She devoted more than a year to the pursuit but once the last full stop had been typed in May 2001, she was unable to find a publisher willing to take on the cricketing establishment and a patriotic public was still in denial. It would take seven years and the death of former South African coach Bob Woolmer at the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean before Caught Out finally saw the light of day. (Publication: ‘SA Sports Illustrated’; March 2008)
Woolmer: The Unanswered Questions
What really happened in room 374 of the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel on that fateful weekend of 17 and 18 March 2007 will probably never be known. On 28 November, the jurors delivered an open verdict – they simply couldn’t decide the cause of Woolmer’s death. The evidence was ‘weak’ and ‘conflicting’ according to the jury foreman. So, just what was the evidence? And why could no cause of death be identified?
Right from the outset, there were two distinct theories – death by natural causes or by murder.
The world first found out that something was amiss early on Sunday afternoon when the Pakistani team’s spokesperson Pervez Mir issued a statement:
We have taken Bob Woolmer to the hospital and he is in the emergency ward…We saw him last night but having not seen him early today two of our officers went to his room and with the help of hotel staff entered. He was found unconscious there. It is too early to say whether he has suffered a heart attack.
The first statement had barely hit the wires when Mir made the shattering announcement that Woolmer was dead: ‘…Hotel staff found him about 10:45 am. He had blood on him and there was vomit on the walls.’
It was a chambermaid who had first discovered the stricken coach on Sunday morning. Fittingly, Bernice Robinson was the first person to testify at the inquest in Jamaica. She told the jurors that she had knocked on Woolmer’s door at around 7:30 am Sunday morning. She said she had heard snoring and thus left before returning an hour later – at around 8:30 am. It was widely reported that Woolmer had been found at 10:45 am – the time first mentioned in the statement released by Pervez Mir. At the inquest, medical and security personnel testified to arriving on the scene around 11:00 am. If the chambermaid discovered the body at 8:30 am, why did help only arrive some two-and-a-half hours later? Upon entering the coach’s room, Bernice Robinson said that she noticed an overturned chair, a bloodstained bed and pillow and smelt alcohol and vomit. The bathroom door was closed and she met with resistance when trying to open it as the coach’s body was blocking the door. The bathroom was spattered in vomit and blood.
Was Bob alive or dead? Contrary to claims from the Pakistani camp that their coach had been unconscious and had had a pulse when he was found, the medical personnel who attended Woolmer later told the inquest that Bob was not breathing, there was no pulse, and no response when they placed him on the cardio machine at the University of West Indies hospital. Incidentally, finding someone alive who has been strangled is ‘most unusual’ say those who know.
While the world waited for the postmortem results, Nasim Ashraf, Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, told Pakistani TV station Geo TV that just before the Pakistani team left for the West Indies, Woolmer had told him that he was having breathing problems at night and was also diabetic. The refrain continued. An unnamed team official was quoted as saying that the Pakistani camp thought their coach ‘…might have died of a heart attack’. However, Gill Woolmer told South African reporters that Bob had been ‘…on a diet, swimming regularly and trying hard to slim down. After the Ireland match he was absolutely fine. He e-mailed me on Sunday morning and there was no sign of illness. There was nothing wrong with him, he was perfectly fit’.
Dr Ere Seshaiah, the Head of the Pathology Department in the Jamaican Ministry of National Security, performed the postmortem. His report led to the announcement that stunned the world, ‘… Mr Woolmer’s death was due to asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation’. Whispers of poison would also snake their way through the ensuing murder investigation.
Scotland Yard’s consultant forensic pathologist Dr Nat Carey and two other pathology experts were brought in to assess Dr Seshaiah’s findings: Ontario’s Chief Forensic Pathologist Dr Michael Pollanen and University of Cape Town Professor Lorna Martin. All the experts concluded that death wasn’t by strangulation but was probably due to heart disease. Accordingly, Jamaican Police Commissioner Lucius Thomas told a Kingston press conference on 12 June that Woolmer had not been murdered after all. ‘The toxicology tests have now been completed and no substance was found to indicate that Bob Woolmer was poisoned or in any other way incapacitated.’ Thus, the Jamaican Constabulary Force (JCF) ended its investigation.
At the inquest four months later, Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Shields admitted that he had not consulted with the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) about the decision to close the case in June. The DPP’s office, in turn, complained that it had not received the international pathologists’ findings. Local experts, however, testified that a toxic substance called cypermethrin had indeed been present in the coach’s blood, urine and stomach contents. The pesticide was also found in a ‘straw-coloured liquid’ and in a glass of water on Bob’s night table as well as in his bathroom basin’s outflow pipe. Dr Seshaiah altered his original verdict to ‘… manual strangulation associated with cypermethrin poison,’ explaining that, despite repeated requests, he had only received the toxicology reports on 21 June – more than a week after the investigation had publicly concluded.
When questioned, both Dr Carey and Dr Pollanen admitted that they too had not seen a toxicology report. Pollanen said that despite asking for the toxicology report and tissue samples he had not received them. Backtracking, both doctors insisted that their reviews had not been final and they couldn’t conclusively state the cause of death. Yet another British expert witness, toxicologist John Slaughter, told the jury that he had tested samples of body fluids taken from Woolmer’s body and found no cypermethrin. But it would turn out that Slaughter had not had sufficient samples to deliver a conclusive result and had not in fact tested the coach’s urine samples. Faced with such contradictory evidence, the samples were tested once more during the inquest proceedings. The results came back negative.
The coach had been found with his head wedged under the toilet bowl. Dr Seshaiah told the jury that ‘In my opinion, it is not possible for the disease to put him in such a position. This definitely speaks of a third party’. Someone else, it seems, had been in the room with Woolmer that night. Tests on two glasses and a bottle of champagne found in the coach’s room identified a second person’s DNA. In addition, the external lock of the door to Woolmer’s room had apparently been tampered with, despite police saying at the time that there had been no sign of forced entry.
The Pakistani team’s physiotherapist Murray Stephenson had occupied the room opposite Woolmer’s on the twelfth floor. Two days before the coach was found lifeless in his room, Stephenson had asked to be moved because of outside disturbance. However, Stephenson’s key card was used to access his old room ten times between 16 and 17 March. Captain Inzamam ul-Haq, it appears, also changed rooms from the twelfth to the fifth floor shortly before Woolmer’s death. After the coach’s death, team manager Talat Ali moved from his room on the twelfth floor to the seventeenth floor, under the assumed name of Newman. When the police asked him why, he reportedly said, ‘We were all scared.’ If their coach had died of natural causes, what was there to fear? ul-Haq, along with three other Pakistani team members, refused to appear at the inquest.
As a motive for murder, match-fixing was the leading contender. Bob’s period as South African coach coincided with Hansie Cronje’s crooked captaincy and came to an end with South Africa’s harrowing departure from the 1999 World Cup at Edgbaston. What South African cricket fan will ever forget Allan Donald mired at his end, bat flung beside him on the pitch and Lance Klusener flailing across the wicket, unable to prevent the incredible semi-final draw that saw Australia go through on points to win the final. Then there was that infamous dropped catch by Herschelle Gibbs in the Super Six game against Australia at Headingley. Another two matches involving South Africa were singled out for investigation by various authorities. Nonetheless, the King Commission in South Africa, just over a year later, never explored the extraordinary events of this World Cup and Bob Woolmer was never called to testify.
Prosecutor Shamila Batohi explained that she ‘…did not call Woolmer to give evidence because he had no knowledge of match-fixing prior to the inquiry’.
However, Bob Woolmer knew, at least, of the match-fixing offer put to the South African team at the end of their 1996 tour of India. And apparently a lot more, according to Clive Rice, who, when Hansiegate broke in 2000, was coaching Nottinghamshire at the same time as Woolmer was coaching Warwickshire. ‘We were actually involved in a match in England at the time and Bob and I discussed it. He told me a lot that never came out. I’m not just talking about other players being involved but officials too.’ Bowler Fanie de Villiers, another South African player who had been coached by Woolmer, echoed Rice’s sentiments. ‘Bob knew too much. He knew everybody in the system…Match-fixing is the biggest problem in world cricket. The guys who are the closest are the players and the coaches. They can see if anything odd is happening on the field.’ Nonetheless, Woolmer was quoted in an article in The Hindu on 16 October 2001: ‘I did not know it [match-fixing] was happening. Unless you knew it was happening, how do you stop it?’
Bob became Pakistan’s coach in June 2004. Why Woolmer took the job is not easily explicable. Pakistan was low down the order in the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Test and ODI rankings; Bob didn’t speak the language and could have made more money coaching an English county side in familiar surroundings. Moreover, he knew of the taint of match-fixing that had clung to the Pakistani team over the years.
By the time of the World Cup in March 2007, the Pakistani team was ranked fourth in the world in the one-day game. In the opening match on 13 March, Pakistan lost to the West Indies, and, four days later, succumbed to debutantes Ireland. In an e-mail to his wife that Saturday night, Woolmer wrote: ‘Feeling a little depressed currently, as you might imagine. I am not sure which is worse, being knocked out in the semi-final at Edgbaston or now in the first round. Our batting performance was abysmal and my worse [sic] fears were realised.’
On the day of the Pakistan/Ireland match, the odds on an Irish win were 500–1. In the run-up to the game, the odds shortened to 8–1. The ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (AC&SU) investigated unusual betting patterns in both of Pakistan’s defeats. Mark Shields told the inquest that the Jamaican police had left it up to the ICC to probe any match-fixing motive. The ICC reported back that match-fixing had nothing to do with the coach’s death.
Nonetheless, one of the most startling revelations of the Jamaican inquest came from a janitor, Patricia Baker-Sinclair, who testified that, on the day before the World Cup began, 12 March, she had entered the Pakistan dressing room at Sabina Park in Kingston. Bob Woolmer was in the room with an ‘Indian-looking man’. The coach was counting ‘coils of US dollars’ and stashing them into a cricket bag. She claimed that the two men were speaking a language she didn’t understand. Presumably it wasn’t Urdu or Hindi. Could it have been Afrikaans? Lawyers representing the ICC suggested that the money Woolmer had been counting may have been for the Pakistan players’ living expenses but it seems that these funds were paid over only two days later. Baker-Sinclair was called back to the stand for a second day but refused to say anything more because of threatening telephone calls she had received following her testimony.
Five days after the events described by Baker-Sinclair, Pakistan crashed out of the World Cup. That night, Pakistan’s coach went up to his room on the twelfth floor and stepped out of the public domain for good. A former Pakistani Test batsman, who was named in the match-fixing scandal of the 1990s, told the media at the time that ‘Woolmer’s death should now reveal a lot of truth, if the investigations are carried out professionally and without any interference from the ICC’. The truth, however, may well have killed cricket, along with the coach.