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April 5, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:43
Edition 625 - Forensic Facts - Angela Gallop
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hey, listen, I hope everything is good with you.
It is, as I record these words, but you know what the British weather is like.
It's always up and down.
At the moment, it's freezing cold.
Yesterday, when I went to the dentist, and that's another story, it was absolutely freezing and snowing for a little while.
Now it looks really bleak.
Looks like a February day.
It's going on last week.
Sunshine, warmth.
And today, quite the opposite, as they say.
Now, it's been a bit of a difficult week one way or another, and you know that I always level with you about things.
So I have to tell you, if I don't sound entirely like my normal self, it's because a crown, one of my teeth, broke and it's catching my tongue at the moment and causing my tongue to be sore and move in different ways.
So I'm a little bit like that in a moment.
So if I'm not quite as clear as you might expect, I am trying to be, then that's the reason for that.
Finding a dentist these days is so difficult, isn't it?
But there's no NHS public dentistry that I can find around where I am.
So to get all of this done, and it turns out I need a lot of work done, you've got to go private.
So that's the story.
So at the moment, this crown is like a stump and it's kind of irritating my tongue and making me sound not quite like me.
It's weird.
If you've been through this, you know what I mean.
I mean, the disturbing thing about it is that the crown must have broken in my sleeve and I've swallowed it.
I don't know.
It might have reappeared.
It might still be inside.
I've no idea where it is, but that's my story.
What else has happened?
Oh, yeah.
I mentioned this on my social media after a lot of deliberation.
The unexplained on the radio looks as if it is going to be part of the radio station's move across to television.
Now, the sound from a TV program will still be heard on the radio in the same place, but it will all be originated as a TV show.
It's a long story.
We've been discussing this for a long time, and you know that I've been doing my shows, all of them, for two years from my own facility.
Last Monday, as I record these words, I went in to do a fill-in for a man called James Whale, a standard news and current affairs show, in video, about which I was absolutely terrified because I don't like being seen.
But it was okay, and everybody seemed to be pleased with it.
Oddly enough.
So now I'm in the situation where it is looking like the unexplained will change and will go towards the video format, but not until May by the looks of it.
Okay, so there are some changes coming.
If you've liked all the bumper music and stuff like that, I'm not going to be allowed to use those on the TV.
And sadly, the theme tune from the radio show, Junior Walker and the All-Stars, Walk in the Night, that can't be run either.
So it'll be a different show from that point of view.
Plus, I won't be able to record anybody for the show.
So everybody who comes onto the radio show, which will be on TV, will have to be in vision and will have to be live.
Basically, that's the only way that it can be done.
I asked if we could continue as a radio show, and the answer to that question is no, it can't.
So, you know, excitingly enough, I guess, at this stage of my life, I've got to learn some new skills.
And they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Well, we're going to find out whether you can.
You know, thank you for your support in all of this.
So if you've wonder what all of that talk is about, it is looking like at the moment, barring any last-minute details, that this radio show, not this show, the radio show will become television a few weeks from now.
I will keep you posted on the details of that, and I hope you will understand what has been going on.
But, you know, everything seems to be moving towards visuals now.
So I guess, when I think about it, I can't afford to be left behind.
What do you think?
You can always email me through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Adam for keeping it all going and keeping the shows coming out to you.
But that's where I'm at.
And I've always been honest about what is going on with me.
You've known about all of my ups and downs in my life, and I've known about yours too.
So that's where I'm at with all of this.
And to be honest with you, I nearly said, no, I'm going to go independent.
I'm going to stay online.
But I have enjoyed the six years.
It's been tons of hard work, almost no holidays or breaks.
But I did enjoy the six years of doing the radio show.
So it would have been a shame to say goodbye, I think.
So that's the honest version of what is going on.
Anything could happen.
Anything could change.
But at the moment, that's where we're at with that.
the podcast, this, will remain completely unaffected by any of this that I've been talking about.
Now, this edition is an extended edition Before I tell you about this edition, let me tell you this.
I'm a little behind on the podcast because I've had so much on my mind.
And I think the other day I was just tired and not thinking.
For the first time in 16 years of podcasting, I erased a complete podcast.
It was a conversation with John Russell, the psychic, that you would have been hearing here, and we will do again.
But I went and erased it, and I didn't have a backup.
What the hell am I thinking about?
So that's that.
I wanted to get that dealt with.
Okay, let's deal with this now.
Guest on this edition, an extended version of a fascinating conversation from the radio show recorded here with Professor Angela Gallup, one of the United Kingdom's most senior forensic officers.
She has an astonishing track record.
She's detailed and dealt with cases from the Yorkshire Ripper to the Stephen Lawrence murders to the death of Diana and many important cases.
If you've ever wondered about forensics And how it works.
In crime investigations, particularly, you will hear details in this conversation that you won't ever, I promise you, have heard before and explained incredibly clearly.
So, Professor Angela Gallup, this is a much extended version of what you heard on the radio.
You might have heard on the radio.
Just a warning before I bring you this.
Of course, we're talking about topics to do with crime.
That involves a certain amount of blood, gore, and suffering.
So, if you are concerned about those things or you don't want the kids to hear this, which I would recommend that you skip this one if you've got kids with you, to be honest with you, you know, it's not really suitable for young ears, I don't think.
You know, it's not full of gory details, but there are some in here.
So you need to be aware of that before we go ahead.
That's the warning.
I think that's basically all of it.
That's an update on me, my dental dilemmas, the situation with the show, my stupidity in erasing a podcast with John Russell that you should have been hearing now, which is why we've had to bring this one forward.
That's about it, really.
Hopefully, the next time we speak, the sun will be shining and it'll be warm, and I won't be sitting here because of the cost of heating, afraid to turn my heating on and freezing.
As I record these words, I'll love a story.
Okay, let's get to the guest now, an extended version of my conversation with Professor Angela Gallup.
Professor Angela Gallup has been a practicing forensic scientist for more than 40 years, originally a senior scientist with the Home Office Forensic Science Service.
In 1986, she established the independent consultancy Forensic Access, primarily to advise lawyers representing people accused of crime involving forensic evidence for a better balance in court.
The next year, concerned about falling standards, Angela co-founded Forensic Alliance, the first alternative source of comprehensive forensic services for police and other investigators.
2005, she facilitated the acquisition of Forensic Alliance by LGC, the laboratory of the government chemist.
I can tell you that the biography is longer than that, but I think you're getting the sense that it's a long and very impressive one.
Angela Gallup, rather than take up another 10 minutes with your wonderful biography, I thought I'd just get to you and say hello.
Hello.
Very nice to be with you, Howard.
You have had an astonishingly distinguished career.
You have been at the heart of many of the most celebrated, and I mean that in terms of notoriety, celebrated cases in the nation, including the Yorkshire Ripper, the Princess Diana investigation, many, many others.
A very impressive and exciting career.
You've done a lot of things.
Yes, I have, but then I've been doing them for a very long time.
You know, I started in 1974.
You're starting to become a forensic scientist.
And so I've had a lot of time to do a lot of things, I think.
But you made a career change.
This was one thing that came out of the book.
And I didn't know this about you.
I've read about you in relation to high-profile trials and things.
You were aiming to be something else in science, weren't you, up to the age of 24?
Well, I was at university and I was studying different things and generally honing my scientific skills, I think.
And it was when I came to the end of that, so I'd done a first degree in botany, then I did a research degree in, it was biochemistry more.
And it was when I came to the end of that and had to get a proper job that I got into forensic science.
And it wasn't my idea, it was, you know, a friend of mine, he knew that I didn't want to continue in academia because I was pretty sure by that time it wouldn't suit me.
I was obviously going to be an applied scientist doing something which is useful immediately in the real world.
I think that was how I looked at it.
And it was he who found the ad in the newspaper, which was for the scientists for the Home Office Forensic Science Service in those days.
And so I applied, and I thought it sounded a jolly good idea.
It was great.
And I applied, and that was the beginning of it all.
So I can't even claim that it was my idea.
Now, isn't that interesting?
Because we tend to think of forensic scientists in connection with crime particularly as being boffins who were sort of born to it.
But you actually applied for a job in a paper.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yes, to the Home Office.
And I mean, while you get your basic scientific training in university, absolutely, and are taught to do lots of things like, you know, how to set up and conduct experiments and all sorts of things that are terribly useful in a very wide range of types of different job.
You know, the only way to really learn how to be a forensic scientist is actually doing the job, or in those days it was anyway.
There wasn't any special training for it.
Right.
In your book, I noticed that you thank a lot of people and a lot of organizations.
Now, that's unusual.
There is a whole page of thanks and two columns.
And this was a little detail that I noticed.
And I think actually the reason I'm saying this is that it says something about you.
It speaks to the breadth of experience and the number of people you've had to have contact with.
I think it's a bit of that.
But I think the other thing is that forensic science is very much a team activity.
People always think, and I think it's largely driven by these wonderful programs.
I mean, they're not got much to do with real life, but wonderful programmes you see on television and the films and things, where it's one superb expert who does about seven jobs seamlessly all at the same time and always gets their man or woman and it's brilliant.
But in real life, it's not like that at all.
Because forensic science can cover absolutely anything and everything you're likely to encounter both indoors and outdoors and everywhere else, it means that you need sort of quite a wide range of scientific expertise to cover that.
And so for any case, and particularly complex cases, you find yourself having to put together a team of different experts or bring new experts in when you suddenly discover that you've got a sort of type of evidence that you hadn't really envisaged.
So you're constantly building teams and reshaping teams as you go through an investigation.
And that's why there are so many people that I have to thank.
And in fact, this is my second book, and it's a book about the richness of forensic science.
And of course, there are going to be lots of people who I'm going to use their cases to talk about the work that they've done.
And that was part of the reason for writing it.
The first book was very much focused on my life and my cases, but this one is much broader because I think that, you know, I think it's interesting people don't realize what real forensics is like, what the real challenges are, and what the real power of forensic science, the use of science in this application is.
So that's why I wrote that, and that's why there are so many people's names.
That's very impressive, Angela.
Okay, how do you define, let's start with the definition, forensic science.
What are its boundaries?
Well, it's really looking for physical evidence, physical traces of all, I mean, of all different types and kinds.
So it could be, you know, firearms discharge residue.
It could be pollen grains.
It could be textile fibers.
It could be digital traces on someone's phone.
It could be anything, absolutely anything that link a victim with a suspect or a suspect with a crime scene or his vehicle with some aspect of the crime.
It could be sort of absolutely anything, really.
But it's all about physical evidence.
It's not about not forensic psychology where you're thinking about why people did things or why they might have done it in a particular way or whether or not they've done other similar cases before because the thought processes behind them are similar.
It's not anything to do with that.
It's actual physical traces.
And is it true that in your experience, no matter how prepared a perpetrator might be, they will always, because they're human beings, leave behind some kind of trace.
In other words, nobody can fail to leave some kind of trace of their presence.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
And in the old days, I mean, there's this wonderful principle that was first espoused in 1910, I think, by this French criminologist, Edmund Lockard.
And he said, every contact leaves a trace, or words to that effect, anyway.
And I and my colleagues, I remember in the 70s and the 80s, we used to say, oh, well, you know, every contact leaves a trace.
We know that.
But in this particular case, you might not get anything because of this, because of that.
And so we used to sometimes almost talk ourselves out of doing things because we thought it's pretty unlikely to find that.
But now, and having done so many of these difficult cold cases, now I know that he is completely right.
And every contact does indeed leave a physical trace.
It's just whether or not we're clever enough to find it.
Or indeed whether we have the technology at the moment.
Yes, that's right.
And whether or not we have the right items, of course.
But we only need one or two of the right items we've discovered.
You don't need much, but you do need something to start with.
I had no idea about the role of forensic science until I was a young journalist in the late 80s, mid to late 80s.
And I used to love to be in the studio reading the news and writing it.
I hated being sent out reporting, but there was an occasion or two when I got deputed to the Crown Court.
There'd be a major trial on, and there was one particular case that was being held, I think, at Birmingham Crown Court.
In fact, I'm sure it was Birmingham Crown Court, involving, and this case, sadly, and its victim have long been forgotten, which is terribly sad, I think, because it made a lifelong impression on me.
But it was the case of a young woman, a young mother, who went to a car park, a shopping centre car park in Redditch, which is on the fringes, it's halfway between Worcester and Birmingham.
And she was brutally, multiply stabbed in that car park.
You know, obviously being a journalist covering the case, I saw the evidence as it was handed to the jury in the case.
And, you know, those sights have stayed with me forever.
You know, she was so, I mean, you know, it is after midnight.
We can say these things, but please be aware this is not nice.
I'm talking to my listener here.
You know, she was wearing a padded jacket.
And the padded jacket was full of blood.
It was like a receptacle, a container for blood because of the ferocity of the attack.
And you would think to yourself, who could do this?
Well, now, the whole case, as I remember it, hinged on a young man, a student, who said that he was first on the scene and helped the victim.
Now, the terrible twist in the tale of this case was that the young man was in fact the perpetrator.
And, you know, without meaning to, I remember in the ante-room of the court, waiting to go in as a reporter, I spoke because I speak to people and I'm polite to them, to two people there.
And it turned out that it was his mother and father.
I'm sure you can imagine how I felt and how they must have felt.
I don't know how they endured those weeks.
Anyway, the entire case, as we saw the various bits of forensic evidence come in, was tipped by a thumbprint on a knife blade.
Now, the question that hung over that trial was that he had thrown away the knife, you know, in panic, apparently, I think was the description.
But in fact, we know why he threw away the knife.
And the knife had a thumbprint.
And I think it was just a single thumbprint that eventually traced the whole thing back to him.
Now, my memory of this case, and I will check it again, you know, later before broadcast, we're recording this on Friday.
But, you know, had it not been for that piece of pure, old-fashioned forensic evidence, I think the case would have been harder to determine.
Yeah, it might be.
I mean, they are difficult.
It's not an uncommon occurrence, obviously, that the perpetrator is the person who says they found the victim.
And then it's about things absolutely like that, like, you know, fingerprints on things and connection with the weapon, and absolutely.
But it's also about the pattern of bloodstaining on their clothing, because you can tell an enormous amount from that.
People always seem to think that blood is really only important because of getting a DNA profile Result from it.
And that is true.
I mean, that is critically important if someone says they were never near anybody when they were being injured and had nothing to do with it.
Then it can be critically important to get the amazing statistics that you can get out of forensic DNA profiling.
But the other side of the coin, that only tells you from whom it could have come and who it couldn't have come from.
But the other side of the coin is very much the pattern of blood staining, and that can tell you how that blood staining arose.
And so if you got, it just depends what you've got, and it all depends always on the precise circumstances of the case.
But if the victim is still alive, there might be a little bit of coughing and spluttering, in which case you might get some small droplets of airborne blood landing on the clothing.
If by the time they were discovered, they would definitely have been dead because they've got too many injuries and all of that, then you wouldn't expect any of that.
But you would expect probably to find some smeared blood, and you'd expect it to find it in certain places.
And so it just does depend.
And then if they were the perpetrator, you might expect to find cast off spots and splashes of blood, which look different again.
So you've got all these different types of bloodstain that you can use, and several others besides, that you can use to kind of build up a picture of what the contact between the suspect and the victim might actually have been.
My father was a police officer for 30 years, Angela.
He had an instinct.
He knew things about people just by looking at them.
I never quite understood how he did it.
He wanted me to join the police, but I would never have been as good as him.
So, you know, when I covered that particular trial, and we'll move away from that, of course, but when I covered that particular trial, I had no idea that the, you know, the alleged perpetrator, you know, could also be the person who found the body, if you know what I'm saying.
But there are cases where a person who actually is part of reporting the crime can actually claim, I found the body.
I found the dying woman, in fact, in this case.
But in fact, they've done it.
I just, you know, it's not in my, well, it wasn't in my young 20-something head then that somebody could actually do that.
Yes, it's not uncommon.
Well, there we are.
Forensics doesn't always work, though, does it?
You know, I was looking, searching before we did this for cases where forensics famously hasn't worked.
There was the case of Amanda Knox in Italy and her former boyfriend, the 2000 murder of the British University student Meredith Kircher.
And quote, there were stunning flaws in the investigation that led to their conviction, according to judges' legal reasoning in Rome.
So, you know, they were cleared and they lacked enough evidence, basically, I'm quoting here, to prove their wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt and cited a complete lack of biological traces in connection to the crime.
So forensics can be wrong.
Absolutely, and that's why it can be quite dangerous.
Forensics, interpreting what your results mean, or in fact even what kind of tests you do, it's all about the context of the crime and what actually happened.
So it's really important to understand in detail, as well as you can, from the crime scene, what happened.
And not generally what happened, but what in detail happened.
Because that will tell you what to look for on what and where and so on.
And I think in some cases you get a little bit of evidence, or you can get a little bit of evidence, and then the interpretation, either by the scientist or sometimes just by the court, but that completely overrides any of the limitations that the scientist might have expressed.
But then it becomes that something must have happened because of this.
And a wonderful example is DNA.
If you get a DNA match, people seem to skip a lot of the context and go straight to, oh, they must be guilty then.
But actually, there may be completely innocent ways in which DNA could have been transferred to something before the crime or after the crime or by someone else in the handling of items from the crime.
There are lots of different ways that can happen, all depending on context.
And I think the terrible thing about the case you're talking about was the fact that they simply didn't take into account enough of the context and the fact that the two girls lived together and there would have been a certain amount of DNA transferred then anyway.
And the co-defendant was the defense's boyfriend at the time.
And so it matters so much that you understand the crime before you start trying to do forensics and then understand what your results mean.
Before we dig into the specifics of the book in the next part of this conversation, let's round out this one.
By saying this, The Guardian, I think in the last few years, I think this was three years or so ago, reported this.
Innocent people quotes are being wrongly, actually I think it was two years ago.
Innocent people are being wrongly convicted and criminals are escaping justice because of the failure of the forensic science system to meet basic standards according to regulators.
Now that's something that you've been all about really.
Your career seems to have been about improving standards in this field.
Yes, definitely.
I mean, first of all, it was all about making sure that defense lawyers, people representing people accused of crimes featuring forensic evidence, making sure that they understood what the evidence was about, the forensic evidence was about, and understood the limitations, just as the prosecution may be pressing the strengths.
But there are always weaknesses in the case, and so it was very important that one side of the court understood those and could present them properly.
So that was all about that.
And then when it became too easy to pick apart the prosecution's case on behalf of the defence, that was when I and a couple of colleagues set up this laboratory to help the police and raise standards there because the point about the first organisation was not to completely unsettle the criminal justice system, but just to balance it up again.
But then when it looked like the balance was tipping the other way, it was really important that the police were supported.
So it was to do with that.
So it is all about making sure that you've got that proper balance in court and you've got really good forensic, Thoughtful forensic evidence, and critically that it's been interpreted in the context of the case.
And that's the problem that we have these days with the police budgets, and why I still go on about forensic science and the dangers of it as well as the power of it.
But because with police budgets under such heavy pressure, an easy part of their work to cut is the forensic budget, because it's an external spend, so you don't have to spend it, so they can choose what they do with it.
And by using forensics like a kind of, you know, it's like kind of going with a shopping list, well, we'll have two DNAs and one footwear mark, and we'll see if we can sort this case out on those, you know, and then just getting this very limited amount of evidence, sometimes you can misunderstand what your results are telling you simply because you haven't got, you haven't done enough, you haven't done enough background to it.
And so that's why, you know, I continue to talk about it.
If you don't look for something on something, then you won't find it, so then you won't know what it might have done to your understanding of the case.
So it is very powerful, but it needs to be handled very carefully.
And I think there are different dangers today.
Probably standards are slightly better generally for testing, but it's what people make of the results of those tests that's where you can have problems today.
This is why it's important we're having this discussion.
Professor Angela Gallup, we're talking about forensic science and her lifetime in it.
A fascinating field, but not for the squeamish.
If you cannot handle topics like this and the discussion of a certain amount of blood and gore, please turn off now.
Let's get into the details of your fascinating book.
And it's really crisply written, Angela.
It makes an easy and fascinating read.
You don't use excess words, and that's wonderful.
Okay, you start with the building blocks, the things that you look at.
And you start with insects, forensic entomology.
And, you know, I didn't really want to think about this.
But of course, after a period, a body, if it is left, will become inhabited.
Let's put it that way.
Yes, absolutely.
And insects can tell you an awful lot about time of death and even sometimes the cause and manner of death.
And so I just thought it was a slightly odd thing to start with, so I thought I'd do it, you know, so that people could get the idea that forensics isn't just, I don't know, mobile phone messages or tire marks or the usual sort of stuff that we're so used to hearing about, but that it covers such a broad range.
That's really why I started with insects.
And I started with a case that was, you know, it goes right back to the 13th century where some obviously very bright investigator was looking at who might have killed this farmer.
And he thought it had been obviously done by one of the sickles that the workers used in the field.
And he wanted to discover which one it was of them.
And so he got them to lay all their sickles out in the sun.
And then he watched, and the flies that were around alighted on just one of them.
And that was because there were tiny traces of blood left on it.
And so that's how he identified the perpetrator.
I dare say that sort of standard wouldn't quite work these days.
You'd want a little bit more.
But it was a very intelligent approach, I think.
Well, absolutely.
You know, I've never thought to this extent that insects could be so important in giving you a clue, the kind of insects, and I suppose the degree of infestation.
My father would occasionally open up in my later years about some investigations that he'd been on.
Mostly as children, he kept all of this away from us, the stuff that he had to handle.
But of course, this is meat and drink to police and investigative work.
Another section is no body, no crime question mark.
And you actually dispel that.
You don't need a body to determine that there has been a crime and what that crime has been.
No, and I give a couple of examples where actually, you know, no body was ever discovered and yet there was enough evidence from what remained at the crime scene or what remained.
Well, there was a great case, your first case, I think, when you described this, a case of a man who said he had a row with his wife and, quotes, she fell on the knife and I think it was tooth fragments found after an extensive exhaustive search of their home that actually gave this away.
Yes, that's right, absolutely.
Yes, he had an account of what had happened.
She'd been making sandwiches and turned on him with this knife.
And so he pushed her and she'd fallen down some steps and cracked her head and that was it.
But then there was quite a lot of handling of the body, which I think probably didn't endear him to the jury.
You know, he had her in the bath and he wrapped her up and then he went and he drove her body over to a river some miles away and dropped her into the river at night and then came back and obviously tried to clean everything up.
And I think there was a, if I can remember right, I think there was a tooth fragment in the waste pipe from one of the sinks and in the washing machine they found critically a tiny piece of bone that a pathologist identified, an anthropologist identified as having come from a very particular part of the skull.
And then the pathologist said, well to get a bit of that bone in there, there would have had to have been considerable force used.
And so there were these bits of forensic evidence, even though no body was found, and he was certainly convicted of that.
It's not in your book, but I remember the famous ITV drama that starred Martin Clunes from Men Behaving Badly, and he played the part very well, about a famous celebrated acid killer who essentially dissolved his victims in a vat of acid.
And that kind of thing is, I shouldn't be laughing here, but that kind of thing is thankfully, I think I'm laughing because I'm happy to still be alive in the midst of knowing of those heinous crimes.
But those people were all dissolved.
How would you begin to begin to unpick that?
If that happened today, God forbid, how would you begin to unpick that?
Would it all be circumstantial and behavioral?
Well, I think you'd want to see if there was any evidence of acid anywhere.
I think you'd want to kind of get a grip of that end of it.
But also in terms of the actual attack on them, because nobody was going to climb into a bath of acid, so there's obviously going to have to be some restraint and assault in some way.
And so you'd be very interested to see if you could find signs of that.
And it might be sort of bits of disturbance with some blood staining in it.
And then you'd have to work out, you know, you'd have to get a sample from the missing person and see whether, you know, you could get a surrogate, we call them surrogate samples, but perhaps their clothing or their toothbrush or hairbrush or something, see if you could get DNA off that and then match it with any blood staining you found.
And you might be looking for weapons and that sort of thing.
All kinds of things you might do.
So even in those circumstances, it didn't all just happen in the bath.
It happened, part of the crime happened outside the bath, and that's what you'd be focusing on.
I think a lot of people will be secretly thinking this question, so I must ask it.
Madeleine McCann, a terrible case from 2007.
It'll be 14 years very, very soon.
And nobody brought to justice.
Some interesting leads that mostly have turned out to be completely blank ends in this.
A suspect in Germany.
Police over there seemed to be optimistic that they were about to make a charge or do something.
That doesn't seem to be happening.
Why do you think in the case of Madeline McCann, where there she was in that bedroom in the Algarve, there would have been traces there.
The window was checked and the door was checked.
Everything and everybody was checked.
The McCann's hire car was checked.
And yet there is so little evidence.
The traces of what may have happened are so scant.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, it all depends how you check it.
And I think that forensic science is done very differently in different countries, and there's an emphasis on different things.
But you certainly, I certainly would expect there to have been quite a deal of evidence from the person who it looks as though someone came in, broke in, or no, so came in.
Sorry, I think the door's unlocked, so it came in and had contact with where she was sleeping and picked her up out of that.
They would have left traces behind of themselves as they did all those things, different sorts of traces.
And so some of that, it should be possible to find some of that.
Now, I don't know whether it would be now, it depends what happened with the particular items.
But I think one thing I have learned in forensic science is never say never.
I mean, that's absolutely true because, you know, all of the cold cases we've done, we've been quite surprised, you know, to find that's why I say, you know, I said earlier on, that, you know, now we really understand that every contact does leave a trace and so you've just got to find it.
And so I think against that background, I'm sure that the perpetrator left some trace of themselves and that it would have been there and would have been findable.
But it just depends on the extent and the quality of the forensic science investigation that was applied to that case.
You have to be cool and scientific about all of these things.
But in the case of the McCanns and so many cases that you must have covered, you certainly will come into contact with people who've been directly affected by the crimes.
And for the McCanns, as we come up to this anniversary, of course, it's 14 years without knowing the answer.
Is their daughter alive somewhere?
Is their daughter dead?
And, you know, how did she die?
Did she suffer?
Those questions remain unanswered for them.
So I'm guessing that even though you have to be scientific, those sorts of considerations and thoughts must hit you.
Well, I think always in the back of our mind, we're always thinking about justice, you know, justice for victims, justice for families.
And so that is always there.
And I suppose it's partly what drives us on.
It's also justice for people who might be wrongly accused of crime.
So it's not just all on one side.
You've got to be very sure that if you're investigating something that you do it properly, to the very best of your ability, and you're very careful about how you interpret your findings.
And so I think that that is partly what absolutely what drives us on.
But we don't get, we very rarely meet people involved in crime.
It's mostly these physical items.
It'll be their clothing or weapons that were used or we might go to the crime scene and investigate the layout of whatever it is, whether it's inside or outside, and sort of do all that.
But we're quite separate.
And I think that's not a bad thing to be separate from the actual people involved at that level anyway.
We don't want to be influenced by anything at all.
We just want to deal with the physical side of it to keep our minds completely clear of anything else.
But as I say, underlying it all, there is this feeling about it.
I remember one case that haunted me for years was rather like you're haunted, I'm haunted, I want to do.
And this particular case was of a young girl who was found naked and her body had been, well, she'd been killed and then her body mutilated on the towpath at Windsor.
And the police could never even find the crime scene because her body was dumped there.
And that was just terrible.
So we had so little to go on.
And I remember taking lots of samples, you know, more samples even than usual, from her body, the surface of her body, because that would have been the last surface that the perpetrator would have been in touch with, in contact with.
And actually, if he'd had to carry her, he would have had good contact with that.
So I was taking these, what were the favourite sample of ours, these stellar tape strips that we call tapings.
I was taking lots of tapings of the body for that.
But it wasn't until 30 years later when the police said, they came to me again and they said, you remember that case you did all those years ago?
Well, actually now we've been looking through our records and we see that there was a very similar case a few years afterwards and this particular Man got convicted of it.
Actually, the similarities are so similar, we've been reviewing things.
And so we're just having some tests done at the moment.
And can you tell us more about the samples you took at the time?
And amazingly enough, the scientists working on that second, you know, that second, the re-investigation, they managed to get some DNA profiles from the samples that I had taken originally of foreign DNA on her body.
And that came from the same man who'd been convicted of this other murder a few years later.
So it is amazing.
I can't remember quite how I was talking about that.
On the premise of never say never.
Yes, exactly.
Never say never.
Very quickly in the McCann case.
You said that procedures differ around the world.
Of course they do.
Do you think that the Portuguese police, as we look back 14 years and across these 14 years, messed this up?
Well, because I don't know about the detail of it, I really can't say that.
All I can say is that I would have expected there to have been some forensic traces left from the perpetrator in that bedroom.
And there would have been something, I haven't heard of anything which suggests, I haven't heard of any results which suggests that they took much or did much with them.
And that's why I'm a bit concerned about it.
And I do know about a little bit, well I can remember now, but of some work that was done, I think actually over here, on some samples taken from the hire car, a car hired sometime afterwards, which was said to have some DNA in it that could conceivably have come from Madeleine McCann.
I think that's right.
And I would have been very skeptical of that.
And I think when it was reported, it got out of hand.
That information got out of hand and got over-interpreted.
And that hasn't helped the McCanns, and I feel very sorry about that.
But it's why you have to be so careful with forensics.
Well, we'll be remembering Maddie McCann again in just a week or two.
Blood is in your book.
We talked about that, I think.
If there's anything else you want to say beyond you talked about the way that you look for blood and the way that the trails and sometimes the exasperated or rather, you know, the airborne blood that would come from somebody gasping their last is significant.
Is there anything else to say about blood?
Well, I think it's just that there's a whole range of different patterns you can get from blood staining, and they are critically important.
And as I said, they're the other side of the coin from DNA.
So if you know how the blood got onto an item and you know from whom it could or couldn't have come, you're a long way, often a long way, down the track of providing some really useful evidence for an investigation and for the court.
Glass and paint.
You know, bits of broken glass that are found, little slivers and traces and, you know, just tiny little scintillas of paint that might appear.
How important are they?
Well, they can be incredibly important.
They're the sort of things if someone breaks a window in a breaking and entering, for example, and breaks a window, it's quite difficult to avoid being showered with tiny, tiny fragments of glass, you know, that come back at you as you break the glass.
And then obviously if you climb in through the window, you know, you've got to undo the catch and the normal thing.
You put your arm through, you can get little glass cuts in your clothing and more glass embedded there.
Or you can walk in broken glass.
It's quite difficult to get into a building through breaking a pane of glass and not get some glass on you.
And so that has always been really important.
And similarly paint, if you've been trying to jemmy open a door or something like that, then you've obviously used a tool for that and there's some damage and there might be some paint on the jemmy and there might be tool marks from the jemmy on the door or the window or whatever.
And so these sorts of physical fragments of things, traces that you get from buildings can be extremely important in suggesting that someone had something to do with the break-in.
And another case that made the news in this country, of course, and I remember reporting on this, the two girls in Soham, Holly and Jessica.
Forensics, very important in that.
And I think it came, and this is from memory, you might know the details better than me, but it was something to do with traces that were left on a car that had come from a muddy path.
Yes, I'm afraid I didn't do that case, and while I read about it at the time, obviously, I just can't quite remember the details of it.
I do remember there was a digital presentation of all the forensic evidence produced at the time of trial, and that was very impressive.
And I think that was probably one of the first cases where these sorts of digital representations were produced to give people an idea of, you know, not just what the evidence looked like, but, you know, where it was at the crime scene and why it was important or where it was on critical items.
So I remember the case partly for that as well.
And I think there were some DNA traces on a bin.
But, you know, again, all of these things are horrible to confront, but somebody's got to confront them.
You talk about hair.
We're always told in investigations that, you know, just one strand of hair found somewhere can be a deciding factor.
Is that true?
Well, yes, it is.
I mean, hair's very variable.
I mean, we used to do an enormous amount of hair comparisons in the past, you know, before we had DNA, because blood dripping wasn't nearly as powerful as DNA, so we were relying on hairs to quite an extent.
But these days, I think, because hair is so variable, it varies within one head and varies certainly widely between different people's heads.
And you can get similar hairs matching between different people, but on the other hand, you can get different hairs on the same head.
I think that's what I'm trying to say.
So they are very variable.
And nowadays, you really need to try and get some DNA out of them if you can.
And with a pulled hair root that's roughly pulled out, you should be able to do that because there will be some sheath cells at the bottom of it where it was attached to the head or to other parts of the body.
So You should be able to do that with pulled hair.
But if hair's dropped out naturally or it's cut in some way, and so there isn't a root, then it's much more difficult.
But I give a very nice example of an old case that was solved quite recently because one hair was found on the neck of this old lady.
And then eventually they discovered that that matched the DNA of the chap who was delivering her meals on wheels at the time, I think.
So he was, I think he was in the frame probably from the beginning, but certainly anyway, eventually he got convicted of it.
But that was several years later.
But that was, you know, a lot of the evidence was around this one hair.
The detailed, the fascinating art of forensic science we're talking about with Professor Angela Gallup.
And we were talking about the various factors in your book that you list beautifully.
We won't have time for all of them, so I'm going to try and just pick out some of the principal ones.
Of course, knives and firearms.
Crucial.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, they're two of the most common weapons, and so obviously they feature very heavily in our caseload.
Yeah.
And when you're trying to trace back...
But when you're talking about identifying a gun, for example, and tracing it back to a person who purchased it and used it, how do you do that?
Well, I think that there are records kept, obviously, of guns, and it's by working out what the gun you've got, it's sort of serial numbers and things, and then just tracing that back in the usual way that firearms experts do.
I mean, that's how they do it.
Presenting evidence in court is quite early on in your book.
I watched, in that particular case in Worcestershire, and subsequently in my career, a couple of other cases, I watched forensic experts on the stand.
You have to be very methodical and you cannot afford to miss anything.
No, you do.
That's quite right.
And you have to be very careful that you don't get too loose.
But on the other hand, it's got to be understandable for everybody.
It's got to be intelligible.
And so it's a tricky little balance between giving too much technical detail and keeping not boring everybody rigid, but keeping it accurate.
It's a tricky thing.
But you can see, I mean, I've noticed, I mean, on the rare occasion, obviously, but I've noticed when you see jurors' eyes start to glaze, glaze over and you think, right, I've got to get this a little bit more immediate, a bit more difficult to understand.
Yes, and not go down.
But sometimes it's quite difficult because, of course, you're at the mercy of the lawyers asking you these questions, you know, and if they ask you precisely how many fibres of a specific type were found in a particular part of an item of clothing, then that's the answer that you have to give.
And if they continue to answer that sort of question, it can get quite dry.
So it's not always particularly straightforward.
Is it not utterly nerve-wracking, though, Angela, when you're on the stand being cross-examined by the defence brief, who of course is going to want to go first for holes and gaps and flaws in the forensics?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, you're definitely, when you go in there, you've got a lot of adrenaline flowing around your body.
That is certainly true.
But I kind of think that it's that rigor of the court process that makes you so careful when you're at the, or helps to make it you so, so careful.
I mean, you want to get the, obviously you want to get it as right as possible anyway.
But it's that thought at the end of the day that you're going to be held to account for every single thing you say.
And so even it might be about the sort of the details of what you've done.
But it's about what you did and when you did it and where you were when you did it and how you can be sure that it's not contamination and how you know that the thing that you looked at is the thing that everybody's referring to and the thing that's shown in the photographs at the crime scene and so on.
So it's all that stuff that surrounds forensics.
It's not just the tests and what you make of them themselves.
It's everything else.
And so it's all that.
And also it's other things.
I mean if the barrister's really driven to it, it hasn't been getting anywhere with you, then they can easily revert to commenting on your grammar or even what you're wearing.
I give a couple of examples of where people have been criticised for what they've worn in court, you know, a blouse that's been too loud or a tie that's not the right colour or something like that.
What possible impact on the evidence could that have?
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I think it's just anything to try and unsettle you.
And they have lots of tricks that they use.
And one of the things I think that I always used to be concerned about, until I talked to a barrister actually about this, is really interesting.
They often say, well, thank you.
They ask you a question, you know, you answer it.
And then they say, well, thank you for that.
We'll come back to that later.
And you think, oh, God, have I just started to dig a bit of a hole there?
What was there that I said?
But actually, when I've talked to barristers since then, they've said, oh, no, no.
What that means is we've completely lost the plot.
When we've regrouped ourselves, then we'll come back and finish what we were going to ask you.
We can't remember.
So actually, you can make things much worse than they actually are.
It's quite interesting, that.
Those things make you realise, as I realised, that Rumpole of the Bailey, wonderful Omio McCurd, who acted in that, played it perfectly because it is exactly like that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think the interesting thing I discovered was that barristers get the best out of you, whether they're prosecution or defense, whoever, when they're being Helpful and pleasant.
It's when they become aggressive that you can't help putting up some human defences and you try to carry on exactly as you have been.
But actually, if someone's attacking you, you know, you're bound to just close up a bit.
And so I've always thought that the most successful criminal lawyers are the ones that are, you know, pleasant and lead you places gently.
They can drop you in it at the end, absolutely, you know, but they lead you gently there.
That's a really interesting tap.
They leave you some dignity.
One theme that constantly emerges in the book, you refer to it a number of times, is the line, never make assumptions, because assumptions can lead you astray if you let them guide you too far.
And you give one excellent case, I mean, it's quite a disturbing case, but it's a woman found dead in bed, and there'd been a fire, and it was assumed she'd been smoking in bed, but it was later discovered by good forensic work that was not the cause.
Yes, I think this is the woman.
They thought that the fire was, yes, an accidental fire.
And this was supported, I think the police thought at the time, by balls of newspaper that were rolled up and were underneath the chairs and all her furniture, really, in the living area of her flat.
I don't know if that's the case you mean, but there were lots of these rolled up balls of newspapers.
Everybody thought, oh, well, she's just, you know, got this, you know, she's done that and the fire's been accidental or she's, you know, in some way, it's not suspicious anyway.
But then, in the midst of this on the bed, we found this glass vase that was spattered with blood and had some of her hair in it.
And of course, that changed the complexion of the investigation completely and immediately.
And then eventually it was discovered that, you know, obviously she'd been murdered.
And I think someone was brought to court over that.
I understand you were involved in the Princess Diana case.
And that forensically seemed to hinge, didn't it, on the toxicology for Henri Paul, the driver?
Yes, there were just, you know, three main things I think we looked at.
Certainly there was that and was the sample in which the alcohol had been found.
Had that really come from him?
And so we had a look at that and did some DNA on it and it was indeed his sample.
And then we also thought about the alcohol level and whether that was all right.
But we were also asked to see if we could determine whether Princess Diana had been pregnant at the time of the crash.
And we did that by working with a well-known hormone expert in, does a lot of sports crime doping cases, that sort of thing, where people take the wrong sort of substances to improve their performance.
But he was an expert in all of that.
But anyway, he helped us, or we helped him probably would be the way to say it, to develop a new technique that you could use on dried blood, because there was quite a lot of dried blood within the car that we could use, to see whether or not there were the pregnancy hormones there.
And so we did that.
And I think on the test that we used, we were confident that if the pregnancy had only been just literally a couple of weeks or so, then we would be able, or he would be able to detect the pregnancy hormones using his kind of test.
So we were helpful in that, I think, because we're very used to using dry blood.
We use it all the time.
It's often been...
Sorry.
The last thing was really to look at some damage to, I think it was a fiat, wasn't it, that was suspected to having been involved in the crash.
And so it was looking at that and looking at some damage to a light, I think, or something.
So those were the three aspects that we looked at.
If, as conspiracy theorists have consistently claimed for how many years now, 25 years this year, in the summer, if this had been more than an accident, would forensics have told you that?
I think that, I mean, again, it depends how the crime scene was handled and all the rest of it.
But certainly forensics can always help, and to some extent or another.
And I think we were able to show that.
I mean, I think the original forensics, we could check those and we could comment on those.
And I think there was nothing in there that we discovered that was concerning from a sort of forensic understanding, forensic interpretation point of view.
And that was our work, was part of a huge review that Lord John Stevens did into the case.
And I think at the end of that, he concluded that there was nothing to suggest that it was anything other than the crash, but how the crash occurred and everything.
I think, well, he dealt with all of that as part of his report.
But I don't think there was anything nefarious about it as was suggested.
Are you pleased that police are re-looking into the evidence, the details of the Gareth Williams case, the young man?
We discussed this a little earlier in this program.
You won't have heard that part, but the young man found dead, zipped into a bag in his bath.
The heating had been turned up.
And it was said at the time of the hearings on this, the inquest, you know, how could anybody zip themselves into a bag like that?
And it was first of all said that there was more to this than meets the eye.
That was the first ruling from the inquest.
And then police said it was probably accidental.
And now they're saying we're going to look at it again.
Are you pleased about that?
Yes, I am, absolutely, because forensics has been moving on.
And even, I think it happened, was it 2010 or something?
It's certainly moved on since then.
And I think we've learnt a lot about how you do these cold cases.
So as long as they've got a decent team of forensic scientists, not that many forensic scientists, well, there are very few actually in the UK who can do work at this sort of level.
But as long as they've got a good team to do that, then they may well discover Some extra bits and pieces in there.
They've certainly got some opportunities.
And so, you know, I wish them all the very best of luck because I think that's something which definitely deserves further work on.
You were involved in the Stephen Lawrence case.
It was one of the very first crimes of this kind that I reported on when I worked for Capitol Radio.
I'd only just really joined the station, hadn't been there long, and I remember the awful aftermath, the shock of that, a young bright boy killed in that way in South London.
And, you know, getting justice took so many years.
You were involved in that case?
Yes, absolutely.
Yes.
I mean, right, you know, from, I think it happened in 1993 and from 1995, I think the CPS had decided that there wasn't enough evidence.
They'd got the suspects, the five suspects, quite early on.
And I think the CPS were thinking about whether or not they had a case, enough of a case to take them to court.
And they decided that there wasn't.
So then the family decided they were going to take out a private prosecution against them.
And I was involved in that.
But just really to pop into the London Forensic Science Laboratory and see if they'd done the right sorts of things and see if they'd missed anything.
And so I had a quick look.
I think I had about a week spent in there just checking the sort of things they'd done and extending some of the searches that they'd made just to broaden the whole forensic thing out a bit.
But didn't really find anything.
The evidence was left pretty much that you're very weak, very limited, really, not much use in a court.
And then, of course, I gave evidence to them at first an inquiry and said, well, it was quite a brief attack, so maybe you wouldn't get much transferred.
But then, of course, in the intervening years, I had learnt so much about never say never and all of that stuff, you know, by doing a lot of other cases, a lot of other cold cases, that I always thought about that, that it would be worth going back to.
And eventually in 2006, we were asked, we'd had a lot of success with other cases, and we were asked to have a look at that one.
And eventually, by adopting a much broader approach to the whole thing, and actually we started out looking for paint, strangely enough, because we were understanding the crime scene, looking at what the witnesses said about what they'd seen and heard and all the rest of it, and trying to devise a few examinations based on that.
And the paint led to textile fibers, and then we started finding textile fibers, and the textile fibers led us to blood.
And we actually, even though it was a fairly limited attack in that Stephen just had two stab cuts and was wearing an enormous amount of clothing because it was freezing cold that night.
So seven layers of clothing, I think it was.
And of course, as you withdraw a knife through clothing, it's sort of kind of self-cleaning a bit.
And so we thought, well, in the way that I described earlier that we used to, you know, well, maybe in this case we wouldn't find any blood on the clothing of the perpetrators because of all of this, you know, and everything.
But anyway, amazingly enough, we did find a spot of blood inside the back of the neck of the jacket of one of the original suspects.
And so we had that evidence on him, plus a number of different types of fibre, and also some fibers linking a second suspect of the original five.
And so eventually, you know, forensics finally got there.
But it was only, I think, really partly because we had new DNA techniques which were much more sensitive.
We wouldn't have been able to analyse a spot that small originally.
But also because we understood so much better how you do these really complicated cases, how you get into them.
Because it's finding a way in.
You know, it's a bit like walking into a room and looking around it in the dark and then you find the light switch and suddenly you can see everything, you know.
And so when you find your way into a forensic case, you know, suddenly you find the light switch and then it's amazing.
And I've had some cases, I think particularly the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path murders, was just like that.
When we finally found the right way in, my goodness, there was an enormous amount of evidence fell out of that.
Absolutely enormous.
And so that's the trick of it.
But we didn't understand any of that originally when we were thinking about Stephen Lawrence's case.
But by the mid 2000s, we certainly did.
So you must never, as you said, say never, because you might always reopen a case and there may always be hope for those who are left bereaved and those who are left without the answers and the closure that they need.
Angela, it's been fascinating and very, very enlightening talking with you.
My apologies to my listener that we've had to do this on the telephone for technical reasons.
But I wasn't listening to the phone line quality.
I was listening to every word that you said.
Just very finally, are there any cases, and you don't have to name that they are, I'm just asking a general question, that you've been disappointed in, that perhaps you felt that you failed in?
Well, certainly the one I talked about earlier, definitely.
I don't know.
I mean, when I say I failed, I mean, I wasn't out looking for crime scenes or anything like that, but I think we collectively, the criminal justice industry, if you can call it that, definitely failed, Claire Walterton.
But 30 years later, we were able to reverse that.
So a few years ago, I would have said that's something that I think we failed.
And I think there are other cases that trouble me.
There are some cases that trouble me.
And I wish the police would just reopen them.
There's a double murder that I often talk about that I think is certainly worth looking for in relation to one particular person who's convicted of other crimes, similar crimes.
And the MO looks so similar that I think that that would be really worth looking at.
And there's some Other cases where I think there's one chap who's been in prison for years, was in prison, I think he's probably out now.
But it feels like, from the forensic side of it, it feels like the evidence is there's something funny about it because it doesn't form the normal pattern.
And there's usually a reason for that.
Sometimes evidence doesn't, but usually you can find a reason for it.
But in this case, I found no reason.
And what's more, it's not just me that worries about that case.
The police did a separate independent police force did a review of the original police work and they said they were very concerned about it but couldn't quite pinpoint what the problem was.
And also one of the lawyers who was involved in the case originally, who later became a judge, apparently he says that it's the one case that he's always been very unhappy about.
So I think even if people have been in prison, got out and have tried to rebuild their lives, I think even then it's really, really important if something has gone wrong and they have been wrongly accused and convicted, it's still really important to sort that out for them because you're only here once, you only have one life and it's really, really important you don't have any stigma.
One of the cases I did was the Cardiff V case that became the Cardiff 3 when three men were convicted of murdering this brutal murder of this young woman.
And these people were convicted and they were put in prison for two years and then let out or they were acquitted because it was shown that the police investigation had been, or interrogation had been far too hostile and got them to confess things that they'd never done.
So they were let out.
But then it was really only when we came along sort of several years later and did a reinvestigation and found the true murderer that they really got some justice.
And I say I very rarely meet the people involved in these cases, but just the other day I did meet one of the Diado Five who had had his life so badly disrupted and had been under suspicion for so long.
And even after he was acquitted, people still thought he and his friends were guilty of this terrible crime.
And it wasn't until our work did that, you know, showed that it was someone else.
And seeing the difference that that made to his life and hearing about it was very powerful.
I found it a very humbling moment that.
So I know that it's just as important to get the people who've done these terrible things, but also very important to make sure that people who have been really badly treated by the criminal justice system, that gets recognised and acknowledged and apologies and so on are made.
It's all about justice.
Angela Gallup, I wish I could speak with you longer.
I think we could do another hour.
Sadly, we can't.
The book is called How to Solve a Crime, Real Cases from the Cutting Edge of Forensics.
I know there are two books.
People should check you out because the book that I've read, and that's the one I've just given the title of, is excellent.
Angela, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.
The fascinating world of forensics, a highly accomplished person, Professor Angela Gallup.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, and maybe I will have had my teeth fixed by then.
I'm not going to certainly be in the process of it.
I think I've got several months of dental work to come, but hopefully the most important thing will be done.
Until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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