On 25 February 2002 Patrick Barkham of The Guardian reported Scientist in dingo case at heart of ambush inquiry.
He said the forensic expert investigating the baffling ambush of British tourists Joanne Lees and Peter Falconio in the Australian outback made the notorious error which jailed a mother for murdering her baby, it was revealed yesterday. Joy Kuhl identified foetal blood in a car belonging to Lindy Chamberlain - the crucial evidence that led to her conviction for killing her baby daughter, Azaria, near Ayres Rock, in 1980. Six years later, she admitted to a royal commission she was mistaken and the "blood" was an anti-rust chemical. Ms Chamberlain, who claimed a dingo had stolen her baby, was cleared. A film shot by a freelance cameraman for police officers and leaked to Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun shows Ms Kuhl spraying the orange VW Kombi driven by Mr Falconio, 28, and Ms Lees, 27, to detect traces of sweat and blood. The presence of Ms Kuhl at the heart of the fruitless seven-month search for the body of Mr Falconio and the gunman who attacked him and Ms Lees, is another blow to the credibility of the Northern Territory police investigation.
A senior police commissioner from South Australia was last week drafted in by territory police as they announced a six-week review of the stalled murder hunt. The investigation has been the most expensive in the Northern Territory's history, but officers' handling of key evidence has come under increasing criticism. It was recently revealed that instead of using the high-quality digital master-tape of CCTV footage of a suspect, police taped the images with a domestic video recorder, then spent weeks trying to "enhance" them. It is not the first time that echoes of the Lindy Chamberlain case have emerged in the outback attack, which Ms Lees survived by hiding from a gunman for hours in the desert 185 miles north of Alice Springs.
When suspicions developed about Ms Lees's innocence - which were quashed by police - Australian journalists noted that the "Lindification" of Ms Lees had begun. Ms Chamberlain was subject to a media witch hunt and rumours that the Northern Territory police did little to dispel. Ms Lees, from Huddersfield, recently returned to the scene of her ordeal with a Granada camera crew to film a documentary for Trevor McDonald's Tonight programme. She is believed to have been paid more than £30,000 for her story.
http://netk.net.au/NT/NT16.asp
