This is how my brother loved to live his life.
This is how he died:
Dave loved surfing, and having fun, and enjoying life. He used to make me laugh a lot, he used to make a lot of people laugh. The story of his death is sad. It can be seen from the documents below that police simply accepted the word of a woman who used to go out with him until 3 or 4 months before he died, who told them he had overdosed on drugs and committed suicide.
After I obtained the file on his death from the police I noticed a couple of things. Firstly, despite the initial pages of the file listing the subject as "Suicide", it soon changed to "Suspicious death" and later "Unexplained death", and the insistence of Dave's ex-girlfriend Tessa Knowles that it was a drug overdose, the post mortem report showed there were no drugs in his body apart from the proper dose of a prescription medicine he was on at the time, and he certainly didn't overdose on anything.
The documents (and other evidence, which will be put up soon) show there were no drugs present in his body, and no evidence whatsoever of drug overdose OR suicide. This woman tells police that he was a hard drug user, but he wasn't. She was. She told them he was likely to have HIV, etc which he didn't, in an apparent attempt to discourage them from examining the body too much.
Click on the images below to enlarge them, the final document is the police report documenting how the pathologist tells the police "I am not prepared to say that this man died of unascertainable natural causes because he didn't." And the notes of the ambulance officers who said "We thought this death was a bit odd because the girlfriend was so cool, calm, and collected while we were there but went into being hysterical when the police arrived." Before going on to suggest the possible scenario that had occured to them at the time.
This theory was supported by the fact that I noticed as soon as I read the post mortem report that there was a needle mark on each inner elbow. Ambulance officers confirmed that they had only put a needle into one arm, which left the second needle mark unexplained.
After further communication with the pathologist he responded "I am still a bit uneasy about this one - it's possible he may have been injected with a biological substance such as insulin, which would not show up in the ESR tests. I would suggest that someone has another chat to the girlfriend to see if she changes her story."
There's more too. There's all five or six of her statements. Then there's the letter from the Solicitor General, who has the power to order an inquest take place. I wrote to the Solicitor General, after going through all the proper channels, and in due course I received a letter back, a long letter, acknowledging each and every one of the matters I'd raised, but finally explained that it wasn't going to be possible to firmly establish what or who caused his death, and why not. The writer was right, too much time had gone by and too much evidence was gone. At least I could let it go, knowing I'd done all I could, and at least established that Dave didn't die of a drug overdose or suicide, there's no evidence of either. The police file states it was a "Suspicious Death". And so it was.
How often does this happen? Detective Tomlinson tried to find out what happened, he reinterviewed the ex girlfriend and the flatmate several times, but by the time he realised it wasn't as he'd been led to believe, it was too late. The statements of their interviews are concerning to say the least. My brother didn't commit suicide, he didn't die of a drug overdose, unless he was deliberately injected with something like insulin, or someone was involved in interfering with evidence because none was found at the scene. How often does this happen?
