as by Basil Cock and the farm secretary. Instead of alerting the police, the family took the silencer to Boutflour's sister's home. Boutflour said it felt sticky. They found red paint and blood on the silencer, and the surface of it had been damaged. When the police collected the silencer on 12 August, five days after the murders, an officer reportedly noticed an inch-long grey hair attached to it, but this had gone by the time the silencer arrived at the Forensic Science Service (FSS) at Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. A scientist at the FSS, John Hayward, found blood on the inside and outside surface of the silencer, the latter not enough to permit analysis. The blood inside was found to be the same blood group as Sheila's, although it could have been a mixture of Nevill's and June's. A firearms expert, Malcolm Fletcher, said the blood was backspatter caused by a close-contact shooting. Scratch marks on mantelpiece Jeremy's cousins returned to the farmhouse to search for the source of the red paint on the silencer. In the kitchen they found marks in the red paint on the underside of the mantelpiece above an AGA cooker. A sample taken by a scenes-of-crime officer was found to contain the same fifteen layers of paint and varnish that were in the paint flake found on the silencer. Casts of the marks on the mantelpiece were deemed consistent with the silencer having come into contact with the mantel several times. Julie Mugford's statements Background On 7 September 1985, a month after the murders, Mugford changed her statement to police, now alleging that Jeremy had been planning to kill his family. As a result of her second statement, he was arrested the following day. Jeremy and Mugford had started dating in 1983, when she was aged 19 and studying for a degree in education at Goldsmiths College in London. She had taken a holiday job in Sloppy Joe's, a pizzeria in Colchester, where Jeremy had a bar job in the evenings. During police interviews, Mugford admitted to a brief background of dishonesty: in 1985 she had been cautioned for using a friend's chequebook after it had been reported stolen to obtain goods worth around £700; she said that she and the friend had repaid the money to the bank. Mugford also acknowledged having helped Jeremy, in March 1985, to steal just under £1,000 from the office