• Question: What is the best experience you have had doing your job? Are there any memorable crimes or cases?

    Asked by itchymist to Anna, Craig, Richard, Shane, Sue on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by abbiishaw, bettyabby, humakyle.
    • Photo: Richard Case

      Richard Case answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Forensics is a very rewarding career and its difficult to pick out a best experience, because I have solved less serious cases using lots of skill and solved murders relatively easily due to the quality of the exhibits.

      I think my best and most memorable experience was when I first presented evidence in court:

      As fingerprint evidence is often accepted in statement form you don’t get to go and present your evidence to a judge and jury very often… so my first case was a murder.

      An old man was killed in his home in Rochdale, Manchester; and I was able to find the killer as he left his fingerprints in the victims blood at the scene.

      I have also done a lot of work for The Fingerprint Society http://www.fpsociety.org.uk/ and have got to meet some very interesting people and learn new things… In 2008 I took part in a BBC News Story that marked the 60 years anniversary of a very important fingerprint case http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7573433.stm

    • Photo: Shane Pennington-Cooper

      Shane Pennington-Cooper answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      As I do not solve crimes or cases I would be unable to answer this from a current forensic scientist view, however the best experience of being a forensic mentor is helping a female student with dyslexia get through her second year of University, she was terrified she would fail but with my help I managed to teach her in a different way compared to conventional means. This alone made me very happy that I do what I do.

    • Photo: Craig McKenzie

      Craig McKenzie answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi itchymist and Abbiishaw,

      A good question,
      there are many memorable things that stay with me from my job – one of the most important things for me was the great people I met and worked with and this is still true now when I teach students and professionals. It is really rewarding to work with people you respect and trust and who you know will work hard (and play hard). When you work in such an interesting and intense job you often make very strong friendships with the people you work with. I also had the opportunity travel a bit to learn new scientific techniques and to attend meetings.

      In terms of memorable cases when I was a forensic scientist in Edinburgh one of my main jobs was to investigate suspicious fires. Sometimes these would involve other crimes which were being covered up using fire to destroy evidence. But not all suspicious fires end up with a criminal case or suspects- sometimes they are just accidents in which something unusual happens and we have to figure it out so we can let the family know what happened.

      As often is the case it has been the fires involving fatalities that I tend to remember most – these are always very sad whatever has led up to them and it is very important that we don’t forget that these people were just like us in many ways and we have to use all our scientific knowledge to figure out the most likely sequence events. It is a matter of respect to them and to make sure those who may be responsible are brought to justice that we do our job properly and with such care.

      In a fire scene i use my experience, the information I am given and my scene observations to look at the most likely causes and i carry out a number of tests back at the laboratory to look for things like traces of flammable materials (petrol for example) that might have been used to start a fire deliberately and also we look at the victims blood to measure a chemical called carbon monoxide to establish whether the victim was alive or dead when the fire started. We put all these things together to provide an opinion on the most likely cause based on the information we have.

      I have seen this careful work make such a difference to a case that then goes to court and to those left behind – there are some cases and people in particular that will always stay with me but out of respect for those victims i won’t say any more here. This is what made me love forensic science so much and which has made me want to continue training those who might be the next generation of forensic scientists.

    • Photo: Anna Williams

      Anna Williams answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi Itchymist – nice question!
      I have worked on a few rather interesting cases. A couple stick out in my mind particularly:
      I did the anthropology analysis on a skeleton of a man who committed suicide by overdosing on heroin. When we found him, his body was completely skeletonised, but there were some pieces of attached tendons and ligaments, and there were lots and lots of maggots. What was really interesting was that when we did toxicology (drug) analysis on the maggots, they had very high levels of heroin in them.

      I also examined the skeleton of a young woman which was found wrapped up in a carpet behind a skip on a building site in Sheffield. My analysis and a facial reconstruction eventually led to her identification. She had a very distinctive underbite and this helped her family to recognise her. She had been missing for over 10 years, and her family were so pleased to get her back!

      Another really good experience I have had was last year, when I went to Egypt to teach the Egyptian Police (like their MI5) how to deal with the dead after a mass disaster incident such as a bomb or a plane crash. They had some quite old fashioned views about what evidence is required for a positive (100% sure) identification of a body, and it was really rewarding to show them methods of examining bodies and taking and recording evidence so that they could better identify all the bodies they might have if there is a big incident like that. It really made me feel like I was making a difference.

    • Photo: Sue Carney

      Sue Carney answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I’ve worked on lots of very interesting cases, and they are all important. However, there are a few that are particularly memorable because they were particularly upsetting, especially the cases that involved vulnerable people such as the very young or the very old. One case that springs to mind is a very brutal sexual attack of an elderly lady. After having examined her clothes, no useful evidence was found to help address whether or not the suspect had carried out the attack. That can sometimes happen and doesn’t mean that the attack didn’t happen. It was only later, when I suggested we examine the suspect’s underwear, that we found some DNA on them that matched the lady, and which shouldn’t have been there if the man had no contact with her, which was what he was saying.

      The cases that I’ve found most exciting though, are cold cases. These are cases dating back 15 – 20 years or more, which have never been solved. Forensic DNA profiling was only just being invented in the late 1980s, and in the early cases in which it was used, needed lots of biological material (e.g. a large-ish blood stain the size of a 50p coin) to get a profile from. Since then, DNA profiling has become much more sensitive, to the extent that we can now sometimes obtain DNA profiles from very small amounts of material, such as a small number of cells on items that have only been handled by a person. These amounts of material are so small, that there’s nothing visible on the item to tell us where the DNA might be, we must use judgement to work out where on an item is the best place to swab.

      In cold cases, the police or Forensic Science Service (FSS) have kept material from the forensic work originally done in the case. This might include recovered hairs and fibres on ‘tape-lifts’ or microscope slides made from swabs taken in the original case. Using these new sensitive DNA profiling methods, we can take material from the slides or tape-lifts and obtain a DNA profile. I’ve worked on lots of cold cases from the 1980s and 1990s during my time at the FSS, and some have helped to identify the person responsible for a crime that happened 15 or 20 years earlier. It’s a good feeling to know that whilst they thought they’d got away with that crime after so long, the police have eventually caught up with them because of the DNA evidence I’ve helped to find.

      If you’d like to know more about DNA profiling in cold cases, I’ve written an article about it here: http://www.defrostingcoldcases.com/forensics/guest-post-dna-profiling-in-cold-cases-the-uk-process

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