March 18 – Pervez Mir, Pakistan team’s media manager, announces news of Bob Woolmer’s death. “Bob Woolmer has passed away. I am speaking from the hospital and all the team management is also at the hospital. Doctors have pronounced him dead. Bob has passed away and it is very shocking news to all of the team and the team management.”March 21 – Mark Shields, deputy commissioner Jamaican police, announces that authorities are treating the death as suspicious. “Having met with the pathologists, our medical personnel and investigators, there is now sufficient information to continue a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr Woolmer, which we are now treating as suspicious.”March 22 – Gill Woolmer, Bob’s widow, admits her husband might have been murdered. “I suppose there is always the possibility. I mean some of the cricketing fraternity, fans are extremely volatile and passionate about the game and what happens in the game, and also a lot of it in Asia, so I suppose there is always the possibility that it could be that.”March 23 – Karl Angell, a Jamaican police spokesman, confirms Woolmer was strangled. “The pathologist’s report states that Mr Woolmer’s death was due to asphyxiation as a result of manual strangulation. In these circumstances, the matter of Mr Woolmer’s death is now being treated by the Jamaica police as a case of murder.”March 27 – Jamaican police test Woolmer’s last meal to check whether it was drugged. According to Shields, Woolmer was “a big man, and unless he was drugged or impaired it would perhaps have been difficult to restrain him. We are looking at whether his food was drugged.”March 28 – Shields denies newspaper reports that Woolmer may have died after falling heavily against the bathroom sink and that a second autopsy was being ordered. “I can assure you there is no post mortem, there is no planned second post mortem.”March 30 – Shields tells media that Woolmer could have been strangled with a towel as there were no marks found on his neck. “If it’s some form of manual strangulation and there are no physical marks on the neck of the victim, therefore there may have been something between the hands of the assailant and the neck of the victim.”April 17 – says samples taken from Woolmer’s blood, stomach and urine have shown the presence of a foreign substance and has quoted an unnamed government official as saying that the substance could have been poison. Shields, however, decides not to comment on the report till all investigations are over. “We have some results from toxicology now, but they will require further investigation and analysis, and therefore it would be totally inappropriate for me to elaborate any further on that.”April 23 – Information relayed to the Woolmer family by Jamaican police suggest Woolmer may have been drugged with snake venom. According to Neil Manthrop, a South African commentator, “The detective told Gill they believe it must have been a natural poison, such as a snake venom, which leaves the body fairly soon afterwards.”April 27 – Police rule out the possibility that snake venom was involved. Shields, who is leading the investigation, told the BBC that there was no evidence to support that theory, and he also hit out at “wild” rumours which continue to surround the case, saying they were “causing a lot of distress” to Woolmer’s family.April 30 – A BBC investigation programme confirms that Woolmer was poisoned before being strangled and that that there is evidence of a drug being present in his system that would have incapacitated him. “It now seems certain that as he was being strangled, he’d already been rendered helpless, leaving him unable to fight back,” said Adam Parsons, the show’s producer. “The specific details of that poison are now very likely to offer a significant lead to finding his murderer.”May 7 – Newspaper reports suggest Woolmer may have been poisoned by a weedkiller, high concentrations of which were alleged to have been found in his stomach and on the outside of a champagne glass. Police sources confirm the presence of weedkiller in the glass while Pervez Mir reveals tht Woolmer was presented the bottles by travelling fans.May 8 – Inconclusive evidence leads a Pakistani investigator to suggest that Woolmer’s death was not a murder. According to Zubair Mahmood, one of the detectives sent to Jamaica, “Several tests have been sent to Scotland Yard and the results are awaited. And the most I can say [is] that the investigation … is inconclusive.”May 20 – A report in reveals that police in Jamaica have privately admitted that Dr Ere Seshaiah, the Kingston pathologist, was wrong to say that Woolmer had been strangled. Angell, however, said that the matter was still being handled as a murder investigation. “That will remain our position until such time as the results of the investigation are known; including the forensic and pathology analysis.”June 4 – Speculation grows that the pathologists’ findings were faulty. Shields, for the first time, hints at doubt on the finding of murder. “Usually we investigate a murder and we look for suspects but on this occasion, because of the lack of evidence to support the pathologist what we’ve done is gone out to prove it’s not a murder. We have to go with what the pathologist gives, and if I’d ignored it and it had turned out to be true I would have been lambasted for not treating it seriously.”June 12 – Jamaican police announce that Woolmer’s death was due to natural causes, not murder and closes the investigation.