Rolfe
Adult human female
I'm sure this wasn't premeditated. He lost his rag in the heat of an argument and went for her. He had an instant decision to make. Immediately shout for help (affecting not to realise she's dead) and stick to the line that it was a sudden loss of temper and he didn't mean to hurt her. Many men have got off with light sentences for culpable homicide at worst when fielding that defence. Or try to get rid of the body and feign ignorance of her whereabouts. In that space of surely just a few seconds he went for the latter.
But he was in an almost impossible position. The middle of Edinburgh New Town, early in a working day, and he doesn't even have a car. He took the bus to work. Car parking around there is like gold hens' teeth. How is he going to get the body out of there? And yet he managed it. He even had the presence of mind to turn off her mobile phone or otherwise neutralise the risk of it ringing and drawing attention to her body.* The story about having to go home for minutes of a meeting was threadbare - even in 2010 these should have been on his computer, surely he didn't have just one paper copy. He didn't even have a door key to his house, so he took a taxi to his mother's house and asked her to give him a lift, with her key, back home. Once there, instead of just grabbing what he needed and saying, will you run me back to Thistle Street please Mum, he waved her off and declared he would take his own car back. To the worse location in the entire world for parking. I cannot stress this enough. Edinburgh hates cars.
I suspect he loaded his car up with stuff that would allow him to line the boot to keep DNA off the car itself. Duvet? Someone suggested an old tent? And back he went to Thistle Street, and somehow he got parked. And somehow he got her into the boot of this saloon car, in such a way that forensic examination of the car revealed not a trace of her. And this is the part that seems well-nigh impossible, the part that has people saying, surely this is a miscarriage of justice. Or did. But in the famous words of Sherlock Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be what happened.
That is a spectacular level of competence, from a standing start. I doubt if 1% of the population could equal that. So let's not assume he doesn't have "presence of mind" in abundance. Or that that didn't continue through the next day. (The manoeuvres of Tuesday were actually more difficult and more impressive than the Wednesday, in my opinion.
There is a particular point to this. Another poster said, why do all that risky car and body-shuffling on the Tuesday morning? Why not leave her where she was, go home on the bus at the end of the day, then come back in the evening with the car when the office was empty? Leaving aside the possibility that she might have been discovered during the day, I'll tell you why. Because if he had left her till the evening he could not have got her in the car. Rigor mortis would have set in while she was in position under the stairs, and she could not have been folded up to get into the boot. It is extraordinarily difficult to break rigor mortis. She had to be got into the boot before it set in. He obviously realised this, and that he had to work fast. Chapeau, frankly.
That evening he even took the family out for a meal while Suzanne must still have been in the boot of the car they travelled in. For sheer cool-headedness, that takes the biscuit. He must also at some point have managed to put some more equipment into the car, a change of clothes and/or protective clothing, perhaps some gardening tools. And he bought that air freshener.
So really, I wouldn't at all discount the notion that, if he was thinking about the pond, he realised the body would float if the body cavities weren't punctured, and punctured quite extensively. I've seen a lot of people recoil in "yuk" mode at a lot of things I did in my job, but I suspect he wouldn't have been one of them. I do think, though, that making a mess of the body in such a way that he might have transferred DNA on to his own person would have been something he thought twice about.
Dumping the body can work, as witness the Tony Parsons saga, and the Louise Tiffney mystery, but as the latter shows, an accidental discovery of the body in the place that is consistent with the police theory of how you did the murder can get you a life sentence. Even if it takes 15 years for it to be found. I think Gilroy would have been afraid of that happening to him, and have tried his best to minimise the possibility of an accidental discovery.
* I was wrong when I said turning his own phone off too early might have been his only real mistake. Omitting to continue to text Suzanne after she was dead was another clear mistake.
