The foregoing sequence of events assumes that everyone is telling something akin to the truth. But can we believe everything? As we have already seen, fact and myth have become horribly muddled because of misremembrance, rumours that have spread so widely they are now assumed to be truths, and even a few deliberate falsities. Jim Wilson's account is believable, although he doesn't add a great deal to the story; he admits himself he was only on the scene for a few seconds. However, it does show that there was at least one more person there than we were knew of before. Some have said that his account is obviously false because he only heard one shot, but he was there and gone so fast, Joe was probably still reloading the gun when he ran away.

Blackmore's story is a little more improbable, although there is nothing to suggest an intentional falsification. It is a coincidence that she missed both shootings, Michael, Jim Wilson, Mrs. Shenton, Albert Shenton and Patrick Pink, and arrived at precisely the moment when everybody was either elsewhere, injured or dead. Having seen two apparently dead bodies, one being a man with whom she was very friendly, she didn't try to find out what have happened. By her account, she stepped over Joe's body and went into the studio; would she have been so careful as to not leave any footprints? I can believe however that she stepped over Joe and looked into the studio - there could have been someone else injured for all she knew, who might have responded to help. I can also believe that she wouldn't have wanted to inspect anything too closely. Her own flat was only a few minutes' walk away and maybe she left to telephone from there. She does not sound like someone who is jumping on a bandwagon, and it's a complex and obscure story if it's not true. It is hard to correlate her version as told with the facts we do know but there seems no reason for her to lie. It should be remembered, though, that although her English is fairly good, it is not perfect, and there may be misinterpretations of her account due to the language barrier.

The police must have been on the scene within minutes. The Caledonian Road police station is almost across the street and only a few minutes further away is Hornsey Road station. This seems to indicate that anyone else hanging around the property would have had to make a pretty quick getaway to avoid being seen.

The only witness we can say with 100% certainty was there is Patrick Pink, and his story has changed since 1967. It seems logical that the 1967 story is likely to contain the most truth, with the exception that he was there over night and kept that information from the police for reasons already given. The intervening time has probably faded his memory on some issues, and exaggerated others. There are many people who speculate that Pink has changed his story on purpose, or knows more than he is telling. Although there are differences, none of the apparent 'changes' indicate anything particularly suspect, besides which anyone with a bit of time to research can find plenty of newspaper reports containing parts of his statements. Several people have independently stated that there was some 'danger' in being around Joe towards the end of his life. Maybe they just mean that his temper was getting worse, but if there was some outside danger, well, maybe Pink is also aware of it and is still a little scared of repercussions. Maybe he feels partly responsible for Joe's death, that he could have stopped it, or that he caused it by telling Joe that Mrs. Shenton was dead. Or maybe it's quite simply that thirty years have just confused an already traumatic experience in Pink's mind. To have something like that take place virtually in front of your eyes and involving a good friend is something that most of us fortunately only read about in books. Until Pink either denies the charges or reveals something else, I am not prepared to assume anything.

And how did the press get there so fast? At least one photographer was on the scene almost immediately. It would have been some time before Joe's body was removed from the premises, so it is not surprising (although a little shocking) to see that photograph. It is surprising to see the photograph of Mrs. Shenton being removed, as her then-grave condition would have taken precedence over preserving the scene of the crime, and she would have been taken out just as soon as the ambulance could get there. The most likely explanation is that the photographs came from the Islington Gazette, although they are not credited in other newspapers, and the photograph of Mrs. Shenton appears in the Evening News. The Gazette's offices were quite close to 304; news travels fast and even on foot they could have been there almost at the same time as the police. Maybe someone in the know called Joe's press agent; or even more likely, maybe a freelance journalist had a police informer. Whichever way you look at it, someone got the scoop of the day.

One thing I would like to mention is the violence we hear about in regard to Joe. The truth is that although a few people got a bruise here and there from Joe's throwing-things-around outbursts, without exception he is described as never intending to hurt anyone and generally wouldn't harm a fly. One young singer who got a black eye as the result of actually getting hit by a flying object remembers running out of the flat, crying, to get on the train to go home. At St. Pancras station, Joe finally caught up with him, having chased him all the way from Holloway to apologise. He was taken back to 304, given some painkillers, and made to lie down for a couple of hours with a steak over the bruised eye.

Videotapes from testing done in Florida recently (not on live humans, I hasten to add) show that a shot fired from less than three feet from the type of gun that Joe had would have a devastating effect on a skull, but leave an entry wound no bigger than the bore of the gun. This doesn't sound like the wound described by Camps at the inquest and, of course, the murder theorists have seized this on. But a 12-bore is not exactly a tiny gun, and in relation to a human head, one could interpret a 'large wound' to be anything from half an inch up.

A blow to the investigation...

We recently discovered from the Home Office that the files on Joe's case no longer exist. If a case is considered closed, is inactive for eleven years with no indication that new evidence may turn up, and the murderer has committed suicide immediately afterwards, all files, reports, statements and evidence is destroyed. Unless we can find a friendly ghoul who acquired a private copy of the files for whatever reason, the truth will never be known. Actually reviewing some of the evidence, had we been able to get it, would have been a gruelling task, but items such as on-the-scene statements and especially the post-mortem report would have answered an awful lot of questions. Even the 999 log for that morning no longer exists; if it did, we could have fixed the time frame almost perfectly; particularly as I suspect that Joe's fatal shot occurred during Pink's emergency call, and would have been audible on the police recording. The log may also have confirmed Margaret Blackmore's story too.

Inquiries have been made to the few surviving officials who were on the case; most claim to be bound by the Official Secrets Act, but one who did talk to us admitted that the fact is, the police attend so many murder scenes that unless it's something really outrageous, they tend not to remember individual cases very well. A man claiming to have served as Francis Camps' assistant at Joe's post-mortem showed up a few years ago in England, but as he refused to discuss anything about it unless he was given large sums of money we declined his offer.

Incidentally, to answer the question about whether Joe had a tape recording at the time, as he often did at all sorts of strange times... Had there been a tape recording, which captured the shots - and as Joe had been mixing down just before, not recording, it's probable there wasn't - the police would have impounded it as evidence. Therefore it would have gone the same way as the rest of the records in 1978.

Francis Camps could probably have answered many of our questions, but he died in 1971. He doesn't mention the 304 case in any of his written works, and bearing in mind that he was the UK's leading forensic pathologist for many years (I believe he did part of his apprenticeship on the Christie case), I wasn't really expecting to find it. Which has raised the question - why was someone so important brought in to 304? Well, it was a capital murder case, and the post-mortem must have been done fairly shortly afterwards for the inquest to have been on March 9th; which means that they would still have been interviewing potential suspects, and had to allow for the fact that the police may, just may, have been looking at something more complicated. Or maybe Camps was just having a slow period. Or maybe there was something more complicated involved...

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