21 April 2002
The case of Nicholas Tucker
By Bob Woffinden
The door crashes open, and Nicholas Tucker bursts
into the room. Dropping the overbalancing files and papers on the table,
he grips my hand enthusiastically. We've corresponded for over three years,
but have never met before. He's shorter than I'd imagined and, with his
blue eyes alert behind the round glasses, and his mop of improbably youthful
hair, I am reminded momentarily of Elton John. But only momentarily; Tucker's
firm and somewhat imperative manner makes it hard to overlook his military
background. It's clear that this is no time for pleasantries. We must get
straight down to the matter at hand.
As we are meeting in a small room off the main visiting
area in Gartree prison, Leicestershire, the matter at hand can scarcely
be forgotten. Tucker was formerly a Squadron Leader with the RAF Regiment,
based at Honington, Suffolk. Since 1997, after a high-profile trial had
led to his being convicted of the murder of his wife, he's been in Gartree,
serving a life sentence.
He has not been idle. He has written his life-story,
and also thorough analyses of every aspect of his case, incorporating all
the material that he and his lawyers or supporters have uncovered. Hence
the stack of files and papers; if he needs to refer to any point of evidence,
Tucker has chapter and verse to hand.
"I've written it all in the third person", he explains,
"I'd like to think I can look at everything in an objective manner. That's
the way I am, the product of being in the services. When you take in all
the evidence, you realise that what I've always maintained is the truth,
that I'm innocent."
________
On Saturday 15 July 1995, Tucker returned to England
after an emotionally-draining six-month tour of duty as a UN military observer
in Croatia. At the end of that week, on Friday 21 July, he and his wife
Carol, who had worked in an office at a local motor company, decided to
go for a relaxing meal at the Red Lion in Icklingham, a village not far
from the base. They left Tucker's Ford Mondeo in the garage and took Carol's
Fiesta instead. As she'd drunk wine earlier (it was Carol's last day at
work, and there was a small lunchtime party), Tucker drove.
They arrived about 8.20, had a main course, dessert,
coffee, chocolates and more coffee and then set off back home. At the bridge
in the village of Lackford, the car veered off the road and tumbled down
a bank into the river Lark.
According to Michael Brown, who was fishing nearby,
it was about 10.30pm when he heard a brief screech of tyres, a sound that
could have been skidding on gravel and then, after a momentary gap, a thud.
After a burst of furious activity from the fish, he heard nothing more.
About five minutes later, a passing cyclist, William
Barber saw the partially-submerged car in the river, with both doors open.
He stopped, went cautiously down the bank to have a look, and called out.
Neither seeing nor hearing any sign of human activity, he cycled back to
nearby houses, and raised the alarm at 10.46. He flagged down a passing
motorist, James Woods, who went to the rescue. He heard "muffled breathing
from under the water", found Tucker in the river, bleeding from a head-wound
and apparently unconscious, and pulled him to the bank. Tucker seemed to
be drifting in and out of consciousness, and kept saying, "Where's Carol?
Where's Carol?" His wife was nowhere to be seen.
What had been a deserted scene quickly filled with
people, as other motorists stopped to lend assistance and the police and
ambulance arrived. It was P.C. Paul Dewing who spotted something red under
the bridge. Carol was seriously overweight, so it took a number of men
to haul her out of the river and over the pilings at the water's edge to
the bank. Attempts at resuscitation were still ongoing when a doctor who
had also stopped at the scene pronounced her dead.
Tucker was admitted to West Suffolk hospital in Bury
St Edmunds at 11.45pm, given treatment for a cut forehead and sent home
at 1.05am. At 2.00am that morning, he had to wake his two children – Vanessa,
then 19, and James, 15 – to tell them their mother had died. The grim irony
was lost on no one. Tucker had spent parts of his career involved in potentially
perilous military situations – in northern Ireland, Cyprus, the middle
East and the former Yugoslavia – only for tragedy to occur on a country
road after a quiet meal at a village restaurant.
However, as the first police report described the
event as a "straightforward RTA [road traffic accident] with no apparently
suspicious circumstances", there was no reason to suppose that anyone beyond
family and friends would ever hear about it.
Yet within days police suspicions were growing. These
appear to have been fuelled partly by Tucker himself, who kept asking in
hospital, "How could she drown in only 18 inches of water?" The Fiesta
was not greatly damaged. So how could this minor accident have led to a
fatality? The police studied the restaurant till-roll, according to which
Tucker and his wife had apparently paid up and left at 9.20. The accident-scene
was only a few minutes' drive away; so there was a time-gap of about an
hour. Then the police made enquiries into Tucker's background and discovered
that, while serving in Croatia, he'd had an affair with an attractive Serbian
interpreter, Dijana Dudukovic.
A criminal case was conceived, but very few have
taken as long to gestate as this one. It took the police nine months to
charge him with the murder of his wife; astonishingly, it was another 21
months after that before the prosecution had got its case ready for trial.
The trial eventually opened at Norwich Crown Court
on 17 November 1997.
Just over two weeks later, Mr Justice Gage, in his
summing-up, outlined the prosecution's case against Tucker in the following
way: "He was besotted with Dijana Dudukovic. As a result, he first strangled
and then drowned his wife in the river…the accident in the river was faked
and when he was seen by witnesses following it, he was simply play-acting.
Either he was not rendered unconscious at all or, if he was, it was only
for a few minutes."
To support this account, the prosecution brought
forward several witnesses. Dr David Harrison, the local pathologist who
conducted the postmortem, told the court that Carol Tucker was 5'3" and
15 stone. There was an abrasion under her left arm, and bruises on her
left breast which, according to the prosecution, were caused by Tucker
forcing her under the water. There were scratches and abrasions on her
back, caused by Tucker getting her out of the car. On the inner lining
of her eyelids, there were also petechial haemorrhages (red blemishes,
caused by underlying ruptured blood vessels) which Harrison had never known
to be associated with drowning. In fact, whenever petechial haemorrhages
are found, the Crown case usually begins to take shape, so frequently associated
are they with strangulation.
On this occasion, however, the prosecution asked
the jury to believe that this throttling had produced petechiae, but no
other injury; Harrison had to add that there were no wounds to the neck
or the head, and no defence injuries. He added that the cause of death
was drowning, and there was no pathological evidence that she had been
drowned by someone else.
But the prosecution had other scientific evidence.
There were four bloodmarks on the car. According to the prosecution, one
from the outside of the passenger door was Tucker's, left by him after
he had staged the accident, pulled his wife out of the car and killed her.
("Probably Tucker's", however, is the correct phrase to apply to the provenance
of the bloodmark. Though four samples were sent back and forth between
laboratories in Huntingdon and Aldermaston, it has, since the trial, been
established by Channel 4's Trial and Error that at one stage all four samples
had the same reference number. Even at trial, it was agreed that one of
the four samples was empty.)
Further, Howard Sherriff, an A&E consultant at
Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, and a medical expert for the Crown,
said that he would not normally expect the injuries to Tucker's forehead
to cause unconsciousness. Together with the evidence of the till-roll,
showing that Tucker had left much earlier than he admitted, this was the
prosecution case. The whole "accident" was an elaborate charade, cleverly
plotted by a man whose métier, the prosecution reminded the jury,
was carefully-planned military exercises. (Tucker had, for example, been
involved with developing battle procedures to deal with a threatened invasion
of Belize by Guatemala in 1977.)
Nevertheless, the case was a thin one and might have
carried little credibility, were it not for Tucker's involvement with Dijana
Dudukovic.
One witness, Lieutenant Tim Stear, a marine who had
spent a month with Tucker at the latter's sector HQ in Croatia, testified
that in Bosnia he had acted "like a lap-dog, doing her bidding". Bernard
du Pasquier, a Swiss UNHCR official who had helped Dudukovic leave Bosnia,
and with whom she stayed in Zurich, told the Court that Tucker, after his
wife's death, had written to Dudukovic pleading his love for her, and that
he would phone her sometimes twice a day (although the judge added that
this evidence "may be…a little exaggerated"). Certainly, in November 1995
Tucker, using a false name, had booked and paid for a flight for her from
Belgrade to Zurich.
There were probably five aspects of the trial that
particularly angered Tucker. The first was that the Crown case, even as
counsel were putting it forward, was changing. Originally, the prosecution
asserted that Tucker drove to the river, and asphyxiated and then drowned
his wife. However, this was replaced by a new theory, according to which
Tucker had stopped the car between the Red Lion and the bridge at Lackford,
and there had semi-asphyxiated Carol, leaving her helpless, so that he
could stage the accident and finish her off.
This shift from theory (1) to theory (2) was necessary
in view of what Sherlock Holmes might have described as the curious incident
of the incurious fisherman.
One the evening of 21 July 1995, Michael Brown was
fishing further along the river from Lackford Bridge. Having heard the
sounds of the car going into the river, he carried on fishing. So what
was important was what he did not hear; he did not hear subsequent sounds
of splashing or violent movement, or cries for help, which might have been
inevitable had there been some sort of life-and-death struggle between
Tucker and his wife. (When he did hear the subsequent commotion, Brown
went to investigate.)
What perturbed the defence about theory (2) was not
just that the prosecution, having already taken unusually long to prepare
its case, still needed to make major last-minute adjustments; but that
the new theory was unsupported by any evidence. There was certainly no
medical evidence; nor was the Crown able to identify any particular place
where Tucker might have stopped en route to the accident scene. So the
new theory – that he had throttled his wife into unconsciousness in some
unspecified place, and in a way that mysteriously left no mark upon her
– was entirely speculation. It was, according to Tucker, "a very sneaky
tactic".
Secondly, the Crown, recognising the shortcomings
in its case, had sought the opinion of a second pathologist, the highly-respected
Professor Bernard Knight. He delivered a report, and told the Crown bluntly
that the medical evidence did not support "any hypothesis that death is
due to the actions of another person". In view of this, the prosecution
did not use his evidence, and the jury never knew about it.
Thirdly, there was the visit by the jury to the bridge
at Lackford, the scene of the alleged crime. Normally, this would not have
been a matter for concern; quite the reverse. In this instance, however,
there was a time-lag of 30 months. The accident happened at night in high
summer; the jury was shown the same spot in daylight in (almost) midwinter.
The surrounding vegetation was obviously absent, and the water level different.
The pilings at the edge of the river had also been removed. There had been
(as Tucker himself found out, after the trial) 119 accidents on that stretch
of road since 1990. After this fatal accident, the council had altered
the road and improved the signposting. So all the key features of the scene
were completely changed by the time the jury saw them.
Then, there was the sensationalist reporting of the
trial, and the press's fixation with the alleged liaison between Tucker
and Dijana. Mr Justice Gage even told the jury that they did not need to
see photographs of Dijana as there had already been so many published in
the papers. This led to the final point, which was the evidence of Dudukovic
herself. There wasn't any. The prosecution elected not to call her, and
she refused a defence request to appear – according to Tucker, she was
afraid that such an appearance might have repercussions on her status as
a refugee resident of Switzerland.
The jurors were out for over seven hours, before
convicting Tucker by a 10-2 majority verdict. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment and, a year later in December 1998, lost his appeal, even
though the appeal court judges conceded that there was "no direct evidence"
that Tucker killed his wife. (Tucker's lawyers argued simply that the conviction
was unsafe. They said "the evidence of motive was … more calculated to
warm the hearts of tabloid newspaper editors than to furnish compelling
evidence of murder… We are of the view that the judge should have stopped
the case at half-time.)
Nicholas Tucker, though, should not have been entirely
surprised to have lost the appeal. Over the past 30 years there have been
about a hundred high-profile victims of a confirmed miscarriage of justice
in Britain over the past 30 years; all had their first appeals turned down
before subsequently have their convictions quashed.
________
Tucker, who turned 50 last year, met Carol Burch
on 14 July 1973, the night his squadron returned to Gütersloh in Germany
from four months in northern Ireland. She worked for the RAF Malcolm clubs.
The original idea of this welfare organisation – to provide young servicemen
with places to go for recreation – had long since been corrupted. By the
'70s, they were just social clubs for serious drinking. "My relationship
with Carol began", he explains, "because each Monday morning, I'd tell
her who'd been banned from the clubs for misdemeanours or unsavoury behaviour.
"It was six months before we really started going
out together. She was then posted to Singapore, and we missed each other
terribly. After a couple of weeks, I wrote and asked her to marry me."
They had intended to marry in Singapore, but their
plans were dashed by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. They independently
flew back to Brize Norton, got a special licence, and were married at Chester
on a wet Monday afternoon. "We spent our honeymoon on the cross-Channel
ferry", recalls Tucker, "with me going back to Germany, prior to leaving
for Cyprus."
The Tuckers had 14 different homes in 21 years. Their
children were both born in Germany, albeit on different tours. "But Carol,
too, came from a service family", Tucker points out, "she'd always been
in an air-force environment. That was one of our strengths. The pressures
that the air-force could put families under didn't apply to us."
However, during his stint in 1995 as a UN military
observer in the former Yugoslaiva, Tucker became emotionally involved with
the plight of the Serbs in general, and of Dudukovic in particular. He
developed good relationships with the Serbs (although he recognised that
this was partly a sensible insurance policy – he was the only member of
the British armed forces working on the Serb side). They respected his
knowledge of the Yugoslav partisan campaign during World War II, when the
British and French had supported the Serbs against the Germans and Croats.
Dudukovic was one of the UN interpreters attached
to Tucker's team. They threw a party for her 21st birthday in March. She
was attractive and flirtatious, and had casual sex with several of the
UN team. She was also manipulative; her Serbian boyfriend had been killed
the previous year, while trying to steal a UN vehicle, and thereafter her
primary objective was simply to get out of the country.
At the trial, Vanessa, Tucker's daughter, who now
lives in New Zealand, gave evidence for the prosecution. She said that,
while on home leave in May, her father had been showing photographs of
the interpreters – Dijana and another woman, Danica – around the mess.
News of this had reached Carol, who then accused Nicholas of having an
affair. Although he denied this, there was some lingering ill-feeling between
them when he returned to Kosovo. However, the defence produced a letter,
written by Carol on 7 June, which suggested that any difficulties between
the couple had been resolved – and indeed that Carol blamed herself for
over-reacting. ("I was hurting so much and you didn't see it. We all worry
so much here and watch every news … then I just snapped when I saw all
the parties going on and all the booze etc. It probably all means nothing
to you but it hurts at home. I worry daily in case you don't come through
it and step on a mine, or a sniper's bullet etc. Try to understand.")
Tucker in turn made a booking for them at the RAF
Club in Piccadilly, London, for his next CTO (compensatory time-off) later
that month, but Carol told him that, because of staff shortages at work,
she would be unable to go. When Dijana said she'd do anything to be able
to visit London, Tucker decided not to cancel the booking and to take her
instead. It was not a wise decision – nor even a temporarily gratifying
one. "Due to a combination of the guilt I felt over what I was actually
doing", he explains, "and the fact that I had suffered from impotence to
varying degrees since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the expected sexual
liaison was a complete and utter disaster."
Dijana flew back to Belgrade ahead of Tucker and,
according to him, a purely professional relationship was resumed. She actually
left the country before he did, flying to Zurich with a three-month visa
and a ticket paid for by a Swiss civil servant whom she'd met in Croatia.
That relationship ran into difficulties, as did a subsequent one, and in
October Dijana flew back to Belgrade. Tucker, who'd kept in touch, told
her she was a fool to have left, helped her to arrange another visa, and
paid for her flight back to Zurich. She then joined Nened Perovanovic,
another Serbian exile, whom she married in March 1996.
The defence therefore argued that the affair had
been very short-term, and that Tucker's motives in helping Dijana were
altruistic; her plans did not include him, as he well knew. Perovanovic
stated that Tucker's letters were "quite normal…every time he greeted both
of us, and not just Dijana". Similarly, Major Franz Metsemakers, the Dutch
deputy leader of Tucker's UN team, gave evidence that Tucker's relationship
with Dijana was "normal".
________
Stripped of its salacious scenario, the prosecution
case can be seen in a different light. The other defence points that were
raised at trial have only been consolidated by further research in the
years since.
Professor Iain West who, until his tragic death last
year at the age of 57, was widely regarded as Britain's leading pathologist,
gave evidence that most of the bruises on the body would have been caused
as rescuers pulled her from the water and over the pilings to the bank.
He suggested that Mrs Tucker may have choked on regurgitated food, and
this would have caused the petechial haemorrhages – although he made it
clear that, in the absence of marks to the neck, the possibility of asphyxiation
could in any event be eliminated. He concluded that there was "no medical
evidence" to indicate that her death was caused by another person. Altogether,
five pathologists have examined the case; all have concluded that there
was no evidence that Carol Tucker was murdered.
There was lengthy discussion at trial about the seat-belts
on the Fiesta, as they had actually been the subject of a recall notice
by Ford while the trial was in preparation. "In the unlikely event [of
an accident]", explained Ford's customer services, "the occupants would
not be properly protected."
That point can be considered in conjunction with
another. Tucker was driving his wife's car. She was heavier than he was,
and the seat-belt, with a now-outdated Klunk Klik mechanism, was adjusted
to suit her. It is probable that Tucker was wearing it loosely, was not
properly restrained, and would have cracked his forehead in the accident.
Professor Alistair Wilson, one of the country's leading experts on emergency
care, said he had "no doubt that [Tucker] was initially unconscious, and
what the witnesses saw was a phase in his recovery". He emphasised that
"play-acting" could be "ruled out".
There is, too, a further question-mark over the 'incriminating'
bloodmark. James Woods pulled Tucker clear of the water and, in Tucker's
view, saved his life. Yet Tucker had a cut head, and if Woods also touched
the car – something he agreed was possible – then the otherwise incriminating
bloodmark could be innocently explained. Nor, in fact, was the mark on
the handle, where it would have been had Tucker opened the door, but below
the lock and towards the edge.
By the end, a total of 29 people were milling around
the scene of the accident, so it is hard to see how some form of inadvertent
transfer could be excluded. The area was never treated as a crime-scene,
and the car was recovered from the river without concern for its forensic
integrity.
Perhaps the most tendentious aspect of the prosecution's
case was its reliance on the time-records from the Red Lion, when the restaurant
itself made no claims for their accuracy. (Indeed, in subsequent years,
friends of Tucker's dined there and noticed that the till-roll wasn't even
altered for British Summer Time). The most important consideration was
that the time at which the bills were calculated was no guide whatever
to the time at which customers left. Bills would often be totalled when
coffee was ordered, so the only guide to customers' departure was when
they paid. Unfortunately, Tucker paid by cheque, and one such payment was
registered at 22.11pm. This may well have been Tucker's (he thinks it was,
and the prosecution couldn't show that it wasn't), thus ruling out any
possible time-gap.
So why had Tucker veered off the road in the first
place? Afterwards, in hospital, he said he'd seen "dogs" in the headlights
in front of him. In fact, these would have been muntjack deer. Every wildlife
ranger consulted was willing to testify to the number of deer in the area.
Many of those involved with the case believe that Tucker's reference to
"dogs" is the ultimate proof of his innocence. Muntjack deer are small
and might momentarily be mistaken for dogs. But if Tucker had really concocted
this wicked plan and hoped to get away with it, would he have replaced
a plausible explanation for the accident with an implausible one? Significantly,
too, that particular stretch of road had been the scene of 119 accidents
in the five years since 1990 – something Tucker only found out about after
the trial.
What actually happened when the car hit the water
may well have been the reverse of what was alleged. It was Tucker who lost
consciousness; Carol was only dazed. She got out with some difficulty (the
marks to her left arm and breast can be explained by her trying to get
out after unlocking, but not removing, the seat-belt), tried to go round
to help her husband, and slipped. In a paper on drowning, Professor Derek
Pounder, of the University of Dundee, described "atypical drowning":
Loss of consciousness is usually instantaneous and
death ensues soon afterwards…The mechanism is believed to be cardiac arrest
induced by impact of cold water on the back of the pharynx and larynx.
The three circumstances common to these deaths are (a) entering the water
feet first, (b) surprise or unpreparedness and (c) a "state of hypersensitivity"
e.g. alcohol intoxication. Eye-witnesses observe that there is no struggle
by the victim who is found to be dead even if the body is immediately recovered.
Such tragedies can occur even in water as shallow
as that at Lackford.
________
At his trial, Tucker could have spent weeks bringing
forward character witnesses. Wendy Yarnold, his wife's best friend, gave
evidence for him.
The judge spoke of the "glowing testimonials from
distinguished brother officers and others, all of whom knew him well".
Tucker's superior officer in Kosovo, Commandant Joseph Buckley, testified
that Tucker had "taken over a team that was barely adequate and turned
it into an effective and more than satisfactory unit". Air Commodore Marcus
Witherow, who knew Tucker throughout his RAF career, praised his "integrity"
and cited his work on defence against chemical warfare attacks as "his
most outstanding achievement". Such encomia may not have impressed the
jury as much as the fact that Tucker's daughter gave evidence against him.
Tucker became involved with a third woman, Jenny
Peacock, while awaiting trial. Peacock has resolutely supported Tucker
ever since and his son, James, now lives at her house. She will, she has
said, wait for him.
Tucker has written one book, In Adversity (Jade,
£48), about heroic exploits in the RAF. He has since completed the
bulky manuscript that deals both with his harrowing experiences in the
former Yugoslavia and his efforts to clear his name. It awaits only an
enterprising publisher. Meanwhile, his case is currently being considered
– far too slowly, for his liking – by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The longer we talk, the more indignant Tucker becomes.
He reserves his most scathing comments, however, for the current prison
practice whereby an admission of guilt is required before someone can make
progress towards eventual release. It means that those protesting their
innocence are discriminated against in comparison with those prepared to
admit guilt; the innocent serve longer than the guilty.
"That's medieval", Tucker insists, "it's psychological
torture. You're up against the bigoted bias of elements of the prison establishment
who deal with these cases. You're made to suffer more because you're innocent.
How can you admit to something you haven't done?
"In my case", he says with blazing anger, the interview
time coming to an end, "something that didn't even fucking happen." |
