How This Prison Officer Murdered His Best Friend

“When a serious crime is committed and the police need all the help they can get, there’s one group of people they turn to time after time: the expert witnesses.”

“An expert witness is critical because they’re going to have that deep level knowledge to really determine if something stands out that doesn’t look quite right. An extraordinary army of men and women with the expertise to reveal the hidden clues criminals have left behind.”

“My brain just sort of exploded with different ideas. Even a single-celled organism can solve a crime. They search harder and look deeper using the very latest techniques.”

“We’re constantly evolving, constantly improving. It’s soon going to become impossible to get away with murder.”

“This is the inside story of how science helps solve some of the UK’s most complex cases.”

“That was one of my Eureka moments in all my 30 years of forensic examination. The chances of finding something were really incredibly slim. That tiny possibility had to be explored.”

“I’ve seen people talk about justice being done, but no matter what kind of punishment he faced, it would never be enough. This is the story of the expert witness.”

“In this episode, we discover how analysis of soil samples helped solve a brutal murder case.”

“It was a case of allowing the evidence to shine through and speak for itself.”

“And we reveal how, when police needed to find a suspect fast, forensic cell phone analysis was critical.”

“Sometimes turning a phone off or leaving a phone unattended can indicate a level of potential guilt.”

“To the naked eye, it may just appear as if it’s soil, but within it, there are so many stories that it can tell.”

“April 2019, South Ayrshire, when 39-year-old Emma Faulds failed to turn up for work, her friends and family were immediately concerned and contacted the police.”

“Former Detective Chief Superintendent Paul Dockley followed the case at the time.”

“Emma Faulds was a 39-year-old woman who was a youth worker. She loved her dog and she was a good daughter. She kept in touch with her parents. Her parents were concerned that they hadn’t received a call from her, and she’s reported missing to the police, and inquiries commence.”

“BBC Scotland’s Katrina Renton reported on the story.”

“It was a huge media story at the time when Emma had gone missing because it was so out of character. Police went to Emma’s flat and they burst down the door. They found no trace of Emma inside, but what they did find was her little dog, her West Highland Terrier, Maverick. Now, this is really significant because Emma loved that little dog more than anything in the world, and there is no way Emma would have left Maverick alone for any length of time.”

“Police launched a missing person’s inquiry, but a week later, there was still no sign of Emma.”

“Emma Faulds’s family reported her missing on Tuesday the 30th of April 2019. They last heard from Emma on the Sunday.”

“Police discovered that on the night she disappeared, Emma drove from her home in Kilmarnock to visit a friend in Monkton. CCTV showed her car back outside her house the next morning, but with a man at the wheel, carefully wiping down the dashboard.”

“That wasn’t Emma that was driving that car. Her car was left in a way that she would never have parked it. Some had described it as being effectively abandoned in the street. So, what was going on here? Well, that was the question that police had to get to the bottom of.”

“The CCTV footage was not good enough quality to allow a definitive identification of the man. Detectives now began to consider the friend Emma had dinner with, 42-year-old Ross Willox.”

“The pair had known each other for 18 years, since they were prison officers at Kilmarnock Prison, and they’d become good friends. But there was some evidence that started to place Willox in a suspicious light.”

“As a result of CCTV, we’ve got Willox buying rubber gloves, disinfectant. That would indicate he’s clearing up after a mess is made. So, what is this man doing?”

“Although Willox is a friend, he’s also a suspect. Police began searching the home of Ross Willox. Meanwhile, investigators attempted to establish Willox’s movements around the time of Emma’s disappearance.”

“We are very fortunate in this day and age to have the ability to track mobile phones to our best advantage. The intelligence was that in the days that followed, Willox was seen on two occasions in Galloway Forest, in a remote part of Scotland.”

“The Galloway Forest is an enormous area of land. It’s, I think it’s about 300 square miles, so you can imagine that they needed clues. Clues that would lead them to specific parts of the forest to be able to search properly.”

“The intelligence was that Willox had worked on a wind farm in Galloway Forest. Now, people do return to places that they’re confident they can go to and not be seen. In cases like this, he would have known exactly where he could have disposed of the body with a very slim chance of a walker or a hiker finding it.”

“But detectives faced a problem. Mobile phone data proved Willox entered this wilderness, but with so few mobile phone masts in the region, detectives could not pinpoint exactly where he went.”

“It is 2 and 1/2 weeks since Emma Faulds was last seen. This remote countryside is now the focus of the search for her body. Police are using a helicopter to map out the vast area between South Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway.”

“The search area in this case was massive. You have to break it down into boxes, and you search each box one by one. The police officer and the police dog walked 200 miles in the search for Emma’s body.”

“The scale of the search seemed overwhelming, so detectives turned to evidence from Ross Willox’s house, in particular, a pair of mud-soiled boots. Could these hold clues to Willox’s movements and Emma’s precise location? To find out, police called in soil expert Professor Lorna Dawson.”

“They were a pair of light-colored Timberland boots, and there was a moderate amount of both soil and vegetation adhering to both the uppers and the soles of both left and right boots.”

“If Lorna and her team could work out where this soil and vegetation had come from, they could help to identify where Ross Willox had been in Galloway Forest Park.”

“This is a similar type of boot to the boot that we received in the Emma Faulds case. It also had staining and deposits around this junction of the stitching between the uppers and the sole, which because of the stitching, the seeds of the grasses and the heathers and the mosses sticks there and retains to that material, and that we can then recover it in the laboratory safe environment.”

“Lorna hoped she could identify the precise origins of the soil sample using a scientific method known as chromatography.”

“This chromatography method allows us to discriminate between soils half a meter away from each other. It’s very precise and can take us to a specific location, narrowing down to a half-meter square area of soil.”

“The soil that was adhering to both Timberland boots was very clearly a fibrous peat, and it was a wet, boggy peat because it was adhering in a particular stained way on the items of footwear. We could also tell that um there was a range of mosses adhering. There was also fragments of…”

“Place on the phone seemed to stop there. There were no calls, there were no text messages. There are then numerous repeated device data records, which would not require any user interaction, and all using the same cell ID, which indicates not only has the phone not left that specific area of coverage, but also hasn’t recorded any activity that would require Mr. Robinson’s presence.”

“It seemed that once at the hostel, Robinson did not use his phone nor did the phone leave the building.”

“To Paul, that was suspicious.”

“In my job, sometimes the inactivity of a phone can prove just as much as the activity. Sometimes turning a phone off or leaving a phone unattended can indicate a level of potential guilt.”

“Detectives looked into the hostel and discovered Christopher Robinson’s brother worked there, the man who owned the suspicious red Citroen. Christopher Robinson’s brother was questioned about his car and crucially, the time period involved in the police investigation.”

“Robinson’s brother refused to cooperate with inquiries, but soon a witness came forward. It emerged through a colleague in the hostel that Christopher Robinson’s brother had turned the CCTV off in the hostel and told his colleagues, ‘If my brother Christy calls, you know nothing.'”

“Detectives believed that Robinson had swapped cars from his own gray Skoda to his brother’s red Citroen once at the hostel.”

“Paul hoped cell phone analysis coupled with testimony and DNA evidence was enough to solve the case.”

“Christopher Robinson was arrested for the murder of Adrian Ismay and in October 2018 stood trial at Belfast Crown Court.”

“The trial was conducted without a jury in order to prevent the threat of intimidation.”

“In Northern Ireland, we have what’s known as Diplock trials, which means that there are no juries. These are reserved for cases where there is a paramilitary link.”

“I gave evidence uh at trial. It was in front of a judge; there was no jury, it was just a judge. I’ve never had that before, and we went through the evidence line by line and each line was uh commented on, and the judge identified the location on every line of data.”

“The judge was meticulous in exactly what each line of data was telling us, and as a result, Mr. Robinson was found guilty.”

“On the 6th of March 2020, Christopher Robinson was sentenced to life to serve a minimum of 22 years behind bars.”

“The judge concluded that Christopher Robinson was aware that Adrian Ismay was going to be targeted, that he drove the car that transported the bomber and the bomb from the west of the city to the east.”

“The work of the expert witnesses in this case were vital. Mr. Robinson’s alibi was that he had been in his home address throughout that evening, and my evidence clearly showed that not only his his vehicle but the phone had traveled to Belfast area and then gone to the hostel where it remained for a significant period before returning home early hours of the following morning.”

“After the trial, Adrian Ismay’s family thanks the expert witnesses involved for their dedication and hard work and bring about justice for their loved one.”

“Thankfully, these attacks are very, very rare.”

“That’s shocking. It’s shocking that we’re that this is a crime that’s happening in modern society.”

“This case should act as a great deterrent for those who are even considering getting involved in paramilitary or terrorist activity of any kind. You might have got away with it in the 70s and 80s, but with modern technology today and with expert witnesses and everything they have at their fingertips, this really should act as a deterrent. You will get caught.”