Julia Turner, a 40 years old resident of Sheffield, England informed her partner Darren Akers that she would be running late to do some shopping. As time passed Mr. Akers became restless after not hearing from Ms. Turner for so long, two days later he received a text message from Ms. Turner. The message said that she would be “Stopping at jills, back later need to sort my head out.” Mr. Akers was surprised because normally Julia would not text and he did not know anyone that had the name Jill. “Tell kids not to worry. sorting my life out. be in touch to get some things.” This was the next text message received. Mr. Akers felt that something was wrong; the police began to investigate Ms. Turner’s disappearance.
The police went to Mr. Simmerson because it was known that he and Ms. Turner were having an affair. Mr. Simmerson’s cell phone and a five page letter talking about how he wanted to kill himself and Ms. Turner were taken by the police.
John Olsson, the director of the Forensic Linguistics Institute, based in Wales, notices something through linguistic similarities between the letter, the text messages that Julie had supposedly sent, and taped excerpts from Mr. Simmerson’s interview with the police. The phrases “sorted her life out” and “head sorted out.” were mentioned in Mr. Simmerson’s interview and also in the text messages that Ms. Turner allegedly sent. Mr. Olsson analyzed immense amounts of sample language and noticed that those phrases are very rare to come up so close together.
Based on the analysis of these messaged Mr. Olsson was able to create enough evidence to convict Mr. Simmerson for Ms. Turner’s murder. In the end, Mr. Simmerson confessed to the murder and Julia Turners body was found in an oil barrel that had once been in Mr. Simmerson’s Ford Ranger. Mr. Simmerson was sentenced to life in jail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12file-text.html
3 comments:
Three things I liked:
3. I liked how the explanation of how they compared writing samples to eachother helped solve the case
2. I like how they can use tapes and letters written by the man to compare with the texts sent
1. The article was a good article because it showed true forensic science at work.
Two things to improve/questions:
2. Why did the man murder this women?
1. How are they able to compare the mans speech to letters to get a definite match.
One thing i found interesting:
I really liked how a forensic scientist can use a mans/womens speech and compare key phrases in the speech to letters or even text messages to see if those same key phrases are repeated anywhere else.
I liked about this article were how linguistics are able to connect older documents from people and connect them to a suspect. I also liked how he explained the sentence that Mr. Simmerson was given for his murder. Finally I liked how he gave us the documents that were said by Mr. Simmerson, and the connection that was made in convicting him.
I would suggest explaining a little more on how they were able to convict Mr. Simmerson because there could have just been a coincidence on how Julia Turners message looked. I would also suggest what kinds of steps are taken or what clues are shown to know what to look for when comparing the documents of the way people write.
One thing I found very interesting was this comparison of documents. I have never heard of a case where they convicted someone because of the way someone speaks.
The things I liked about this review were how he gave the background to the story, how he described how the investigation developed, and how he gave an example of the evidence that was used to convict Mr. Simmerson. This review could be improved by describing any differences in the warrant laws of England, which would explain how they got a warrant to search Simmerson’s house on the sole basis of an affair. It could also be improved by at least mentioning the other evidence that allowed Mr. Olsson to have enough to convict Simmerson. From this review, I found it interesting that there could be evidence on the basis of how someone speaks or writes in connection to how a text message is written.
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