Would You Believe ‘CSI Bournemouth’?
George Orwell once wrote a famous essay about the English public’s (or at least the media’s) fascination with ‘the English murder’, with the newspapers’ covering them as ongoing serials ending with the trial verdict. He said this dated back to the Dr Crippen case in 1910, one that has local links including the fact it was a "first" for the use of electronic communications (Marconi conducted 'morse' tests locally). The ‘English murder’ here is a premeditated and carefully planned killing – an attempt at the perfect crime, by people who ought to know better. (A variant is the elaborate disguising of the crime scene after an unplanned murder.) English detective fiction has also built on this scenario from the work of Agatha Christie on. It’s a fact of life nowadays that major crimes are media events. During real-life cases, the media often play a major role as middle-men, with each side, hunter and hunted, trying to control or influence the public disclosure of information. (An acquaintance of mine actually trains the police how to deal with the media in such situations.)
     Today, crime dramas have come to dominate TV schedules. British TV schedulers now tend to use holiday weekends to show commemorative crime-drama programming specials and strands. There was an ITV 20th-anniversary Inspector Morse weekend, with special interview and behind-the-scenes documentaries, and on ITV3 an Inspector Wexford weekend. Another was used to commemorate “the planet’s most successful TV programme franchise,” CSI, on the work of America’s Crime Scene Investigators. (The British equivalent are Scenes Of Crime Officers. ‘SOCOs’ are detectives – which would avoid the silliest aspect of the US series - crime lab technicians detaining and questioning suspects.) “CSI - The Inside Story” had interviews with the show’s main director and executive producer, Danny Cannon, who turned out to be British, as did the writer interviewed. (The 3 series theme tunes are also British – all songs by The Who.) The producers and stars described how it had gone from being a hit series, set in Las Vegas, to being a programming franchise, with two other series up and running: CSI: NY, and CSI: Miami. All 3 series now run here on FreeView - up to five times a night. The point of local interest here was that the producers are now contemplating setting a 4th series set in England. “We’d love to do a ‘CSI Bournemouth’ ” said one.
     At first this might seem a joke, but whether it was or not, the suggestion may not be as frivolous as it first sounds. Every other distinctive corner of Britain seems to have had its own mystery series already: Bergerac on Jersey, Wycliffe in Cornwall, Inspector Morse in Oxford etc – all the way north to Taggart in Glasgow. London has certainly been ‘done’ for forensic detective drama, for who could outdo Prime Suspect? We already have CSI-type shows, set elsewhere. Logistically, London is expensive, and murder (so to speak) to find parking spaces. BBC productions have long used Bournemouth as a locations centre as it has a variety of architecture and the parking is easier. (In a recent BBC ‘Comedy Connections’ retrospective documentary Nigel Havers gave ease of parking as the reason the 90s London-set sitcom Don’t Wait Up was exterior-filmed here.) Bournemouth does have one famous murder case, the 1935 Rattenbury affair, about which Sir Terence Rattigan wrote a play, Cause Celebre, (produced as an ITV teleplay with Helen Mirren) and Nigel Havers's own father, a QC, co-wrote a nonfiction book. But this being a strictly domestic crime of passion, there was no manhunt involved. Nor has Bournemouth had its own detective series. (Dorset got one with BBC’s Rockcliffe’s Folly, set in ‘Maidenport’ and filmed in Weymouth and Dorchester.)
     Bournemouth is a relatively young, purpose-built town like Las Vegas and Miami. It’s also part if what has been called the largest non-industrial conurbation in Europe, adjoining the older market towns and ports of Poole and Christchurch, and now including suburbs like Ferndown. But would it work as a ‘CSI’ story setting? Well, it might seem that most of the deaths would be simply due to old age, to those who only know the town from the two 1990s BBC sitcoms set and/or partly filmed here, One Foot In The Grave and Waiting For God. (The latter title comes from a pun on the play Waiting For Godot and the nickname for Bournemouth as a retirement haven – “God’s Waiting Room.” This aspect could certainly be worked in, with cases involving flashbacks to when the protagonists were young. Youthful follies proving to have long-term or belated consequences today is an idea that would fit the moralistic side of the detective mystery, where justice is, finally, done, and the world set to rights, till next week. Other detective series have certainly mined this vein, with stories of belated revenge killings elaborately disguised with esoteric clues from the past. This aspect also suggests a potential series theme song, The Who’s ‘My Generation,’ which was about the young not trusting the older generation, composed by those who themselves are now of pensionable age.
     Most people know Bournemouth as a seaside resort. This now includes a youth-oriented ‘surfer’ scene, something mainstream American audiences could relate to. The summer-holiday aspect provides potential variety for plot setups - both the Las Vegas CSI series and CSI Miami plots often build stories around visitors who are there to party. The Las Vegas series is set during the night shift and focuses on night life, whereas the Miami series is set mainly in bright sunlight. Bournemouth could offer both aspects, for as well as its beach scene, its new club scene has earned it the nickname Sin City, with the downtown core referred to as Clubland after dark. (A recent nightclub shooting revealed there were undercover officers in the crowd on an another, drug-related case.) The club scene overlaps with its resort aspect, the town having a reputation as the British equivalent of the Greek club-resort of Faliraki where the objects of an evening out are drinking and sex, leading to many different kinds of trauma and casualties. Many such incidents of non-fatal assaults, robberies and other crimes occur are not reported in the press. The “vics” (to use CSI parlance) or victims of head injuries often wake up with partial amnesia.
     The town is also a venue every autumn for political Party Conferences (what the Americans call conventions), so there could also be security and terrorism-related scenarios involving bomb or mass-poisoning plots. (The budget per show is $3 million, enough for large-scale scenes.) Bournemouth has had real-life IRA bomb attacks and associated scares. The behind-the-scenes CSI documentary also said plots are often inspired by real cases, and of course there was a local real-life bomb plot which would make a suitable pilot episode. It had all the usual elements – advance warnings of mayhem to come, the police racing against time to prevent it, a ‘perfect’ crime plot spoiled by a fatal error, massive police surveillance operation, forensic analysis of clues, a cat-and-mouse game involving coded messages in newspaper personal ads, the innocent ‘red herring’ suspect, a special bank account set up for the ransom, and that favourite of crime writers, the dawning realisation this was a ‘copycat’ crime …..

The Bournemouth Bomber Blackmail Plot – A Real-Life Local ‘CSI’ Case
The case I would nominate as most suitable for a ‘CSI Bournemouth’ pilot episode was one of criminal (as opposed to political) terrorism, a parcel bomb campaign self-publicized by the criminal to put political pressure on the police into paying the ransom. The case ran from 2000-2001 but turned out to have roots in earlier crimes, this being used to help create a profile of the bomber.
     In autumn 2000 a suburban Bournemouth branch of Tesco’s supermarket received a demand for ransom to avoid a letter-bomb campaign that would target their customers, which would destroy public confidence in shopping there. The ransom would be £1000 a day and was to be paid by Tesco via loyalty cards that could be used in cash machines. This was to circumvent the most vulnerable point in any blackmail plan, the need to get hold of the money without the police being able to get hold of the blackmailer. The letter writer planned to exploit the fact some “store” cards were also debit cards via a magnetic strip that could work in bank ATM cashpoint machines. Tesco were told they would have to issue, on a date given them, a run of such ‘dummy’ store loyalty debit cards in a newspaper supplement. Only the blackmailer would be given the PIN and be able to draw on the account. The limit was to be £1000 a day, with no end date given: payment would be ongoing.
     The police noticed the envelope and letter had burn or singe marks. Was this deliberate symbolism, or something that had happened to the letter in transit? The police checked with the Post Office: there had been one such fire, at a suburban postbox not far from the Tesco’s branch. Then the police got their first break: the blackmailer had left the original of his blackmail letter in a photocopier at a newsagent’s in north Bournemouth. The fire could have been "routine" vandalism, but police now theorised that when he had discovered his mistake, the bomber had fire-bombed the postbox to destroy the letter. (He may have got muddled between original and photocopy.) He also thought the fire had destroyed the posted version for he sent another, and the police ended up with three versions.
     Yet forensic examination yielded no fingerprints, and the crime lab had no luck getting DNA from the back of this particular stamp. The blackmailer was obviously using rubber or latex gloves to handle the paperwork, and was not licking the stamps but using tap water. The use of a photocopy had evidently been just paranoia, in case his precautions were inadequate. What his muddle over the letters did accomplish was to establish a ‘matrix’ of locations: Tesco’s branch, photocopier, and burnt postbox. These narrowed down the potential surveillance area to the Ferndown/Ensbury Park/Castle Lane-Bradpole Road vicinity. This was a considerable advantage, for having too wide an area makes surveillance impractical. The firebombed postbox was actually just outside a Post Office, allowing a hidden camera to be planted overlooking it. But for three months no blackmail letters were posted from that box, though the CID theory was that everyone has a comfort zone, and sooner or later the bomber would return there as a familiar location. This theory would eventually prove correct: in January 2001, the post office CCTV camera would capture him posting a blackmail letter, though at this stage he was just one face among several dozen, and the CCTV provided only poor quality images.
     The search and surveillance area was still large, and Dorset police began to assemble the biggest CID team in their history for “Operation Hornbill”. No bombs had as yet exploded, but there were other reasons to be concerned. One was that the Tesco customer database might have been hacked into if customers’ home addresses were being obtained, as implied by the threat to send them letter bombs. Another was the potential economic loss to Tesco if shoppers began to stay away out of fear. Tesco, as one of Britain’s largest enterprises – controlling much of the food chain – gets kid-glove treatment from MI5 as well as the police, and there had been an earlier such threat to the supermarket trade. This previous case had proved ruinously expensive - not to the supermarket trade, but to the police authority and the taxpayer, as it lasted over three years and involved hundreds of police officers. This was the case of the London ‘Mardi Gras Bomber’, referred to by the Daily Telegraph, who were intermediaries in the case, as “Britain's equivalent to America's Unabomber.”

The Bournemouth Bomber
Thus, when the Dorset Police came to the Bournemouth Bomber case, the fact there had been yet no injuries was no consolation. They saw it as a race against time, and formed a team hundreds strong. As it happened, the case would take six months to clear up.
     Whether they suspected the perpetrator was a policeman was not disclosed, but at first they had to cast their net wide. One theory, put forward by Tesco management, was the store chain was being targeted by animal rights activists. The prime suspect suggested by Tesco seems to have been … the Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds (membership: 1 million). Its head, Julian Pettifer, a BBC journalist, had resigned after producing a documentary critical of salmon farming practices. He was then tipped off by an anonymous letter from a whistleblowing insider that MI5 had been spying on them at the request of a Tesco executive. The letter said the same executive suspected at the outset that the Bournemouth bombing threats might be linked to the RSPB. The reasoning seemed to be the bombings were by animal rights activists, who are usually highly critical of Tesco. This came out in the Sunday Times [11-3-01], which they said prompted a ‘molehunt’ within MI5, the chief suspect being a disillusioned Special Branch officer.
     In the meantime, local police were facing an immediate snag with one of the case’s ‘copycat’ aspects, the demand to use promotional ‘dummy’ store cards secretly tweaked to work in cashpoints if you know the PIN. After the earlier cases, safeguards had been quietly introduced to prevent this. Tesco printed up a supply of 100,000 dummy loyalty cards, but if the bomber discovered his plan for being paid was now unworkable, he might go on a bombing rampage.
     The same communication setup was employed as in the Mardi Gra Bomber and Baby Food Poisoner cases – personal messages in the newspaper classifieds. The bomber called himself Sally. At his request, cryptograms were also inserted, by a team of 10 officers, in the Daily Echo. These looked like squares of jumbled words, but contained coded data for use in verifying details such as how to access the special account. He was demanding that the Tesco cards be inserted in the newspaper on a specific date to be agreed – presumably so he could scoop up a collection of them at different venues.
     However, this whole line of communication proved complicated for the bomber. The police had to keep putting personal messages in the paper to Sally to keep in touch (“we need to talk – let’s sort this out together”). The bomber complained in another letter of a coding error. Part of the problem was probably that the bomber was not very literate, and the cryptogram puzzle may have baffled him. For instance, in a pathetic attempt at being legalistic, he put a ‘Without Prejudice’ header on his blackmail letters. This is a legal phrase which means the document cannot be used in court against its author, but it’s only used by lawyers negotiating a settlement in civil cases – it’s useless in forestalling criminal charges. He also mis-spelt it as ‘Without Predujice”, a slip that would become evidence against him when his computer was examined. The Telegraph later noted that “his deadlines were unusable because he muddled his dates up.”
     He sent four Tesco customers parcel bombs. Three were intercepted at the postal sorting office, but one got through. When opened, the cassette inside burst into flame, blinding a pensioner temporarily, fortunately causing no permanent injury. More letters were sent to customers, threatening they would be bombed unless Tesco paid up. But how had he got the addresses? Had he got inside access to Tesco’s customer database? Was he a computer hacker? An employee? Had he an accomplice? All leads had to be followed up. This later proved another red herring – it would turn out the bomber had merely followed shoppers home to get their addresses. (The police should have realised this as the warning letters were addressed with the street number only - no names.) He sent another letter saying he was building pipe bombs filled with gunpowder and planting them in people’s gardens. He gave a grid reference where the first bomb would be found, but this only narrowed the area down to 500 homes across 19 streets. Over a hundred police, plus the Army Bomb Squad and a unit of Gurkhas spent days digging up suburban gardens for a non-existent bomb. Three other bombs were not delivered as they had insufficient postage, and were taken by police from the Sorting Office. He carelessly licked one of the stamps instead of using water, leaving his DNA on the back.
     In February 2001, police arrested a 50-year old man, Robert Dyer, at his home in Kinson. Press reports described him as a failed businessman and a self-employed electrician. When detectives knocked on his door, according to the press report, Dyer “invited them in and agreed to provide samples required for elimination purposes.” Presumably the samples were to test his DNA against that found on the back of the stamp. Dyer must not have realised he had carelessly licked one of the stamps he used instead of using water. In any case, the detectives examined his PC, and found another blackmail letter. They arrested him and took his computer in for forensic analysis. Documents were found on it with the same telltale spelling mistakes the bomber had used. At the station, his DNA was matched to the DNA from the postage stamp. Detectives still asked magistrates for extra time to detain and question him, probably on legal advice to justify a full range of charges and counts. At his trial, Dyer pleaded guilty to 9 counts of blackmail with menaces, and one of assault. He got 16 years, reduced on appeal to twelve. Apparently his motive was money to pay off his debts, but he never got a penny in ransom money.
     A final mystery remains. How did the police arrive at his address? For he did not live all that near the postboxes in question, but in Kinson, to the west. My guess is police had cameras overlooking all the postboxes in the area, and were also working with the Post Office to intercept the next blackmail letter. That is, when the twice-daily postbag from each postbox was brought in by the post van, they would check through it, until they found the next letter to Tesco. The cover story feature the Echo ran [5-5-01] after his conviction said the police knew that 38 people had posted letters into the relevant postbox the day the next blackmail letter arrived, which must refer to CCTV. To trace the 38 senders, they would probably have checked the local electoral rolls for known criminals, and done routine house-to-house enquiries locally. It’s also possible that one or more of the detectives may have recognised Dyer’s name or face from 8 years before - he was actually a murder suspect after his wife was found garrotted in their home. (He claimed she was depressed and killed herself, and questioning of him was abandoned as he had collapsed from a heart attack.) The official account, the Crown Prosecution Service year-end report, merely speaks of “meticulous detective work.” Evidently, this was a combination of traditional and modern approaches, from old-fashioned legwork to paper trails to more modern approaches – electronic surveillance, DNA testing, and computer forensics.
     Since then, a BBC Crimewatch retrospective item dramatising how they caught the Bournemouth Bomber has provided the answer to how they broke the case: old-fashioned stakeouts, just as we've seen in hundreds of police dramas. CID officers, sitting in cars, watched the postbox used to post the burnt letter. They had (poor-quality) CCTV image printouts of the 38 people who had used the postbox on the relevant day, of whom they had already eliminated 14. A detective spotted a man walking by who matched a CCTV printout of the remaining 24 suspects. The suspect did not post any letters, and neither of the detectives followed him (as they would in a movie). This may have been because (a lucky break, this) he was carrying a petrol can, obviously headed for the local petrol station. Detectives checked the CCTV footage there and found the suspect had paid by cheque, which gave them Dyer's name and address. Unlike in a fictional crime drama where they would ram the door down, they simply asked to come in and speak to him, and then asked for his cooperation in eliminating him from their enquiry. Partly this was by providing a DNA sample, but they also asked to check his computer, which yielded a more immediate result. This involved loading a floppy disk containing a batch of keywords, including the misspelt "Without Predujice" - and up popped a "Sally" letter. (The fact he was a suspect in the death of his wife 8 years before doesn't seem to have been part of the investigation, and the matter was evidently not reopened.) The 8-minute Crimewatch reconstruction, including interviews with the actual CID officers, is archived online here.)
     The TV series CSI was just climbing the ratings charts when Dyer was dropping forensic clues. Since then, American police forces have complained the show is making criminals more conscious of potential scene-of-crime evidence. The Echo reported local police were being cagey about exactly how they tracked Dyer down. No doubt they realised it is only a matter of time before another copycat emerged from the shadows. The Echo reported that five years before, a Dorset man had tried a similar campaign, threatening to bomb Tesco's if they did not pay him half a million in cash and diamonds. (He got 6 years.) While the criminals’ inherent laziness and self-stereotyped behaviour prompts them to believe they can profit from copycat schemes that had not in fact worked out previously, the police have actually been learning from each case - including not to tell the media everything. There have been bomb scares since, one involving Tesco again. So far, these have been hoaxes. But this is not the end of this scenario, as our postscript below shows.