A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong
stage by stage. And Britain is very firmly entrenched within its forensic credentials, so absolutely everything was done to an evidential standard we knew would stand up to scrutiny.
Before we explore Kosovo further, I want to hear a bit about your early life. I understand your grandmother was particularly important …
That was my father’s mother, and I spent a lot of time with her. She was one of these amazing ladies who could interact with a four-year-old as easily as she could with an 18-or 50-year-old. And she always had time, which I think is the most important thing any grandparent can have, because your own parents are so busy. She was the most adorable woman, she really was. She died when I was 15. She knew she was dying of lung cancer because she’d smoked a horrendous number of cigarettes throughout her life. She told me she was going to die, and I remember being very upset. But she did what is probably one of the cruellest things you can do: she said, ‘But I’ll never leave you! For the rest of your life I’ll be sitting on your left shoulder to keep the devil away, and any time you need advice, you’ve just got to listen and you’ll know what’s the right thing to do.’ [laughing]
And has she been there?
Oh, it’s the bane of my life! There are so many times I’ve wanted to do something, and I find myself turning my head [looking at her shoulder] and thinking, ‘No, she wouldn’t be proud of me if I did that.’ And I know that when the time comes, I’ll actually have to face her, so I’ve got to get it right. What an awful burden to give your grandchildren! But she was a wise, pithy old lady and there was a huge hole when she died. She’s seen me through all sorts of things, you know.There have been some horrendously difficult times, but she’s still there – 35 years later.
As a woman doing science, have you ever found yourself at a disadvantage?
Never. Any time that I’ve worked with the police … In Kosovo, for example – you’re out there with a team of 18 men; you’re the only woman; there’s no toilet, so when you want a pee 18 men all have to look away. Never once has any one of them made me feel uncomfortable because I’m female. They are, in many ways, more protective.
One of the most disruptive things you can do for policemen is to have a young, blonde, available female on the team. You need a mother figure. They respect you for that, and they’ll protect you.
So you’ve found that role has fallen to you?
Oh, absolutely. They want to talk about their families, about the things they see, and how they feel about it. They want to talk to someone who’s not going to be a threat, and I think it’s a huge compliment that they’re prepared to do that, because policemen don’t give personal information very easily. But they’ve never, in any negative way, treated me differently because I’m a woman. And coming to Dundee, being a woman hasn’t made any difference whatsoever. If you can do the job and achieve the goals, then you’re the same as everybody else.
Back to Kosovo – what were the challenges?
Well, the first challenge was the first site – those 42 men who had been herded into an outhouse. The gunmen had stood at the door and sprayed it with Kalashnikov fire. The chap who managed to get into the corner first was a survivor, and it’s important for an indictment that you have one. The gunmen’s accomplices stood at the windows, threw in straw, and torched the place, so that when we arrived all the bodies were huddled into one area because they’d been trying to get away. There had been six months of decomposition, so there was very little recognisable soft tissue left. ‘Big, boiling masses of maggots’ is the only way to describe it. Partly burnt, and dogs had gone in and taken away bits for food.
Our job was to document the evidence. If this is going to be an indictment site against Milošević, then the witness statement has to match up with the forensic evidence. If what the witness is saying is not borne out by the evidence, or vice versa, then that’s not going to be a site that’s likely to lead to conviction. So we literally had to start at the door of the building, on our knees, sifting fingertip through every piece of rubble. Once you got to what was a part of a body, or you could perhaps outline as a whole body, then you would lift it, take it away and do the post-mortem on what was left. Again, it’s about establishing: is this male or female? How old? How tall? Is there any clothing or documentation? And literally working your way through that room until you’ve cleared it – bearing in mind that there might be explosive ordnance there as well.
I was going to say, what were the dangers?
We had an explosive device left for us at that scene. You have to make things funny – it’s not at the expense of the deceased people, but it’s what keeps you going in these difficult situations. There was a tree next to the crime scene, and we’d use that tree when we needed to take care of bodily functions. The first person to do that was one of the Anti-Terrorist Branch explosive ordnance officers. He came back beaming from ear to ear, and said, ‘I’ve found a device!’ They’d planted a device near the tree, with a trip wire so that when we walked down the path it would go off. And he was so delighted, first because he’d found something to do, but secondly because he’d actually been relieving himself on to the device and he was really impressed that he could still stop peeing in mid-flow at his age!
We had to blow up that device. And we had grenades that were placed underneath bodies with the pin removed, so that when you lifted the body the grenade would go off. You’d find razor blades, hypodermic needles in pockets, things that would inflict pain.
And how did you deal with witnessing such horror and such obvious cruelty?
Well, by that point I’d probably done 10 or 15 years of forensic work. I might not have seen anything on that scale, but it’s the same principle. To work in forensics you need a clinical detachment, because you’re there primarily to retrieve evidence. If you do become affected by it, you become inefficient in your objectivity. So you actually close down emotionally. Where it kind of breaks through is when you’re really tired, when you’re really hot – you know, when there are other stresses. Then sometimes it can boil over, but the majority of the time it doesn’t.
I think anatomists learn this gradually as they’re exposed to the human body. The first case I went to was a microlight pilot who went down off Inverbervie. He was a decapitated torso. I did that case with my supervisor. You become more and more able to cope with things that are difficult. But what you don’t forget is that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can hit you any time. It may never hit you. It may be tomorrow, it may be a month, a year or even 10 years, so you have to be aware of it. But I can say, with my hand on my heart, I’ve never had the flashbacks or the lack of sleep …
In Kosovo did you have the relatives around, and does that unnerve you?
We didn’t on that particular occasion, because we were so close to the time when the Serbs had retreated that the refugees hadn’t started coming back. But they did very quickly after that, so we soon began to get onlookers. These were the relatives, neighbours, friends, and that adds an extra dimension, because the last thing you want is to add to their grief. So you take on board the responsibilities of your own job and the added responsibility of dealing with people who’ve gone through things we can only imagine.
Often it’s very humbling. They felt they had to give you something, so they’d come with a cup of coffee, or cold water, and that was almost more difficult because they were thanking you for what you were doing.
But the one that will stick in my mind forever was a man who lost his entire family. A rocket-propelled grenade took out his trailer and on the trailer were his wife, his mother, his sister-in-law and their eight children. They were all literally blown apart. He retrieved as much as he could and buried them, which is a tremendously brave thing to do … To be able to go round and pick up what’s left of your family, from an 18-month-old baby to your twin 14-year-old sons. And then we come along and say, ‘Look, the UN has identified this as a potential indictment site; we’d like to exhume what you buried. Are you okay with it?’
We don’t have