Ep.8 Errant Garbage

After studying the Kathleen Marshall murder my attitude to offering a sample for DNA testing in a criminal case has changed. The DNA discovery in Andrew's case stopped police from pursuing other avenues of investigation. There were multiple issues with Andrew's DNA from collection, storage, analysis, results and statistical reporting . Mixed blood samples are problematic and can easily implicate suspects wrongly. A previous case of Ken Cox's comes into question. 

Transcript

MURDER AND THE HELLCATS

EPISODE 8

Previously on Murder and the Hellcats.

VICTOR LICCIARDI: All I can say, he was very noticeable by the fact that he wasn't noticeable. He was very nondescript in every way. He was just normal, casually dressed. I didn't notice anything that stuck in my mind that way.

LAURA-LEIGH CAMERON-DOW: So initially for the trial preparation, Andrew's team were all working on a time of death and then it was very close to the trial when the prosecution changed it and everybody was in a mad scramble trying to figure it out. 

CATHERINE MCHUGH: I'm Catherine McHugh, and this is episode eight of Murder and the Hellcats. 
 

ACT I  Imagine you're at work. People are coming and going; clients and coworkers. Then you're told that someone has been killed. You may have heard of this person in conversation, but never met the person who has been murdered, but the victim is a known associate of a client of your coworker. 

The police show up and they're wanting to talk to your coworker because every known person connected to your coworker's client is being questioned. They only have one clue as to who killed the victim, and it's DNA evidence.

They walk past you and casually ask if you'll submit to a DNA test just to eliminate you, but you've never met the victim. You don't know anything about the murder except what you've read in the paper. Your colleague has never met the victim. All he knows is his client has an association with the victim. When they ask for your DNA, what do you say?

If you know you had nothing to do with the murder, you say, sure, no problem. But what if you are suspicious of authority? What if the year is 1998 and the science of DNA seems pretty new and because you like to get all your facts straight and you know that sometimes governments or police or anyone else in power, sometimes they get it wrong. Do you say yes? I have asked myself this question. Before I heard about the Kathleen Marshall murder, I would've said yes. Of course I would want to help the police in any way I can, but now knowing what I know from studying the Kathleen Marshall case, there is no way I would willingly give my DNA to be tested. No way.

I just Want to go back to what the judge said at trial after Andrew had been convicted. Here is Judge Mackenzie, but it is not his voice.

JUDGE KEN MACKENZIE: Andrew Richard Fitzherbert, this is a crime of which you would not have been convicted, but for the recent explosion in knowledge in the field of genetics. You were obviously not a person of interest until it became apparent that the blood at the scene included male blood. Although evidence could not be led of it before the jury because you were exercising your right not to cooperate with police, your persistent unwillingness to give a specimen of DNA when police were trying to exclude people as possible offenders, must inevitably have led to suspicion that you were involved as the jury have rightly found in my view.

CATHERINE: In this episode, I want to talk about the DNA evidence that linked Andrew to the crime scene. I do have Ken Cox, the DNA scientist's statutory declaration and his trial testimony. I also have all the DNA documentation from the John Tonge Centre. However, it's not much used to me because I'm scientifically illiterate. But I am going to work on the assumption that the vast majority of you, the audience are too. So I'll do my best to explain, in as simple terms as possible, those infamous five drops of blood that single handedly sent Andrew to jail for murder.

ROD DAYMENT: It was the golden bullet at that time. When you get the golden bullet. You know, you jump at it, and you follow that track and you sort of let the other things slip. Well, you shouldn't, but that's what happens.

CATHERINE: As the retired detective inspector Rod Dayment told me, pressure on the police from their superiors and the media drive police to try and solve high profile cases quickly, minimising the waste of limited police resources.

ROD DAYMNET: We've got him, you know, it's a new science, we're going to run with this. Um, okay, well, we've cleaned this case up. Let's get onto the next one. All these other suspects who are on the periphery of the inquiry, they just don't follow through with those inquiries. There's only a limited number of police and investigators and crimes happening all the time.

CATHERINE MCHUGH: Academic. Laura-Leigh Cameron-Dow also thought the DNA blinkered the investigation.

LAURA-LEIGH CAMERON-DOW: Because they came up with this blood evidence and Ken Cox said Oh, I've got a male DNA sample and that took away the focus on traditional policing and instead they went and rounded up every man who'd ever had anything to do with Kathleen and tried to test everyone they could find in the hopes of matching the DNA sample and all the police evidence and work went into that goal. So a lot of the traditional stuff wasn't done.

CATHERINE: Of the swabs taken from the crime scene to the John Tonge Centre for DNA testing, 11 yielded a DNA typing. Of those, six were from a female, four were male, and one was a mixed profile. Ken Cox gave this evidence at trial. This is not his voice.

KEN COX: I initially picked only six of those 20 scene swabs to look at the ones I thought may not be so closely associated with the major blood pooling. And three of those were all the same and were different from the others.

CATHERINE: Ken Cox wasn't asked to elaborate on why those particular drops of blood looked different. Was it the shape of the blood pattern, the colour? With a veritable blood bath, how does some blood look different from other blood at the scene? 

A nine loci analysis was completed on those three male swabs by March 31st, a month after Kathleen's body was found. The fourth was done on April 17th. The fifth and final swab was completed on April 22nd.  The first swab to have male DNA identified was swab number 10. It was received by the John Tonge Centre as a piece of cardboard measuring four centimetres by four centimetres, cut from collapsed cardboard boxes found propped up against the rear righthand wall of the surgery. The blood was described as directional splashes.

Swab 11 was from the surgery floor, 84 centimetres from the rear door.

Swab 22 was from a large blood stain on the surgery floor opposite the bench area.

Swab 12 was from blood on the wall to the righthand side of the boxes.

Swab 18 was a mixed sample of male and female DNA from the plastic bag near the sink. Its washed-out appearance, implied the possibility it was the victim's and perpetrator's blood mixed in an attempted cleanup.

LAURA-LEIGH: And that was one of Ken Cox's statements. He said he always started testing from as far away from the body as possible on the assumption that the dead person never got there. So if he found DNA from somebody else far away from the body, that was when he stopped testing. So when he found male DNA and the drops of blood at the other end of the room, he stopped looking. He doesn't test closer to where the body is. So all we know is that if it is Andrew's DNA, he was at the other end of the room, doing something at some point. There's nothing to connect him actually to Kathleen's body.

CATHERINE: Here's another problem, Laura Lee raises with the DNA findings of King Cox.

LAURA-LEIGH: They took, from Kathleen's body, they got a rib. They got a vial of blood and they got blood, uh, blood-soaked buttons from something she was wearing. But Ken Cox said he could never get her DNA profile off any of those.

CATHERINE: In fact, this is the list of items given to Ken Cox to type Kathleen's blood:  a tube of her blood, a vaginal smear, a swab taken from her body, some of her hair, part of a rib, a blood soaked button found under her body, and a bag of her bloodstained clothes.

LAURA-LEIGH: He got the samples within a day or two of her dying, and I'm sure we've worked with more degraded DNA than that. So the presumption was that the female DNA sample mixed with the male DNA sample on the plastic bags, the presumption is that that was Kathleen's. But there's never been her profile.

CATHERINE: In a 2004 case, Dr. Angela Van Dal, one of the world's most senior DNA experts, was reviewing a case from the John Tong Centre as a defence expert, a vaginal sample was taken in a rape kit, but the JTC lab could not detect any DNA at all from the swab. Dr. Van Dial said, and I quote from the article, if it couldn't find the woman's DNA, there was almost no chance it could have detected the alleged offender's, DNA.

I'm not sure if the same principle applies here, but if a DNA scientist can't type the DNA of the victim when there is literally pools of their blood at the crime scene and presumably their blood was shed at the same time, how can the DNA of a perpetrator be typed from just a few drops? It seems like a case of if the glove don't fit, you have to acquit.

When asked about the lack of victim DNA profile, Ken Cox replied in court, and this is not his voice:

KEN COX: It was just too badly decomposed. I attempted it once or twice, but I didn't persevere any further because it, there was a large amount of blood around the body itself and in the rest of my testing I did not find any blood of Kathleen Marshall on any other property.

CATHERINE: No other conversation was had about it. And if Andrew's barrister or the judge didn't question the lack of DNA profile of the victim, why would a jury.

TED DUHS: Bentley Atchison, who was the head of the Victorian Forensic Institute of Medicine, and asked Dr. Bentley Atcheson to. Look through Cox's notes and the electropherograms and the profile collation sheets and the other data that Cox had carried out on his DNA analysis.  Dr. Bentley Atcheson produced a report, a six-page report in March of 1999.

CATHERINE: Amateur sleuth Ted Jews explains that Andrew's defenCe team commissioned another DNA scientist to give an opinion on Ken Cox's conclusions.

TED: Now that report was shown to Jeffrey Hunter, who was engaged by Legal Aid to be Fitzherbert's barrister at his committal and also at his trial. But Jeffrey Hunter apparently did nothing with the Bentley Atchison report. And Fitzherbert didn't know about the Bentley Atchison report until about 2008, ten years later when I showed it to him in one of my visits to the jail.

CATHERINE: Wow. Okay, so my first question on hearing that, why isn't the lawyer obliged to inform their client?  I'll save that one for a legal expert. And what did that report say?

TED: There were two conclusions. They were stated at the beginning of the report. Conclusion one said that Bentley Atcheson had discovered discrepancies between Cox's notes, his working notes, and the computer analysis, the electropherograms, the profile collation sheets and so on.

CATHERINE: So what Bentley Atchison said was that the results from the Profiler plus DNA testing equipment notes do not match the conclusions drawn by Cox about these results.

TED: One example that he gave was that Cox had said sample 11 was a perfect match to Fitzherbert's profile, and Bentley Atchison said that one of the Loci on sample 11, I think it was a D seven Loci, was given as 9/10 by Cox, and yet nowhere in Cox's analysis was there a 9/10 conclusion. Cox's claim that sample 11 gave a perfect nine Loci matched to Fitzherbert was wrong.

CATHERINE: Now swab 11, which was just discussed, was from the surgery floor near the rear door. Tell us about sample 10, which was the blood on a 4sqm piece of cardboard, cut out from the cardboard boxes.

TED: Sample 10 was a bit similar because that same locis in sample 10 was reported by Cox as a genuine loci. But the reflexive fluorescent level, RFU was below 50. Now, Cox was reporting below 50. So other scientists, confronted with the same evidence on the electropherogram, would've said no it's not genuine. We can't report it.

CATHERINE: When the police scientific officer Michael Holohan first noted this swab, number 10, it was documented as being taken from the right hand surgery wall. However, when it was logged at the JTC, it was described as one piece of cardboard. The other problem I have with this sample is the fact it was cut out from a larger piece of cardboard. Isn't it the case that the lesser piece of evidence is handled, the safer the chain of custody? Why not just hand in the whole piece of cardboard?

Now we get to swab 12, which was taken from an area to the right of the cardboard boxes.

TED: When Bentley Atchison and looked for the results from Cox's notes for sample 12, he couldn't find anything. And subsequently Cox was asked, well, why didn't you put in your results for sample 12? He was asked by the court, by the judge, and Cox said I thought I'd done enough at this stage. He didn't report Sample 12.

CATHERINE: So sample 12 had no supporting electropherogram data sheet, which is the raw data illustrated as a graph of bans. That means that match could not be verified.  I don't think Ken Cox should have offered this swab as a match when there was no supporting documentation to prove it was.

That brings us to sample 18, which was the mixed sample. But before we talk about the mixed sample in Andrew's case, I'd like to talk about mixed DNA in general. My research led me to some shocking conclusions about mixed DNA.

ACT II 

I Googled the phrase 'mixed DNA samples'. And the first entry is an official site of the United States government National Institute of Standards and Technology. An article entitled DNA Mixtures, A Forensic Science Explainer was written in 2019. Straight up, it says that along with trace DNA, which is the DNA left behind when someone simply touches something, mixed DNA results can be ambiguous and difficult to understand, even for experts.  And incidentally, touch DNA wasn't a thing in 1998 when Kathleen's murder occurred.

According to the article, the three challenges of interpreting mixed DNA are, number one, the number of contributors. More people make it more difficult to interpret. Number two, how much DNA did each person contribute? The lower the amounts of the other contributors, the more complex the mixture and harder it is to interpret. And number three, DNA degrades over time, making it more difficult to determine.

Even today when DNA analysis methods are far more advanced than in 1998, some DNA mixtures are too complex to reliably be interpreted, and those standards about what mixture is able to be reliably determined are not mandated by some peak body. They are entirely arbitrary and based on the DNA laboratory standards or even the individual scientists given the task for analysis.

 Here's something I found in this article that is important to note. A mixed sample can show peaks that match a suspect's profile, but it doesn't mean that the person was present. That's because two other contributors can make up the same peaks as the single suspect.

 Back in 2016, The Atlantic ran an article entitled The False Promise of DNA Testing by Matthew Schaer. In that article, Schaer describes a study conducted by two academics. The study was based on a 2002 Georgia rape trial that relied on DNA. At trial, the two DNA scientists in the case made the conclusion that the defendant could not be excluded as a contributor to a mixture of sperm found inside the victim. The defendant was found guilty. The academic sent the DNA documentation from the case to 17 lab technicians without providing any details. Each DNA scientist had at least nine-years experience in the field. They were asked if the mixture based on the documentation was a match to the defendant.

Of the 17 opinion sought, only one agreed with the finding that the defendant could not be excluded. Twelve found it was exclusionary, and four said it was inconclusive that the defendant's DNA was in the mixture. Schaer said, in other words, had any one of those 16 scientists been responsible for the original DNA analysis, the rape trial could have played out in a radically different way.

Why were the results so different? 

Because, despite the perception that DNA is a silver bullet, testing standards and practices vary, training levels vary and equipment varies. In the case of the John Tonge Centre, even the way the equipment is used varied, and in the end, DNA has to be interpreted by people, and people make mistakes. One or a combination of these factors means DNA results, especially when a mixture is involved, cannot be regarded as a silver bullet.

Dr. Atchison said of the mixture sample, that the data does not support Ken Cox's conclusion that the data does not support this conclusion. He said the DNA test results were recorded on different sheets, but those sheets don't all agree with each other. Some show different genetic markers or alleles than others. Also some markers that should be there if the DNA really came from the accused and the victim are missing, and in some places there are extra markers that don't belong. Dr. Atchison goes on to say that this raises doubts about whether the DNA really matches Andrew Fitzherbert or whether there were errors in how the results were recorded or interpreted. 

ACT III 

I'd like to now elaborate on something that Ted mentioned about the way Ken Cox was using the DNA testing equipment. Ted highlighted the fact that Ken Cox was using thresholds with the testing equipment below 50.

The minimum relative fluorescent units or RFUs that the equipment manufacturer at the time had recommended was a threshold of 150, not 50. And Ken Cox used this lower threshold of 50 on all the samples he tested that he said matched Andrew's DNA.

We know that Andrew's defence barrister didn't call Dr. Bentley Atchison from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine at Monash University to give evidence. Andrew's legal team didn't even tell their client they had another expert opinion on the DNA.

I asked legal academic Laura-Leigh Cameron-Dow why she thought Andrew's barrister didn't call Dr. Bentley Atchison to counter Ken Cox's testimony.

LAURA-LEIGH: My understanding is that his counsel at the time believed they had a good grip on DNA evidence and didn't feel that they needed another expert. There's also the fact that at the time the issues with DNA evidence were attributed to laboratories. So there were cases in the UK where DNA evidence had fallen behind fridges and gone missing and been degraded. And we had an instance of Andrews falling off a bench and disappearing for a while. So the counsel at the time focused on the laboratory, the accreditation process, the fact that it had gone from a pen and paper version to a computer version that the standards of the John Tonge Centre weren't great.

CATHERINE: Just aside here, what Laura Lee is mentioning was in fact an issue in Andrew's case. An entire sample went missing and was found sometime later in a fridge. The handwritten recording system had a number of errors that showed the record keeping was shoddy, and the JTC didn't actually have a accreditation to perform DNA testing at the time They processed the DNA evidence from the Marshall murder. So those aspects alone gave Andrew's defence plenty with which to attack the JTC.

LAURA-LEIGH: They didn't attack the actual DNA results, but it was new science. People weren't really aware of how wrong that DNA science could be, and how much impact it has on the reliability of the evidence if you don't get the peak heights correct, if you assume a match where there isn't a match, how much background noise there can be in test results that look like matches that aren't matches. Nobody was querying DNA at that level at that point.

CATHERINE: So what Laura-Leigh is saying is that it's the DNA analysis by the JTC that was wrong, and to understand how the analysis was wrong. We need to circle back to the RFUs mentioned by Ted Duhs earlier.

This is my understanding of how RFUs work: fragments of DNA material are allocated with fluorescent dyes and then fragments are separated by size. The DNA analysis processing involves the fragments passing through a detection window where a laser triggers the dyes, causing them to emit light. A computer program then measures the intensity of this emitted light and converts it into RFUs. ​ The intensity of the fluorescence is directly related to the quantity of the DNA fragment. Forensic labs use RFU values to determine the presence and quantity of DNA alleles.

Peaks that are too low, that is below a certain RFU threshold, are disregarded as potential background noise or artifacts. Basically, setting the threshold too low risks noise and artifacts causing peaks in the electropherograms leading to false positive matches of DNA. The low thresholds used by Ken Cox on the Profiler Plus Machine were described by Dr. Atchison. It is not his voice:

BENTLEY ATCHISON: Would almost certainly lead to the scoring of false peaks. It clearly would be unacceptable to vary the cutoff value so that the small peaks are included in specific cases to match accused persons.

CATHERINE:  Now I want to talk about the statistics, the probabilities of the samples being Andrew's DNA, quoted in this trial by Ken Cox. Remember Andrew's defence barrister did not call Dr. Atchison to the stand. So even though Atchison disputed Ken Cox's results, the probabilities established by Cox, which I will tell you about in a minute, were really left effectively unchallenged.

Here's how Ken Cox was introduced by Paul Rutledge, the prosecution barrister. You can hear the effort he made to set up Cox to deliver the bombshell statistics. This is their exchange at trial. It is not their voices.

PAUL RUTLEDGE: To statistics and such, like, can you just give us a little background with respect to your experience in statistics

KEN COX: Although my degree major was in biochemistry and microbiology, I did all of the second-year statistics that could be done. I did first year pure mathematics, and I did all the second-year statistics that could be done in my science degree. So it's not a major in statistics, but I have made it for the last 12 years an important part of my work in developing computer programs for analysis of population data and the like.

PAUL RUTLEDGE: Now, the computer program that you developed, how widely used is that?

KEN COX: That's used in every Australian forensic biology laboratory. There are other programs which can do other things, but it is still widely used plus some overseas laboratories as well.

CATHERINE: With Ken Cox's statistical expertise established at the very top of his testimony, he then offered this probability of the DNA being Andrew’s at the scene in regard to the mixed profile swab.

KEN COX: It might be called 1.4 by 10 to the power of 16. If you regard a billion as a thousand million, which is 10 to the power of nine, you are looking at a 10 to the seventh by 10 to the ninth. So you are looking at 1.4 times 10 million billion.

CATHERINE: In other words, the jury was told that the chances of it being Andrew's blood at the scene is one in 14 with 15 zeros after it. This is what Dr. Atchison said in his report about the probabilities offered by Cox. It is not his voice.

BENTLEY ATCHISON: Mr Cox has chosen a method of reporting population frequency statistics, which are not supported by the majority of scientists in the world. He claims that a match in nine DNA tests is sufficient to say the stain came from the accused and no one else in the world. This concept has been called errant garbage by the eminent statistician, Dr. Ian Everett, who works for the home office forensic service in England. Current reporting procedures recommended by a special advisory group consisting of Australian and New Zealand scientists, specifically preclude the concept of individualization.

CATHERINE: The term individualisation is referring to the claim that a sample can be pinpointed to a single person, and therefore a probability ratio containing a figure of an enormous amount of zeros. It gets complicated, but Dr. Atchison says Ken Cox makes assumptions about the population data that is no longer true, which calls into question this statistical software that Ken Cox developed and said was being used in forensic DNA labs around Australia and overseas.

ACT IV 

I just want to talk about another case that Ken Cox was involved with. It was another mixed sample case. Marc Renton was accused of being the male participant in a series of bank robberies on the Gold Coast in 1996, carried out by a man and woman that came to be known as the Bonnie and Clyde robberies.  Marc Renton, who had a criminal record, maintained his innocence and with eye witness identifications, varying from a tall person, a short person, a fat person, a skinny person, fair head, and dark head. The case against him was far from solid.

Marc Renton was charged with armed robbery in 1996. Ken Cox was tasked with testing a balaclava found at the scene with the hope of finding DNA from saliva. Two areas around the mouth of the balaclava were tested, but no DNA was found. Not withstanding, Renton and co-accused Brunette Festa were brought to trial in April 1997.

Two weeks into the trial, Cox had conducted new DNA testing which implicated Renton. Cox testified that he had retested the balaclava and found samples of DNA that belonged to Renton, Festa and a third person. who was not identified.

Cox said he had found the DNA of three different people. The judge at trial saw no reason to exclude the DNA evidence. The jury found Marc Renton guilty and he was given a 14-year sentence. The case became the subject of a segment on the ABC's Catalyst TV show entitled DNA - A Shadow of a Doubt, which went to Air in 2002.

Renton's lawyer, when shown the evidence, accepted it as incontrovertible. He admitted on the Catalyst show that like the jury, the judge, and the crown prosecutor, he is not a DNA scientist, so how could he disprove it? 

Ken Cox appeared on the Catalyst Show and was asked to look at his notes from his testing of the balaclava. He was then asked why he said at trial that there had to be three people present in the profile he found on the balaclava, which contradicted the findings in his notes. Having seen his notes, he replied that he couldn't possibly have said that it could only be three people's DNA present.

The catalyst host then pulled out the trial transcript and quoted page number 748, where he says, these are his words from that trial, but not his voice.

KEN COX: In the DNA isolated from the balaclava, it was obvious that it was a mixture of more than two people. I can only say that there were more than two donors. 

CATHERINE: Despite the gotcha moment, Marc Renton who had already had a failed appeal before, he was never granted another appeal. I got a chance to speak with someone who was involved in this case. Michael Strutt is a prisoner advocate. He's an expert in statistics, and short of being a DNA scientist, has the best understanding of DNA science that I've spoken to so far in this podcast. I asked Michael why, if Ken Cox got it wrong and was publicly called out, why there weren’t any repercussions.

MICHAEL STRUTT: He didn't say that he got it wrong. He did say that basically when it was put to him he sort of like, given the evidence in a way that the jury might misunderstand it, he more or less sort of conceded that, but he didn't come right out and say he made a mistake.

If anything, it was a mistake of omission, right? To pin it down, basically he didn't give the likelihood of a chance match, of just a match purely by chance. It was before Andrew's case. It was older DNA technology. It had much lower ability to discriminate and he was working with a mixed sample. 

There was no reason to think that it should have been more than two people. There were only two people seen in the bank. And the profile on the balaclava he tested was consistent with two people. But the problem is if you took it at two people, there was a part of the profile that exonerated Marc.  And so what he did is he said, oh it's actually a mixture of three people even though there was no reason to say that. And that spike that's not consistent with Marc, that's from the third person. But then he didn't give the odds of that hypothesis being accurate or not. And if he had, he would've had to have admitted that if he'd chosen any Australian couple at random, say just two people or man and a woman chosen out of the court and then said, okay, um, does this sample show your DNA plus a known third person? There's a better than 95 percent chance he could have said yes. So in other words, you know, the evidence he was giving on the DNA meant virtually nothing. It could have exonerated anyone. 

CATHERINE: What do you think about Renton's lawyer getting a second opinion on the DNA.

MICHAEL STRUTT: Renton's lawyer was fairly typical of all lawyers in Australia and especially Queensland at the time. And that, you know, sort of like the prosecution says DNA and they go into shock. It’s completely out of their area of expertise.

Even now most lawyers are very reluctant to sort of give serious cross examination about DNA evidence because they know that the expert witness can basically completely bamboozle them and make them look like idiots. 

CATHERINE: But wouldn't the wise thing to do in Renton's case would be to get your own expert if your client is adamant it's not him.

MICHAEL STRUTT: Firstly, it's not cheap and you're probably not going to get it on legal aid.  And secondly, like in the cases that I have seen, it's up to the judge to try to balance that evidence for the jury. 

CATHERINE: The Marc Renton case is a good illustration of the problems with mixed DNA.  When the DNA scientist omits important information to the court justice is not necessarily done. Apart from the DNA scientist on both cases being Ken Cox, there is another link between the Marc Renton case, Andrew Fitzherbert's conviction, and Australia's most famous miscarriage of justice: the Lindy Chamberlain case.

Next time on Murder and the Hellcats.

BARRY BOETTCHER: Fitzherbert's blood did not come out of Fitzherbert's body at the time that Marshall was murdered. It may well have been deposited at about that time, but it certainly was not deposited at the same time as the murder.