You then heard from Mr. Thomas himself. He received the bags from Mr. Burns who took them to the cycle store, opened them up and divided the items. He photographed them. He said he took the items out one by one from the bag, labelled each and photographed them, noting the times at which each item was split out. According to Mr. Thomas the rock was the last item he removed from that bag, and he timed it at ten-thirty three a.m. in the register. The process had started at about nine o'clock, and he said he had to get them out and write the record and individual label for the split exhibit. The items were then laid out to dry. Mr. Burns came back. He saw the items, including the rock on the floor in the makeshift drying area of the cycle store. Mr. Burns then completed the entries in the exhibits book for each item, and you have a copy of the exhibits register. I do not think we need look at it, divider 14. He said he had done that on the day of the splitting, the 4th of October, and he identified the handwriting in each case as his. He said he had made an error in recording Mr. Braddock as being the person who had recovered the items. He said it was a pure error, and that the exhibit labels in fact spoke for themselves.
I think that concludes the evidence of the dives in 1997. Mrs. Rushton gave evidence about the clothes; you will remember that. She examined those items. They were all in that folder of photographs, and of course the crux of her evidence was that the vast majority of the items she saw dated from the early to the mid 1970's. There was nothing amongst them dating from the mid 1970's onwards. There were certain individual items she could not date at all, and it was clothing for a lady of the size 10 to 12 range, she thought. There were two matching pairs of shoes. I do not think you need to turn them up, but you may want to know numbers 14 and 22 were one pair, 15 and 21 another. There were also individual boots or shoes without their pairs. There were cosmetics dating from the same period, and Mrs. Rushton did accept that some of the dating brackets she gave us were what she called soft around the edges, in that she could not be entirely precise about it. In respect of manufactured items, she said she had not gone back to the manufacturers to get the dates; she had simply used her expertise.