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VITAL EVIDENCE: forensic linguistics expert Prof Malcolm Coulthard

MURDERER David Hodgson was convicted of killing teenager Jenny Nicholl with the help of pioneering anaylsis of text messages he sent from his victim's phone.

Joe Willis talked to the forensic linguistics expert who gave evidence at the trial

NINE days after Jenny Nicholl was murdered, her killer David Hodgson sent messages from the teenager's mobile phone to two of her friends.

Five days later, he sent another text to her father.

The messages were an attempt to suggest to police and her family that the 19-year-old was still alive.

However, when Hodgson was eventually brought to trial for Miss Nicholl's murder, the texts became key pieces of evidence for the prosecution.

Detectives say they suspected from the beginning that the messages were not sent by Jenny.

But how did they prove this in court?

In a first for the region, Det Chief Supt Sue Cross, the senior investigating officer, and her team turned to a forensic linguist.

Prof Malcolm Coulthard has given evidence at a number of high-profile court cases.

These included the successful appeals against conviction of the Bridgewater Four and Derek Bentley, who was hanged in 1952 for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles.

Police investigating Miss Nicholl's disappearance gave the professor transcripts of the three July messages, plus more than 100 sample texts sent by the accused and 11 sent by Miss Nicholl.

Prof Coulthard said: "The interesting thing about text messages is that they're very short, but because it's a new way of working, people partially make it up themselves.

This makes text messages much more distinctive (than other types of writing)."

The professor's first step was to establish if there was evidence Miss Nicholl had sent the three mystery texts. At a glance, the texts looked like they could have been sent by the 19-year-old.

The recipients later told the court they had their doubts about their authenticity, but the messages looked genuine enough for Ann Nicholl, Jenny's mother, to go looking for her daughter at the places they were sent from.

Under closer scrutiny by the professor, however, differences were found.

When he examined the texts, he noticed that both Miss Nicholl and the sender of the mystery texts used the number "2" in place of "to".

However, while Miss Nicholl left no space between the "2" and the following word, the sender of the mystery texts did, for example in the phrase "ave 2 lve".

Other differences were more obvious.

While Miss Nicholl usually wrote "Im" and "Im not" in her texts, the mystery texts featured "I am" and "aint".

When Miss Nicholl would use "my", "cu" and "fone", the words "me", "cya" and "phone" would appear in the July texts.

"I was able to say that it was highly unlikely she sent those text messages," Prof Coulthard said.

He then attempted to determine if there was evidence Hodgson had sent the three texts.

To do this, he used the defendant's sample texts, plus two suicide notes he had left, as well as notes from a writing exercise Hodgson carried out at the request of detectives.

A number of similarities with the mystery texts were found. The mis-spelling of the word "off", using one "f" rather than two, featured in a suicide note and the July texts.

During the writing exercise, Hodgson even asked a police officer for help to spell the word. The word "might" was also mis-spelt as "mite" in the mystery texts and Hodgson's examples.

Matching abbreviations such as "aint" and "didnt" were also found in Hodgson's texts and those sent from Miss Nicholl's missing mobile.

Prof Coulthard said: "From a linguistic point of view, what I couldn't say was He sent those text messages'. But what I could say was He shared a lot of the same features and was among a small number of possible senders'."

The professor added that the unusual shared characteristics between Hodgson's texts and the mystery texts meant the number of possible senders was reduced.

His conclusions led prosecutors to tell the jury that Hodgson had attempted to mimic Miss Nicholl's texting style, but had made mistakes because he was rushing or he had not studied her style sufficiently.

Prof Coulthard accepts that his evidence on its own was not overwhelming.

However, he said its importance increased when used in conjunction with other testimonies.

Miss Nicholl's friends told the court that they did not understand some of the references in the texts, while the teenager's mother said she used to work in Richmond police station and her daughter would have more respect than to call police "pigs".

Later in the trial, a witness from the O2 mobile phone company revealed that the texts to Miss Nicholl's friends were sent from Brampton in Cumbria on July 9.

The message to her father was sent from Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders, on July 14, he said.

Records from a car hire firm were then produced. These showed that Hodgson had taken out a hire car over the periods the texts were sent.

When the mileage records of the hire cars were examined, they fitted roughly with the distances there and back to the locations where the messages were sent from.

The prosecution told the jury this all had to be more than just an unhappy coincidence for the defendant.

They agreed and unanimously found him guilty of killing Miss Nicholl.

Hodgson was told he must serve a minimum of 18 years behind bars.

He may reflect during this period that, had he not sent the messages, he may well have got away with murder.

1:43pm Friday 7th March 2008

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