She had been smuggled into Britain a few days earlier, she said. She was escaping from a religious cult that had been active in her home country of Sierra Leone and in Nigeria. Her husband was involved in the cult and had been responsible for the deaths of 11 children during ritual sacrifices. One of the victims had been their eldest child.
The woman, Joyce Osagiede, was resettled in Glasgow and appears to have struggled to care for her daughters. Social services became involved.
When, some months later, she appeared in court facing a minor charge of a breach of the peace, a social worker presented evidence that the woman had said she wanted to take one of her daughters to a house where a demonic ritual was due to take place.
A local policeman, who was listening in court, made a connection that had eluded others and called detectives at an incident room in Catford, southeast London.
They were investigating the killing of a young west African boy whose torso had been retrieved from the River Thames by Southwark Bridge on September 21, 2001, just a few weeks before Osagiede arrived in Britain.
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The south London officers — members of the serious crime group — might never have known about Osagiede if the officer in Glasgow had not set off the latest remarkable phase in the investigation of the so-called “torso in the Thames”.
Last week police disclosed for the first time a full account of their complex investigation into the murder.
They revealed how breakthroughs in forensic evidence have now matched evidence that implicates Osagiede and her husband, Sam Onojhighovie.
OSAGIEDE was not from Sierra Leone as she had claimed on her arrival in Croydon. The police discovered that she was a Nigerian from Benin City, the probable home of the torso victim. She had married Onojhighovie there. The police found their wedding video.
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How did this link to the dead young boy? Early on the police had named the torso boy Adam. They knew only that he was black and aged between four and seven years old. His limbs had been deliberately and skilfully separated from his body. They knew — but have never yet revealed — the cause of death.
What they did not know was who he was and how he had come to be in the Thames. They suspected that he might have been the victim of some kind of ritual crime.
The only visible clue was the pair of shorts he had been wearing. They were bright orange, marked Kids & Co, size 116. This was an own-brand product of the German branch of Woolworths. The police went to Germany and discovered that the shorts were marketed as girls’ clothing and had been a new line in the summer of 2001. In all, 820 pairs in the same size and colour as Adam’s had been bought.
With nothing else to go on, and after inquiries to match Adam’s remains with missing children files across Britain had drawn a blank, the police turned to forensic science as their only hope of producing new leads.
Ray Fysh, an official at the Forensic Science Service, joined the Gold Group, the committee overseeing the murder inquiry, and suggested other lines of research.
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The work was painstaking and took many months. It involved repeated trips to the mortuary at Poplar in east London to take samples from Adam’s body, which would have to be removed from the freezer and defrosted each time. The exhibits’ officer, Detective Constable Mark Ham, became familiar with the smell of death that clung to his clothes after every visit.
Adam’s DNA samples were tested with two new approaches. There was mitochondrial DNA, which is not unique to each of us like conventional DNA but is carried in links through the maternal side of families. There was also Y-chromosome DNA profiling, which follows the male line.
Adam’s results pointed to a west African origin; but since west Africans have dispersed throughout the world, this was not initially of great significance.
The police had first thought that Adam’s death might be related to South Africa, where the traditional healing practice of muti was sometimes corrupted to make use of human body parts.
Detective Inspector Will O’Reilly, the senior investigating officer, and Commander Andy Baker had travelled to South Africa and met Nelson Mandela, who had been persuaded to make an appeal about the case.
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At the Royal Holloway branch of the University of London in Egham, Surrey, two scientists had set to work with other body samples. Nick Branch, a palynologist — he studied pollen — examined samples from Adam’s intestines which indicated that the boy had been alive in London long enough to have ingested some of the local pollens.
Branch also found an odd sediment inside Adam’s lower intestine. It appeared to be a mixture of ground animal bones, quartz or sand and clay with traces of gold.
The scientists thought it was man-made. For the police it raised the possibility that the mixture was a potion given to Adam before his death, perhaps as part of a ceremony or ritual.
Ken Pye, a geologist, had looked at the chemical make-up of Adam’s bones. Like all of us, his body carried hidden traces of where he had been living. The element strontium could provide the so-called isotope signature, which might indicate where Adam had been raised.
After completing his tests, Pye needed control samples to match against Adam. There was only one way to get them: O’Reilly, Fysh and another scientist went to Nigeria and travelled around collecting soil and animal bones, buying bush meat and market produce to take back for testing.
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They also collected the remains of post-mortems from Benin City.
When Pye studied and compared the control samples with Adam’s isotope signature, he was able to say with some certainty that Adam had been born and raised in a corridor of land 100 miles long and
50 miles wide in southwest Nigeria. The closest match of all was the post-mortem sample from Benin.
THE police had begun with a victim who could have come from anywhere in the world. Now they knew almost exactly where he came from. The call from Glasgow had prompted a new line of inquiry that led to the breakthrough.
Officers visited Osagiede at her flat and asked her to volunteer a DNA sample.
She refused.
During one visit an officer noticed some papers on her sideboard that related to an address in Catford. When they went there, officers discovered that she had called at the address some time earlier, apparently searching for a pastor who lived in the area.
She had stolen the documents, perhaps to set up a false identity. The residents in Catford told the officers that she had chatted to them about living in Germany.
Germany: now the police became excited. They went back to Osagiede’s flat in Glasgow with a search warrant and found five items of clothing from Kids & Co, including some pairs of size 116 shorts. But no orange ones. Osagiede was arrested and the Forensic Science Service broke all records in producing a result from her DNA sample in nine hours. It did not match Adam’s.
The police went back to Germany and retraced her steps. They discovered through school and benefit records that she had been living there until a few days before she turned up at the Immigration Service in Croydon in 2001.
So she probably could not have been involved in bringing Adam to the UK and was probably not therefore involved in his murder.
Then the police discovered that she had placed her daughters in temporary care while she was living in Hamburg. They visited the foster carer who recalled two dishevelled children, one of whom had been wearing orange shorts.
When the carer was shown a pair of shorts identical to those found on Adam, she said that they were the same as the ones that Osagiede’s daughter had been wearing.
The police re-interviewed Osagiede; but she would not comment on the allegations that she had made to the immigration authorities about a cult and her husband’s involvement in murder. The cult had an extraordinary name (which the police have asked that we do not reveal). It was apparently a sub-sect of a legitimate religious group that had started in Asia and spread elsewhere. The Nigerian leader of the group had once been accused of ritual sacrifice, but the charges had not been substantiated.
Osagiede did admit to buying some orange shorts, but she prevaricated about what she had done with them. Initially she said they were in her Glasgow flat. But they were not. Oh no, she then said, I left them behind at my home in Hamburg and you’ll never find that now. But the police had found her home in Hamburg and there were no orange shorts there either. Oh, I gave them to a friend, she said, and refused to say more.
The police concluded that the shorts were the ones Adam had been wearing when he died. They started visiting Osagiede’s associates and at one address they found her Nigerian passport. It showed her city of origin as Benin.
Unable to take their inquiries any further forward, however, the police handed her over to immigration and, in November last year, she was deported to Nigeria in a specially chartered executive jet.
Meanwhile, her husband had disappeared. He had absconded from Germany where he had been sentenced, in his absence, to a seven-year jail sentence for fraud and people trafficking.
It took the Adam-inquiry officers weeks to trace him to Dublin early last month, where he was not only claiming asylum but also seeking Irish nationality as the father of a new-born child. He had bigamously married the child’s west African mother in Ireland. The arrest warrant listed 11 of his aliases.
The police are now awaiting the results of his DNA tests. They do not believe he is Adam’s father, but they do believe he is connected to the boy’s death.
While he remains in custody in Ireland, pending the outcome of a German extradition request, the forensic hunt continues.
A bizarre animal skull, pierced by a metal staple and bound with black cotton, was found during raids last week, in a cloth bag inside a suitcase packed with clothes. It will be tested for the possibility that it is the source of the ground bone in Adam’s stomach.
The office of the chief medical examiner in New York has also offered to examine the ground bone.
Since the September 11 attacks (which occurred 10 days before Adam was found in the Thames), the New York authorities have developed new techniques in identifying bone debris. (This was primarily so that relatives did not receive remains of victims mixed up with those of the terrorists.) The London police hope their bone powder can be identified, too. It may make more sense of the potion.
This extraordinary detective story is not yet over. All those involved in the investigation hope and believe that one day they will mount a prosecution for murder.
Then they hope to reunite Adam with his real name, perhaps his real family and see him removed from Poplar and buried with the same dignity that they have tried to give him since he came out of the Thames nearly two years ago.