Why the Acid Bath Murderer Wound Up in Hot Water ; TV WATCH

Horizon: How to Commit the Perfect Murder BBC2

THIS is a television column, not a restaurant review, but I’ve worked as a food critic, and feel it’s my duty to warn you about a Japanese restaurant in W1.

When I visited it recently, we were served sushi that looked like it could remember what it was doing on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, and steak that wobbled like Winalot, while the warmest consumable at our table was the white wine, served in glasses topped to the brim.

Nor should I neglect to mention the decorticated waitress who asked us “would you like to see the menu?” (a question so vacuous that the only logical reply is: “No thank you, I’ll just look at the stains on your sodding apron and guess what’s on tonight”) and tacky picture lights that would have seemed shabby even in a 1960s old people’s home.

So it was no great surprise when the staff started stacking chairs on the tables (universal restaurant semaphore for “go home”) while we were still finishing our dinner.

Add to that a bill topping a stratospheric Pounds 100 a head, and I reckon the place isn’t a restaurant at all it’s revenge for Hiroshima.

Nevertheless, the way they murdered my sushi hasn’t put me off ordering raw fish, any more than did a friend’s casual remark that “oral sex is like eating sushi off a barbershop floor”.

But last night’s Horizon: How to Commit the Perfect Murder did make me think twice by reminding me about the little bit of trouble that befell Alexander Litvinenko at Itsu in Piccadilly last November, when somebody (presumably a Russian hitman) laced his order of sushi with a fatal dash of Polonium 210.

“With the help of forensic science, most crimes can be solved,” the narrator told us, but this assassination was particularly cunning, becauseby the time the authorities realised what had happened, Litvinenko was wearing the pine overcoat, the killer was long gone, and thousands of other diners had passed through Itsu’s doors, making it well-nigh impossible to find incriminating evidence.

Even so, I wouldn’t call it a perfect murder, because surely that accolade should be reserved for crimes that are so skilfully executed that nobody ever realises a killing has taken place at all? What followed was a detailed and grimly fascinating analysis of the pitfalls that can befall the beginner in homicide. Guns are strictly for amateurs, it seems (“When you shoot someone, it’s gotta be at least nine times,” said one medical expert, “you know how often I’ve seen someone killed instantly by a single bullet? Never.”).

And even though sulphuric acid will eventually dissolve skin and bone, you need 27 gallons to do a proper job, and even then it can’t cope with gallstones or lipstick ‘One had admire dedication scientists studying insects grow decomposing bodies as makes it possible pinpoint time of (which is how the police caught John Haigh, back in the 1940s).

Burning the bodies in a high-temperature furnace is better, but it’s hard not to leave tell-tale traces of DNA in the vicinity, and even though one novice killer from Ohio watched every episode of CSI to learn how to cover his tracks, he, too, made one fatal mistake.

Having killed and burned two people, he dropped his bloodstained boots off a bridge into a nearby lake, failing to notice that it was winter, so the water was frozen, and his gore-encrusted footwear perched conveniently on the surface until the crime squad came to retrieve them.

The details were chilling, but at times so was the programme’s worryingly naive faith in the infallibility of forensic science (a belief that, for example, sent the innocent Birmingham Six to prison for life after tests “proved” they’d been handling explosives, when they’d actually been playing cards).

But equally, one had to admire the dedication of scientists prepared to study how insects grow on the decomposing bodies of 50lb pigs (the size of an average supermodel), because the entomological life cycle makes it possible to pinpoint the time of a person’s death, months or even years after the event.

Pathologists, by contrast, can only guess the passage of time from body temperature or hypostasis (the red corpuscle “ink blot” on a corpse that reveals its position when blood circulation ceased), although we also saw them determining the cause of death of American soldiers who’d perished in the Second World War, by reassembling fragments of their shattered skulls.

Well, terrible things happen in war, like to my Uncle Bert, who had his tongue completely shot off by the SS (he never talks about it).

As this bleakly gripping programme demonstrated, it’s not easy to escape detection, yet people do sometimes get away with murder.

Harold Shipman and the Washington Snipers almost evaded the law, and perhaps they would still be at large if they’d used every schoolboy’s fantasy weapon of a dagger-shaped block of ice (which melts to leave no clue as to the murder weapon), because despite the widespread belief that it would never work, a demonstration here showed that it goes through meat like a knife through …

well, like a knife through meat, I suppose.

Actually, there is one perfect murderer in our midst, called the Grim Reaper, and his preferred technique is to wait patiently for us all to snuff it, although the Fred Wests and Jeffrey Dahmers of this world do sometimes offer him their assistance.

Let’s face it. Life is toxic. Indeed, I reckon that even saliva is a mild poison, and after swallowing small quantities of it for several decades, it finally kills us.

(c) 2007 Evening Standard; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.