torso in Thames
Forensic science close up
I suspect I’m not alone in sometimes railing against the time taken for real-life cases to come to court, or the release of dangerous criminals on technical grounds, or the vast sums spent on enquiries long after the event. How can people really recall events accurately years later? How can the judiciary live with the knowledge someone else was assaulted or kidnapped or died because they didn’t keep a criminal behind bars? How much money is wasted by the protracted goings on in our justice system? …
I occasionally dip into programmes like Forensics: the real CSI, or Silent Witness, or Professor Sue Black in action, and find the science fascinating. But I was brought up short in a more intense way by a detailed book about the work of the scientists whose job it is to provide evidence that will be robust enough to stand up in a court of law against other scientists and lawyers doing their damnedest to get the criminal off. Conscience duly smitten. How dare I criticise these people? The only wonder now is how those involved cope with the exhaustion, frustration and criticism, and keep persisting case after case after case. Some take years and years of meticulous investigation; some are never solved. Forget needle in a haystack; we’re talking a single hair or thread in a whole crime scene, a minute particle of a chemical in the bones of a whole nation.
The book is Shallow Graves, by forensic scientist Ray Fysh, (well, actually written for him by James Nally) – a fascinating insider’s view into the demanding work of gathering evidence. Fysh was a working class lad from South East London. Back in 1970, at the time he joined the Met Police, forensic investigation was seen as a niche area for geeks and boffins, but Ray and his team set about transforming it into an essential and integral part of police investigations. He progressed from being a toxicologist to become specialist advisor on all areas of forensic evidence gathering, helping to solve cases and stop violence, a key player in reducing murder rates and saving lives and minimising traumatic loss to families. No mean feat, huh?
So highly prized was his expertise, that he became the go-to man for many major investigations, cases indeed that strike a cold dread into the hearts of anyone who read or heard about them – the murders of Sarah Payne and Damilola Taylor and Billie-Jo Jenkins; London’s 7/7 and 21/7 transport bombings; the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko – that kind of level.
The detailed descriptions of what happened and how tiny factors like a thread or a hair or a shoe print or a radio-active isotope could clinch a case, make mesmerising reading. So, for example, in the case of Billie-Jo Jenkins in 1997, it was the pattern of pinprick blood spatter and minute skin particles on her foster-father’s clothing that eventually convicted him of the murder. Imagine the sheer impotence of the team, then, when seven years after her death, Sion Jenkin’s team successfully appealed against this incriminating evidence on the say-so or another expert, resulting in him walking out of prison a free man.
Who could ever forget the abduction and killing of 8-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000; those haunting photos of her beautiful innocent little face, and the devastation of her family? It took 7 months and 5 days to convict and charge Roy Whiting – months and months of sifting through a vast collection of items from Whiting’s white van and her makeshift burial site, constantly bearing in mind the mantra: Every contact leaves a trace. Then a black child’s shoe was found on the road; 350 fibres were extracted from the velcro strap; a few proved it was Sarah’s, worn on the day of her abduction; others were indistinguishable from fibres from a red sweatshirt on the front seat of Whiting’s van. And on that sweatshirt was a hair from Sarah’s head – bearing her DNA.
The scale of the case remains unparalleled. Police received over 35,000 calls from the public. Eight hundred premises, waterways and agricultural complexes were searched across five counties. More than sixty miles of roads were combed for clues. The case involved 910 police officers and 112 support staff, costing the taxpayer over £2 million. in all, counting everyone involved, 136,941 hours have been put in – which equates to 5,705 days, or 15.6 years.
And yet Whiting’s conviction ultimately came down to the discovery of a few fibres and a single blonde hair …
You can’t put a price on a moral imperative like getting justice for Sarah Payne and her family.
It took 25 years to catch David Fuller for the so-called ‘Bedsit murders’ in Kent; 34 years until he was sentenced. And again it was forensic evidence that convicted him. But in those intervening years he had been busy. Police found in his home a massive collection of written and filmed evidence of 10 years of violating 102 deceased females aged between 9 and 100 in mortuaries in Kent and Sussex hospitals where he worked as an electrician with access to all areas – crimes committed while the police were methodically looking for evidence for the bedsit murders.
The discovery of a tiny torso wearing bright orange shorts in the Thames was a huge challenge to Ray Fysh and the team. No child had been reported missing. There was no face to use in appeals to the public. Desperate to give this little boy some dignity in death, using applied science, they made amazing strides in tracking across continents to try to identify him, discovering that he was from West Africa, the victim of people trafficking for human sacrifices to appease African deities. No one was ever charged for his murder but the relentless pursuit of answers led to the development of ground-breaking techniques in familial DNA searches and geological mapping to identify where someone had lived – techniques since used to solve countless crimes. Ray sees this progress as the investigative team’s tribute to the little lad whose name they were unable to discover. They themselves assumed the role of his family and gave him a dignified farewell.
The constant struggle to find water-tight forensic evidence even in cases of blatant crime was so clearly evident in the case of the serial rapist who committed 8 such attacks in the space of a year, 4 of them in less than a month. He brazenly seized females aged from 10 to 52, dragging them into more secluded spots to carry out his sexual assaults. And when the evidence is deemed to be insufficient, the team must watch in horror those responsible either go free or be allowed out on parole or prematurely released. Their exhausted impotence surely knocks my semi-detached anger off the bottom of the scale.
The Night Stalker terrorised south London for 17 years, going on sprees of burglary and sexual assault and then lying low. He targetted elderly people who lived alone and attacked at least 98 victims – mostly elderly women but a few men, aged between 68-93. Though thousands of names were added to the ‘possible’-list based on forensic factors, somehow the real villain had been erroneously eliminated from enquiries early on, which meant he was thereafter not considered a possible suspect. Bizarrely investigators actually had his DNA, they knew about his shoe size, his accent, his smell, his MO, his Carribean origins. They suspected he was a carer of some kind, with a religious background, but again and again he eluded them. In the end it was his car which identified him, and the Jamaican taxi driver who had cared for his wife with MS and been a Jehovah’s Witness was finally arrested after 17 years of diligent work involving state-of-the-art equipment and countless experts.
The stories individually and collectively catalogue the colossal amount of work, the eye-watering costs, much of it not bringing results, which these skilled and patient people carry out. They show the huge hurdles to be overcome to get a conviction in court even where no-one is in any doubt as to guilt. I have a new respect for their stamina and dogged determination, and I am moved by their sheer humanity in wanting to give closure and dignity and a sense of justice to the families as well as the deceased. It’s a sad end to this tale that the government decided to cease funding this service which was the envy of the world on the grounds of cost.
Apologies for this long post … I’ll make it super brief next week!