Mark “battered his father to death”.
Police discovered Samuel’s “dismembered body and battered skull”.
Samuel died “having suffered blows to the head”.

– Excerpts from the Daily Mail et al

We simply don’t know how my father died. The Home Office Pathologist was “unable to formally ascribe a cause of death. I give a cause 1a. unascertained”. There were signs of bruising and fractures to his skull, but it was impossible to say whether these in fact caused my father’s death, and if they did, whether they were the result of third party assault or just an accident. No murder weapon was ever found:

“We cannot say whether the deceased in fact suffered an unnatural death” – Home Office Pathologist

“There was no evidence of any decomposing blood clot within the cranial cavity. This would be a common accompaniment to severe head injury and often persist even when there is severe decomposition” – Consultant Forensic Pathologist.

Things were made considerably more complicated when a Scenes of Crime Officer later revealed that he had somehow smashed my father’s skull with a pneumatic kangol drill, completely undermining the pathologists’ findings:

“It appears that the pneumatic drill or kangol I was required to use had caused damage to the skull of the deceased” – Scenes of Crime Officer

“At the head was some artefactual damage that I understand was occasioned during the course of the extraction of the body” – Home Office Pathologist

In the end, the Home Office Pathologist admitted that:

“I can’t completely rule out that those fractures occurred after death”.

While his superior confirmed that:

“It cannot be determined whether any skull fracturing occurred in life. Some may be the result of striking by a drill… some a consequence of heat and brittleness of bone” – Consultant Forensic Pathologist.

Though as a family we feel it would be undignified and inappropriate to release the full post-mortem analysis, I have attached a copy of the Home Office Pathologist’s basic findings, as well as the subsequent admission – 4 months later – by the Scenes of Crime Officer who struck my father’s skull with the pneumatic drill.

Back to: 10 things the Daily Mail got wrong about the trial of Mark Alexander or move on to: Mistake #3