Cross checking

You can skip the tables but you can’t skip the conclusions in this detailed, gripping investigation by an interested party (prefers not to be named) of the ‘expert testimony’ by (now retired) Associate Professor Rod Cross presented by Mark Tedeschi KC for the prosecution at the 2008 trial of Gordon Wood for the murder of his fiancée Caroline Byrne. It is in the form of a letter to the editor and is published in full in the interests of debating  reforms needed in the criminal justice system. Wood was found guilty but the verdict was quashed on appeal in 2012. (See more stories on this case by link from the menu on the right.)

Hi Andrew,

Quite some time ago, a guy named Carry wrote the following on your website. Carry wrote:  “Cross’ fastest female test subject was a previous high school hurdling champion.”

I prepared a very long answer which I never sent to anybody. In these post-Folbigg-freeing days where Anna-Maria Arabia of the Australian Academy of Science et al are very interested in scientific evidence going haywire in NSW trials, perhaps my ravings should be made public, somehow? Or sent to Ms Arabia, perhaps?

My extremely long reply – sent to nobody – was:

That’s what the people at the trial and the appeal thought, but it’s incorrect. According to the exhibit at Wood’s trial which was Cross’s third report, Cross’s fastest jumper was Subject 4. But it was Subject 5 who had been a high school hurdling champion 12 to 15 years earlier. I’ve checked that it’s ok for me to quote here from Cross’s reports. So here we go! Ref this table from his third report:

All 21 jump results for subjects 1 to 7 with eight columns presented:

Subject Vx   Vy     Vo 

1          4.20 1.41  4.430

2          3.65 1.67 4.014

3          3.36 1.36 3.625

4          4.05 1.14  4.207

5          4.48 0.40 4.498

6          3.59 1.58 3.922

7          3.16 1.00 3.314

 

1          4.07 1.43 4.314

2          3.51 1.37 3.768

3          3.60 1.04 3.747

4          4.65 1.10 4.778

5          4.47 1.17 4.621

6          3.79 1.73 4.166

7          3.79 1.00 3.920

 

1          3.92 1.47 4.187

2          3.41 1.64 3.784

3          3.45 1.64 3.82

4          4.03 1.06 4.167

5          4.34 1.16 4.492

6          3.77 1.98 4.258

7           3.98 1.39 4.216

where 

Vx = horizontal launch speed (m/s)

Vy = vertical launch speed (m/s)

Vo = net launch speed (m/s) 

Z = launch angle above horizontal (degrees)

dr = run-up distance (m)

dt = takeoff distance (m)

df = flight distance (m)

D = dt +df = total horizontal distance for a 29.0 m fall (m). 

Subject  Z      dr       dt        df.       D

1.         18.56  4.1    0.38   10.84    11.22
2.        24.59  4.2    0.39    9.52      9.91
3.        22.04  3.9    0.27    8.65      8.92
4.        15.72   3.8    0.53   10.33.    10.86
5.          5.10   3.9     0.63   11.08     11.71
6.        23.76  3.8     0.25     9.33     9.58
7.         17.56   3.8     0.14     8.02     8.16

 

1.         19.36  4.0     0.33  10.51     10.84
2.        21.32   4.5     0.32    9.04      9.36
3.         16.11   3.9     0.38    9.15       9.53

4          13.31  4.5     0.41    11.85      12.26

5          14.67  4.2     0.48   11.42       11.90

6.         24.54  4.3     0.18     9.91      10.09

7          14.78   4.5     0.25     9.61       9.86

1           20.56  4.1      0.32   10.14     10.46

2.         25.69  4.5       0.37    8.89     9.26
3.         25.43  4.0       0.30    8.99     9.29
4.         14.74   4.2       0.41   10.25     10.66
5.         14.97   4.1        0.53  11.08      11.61
6.         27.71   4.6         0.10.  9.96      10.06
7.         19.25   4.6        0.40  10.26.    10.66

The aim of this part of Cross’s experiments was to find out if any of his seven female subjects could achieve a jump speed of 4.5 m/s in Column 1, which equates to a horizontal distance of 11.8m in the last (8th) column – that would land them into Hole B. The maximum run-up available at the North Ledge was still understated as 5m at the appeal,  even after the malicious doctored photo evidence from the trial had been removed due to its fake date (details available on request). In his first report, the maximum run-up available, based on incorrect assumptions made by Cross, was assumed to be 4.5m. After Cross’s conclusion of suicide was sent to the police in his first report, changes were made between reports one and three to reduce the available run-up from 4.5m to 4m.

That required jump speed of 4.5 m/s assumes that Caroline landed in Hole B, not Hole A. Lisa Camwell, who retrieved the body, always thought she landed in Hole A, but Cross though she landed in Hole B. I have no idea which crevice or cavity she landed in. Having read all the evidence, I’d guess maybe Hole A, possibly Hole B or possibly even a different crevice altogether. It’s hard to say. We simply don’t know.

Subject 4 succeeded in reaching Hole B in her middle jump of 12.26m. Her fastest horizontal jump speeds was 4.65m/s, a successful suicide jump.

The high school hurdling champion was Subject 5. Her fastest horizontal jump speed above is second fastest – 4.48m/s, which if rounded would successfully be 4.5m/s.

One of the many problems with Cross’s data is the lack of error margins in his presentation. I was taught at high school science that any decent scientist includes +/- error margins when presenting their data as results. I have no idea why he didn’t. If 4.47 is 4.47 +/- 0.6 (say), then his conclusion would change. Not the conclusion of his first report, I mean, but the different conclusion of his later reports after changes were made until the desired outcome somehow happened to be reached.

Here’s just some of the assumptions Cross made:

– in his first report, he assumed Hole A is correct. His conclusion from his first report was that Caroline probably committed suicide. In his first report, Cross sensibly makes many of the same comments that the Appeals Judges made later, about a struggling body, throwers going over the edge etc. Such comments vanish in his later reports.

– Cross assumed that Caroline had to run up in a straight line to any suicide jump. She didn’t have to, and most likely did not. Assuming she didn’t, she’d have a 7m or 8m run-up near the corner post and the mushroom rock, which changes everything.

– In all his reports except his first report, Cross assumed that Caroline jumped or dived or was thrown, ie he didn’t include that she simply ran over the edge without jumping or diving, with her body bending forward at the end of the run, so she landed in the manner that she did. He did include that possibility (likelihood?) in his first report which concluded that she probably committed suicide.

– Cross assumed that even though Caroline’s feet were sticking up in the air pointing towards the corner post of the safety fence, that it was incorrect of Mark Powderly to make the logical deduction of being certain that she left the cliff edge near the corner post.

– At times Cross assumed without testing or experimental justification that jumping feet first lands feet first and diving head first lands head first. My American friend who survived his suicide jump disputed this, based on his own experience. I don’t know if it’s true. Telling a jury it’s true without any scientific or experimental basis strikes me as unscientific.

– Cross assumed that three jumps or dives per subject were adequate for firm conclusions to be drawn, even if some of those jumps or dives were very close to the target figure.

The inaccuracy of any one on those assumptions invalidates all of Cross’s work, but we’ll put that aside for now. 

Returning to that 4.48m/s jump, which when rounded to two significant figures is 4.5, then if we make no allowance for error margins, Subject 5 would have landed about an inch or two short of the target Hole B at The Gap. Given that one or more medical experts at the trial thought that the damage to Caroline’s head indicated that she may have landed then moved or skidded forwards into the cavity, 4.48m/s might well be an adequate horizontal speed for a suicide. We simply don’t know.

A pro-prosecution scientist’s thinking might be: I’d better not let Subject 5 or Subject 4 do any more jumps. They’re too close for comfort.

Subject 4’s second jump (4.65m/s, 12.26m) achieved the objective. Case closed? One would think so. Caroline could have committed suicide. Hang on. Not so fast.

The other five subjects couldn’t get enough speed into their jumps. This includes the one who in Cross’s videos did ungainly belly flops. The belly flopper was no comparison to Caroline Byrne, who grew up diving into the family’s swimming pool near Camden, and who was a regular at the gym until the drug Dianette she was prescribed by Dr Cindy Pan just before her death had its unfortunate and typical effects which curtailed Caroline’s gym visits and ultimately contributed to her death.

Several of the subjects are hardly comparable to Caroline. But that doesn’t matter – Cross’s aim was only to see if any of the seven subjects could do it. Subject 4 could. Subject 5 probably could – if Cross let her have a couple more jumps, which is what Cross did for his throwing experiments when he introduced the very strong huge man Trent Southwell to the throwing. Subject 5 most likely would have been able to commit suicide if given enough tries, especially if we accept Cross’s point that practice improved performance in some cases in the experiments he did.

So Cross concluded that none of his seven subjects could jump at the required speed. He omitted the successful jump by Subject 4 on the mistaken belief that it was done by Subject 5 whose results he decided to omit, based on Subject 5’s athletic ability about 12 to 15 years earlier. By the way, why include Subject 5 in the experiments if you are going to omit Subject 5’s results if they don’t suit your hypothesis? This reminds me of Debendox, the downfall of Dr Bill McBride’s Foundation 41 and the important research of Dr Jason Chin at Sydney Uni. Science in action at its grimmest. The human factor. Nobody at the trial nor the appeal mentioned the muddling of Subjects 5 and 4. It wasn’t fresh evidence so it couldn’t be included in the appeal.

It’s not very important, but I should mention that Subject 5 was about six years older than Caroline, and that running speed slows down with age.

Given that Caroline was found head first in the crevice with her legs dangling back towards the corner post, we’d better look at “dive” results too.

All Cross’s 21 dive results for subjects 1 to 7:

Subject.  Vx.   Vy.     Vo

1             3.64 0.19   3.645

2             3.18 0.99.  3.331

3             3.01 -0.45  3.043

4             3.48 1.16.   3.668

5             3.55 0.59.  3.599

6             3.37 0.87.    3.48

7              3.45 -0.74. 3.528

 

1              3.70 0.62.   3.752

2              3.18 0.82.   3.284

3              3.54 -0.28. 3.551

4              4.10 0.67.    4.154

5              3.82 0.51.   3.854

6              3.61 0.94.    3.73

7               3.27 -0.50. 3.308

 

1                3.78 0.49.  3.812

2                2.95 1.02.  3.122

3                2.46 0.20.  2.468

4                4.03 1.09.   4.175

5                4.13 0.32.   4.142

6                3.70 1.00.   3.833

7                 3.76 -0.52. 3.796

 

where 

Vx = horizontal launch speed (m/s)

Vy = vertical launch speed (m/s)

Vo = net launch speed (m/s) 

Z =  launch angle above horizontal (degrees) 

dr = run-up distance (m)

dt = takeoff distance (m)

df = flight distance (m)

D = dt +df = total horizontal distance for a 29.0 m fall.

 

Subject.   Z    dr    dt     df      D

1.            2.99 4.2  0.59  8.93 9.52
2.           17.29 4.5 0.38 8.06  8.44
3.          -8.5   3.9  0.53 7.19    7.72

4          18.44 3.9   0.53 8.89  9.42

5.          9.44  4.1    0.58 8.85 9.43
6.          14.48 4.4   0.33 8.50 8.83
7.           -12.11 4.4   0.52 8.13 8.65

 

1.            9.51 4.05   0.63 9.24 9.87
2.            14.46 4.3   0.37 8.01  8.38
3.           -4.52 4.0     0.48 8.51  8.99
4.            9.28  3.9    0.56 10.26 10.82
5.            7.61 4.05     0.65 9.49 10.14
6.             14.6 4.2      0.50 9.13 9.63
7.             -8.69 4.3     0.39 7.79 8.18

 

1.               7.39 4.0     0.44 9.39 9.83
2.             19.07 4.1      0.46 7.49 7.95
3.              4.65 3.9     0.46 6.03 6.49
4.             15.14 4.05   0.35 10.26 10.61
5.              4.43 4.05   0.58 10.18 10.76
6.               15.13 4.2     0.41 9.39 9.80
7.                -7.87 4.3    0.44 8.95 9.39

Even allowing for the fake photo (whose falsity was exposed at the appeal) and Cross’s false assumptions creating a ludicrous maximum run-up of 4m at the trial, whereas email discussions between Cross and me in recent years have established that her real maximum run-up at Gap Bluff was 7m to 8m, the best performing athlete (Subject 4) got estimated horizontal distances of 9.42, 10.82 and 10.61, with the second best performing athlete (once again, Subject 5) getting 9.43. 10.14 and 10.76.

In the third report, Cross explains about Subject 5: “One of the seven subjects tested in Dec 2004 (subject 5 in the present tests) had previously excelled at all tests conducted in July 2004. It turned out that she had previously been selected to represent her high school at hurdling, was a member of the State Netball team and was still an active netball player when the July tests were conducted.”

Subject 5 was not the top performer in Cross’s experiments. You were wrong. The trial, the newspapers, the appeal, the lawyers, all the people who didn’t read Cross reports, they were all wrong to think that. When I did Science at Sydney Uni, we were taught that any decent scientist should get his data checked. Cross should have got someone to check his data and his conclusions, to prevent his misidentifying of Subjects 4 and 5. Perhaps he did., and the checker failed.

That was a trivial point which required a long explanation. There’s other matters here which are far more serious. Thanks for being interested.

So how did a random person like me become involved in this case? It’s very much like the random way Cross became involved – an accident. While I was watching a fictional telemovie about the case, I noticed that the fictional Physics Professor named Cross in the telemovie made three errors. I knew nothing about the case. I did some online research, discovering that the real life Associate Professor Cross seemed to have made the same mistakes. Cross was about to give a talk at the Footbridge Theatre at Sydney Uni to promote his new book. I couldn’t attend, but two of my friends did.

In question time, when one of my friends started asking curly questions, the moderator, quite possibly coincidentally, shut the question time down. The next morning, my friend told me that: “It’s all rubbish”, using  a swear word b…s… instead of rubbish. “Take a look at the video on his website”, my friend said….  “see how the Associate Professor in the video is standing beside Hole A and says that the late Lisa Camwell and Mark Powderly referred to a wall of rock between them and the ocean when they retrieved the body. Cross says there’s no wall of rock behind him, so Hole A couldn’t have been the right hole. Then within a second or two of Cross moving away from Hole A, the massive wall of rock between Hole A and the ocean appears in the video. The previous camera angle as he stood beside Hole A just happened to be such that you couldn’t see the wall of rock that was there beside him, out of screenshot. My friend explained that Cross’s talk was mostly like that – none of it stood up to close scrutiny. Obviously I had to buy Cross’s book.

My friends and I  had no idea if Wood was guilty or innocent. All that my friends and I knew at this stage in late 2009 was that the Associate Professor’s evidence had flaws in it. I decided to head off to The Gap at about midnight on a cloudless night (the night of Caroline’s death wasn’t cloudless by the way – the meteorological report (available on request) exhibited at the trial describes the clouds) with about half a moon, to see if I could reproduce what Wood said he did when he woke up late on 6 June 1995.

I left my car in Crown St near where Rivkin’s garage was and walked to Macleay St where Byrne and Wood’s apartment was. From there I walked fast back towards the garage, scurrying a bit, just as Wood said he did. I discovered that the Prosecutor’s statement at the trial of the number of blocks involved was exaggerated by including laneways in the definition of a block. No surprise there. It didn’t take me as long as the Prosecutor at trial said it would take me. No surprise there. Got my car and first drove to the Connaught building nearby, just as Wood said he did to see if Tony Byrne’s apartment’s lights were on. Wood said he asked the attendant at the Connaught garage if Caroline’s car was in the second parking spot for her father Tony’s apartment. The reply was No.

I’m pretty sure the prosecutor at the trial said that’s a lie by Wood because the garage would have been unattended that late at night. So I asked the attendant if the car park was attended all 24 hours. Yes it was, contrary to the info at the trial. How about way back in 1995? He expected it was, but suggested I come back in the daytime to ask the attendant who’d worked there for ages. I did, and received confirmation. I also asked if Tony’s apartment would have had two car spots. Yes. I checked later with a friend who lived in the Connaught in the 1990s – he confirmed my information.

Not fresh evidence, so it can’t be used at the appeal – same old story. That’s why Wood was acquitted only five times on five different grounds instead of on perhaps ten or more grounds. Do any of the lawyers out there know if there’s ever been any other appeal with so many grounds upheld?

Wood had said (on the record, in early police interviews) that that’s when he began to panic that something was wrong. When his fiancée who doesn’t go out late at night on her own wasn’t in their apartment, he’d assumed she’d be at her dad’s place.

So Wood drove to that grassy patch at the end of the narrow road on the harbour-facing headland just south of Camp Cove where he and Caroline had sometimes gone smooching – it might be a place she’d go back to. I went there too. As I drove back on the only road back (Military Road), you cannot avoid seeing the first car parked on the left side of Gap Lane which is directly in front of you, while Military Road veers right. It’s inevitable that Wood would see Caroline’s Suzuki Vitara parked under the streetlight directly in front of him – that’s how he came to realise, with dread, that Caroline was at The Gap. On the  Witness program, perhaps a similar long explanation by him was edited out and only those fateful summarising words about her spirit perhaps guiding him there were sent to air, leading viewers and jurors to wrongly think he’s guilty.

consistent with innocence

I’d never been to The Gap before. Like Caroline, I parked in Gap Lane. I didn’t notice the steps to The Gap to the north of my car, so I walked up a rough track from Gap Lane through some forest in the dark, emerging (thanks to my torch) near the Dunbar anchor where the fishermen had heard the single scream (exactly a suicide jumper would do), not a series of screams that a struggling, carried, conscious woman would make. It was dark and scary. Just how Tony Byrne and Peter Byrne described it when Wood took them there that night. in the darkness I could see white blotched on the rugged rocks below which a panicked fiancé might mistake for clothes.  My trip confirmed that Wood’s description of his actions that night were entirely consistent with innocence.

Tedeschi explains how he won virtually all of his jury cases in two of his many interviews. We all know that the prosecution, with the police and government onside, have all the money and resources, and that the defence usually lacks the time, money and resources to fact check. You can read Andrew Urban’s book Murder by the Prosecution (see below), or Brandon Garrett’s book Convicting the Innocent, or Mark Geragos’s similar book, if you don’t know that basic fact of criminal justice.

Most of my new information – being new not fresh – had to be omitted by Michael Bowe and Tim Game at the appeal, because only fresh, not new, evidence is allowed at appeals. Even fresh evidence might not be allowed in Australia, which in my opinion is scandalous because that promotes injustice. Reform is needed.

I noticed in Cross’s book that in two diagrams, AB + BC in one diagram was not the same distance as AC in another diagram, even though B was on the straight line between A and C. That’s impossible, so I had to go to The Gap to check if the measurements at the crime scene were accurate or not. Off to IGA to buy cords and textas. Dangling cords over cliffs with bright texta marks on them, a friend and I ended up with plenty of measurements. We discovered that some of the crime scene measurements in Cross’s book were wrong and others were right. 4.5m for example might be 4.7m, and 5m might really be 5.4m.

An official-looking man walked up and asked what on earth we were doing. It turned out that he was the guy who attended to the bodies of the suicide jumpers at The Gap in 2009. At that time, The Gap was the third most popular suicide place in the world, according to Wikipedia, behind a forest in Japan and the Bloor Bridge in Canada. The crime scene in 2023 no longer resembles what it was in 2009 or 1995, due to rebuilding of fences etc at The Gap to reduce the number of suicides there. The guy and I started chatting.

The defence throughout the trial and afterwards had been trying to find out – “if Caroline landed furthest out, where did the other jumpers land?” This man from the research centre building just north of The Gap told me the answer. The other 50 or so suicide jumpers p.a. all jumped over there at The Gap, above the tessellated pavement, where there’s only a 2m run-up due to the proximity of the safety fence to the cliff edge. Where I was – at Gap Bluff – there’s a 7m or 8m run-up, maybe more if you run uphill. None of the other suicide jumpers jumped from Gap Bluff where Caroline had jumped from. So Caroline hadn’t landed further out than anyone! The entire case against Wood was like a straw house, built on nothing.

Not fresh evidence – no good for the appeal. Interesting though ….. I think it’s only a failure to disclose to the defence at the trial, if the prosecution knew that. I don’t know if they did. Unless the boxes of all the papers of the prosecution in this case are examined one day, if they still exist, we’ll never know.

My measurement evidence, not being new, at long last was fresh evidence. And evidence of error. My measurement techniques obviously were crap, so at the appeal I noticed that the defence (tipped off by me via the woman who did all the honest hard work to set up the appeal) got two (or was it one?) professional measurement companies to remeasure the crime scene, confirming the errors I’d found.

“Caroline’s tits …”

A friend who lived at Bondi was moving to Melbourne. At his farewell party, I asked some locals whether they knew anything about the Gordon Wood – Caroline Byrne case. They all did. They all knew that Wood was 100% guilty for sure. They all gave the same two reasons, which was that Gordon asked to see Caroline’s tits when he was at the morgue. Only a total creep would do that, they said. And that he’d said that her spirit must have guided him to The Gap that night – we’ve dealt with that second reason.

When I got home, I googled the first reason. It’s a long story involving the Glebe morgue attendant Kenneth Nichols, a commission of inquiry into Glebe morgue which criticises Nicholls’ honesty, and Caroline’s ex-boyfriend Andrew Blanchette. Rod Cross in his book quotes Blanchette’s then girlfriend Melinda Medich mentioning that Blanchette says he sneaked a look at Caroline’s breasts at the morgue the morning after she died. A journalist Robert Wainwright wrote an article about how he’d found a useful new source of information about Gordon Wood – a guy named Andrew Blanchette – and a few days later Wainwright broke a story about how Wood had sneaked a look at her tits at the morgue. That story went viral.

Blanchette set up an investment company, naming it Titanium Asset Management (note the first three letters of each word). Like Wood, Blanchette 100% for sure was not responsible for the death of Caroline Byrne. You can look most of this up on google. Remember that these people thought Wood was guilty. I’m not saying that anything untoward happened, but it’s possible that Blanchette has a wicked sense of humour. Whatever, my friends’ first reason to think Wood is guilty clearly had no basis.

As Andrew Urban’s book Murder by the Prosecution points out, it’s very important to have the public (and thus the jury) think badly of the defendant, if you want a guilty verdict.

None of this information has appeared in public before. Obviously I will have made some mistakes in writing something as long as this. It’s just that Carry and Nomen Nesco seemed genuinely interested in this case, so they deserve to be able to have more information about this case.

Here’s a summary of Cross’s seven rather long reports, which were Exhibits at the trial. I doubt if anyone except me and one other person took the time to read them closely, checking – not the calculations and methodology which are fine – but the assumptions and errors therein. I was in shock after I did that. By then, I was beginning to realise that Wood is innocent.

Report 1 – Cross’s conclusion = probably suicide. Report is fine. Good job.

Report 2 – landing spot changed, more experiments, conclusion that throw is likely … run and suicide jump not as likely. Report sent to police.

Report 3 – available run-up reduced (for reasons which the appeal showed to be fake evidence provided to Cross by the police), more experiments, omits successful jump from results, his new conclusion is what he is paid to conclude – that she was thrown.

Report 4 – “that this is my fourth report indicates that there have been significant problems …  in identifying the correct landing point …. Office of the DPP requested in May 2005 further factual information regarding the landing point. Consequently, additional measurements of the site were undertaken on 8th June 2005 by myself and by personnel from the NSW Police Forensic Imaging Group….”

The first report was fine. Progressively, each report gets murkier than the previous one. This is the messiest by far. Cross repeatedly says that the key evidence that Hole B is the right crevice or cavity is because Mark Powderly once wrote that there are two boulders round the correct hole (as is the case for Hole B), then when he quotes Powderly on lines 7 and 8 of page 27, Powderly refers to three or four (not two) boulders or rocks around the correct crevice. Therefore, in Appendix 7 of this report on page 27, Cross is clearly saying that Hole A (three or four rocks round it) is correct and Hole B (two rocks round it) is incorrect.

The conclusion in the report itself contradicts this evidence which Cross himself provides. Cross also tries his hand at medical evidence. Nothing in this report is convincing. The Prosecution (not the police) ask for a certain conclusion, you’re paid by them and you’ve got to give them something. Even with Cross’s unwitting evidence that Hole A (the one in his first report) is correct, I’m not convinced. It could be either hole, or neither. We don’t know where Caroline landed. We do know (from the angle of her feet) where she left the cliff edge and that could not have been the North Ledge. Let’s move on.

Report 5 –  The trend continues. “I determined that [throwing from the North Ledge] was not particularly dangerous, given that only one thrower in my experiments overbalanced and fell over the edge…” If you’ve ever seen the North Ledge, that’s an extraordinary, unscientific conclusion. Cross says his throwers required a 2m to 3m run-up. The North Ledge is a 5m long uneven rocky area where the chances of any thrower killing himself are high. Cross describes the North Ledge  in Report 6: “the extreme edge slopes slightly downwards, appears to be covered in small stones, and is probably quite slippery”. Any throwing killer with a brain could and would easily throw a girl to her death at the corner post instead, out of sight of the Watson’s Bay houses. House lights can be seen from the North Ledge at night, because it is 4m to 5m higher up than the corner post. That means the North Ledge, unlike the corner post area, is probably visible to houses. The throwers in his experiments were on flat surfaces beside a swimming pool in daylight.

Cross writes in this report things like: “The conclusion that I came to was that Caroline Byrne was thrown from the cliff top. That conclusion did not depend  on which of the two landing points was the correct one.” But he fails to show why his “likely suicide” conclusion in his first report about Hole A is incorrect”, other than making some false claims about Caroline’s health as if she was an invalid. Unbelievable.

Report 6 – is a summary, beginning with the false statement that “Caroline Byrne landed at a surprisingly large distance from the cliff” which simply is not true.  If she had have run up at full and used the maximum run up distance she had available (about 7m or 8m), she would have landed much further out than she did – about 15m or 16m from the cliff edge instead of her actual horizontal distance of 11m to 12m out. The rest of the report is a reiteration of errors and facts from his previous reports.

Report 7 – The trend continues. In his fourth report, Cross indicated that Hole A was ruled out because “the incorrect cavity is about 40 cm wide at the top and narrows to about 30 cm at the bottom”, so Caroline’s shoulders could not have fitted into the top of it. No data is provided about how deep the cavity is. A police drawing labels Hole A as 50 cm wide at the top, contrary to Cross’s 40 cm. In Report 7, Cross mysteriously drops the width of the cavity at its top to about 30cm (“the incorrect cavity was only about 30cm wide”) then sets out to show that the shoulders of a woman with both arms or one arm out in front of her are too wide to fit.

Cross openly shows photos of the burly muscular girls he used in his experiments (Caroline was slim). When asked to hold hands above their head with fingers touching, most in their photos have arms out wide with fingers nowhere near touching, barely or not narrowing their shoulders. One fairly muscular burly girl does follow the instructions of actually bringing her shoulders in as her arms touch above her head – her shoulder width dropped to 30.1 cm. Cross’s conclusion after being asked about shoulder width with one or two arms overhead: “It is not possible for a normal adult female to reduce her shoulder length to less than 300mm or less by raising one arm”, with no mention of the successful shoulder squeezer, who admittedly had two arms raised. His conclusion is not justified, given that the girls in his photos (bar one) seemingly failed to make any attempt to narrow their shoulder width in his flawed experiments.

Cross states that a mannequin (shoulder width 365mm with arms) with arms removed could get into Hole A only “with difficulty”, yet a video shows that it fits easily. He then makes a series of claims which do not have any meaning nor relevance.

The piece de resistance is a fitting end. Cross tests 9 members of Sydney Uni’s rugby team to try to show that Throwing Ability and Max Bench Press (strength) are related –  a relationship which the Prosecutor was keen to see proven. The two strongest bench pressers come 6th  and 7th out of 9 at throwing, with the third strongest coming equal third. Cross’s conclusion (which was presented at the trial) was that: “The data shows a strong correlation between throw speed and bench press ability.” I was gobsmacked. The poor jury, who see only the conclusion, not the data.

A few years after Caroline died, a Watson’s Bay resident Doherty who had seen long haired Gordon Wood in a photo or TV show told how one winter’s evening in about 1995, he saw two people arguing at the shops at The Gap, identifying the man with long hair as Gordon Wood, on a night where a scream later suggested a suicide jump.  A problem is that photos exist – I think they were shown at the appeal, if the evidence was allowed in – showing Gordon Wood with very short hair just before and just after Caroline died. So it couldn’t have been Wood that Doherty saw. All the evidence in the case against Wood simply collapses when examined.

I went to Australia’s first Wrongful Conviction Seminar, conducted by Dr Robert Moles and other legal academics at Flinders Uni in Adelaide. Gordon Wood was there too, trying to prevent other miscarriages of justice from occurring. Evidence from USA and elsewhere shows that no guilty person ever attends such things. I at last knew 100%  for sure that this was a terrible miscarriage of justice.

No blame can be put on the Wood jury. It is what they and the public were presented with that was wrong, just like in the trials of Sue Neill Fraser, Kathleen Folbigg and Robert Xie. If the jury and public are presented with misleading data, their conclusion could be anything.

Justice Peter McClellan in the Wood appeal writeup made suggestions to try to prevent  this sort of flawed forensic evidence recurring in subsequent NSW trials. Evidence on this website is that it keeps happening. Although there was a review of appeals processes by the NSW AG’s Department a few years ago, none of the eminent Judge McClellan’s suggestions were implemented. NSW, like Tasmania, is still stuck in the dark ages. By providing more information about the Wood trial, I hope that other people try to improve how things are done.

Carry – thanks for triggering me to write up this stuff.

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Extracts from Andrew L. Urban’s Murder by the Prosecution (Wilkinson Publishing):

Background : Gordon Wood was convicted in 2008 of the murder of Caroline Byrne, whose body was found early morning on June 8, 1995, on the rocks at The Gap, a notorious suicide spot on Sydney’s Eastern coast. In 2012 the Court of Criminal Appeal set aside his conviction and entered a verdict of acquittal. The Chief Judge at Common Law made it clear in his judgement that even the most basic elements of the case had failed to be established. “I am not persuaded that Wood was at The Gap at the relevant time.” He concluded that the verdict of the jury could not be supported having regard to the evidence. (Reminiscent of the High Court’s 2020 opinion in the Pell case, that “the evidence of the opportunity witnesses … required the jury, acting rationally, to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to the applicant’s guilt.”)

The main witnesses for the prosecution were the investigator, Detective Inspector Jacob, and the expert witness, Associate Professor Rod Cross. They had worked closely with each other, and, according to the Chief Judge at Common Law, they had presented evidence which was either inadmissible or unreliable.

The quality of the investigation was a particular concern. Because it was thought to be a suicide, the police took no photographs of the scene at the time of the death and the spot where the body was located was not recorded at that time. Subsequently, the precise location of take-off and landing points was to become the central feature of the case.

Extracts from the transcript of the judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal, 2012, which quashed the murder conviction and acquitted Gordon Wood:Question 23 was: “How would anybody, athletic or not, do a running dive from the top of The Gap in almost total darkness and on uneven ground into either hole A or hole B?” This question reversed the onus of proof by calling for an explanation from the applicant. It was for the prosecutor to exclude the possibility that Ms Byrne could have dived from the top of the Gap to either hole A or hole B (or any other point), not for the applicant to show that anybody, athletic or not, could do this.”