Read an Excerpt
Preface
‘Working on an interesting case?’ I asked my colleague sitting
opposite me.
She looked up from her microscope. ‘Not really,’ she replied.
‘There’s blood on the knife matching the victim and cuts in
the victim’s shirt that the knife could have made. The suspect
denies it but his fingerprints are on the knife. It’s the usual
murder stuff.’ She smiled and went back to what she was doing.
I have worked as a forensic scientist for over forty years,
during which I have dealt with some of the most terrible
murders. The murder detection rate in the UK is about 85 per
cent and most murders are not difficult to solve. There are
three reasons for this. First, most people are killed by someone
they know; the killer will be found within a small group of
family, friends and acquaintances. Second, the crime is the
end point of an escalating series of events that usually leaves
behind abundant evidence. Finally, the police methods used
to investigate this type of murder are highly effective.
Most of the murders I have worked on were pushed from
memory to be replaced by others in my busy operational role.
I gave evidence in only a small proportion of cases and it was
rare for me to get to know the outcome of any trial. Apart from
my memories, my only record of these cases, if I have one, is a
line in a notebook or diary recording the date I attended the
crime scene or court. My involvement was, in the end, relatively
superficial, as was my knowledge of the case. The public
profile of these cases also diminished, leaving the individuals
directly involved to deal with their impact and loss. The cases
in this book are different, for many reasons; they involve serial
killers (very rare), child victims, miscarriages of justice, poor
investigations or police misconduct, or they remain unresolved
or contentious. All have attracted a great deal of attention from
the media. My level of involvement was also very different. I
was much more closely engaged, sometimes over a very long
period, and I had extensive and detailed information about the
investigation. I knew these cases intimately and had some sense
of their often tangled trajectories.
A common theme in all of these inquiries is that they are
multi-layered; small stories are enclosed in bigger stories that in
turn are enclosed in yet bigger stories, like a set of Matryoshka
dolls. In this book, I deal with three layers. The outermost layer
could be called ‘societal’. These are the biggest stories; public
stories of expectations and beliefs, right and wrong, good and
evil, justice and injustice. I do not spend much time on this
layer, but all of the cases have some element of it.
The middle layer is what we might call ‘institutional’;
the systems that deal with murder investigation – for our
purposes primarily the criminal justice system (CJS).* The CJS
* There are many important elements to the criminal justice system –
social work, prisons, parole boards – but I confine myself to those I have
had some involvement with; primarily the police and the courts.
generally presents us with an image of procedural rectitude,
but these cases reveal a different reality under this polished
veneer. Although the CJS produces a binary output of guilt
or innocence,* this does not come from a mechanical or
algorithmic calculus, but from something more organic and
gelatinous. Component parts collide and merge in a loosely
linked, constantly moving network, like distributed ganglia in
some vast primitive organism. The CJS is all periphery and no
centre, a system that is not a system,1 a system that no single
individual fully understands. Organisations cooperate or
clash, muddle along or fail. My viewpoint of the CJS is narrow,
framed by science and technology, a peripheral domain that
is sometimes valorised, sometimes condemned. Science and
technology in this context does not stand alone; it relies on
human action, knowledge, imagination and fairness. It can
also be attenuated by human inaction, ignorance, failure
or prejudice.
The innermost layer of this book is the individual perspective;
my individual perspective from my direct involvement in
these cases. I have spent much of my working life looking
down microscopes: low-power microscopes, high-power
microscopes, polarising microscopes, comparison microscopes
and microscopes connected to other scientific instruments
that analyse colour or chemical structure. Looking at everyday
things under a low-power microscope reveals an extraordinary
micro-world. The surface of clothing yields an exotic array
of particles: fibers from the clothing itself and the items it
* Strictly speaking, not guilty. And of course in Scotland there is the
unique verdict of not proven.
has been in contact with, such as other clothing, furniture,
bedding; hairs from you, your family and acquaintances; fibers
and hairs from seats in your car; hairs from animals; minute
quantities of skin or dust; sparkling fragments of minerals and
crystals from domestic products, such as sugar or salt; glass
fragments, particles of foodstuffs, plants and insects.
But low magnification only takes you so far. Like scanning
the horizon with binoculars, it shows the trees and other
features but does not identify them individually. Increase
magnification a level and some of the debris can be more
clearly seen. It becomes possible to distinguish different types
of fibers and hairs, although it is hard to keep things in focus;
they tremble and disappear when you try to pick them up
with forceps. They are also more difficult to find. It’s rather
like trying to locate a star in the night sky with binoculars. At
higher magnifications, the Petri dish containing the debris
takes on the proportions of an airport long-stay car park, with
vast areas to search. Sometimes you look straight at the thing
you are hunting for but don’t realise it because it completely
fills the field in front of your eyes, like a giant cinema screen.
You can’t see the trees for the wood. In this world of higher
magnification, it is easy to get lost. And if you don’t know what
you are looking for, you can’t operate. You can’t search for
fibers when you don’t know what colour they are.
The cases in this book are under the microscope. For most
murders, those that are quickly resolved, low magnification
suffices. But when the police investigate the more difficult
homicides or unexplained deaths, they enter the equivalent of
the forensic scientist’s micro-world. The more closely they look,
the more they find, and the more detail they see. It becomes
harder to stay focused and what they discover becomes more
complicated and contradictory. Sometimes they don’t know
what they are looking for; but not looking is not an option.
These cases can become so saturated with information, so
fogged with detail that sometimes no sense can be made of
them. There is so much inchoate data that logic and reason
are overwhelmed.
These are cases that have puzzled me for many years, and I
have written about them in an effort to understand them and see
what they tell us about the business of homicide investigation.
The book moves constantly between the institutional and
individual perspectives. We shift from one lens to a second and
occasionally a third. Having worked on these cases, I thought
I knew their stories. I was wrong
