Welcome to the first of this academic year's Mansfield Public talks.
Those you don't know me. I'm head of Mansfield. I'm the principal here.
And it's wonderful to see so many people. I'm delighted in particular to welcome you because this today is our second and Jocelyn Bell
Burnell lecture in science in honour of our Professorial Fellow and then just Lynn Bell,
Professor Belvin. And she's here, I'm very pleased to say. The reason we have a public lecture named for Jocelyn is because she discovered pulsars,
the dead remnants of massive stars, which you get after a supernova explosion.
When she was a graduate student at Cambridge.
And the significance of that discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prise in physics while she was still a graduate student.
But despite Jocelyn being the person who discovered pulsars, which she's talked about in one of these talks,
the prise was awarded to her supervisors, Anthony Hewish and Sir Martin Ryle.
Jocelyn is the embodiment of modesty, and she defended that station and said, While I was just a research student at the time, that's how it works.
But I know that we and I think now the world feel the injustice of that on her behalf.
And we are very happy that since then Jocelyn has received very many honours.
And when I just arrived here in 2018,
she got a breakthrough prise for physics from the Fundamental Physics Prise Foundation, and she pledged all that money.
And it was a lot of money to create scholarships for women and minority and
refugee students to follow her footsteps and undertake research in physics.
And she felt because I remember her saying that she did that because she felt that she had spotted something different, because she felt so different.
And I think it's really important reason that diversity of thought matters.
It's not just about fairness. It is about fairness.
It's about people having ideas that interlink and make you think of things you hadn't thought about before.
And it just is so very much an admirable thing about Jocelyn and something that we hope that we can develop here at Mansfield.
Now, in 2021, Joslin joined Albert Einstein,
Edwin Hubble and Stephen Hawking by becoming a recipient of the prestigious Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal for Astronomy.
And what happened since the last time we had one of these lectures. So we need to congratulate her on that.
And she was also one of the small group of women scientists who set up the Athena Swan Charter,
which is now used across the globe as a framework for transforming gender equality within higher education and research.
So we're delighted that Jocelyn is professor and fellow here.
We are delighted that we are able to honour her in this way.
And we hold the Justin Burnell lecture in November because Jocelyn's discovery of pulsars is on the 28th of November 1967,
and that's our way of honouring her incredible contribution to science and to encourage that kind of enquiry by everyone now.
And we owe the presence of Jocelyn at our college to Professor Stephen Gandel, who's here tonight, and his wife Catherine Blundell,
and who are a truly dynamic husband and wife team who both world leading scientists and professors at Oxford.
And Catherine Blundell is at St John's where our speaker tonight, Steve Black, is the new president.
And so Catherine and Stephen introduced to Mansfield and have been great champions of the establishment of his lectures.
I want to thank the Plum Devils as well. And in a minute I'm going to hand over to Steve, who's going to be in conversation with our speaker,
Professor Dame Sue Black, and then take questions from you.
But I do just want, having said a great deal about Jocelyn, to welcome our speaker this year, Professor Dame Sue Black.
It says a lot about the calibre of Jocelyn that because this other great Scottish
scientist knows her for and they've known her for a long time and that she was,
I think, pleased.
And in her first term, first couple of weeks really at Oxford, was prepared to take on another thing and come and give this talk for us.
So that's something else that we owe.
Jocelyn Su is the words of the UK's leading forensic anthropologist, and her work has ranged from war crimes investigations,
Kosovo to single suspicious deaths in the UK, everything in between.
And she's been recognised nationally and internationally for her work in the fields of war crimes investigations, mass fatalities and other casework,
and also recent research focussing on the identification of perpetrators of child sexual abuse from indecent images of children.
It's very hard work.
I am in awe of her for doing it and she's had a string of awards, which I'm not going to read out, but a lot of awards for this work.
And Steve is going to talk to her about it and then take any questions from you.
So thank you very much for coming tonight, I think.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Helen. Thank you so much for being with us this evening.
The first question I wanted to ask you were described by Helen as a forensic anthropologist.
So what is a forensic anthropologist? So most people say, what's the difference between a forensic anthropologist and a forensic pathologist?
And they usually say about a hundred thousand a year and salary is the difference between the two.
So the forensic bit just tells you you're an expert when I'm sorry if I sound like a tuba, but.
Well, welcome to Oxford. Precious flu, which I got a week ago, so I'm normally about an octave higher, so I do apologise for this.
So the forensic bits comes from the Latin word forensics, which means pertaining to the forum and the forum of the courts of Rome.
So fundamentally, anybody who's a forensic, anything, it just means that they take their anything into the courtroom and the anthropology,
which is the Greek, it is the study of the human or what remains of the human.
So when you put forensic anthropology together. Primarily it was this life for me about densification.
What a pathologist will do is they will tell you about a cause of death or a manner of death.
Our job is to say, who was this person when we're live?
Or if I'm looking at images, is the person who's in the images the suspect that we.
Oh, my. Is in the way I do. You know, I love this necklace.
And I knew it was going to be problems from day one. So let's let's take that out of the way.
Let's get rid of that and hopefully we'll be doing fine.
Guess. So can you tell us what a forensic anthropologist is at some point in your life?
You must have decided I want to be a forensic anthropologist.
No, nobody wants to do that for a living, do they?
You know, there's no career prospect in school that says, you know, I'm going to be a forensic anything, quite frankly.
And it's a wonderful thing when you get to be so old that you can look back on your life
and you can look at the path you've taken and you can find those crossroads and you say,
Why did I make that decision at that crossroad? And it's only time that often allows you to do that.
And so I've been doing a little bit of that of late, and I go far enough back.
I think my father I was a daddy's girl. I adored my father.
Any excuse I had, I was this little shadow. I went everywhere with them, God bless them.
And my father was a great shot. And so he would go out shooting rabbits and deer and whatever it would be, it was always for the pulse.
It was never for sports. Never, ever.
And so from about four or five, I can remember walking back with my dad carrying rabbits or pheasants or whatever it may be.
And my mother was a bit squeamish, so my mother was happy to cook them, but she was never happy to do anything else.
So I had the excuse of sitting at the back door with my father,
and he would teach me how to skin a rabbit or how to grow like a deer or pluck a pheasant or whatever.
So from about five or six, I was really quite happy having hands covered in blood and having dead animals around me.
It just it just seemed like a normal part of life.
And then classic Scottish Presbyterian, as my father said to me when I was 12, what are you going to do for a job?
And I thought he meant when I grew up. No, he meant when I was 12.
What job are you going to get? Because his rationale was, you have five days in school.
You have two days when you're doing nothing else. And that's the devil's work. So you have to be doing something for those two days.
So go out and get a job and whatever job you get, half of your earnings must go to your mother for your board and lodgings.
And so at 12, it seemed perfectly logical to get a job in a butcher shop.
And so the entirety of my teenage years were in a butcher shop up to my elbows again,
and blood and muscle and bone and feeling quite comfortable about that.
All of my friends were working for fashion stores or the makeup counter on boots or whatever.
But you know, I was up to here and liver and such things, just feeling, you know, it was a perfectly normal thing.
And my biology teacher in school and teachers are so important.
But my biology teacher said, when you go to university and I didn't know I could because nobody in my family had ever been to university.
So I didn't know what that meant. But I just I worshipped this.
There's a there's a sort of repeating history of me worshipping men in my life.
And I don't mean that I really don't. But he was just my favourite teacher.
I just adored him and I still talk to him to this day. And he said, You know, you need to go to university.
So I wanted to be a biologist like him. And my first two years in university, I had no idea of why I was there.
I was so bored and I couldn't see any point to what I was doing.
Forgive me for the for the botanists in the room.
But, you know, I cut so many plant stems and half with a razor blade, I never understood the point of why I was doing it.
I had petri dishes full of dead fruit flies,
figuring out whether they had rounded bottoms or pointed bottoms because it had something to do with genetics that I never understood.
And by the end of the second year, I was really questioning, what am I doing here?
And in the third year, they gave me the opportunity to go into the anatomy departments.
And of course, the anatomy department is just a butcher shop with a different animal.
And so that Rubicon of crossing into a dissecting room and knowing that the person in front of you.
Actually gave their remains solely the purpose for you to learn that really
important moments that I thought nobody is ever going to give me a gift like.
This is what the value and the cost of education is about.
And so dissecting what we did was we dissected a human from the top of the head to the bottom of the toe,
took an entire year to do, and I knew I'd come home.
That was where I was comfortable. So at that point I thought, okay, I'm going to be an anatomist.
And in anatomy, most of the research projects we're doing things like LED levels in rat brain or carcinoma in hamster pituitary.
And I have a pathological fear of rodents.
So my girls have never had a pet hamster, gerbil, mice or anything.
In my books, the only good rodent is a dead rodent.
And so there was no way I was ever going to pick a dead rat out of a bucket to do anything with it.
And so I went to the member of staff and said, What else can I do?
And she said, Well, why don't you think about looking at human remains and how can you identify people from human remains?
And that's where my research project went.
When I was in, I think it was about the first year of my Ph.D. There was a case came into the Department of Forensic case,
and I'm so old that these were in the days before DNA was being used in a forensic investigation.
And this case resulted from an individual who had was flying a microlight.
And the microlight crashed off the east coast of Scotland and his body went into the sea.
And it was a couple of weeks before a body was washed ashore and a couple of weeks in the North Sea.
You're not pretty. But by the time you come in and there had obviously been some damage to the area around the head
and the means of identification at that time was could you identify somebody from their face?
But the face was just not usable because of the saltwater.
The fingerprints had gone, so you couldn't use that. There had been so much damage to the face.
We couldn't use the teeth and there was no DNA.
So the question was this body that came in. How likely was it to have been the young man who went missing on the microlight?
Now, what we could tell is from enough of the soft tissue that it was a male,
that it was a young male of the right sort of age, that the height was about right and the ethnicity was about right.
And that's okay. But that just tells you you've got a man between 25 and 35, four, 8 to 5 foot ten and height and point.
That doesn't tell you it's the person. And so you then have to start looking at the identifying features.
And we identified that he had a birthmark just below his left nipple.
So we spoke to his mother and his mother said, my son had no birthmark.
My son was perfect. I thought, Oh, no, that's difficult.
We spoke to his girlfriend and his girlfriend said, Yeah, of course, he's got a birthmark and.
Really important that when you're asking the question of somebody, that you ask the question of somebody who notes the intimacy,
often your mother, the last person to know what you you may be hiding underneath your clothes.
You may need to speak to somebody more personal. But the importance of that was once the girlfriend.
When we released the body, the Procurator Fiscal was happy that it would be that individual.
That girlfriend accepted it. But the mother never did.
She never accepted it was the body of something which is no problem do the DNA test.
But at that time we couldn't.
And that was a real challenge to say not only are we perhaps in some cases, looking at identifying someone for the purposes of the courts,
but we're actually trying to convince family that the body we're giving back is the person that they're missing.
And sometimes family don't want to know that because they want to be able to keep the hope alive that the person is.
And sometimes we bring back is really hard.
That was a really long answer to say, why did I want to become a forensic anthropologist?
I didn't. It just kind of happens that way.
So you you you found that career path by a security route and that you've clearly thrived in this and been extraordinarily successful.
What is it you think makes a good forensic anthropologist?
A huge amount of curiosity. So you never accept anybody's word for anything, which, again, I know I can hear that I've got problems on this as well.
So not quite working. I mean, I'm happy to.
It's still here. Let's try it again.
But maybe. Sounds like the battery is gone.
I don't know if there's a spare one. It might be something. I'm happy to use that if you are.
Yeah, that's no trouble at all. So what was the question?
What makes a good for a good forensic anthropologist? First of all, they need a curiosity.
So you never believe anything that anybody tells you,
because there is always more than one side to any story and you need to be able to listen to all sides.
Your job as you go into the courtroom is to be an impartial scientist.
And you can't be an impartial scientist if you're only listening to one side of the story.
You have to listen to all sides. So we like to ask a lot of questions.
For an anthropologist, I think you need to be an anatomist.
There is a lot of training that is done on human skeletal remains, but the skeleton is just a small part of the entirety of the body.
So you really need to understand all of the soft tissue as much as you do the heart tissue.
You need to have skin that's as thick as a rhino because if you're going to be a forensic, anything,
those lovely lawyers that we have in the courtroom, she says, looking at Helen, their job is to make your life difficult.
And so you really have to be almost unflappable in difficult circumstances, and you have to have a really strong stomach.
So you have to be prepared for what you can't be prepared for.
And often in a team, the police who are in that team or the military or in that team will look to you as a scientist,
too, to not be affected by what is going on around you.
And you become an anchor in many ways for those teams.
So you do have to be very, very carefully grounded in what you do.
I mean, you mentioned there about the relationships you have in your role with with other bodies.
I mean, one of those is the police. So working as a scientist with the police.
How how does that work? Do they do they respect you or do they.
You'd have to ask them if they respect me.
I have never found and we talk about police and military, not so much these days, but in the past there's been quite a misogynistic approach.
I've never had that. I have never in any way felt that I have been treated negatively because of a female.
In fact, quite the opposite. So if you imagine in Kosovo, we're at a crime scene and it is in the middle of nowhere.
It is not like CSI. If you think CSI is what the reality of, it's like, it really isn't.
We have no running water. We've got no electricity.
There's no security. I mean, it really is quite grim.
And, you know, when you're the only woman on the team, these are very obvious things.
But you monitor how little you drink because if water goes in one end of you, it has to come out the other end of you.
And whilst it's easier for men because they will find a tree, it's much more difficult for women.
And I find that the men in the team,
they recognise that there were some situations that were more challenging for a woman and they never, ever made you feel uncomfortable.
So I thought I was very, very lucky.
But that doesn't make you immune to the fact that when you're a part of that team, they're not going to cut you any slack.
Absolutely none.
So we had a mortuary in Kosovo, which was a disused grain store, and they knew that my my fear of rodents was was a real fear of rodents.
So the military, God bless them, they'd go into the mortuary first thing in the morning, make a load of noise, frighten all the mice and the rats out.
And then it would be, you know, in you go. Now, I've done my bit. Get on with that girl.
Or when we were at Pontecorvo Meat Market, one of the techniques that they had was that they would dig a mass grave,
the bodies would go in and they would place something like a horse or a cow on the top.
So when you smell decomposing, the expectation as you dug down was you'd find an animal.
And so we were digging in podia of a meat market one day and you're sitting on the on the bumper of the car,
and you could see that they'd hit something. And I went to move forward.
And one of the officers bear in mind that they're carrying firearms at stay.
And when an officer with the firearms says stay, you genuinely do stay.
And what had happened was they'd hit this liquid horse and it was a rat's nest within the liquid horse.
And so, of course, all the rats shot off, down, down, the sort of, you know, rat tunnels.
And then once they'd gone, you went, okay, now get into the hole with the liquid horse.
So there's no suggesting that as a as a girl, you're going to need any special treatment.
But they were also sensitive enough to know that that was my genuine jumper.
But they weren't going to treat you any differently whatsoever.
Get in the hole with a liquid horse and you knew you were going to smell bad for weeks on end when it came to that.
So moving on from the police side, you also mentioned about working with with lawyers.
And I'm a physicist, so I'm used to have. A scientific idea.
I'm working on questions by colleagues in the in the part of scientific debate.
But that works within a framework of respect about certain ways of arguing.
Inevitably you get called into a courtroom where there's two sides and it's
adversarial and there might be a side that's higher to you or is in the crown,
for example. And there's another side that's trying to show that somebody is innocent of whatever crime the crown is being produced by.
And you have the lawyers then insisting he was an expert witness.
So that's a very different kind of way of having your science being examined.
And there are there are good lawyers and there are bad. So I have had some experiences in court where it has been so utterly fair.
And you think those are the good quality lawyers who are there to question you on your evidence?
And that's what we're there for, is to have our evidence questioned. And you need to be prepared as a scientist that you are impartial.
You might have have produced your report at the request of the prosecution or the defence, but it shouldn't make any difference which side.
You're not on sides. When you go into the courtroom, you are an impartial scientist.
Your evidence should be the same on either side. There are some lawyers where it really is a gladiatorial arena and it is going to be an arena.
And whoever credit the the witness. Well, not necessarily to discredit the expert witness.
Some some will try to do that if they feel that's something that will be beneficial to their case.
But their case is about representing their clients and they have to represent their clients as best as they think and feel they're able to do.
And there are some that will use some tactics and others who simply won't.
And so we often find that that lawyers will come after us in three ways.
So the first one will come in after our evidence, and that's exactly what they should be doing.
It's about testing the science, testing the theory. How sure can you be?
Are there other options that perhaps you haven't thought about and where an expert witness makes a mistake?
Often as they feel, I'm a prosecution witness, so my job is to support the prosecution case.
No, it's not. That's not your job at all. Your job is to help the jury.
And the jury are the most important people in that courtroom because they're the ones who will decide.
And we have to try and explain the evidence to them so that they can make a sound decision.
So our evidence is fine sometimes. So they will come after you in terms of processes and procedures.
And I've seen a colleague really just brought down in courts because the question was, how long did you spend looking down a microscope?
To which the answer she gave was, I don't know, was about ten, maybe 12 hours.
What do you mean you don't know? Isn't the job of an expert witness to record everything you do?
So shouldn't your notes have the point at which you went onto the computer under the microscope and the point to which you came off?
So you should be able to tell me to the minutes to the hour, how many hours you spent.
If you can't keep that level of notes, what kind of an expert witness are you?
And I just it was just awful to watch. You could see that she didn't have the rebuttal skills that she needed.
And so at the end of the day, they decided that she was not a credible witness.
And so she literally was taken out of the courtroom on the fact that she hadn't written down how many hours she had spent on a microscope.
And if they can't get to you on that, they'll come after you personally.
And by that I mean they will give the junior lawyers free rein to say, go see what you can find on social media,
on Facebook, on Twitter, on whatever, because we're looking for a way that that will give us an inroad.
So I've seen a colleague who they went online and finds a lecture that she gave ten years before they brought it in and said,
ten years ago, you said this. Here's the lecture that you gave.
Goodness knows when you're not saying something different. So what's happened in between?
So sometimes you've no way of knowing what's going to come at you.
And I had a truly horrendous moment where it wasn't me that had the horrendous moment.
It was my young colleague.
And I gave evidence, first of all, and it was fine because it was after my my evidence that they went and that that was absolutely fine.
But when they got to him, that they went after him personally and they said to him, What's your relationship with Professor Black?
And he said, Well, she's my head of department. They went, Oh, no, I think it's more than that, isn't it?
And he said, I could feel my face getting better. And he said, The redder I got, the more guilty I felt about something I'd not done.
And and he said, Well, I don't know what you mean. And he said, Well, I think it's a bit bit of a stronger relationship than that, isn't it?
And he said, no, it absolutely certainly isn't. But they were just trying to rattle him.
And if at any point that there had been something inappropriate happening,
which there wasn't, then, you know, he might have said, oh, yes, you're right.
You know, we have had a bit of a fling or whatever. And that was just their way, too, to get.
To him and to and to rattle him now often will find that judges in court will say,
you're expert witnesses, your big boys and girls, you know, sort of out for yourself.
And often they won't step in, whereas they will step in when it's witnesses who are members of the public, for example,
because there is a bit more of a protection there for us in many ways, we kind of get left to of our own devices.
But I have an arch nemesis in Scotland who is called Donald Finlay, who's now Casey.
And I love Donald Finlay because you know that when you get on the stand with him, he is going to give you the roughest time you could imagine.
And I met up with Donald. He had cross-examined me for about 4 hours in a particular murder enquiry.
And afterwards I said, Donald, you were really hard on me in there.
He said, I, he said, I like to get you in court.
It's a bit of a challenge. These pathologists are easy, he says.
And you think, I don't want to be your challenge? But it but it is really an alien place at times for a scientist to be, I think.
I think it was also a great encouragement for any science students who hear about record keeping.
Oh, please. Yes. You're never going to regret keeping too many records.
Not ever. And every photograph take another ten, because the very photograph you want will be the one that you didn't take.
And times and dates and times and data and sound.
Yep. Yes.
Well, when you when you're coming to do your work identifying a body and maybe even you got, you've only got bones and maybe not an entire skeleton.
What's the what's the bone you most hope to find that's going to be the most important, most informative.
Well, I mean, given a straight choice, I'd rather have a whole body is the truth, because then there's so much more information that you can get.
One of my areas of expertise is in human dismemberment, and so there isn't necessarily a favourite parts,
but there are different parts of the body that will tell you different things.
And so if you're particularly, you know, even if it's just skeletal and we're looking for evidence, is this masculine and feminine,
then I'd quite like to have a bit of pelvis and I'd like to have a bit of skull if we're looking at is this a child?
And I'd quite like to have a bit of legs. Thank you very much indeed. It just differs.
But there's a lovely bone, you know, there's a favourite bone, I have to say,
if I'm allowed to have one, and it's the one that sits just under your collar.
So it's your collarbone, your clavicle, when it was being designed, you know, whoever designs us,
and that's up to everybody independently what fun they had with this bone, because it's a ridiculous shape.
First of all, it doesn't do anything functional at all. You can actually remove the clavicle and providing you stitch the muscles back together again.
You don't need it.
And in fact, jockeys used to have the clavicles removed because if you fall off your horse, it's the bone that's most likely to be fractured.
And there's some very big blood vessels underneath there. So you want to avoid them if you possibly can.
So if you can remove them, so much the better.
So you don't really need them, but they're the first bone that starts to form in you as a foetus when you're inside your mum.
So just in the first few weeks, within sort of 6 to 8 weeks of, of you being made, that bone is starting to form.
And I think that that's really, that's a really cool thing to be is the first one.
And it's so it forms in the shape that stays with you for the rest of your life.
So onto genetically it is fit for purpose, whatever that purpose is, because it doesn't change its shape.
And as you're a baby growing, it adds about a millimetre a month so that you can age a baby really very accurately from the length of their clavicles,
which is why that's the bone quite often that they will look at. They'll look at the femur, but they'll also look at the clavicle.
How long is it once you're you're born, that's the bone that survives the best.
So wherever we're looking at bones through fire or explosion, I can pretty well guarantee the two areas I'll find will be the collarbone.
And a bit of this at the base of your skull. That's called the sort of mastoid area.
So they survive really well, and they're also the last bone to stop growing.
So when the rest of your body has stopped at the end of being a teenager, this bit just in the middle here keeps growing until you're about 25.
And that's really useful for us in age estimation. So it's got so much going for it.
And I just love the fact that it's called the clavicle. It comes from the word clavicle, which is the shape of a Roman key.
I just love the idea that you have this key that sits underneath your collarbone.
So I kind of like the clavicle. It's a it's a bit of a soft spot for me.
You said you were an expert in dismemberment. You've worked on a number of a murder case.
I guess in the loss of and a lot of murder cases.
People are doing it for the first time and they've got into some shocking situation that they haven't been able to get out of.
And they're they're not professionals yet, which means that mistakes are made and they're probably trying to hide the evidence.
So that's something. Yes. I mean, most people do not set out to murder someone else for whatever the television tells us,
whatever CSI programmes tell us, whatever the novels tell us.
Most people do not set out to murder somebody else.
It usually happens in a moment of passion, whether it is fuelled by drugs or it's fuelled by alcohol.
And you find yourself in a position you've lashed out, and now you have a situation where you have a body.
Most people will feel suitably shocked that they will confess at that point.
They will phone for an ambulance, they will phone for whatever, and the body will be found.
But there are a few individuals who do have that panic of thinking, What do I do?
And they may have watched the television. They may have have read the books.
And it makes it sound as if it's really easy and it isn't.
Human bodies are heavy things, and they're not very cooperative.
They've got arms and legs that fluff about. And so they tend to also be a little bit wet.
So whether we're talking about vomit or we're talking about other parts of body suppressants, they're often not very pleasant to handle.
So you're faced with it and you think, What do I do with it? And the question is, I need to get rid of it.
And usually what happens is the person who's responsible wants to try and get as much distance between themselves and the body as they possibly can.
And they think, Where do I put it? You will find bodies that are secreted in houses.
You'll find them underneath floorboards, or you'll find them in a cupboard in an attic.
Used to be that babies were often found up chimneys behind bath panels.
All of these sorts of places where you can hide a body.
But very quickly you realise that bodies are anti-social things and they start to smell and smell badly very, very quickly.
So you suddenly realise, even though you might have lived with it for a few days, you can't keep on living with it.
So now you have to dispose of it and some people will go in the back of the car.
So in the boot of the car, I need to get rid of it. Where will I go?
They will often go to somewhere that they know.
And of course it's really difficult to not be caught on an automatic number plate recognition anywhere in the UK at the moment.
So people will be able to follow your car. Bodies tend to end up in bodies of water so that we often find them in rivers or we find them in
locks or we find them being washed in ashore because people think we can just dump them out to sea.
So bodies keep returning. They're like boomerangs. You can't really throw them away.
They will come back and some people will think, well, actually,
it might be better if I if I can cut the body into pieces because it's really heavy and it's really difficult to move a whole body.
So I'll put it into pieces and most bodies will go into five pieces.
So you have to offer limbs to lower limbs and a trunk. Very bad idea to try to separate the trunk.
You do that. It's very messy. It's very smelly and it's really very unpleasant.
So best not to address the question. Do most people have, you know, the determination to remove a head?
Removing the head is actually really challenging. So it's that as the head and the trunk and to upper limbs and to lower limbs.
So you think, well, it must be easy to take a limb off and most people will go to the kitchen and in the kitchen you'll find a knife.
And so they start cutting. And then suddenly they realise as they're trying to get through an arm, a bone is a really difficult thing to cut through.
So you will often see the first place that they have gone to in the dismemberment.
You have several of these attempts to cut the body and they think this isn't working.
What else can I do? This is somebody who's learning on the job.
So it's saying, okay, this doesn't work for us will work. I've got a saw in the shed.
And so they'll go and they'll get a sore and they'll realise that you can't
actually cut through skin with a saw because the blade catches up so they realise,
okay, I have to cut the soft tissue first,
then I have to try to solve through the bone or if it's not sawing they might use if they have a blade in the kitchen,
for example, you know, one of these meat cleavers, that might be the kind of thing they do.
So the first limb they remove is usually a mess, a complete and utter mess, but they've learnt in the first limb how to take it off.
So by the second limb you see it's a much cleaner removal.
And so for the third and so for the fourth. And how many times?
When you're walking along the street, do you see somebody pulling a suitcase?
Nobody thinks what's in the suitcase. And so you often find that body parts get transported from one place to another inside suitcases.
But that just dismemberment leaves a tremendous number of clues because it leaves a dreadful mess.
So where are people most likely to do it?
Well, the most likely to do it in a bathroom, because in a bathroom, you have a piece of furniture that is already the size of a human body.
It's called a bath. And so a body fits into a bath rather nicely.
It's got a drain, which means that a lot of the fluids go down the drain and it's got a water source, which means that you can wash it down.
So we're going to go to a bathroom. First of all, if they've used a cleaver or if they've used a soul,
we're going to have the marks on the side of the bath that shows what happened there.
And when we go down those drains, we're going to find all of the detritus that you would expect.
So there are well described patterns of what we expect to find.
We never expect somebody to be particularly efficient because most of us have never dismembered and will never dismember.
But we did have a case where a gentleman was dismembered.
And my colleague and I, we looked at it and we went, this is somebody who knows what they're doing.
And of course, the question from the police is, well, who's got that level of expertise?
A fellow forensic anthropologist could do it. You know, a surgeon could do it.
A vet could do it. Maybe a nurse could do it because the body was jointed and had gone through literally the major joints to separate.
And what we found out was that there are a certain group of individuals usually associated with the drug gangs and the major drug gangs.
And their job is to be a cutter. And they are trained how to dismember bodies.
And so if somebody wants to to lose somebody, so you've got a murder victim, you take them round the back of the nightclub.
The cutter cuts the body into pieces, the dumper takes the pieces and gets rid of it.
And that's the last you see of the individual. I never knew in my life that there was a career opportunity as a cutter for a drug gang,
and I suspect they are more in the process of cutting than we certainly did in our forensic investigation.
Yeah. So so when you watch a detective show on the television or read a crime novel, I.
I know you know well, MacDermott, but we're in Oxford, so I guess we should talk about Inspector Morse or Lewis or Endeavour.
So when you watch one of those shows and they have somebody who will be a forensic pathologist or whatever working at the time of the body and going,
Oh, yes, their stopwatches stopped at precisely this time. That's the time of death.
So how do you feel when you watch those kinds of. My husband's is banned from watching them.
I'm not I'm not allowed because I get so utterly incensed.
But I did love watching Morse. And I used to watch Morse with the story.
Now I watch and go that St Giles.
So I'm so totally Oxford now that I'm looking at what's going on and not really interested in the count, let's call it.
I know it's not St Johns, but it's definitely not ours. So I sort of look at it now in an entirely different light.
So it's a sort of architectural investigation for me, no more than it was,
but it's bearing in mind that these things are about entertainment, they're not about education.
And, you know, you can't let reality get in the way of a good story.
You just can't. And so for many of these, it's a necessary part of the story that you just stretch the truth a little bit.
But I don't watch them. But the some of the crime writers and you mentioned Val, are really very,
very focussed on getting the experience as realistic as they can because they
respect the reader and the reader will know when it sounds as if it's not true.
And so they want to get as close to it as they possibly can. So Val's a dreadful woman.
She's a really good friend of mine's a dreadful woman. And she'll phone me up and she'll say, Oh, what are you working on at the moment?
And you think she's looking for a story? That's what she's doing.
And she will get my research into one of her novels before I've got it into a scientific paper.
And you suddenly think, Oh my goodness me, if I end up in a courtroom and, you know,
I'm being I'm being questioned on the the fiction of what my science is from a McDermid book rather than the reality that will be a first,
but it's never got there. But they really do want to get as close as they can.
So for me, it's a busman's holiday that they will send me a chapter and say, Does this sound right?
What do I need to do differently? Would they say this? Would they do that?
And that for me is a bit of fun. But I'd never write something in that genre.
Never? No.
I just want to ask you one more thing before I open it up to the audience, because I'm sure there are people here who have questions to ask.
But you're dealing in your working life as a forensic anthropologist with some pretty tough things.
You've worked in Kosovo. You've worked. The aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia.
You've worked with a number of grisly cases and you're there at the sharp end of that life and death.
And of course, we will all end up one day as the body.
What do you think is a unique position that you're in and seeing life through that particular lens?
What perspectives does that give you on life? I was very lucky as I grew up on the west coast of Scotland and my best friend was my grandmother
and my grandmother was a classic Scottish West Coaster who believed in a life beyond this one.
And so I used to have the most wonderful conversations with my grandmother as a child,
and she believed that death walked alongside you every moment of your waking day.
And she believed that if if death was your constant companion,
you better make a friend out of it because you don't want to walk every day of your life with an enemy.
And she grew up in a little place called Glenelg in the 1800s, and she was not allowed to have a man who was a friend.
And so death to her was always a woman. So in my family, death was always a shame.
And somehow that she takes a little bit of sting out of it, takes a little bit of aggression out of it.
There's a kindness in death. There's a real compassion in death.
And I was honoured to be with my father as he took his last breath, who, as I said, she was the most important person in my life.
But my grandmother said to him, When your father dies because it's her son, when your father dies, you need to be there.
He won't want to die on his own. And so he had a horrendous dementia towards the end, and he was non-communicative for about a year.
And on the nights when he was dying and I'd said to him, Right, Dad, I'm going home now.
I'll be back in the morning. And a man who had not talked for a year, a fear came across his face that I saw and my oldest daughter saw.
And she said to me, You're not going anywhere tonight, Mum. And I said, No, I'm not.
I need to be here. My grandmother said, I need to be here with my father.
I need to be here with him. And at that 3:00 in the morning, that dead of night, the rattle came into his breathing as his lungs filled up with fluid.
And I was there with my father as he took his last breath, which for me was the biggest honour of anything that I could ever have been alive to do.
And I've never had a fear of death. My grandmother made sure I never feared death.
My father made sure that when that time comes for any of my family, I won't fear the death.
All respect it, but I don't fear it. And there is, I think, in our society, a change towards death.
The Victorians loved a good death. They celebrated a great death.
And in my parents generation, Granny, when she died, was laid out in the front room, in the coffin, and everybody came to say goodbye.
We've moved away from that. We've medicalized death and we've removed ourselves from it.
And I think we'd be a lot healthier and a lot happier in that acceptance of death.
We don't talk about it often enough, but when I see it and in my working world, then most of the time the really sad circumstances,
the the aggressive circumstances and the piece of advice that was given to me by a
senior officer was the only way to cope with this is to say you didn't cause it.
You couldn't have stopped it. Don't own it. Don't own the guilt.
It's not yours. Be a scientist. Find the evidence, recover the evidence, analyse the evidence, present the evidence, close the door and go home.
That death isn't in your family. It's not yours.
It's somebody else's. And you couldn't have stopped it. So don't allow yourself to become personally and emotionally involved.
It doesn't mean that we're clinical, but if we have to do our job and families rely on us to do our job impartially,
then we need to have that little bit of removal.
And it's the same of any clinician. You have to have a little bit of removal of yourself from the situation that's going on around you.
Thank you. Let's see if we have some questions in the room.
Anybody who would like to ask, we have a microphone going around.
So there's one at the back, I think maybe to. Nothing's out of bounds.
Hello. Hi there. Thank you very much.
I was wondering what you make of the use of forensic in DNA phenotyping, particularly in crime scene investigations and in physical reconstructions,
particularly in light of lots of studies which suggest they've been mobilised for racial profiling
in kind of criminal investigations in the US and increasingly in the European Union as well.
So in terms of forensic phenotyping, what they mean by that for those in the room who might not know that's being able to take the DNA,
is being able to extract information from the DNA that says, can I rebuild who this person might have been?
Can I tell something about their ethnic origin, for example?
Can I tell what colour of eyes they might have had? What colour of hair they may have had?
Would I be able to reconstruct their face if I knew what the genetics were that were behind the basis of that face?
So we have made huge leaps forward in terms of what we understand from DNA.
And most of those initial leaps forward came from the world of medical genetics.
It was about understanding the human and the variation the human.
What the forensic world does, it's a bit of a magpie in that it goes and finds all the shiny things that everybody else does in science.
And then we steal them and we try to then use them to answer some of the problems that we have and some of them we can answer quite well.
So if we're able to get a full DNA profile, we might be of colour.
Some of these eyes were. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't tell you what colour their contact lenses were that they might wear.
So it might tell us what colour of hair they would have, naturally.
But how many people in the room have the natural colour of hair that they perhaps their DNA was telling us about?
So we have to do everything with that pinch of salt that says some information will be really useful to others.
We have to be very careful. Can we reconstruct face reliably?
Well, I would say not yet. But that doesn't mean that it won't happen.
Science fiction has a wonderful habit of turning it into science fact because it's something that we can study.
I think it becomes really challenging when we start to look at ancestry because we live in such an incredibly cosmopolitan world.
What does it mean to belong to a particular group in this day and age?
Probably very little because we have so much admixture and we move around the world and we have
such a great amount of variation that it probably is definitive enough for us to be able to use.
So I think it's a great idea. It's something wonderful to play with.
But I have. Thank you.
Another question. Come on.
Anything? Yes, there's one here. It doesn't matter how silly you think it is, everybody else is thinking that.
Thank you so much for this.
I was wondering, it seems like in the past forensic careers were something you chose and you very much had a decision about.
Do you want to see gruesome content in your life or not?
And I think now you only have to open Twitter and you see images from Ukraine or, you know, any of the catastrophes around the world.
And I wonder if your career in forensic anthropology, you think,
has any lessons for the modern layperson who's just trying to navigate the Internet, for example?
Yeah, there's a lot more that's available to us now than there ever was.
And I at our freshers dinner at St John's, I talked about what it was like for me as pressure.
And I had come from Inverness, which was a terribly sheltered background and my first exposure as a fresher in Aberdeen University.
I wasn't that far away from Inverness. They ran a film and I was so shocked.
I can remember to this day how shocked I was by the film that they showed.
And it was the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had never seen men in stockings and suspenders.
It didn't happen in Inverness.
So what was shocking to me back then is so mainstream now that there is no doubt we have a little bit of a desensitisation I think happens.
But the desensitisation of what you see on the screen.
Very to what you see when it's in front of you.
I don't think that ever goes away. So it should be in the past.
Forensic experts, they thought, you know, we're immune. There's never going to be anything we see that is going to affect us.
And one of my dearest friends, Dick Sheppard, who's a forensic pathologist, wrote a book called Unnatural Causes.
And Dick has done thousands of post-mortems in his life.
And the bravest, one of the bravest men I know,
he talked about being in a bar and he heard somebody drop ice cubes into a glass and he suddenly realised he was back in Bali following
the Bali bombings and all the rows of bodies that were laid out that families had to go along and trying to find their loved one.
And he said, I find myself going into a downward spiral and I couldn't get out of it.
And he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.
I have never known of any pathologist who has been brave enough to say, I'm just as susceptible to this as anybody else's,
and we might think we're immune because we can see all these dreadful things on television.
But when you're in the mortuary and you're faced with it, what you see,
what you hear, what you smell, that it's so strong, the smell you can taste it.
It never, ever leaves you. That's an assault on so many senses at the same time that you never, ever take that for granted.
So you might see it. But the reality of it is something very, very different.
Very. And we have to try and train our students to be able to cope with that.
And we do it very gradually. So if I can take them through a dissecting room, I can use the dissecting room to talk to them about death.
I can talk to them about muscle and bloods and bone.
I can take them into a post mortem in a hospital where it's it's not a violent environment and we can start to get them more acclimatised towards it.
But the first time I take them out on a case, I spend a lot of time talking to them about what it is that they're likely to see.
I then talk about them to say it's okay for this to be difficult, but you need to talk about it afterwards.
So I have a wingman and she knows me better than my husband does, and I've known my husband since I was 17 and she's my wingman.
And she knows that if I start behaving differently, I drink more than I shoot.
I'm not sleeping at night. She recognises there's a problem and I do the same for her and you need to have that person you would trust your life with.
Who's going to watch out for your wellbeing and your mental health?
Because if I don't look out for mine and hers, we can't do our job and we have to.
So we really take what our students need to go through really seriously because we don't want to break them.
We really don't. They're going to be modern day senators who are going to consume the sins of the rest of the world.
And we're going to have to help them learn how to cope with that, because why would anybody ever want to do this for a living?
It's ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Thank you.
Helen had a question, I think. This is not right.
So lawyers and judges. Yeah, I just it was respectful.
It's it's a fair point. I know that you were talking about the Royal Society and the kind of guidance they've made for lawyers.
But one of the things that I'm aware of is that lawyers are often very bad scientists or mathematicians, and people do get convicted, for example,
in relation to sudden infant death because lawyers don't understand statistics properly, so they misdirect juries in a way that they don't understand.
And presumably the same is true of DNA evidence.
An expert who's sure of something could convince people without the lawyers necessarily understanding enough to unpack it.
And I just wonder how, you know, you talked about the irrelevant sort of snide question of poor lawyer will.
Right. Will last,
but it is also a lawyer's job to make sure that all those questions have been asked and people can think about how much doubt there should be.
How do you, I guess, train people to have to ask things and to have that appropriate and proper doubt?
Often in courts, we will not have met the legal team before we're actually in the dock and that's not helpful.
So. So being able to be in a position where at least you can talk to the.
You can explore the extent of the evidence of the kind of questions you.
It is the first time you meet them and you're standing in the box that.
What we will we will try to do is, of course, we can only answer the questions for us.
And if we're not asked the right question, we can still test.
We actually have to own the. Sometimes we will we will get a lot of time with.
That's where it's most. And certainly in an English court, you can sit in the courtroom.
And so we can pass information to the. Instead that saying that's not quite true.
You need to. In a Scottish culture. How to do that.
You're not allowed into the. Any other time except to give you evidence so you don't know what's going on, right?
So we have to be able to operate, first of all, in all the jurisdictions.
The UK and they've all got a slightly different legal system.
We might not be able to talk to them beforehand.
All they have is your report to go. So your report needs to be as as informative.
But often where we get the most of voice is when we'll sit down with the lawyers.
Let's. To say, what kind of questions would you be asking me?
And, you know, Donald is wonderful for that, because if you can understand.
So in your evidence. And say, Well, I need to save this and this.
Because that may. Teams are write up the right sort of.
Where we try to help is in the primaries that are jointly from the Royal Society of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
They have come together. To produce pieces of prose that are simple language.
People who are not scientists. And mainly it's the judges to be able to.
It's our job to train every lawyer to be a scientist. That's not their job.
But as the judge notes, when we're looking at a particular evidence.
This is the really solid ground of that evidence. Go for it.
Ask the questions there. But when you get on to here, you know, the research isn't too strong.
So if we're looking at DNA, being able to talk about.
Some probability, then it's very solid ground until you start to talk about transfer persistence of DNA.
So if you imagine you're in a bar and it's a loud bar to be heard, your chart,
as you showed, your DNA is being spread around because it's being spread your saliva.
Your DNA is landing on all the people around you. They go home and something happens at home and there is a scene.
Your DNA is now at that crime scene. You were never there, but your DNA is there.
If we detect such. We can because.
You can detect DNA from single cells. What does that mean?
Well, it's see evidence of your DNA at that point.
Unfortunately for you, somewhere in your past, you've committed a crime and you're on a DNA database and we run it.
We go to Europe. Jeff, you know, you've done a few naughty things in the past.
Just so happens we've picked up your DNA. That has.
We don't understand how DNA transfers and we don't understand how long it persists on a piece of woodland jumper or on a pretty or whatever it may be.
We just don't know. So the lawyers need to understand how far.
And beyond. That step is too far. Because we don't have.
It's a very delicate scorpion dance that occurs in the courtroom around the friends of some of.
And by enlarge the jury are bored out of their minds.
In a courtroom, it's often not the most exciting place on the planet for a member of the public.
And the last thing they want to hear is a statistician who comes in to talk about probability.
A Bayes theorem because at that point it completely glazed over.
But all of forensic sciences, they're sexy because I've seen them.
Excellent. And often all we do is disappoint because we can't get the kinds of expectations that they might have that television has given them.
So we're often a big disappoint. I think that was a fun quick.
Yes, there was a question there. Is that, like, you know.
Yeah. Helen mentioned your work with voting patterns and hands, and I believe you've also got a citizen science project on that.
Um, I just wanted to ask about that and also how you cope with that particular area of work.
So you've been doing your research. Thank you very much. Delighted.
So back in 2006, the Metropolitan Police got in touch with me to take a case and it's been rattling around inside our department.
It was a young girl who alleged that her father convinced.
The sexual abuse of. And she told her mother and her brother.
But the young girl did what? She left her camera on her computer running at night.
She put her camera on to record.
And at 4:30 in the morning, what we see is a hands and a forearm coming into view of her camera, doing exactly what she said was her.
If you leave your camera running at night, it slips into your room for a.
And you can see in the dark and near-infrared lights by this.
Closer to human skin. It acts, it interacts with the deoxygenated blood in your veins, and you can see your vein pattern sloughing blood timelines.
So we have these tramline pattern of veins. For the hands of a.
She took her video to the police and said, this is all my fault.
So police came to us and said, What? Can you do it? No idea.
I'm a forensic anthropologist. I deal with dead bodies. I don't deal with rape concerns in child sexual abuse cases.
And they said, but to me. That's true.
And in anatomy, we know that veins are variable.
So I guarantee to you this is a dangerous thing. But I guarantee you that the pattern of veins on the back of your right hand.
A difference of a positive change on the back of your last time.
I guarantee you, if you're an identical twin, they will be completely different between you and your identical twin.
They won't be the same as your mom or your dad's or anybody.
Is that being pattern as laid down in your features inside your mouth and it's laid out in response to the.
Tensions around you in that environment. So what I said is from the times of the salience of the 1500s.
And before we've known about variation. And there's no value that has a firm name in the human hands below the level of the elbow,
because everything down there is so utterly, ridiculously variable that there's nothing holding.
And I said, what I can guarantee is if we if we do a pattern of very much.
Between the offender and the suspect. If they don't match, it's not him.
Because you're being so changed. You don't grow in your brain. But if they match.
I don't know what that means. And the police said, that's okay, let's do it.
Because they said if we could exclude that, that will help us move.
I think that's perfectly between the veins on the perpetrator and the veins of.
She said. And so we went. The case went to the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Crown Prosecution Service said, we're going to take a punt. We're going to take this into court and see what happens.
Which is the worst thing that a scientist wants to hear is going to be had our team court.
And the judge called a volunteer so that the jury went away and he decided on the basis of anatomical knowledge.
If he was alive. The evidence. It is the first time that evidence of ongoing concern amongst.
I've been hired. We gave our evidence.
The jury went away. The jury came back and they found not guilty.
And at that point, you take the responsibility.
And I said to our buyers, Sir, what did we do wrong? What are we not able to explain just how variable they.
And the lawyer said to us, and I'll never forget that, she said, you know, I don't think you did anything wrong.
I think your evidence is. They didn't believe the girl. She didn't cry.
She didn't break time. And then finally, the teenage girl who'd been brave enough.
To accuse her father. To record the abuse, to show that it was.
To take that evidence to the police and to go through a court.
And I fought for a court to decide on the basis of the.
And science needs to do the research. And that was what kicked off our research project.
We needed to be able to go into a courtroom the next time and say, this is a one in a 500 chance or one in the thousands, a one in a million chance.
That's where the research needed to be. A very lucky for me.
At the time, I was training police officers. And so I had 500 police officers going through my department and to a man and a woman, bless them.
They agreed to strip down to their underwear to allow me to photograph their hands on their forearms to their feet,
their legs and their thighs, to look at the same pattern variation to look at skin pattern.
Variation to be able to set the database. And that was where we started the work.
The Citizen Research Project is occurring at the moment.
Computers through A.I. To do our job. We want to be able to.
Computers to say in this video of child abuse. We have struck the house.
If I struck the hands, could I have struck the vein pattern? Can I abstract the muscle crease patterns?
So if you look at the parts of the skin, pieces of your knuckles that difference on everything, you're them different.
If you're a redhead, get a Franco costume. It's. It's unique. It's yours.
No one else is going to have your. Your Franco pantsuit. If you're a redhead, it's just not going to happen.
I have three redhead children. None of their freckle patterns are the same.
So all of these features.
To be able to find the research team are so mean to me that they have to be one day to say, we just trained to do the computer.
To do something and they find something you missed so that they thought that's never going to happen.
I knew that. But that's exactly what they have. We have now got to a position where the computer is picking up a very concern.
But I. I think that's our way forward.
Is that we can now look. Millions of. Using algorithms to obstruct the.
And we can now connect to. So if you want to send us photographs of your hands, wonderful segway for you.
If you look closer, actually, you'll see it's through Lancaster University and it's working jointly.
It's on the university as well. So that it's unique project.
We're asking the public, Just photograph your hands. We strip off all the data so it's not your data.
We'll never be able to link it back to you. It allows us to look at variation.
That's where we create the algorithm. We then destroyed the images and the algorithms that we then use in.
To be able to say this. Individualism. No child sex. Can we find their hands in the millions of.
That are held by Interpol. And that's the way that our.
That's wonderful. We'll see. Thank you so much indeed for for sharing with us.
Before we we thank Sue, I would like to say if you if you want to read more about this, her books,
All That Matters and written in bone absolutely beautifully written that sort of thing.
It places hilarious in places and inspiring throughout to absolutely wonderful.
Before we close, Helen is going to just say a few words.
Well, and I'm sure you'll want to thank Sue.
That was enthralling and I think brought together a lot of questions about doubt and law and rights and police and science.
And I and it was wonderful. I suspect we may need to teach some jurors a little bit more about psychology and teen psychology, but there we are.
So I don't think it's your fault. But just before we thank Sue, I just want to let you know that next week's lecture,
which is an open trot lecture or annual lecture in memory of Adam von Trotta,
who was an alumnus here and was hanged in the Fifth for trying to bring down Hitler.
So we have an annual lecture memory of him, and this year it's going to be Hartwig Fisher, who's the director of the British Museum,
talking about deep in history and the world of Stonehenge and a completely different kind of detective work.
So do come along or tell people who might be interested. And that's half as five next week.
But. Yes. Thank you very much, Sarah. Steve and I can thank you together.