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In 1992 I was asked to assist a murder inquiry by commenting on the authorship
of a suicide note in the handwriting of Paula Gilfoyle. I had provided
guidance to a number of other big investigations.
The police officer leading the inquiry presented the suicide note to me with
the fascinating thesis that it had been dictated to Paula by her husband,
Eddie, who was believed then to have encouraged Paula to put her neck in a
noose while he stood behind her, after which he killed her by lifting her
legs to hang her.
I was told that it was believed that Eddie had murdered Paula, who was eight
and a half months pregnant, after tricking her into writing the suicide note
on the pretext that he needed it for a paramedical evening class he was
taking. His motive, in the crime novel tradition, was hinted at being an
affair that he was having.
I have always been fascinated by the psychological implications of the written
word, having even studied my own correspondence with my childhood friend,
the film director Mike Leigh, when I was a student in the 1960s. In the
context of crime the written word can often be regarded as the crime scene,
especially when I have given guidance on threat and extortion, for which the
text provides the criminal act.
So I worked with some postgraduate research assistants to consider how we
might analyse Paula’s suicide note to determine if it did indicate her
intention to kill herself. It is important to emphasise that from the start
that I did not think we could establish authorship categorically but needed
to consider the note in its whole context.
Part of my report was the result of comparing the suicide note with other
written material we had of Eddie’s and of Paula’s. The approach that we took
to analysing all this material was highly numerical; the proportions of
personal pronouns, connectives, sentence lengths and so on.
But we had no firm basis in previous research to work from. No one has been
able to provide a truly reliable, objective, numerically based procedure for
determining authorship with small examples of text. There is a tremendous
difficulty in doing this because we all change how we speak and write
depending on the circumstances of our communication. In fact, a moment’s
thought about the nature of communication reveals that we must change it in
accordance with the situation.
The written material we were working with was a great mixture of jottings left
in notebooks, letters to friends, postcards and a series of notes that Paula
wrote to Eddie about their relationship. So comparison of the text across
them was very problematic. However, I came to the conclusion that the
suicide note was not typical of Paula’s style, nor was it typical of Eddie’s
and taking all the circumstances and note into account formed the opinion
that Paula “had not intended to take her own life”.
My report was never presented to the court but apparently had an influence
behind the scenes. But I had always been curious about how a pregnant woman
would write a suicide note under dictation from her husband with whom she
had had a strained relationship, and then put her head in a noose with him
standing behind her. So when the opportunity arose a few years later for me
to talk to Eddie and his family (an option I had been denied as a
prosecution expert) I jumped at it. The picture that emerged from these
discussions was much less clear than the original story. There was no strong
evidence that Eddie had ever dictated a suicide note, or even claimed that
he was doing a course as a paramedic, just hearsay from friends of Paula,
which was never presented to the court.
By the time I met Eddie I had been able to oversee a variety of other studies
on text and authorship and had formed the view that the purely numerical
approach could be very misleading. I had developed an interest and
understanding of the need to reveal the implicit and explicit narrative in
any material, possibly closer to an English Literature approach than a
purely statistical one.
This set me to consider the unfolding story within the correspondence between
Eddie and Paula that culminated in the suicide note. To my surprise I
realised that no one had ever done that. The documentary evidence of the
relationship between these two people leading up to Paula’s death had never
been reviewed in sequence, either in the original court case or at Eddie’s
first appeal. All the focus was on circumstantial evidence from apparent
witnesses.
Eddie and Paula had been on different shifts so left a dozen or more crucial
notes for each other. When I read these through in sequence a very clear
narrative emerged. This showed Paula’s disquiet about her pregnancy and
relationship to Eddie for which the suicide note was a natural ending.
Furthermore, the related research, which has recently been supported even more
strongly in a major doctorate that I have supervised, emphasised that the
point of suicide notes is often to excuse people who take their own lives.
The notes typically take the form of an apology to exonerate close
relatives. Fewer than half of those who take their own life leave suicide
notes; some studies put the figure as low as 15 per cent. Notes are usually
left because they know how hurtful and unacceptable the death will be to
others. This is exactly what Paula’s suicide note is about. With a bitter
irony, it is mainly devoted to telling Eddie not to blame himself.
In addition, we have also found that in about a tenth of suicides there are no
obvious prior indicators. This means that the judges’ claims in both the
original trial and two appeals, that Paula’s demeanour in contact with
others, was clear evidence that she did not intend to kill herself,
completely ignored what many now recognise, even with the recent suicides
around Bridgend. People can present a happy face to the world while still
intending to kill themselves.
All these matters and other factors, most notably the demanding creative
imagination, beyond Eddie’s abilities, that would be needed to invent the
sequence of notes and letters changed my opinion. I formed the view that my
original analysis had been too greatly, if inadvertently, influenced by the
story that the police had originally given to me. The reliance on number
crunching was also misleading. I therefore wrote a further report for
Eddie’s second appeal which argued that there was a psychological logic that
made it very likely that Paula had taken her own life.
David Canter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool
