Victoria wrote:I hope for the sake of Carl's family, the murder is solved.
A documentary about the case is on Channel 4 tonight "Interview with a murderer" starts at 9pm.
Si_Crewe wrote:Can't recall the name of the person but bear with me....
There was a case, a few years ago, about a girl (who was autistic IIRC) who claimed to have been raped by a judge in Scotland and who was, apparently, a victim of abuse by a ring of high-powered paedophiles.
If you read the basic facts about the case you couldn't help thinking "WTF? How can this be allowed to happen???"
But then, if you read more about it, it turned out to be an insanely convoluted case where none of the facts corroborated the story and it was unavoidable to conclude that the mother had either simply believed something her daughter had said or that she's maliciously made up the story for her own ends.
I think this case is a bit like that in some ways.
Superficially, it seems like Spencer might have been responsible but the more I read about it, the more it seems like it's really just a case of some people seeking to take advantage of an incredibly arrogant (and possibly psychopathic) person for their own ends.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that you can't just "get rid of" a legally held shotgun in the UK. You have to inform the police of how you've disposed of it (if it's sold, who you sold it to or if it's been scrapped you'll need proof).
Added to that, you can't get forensic ballistics from a shotgun in the same way that you can from a rifle or handgun due to the nature of the ammunition.
So, there'd be no benefit in the police seizing the gun for any ballistics purpose.
The only benefits would be:-
1) to prove Spencer possessed the type of gun used in the killing - which they could do from his FAC, regardless of whether he still had the gun in his possession or not.
2) to get other forensic information from the gun such as blood samples - which they could get after seizing the gun from it's new owner.
And, of course, if the gun HAD been disposed of illegally, or it'd been scrapped legally just after the shooting, that in itself could be considered circumstantial evidence that the gun had been used for something illegal.
The death of Hubert Wilkes is a bit odd too.
Spencer is said to have argued with Wilkes and then picked up one of Wilkes' own shotguns and killed him with it.
The odd thing is, the gun in question was a sawn off shotgun - an illegal weapon in UK law.
So, what was Wilkes doing with a sawn-off shotgun and why was it somewhere that a visitor could access it?
I can't imagine that somebody would leave an illegal weapon lying around where a visitor could see it.
Fundamentally, it seems like Spencer at least thinks he's clever and (assuming he's guilty) his alibi for the murder of Carl Bridgewater WAS clever but then a lot of the things his ex-wife has alleged certainly aren't clever at all.
If you're a psychopath and you've decided to kill somebody and you've gone to the effort of creating this perfect alibi and you've found a way to dispose of the weapon you used, would you really wash your clothes straight after the murder in that was out of character?
In fact, if you've disposed of the shotgun for fear that it might yield evidence that could convict you, why would you wash the clothes at all rather than just burning them or, at least, throwing them away?
Related to the above, for a guy that is so arrogant and borderline psychotic, the murder of Wilkes doesn't seem very calculated at all. It was a spur-of-the-moment act with no convoluted attempts made to avoid prosecution, which is (if we're considering whether or not the same person committed both offences) completely the opposite of the Bridgewater case.
Wacky, "tales of the unexpected" scenario: Wilkes killed Carl Bridgewater with his sawn-off shotgun and then, by complete coincidence, Spencer killed him a couple of years later and then, ironically, finds himself accused of BOTH killings.
traveller wrote:Re the shotgun used to kill Wilkes, you're right of course Si, I couldn't remember how Spencer said that he got hold of the gun he used, and I'd deleted the recording, so I used poetic licence in saying that he went home to fetch it,
I remember now, he said that he took another shotgun from where it was, leaning against a door jamb, I say another, for I'm reasonably sure that he'd mentioned seeing one in the farmhouse already that night.
He said that he took this second shotgun outside, and sawed the barrels down, then went back inside and shot Wilkes.
I'm not a murderer, nor a burglar, so I find it incredulous that someone should be so precise as to saw the barrels before using the gun to kill someone.
If someone had pissed me off so much that I wanted to kill him/her, I'd use the shotgun as is, or was, but what do I know, maybe the gun would only kill someone if the barrels were shortened, I'll defer to you Si, I don't doubt that you're an upstanding citizen, but you seem to know a bit about shotguns.
geofff wrote:why did bert spencer cut the barrel off his shot gun,you do this when you wont to hide the gun ...maybe he use it befor that day
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