed a higher opinion of him, but Medawar would expect him to disappear rather than die, if that had happened. His most recent assignments seemed to be to do with cyber crime, rather than actual intelligence work.

Since Mr Williams was recruited by GCHQ, he would seem to have been too invisible to become a murder target for the sort of seriously-determined party that could have carried off the cover-up and smear campaign. But, young as he was, his life did not start when Gareth Williams was recruited in 2000.

Thing is, before becoming a secret spy, Gareth Williams was actually famous within a small band of online games enthusiasts and an over-lapping circle of hackers. He had a reputation for being "unbeatable" at certain games and, apparently, at certain types of recreational hacking and amateur codebreaking. The crucial period in his life was between finishing a degree course at the university of Bangor in North Wales in 1996, and his recruitment by GCHQ in 2000. Because he did his first degree whilst still of school age, he was still living with his parents whilst studying at Bangor. He then went on to do a Phd at the University of Manchester, and then started, but did not complete, an advanced maths course at St Catherine's College, Cambridge.

His Phd dissertation was centered around computer games, but was not as trivial as that might sound. A lot of high-powered maths is connected to "game theory" and games are one way of determing what things are, and are not, mathematically possible. Some of the applications are of very immediate interest to organized crime, too.

With hindsight, and in the light of the BBC Panorama investigation into the activities of the News Corporation electronic security company "NDS", it would seem that Mr Williams was in greater danger of contact with "serious players" between 1997 and 2000, than at any time during his service within the protected environment of GHCQ and the (less well protected) world of MI6.

The BBC discovered that NDS (mostly through the NDS offices in Haifa) had been part of a systematic operation to drive out of business, all rivals to pay-TV satellite broadcasters owned, or associated with, their parent company, News Corporation. The BBC focused on the main UK rival to News Corporation's "BSkyB", On Digital, which was relaunched as ITV Digital, before going bust with losses of £1bn. But several other European and global broadcasters were driven from the market by similar campaigns.

In 1996 to 1997, NDS, represented by a former MPS Chief Superintendent, Ray Adams, went round all of the most active and talented "famous" hackers in Europe, seeking recruits for an operation that was to crack, and keep cracking, the encryption methods by which On Digital and others ensured that only paying customers could view their service. Up until the service finally went bust, leaving BSkyB with an effective monopoly, NDS kept refreshing a hacker's website "THOIC" with up to date codes for breaking the encryption used by On Digital and other potential competitors. In the end, tens of thousands of fake smartcards using the codes were sold by hackers in pubs and at car boot sales (and through online auctions), and it was often said that On Digital had more non-paying customers than ones who paid the full whack to the proper party.

Given that Mr Williams was famous within that circle of talent, at precisely that time, it's unlikely that Mr Adams neglected to try him out, However, because Mr Williams doesn't appear to have been a greedy man at all, he might not have been as receptive to the offers being made as some of the others evidently were.

At the time, NDS and Mr Adams might simply have thought they were helping the Murdoch Empire put one over on the competition, but over the subsequent decade, it would have become apparent that the pay-TV hacking campaign against News Corporation's competitors had done far more than drive On Digital out of business with a billion pound loss.

That hacking campaign had made News Corporation a major world power. Fox News had some control of the news agenda in North America (by no means unchallenged) but in the UK, Sky News and News International between them were openly mulling over who they would support, politically, and who would win general elections: they had considerable influence over who came to power and what they would do when they did. In Italy, control of Pay-TV and especially sports channels, directly determined who was the government.

In Asia, it was News Corporation who ruled the roost and determined how the emerging powers of China and Malaysia would relate to the rest of the world.

The NDS hacking campaign ended up changing the distribution of money, and power, all around the world, more dramatically than any British Intelligence operation in the same period, or frankly, since the Second World War. Moreover, it's a much narrower field, in which Mr Williams must have seemed much more important than he did in the general run of national intelligence.
And, strangely, it changed that distribution of money and power conclusively in favour of News Corporation and its many subsidiaries.

And because Mr Williams also appeared to be the only one in that field not eager to accept large amounts of cash to perform extremely dodgy actions, he might well have seemed to be dangerous, especially when some of the key players found themselves increasingly under suspicion for other crimes and cover-ups. (In reality, it was a German hacker who'd been quite happy to take their money, who was equally happy to betray all that they had done, to the BBC.)

Isn't it strange that by taking a completely different journey, Medawar finds himself looking once again at a Chief Superintendent who left the Metropolitan Police Service in 1996?

Update:
More emerges about NDS and the global political and economic impact of its multiple illegal hacking campaigns. See this link. Interestingly, this particular newspaper started to investigate the issue four years ago, which means that Mr Williams was murdered about the same time that Ray Adams might have realized the game could be up.

America's Forgotten Anti-Gangstalking Law: USC 18 Section 241

Many of Medawar's fellow bloggers are calling for laws in the USA, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom against "gangstalking" and "proxy stalking" which could both collectively be called organized stalking. And certainly in Canada and Australia, some legislative action is imperative. But it's long been Medawar's view that in the United Kingdom (both England and Scotland; unlike the Berlin Wall, Hadrian's Wall has never fallen in the legal sense) all forms of organized stalking were breaking several laws already and the problem was recognition of that fact by the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service and action by the police.

In the USA, there already is a highly specific law, under which it is pretty well impossible for any two or more persons to carry out a stalking campaign against a citizen, without conspiring to deny that citizen their legal and constitutional rights. Under USC18 section 241, this is an offence normally punishable by a fine and/or up to ten years imprisonment. But if the conspiracy leads to a loss of life, and the usual qualifications of premeditated murder are not specified (because murder is not a Federal offence and would be dealt with under county or state law if it had happened) then the penalty can be life imprisonment, or death.

So, if somebody is harassed and deprived of their legal and constitutional rights to the point where they commit suicide, or become ill and expire as some other consequence of the conspiracy to deny them their rights, then a capital crime has been committed. For example: if a conspiracy to harass a citizen restricted his ability to earn money to keep himself properly fed and housed and he were to die as a result of living rough, the conspirators have committed a capital crime, just as they would have done had they conspired to prevent him receiving proper medical treatment for an illness. Or, if they conspired to restrict his freedom of movement and he was unable to flee a natural disaster, they would have committed a capital crime that could be investigated by Federal Agents and tried in a Federal Court.

The possibility of life imprisonment or capital punishment also applies if the citizen is kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or there is an intent to sexually assault, or an attempt to kill.

These are extreme examples to demonstrate the circumstances in which organized stalking is a capital crime under US Federal Law. But not so extreme that there are no stalking groups currently risking such a charge. In fact, the threat and fact of sexual assault is pretty common.

In the less extreme case, whereby a citizen is not harried to his death, merely prevented from living the normal life of an American citizen, it is still a felony, punishable by a longer prison term than many burglaries, assaults and contraband offences. And nearly ALL stalking activity involving two or more persons acting together, commits this felony.

Even if a lone stalker enlists the help of another for a single part of his stalking campaign against a citizen, a conspiracy to deny that citizen his rights has probably taken place.

The relevant legal text is a lot shorter than this post and is reproduced, below.

       If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or
  intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth,
  Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any
  right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of
  the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;
  or
    If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the
  premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free
  exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured -
    They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
  ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in
  violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an
  attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit
  aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined
  under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life,
  or both, or may be sentenced to death.

The second paragraph makes it obvious that the Congress had the Ku Klux Klan very much in mind when drafting this law; anyone who thinks that they are stalking in a more noble cause, should think again: if you resort to the Klan's methods, your cause is incapable of nobility and you fully deserve to be tarred with precisely the same brush. It is legally impossible to stalk in a good cause. This title is not an anti-racism law: it is a law against denying a citizen his constitutional and legal rights on any pretext whatsoever.

Update:
Four police officers in New Haven, Connecticut, have been indicted and arrested under this very law.

Further update:
Judge, Sheriff and Prosecutor from Mingo County, West Virginia, all jailed under this law and a few others. See also this link.

Update 5/6/2017: Most readers of this post will be interested in this newer post, which contains a link to a new report by the UK's Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, into stalking and the inadequate response of police and prosecutors to it. There is also a research document published alongside the report, which is of relevance to stalking in whichever country it occurs.

Update 15/7/2020: see new post for pretty conclusive proof that organised stalking can happen and that it can lead to Federal charges.

Stalked

This link is to a blog by a person in the UK who is being persistently stalked, apparently by a "registered nurse". (As of May 2020 this link no longer works. The article is being left up because it shows ways in which stalking or "gaslighting" behaviour can be prosecuted.))

It would be very helpful to know whether this means a "State Registered Nurse" or a "Registered Mental Nurse". The element of pyschological warfare rather suggests the latter. The stalker appears to have secured a number of minor public positions, such as school governor. It is by no means outside Medawar's experience for a psychopath to secure as many such positions as he or she possibly could. Particularly if "psychopath" further translates to "pathological liar."

Too many stalking victims try in vain to get the police to act "against the stalking". Due largely to problems with definitions, the law is less than helpful here.

However:
If the stalker has given any clue at all, or made any suggestion at all, as to what the victim is supposed to do to make the stalking stop, or stop it getting worse, no matter how large or small this requirement may be, the stalking becomes a component of blackmail, or conspiracy to blackmail if the stalker has even one accomplice or supporter. As soon as a stalking victim can tell an English or Welsh policeman that the stalking is intended to force them to perform an unwanted action that would represent a loss of material or rights on their part, then the stalking victim can make a complaint of blackmail and the police have both duty and powers to act.

The law of blackmail in England and Wales is not defined as an attempt to obtain money or goods: it is defined as an attempt to force a loss upon the victim. The courts have accepted that "loss" can include interference with the right to carry out normal activities.

Medawar would suggest that being forced to install a level of security not considered normal or necessary by one's neighbours, is a material loss for starters.

The stalker can also be prosecuted for inflicting grievous or actual psychological harm. Actual psychological harm is anything you need medical treatment for, grievous psychological harm is usually defined as anything that requires the victim to stay in hospital for treatment.

It is also an act of criminal trespass if the stalker, from the victim's property or any adjoining property, prevents the victim from doing anything on the victim's own property which the victim has a legal right to do.

Anyone in a similar predicament might usefully remind their local police of these three things. Because even if the victim has not yet required psychiatric treatment, if the stalking is designed to bring this situation about, it is a wilful attempt to cause grievous psychological harm -and that's just as much an arrestable offence as swinging a hammer at someone's head.

Sentences for blackmail tend to be severe, especially when the blackmail involves physical intimidation. Sentences for causing actual bodily harm can range up to seven years, those for causing grievous bodily harm can be longer still.

Any criminal conviction for offences of this nature could disbar the stalker from being a school governor, or even from having contact with children. It is also likely that the relevant Royal College would strike the stalker off from ever practicing as a nurse.

Stalkers and Malware

Many "phishing" and other scam e-mails are sent from hijacked e-mail accounts, using lists of e-mail addresses found on computers by infecting malware. Usually, these are friends and contacts of the account holder, so they may be people who'd be sympathetic if he got into difficulties and needed money.

But what happens if such malware infects a computer owned by a stalker?

Well, the malware searches for lists of e-mails and personal details, and sends scam e-mails to them, and passes any other contact details to cold-calling scammer's call centres, as usual. Except these are not the computer-owner's friends and contacts: they are the people he's been stalking and obssessively gathering information on: see below for an example.

-- On Sat, 17/12/11, PHILIP BEAVEN <philbeaven@btinternet.com> wrote:

From: PHILIP BEAVEN <philbeaven@btinternet.com>
Subject: My Sad Trip...Philip Beaven
To: philbeaven@btinternet.com
Date: Saturday, 17 December, 2011, 9:34

I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about my trip, because it was impromptu. I had to be in Madrid Spain for a program. The program was successful, but my journey has turned sour. I misplaced my wallet on my way back to my hotel after I went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables I had. Now, my passport is in custody of the hotel management pending when I make payment.

I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a loan of 2,605 Eur from you. this will enable me sort my hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest. Thanks so much.

Phil


Normally, one is sympathetic to someone whose computer is hijacked in this way and in whose name, friends and family get reams of malicious spam.

But in this case, Mr Beaven seems to have been hoarding details of people who were not friends, family or contacts: they are people he hounds.
Including the unfortunate stained glass artist from Ipswich who Mr Beaven tried to out, falsely, as "Medawar".
The e-mail lacks the profanity and hate-filled abuse that Medawar normally expects from Mr Beaven, which is partly how it was spotted as a scam.

Stalkers and Snake Oil

Rhys Morgan, a young man with a serious illness who decided to expose some of the cranks and con-artists peddling harmful alternative "cures" for his condition, is beginning to experience the early stages of an organised stalking campaign.

This may get worse, but he may also find that many of the threats are empty ones. If someone is really going to sue, they get a properly registered solicitor to send a letter. Threatening e-mails have no legal force whatever, and the person sending them is almost certainly breaking the law and/or professional codes of conduct.

The way to tackle this kind of thing, is to keep striking at the head of the snake (or the snake-oil salesman) and not to allow skanks hired by the snake oil salesman to divert attention from the con.

The people doing this are in the United States, they are almost certainly breaking Federal Laws and are exposing themselves to massive civil liabilities from people they have sold harmful substances to on the basis of false promises. They have a great deal more to lose from a court battle that Rhys Morgan has, so what they are doing is lay down a barrage of threats of legal action, as well as threats of a more direct nature (sending him Google Earth images of his home, for example) precisely in order to keep the matter out of court.

The stalker's next move will be to use a campaign of lies to induce individuals to initiate some kind of physical harassment against Rhys and his family. These lies may be completely unconnected to Rhys's campaign, and probably won't be based on even a grain of truth. At which point, he must contact the police, very firmly and preferably with a solicitor in tow, and make it plain that there is a criminal smear campaign against him, and that it is taking place in order to protect a large scale consumer fraud.

The ACPO advice, which leads many police forces into abject failure on stalking cases in particular, is effectively to blame the victim for provoking "anti-social behaviour" from conveniently unidentified local "kids". (The Data Protection act supposedly (but not actually) makes it illegal for the police to tell the victim who they think it might be!)

It is very important to squash this suggestion from the outset and every single time it is subsequently deployed, because a succession of police officers will be involved, and it only takes one of them to succeed in making this suggestion without challenge, for it to go on the file and become the official explanation for any crimes committed against Rhys and his family. The above advice may sound hostile to the police, but it's necessary to recognise that many of their guidelines are issued precisely in order to limit the number of cases they get involved with. They will help, providing that the victim can ensure the case is recorded and presented in a way that triggers investigation and solution, rather than pallative or evasive measures preferred by the more political levels of the criminal justice system.

If threatening e-mails originate from the USA, this is where to report them.

Meredith Kercher: Evading the Obvious Explanation

Now that there's nothing about the Meredith Kercher case which would be defined as sub judice under English Law (no-one facing an unresolved criminal charge) it may last be safe to point out a painfully obvious probability, and pose the one question which Italian Police and Prosecutors notably failed to ask:

In the two or three months before Miss Kercher was murdered in the cottage she shared with Miss Knox, did anyone in Northern Italy (not necessarily Perugia itself), systematically research the financial means of families of foreign students studying or due to study in Perugia? The Knox family in particular, but it wouldn't be confined to them, at least not in the early phases. Someone would have found out the names of foreign students, found out where they came from, then narrowed their sights a bit onto those who seemed to come from prosperous communities. These would have been researched a bit more deeply, until a shortlist was drawn up, of students with caring families who could afford a ransom, but could not afford (and would not know how to hire) a small army of ruthless mercenaries instead.

The Kerchers are from Surrey, which might excite interest, but there's a bit of a financial gulf between St George's Hill and Coulsden, and once the list-maker discovered the Kerchers came from the latter, Meredith might have been struck from the list.

Eventually, such lists have one name on it, and, with hindsight, Amanda Knox probably struck the ideal balance between wealth and vulnerability, so the name would have been hers. The name would be passed to someone more local, who'd played no part in researching the list, and who was definitively expendable -and they would have to be known to organized crime. The expendable local would have cased the joint, more competently or less, and when he observed a window of opportunity, he would have summoned a small group of specialists, whom he would have led to, and into, the property.

Both Meredith and Amanda have the same general description: English-speaking ,young, female, long brown hair. Miss Knox protests that until she was arrested, she'd never been in the same place as Rudy Guede before, and this would imply that Mr Guede would not have been a reliable authority on the crucial matter of which English-speaking young woman with long brown hair was which.

Fairly quickly, the specialists and their expendable local would have realized that something wasn't stacking up. Almost certainly, the specialists would have realized this long before the expendable local was prepared to admit it. Faced with a choice between total disaster and trying to get a ransom for a different young woman, they would have chosen the latter, and tried, in a few minutes, to establish equivalent information to everything which the researcher had supplied for Amanda after a month's work. That would account for the huge number of injuries on Meredith's body: sexual assault and torture at first, giving way to frustrated psychopathic rage when her answers, or the lack of them, signalled the end of their perceived opportunity for gain. This would have also served to impress Mr Guede with the urgent need not to implicate or identify the specialists in any way. Which he's managed not to do.

A bloody handprint links Mr Guede to the murder scene, but there are also fingerprints for several other persons, none of whom Italian Police have been able to (have tried to?) identify.
Tne unambiguous bloody hand-print emphasizes Mr Guede's expandability.

The above is not a flight of fancy, but a well-informed description of one of the most famous and lucrative industries of Northern Italy, one which every level of Italian officialdom, politics and the judiciary, has always preferred to pretend doesn't exist. Kidnap for ransom.

Amanda Knox is not lucky to get out of jail: she is lucky not have to have spent a few terrified weeks in a cellar or cave, having peripheral parts of herself sliced off and sent to her family through the post, before being found, almost certainly dead, in a car boot somewhere on payment of a ransom. Meredith Kercher was very unlucky, but also possibly, and we will never know for sure, brave enough not to cooperate with Amanda's would-be kidnappers.

A further observation might be that a young member of an important organized crime family, might have felt the need to pull off a major crime to prove his worth. If this was it, it couldn't have gone more wrong. As Medawar has observed elsewhere, "clogs to clogs in three generations" applies to organized crime families as well as industrialists.


Update:
The Appeal Court has published its reasoning over Miss Knox's acquittal.
There has been some deabte over whether Miss Knox might have been convicted on the evidence produced by the Italian prosecution, in a "UK" or US Court.

There is no such thing as a "UK Court"; an English Court is presumably what is meant, as the victim came from a long way South of Hadrian's Wall.

But the question really ought to be , what repercussions would there have been for the chief prosecutor and the detectives involved? Because they are the only ones who might be convicted of anything in an English Crown Court on the basis of the case they presented against Miss Knox and her boyfriend! What they did may be legal in Italy, but as the Appeal Court Judge has made very clear, it's definitely not acceptable in Italy and it's certainly not a way to solve a murder.

The case against Miss Knox and her boyfriend looks, for all the world, like an attempt to fill in the obvious two-person gap in the case against Rudy Guede, which is very incomplete despite, in some ways because of, his guilty plea. We'd be a lot nearer the truth if he'd fought the case and forced the prosecution to produce more of their evidence against him.

But that might have cast a spotlight on names and faces which the world still hasn't seen or heard about. Given a choice between that, and a sixteen year prison stretch, Mr Guede willingly takes the porridge. Which implies that the obvious two-person gap is in reality filled by much more frightening and resourceful personalities than those of Miss Knox and her boyfriend.

Forced Labour in Skane

This link is to an article reporting that human rights researchers in Sweden have found that at least seven Irish organized crime gangs are using forced labour on construction contracts in Sweden, with the slaves receiving little help or concern from Swedish authorities and, even more shamefully, no detectable concern from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office at all. It is apparently being left to the Serious and Organized Crime Agency and local (English) police forces to do all the work, and they obviously have no diplomatic power to pressure the Swedish government into living up to one of the most basic responsibilities of a government in the civilized world: to stop slavery happening and to punish the slavers.

Whilst the Daily Mail concentrates on those slaves who may be British subjects, it appears that practically all of them have been trafficked through the UK, which makes their welfare a British responsibility regardless of where the gangsters involved originally kidnapped them from. The current British Prime Minister is an appeaser at heart, and nothing would pain him more than to embarrass a fellow European politician on behalf of down and outs who don't own a single top-end Rangerover between them, but using the very considerable power of his office to protect the weak against the venal and ruthless is one of the duties that goes with all the power and privilege. The Swedish Prime Minister should not feel humiliated by being taken to task for this: the dishonour and humiliation lies in allowing it to happen, and that would appear to cover several successive British Home Secretaries from the early nineties to the present day, as well.

Stalkers in Central Texas

The unlovely pair on the left are stalkers, active in Fredericksburg. Readers with names, addresses and other useful details about them are welcome to post anonymous comments here. Medawar would also be interested to hear victims of this pair other than the lady who took this phonetrait. It would be interesting to know how far out of Fredericksburg their writ (if they are literate) runs. It would be helpful if anyone suggesting names states red or blue so we know which is which.

Markrepcarinabking

The above "follower" has been blocked on suspicion of being some form of spam follower.
Unless Medawar receives an intelligent communication which convinces him that something other than spam was intended, that follower will remain blocked.

Fresh Slavery Arrests

Three more people have been arrested in connection with slavery adn servitude offences at Green Acre caravan park in South West Bedfordshire. See Link.
So far, everyone ever arrested in England under the "Slavery and Servitude" Section 71 of the Coroner's and Justice Act, has been a member of the same, Connors, family.

However, it is becoming apparent from the testimony of liberated slaves, that some of them were traded, and had originally been abducted by persons unconnected with the Connors family. It isn't clear how effectively the new laws deal with the trading of persons for forced labour. The basic techniques employed, seem remarkably consistent regardless of who the slave-holders and traders are, and this would seem to indicate that the practice has been going on for long enough for "best" practice to be established and disseminated, albeit within a narrow community.

Medawar hopes that the Proceeds of Crime Act will be applied in all of these cases, because Section 71 appears to set a maximum prison term of 14-15 years, and some of the slaves have been held for longer than that. If there cannot be complete justice, there must be reparation.