Did Greg Domaszewicz kill fourteen month old Jaidyn Leskie with a crowbar on the same night in 1997 that his neighbour dumped the head of a slaughtered pet pig called Darryn Millane on his front lawn?

Six month’s later, Jaidyn√≠s body was found in a dam near his depressed industrial home town of Moe. His broken arm was crudely bandaged and the body was weighed down with the crowbar.

On the fatal night, his mother Bilynda was roaring drunk in a pub, leaving her boyfriend Greg to look after Jaidyn. When Greg dutifully picked her up, he told her the child had been rushed to hospital with burns. That was before he found the head of the pig, named after his footballing hero. Bilynda was too confused to make sense of his lies, and only realised Jaidyn was gone after the police were already searching the local swamps.

The case thrilled and appalled the state. Domaszewicz was charged – and acquitted by a jury unable to point the finger in a chaos of childish hatred, driveway fights and elaborate small minded revenge. All the stories were equally bizarre, and the people were all capable of anything. The defence won the day by claiming the police fixated on Domaszewicz and did not investigate anyone else.

The saga was covered well on Court TVís Crime Library, by a US journalist writing from Oregon. Seamus McGraw lives in peace near bears, and his children are called Miriam, Yona and Seneca. Such is the internet.

After a long campaign by Jaidynís family, we are having an inquest. Various prisoners have come forward with Domaszewiczís rambly stories, retold by the Melbourne Herald-Sun.

“Prisoner R yesterday told the inquest Mr Domaszewicz admitted Jaidyn was screaming in pain with a broken arm and drugs had failed to silence him.

“Greg then told me that he put a pillow over the kid’s head and hit him a couple of times with a crowbar,” the former inmate said in a statement.

“He said he felt the kid’s pulse and neck and the kid was dead.”

Strangely, the inquest was told, DNA on Jaidynís bib points to an outside woman who claims she doesnít know the family and never went to Moe. Unfortunately for the scientists, her DNA was in the same laboratory Рfound on a rapistís condom.

The scientists have made an awful mistake, showing vividly how the smoking gun of DNA evidence can still be wrong.

At least here the science is agreed and the error is human. But there√≠s another case in the news at the moment in which the experts are simply whacking skulls like rutting bison. This one has been going on for forty years – and may have started four centuries ago. It’s almost a relief from the real world where children are beaten to death.

In 1962, Yale University was given the “Vinland Map”, which had been sold by a Spanish bookseller bound together with a description of a Vatican expedition to the Tartars. It allegedly came from a family connected to Columbus. On the parchment is the faded outline of Europe, North Africa, Scandinavia, Greenland – and the mysterious coast of Vinlandia on mainland North America. It seemed to be the oldest known Western record of the New World. (A lovely 2.5 meg image can be found here.)

So was it a forgery? The timing was very convenient – this was just before archeologists found hard evidence that the Vikings reached the coast and camped.

First concerns came from Walter McCrone who used both light and electron microscopes to analyse the medieval iron gall ink with its characteristic yellowing edges. He discovered two layers, suggesting the yellow edge was actually created by a preliminary line underneath. This yellow came from titanium dioxide, in a regular crystalline form called anatase, only manufactured since 1923. There was no reason at all for titanium in the carbon black ink on the surface. Smoking gun.

In 1987, Robert Cahillís Californian team counterratttacked. Using chemical analysis rather than microscopes, they found titanium too Рbut only in tiny amounts which probably came from the atmosphere. McCroneís side claimed they had the precision to analyse only the yellow layer, where the concentrations were much higher.

The debate climaxed in July 2002, as reported neatly in a Nature Science Update.

In the August issue of Radiocarbon, scientists from the University of Arizona, the Smithsonian Institute and the impeccably prestigious Brookhaven National Laboratory, dated the parchment to around 1434 A.D. Later work used the watermark to place the parchment in a particular batch made for a Church conference in Basle. This was politically plausible, since such a map would probably have been discussed.

This was nearly sixty years before Columbus and some observers suggest he might have used it on his voyage, although it was much further north. He believed that Asia was close; perhaps he thought the Vikings had charted Japan.

Unfortunately, the parchment is not quite the point. Was it a new map on an old surface? Was the map used at Basle without the Vinland addition? Our forger, after all, was cunning enough to lay the yellow line.

Robin Clark and Catherine Brown, working at University College London, then used microprobe spectroscopy (a different and more subtle technique) to find McCrone’s signature anatase, and carbon in the ink. Their supportive results were published in the ultra spiffy Analytical Chemistry, journal of the American Chemical Society.

Cahill quickly responded. The double ink forgery has never been found anywhere else. The quantities were too small to be sure. The anatase crystals were regular, but his contamination argument did not deny they were manufactured. Still, his argument sounded thin. Case over.

Enter the now retired Smithsonian biochemist Jacqueline Olin, who is publishing another paper this December, again in Analytical Chemistry. Since the problem is the ink Olin simply asked how it was made.

She claims the ink is actually iron gall cut with carbon so it can be seen wet. The titanium comes from the original iron, which was found with ilmenite. Using the green vitriol (or ferrous sulphate) of medieval chemistry, she reproduced the ink, deriving subtle traces of copper and aluminium which the forger would not have known to include.

What is more, she claims the same chemistry is found in inks on other documents, which are known to be medieval.

So the debate continues. But there is another level, which adds a certain spite to this discussion. McCrone used the same techniques to discredit the Shroud of Turin, and there is still a lot of religious support for it, masquerading as science. The dispute is amplified by another community anxious to attack his methods. The Shroud and the Map are his forensic claims to fame.

On one level the whole discussion is academic. It reminds us both that science is controversial, and that its techniques are now extraordinarily subtle. But we keep wanting it to be definitive, to provide a true “open and shut case”. And it never does. Justice cannot be measured.

The secrets of Jaidyn Leskieís last sad hours will not be found in molecules. They are hidden in Greg Domaszewiczís twisted mind, and the hard hearts of those who fought him in the streets of Moe.

As Julie Ann Davies wrote in The Bulletin:

“There is nothing more desolate than a child’s grave and Jaidyn Leskie’s is no exception. Here’s what the elderly visitors see: a heartbreaking array of offerings lie sodden on the marble shelf below the headstone; a chocolate Freddo frog floats in a pool of rainwater, a sopping stuffed toy and a handmade card created by a child but bearing the words of an adult:

“For Baby Jaidyn,

May Justice Prevail.

R.I.P. Jesus Loves You.”

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