A homicidal cycling and running fanatic known for his meticulous nature in tracking his victims has been undone by location data from his Garmin GPS watch.
Police in Merseyside, in northwest England, announced that a jury last week found Mark Fellows, 38, guilty of two gangland murders: that of “career criminal” John Kinsella last year and gang member Paul Massey in 2015. Fellows was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Kinsella was gunned down on 5 May 2018 by a masked hitman on a bicycle who was wearing a high-visibility vest with yellow markings and black tape that CCTV cameras easily picked up.
Steven Boyle, 36, also found guilty in the killing of Kinsella, gave testimony against Fellows and acted as his spotter in the slaying, according to the Liverpool Echo. Boyle received a sentence of 33 years to life.
GPS watch
As the Liverpool Echo reported in December, during a search of Fellows’ home following Kinsella’s killing, police had seized a Garmin Forerunner 10 GPS watch. A prosecutor pointed out that the seized watch matched one Fellows had been wearing in photos taken during a road race – the Bupa Great Manchester Run – on 10 May 2015.
Investigators had taken the watch to Professor James Last, an expert in satellite-based radio navigation, to see whether the gadget had ever been to the area near Massey’s home.
It had. Professor Last testified that the Garmin had been near the victim’s home on 29 April 2015: almost two months before he was gunned down with a submachine gun. Prosecutors said that the trip was Fellows’s reconnaissance mission.
The watch mapped out Fellows’s journey and his escape route: a 35-minute journey from Fellows’s home to a church where he had lain in wait for Kinsella to take a walk with his pregnant girlfriend, then Fellows’s return path across a field towards woods and a railway line.
The Garmin also provided useful evidence regarding its wearer’s speed. Professor Last told the court that the Garmin wearer initially traveled around 12mph, suggesting that he was on a bike.
Professor Last said that the Garmin wearer slowed down to about 3mph on the grassland area, consistent with walking. Besides the Garmin GPS data, Professor Last also examined a TomTom Start satellite navigation system that police found in a car, and that prosecutors say was strongly associated with Fellows.
The TomTom data – the “Tomtology report” – showed that it often set off from an area near Fellows’s home and visited two locations that the prosecutor said were of interest in the investigation: one close to the home of a man with a van that prosecutors said Fellows used, and another area in which a mobile phone tied to Fellows was used, as the Liverpool Echo reports.
Given that CCTV repeatedly caught footage of Fellows on a bike, clad in the luminous yellow markings and covered with the black tape of his high-visibility jacket, police had already suspected that they knew who killed Kinsella.
Kinsella’s killing had commonalities with Massey’s murder. But it was the Garmin data that tied the two together, the Echo reports: the location data provided “key evidence” in the Massey murder, said the local paper.
Other device-based convictions
Other convictions based on location data have included the pivotal Carpenter v. United States, which concerned a Radio Shack robbery and the privacy of the phone location data that got the robber convicted. In June 2018, the Supreme Court ruled it unlawful for law enforcement and federal agencies to access cellphone location records without a warrant.
The legal arguments in Carpenter have gone on to inform subsequent decisions, including one from last week in which a judge ruled that in the US, the Feds can’t force you to unlock your phone with biometrics, including your finger, iris or face.
Tony Gore
This is just the start – ways in which the great data cloud will help. Take the modern smart thermostat for controlling your heating. Many of these have an “away” setting that turns the heating down when the mobile phone it is linked to is out of the house. This data must end up being stored short term on a server. I had the unfortunate occurrence of 3 weeks without broadband, and none of my smart controls could be controlled by anything on my network because they could not authenticate the server.
This strongly suggests that when the police are investigating a crime, maybe one of the first things they do is the digital equivalent of putting tape around the scene i.e. cutting off broadband, wi-fi and mobile access. AI mining for associated data will also be one of the new forensic tools (it probably already is and exists at the keyboards of the security services).
Riggarob
haha haha…. great no gun policy in the UK LOL. As far as taking things from people’s home to use against someone without a warrant, no matter what the crime, I’m completely against it. The US court judge just got it right when she said you needed a warrant to search anyone’s phone. And, no more making you open your phone if you use anything but a punch in code. Finally, a win for the common citizen.
David
In the US there were over 8100 homicides in the US where guns were used. Note that number does not include suicides, accidents etc. Just homicides. In the UK there were under 100. Per capita that is about 100 times more than in the US.
Steve
I am not surprised to see that there are no sources cited here. I don’t swallow your “statistics”.
Paul Ducklin
I wondered about the stats, too.
A really quick Google search took me to an official report from the Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) that gives the number of homicides by shooting in the UK for the year ending March 2017 (New Year’s Day used to be 25 March and the UK financial year still follows the April to March rhythm).
This document puts 2017 UK shooting homicides at 32, noting that the total was 45% lower than in 2007.
I couldn’t quickly find official “dot gov” shooting homicide figures for the US but several sources seemed to suggest that the total was at most 1/3rd of 40,000, where 40,000 is the total number of gun related deaths, 2/3rds of which, sadly, are suicides. Presumably the 1/3rd of non-suicide deaths includes shooting accidents as well as homicides. So let’s accept David’s figure of about 8000 shooting homicides as the US figure for the same period.
Population figures for 2017 seem to be about 325,000,000 for the US and 65,000,000 for the UK, making the US about 5x as populous.
8000 per 325M is about 25 per million. 32 per 65M is about 0.5 per million. That makes the shooting homicide rate 50x higher in the US than the UK. (Not 100x as the OP stated. His figure, based on 100 gun homicides in the UK rather than 32, should have been about 15x.)
Of course, that doesn’t say much about whether UK gun laws are effective at reducing shooting deaths (though it certainly seems they are), or whether they reduce the homicide rate (you are 10x more likely to be stabbed to death in the UK than shot)…
…but it does seem to be a simple truth that gun homicides are very rare indeed in the UK, and 50x less common, per capita, than in the US.
Wil
compare the knife related homicides now. a criminal will always find the tools he needs in order to commit his crime.
Paul Ducklin
I didn’t check how knife homicides have changed since the handgun ban in the UK – guns in general weren’t banned, only handguns.
Firearms have never in recent times been particularly easy to acquire in the UK. Unlike in the US, there is no legal “right” to own a weapon – the law explicitly states it clear that private firearm ownership (which includes air rifles) is a privilege.
Slow Joe Crow
I read about this in Velonews last week where they picked up on it because of the bicycle and GPS angle. Fellows’ use of a bicycle was creative and his failure to destroy an incriminating device is inexplicably stupid since cell phone tracking has been known for years so he should have known a GPS device would give him away.