Mr. Rideard turned his attention to the hammers recovered from Mr. Park's home and the marks found on the flattened pipe. He thought there was one hammer that could have been used to cause the marks, the Stanley claw hammer. It was more worn than the hammer used on the pipe could have been at the time of use. He accepted that other hammers could equally have caused such marks, and that one had to be a long way from conclusive in thinking that the hammer he saw had caused the marks. He told us that the hammer taken from Mr. Park's home is of a type produced in large numbers and has been sold for many years and is still available today, and we know it is, because Mr. Baxter had bought one later on.
Mr. Rideard's evidence was that any such Stanley hammer could have made the marks. He agreed that the new hammer that he was shown which Mr. Baxter had brought had a bevelled shoulder sloping away from the strike face as he described. He agreed that there was no such bevel mark detectable on the piping, but in his view whether the bevel would be detectable would depend on the completeness of the marks. He was shown the castings made by Mr. Baxter. He said that some of the marks were good, but he was unable to detect any bevel mark. Mr. Rideard thought that the sharp edges on the new bevelled hammer could produce marks of the type found on the piping, and that was where he diverged from Mr. Baxter. None of the marks he thought were sufficiently deep to reproduce that bevel. In Mr. Rideard's view, the bevelled face, any particular mark would have to be at least three millimetres in depth, and he did not think that the older type hammer that was produced to him, you remember the one with the chip out of it, could have made the marks that were seen. He agreed with Mr. Edis, however, that there was no conclusive connection between the marks on the piping and the hammer taken from Mr. Park's home. The marks could theoretically have been made by any number of hammers, particularly by a bevelled Stanley hammer of a very common type.