KEY POINTS:
Ever since human beings began bumping each other off, murderers have plotted the perfect crime.
These schemes take two forms: making it look like someone else did it or making it look like it wasn't murder.
Frame-ups require subtlety and careful planning to exploit the police's periodic inclination to jump to a conclusion and then assemble a case designed to validate their instinct. But if they're satisfied it was an accident or death by natural causes, there's no need for an investigation. You're away laughing.
A crime genre cliche is the hero or heroine who refuses to accept that it wasn't foul play ("My husband would never commit suicide; he had too much to live for") and, undeterred by official indifference or active discouragement, embarks on a lonely quest to ensure justice is done.
In the Bob Woolmer case it's the other way around. After initially finding the cause of death inconclusive, the pathologist changed his mind and declared the Pakistan coach had been "manually strangled". Undeterred by mounting scepticism, the Jamaican police have proceeded on that basis.
"Police sources" have obligingly speculated on the how - he was strangled with a towel; he was subdued with poison, then throttled - and the who. It was a professional hit ordered by the Asian gambling syndicates to stop Woolmer blowing the whistle on match-fixing.
Or an enraged fan venting his anger at Pakistan's humiliating exit from the World Cup.
Or a clique of ultra-devout Muslims within the Pakistani team over-reacting to his campaign to curtail their endless prayer meetings. (When invited to join the players in prayer, Woolmer told them, "My religion is cricket". To hard-core Islamists that's presumably even worse than being a Christian.)
It was pointed out Woolmer wasn't the healthiest specimen - he was a 58-year-old 113kg diabetic who slept in an oxygen mask - and was under considerable stress. If colouring is an indicator of blood pressure, his aged beef complexion as he watched his team capitulate to cricketing minnows Ireland would suggest that the needle was well into the danger zone.
But these quibbles were drowned out by media clamour and the buzz of sensation. It was Murder at the World Cup. It was Cricket's Day of Infamy. It was a damn sight more intriguing than the tournament itself.
An open-and-shut case of murder, said Jamaica's top sleuth, an impressively tanned ex-Scotland Yard man who looked as if he was auditioning for a part in CSI: Montego Bay; the CCTV footage will reveal all. That was two months ago.
On March 31 the Times reported "extraordinarily antediluvian scenes within crucial areas of the enquiry". The inquest was being conducted by the Kingston Coroner's Court, a one-room, three-person operation with a backlog of 4000 cases. When the reporter arrived the coroner and his assistants were sitting at desks devoid of paperwork shooting the breeze.
Next, the Sunday Times revealed that after studying photos of the deceased and examining the facts, such as they were, five of Britain's leading forensic pathologists doubted that Woolmer was strangled.
They cited the absence of bruising, ridiculed the towel theory, and argued that the broken bone in his neck could have been caused by a fall, rough handling of the body, or dissection during autopsy. One expressed the view that Jamaica's post-mortem examinations were often of poor standard: "They're hackers, not cutters."
This week, the British Home Office's top pathologist, a man with recent experience of murder by strangulation courtesy of the serial killer who preyed on Ipswich prostitutes, concluded Woolmer wasn't strangled. Coincidentally, reports circulated that Scotland Yard detectives who have been involved in the case are convinced he died of a heart attack.
Not surprisingly this confusion is making Jamaicans uncomfortable. An opposition MP described the investigation as "a global embarrassment", and the Jamaica Gleaner likened it to "a farcical soap opera that makes the Jamaica Constabulary appear a bunch of incompetent boobs".
Jamaica is a third world country of fewer than 3 million people teetering on the verge of anarchy. In 2005, there was no routine fingerprinting of suspects, no use of DNA evidence, and bodies were often buried with bullets in them.
It has more than 1300 murders a year, most of which aren't solved. New Zealand's worst annual murder tally was 74 in 1996; in 2003 there were 46.
Which raises a couple of questions: given our justice system supposedly comprises a squeaky-clean police force equipped with the latest crime-fighting technology, a rigorous and transparent legal process presided over by a highly trained, meritocratic judiciary, and an educated and informed populace, how come it exposed itself to an almighty kick up the backside from the Privy Council?
And if the Woolmer case is a global embarrassment, what does that make the David Bain affair?
