Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 36 - Ticker Tape - Full Episode | Forensic Files

a murder in australia had everyone baffled especially police but in a bizarre twist
a device in the victim's body recorded vital information that made forensic history
[Music] [Music] so [Music] tasmania is a tiny island off the coast of australia considered to be one of the
most unspoiled and remote spots in the world [Music] in the city of la froy for example there
are only a handful of residents the people that live in froy are sort of people that i think just want to be left
alone to some degree they're not employed most of them i would guess that probably
20 25 people at the most would probably live in lafroy and that includes small children
early on the morning of october 9 2000 ivan jones went to his cousin's house to ask for a ride
while his cousin got dressed jones took his dog for a walk and found one of the neighbors dead
the victim was identified as 72 year old david crawford a retired veteran of the
royal australian navy the way that mr crawford was dressed was a fair indication that he had been in
bed he was wearing pajamas and had been awoken at night and had left the house to
see whatever confrontation it was that awoke forensic pathologist dr robert kelso
went to the crime scene and tried to determine when crawford was killed the time of death is actually quite
tricky but at the time i measured the body temperature and noted the ambient temperature
dr kelsey estimated the murder took place sometime between 4 and 7 30 in the morning when the body was discovered
but there was no way to tell anything more conclusive this window is quite difficult to work
out mainly because of the vagaries of determining the time of death from the body temperature
neighbors told police they heard dogs barking just before dawn but that wasn't unusual
with the wildlife around the town it may be that it was kangaroos that spooked the dogs or maybe the dogs
smelled a person police found no signs of forced entry but crawford's wallet was missing from
his bedroom there were no signs of a struggle inside the house and no foreign fingerprints
either in the front yard investigators found what looked like a blood stain they waited for nightfall then sprayed
the area with luminol seconds later a clear unmistakable image appeared you see this
axe head appear at night with the luminol yes it was it was pretty amazing the image was so clear
investigators could determine what type of axe it was a particular type of acts called a
canadian axe where the head goes down and forms the bottom edge as a point and then there's
quite a definite arc of the bottom of the head and you can see that quite clearly in the luminal it
was amazing with only a few dozen people in town the killer was probably someone crawford
knew really i mean every able-bodied man who could swing an axe or woman who could
swing an axe in the town could have been a suspect at some stage david crawford's death was a blow to
everyone in lafroy tasmania who knew him to be a kind and generous man he helped people out in the township
before the elderly people he used to take them out and about and shopping into doctors and things like that but he
wasn't one that had had parties or have heaps of people in he was quite happy with himself going to see his
grandchildren he was quite happy doing things like that that was his life the blood stain discovered on david
crawford's lawn was unmistakably the outline of an axe the forensic pathologist believed that
an axe was most likely the murder weapon dna testing revealed the blood was crawford's
the axe however was gone obviously a little town like lefrey would have a few axes around but if we
were able to find the axe with blood on it and match it up then we were well on the way to getting a conviction
as a former mining town lafroy was riddled with mine shafts many of which were underwater
they were perfect places to hide a murder weapon this is an actual police video of those
searches there's a lot of shafts and we used underwater cameras in some fairly derelict old shafts and we
drained a substantial dam on the township and just with the hope of locating the
expert again to we had no luck or no joy with those searches with crawford's wallet missing police
assumed the motive was robbery historically tasmania has had very little crime but many retirees kept a lot of cash on
hand in tasmania the people especially elderly people keep money in their homes and that rumor if you live
in a small town that room assume gets around that yeah such and such got a lot of money they keep it under the mattress
or in a jar or something and this goes on then police learned of another interesting coincidence
the man who found crawford's body 19 year old ivan jones reported seeing a suspicious man casing the neighborhood
jones had claimed he had told mr crawford that someone was stalking him that someone
had been seen by jones with a torch around the house on an evening before or several evenings before the
murder jones told police what he initially told crawford that he did not recognize the man
lurking in the neighborhood on a hunch investigators asked jones where he was at the time of crawford's murder
jones said he was home with a sister and her boyfriend his alibi was that he was
asleep in his sister's house he was asserting that he had been asleep between the hours of
one o'clock and six which covered the period of the murder jones sister confirmed his alibi and
said as far as she knew he never left the house next police interviewed jones cousin
darcy mclean who found crawford's body along with jones maclean said he was asleep in his home
around the time of the murder but since he lived alone there was no way to corroborate it
then darcy gave police two very useful pieces of information first he claimed that someone had stolen
an axe from his home second he said that his cousin ivan jones behaved suspiciously on the morning of david
crawford's murder from darcy mclean we were led to believe that it was unusual for ivan jones to go
to his house at 7 30 in the morning and ask for a lift to his parents place i understand he'd never asked darcy mclean
to do that before so yes it was unusual in that respect but ivan jones had an alibi
darcy mclean didn't david crawford's autopsy took place in the royal hobart hospital the day after
his body was discovered the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head most likely caused by an axe or similar
implement crawford had been a healthy 72 year old man except for some heart trouble
he had a condition called cardiomyopathy which simply means that he had some had
heart disease of unknown cause then dr kelso made a discovery that would change the course of the
investigation he found that crawford had a heart pacemaker implanted in his chest
a pacemaker is a way of stimulating the heart it delivers anything from about two to five volts into the heart to make
it pace that is contract i was vaguely aware that pacemakers have a recording unit inside them
if so crawford's pacemaker might reveal the exact time of his murder unfortunately pacemakers hold
information for only a short time before it's recorded over the autopsy took place
almost 30 hours after the murder which meant the pacemaker memory might have already
been erased we knew that we didn't have a great deal of time that we were running out of time
i recall being a little bit nervous a little bit worried that we might get a reading
the hospital's pacemaker specialist quickly scanned it to gather the pacemaker data and load it onto a
computer in an unbelievable turn of events this particular pacemaker had something
very few pacemakers had at the time a computer chip that had what's called an event memory
this is unique to this product and is in fact uh was hardly ever used and by sheer chance the pacemaker
technician involved recognized that if there was going to be any information it would have been on the event record
the software produced a detailed graph that yielded a spectacular array of information
the interesting part that we could work out is that we could tell exactly when the patient awoke
when the patient went outside and was being assaulted and finally when the patient had died in between
that time there was a period when the patient was unconscious and bleeding to death and at that point the pacemaker
went back to its dormant state the event record showed that david crawford went to sleep
shortly after 10 o'clock at 4 46 he woke up at 4 54 his heart was beating well over 100
beats per minute which is when he was attacked the confrontation was over at 504
and david crawford lay bleeding until his heart stopped pumping at exactly 5 34 a.m
scientists retrieved this information with only hours to spare it was about to be wiped
within an hour or maybe two hours that information would disappear and investigators discovered why crawford
would have gotten out of bed crawford's neighbor who lived across the street was in the hospital and had asked
crawford to keep an eye on his house until he was released everyone knew that he would be in
hospital the neighbor was presumed to have money in his house as well according to his son he was that sort of
person that if you heard a noise he would get up and investigate the noise all police had to do now
was find out who didn't have an alibi for 5 34 that morning it reminded me of a quote of eleanor
roosevelt who said that many people will walk in and out of your life but only true friends will leave
footprints in your heart in this case we left a pacemaker thanks to dr robert kelso and his quick
response to the readings on the pacemaker found during david crawford's autopsy investigators now knew the exact time of
crawford's death 5 34 in the morning having these timelines we have the perfect witness
there's no way that that in court could be discredited ivan jones and darcy mclean the two
cousins who found crawford's body were the prime suspects but if one of them did it
he made a colossal blunder had he waited just a couple of hours longer before calling police
crawford's pacemaker memory would have been erased had he laying there for any length of
time longer than he did without being discovered then we would have lost the time in the pacemaker
but who was the killer [Music] darcy maclean said he was sleeping at 5 34 on the night of the murder he lived
alone so there was no way to corroborate his alibi he also claimed that an axe was missing
from his home a search of his house revealed nothing ivan jones said he was asleep in his
sister's home until he woke up at 6 00 a.m but joan's sister provided a slightly
different timeline she said she last saw ivan at 3 a.m when he asked her for a cigarette and then
not again until 6 a.m when she heard him in the shower so no one could confirm his alibi
between 3 and 6 a.m and police believed that ivan's 6 a.m shower was no coincidence
a man who's been involved in a violent murder mum would also expect there to be blood on his body and of course
the investigation found that he had a shower almost a bath by six o'clock and that his clothes had
been washed and that bleach had been used in the washing machine where he washed his clothing
in a search of ivan's home investigators found a possible link to the murder one of our detectives
located a torch in a hole in the foundation of that residence it was very clean it was not covered in
dust so it certainly hadn't been there for any great length of time to put a flashlight
under the house is just something that way out of the ordinary not something anybody would do unless they had
something to hide there were no fingerprints on the flashlight so forensic analyst debbie mccool looked
for possible dna evidence i didn't find any obvious blood stains i took a swab from the outer surface of
the torch i removed the batteries and swapped those as well and she made sure to swab the one place
that's easy to overlook the area underneath the on off switch hoping to find dead skin cells
well dna can get onto an object just by handling it by swabbing the item we can often
obtain a dna profile amazingly there were enough skin cells to develop a dna profile
the skin cells in the crevices of the on off switch were not ivan jones or darcy
mcleans they were the skin cells of the murder victim david crawford proving it was his flashlight
mr jones i don't think was a person of high intelligence first of all he committed a gruesome murder that's bad
enough but then to keep the torch with the dna at his home just shows the mindset of a person
investigators believe that jones planned to burglarize the empty house across the
street from david crawford to break in jones stole the axe from darcy mclean's home
[Music] but when he got to the house a neighborhood dog started barking and woke david crawford
he got up and grabbed his flashlight to investigate crawford saw jones [Music] and that's when jones attacked
crawford lay bleeding from his wounds yet was still alive jones dropped the axe went into
crawford's home and stole his wallet then he picked up the axe and crawford's flashlight and
fled david crawford's heart stopped beating at 5 34 am jones disposed of the axe and crawford's
wallet but for some reason kept the flashlight to establish an alibi jones made sure his sister and her
boyfriend heard him taking a shower around 6 a.m in an attempt to further shore up his
alibi jones went to his cousin's house at 7 30 that morning and he arranged to find crawford's body
with his cousin there as a witness hoping the discovery would eliminate him as a suspect
but jones didn't know about the pacemaker had he waited to call police just a little while longer
the pacemaker's memory would have been lost long before the autopsy had an excellent alibi it is possible
that in the court of law he may have been found not guilty in that there was insufficient evidence
this was the absolute perfect evidence to put away this man this case marked the first time in the world that
data from a pacemaker was used in a murder trial in october of 2001 ivan jones was convicted of murder and
sentenced to 20 years in prison [Music] the pacemaker was a silent witness but it told the jury
all they needed to know i'll carry with me for the rest of my career and i encourage other investigators to uh to
give that consideration to pacemakers because you know time of death is not known you never
know what you'll get out of the data from a pacemaker these things were never heard of years ago in solving crimes
like this and i think it's marvelous that something like that technology and that was able to do that
seems very ironic that this man had a pacemaker which actually outlived him because it was designed to keep him
alive of course but nevertheless acted as a a real witness to what's happened an external
machine if you like which saw what was happening when nobody else did [Music] [Music]
you

A lifelong resident of the tiny town of Lefroy, Tasmania was murdered outside his own home. Robbery appeared to be the motive, but with no suspects, the investigation came to a halt.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

A pacemaker's data helped solve the murder of David Crawford in Tasmania, leading to Ivan Jones' conviction.

Key points

A Murder in Tasmania. A retired navy veteran is found dead in a small town, sparking a baffling investigation.
Ivan Jones Convicted. The first case in the world to use pacemaker data in a murder trial ends with a conviction.
The Pacemaker's Revelation. A pacemaker records vital information that reveals the exact time of the victim's murder.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was the absolute perfect evidence to put away this man.

Summarizing the significance of the pacemaker data in the trial.

19:55WatchJan 20, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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