UK UK - Corrie McKeague, 23, Bury St Edmunds, 24 September 2016 #19

[Shiressleuth]

Genuinely baffled how this wasn't found out to start with. It seemed the obvious answer to what had happened to Corrie after hearing about his phone pings. Seems like a few people dropped the ball here.

It was discounted due to no forensics in h/s, bin or lorry, low bin weight and because sorting procedure and incinerator procedure would supposedly have found him. He was also not seen in cab or on truck on cctv. It's only just now back on the table due to the weight but the other things still stand. We don't know the real reason the weight has changed either.

 

[Happygirl]

Disgraceful that's its taken all this time to search the Landfill, everything pointed to Corrie being there, it should have been the first port of call, even if it was to rule it out. I get the feeling that there'll be quite a few pulled over the coals for this if Corrie's found there and quite rightly so!! I'd sack the lot of them for incompetence 😠

 

[Shiressleuth]

so he was actually deceased for the entire journey....he in fact died in HS one way or another

Rose, where does it say this anywhere? I don't follow you.

 

[TheTruthWillOut]

Another question. Why is it SP are saying >100KG? Still no precise number? I doubt the computer or paperwork say "above 100KG".

 

[Shiressleuth]

Disgraceful that's its taken all this time to search the Landfill, everything pointed to Corrie being there, it should have been the first port of call, even if it was to rule it out. I get the feeling that there'll be quite a few pulled over the coals for this if Corrie's found there and quite rightly so!! I'd sack the lot of them for incompetence 😠

I think we should let them get on with the search before judgment. Biffa have played a part in this.

 

[Shiressleuth]

Another question. Why is it SP are saying >100KG? Still no precise number? I doubt the computer or paperwork say "above 100KG".

Who knows what the real weight was?

 

[TheTruthWillOut]

Disgraceful that's its taken all this time to search the Landfill, everything pointed to Corrie being there, it should have been the first port of call, even if it was to rule it out. I get the feeling that there'll be quite a few pulled over the coals for this if Corrie's found there and quite rightly so!! I'd sack the lot of them for incompetence ��

We still don't actually know if the bin lorry did go straight to Milton after Mildenhall. Nicola said in this evenings Look East interview she was told it went to recycling to be sorted and he would have been found there. On the other hand Nicola has insisted from the beginning that the landfill should be searched which wasn't logical at the time.

More to twists to come I feel as nothing adds up or makes sense right now.

Who knows what the real weight was?

SP. They are saying it was above 100KG. Are they just plucking this out of thin air to "back up" him being in the LF? That figure must be recorded somewhere!

 

[Shiressleuth]

No, they're not in our passports, I have never had mine taken

If they weren't found on the bin, who opened the lid?

They weren't found anywhere in H/s were they? No trace would include no fingerprints.

 

[Satchie]

Hindsight is always 20/20.

Biffa was obviously over-confident that this could never happen, and the police can't go around disbelieving reputable companies, and assuming they are lying or incompetent.

I also think SP had to pursue the other evidence because it might a) have lead to Corrie while still alive or b) have lead to evidence of a crime. Their focus is on solving crimes, not accidents.

If anything was in the landfill, it wasn't going to go anywhere, whereas witness memories might fade, perps might cover their tracks, forensic evidence of a crime scene could be compromised.

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[Shiressleuth]

No, they're not in our passports, I have never had mine taken

If they weren't found on the bin, who opened the lid?

The bin man?

 

[Shiressleuth]

Hindsight is always 20/20.

Biffa was obviously over-confident that this could never happen, and the police can't go around disbelieving reputable companies, and assuming they are lying or incompetent.

I also think SP had to pursue the other evidence because it might a) have lead to Corrie while still alive or b) have lead to evidence of a crime. Their focus is on solving crimes, not accidents.

If anything was in the landfill, it wasn't going to go anywhere, whereas witness memories might fade, perps might cover their tracks, forensic evidence of a crime scene could be compromised.

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Completely agree with your posts.

 

[Northern Light]

Another question. Why is it SP are saying >100KG? Still no precise number? I doubt the computer or paperwork say "above 100KG".

I agree. And when was this discovered, and how was it discovered after so long. There are more questions, arising from the facts given, throughout this case, than enlightenment. My fear is, that if there is a cover up, that it stays a cover up. Nicola however, rightly so, won't rest till she gets the answers, if they can be got.

 

[Happygirl]

IMO I still think they should have brought in the cadaver dogs.

 

[Redgoblin]

It would be easy for a dispatcher to assume weight logs were off and that may of led to altering the paperwork, especially if the onus is on the driver to do that part of the paper work, not so much if the dispatcher has to check the vehicle himself, then obviously that would be harder to explain... this is probably why it's taken so long to get to the bottom of it. Oversight?

Like I've mentioned a few times before 16 % of the time a dead person is missed in the process and gets to landfill, not a huge margin but possible certainly, they wouldn't be digging it up if it wasn't.

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[Reallyodd]

It seems very odd to me that the driver, knowing he was collecting recycling, didn't think it was odd to have such a heavy load in a relatively small bin. This should have been noticed before it was tipped in and the motion stopped and thoroughly checked as being suspect. Also, why did that load go to landfill, if it did, when it was recycling material? It can't have gone there that night because it wouldn't be open and the phone pings were on BM mast until 8am.

SP in their update sound as though, as far as they are concerned that is the end of the matter, in the way they thank people at the end.

I really do feel for Nicola and the family as they seem to have been put through so much unnecessary emotional turmoil. They can't get any kind of closure with so many things still outstanding and unanswered.

 

[Amonet]

So what your saying is DNA is nonsense and should never be used?

I don't think the answer is that it's nonsense that should never be used. In the example that Dave gave it gave a correct result for ID'ing the person the DNA belonged to but the person was innocent of the crime.

In some other forms of DNA analysis (there's a BBC article out there somewhere about this, but I don't have a link handy) the DNA is interpreted to have so many markers out of a maximum number and then if the contents have enough markers lawyers present this as saying that there's a 1 in however many chance that someone else in the region might have those same markers, blah, blah, it's so unlikely that you must convict. But the argument is tainted, not the DNA that's tainted but the interpretation of what it means can be tainted.

I could never sit on a jury where DNA was involved because I'd just internally combust by knowing that I know enough to know what I don't know. And sometimes that's the point in the way criminal cases are presented to juries; the jury is in effect being told what to think based on the limited knowledge of an expert subject by lawyers whose job it is to make a case for or against an individual.

I don't think the DNA is relevant here as first they'd have to find blood and tissue in the forensic testing, and that alone would have been important even without DNA. The only way I know about that subject is from TV, though, so there are times when I don't know what's fact and what's exaggerated to make fiction -- the end result *is* fiction. But there are some excellent series out there these days that do have excellent advisors to make them far more realistic than ever before imho. So I can't say "all they need to do is shine a black light" when it's far more complicated than that.

I would have expected there to be biological contents in the back of that lorry and possibly on the compacting mechanism, and also a possibility of threads from clothing. I wouldn't expect that it could be cleaned well enough to remove all forensic traces...but I'm not an expert in cleaning bin lorries or in forensics. And Dave was talking about detectives being busy with 20 cases at a time, but it's not detectives who do forensics, it's the forensics team who does that job and they do the job based on what they're told to look for and then present a report to detectives who then take the report and read it (or maybe mostly read its conclusions rather than the methodology).

We don't know exactly what forensics have been used where. We've heard about dogs being used in the horseshoe and around BSE, but I would have taken out tracker dogs before cadaver dogs. Cadaver dogs could come in after the scent has been picked up but it seems silly to use them before. There was too much foot traffic around the horseshoe for Corrie's scent to be picked up. We don't know how a tracker dog would react to the inside of the bin or even if anyone opened the lid on a bin to find out. And if Corrie wasn't deceased in the bin then a cadaver dog sniffing the inside of the bin would be pointless, but we don't know if they put a dog in each bin to find that out. My conclusion/advice would be to not surmise anything on this side...all we can do is go by what we've been told, but we don't know exactly how that information has come about.

 

[Miss_B]

Absolutely devastating, now I suppose the question is how did he get there , but also it may be time to re asses how these bins are stored or collected. That said many things seem to be in play , an inexperienced collection worker , not used to normal bin weights , and why did the load go straight to the landfill . Biffa imo have some explaining to do .RIP Corrie McKeague and deepest condolences to his tortured family........ so very sad

If the bin collection guy was inexperienced and say recorded 111kg - maybe one of the guys in the office thought "Ah, he's got that wrong - must be 11." And then maybe changed it so it fell in with usual recordings.

I don't know... very sad mistake however it's happened. I so hope he's not in the landfill after all this time.


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[Amonet]

I'm still on page 20 of 26 of this thread, so I don't know what's been posted in the last few pages.

I can only think that the phone went into the back of the bin lorry but wasn't initially destroyed by the compacting mechanism. So it kept pinging all the way to Sainsbury's at Mildenhall. I don't know how the compacting works and if it's a cumulative process but I'm thinking the Sainsbury's collection went in and the compacter went on again and that destroyed the phone, leaving the ping on the Barton Mills mast until it was expunged somewhere between 4.30am and 8am (the police didn't give exact times for those things, only approximations).

I don't know what sorting processes that load went through, if any, but from what I've read today (and I couldn't click all the links as I knew some would be TMI for me) those processes wouldn't be looking for a 5'10" body dressed in pink and white. I would have thought that someone would, nevertheless, have had a scream and puke moment on a manual conveyor, but I don't know exactly how that works. As far as simply tipping the load, I don't think it would have been very obvious what was inside there.

I did read one of the articles that said there was a 20' drop to go into the back of a bin lorry...I can only hope Corrie hit his head and just went into black oblivion. That won't show up on a post mortem, but I think that is a reasonable thing to have happened.

On "Bones" they always say that bones show blood if someone's 'alive' when a bone injury occurred. If Corrie was deceased an hour earlier, would those bones still show bleeding at injury sites that occurred post-mortem? But the police will have viewed the cctv to see how fast people walked past the horseshoe and if there's a five or ten minute gap somewhere, then that might be suspicious. If there's no gaps and no obvious signs that Corrie was deceased in the bin, then I think this will go down as tragic misadventure.

And, as I said before this new information about the bin weights was released, I think it's a very sad end for a young and vibrant life, and my condolences to all his family, including April and the upcoming baby.

 

[Amonet]

I think we are doing exactly what BIFFA did, interpret the facts incorrectly. There is no mention of the weight being wrong, calibration being wrong. Clearly from the fact they know the actual weight of the bin, that the calibration/weight recording was correct. Because the weight of the bin was irrelevant to how much the customer was charged, it's recording and what and where it was recorded was obviously not important. From the police statement it appears the correct weight was recorded but most importantly in the wrong place, or the person giving the police the info.read it from the wrong place.
While many are heaping huge criticism on the police, if they ask the straight question, what was the weight ?? and are told X .. and are shown a data sheet with X on .. how are they to know that the what was written in 'X' was actually Y !!
What the police have done excellently is go back to basics, re-examine the facts BUT this time not assuming the facts they were given were correct.
As someone who worked on missile systems, laser guidance systems (for bombs), satellites .. there could never be a case of assumption .. assumption for me could mean a missile going off target .. a satellite failing. WE had systems of checking, systems of checking the checks. A guy writing down the weight of a bin when he knew that the info wasn;t needed .. so what if he wrote it down in the wrong place .. and that i think is what happened here, plain and simple.

Exactly. They used the initial information as guidance, but they were willing to go back and reexamine that information and they determined it was wrong. At that point they investigated whether they had purposely been given false information, took someone in for questioning, and they've decided it was an innocent mistake, but it does confirm the bin as the most likely answer.

 

[jslk]

They weren't found anywhere in H/s were they? No trace would include no fingerprints.

But - bin aside - what was he actually going to touch in the HS?

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