Accidental Death or Premeditated Murder? | Forensics | Real Crime

a man is found wandering the port hills in a state of shock a car and the body of a young woman lie in a steep ravine accident or has a car being used as a weapon of murder in this case the combination of pathology physical evidence and forensic engineering provide vital clues as science unravels the curious case of operation lamar a crime scene is a puzzle that has to be solved a whodunit a scattering of clues to be deciphered by clever detective work and the power of science [Music] our case begins high above christchurch on a cold september evening [Music] we had a friend who had been over living in new zealand for a few years and he was from the states and the very next day he was due to fly out so we were going for a drive and the last chance to have a look at the city before he headed home there were two cars i was in the lead car and i was driving and came around the corner and suddenly a man popped out and he distinctly had a wound on his head it was freezing cold and he was in bare feet no top wearing nothing but jeans the way he approached us with a just an intent to get inside the car quickly was almost spooky he ended up coming up into the passenger side and just opened up the door and proceeded to try and climb inside the car despite the fact there was someone sitting beside me that person clambered straight over the top of me and went ahead first onto the road what has happened to this man what has left him so traumatized my immediate thoughts was perhaps he'd been beaten up and dumped on the side of the road i could see a car slightly further down the road and i wondered whether or not that might have been the people that left in there so there was a concern that whoever left and they might come back but they could get no explanation from the terrified man there eventually he gestured up the road which made me think that potentially there was something up the road that we needed to go and look at so i went up the hill and slightly around the corner couldn't see anything from the road decided i'd have a little look down what was a bit of a gully down there and i walked down maybe 100 metres off the side of the road and found a car as i approached the car i could see that both doors were open there were casino chits lying all around the car the fuel flap was open and then the strangest thing about it was the fact that the fuel cap was missing and i became a bit concerned that potentially someone else might have been down there a phone call was made to emergency services uncertain if anyone else had been involved the young men attempted to search the steep gully in the dark we really had no idea what was going on up until the point in time the services arrived police were first on the scene the young man wasn't badly injured and was attended to while other officers searched the hillside for any other victims it was then that they made a tragic discovery they found a woman approximately 20 metres down the hillside deceased and initially thought that it might have been a vehicle accident where a pedestrian had been been struck i felt bad that we couldn't have found the girl's body we would have been walking seriously close to where she was underneath the lip of the row but without knowing she was there it was obviously nothing we could do to help her [Music] the body was lying face down towards down the hill and she was wearing a green top and a black jacket that had been pushed up it was obvious that she had a bleeding injury to her head and there was a blood staining in and around the area of where she was found who was the young woman and what events had taken place that led to her death very little could be ascertained in the dark but by morning a full investigation team is assembled when i first arrived the first thing that struck me was the size of the scene the crime scene area extended across a vast hill and down a steep gully with a narrow road weaving through the middle it was such a large area the body was about 25 meters down from the road the car was more than 100 meters down from the road and it was covered in large tussock grass so it was going to be a real challenge every detail of this large scene had to be assessed and recorded the victim had been identified as a sheeping you a 22 year old chinese student she was the registered owner of the vehicle investigators needed to establish who had been driving and exactly what had caused the car to leave the narrow winding road of the port hills so esr's role is to examine the scene for items of physical evidence and blood staining that may relate to the event and help reconstruct what actually happened whether it was just a motor vehicle accident or whether or not there'd been something more sinister i had the photographers go up in a helicopter above the scene and take some aerial images and that was able to establish the exact path that the vehicle had taken as it jumped around turning over several times before coming to rest from that we were able to walk down that same route the vehicle had taken to examine that area to see if there's any other forensic evidence that may have dislodged from the vehicle or have been caught up in it on the top of the roadside there were items of broken off from the car there was also items of clothing and blood staining among those items was a shoe and an earring the earring a match to one worn by sheeping you in an older photograph as you went down to the grass verge and to the broken area of fence you could see the track marks of the tyres where it pushed down the grass so it gave us an idea of the way the car was traveling when it left the road and it traveled through that fence to assist with the reconstruction of events police enlist the skills of an expert mechanical engineer the evidence of the bent waratahs and the distorted wiring showed where the vehicle had gone through the fence off the edge of the road and the shape of that damage indicated the vehicle had gone off the road more or less at right angles to the road it hadn't gone off at an oblique angle if it was an ordinary motor vehicle accident you might expect them to go off on an angle whereas this seemed to go perpendicular to the road this was the first abnormality as more evidence is collected at the scene investigators begin to suspect that this was no ordinary accident the evidence on the road such as her earring and the shoe indicated that something had happened up on the road that was quite a long way from where her body was found and just the condition of the body that it was thrown from the vehicle but the injuries to the body just seemed a little inconsistent but perhaps this could be explained by the surviving victim the man found on the road 23 year old kaiji who was also a chinese student he was interviewed at the christchurch central police station it was a long interview over the period of the whole day and i was tasked to really find out the circumstances of what what already had occurred because we didn't really know a lot of that stage staff immediately felt that the situation wasn't quite as it should be didn't read as a motor accident i was there to really get those details of what had occurred the previous evening kaiji spoke very little english and communicated through an interpreter he had met sheeping you who he called ginny at the english language school and they had been in a romantic relationship which had broken up just two weeks prior to the night she died he contacted her with the intention of returning some property to her namely her laptop according to him he went to ginny's place at about 6 pm that night after spending some time there they returned to his place to pick up a laptop computer he then drove up to the port hills stopping at the lamar car park to talk kaiji was in a bad situation he had gambled and lost fifty thousand dollars of his parents money we talked about a lot of things but mainly about what i was going to do about having lost all my parents money at the casino and i talked to her about how ashamed and sad i felt and that i felt that i had lost everything ginny got a call on her cell phone she got out of the car to talk on her phone she was not on the phone for very long phone records showed the call was received at 8 40 pm and was from her new boyfriend he rang her phone again several times just after 10 pm but those later calls went unanswered [Music] kaiji became angry that ginny had been speaking with her new boyfriend an argument began she got out of the car and walked away i was unhappy i wanted to keep on talking to her i drove the car up to where she was walking up the road she was walking along the grass area beside the road i then got out of the car and spoke to jenny i told her that i was sorry i said that i was very sad and that i was going to kill myself by driving the car off the hill she told me to think about my parents and pleaded with me not to be so stupid i walked up to ginny and then kissed her on the cheek and [Music] hugged i got back into the car i closed my eyes and put my head down i then put my foot on the accelerator of the car i was committed to driving off the road i really wanted to die kaiji claims not to have seen ginny nor heard any impact as he blindly plunged the car off the road the car rolled down the hill i was thrown around inside the car i cannot remember when the car stopped i was very surprised that i was still alive i was also very sad that i was still alive as the interview ended investigators were left with questions was kaiji telling the truth had he accidentally driven into her as he tried to end his life or had it been something more deliberate and could forensic science reveal the truth so most people when they think of weapons they think of knives and guns and baseball bats and the like when you see some with stab wounds you don't normally think oh that was an accident but when you see a motor vehicle accident on the side of the road where you see a crashed car your first instinct is that's happened just by chance but sometimes it's something more sinister the investigation into sheeping new's death was now in its second day the large and difficult terrain provided an added challenge to carrying out the scene examination officers searched for any evidence that could aid them in the reconstruction of what events had taken place so the scene on this occasion was critical to establishing what had occurred because we had no witnesses that were able to say what had actually occurred on the night and from the account of kaijee we weren't sure how much of it was truthful or not so a lot of weight was placed on trying to confirm from the scene what had taken place we take different samples in order to help with the reconstruction what we want to do is to be able to establish if the deceased has come in contact with the car and if so whereabouts on the outside of the vehicle was a small amount of blood staining on the bonnet and on the windscreen on the driver's side this corresponded to the dna profile of the deceased further clues were detected in the damage on the car one of the significant items that was damaged on the vehicle was the ventilation grill at the top just above the bonnet now why that was relevant was because that was located further up in the scene just by the roadside and what was important in this evidence was a long hair which was embedded in a crack in the plastic it had black roots and the remainder was blonde and it corresponded to the hair of the victim investigators suspected this belonged to the victim but could dna testing prove it this here had an anagen root so an anagen root is a type of root where the hair is actively growing and that has the most dna so in our normal here we have most of our hair which is in the last stages of its life which falls out readily and these are the hairs that you'd find on your clothing or on your bedding then the early stages of growth when it's actively growing that's when the most dna is present so in this case the dna corresponded to the victim and it showed that the hair had probably been pulled or forcefully removed the hair was a crucial piece of forensic evidence and its position confirmed where sheeping you came into contact with the car we were able to physically fit that back to the plastic ventilation grille on the driver's side of the bonnet and the position of it was critical for the reconstruction the hair and the grill told us that there'd been an impact where miss you had been hit at the front vehicle and been thrown back towards the windscreen but how could this prove whether the impact was intentional or accidental dr tim stevenson is a forensic engineer and crash investigator by inputting car and scene measurements he was able to create exact computer simulations to explore different possible crash scenarios well we're trying to find out which scenarios are the most likely we've got different versions of events both from what we've been told and what we have inferred from our own interpretations of the evidence and so we're putting those scenarios to the test the simulation breaks it down into the tiny small increments one millisecond point one of a millisecond and it looks at the different forces that are generated during each interval of time and then the resulting stresses displacements and movements of all the different components within the simulation by combining these elements with the evidence of the scene a reconstruction could be made of what had happened simon the vehicle appears to have approached the pedestrian impact point from the lamar track car park about 200 meters to the east so that's this way in this direction here so it's been coming up the hill and miss you has been walking ahead of the vehicle had she thrown herself in front of the car to stop him committing suicide and the question is whether or not it has her front on with her legs facing the vehicle like this or whether she was facing away like this a computer simulation is created to explore the outcomes of the victim facing towards the vehicle on impact so the first point of contact is going to be between the leading edge of the bumper and it's going to strike pedestrians legs and basically take the lower feet out from under them the person's legs crumple so their upper legs then come down onto the leading edge of the bonnet and then the pedestrian progressively folds down the upper body coming into contact with parts of the car progressively further back but there were evidential inconsistencies with this scenario now there's an absence of any injury to her knees no ligament damage there was no fracturing of her tibia bones and the shins no bruising of those bones so we concluded that she had not been facing the vehicle but that she was facing away from the vehicle like this or perhaps turned partly to her right this is corroborated by bruising on the back of her body the speed of the impact could also be determined when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian at a high speed such as 50 kilometers per hour the pedestrian themselves attain a much higher speed and the interaction becomes much more complex the limbs flail more dramatically the pedestrians thrown around a lot more are we confident that speed was around the 30 kilometers per hour had it been higher her head would have hit up in this mid-screen area or higher still up at the top of the screen had the speed been lower her head would have hit around about the middle of the bonnet being hit from behind at 30 kilometers per hour is verified by the evidence on the car so the impact would have thrown her onto the bonnet like this with her head moving towards the plastic fresh air intake grille at the base of the windscreen and her head has hit that and in doing so it's broken that grill and one of her hairs has got captured in a fragment of the grill and is finished up on the road her body would have most likely if the vehicle was at a constant speed have been thrown and jackknifed over this part of the bonnet over this way william landed on the grass verge beside the vehicle which is traveling through here it was quite a low speed impact which would have left her concussed but probably otherwise uninjured apart from minor abrasions so the evidence strongly suggests that the victim was hit in this direction yes from behind and that that event wouldn't have been fatal that's correct this raises crucial questions for the investigation could this really be accidental and what other events had taken place that night in the port hills investigators have established the victim was hit with the car from behind was it possible kaiji had accidentally struck her as he blindly drove off the road or had he intentionally run her down and where was the evidence that would provide the answers what was unusual on the bonnet of the car was an area of scratches and this was consistent with being in contact with the barbs of the fence wire as it's gone through the fence scratching the top of the bonnet the vehicle was air lifted off the port hills by helicopter and then taken to the police lock up for a more thorough examination we needed to collect areas of paint from different parts of the vehicle because when a car gets repainted the paint layers from the different parts of the vehicle may differ so it's important to take a representative sample to be able to compare a section of the broken fence was also removed from the scene and taken back to the lab to be examined there was black smears of plastic on the fence wires and also white smears of paint so we collected these samples by scraping them onto a petri dish the paint samples were carefully extracted for analysis if samples from the car and fence could be matched then investigators could establish the car's exact path after leaving the road dr sally coulson carried out the analysis work on the paint each tiny sample is carefully positioned on its side in the mold a resin is added to preserve them and hold them in place now the two paint samples can be observed microscopically for any similarities we have a fragment of paint from the driver's side of the vehicle on the left-hand side of the photo and on the right hand side is a fragment of paint from the fence and this photo has been taken while we've been looking down a microscope and what are the layers then they represent paints do they they do so these paint fragments have three layers and on the bottom we've got our metallic black layer and then the colourless layer but then on top of that we've got this thick white layer what does that tell us normally cars have a colorless layer as their uppermost layer that protects your paint but on this sample we've got a white layer on top so that white layer tells us this vehicle has been repainted at some time after its manufacture oh it was a black car and then someone resprayed it that's right so that makes this paint layer structure very different to other cars that would have been manufactured at the same time this is really strong evidence linking the car with the fence eye it's come into contact with the fence at some point yes that's right matching the car's paint on the fence and the scratch marks on the car enabled investigators to determine the angle of the vehicle when it struck the fence so we've got evidence on the road verge telling us where the vehicle left the road we've got evidence from the damage of the fence as to where it went through the fence and by connecting those two up it's telling us that that vehicle was pretty much perpendicular to the road kaiji claimed he'd driven the car off the road without stopping but given the geography the narrow width of the road and the direction the car had gone through the fence was that even possible with our professor of mechanical engineering we set up the exact scenario and put it to the test these cones represent the broken fence and all i need to do is drive the car turn at a right angle and drive straight into the fence okay so just see if you can ease forward and going on hard right lock aim is there going to go through that fence that's on hard so you've stopped pretty much with your right front wheel on the edge of the drop down onto the hillside and you can see that the vehicle's still only angled at about 40 degrees to the line of the road and there's no way you're going to line up to go through that no the only way i can get through that is to grind the gears but do another maneuver reverse realign and then forward and with that stage i've actually gone off the edge of the hill and i'm going down now towards the fence yeah and i'd get through but that took two maneuvers didn't it it would take two maneuvers to do that that was assuming kaiji was driving in the right hand lane but if he'd gone to the left-hand side would that have given him more room to make the maneuver in one swift action right so i've nearly gone off the edge of the road there and again the car is not facing the gap in the fence is it it's not it is physically impossible on the narrow stretch of road to reach a speed of 30 kilometers per hour hit the victim and then leave the road at a right angle in one action there had to have been two separate events nothing was matching kaiji's account and nothing looked accidental the vehicle had gone down and had flipped several times before coming to rest where it eventually did so i would have expected that anyone in the vehicle had at least some injuries even if quite minor and he did have a small abrasion to his forehead but no other injuries investigators now questioned whether he had been in the vehicle at all his admission was that he had been but the injuries were very light so we thought okay is there another way of confirming within fact he was in the vehicle or not the vehicle had a broken window on the driver's side the first time that it turned over the driver's window had completely come out but it was shattered into hundreds and hundreds of pieces so when a window is broken the majority of the glass goes in the direction of the break but some can also go back onto the person near the glass window if kaiji had been in the car some fragments of glass would have collected on his clothing when we examined the pants of the driver of the vehicle there was a few fragments of glass found on the outside of the clothing and also inside the pockets of the pants and this indicated that the driver was very close to that window when it was broken and most likely was inside the vehicle when the window broke proving he was driving when the vehicle left the road but what else had happened that night and what had caused the young woman's death the scene examination of the port hills took weeks to complete but piece by piece they were able to put together a picture of what had happened that night as the scene examination wore on and more items were found and more of the movements of kaiji became known it would appear apparent that there was some time between when he drove over the side and the witnesses came along so what was unusual in this scene is that there was blood staining on the petrol flap which was open so this blood staining came back to corresponding to the driver of the vehicle further inspection of areas including the petrol tank identified matches inside the flap and they had been lit indicating someone attempting to light the vehicle i then realized that i had some packets of casino matches i opened the cover to the petrol cap of the car i unscrewed the cap to the petrol tank [Music] i then lit the matches and threw them in the petrol tank i thought the car would blow up in flames so that i would be killed but nothing happened any highly volatile fuel requires the right ratio of fuel to air and the vapor for that combustion to be initiated the match will have tended to extinguish as it dropped into the tank so it's just got to be able to find that right combustible mixture as the lit match drops into the fuel tank and in this event it didn't happen kaiji claimed his attempt to blow up the car was another endeavor to end his life but investigators believed there was another possibility he was trying to destroy evidence that night he had taken some of his clothes off and hidden them where the jacket was eventually found was quite some distance away the other item that was missing was the shoe worn by the victim one shoe was found but not the other and that was eventually found above the roadside we would expect to have found that further down either on the roadside or further down and there was no logical explanation for being up there other than kaiju himself throwing it up there kaiji was trying to cover his tracks evidence has shown that kaiji ran into ji ping yu on the road at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour it's reasonably apparent that first impact didn't actually do a lot of damage to you it's also apparent that something else happened that did do a lot of damage to her so it was a question of figuring out whether she had been run over as well as having been struck initially by the vehicle a post-mortem is conducted what clues will the body hold so not only are we looking at cause of death we're looking at reconstructing the events around the death injuries that may not even be responsible for death are often quite forensically important because they can give a lot of ideas about context initially we look at the external injury so she had quite a lot of linear abrasions and lacerations in multiple places so she had them on her legs and on her chest and on the back of her neck and back this was clear evidence of a second event an abrasion is an injury that you get when you've got two objects moving against each other so say a car moving against the skin in this case the injuries were actually associated with grease marks so esr's role in the post-mortem examination is to uplift the trace evidence from the outside of the body that might assist in the reconstruction of events in this case the deceased had a large area of black greasy like staining which started from her waistline and extended up to her chest on the right hand side investigators suspected these greasy marks were the results of being run over and if so could science provide an evidential link samples of the grease were taken from the victim's body and clothing and sent to esr for analysis the underneath of the vehicle was examined and sample areas were carefully selected underneath the vehicle there were several different areas of grease-like staining it was important to take samples from different areas just in case the composition of the grease in these different areas was different there is a huge variation of substances detectable on the underneath of a vehicle the trick is determining exactly which part of the car had connected with the victim's body five areas were sampled and sent to dr sally coulson for analysis so how do you analyze grime that's been removed from a vehicle so we've got a sample here that's a mixture of oil and dirt and it really just looks like dirt and so we've got a solvent which is called dichloromethane and this solvent is very good at dissolving oils and those types of chemicals that are in oil so a bit like paint stripper yes just like paint stripper can be used to dissolve paint this solvent can be used to dissolve any oil what you can see now is sort of a cloudy liquid but the soil is still solid so we need to separate out the solvent from the soil and we can do that just by filtering some of the solvent just to make sure that none of those bits of soil end up in our sample for testing so the liquid in the bottom now is just the solvent plus the oil that's correct and we just need a very small portion of this that we put in a vial so here we have our sample and a little vial that's ready for testing the sample is then analyzed in the chromatographic mass spectrometer this machine evaluates each of the individual chemical compounds in the oily substance and will display a peak value for each compound so we had five samples from underneath the car all five of those samples showed slightly different chemical profiles and that's probably because they're a mixture of different oils but one of those samples matched the oil that was on the torso of the victim they've got pretty much identical peaks meaning they've got the same compounds present so we can say that these two samples have come from the same source which would suggest that at some point the body of the victim came into contact with the underside of the vehicle that's right when a vehicle is used as a weapon a really good clue that was intentional is that there's more than one impact more than one event the initial hit was damaging but not necessarily fatal so in order to finish off the job a second event has occurred and that is a quite distinctive pattern in terms of being spear at the moment event possibly initially but then realising that it can be used to finish the job when kaiji was first found on the road that night he appeared to be an innocent witness traumatized by some terrible incident but as the investigation ensued a picture of a very different person emerged kaiji and xi bing yu were both students at the same english language school and other students would provide more background to his character the students on the course would all associate with one another and so they were all interviewed during the investigation there's more around the background as to who was kaiji who was miss you and it's about finding out who they are the nature of their relationship any previous incidents between them anything that might be of significance to the investigation fellow students revealed that just days before her death she ping yu had asked a friend not to leave her alone with kaiji because she was afraid that he would hurt her when she had ended their relationship kaiji had become angry and violent hitting both her and her new boyfriend if the suspect during interview gives an account of a story at the crime scene you do look at that and work out whether the evidence supports what he said or refutes what he said it seemed to investigators that very little of kaiji's account of what had happened that fateful night could be supported we will never know the conversations they had on the way up the hill we never know you know what was the basis of argument from the car what was said between both parties you know we had his version of events which didn't match what was coming out from the scene and putting all those pieces together and spelt a different story different version of events we know sheeping you was walking or running away when she was hit by the car for the first time her body falling off the car and landing on the side of the road if she had been flung over that bank by the initial impact i find it very hard to believe she would have stopped short of the fence because if you're thrown over there by the vehicle with some speed you're not going to come to a stop on that bank you're going to come to the stop at the bottom of the bank and to my mind that tells me that she hasn't been thrown over that bank by the force of the impact but rather she's been placed on that bank after the impact this would suggest that following the first impact kaiji has moved misu's body and deliberately placed her in a position so that he could run her over my impression from the injuries is that it was probably more likely that she was on her back and that the car was on her front and that's from the grease marks and there was also the crush type injuries were to the front of the chest as opposed to the back of the chest although we commonly say people get run over they don't really they get run under by cars the car goes underneath the pedestrian the pedestrian tumbles off the top and ends up on the road surface in this instance we've had a true run over she's gone underneath the vehicle and we don't have a large amount of abrasion present we don't have a large amount of grass stains so we've got almost a downward force acting on her which is unusual and draws attention straight away but when you look at the scene when you look at the steepness off the bank you can quite easily see how it could be done in terms of the vehicle coming off the bank and coming down onto here with a significant force kaiji has repositioned his car by doing a three-point turn so that he is facing misused body and in line to drive across the road and down into the gully the vehicle is a 1985 honda prelude it's not exactly a high performance vehicle it is front front-wheel drive and it'll be needing some throttle in order to go over that verge so i'd be saying something in the vicinity of 10 to 12 kilometers per hour as the vehicle left the bank that doesn't sound like particularly high speed but we have the slight lip that will tend to lift the vehicle slightly and then we have a very steep bank which will cause the vehicle the front of the vehicle to leave the ground briefly when i have simulated this it's shown quite clearly that the vehicle has performed a very small jump as it has left the side of the road and come down on her quite hard when you look at the physics of the jump it tells us that she wasn't very far off the road but then as the vehicle has gone over her it has grabbed her to some extent and pulled her down the bank as the vehicle has then gone through the fence the injuries that she ultimately died from were so there was a significant amount of bleeding within the pelvis and the abdomen from the injuries so it was blood loss all of the ribs on her right side were broken she wouldn't have been able to breathe properly that causes impairment of respiration which in turn would lead to decreased oxygen supply to organs and that along with internal blood loss would have resulted in death the evidence that we have suggests that she moved herself from a position at around the fence line or just below the fence line to where her body was finally found we found blood staining on the bottom wire of the barbed wire fence as well as blood staining where she was found it indicated that she had been bleeding before her final resting place when we looked at the sections of the brain the cells in the brain were starting to react and starting to change and you don't see that change unless somebody lives for a number of hours after the injury was sustained it is estimated that she lived for about three hours before she died the victim has been struck multiple times once above the vehicle and then at least once underneath the vehicle as well which shows a deliberate act on kaiji's part in running monsieur down that was really what the evidence centered around was showing that this was a deliberate act not an accidental act kaiji was arrested and charged with the murder of sheeping you kaiji was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum approval period of 10 years [Music] it's really just good to get that outcome for the family you know the unfortunate thing is we all know it doesn't bring anyone back [Music] without physical evidence chemical analysis and forensic engineering we would have never determined the intentional from the accidental and the truth of what happened that night the port hills would have never been told [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Real Crime

Views: 397,676

Rating: 4.7926474 out of 5

Keywords: real crime, crime documentary, true crime, Forensics, forensics tv show, criminalistics, forensic science, criminal investigation, murder, murderer, tv show - topic, full episode, solving crimes, hidden clues, crime scene, crime scene investigation, crime documentary full episodes, forensics S2 EP1, forensics nz, crime of passion, murder coverup

Id: sDOoaYqMr4U

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020