The Murder of Maureen Cosgrove

During the first days of the investigation, detectives visited the home where George Maben lived in Rosehill with his mother in an attempt to verify his claim about how he had injured his hand. However, they saw nothing to indicate that the washing machine had been moved recently, as Maben had stated. Now believing that Maben had lied to them and with little to lead them toward anyone else, the murder squad detectives moved the intensity of their probe up a notch, making Maben their primary focal point.

Not swiftly getting anywhere, DCI McFarlane tried another approach and ordered that hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television footage from the day of the murder be retrieved and reviewed to check out Maben's alibi, footage of the locations where Maben had told them he had been on March 24. The effort paid off. Investigators discovered that Maben had met Lucy at the pub where they had their drink an hour later than he had told them. Another lie, it seemed.

Although gut feelings had led DCI McFarlane and his team to believe that Maben was their man earlier in their investigation, they were now all but certain that he was the murderer. For their case to stand up in court, however, they needed additional evidence before charging him with Maureen Cosgrove's murder.

Detectives had obtained a black jacket that Maben had been wearing on the day of the murder, and ran a forensic analysis on it for evidence. They found a number of fibers that were believed to have originated from a red top worn by Maureen on the day she was killed, and the investigators reasoned that they could only have gotten onto Maben's jacket as a result of close contact with the victim. Not surprisingly, the forensics team also found a number of black fibers on Maureen's body that were similar to fibers from Maben's coat.