Dear Garry. I've decided to end it all: The full stop that trapped a killer



When police inspector Garry Weddell learned that his wife, Sandra, was having an affair, his revenge took the form of what he hoped would be the perfect crime.



Strangling the 44-year-old nurse at their home in Bedfordshire in January 2007, he put a cable tie around her neck and hung her body in their garage to make it look as if she had killed herself.

Next to it he placed a single sheet of A4 paper on which he had typed her 'suicide note' - wearing rubber gloves to ensure he left no evidence.



Crime uncovered: Garry Weddell, right, murdered his wife Sandra and tried to pass her death off as a suicide



Weddell's ingenuity drew on everything he had learned during 25 years in the force, but it did not help him evade capture, and some remarkable detective work led to his arrest.



Just months later, while free on bail, he travelled to the home of his mother-in-law, Traute Maxfield, in rural Hertfordshire, and shot her dead before turning the gun on himself.



In the ensuing controversy about how he had been freed to kill again, little attention was paid to the story of how his crime was uncovered.



But now a new book reveals how just one misjudged full stop on the forged suicide note contributed to his downfall.



To the book's author, John Olsson, a dubious full stop can be as revelatory a clue as a blood-stained footprint or discarded weapon would be to a conventional sleuth.

A veteran of more than 300 investigations into crimes ranging from extortion to murder, Olsson is one of the leading experts in a still emerging field known as 'forensic linguistics'.



His skill lies in identifying a suspect's 'linguistic fingerprint' - the distinctive use of language which makes each of us unique, whether we are writing letters, emails or mobile phone texts.



Thanks to Olsson and his colleaues and their work, police no longer have to depend on a crooked 'c' or a missing 'm' on a suspect's typewriter to establish whether they have written an incriminating document.



Even in today's high-tech culture, when villains use seemingly identical computers and mobiles in pursuit of their crimes, these modern-day Sherlock Holmeses can still track them down - simply through their choice of words, spacing and punctuation.



To understand how they go about this, we need to explore the origins of a technique which was most famously used in the conviction of American 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski.



Word sleuth: John Olsson has helped solve hundreds of crimes by investigating the way suspects write

In 1978, he began an 18-year bombing spree which killed three people and injured many more.



He was caught in 1996 only after his brother David spotted similarities between phrases used in letters he'd received from Kaczynski and those sent to the New York Times by the Unabomber.



The investigation and Kaczynski's imprisonment for life were hailed as early successes for forensic linguists employed by the FBI.



Yet their methods were originally developed in Britain as a result of the notorious murders at 10 Rillington Place.



In 1953, John Christie was executed for strangling seven women and a baby at this house in London's Notting Hill.



With gruesome irony, he was hanged on the same gallows used to dispatch his 25-year-old lodger Timothy Evans, wrongfully convicted of two of the murders in 1950.



Though Evans was mentally retarded, and there were many inconsistencies in the case against him, his name was only cleared following a high-profile media campaign in the Sixties.

This attracted the attention of Professor Jan Svartvik, a Swedish linguist then working at the University of London.

He analysed Evans's alleged confession for what linguists call 'register', a measure of how colloquially a person speaks.



Concluding that the confession contained many examples of 'policeman's register', the formal language used by officers giving evidence in court, he concluded that it was unlikely to have been taken down verbatim from Evans and this helped prove his innocence.

The posthumous pardon Evans received in 1966 helped bring about the abolition of capital punishment three years later.



But this came too late for another alleged killer, whose name would also be cleared thanks to extraordinary research by forensic linguists.



Incriminating punctuation: From looking at other letters written by Sandra and Gary Weddell, Olsson discovered she was unlikely to have made this grammatical error - but he often did

Like Evans, Derek Bentley had a low IQ and he was just 19 when he was hanged in 1953 for the murder of a policeman during a break-in at a warehouse in Croydon.



Bentley's conviction hinged largely upon his confession, and his claim that the police 'helped' him with it was tested 40 years later by Malcolm Coulthard, then a linguist at the University of Birmingham.



What struck Coulthard was the unusually frequent use of the word 'then' in Bentley's 'confession'.



In samples of everyday English, this word occurs on average only once every 474 words, but in Bentley's statement it cropped up once in every 60.



Rather than reading like run-of-the-mill English, this was much closer to the frequency found in samples of police reports in which the tell-tale 'then' appeared once every 78 words.



Together with other evidence, this helped win a pardon for Derek Bentley in 1998, adding to the growing credibility of forensic linguistics.



A postgraduate linguist alongside Coulthard while he was working on the Bentley documents, John Olsson began specialising in this new discipline in 1994 and he was soon working on murder enquiries across the country. Few killers he came across went to such lengths to avoid detection as Sandra Weddell's husband Garry.



The discovery of Sandra's body at their shared home shocked friends and neighbours.



The popular mother-of-three was a devout Christian known for her kindness to others and they found it difficult to accept that she could have committed suicide.



Furthermore, detectives had concerns about the ligature placed around her neck.



Crime records suggested that, where cable ties had been implicated in previous deaths, they were always murders and never suicides.



Also, bruises on the body suggested that Sandra might have struggled with an attacker before she died.



This still left the question of the suicide note. Could Olsson prove that it was bogus and, if so, that its author was Garry Weddell?



Olsson's experience found that faked suicide notes reflected society's preconceptions about suicide victims being weak and unable to face their difficulties.



Justice: Olsson helped catch the man who murdered teen Jenny Nicholl after analysing text messages he sent from her mobile

Those who forge such notes frequently use words such as 'crazy', 'cowardly' and 'selfish', but these are rarely found in the genuine items.



According to this reasoning, Sandra Weddell might well have killed herself, since her apparent suicide note made no reference to insanity or weakness.



But given her husband's experience of police work, he might well have known which sentiments would ring true to the detectives. His involvement could still not be ruled out.



In trying to establish the note's authenticity, Olsson began looking for other clues, including the spelling, which could often betray the perpetrator of a crime.



In 2005, Olssen had been called in by police investigating the disappearance of 19-year-old Jenny Nicholl from her home in Richmond, Yorkshire.



For some time after the last sighting of Jenny, her parents received texts from her phone and the police were concerned that they were sent by an abductor who wanted to pretend that she had left home of her own free will.



Scrutinising these messages, Olsson discovered that they were longer than those known to have been sent by Jenny before she disappeared, and there were also differences in style.



Where Jenny tended to leave few spaces in her text-speak, using phrases like 'ave2go' to mean 'have to go', the later texts introduced gaps so that they read 'ave 2 go'.



These small differences proved significant when, last year, Jenny's boyfriend David Hodgson, a 47-year-old married man with two children, stood trial for her murder.



Her body was never found, but the case against Hodgson included evidence from Coulthard, by then Professor of Forensic Linguistics at the University of Aston.



Coulthard had compared messages sent from Jenny's phone with a selection sent from Hodgson's mobile.



Abbreviations such as 'aint' and 'didnt' were found in both Hodgson's texts and those sent from Jenny's missing mobile, along with spelling mistakes such as 'mite' instead of 'might', and 'of' instead of 'off'.



These findings helped bring about Hodgson's conviction for murder and he was jailed for 18 years.



The problem for John Olsson was that there were no obvious spelling mistakes in the suicide note found in the Weddell's garage, or in letters written by Sandra or her husband.



He would have to dig deeper. In dealing with such cases, what he and his colleagues are looking for is sometimes smaller than the tiny specks of evidence sought by police forensics officers at crime scenes.



In 2005, Olsson found himself on the trail of a comma. That case concerned Julie Turner, a 40-year-old mother-of-two who was last seen at her home in Sheffield.



Suspicion quickly fell on Howard Simmerson, a businessman with whom she had been having an affair.



Killer: Howard Simmerson was jailed for the murder of his girlfriend thanks to Olsson's forensic linguistic investigations

But, although he admitted pressing Julie to leave her husband and move in with him, he claimed not to have seen her, and even to have received a text from her which effectively dumped him.



It read: 'Sucker.im stopping at my friends.dont bother looking for me.'



Reading this, Olsson's eye fell upon the full-stop which came immediately after 'Sucker'.



Most people would put a comma there, but this matched the punctuation in a letter which had been written by Simmerson and later seized by police.



This suggested that he was the author of the messages. The missing person inquiry became a murder hunt - with Julie's body found in an oil drum in a scrapyard. She had been shot through the head.



Less than six months after Julie went missing, Simmerson was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.



Taken on their own, Olsson's findings would not have been enough to convict him, but they made a vital contribution to establishing his guilt, just as they would in identifying Garry Weddell as his wife's killer.



Olsson's breakthrough in the Weddell 'suicide' also depended on his eye for detail.



What finally struck him was the brevity of the sentences in Sandra Weddell's alleged suicide note - and a quirk in its punctuation.



In a chilling echo of the Julie Turner texts, the first full stop appeared immediately after she had supposedly written her husband's name. It was this full stop that drew Olsson's attention.



'Garry. I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn't read it.



'I am so sorry for all the hurt I have caused you garry. I never meant to hurt you or cause you so much pain.'



Brief, to the point - and peppered with full stops, most notably the first one - the letter was very unlike others known to have been written by Sandra, who favoured long rambling sentences, sprinkled with commas, dashes and semi-colons.



In fact, one of her past sentences was more than 130 words long - compared to the average word length of only 12 words per sentence in the suicide note.



Much closer to the style of what was allegedly her final missive were letters written by her husband who used full stops liberally and whose sentences averaged only nine words.



It was this and other evidence that convinced the police to charge Garry Weddell with murder - with the tragic consequences that followed.



Adapted from Wordcrime: Solving Crime Through Forensic Linguistics by John Olsson, published by Continuum at £14.99. ©John Olsson. To order a copy for £12.50, call 0845 155 0720.



