ABSTRACT
Danielle Jones disappeared on 18 June 2001; she has not been seen since and her body has never been found. Within hours of her disappearance two text messages were sent from her phone which, the police suspected, might have be written by her Uncle, Stuart Campbell. In the first case of its type to reach the UK courts, Malcolm Coulthard offered a linguistic analysis which showed that the messages were unlikely to have been written by Danielle. Stuart Campbell was convicted of Danielle’s murder on the 19 December 2002 at least in part because of the linguistic evidence. In a parallel case, Jenny Nicholl disappeared on 30 June 2005. Once more Malcolm Coulthard was able to offer a linguistic analysis suggesting that she was unlikely to have texted the final messages sent from her phone and that her lover, David Hodgson, was one of a small group of possible authors. Hodgson was convicted of Jenny’s murder on 19 February 2008. Further evidence of the potential utility of forensic linguistics in the examination of
text messages was provided in 2007 when I was given permission to carry out a survey of mobile telephone seizures by the Northamptonshire Police, a medium-sized semirural force, located in the East Midlands of the UK and covering about 900 square miles and a population of 640,000. The police in the UK have powers to seize mobile phones and the information they obtain ranges from the location of the phone at any particular time, to the call record and details of the SMS text messages sent and received. I was given access to all 186 phones seized during a three-month period, from which a total of some 10,000 text messages were recovered. Further analysis of the case files showed that for only twelve of these phones was there any suspicion that the owner had not sent all of the messages. Perhaps unsurprisingly in none of the cases was a forensic linguist employed to resolve these potential disputes. However, the degree of actual and potential investigative interest in the authorship of text messages appears to be growing and this raises some very real theoretical and methodological problems, not least whether such short and fragmentary texts are amenable to any form of authorship analysis.
