I looked up this case for a personal reason I'll come to in a minute, but as I was reading the newspaper account one thing really stood out. The culprit committed the rape and murder in 1968. Although he was handed a life sentence, he was released in 1979. Eleven years at the most. He was only 34 when he got out.
He married, and in 2007 started sexually abusing his two step-grandchildren, who had no idea of his criminal past. They didn't tell the police until 2017, and he was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 27 months. Which again seems very lenient, although he is in his mid-seventies by now.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/new...er-sex-killer/
I think sentencing guidelines for murder have been revised, but I'm astonished that a brutal murderer like that was released after only eleven years, even though there's no evidence that he reoffended during the following 28 years.
However, that's not my main interest in the case.
I have a friend and former colleague (we once shared an office at work) called Archie Hunter. He's a vet (obviously) who is an expert in diseases of tropical livestock. He worked for my former employer off and on before and after his retirement on a part-time basis, and at one point when staff contracts were being formalised he asked for an official contract for the temporary locum jobs he was doing.
As usual, the personnel department sent off for a "disclosure" - a criminal records check. For a long time he heard nothing, and then the news came that they couldn't give him clearance. Alarmed, he tried to find out what it was all about. Yes, you have a criminal record, they said. Archie, who doesn't have anything more than the odd parking ticket, asked what it was he was supposed to have done. Oh, we can't tell you that! Was it serious? Oh yes, it was serious. Well, would I have been sent to prison? Oh yes, you were sent to prison.
Archie couldn't get any more sense out of them and in the end our employer decided to waive the criminal records check because he'd been working there for quite a while and everybody knew he'd never been in prison. He could show that he'd travelled abroad extensively, including living in Africa for a while, during the period it was hinted the records showed him as having been in jail.
Then some time later he started getting strange letters from his bank about an account in arrears. He didn't have an account in arrears so he went to see the bank manager and they pulled up the records of all the accounts he had with the Bank of Scotland. Yes, that's mine, and that's mine - but that account there is NOT mine.
It transpired that the bank had found this other account in his name and with his date of birth on it, and just assumed they all belonged to the same person. Archie began to believe that his obvious doppelgänger had been convicted of a serious fraud or other financial crime, on the basis of the bank irregularities. He managed to persuade the bank to disconnect him from the account that wasn't his.
Things got complicated, but the end point of the investigation was that Archie had been completely conflated with the murderer Archie Hunter, the subject of that newspaper report. It turns out that not only do they have the same name (although my friend has a middle name which the murderer does not), they were born on exactly the same day, in the same county (Aberdeenshire), though not the same town. How many areas of our lives are our identities confirmed by name and date of birth?
Things got even more complicated when Archie tried to go abroad with his wife on holiday. He was stopped at passport control and pulled aside, although he managed to get through in the end. I think that's when he began to research the thing in earnest.
Obviously the murderer Archie Hunter was convicted of the child sex assaults last year, and that's possibly what got a flag put on his name for passport control. Archie the vet has taken to carrying around a copy of the newspaper report, and has since got through passport control again by showing it. He says actually the other man (whose photo is in the article) does look a little bit like him. They're exactly the same age, obviously, and the same ethnicity, and similar build. But the resemblance isn't close and I'd say it's pretty obvious if you have that photo to refer to that my friend is not that guy.
But as Archie said to me, he was jailed for 27 months in February last year. That means he'll get out on parole in May 2019, because it's usual for someone only to serve half of a determinate sentence. Now Archie is worried that this guy will find out about his namesake and try to capitalise on it. Considering the amount of conflation that has happened by pure accident, he could probably do a lot of damage if he set out to do it on purpose.
Funny thing. If the other guy had been perfectly law-abiding, Archie would probably never have found out about his doppelgänger, or certainly not about the common birth date thing. But there you are. Whoda thunkit.
He married, and in 2007 started sexually abusing his two step-grandchildren, who had no idea of his criminal past. They didn't tell the police until 2017, and he was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 27 months. Which again seems very lenient, although he is in his mid-seventies by now.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/new...er-sex-killer/
I think sentencing guidelines for murder have been revised, but I'm astonished that a brutal murderer like that was released after only eleven years, even though there's no evidence that he reoffended during the following 28 years.
However, that's not my main interest in the case.
I have a friend and former colleague (we once shared an office at work) called Archie Hunter. He's a vet (obviously) who is an expert in diseases of tropical livestock. He worked for my former employer off and on before and after his retirement on a part-time basis, and at one point when staff contracts were being formalised he asked for an official contract for the temporary locum jobs he was doing.
As usual, the personnel department sent off for a "disclosure" - a criminal records check. For a long time he heard nothing, and then the news came that they couldn't give him clearance. Alarmed, he tried to find out what it was all about. Yes, you have a criminal record, they said. Archie, who doesn't have anything more than the odd parking ticket, asked what it was he was supposed to have done. Oh, we can't tell you that! Was it serious? Oh yes, it was serious. Well, would I have been sent to prison? Oh yes, you were sent to prison.
Archie couldn't get any more sense out of them and in the end our employer decided to waive the criminal records check because he'd been working there for quite a while and everybody knew he'd never been in prison. He could show that he'd travelled abroad extensively, including living in Africa for a while, during the period it was hinted the records showed him as having been in jail.
Then some time later he started getting strange letters from his bank about an account in arrears. He didn't have an account in arrears so he went to see the bank manager and they pulled up the records of all the accounts he had with the Bank of Scotland. Yes, that's mine, and that's mine - but that account there is NOT mine.
It transpired that the bank had found this other account in his name and with his date of birth on it, and just assumed they all belonged to the same person. Archie began to believe that his obvious doppelgänger had been convicted of a serious fraud or other financial crime, on the basis of the bank irregularities. He managed to persuade the bank to disconnect him from the account that wasn't his.
Things got complicated, but the end point of the investigation was that Archie had been completely conflated with the murderer Archie Hunter, the subject of that newspaper report. It turns out that not only do they have the same name (although my friend has a middle name which the murderer does not), they were born on exactly the same day, in the same county (Aberdeenshire), though not the same town. How many areas of our lives are our identities confirmed by name and date of birth?
Things got even more complicated when Archie tried to go abroad with his wife on holiday. He was stopped at passport control and pulled aside, although he managed to get through in the end. I think that's when he began to research the thing in earnest.
Obviously the murderer Archie Hunter was convicted of the child sex assaults last year, and that's possibly what got a flag put on his name for passport control. Archie the vet has taken to carrying around a copy of the newspaper report, and has since got through passport control again by showing it. He says actually the other man (whose photo is in the article) does look a little bit like him. They're exactly the same age, obviously, and the same ethnicity, and similar build. But the resemblance isn't close and I'd say it's pretty obvious if you have that photo to refer to that my friend is not that guy.
But as Archie said to me, he was jailed for 27 months in February last year. That means he'll get out on parole in May 2019, because it's usual for someone only to serve half of a determinate sentence. Now Archie is worried that this guy will find out about his namesake and try to capitalise on it. Considering the amount of conflation that has happened by pure accident, he could probably do a lot of damage if he set out to do it on purpose.
Funny thing. If the other guy had been perfectly law-abiding, Archie would probably never have found out about his doppelgänger, or certainly not about the common birth date thing. But there you are. Whoda thunkit.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2k3Vi8v
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire