A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong
long has this person been dead?’ Because if it’s more than 70 years before the current date, then it’s no longer a forensic case, it’s technically archaeological.
Literally? That’s the cut-off point?
Yes. It’s man’s ‘three score years and ten’, and if it’s a murder case the chances of the perpetrator still being alive are, of course, slim, so there’s little technically for police to investigate. You will always get cases that won’t fall neatly into that category. For example, if you find children’s remains on Saddleworth Moor, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s 100 years from now, they will still possibly be the Moors Murders. Certain cases have a notoriety.
So, is it human? How long has it been dead? And then, what more can I tell? Are you male or female? How old were you when you died? It’s much easier to assign an age to a child than to an adult, because children go through a phase of quite regular growth, so that you can go into Marks & Spencer and buy a pair of trousers for a six-year-old. You can’t buy them for a 42-year-old. Because growth and age are so closely related in a child, we can get very close. With a fetus, you can identify age to within weeks. With a young child it’s to within months, and with an older child it’s to within a year or so. By the time you reach puberty it’s to within a couple of years. But once all the growth changes have stopped, then the human body goes through a stage of maintenance, in the twenties. So if a body is in a maintenance phase we can say that person is in their twenties. But beyond the twenties – unfortunately it seems very young – everything’s degenerative. And some of us will degenerate quicker than others, so it becomes very unreliable to assign an age if you’re over 30.
So, we have to assign a sex; we have to assign an age. We can then assign a height. Height’s not very useful for separating people unless you’re exceptionally tall or exceptionally small. Then the fourth indicator of biological identity is your race. But race is such a contentious issue, for a number of reasons. It’s also a fact that we have such an admixture between the races that it’s very, very difficult.
So that’s the first thing we’ll produce: a biological profile that says, he’s male, aged between 25 and 30, 5ft 6 to 5ft 8 tall, white. Then you want to establish the personal identity. What information can you take from these remains that will separate two individuals with an identical biological profile? When it comes to DVI – Disaster Victim Identification – we have four principal means of identification: dental work, DNA, fingerprints and any unique medical condition, such as a hip replacement or a pacemaker with a unique serial number.
But that’s not really forensic anthropology. Dental records are the odontologist; DNA is the forensic biologist; fingerprints are the fingerprint officer, and unique medical conditions are the pathologist. What does that leave for the anthropologist? In many ways we get the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. We know our position! That is, if you can’t get identity by any other means, come back to the anthro.
So do you generally work as a team with these other people, or are you just called in after everybody else?
Depends on the situation. If we’re working on a deployment for DVI, we will be part of a team. If it’s a case where the police bring in a bone to you, then you’re on your own, because basically they’ve decided that pathologists can’t do anything; they can’t get any DNA out of it. And so it’s all about trying to establish biological identity.
For example, we had a case in Scotland where a middle-aged woman went missing, and her husband’s plea was that she’d gone down south to support a friend who had marital difficulties. But the trouble was that this woman, every night of her life, had phoned her elderly parents at the same time, and she’d stopped doing it at that point. That change in behaviour is an indication that something’s wrong. So the ‘scene of crimes’ people went to the house; they found some blood in the bathroom; they found a chipped piece of her tooth in the U-bend of the bath. But that doesn’t mean she’s dead. She could have gone into the bathroom, tripped, cracked her chin on the bath … But they found her blood on the door of the washing machine, and in the filter they found a tiny fragment of bone no bigger than about 10mm long, maybe 4 or 5mm wide. And that’s all they had. DNA showed it was this missing person. But the question was: which part of her is it? Because if it’s a bit of her finger she could still be alive, but if it’s something more critical, then we’re in a different story.
We could identify that that tiny fragment came from the left greater wing of the sphenoid bone, which is around your temple. That’s the only place in the whole body that fragment could come from. So then you can confront her husband and say, ‘This is a bit of her skull, and it’s found in the washing machine … We need an answer.’ He changed his plea. He said that they’d had an argument, she’d run out the back door, tripped on the top step, cracked her head on the patio and died. He stated that he’d picked her up, which is how her blood and bone got on his clothing, put her in the bath, which is how her blood and her tooth got in the bath, wrapped her in plastic and dropped her body in the local river. We’ve never found the rest of her body. All we’ve ever had of this missing person is this tiny fragment of bone.
And was there a conviction?
Absolutely. The pathologist’s testimony in court stated that it couldn’t have been a single blow because the bone fragment was dislodged on to his clothing, and when he put his clothes into the washing machine, that’s how the bone got into the filter. He was convicted of manslaughter. So we’ve no idea, when we get a tiny fragment of bone – it may go absolutely nowhere, but it may lead to a conviction for manslaughter.
When you started in this field, were there people with this kind of experience who could teach you, or have you pushed at the boundaries of knowledge as you’ve gone along?
A bit of both. There’s always been a very good relationship between anatomy and forensic matters, but it was never a formal relationship. My PhD supervisor was interested in bone, so that was useful. And she was an exceptionally good anatomist, so we kind of learnt together and tried to keep up with the latest developments. Then when I moved to St Thomas’ Louise Scheuer was there, who’s also an exceptionally gifted anatomist who was interested in bone. So I always had strong women around who had the kind of information I could ‘feed off’ and develop. But there was no formal training; you couldn’t do a degree in forensic anthropology in the UK.
Things really changed around the end of the 1990s, when suddenly forensics became sexy and you had forensic courses being set up in universities across the country. Suddenly people were becoming teachers in forensic anthropology, who’d never done a case in their lives and who were learning it one step ahead in the textbook. I have some sympathy with that because in the early stages I wasn’t that much different. But within the last 10 to 15 years there has been a huge change in the professionalism of the discipline. And, of course, international and national judicial scrutiny is such that we have to know what we’re doing – we can’t play at it any more.
So did you actually set out to become a forensic anthropologist?
In my heart of hearts, I’m an anatomist. But the work just kept coming, and the big turning point for me was Kosovo. At that time I was working with Peter Vanezis, the forensic pathologist in Glasgow, and Peter was deployed with the British forensic team to Kosovo in 1999, very shortly after the Serbs retreated. He found himself faced with a crime scene that was an outhouse with 42 co-mingled bodies very badly decomposed: partly buried, partly burnt and partly gnawed by dogs. He said, ‘I don’t know how to do this, but I know somebody who does.’ So at that point forensic anthropology became a subject within UK deployment.
And you were the first person to do it?
Yup … I went out to Kosovo about a week after the main team, and it was just, you know, ‘How the heck do you do this?’
Had you ever had anything like that?
No, no. It had always been one or two little fragments at a time – a house fire, that sort of thing. But I was working alongside the Anti-Terrorist Branch, SO13, at the time,