Facts and excerpts from Redrum: The Innocent and The Kaufman Report that suggest or corroborate the idea that the body of Christine Jessop may have been dumped in the Sunderland field at a later date perhaps November or maybe even December of 1984:
KAUFMAN REPORT
Pg 680
As the Pattersons walked along the tractor path they spotted what initially appeared to them to be garbage approximately 25 feet from the west edge of the tractor path. The trailer, which had been put there by the owners of the property, was approximately 60 to 70 feet from the site of this garbage.
Pg 680
Mr. Patterson and his daughters then walked along a trail in the grass towards the site of the garbage. The grass adjacent to the beaten down pathway was approximately 1½ feet tall. As they came closer to the site, Mr. Patterson realized that they had come upon the remains of a child. Although he had walked along this property a number of times between October 3, 1984 and December 31, 1984, this was the first time he had noticed the remains.
RED RUM: THE INNOCENT
Pg 54
Its funnythats what I said to my wifeI cant really understand why I never seen it before, Patterson marvelled later. Because I must have drove, I figure, between four and five times past that body. And it must have been there at that particular time, but I never seen it. My neighbour drove up there, tooand he never seen nothing.
Implication: Fred Patterson did not discover the body earlier because it wasnt there.
Pg 58
As he shuffled around, Fitz(patrick) pondered how remarkable it was that nobody had found Christine earlier. This was hardly a cunningly concealed body.
Implication: no one found it sooner, because it wasnt there.
Pg 60
Three months of heartache and brain fatigue were ending in a board full of bones, frozen maggots and a head wrapped up in a ball of clothing.
Implication of frozen maggots in December: Even if it was a mild early-winter (and it was), its hard to imagine that blowflies were still active at the end of November or into December for maggots to present. Almost all insect activity in Ontario has gone dormant by the end of October and certainly by November. Maggots, once theyre dead, disintegrate quite fast on their own, or theyre consumed by other insects and birds. So the fact (if its accurate it might not be see John Ferriss appraisal later in this post) that frozen maggots, or maggots of any kind (live/dead) were found on the body could be highly significant and point to a later arrival of the body at the Sunderland field.
Pg67-68
What was difficult to understand was why the Culls didnt discover Christines body just a few metres from their trailer in early October. Later that month, James Cull had smelled a foul odour he took to be caused by goats nearby, but he never found a source for it. On November 1, Mrs Cull had died suddenly from a heart attack. Her husband stayed away from the trailer during the immediate mourning period, finally forcing himself up there in early December in order to gauge whether he wanted to keep the land or not. When he was still a few paces away, Cull noticed the broken glass in the trailer door. He unlocked it and walked over the shards feeling flat and depressed. Just about anything worth stealing was gonehis Skil saw, a naphtha heater, a propane tanks and a Coleman lantern. Several small hand tools had also vanished.
Implication: the Culls had been to their trailer in early October and did not see a body even though James claimed later that he smelled something foul. (Remember, the body was found only a few meters from the trailer). James Cull returned again to the trailer in early December and found his trailer broken into. One would assume that he walked around the trailer, investigating looking to see if his items were indeed stolen, or if they had been pitched into the trees. He would have looked for tracks, perhaps other signs of trespassing and vandalismbut no body was discovered (and again, the remains were eventually found not too far from the trailer see body dump site diagram in earlier post with relevant information.)
Pg116
Despite the rather remote location of the body site, there had been no serious attempt to hide Christines body. No grass or leaves had been piled on it and the spot was easy to see from the tractor path.
Implication: It was easy to spot from the tractor path and it was spotted from the path by the Fred Patterson and his daughters (once it was there).
Pgs 403-405
John Ferris, the head of autopsy services at Vancouver General Hospital and a veteran of 650 autopsies in cases of suspected homicide, was retained by the defence (of GPM) to analyse the results of the exhumation.
None of the Morin prosecutors had ever seriously envisioned the killer returning to the site. Now, Ferris was suggesting that the killer had mutilated the body well after the murdereither before or after taking it to the body site. Then, the killer had arranged its legs in the wishbone position as part of some demented fantasy. Ferriss first reason for thinking this was that such a massive chest injury would have necessarily caused tremendous leakage of blood into the surrounding soil during the assault. Yet there had been none. Products of decomposition also would have been expected to remain in the soil undisturbed by rainfall, since fatty tissues are not water soluble.
Second, photographs of the remains revealed no signs of dead insects or their larval shell, as one would expect at a decomposition scene. It is not a question of a few, Ferris said. There should be hundreds.
Third, no one passing near the body had ever been attracted by the extremely strong odours which invariably accompany decompositionodours that are easily detectable up to thirty to forty metres away.
Fourth, there was an absence of leaves or other debris deposited on the body. This made no sense if Christines remains had truly lain there for three months.
Fifth, there was no evidence that the remains had been ravaged by small animals such as raccoons, squirrels and mice. Nor were the bones scattered about the site as would be expected if they had been there for quite some time.
Sixth, there were decomposition fluid stains visible over much of Christines bunched clothing. Given that her body had been found naked, the stains suggested that Christine must have been clothed for a substantial period immediately following her death.
Seventh, there was an absence of internal organs. This might be from decomposition or animal activity, but it also could suggest the killer might have removed them prior to the body being dumped at the site.
Finally, the remains of skin did not show the signs of wrinkling one would normally expect in a corpse which had been exposed to the substantial rain which fell that autumn. Human remains left in the elements tend to grow leathery and mummified, Ferris said. These were not. Even more significantly, within forty-eight hours of being found, the skin had shrivelled up and dried out. It all pointed toward the body having been protected for a time and dumped at the site within two weeks of being discovered. So far as Ferris was concerned, it had almost certainly not been at the body site for three months. It could have been covered by clothes or plastic, he suggested. Or it could have been buried. But it must have been protected from animals and surface insects.
I believe they were probably at that location for little more than a few days; maybe two weeks, Ferris said. Certainly not for three months. It was somewhere else.
Ferris offered another shocking observation. He said there was no reasonable explanation for why the pile of bones found by the Jessopsa finger bone, two ribs and a splintered vertebrahad been in such close proximity to one another. Bones not anatomically related have gotten together in a little pile, he mused. The only animal that could do that has hands. It is almost as if someone had searched the area for bones and put them in a little pile.
(Note concerning the bones that Ferris is referring to: Well after the police had thoroughly searched the body dump site after the removal of Christines remains on the night of December 31, 1984, the Jessop family returned to the spot in the spring of 1985 and Christines brother, Ken, found a small collection of bones that the police had missed. The family collected the bones in a coffee cup and took them to a Sunderland police station and they were later confirmed to belong to the remains of Christine Jessop.)
Pinkofsky (GPMs defence attorney) was convinced that the disappearance of Christines blue sweater was proof positive that she was kept by her abductor and reclothed prior to her death. In addition, the running shoes found with the body were size three, while her family said her shoe size had been one and a half. Pinkofsky embraced the theory even more tightly upon learning that white panties were found beside Christines body. Janet Jessop had always maintained that Christine was wearing pink, frilly ones on the day she disappeared.
Final thoughts:
Again, here we see a nearly complete contradiction of the facts presented elsewhere. This is indicative of the entire case. Everywhere you look, nearly every fact in this case can be paired up with a contradictory fact. They nullify each other like basic algebra. Positive one, plus negative one equals zero.
What does it mean? Like this whole case, you can see what you want to see. The facts can be assembled to support a great number of theories. Unfortunately, this has allowed Christines killer to walk between the raindrops and escape. This is also a reminder for anyone investigating this case to keep an open mind and dont get too cemented into one particular theory or scenario.
I wonder if the clue or clues needed to catch the killer, or at least put us onto his path is not here somewhere, dispersed and muddled up with everything else. Could it be a matter of finding the correct clues and stringing them together in the right way? Or, are there so many false cards in the deck that this is now, thirty years later, completely impossible?
In regards to when Christines body was placed in that Sunderland field, I cant help imagining an interesting experiment. In order to consider this experiment thoughtfully and critically, one must first divorce himself/herself of all emotion and think strictly like a scientist.
Imagine now, this experiment with me:
Select three, dead, young pigs of the same size and mass from a farmer. Their mass would correspond to that of a 9-year-old child. Why pigs? Because in biological terms, a pig closely resembles a human being in terms of organ size, organ arrangement, and pigs dont have fur, they have skin like us.
Now imagine each of the dead pigs stabbed and cut with a sharp knife, front and backin a way that resembles the injuries of the victim. Each pigs injuries must be identical in terms of location on the body and depth of blade penetration.
Place one of the pigs in a grassy area near small trees at the borderland of a farmers field in the same micro-climate of Sunderland in early October. It doesnt have to be Sunderland, just the same micro-climate.
Refrigerate the other two pigs and place each of them in a corresponding environment in early November, and then, the last pig in early December.
Leave them and let nature do its thing.
Then on December 31, check and compare the degree of decomposition, insect activity, and animal scavenging, etc., on the remains of the pigs. Of course, it goes without saying that certain variables could not be controlled (the presence of animal scavengers, the weather), however, the experiment might provide us with a base-line of data for comparative purposes. I know that such data already exists concerning human decomposition (see the work of William M. Bass at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, etc.) but instead of relying on expert opinions and old data, I would conduct this new, unbiased experiment.
Which pig would most closely resemble the remains as they were found in late December? Would the remains be in a dry state? (See my earlier post on the various states of human decomposition.)
Could an experiment like this help us answer the question: when, most likely, were the remains of Christine Jessop placed in that Sunderland field? And, I wonder, was an experiment like this ever carried out by law enforcement or forensic personnel?
I wonder.
