An interview with Prof. Dame Sue Black - YOU AND EXPERIENCE - Part 1

[Music] there there's a very simple answer to the question what is a normal day or a day in the life of soo black like and the answer is that there's no conformity so no two days are ever the same in an academic role of course I end up doing a lot of the stuff that nobody wants to talk about which is the bureaucracy and the paperwork and the admin but they're really exciting stuff is the stuff that you can't plan so a phone call that that comes into the office that says we need you at a crime scene this afternoon can you please be there or we've got a mass fatality event that's occurred somewhere around the world and we're going to need to fly you out or someone says we want to come up because we've got some images usually police forces that we want you to look at so when those sorts of things happen you can't plan for anything it's totally at random and you've got to be able to be agile and flexible because that great plans that you had for the things you were going to do that afternoon or next week of course can go completely by the wayside so it's quite exciting it's quite inconvenient but the very fact is no two days are the same when I was very young my father was a great shot when we lived out in the country and so my father would bring home pigeons and rabbits and deer and all sorts of things and my job would be to gut them and skin them because my mother wouldn't do it and so from a very young age I became very comfortable in working with dead material and when I was a teenager I got a Saturday job in a butcher shop which seemed a perfectly logical next step from helping my father got rabbits and when I went to university I wasn't much good at anything but I really like the idea of Anatomy because being able to look inside the human isn't that much different from looking inside the animal and so I felt I could make the transition from the butcher shop to an anatomy department and so I spent my final myomas years in the anatomy department and then my PhD and I thought I was probably going to do something on identification of skeletal remains because the material I'd worked on was archaeological and then a phone call came in just just as I talked about in terms of there being no prediction of the way things go which is a police force it was Grampian police force in fact who had a pilot who had come down as microlight had crashed off the coast and the body of a found several weeks later and there was a question as to the identity of the body across these were in days before DNA which almost seems impossible and so my supervisor said I'm going to do this do you want to come with me and I thought you know I can go from the dead animals to the butcher shop to the anatomy department can I go into the mortuary with the dead human in varying stages of decomposition and I found that I could so there was no real conscious decision if you like and and Steve Jobs said if you if you stop and you look back on your life for a moment you can see all the dots and you can see how they join up and it is only with age over time that you get that ability to do that and I can see where all of these things linked up to when I look backwards but of course I wasn't aware of them at the time and you just have to have the faith that the dots that you're going to make into the future when you stand back and you look at them they'll fit in to what you've done in the past as well so not a conscious decision but of very logical and natural progression for me to work into the forensic arena and particularly with regards to identification of the human the most rewarding thing that's really quite challenging because I think it happens at different levels I find it rewarding to teach students I love that moment when you're dealing with something so complicated and then suddenly you can visibly see all these light bulbs going on and you think yes now you know now you get it something that you thought was intangible and totally incomprehensible you managed to convey that so that somebody else can understand it so I get a huge sense of satisfaction out of that I get a huge sense of satisfaction out of when a body is found and we don't know who it is but through very painstaking scientific research you get to a name and that means that that deceased individual can be buried with that name but it also means that their family who have been missing this individual gets that return to them and we're conscious always that it's it's sad news is really difficult for them but there's an honesty in it and there's a sense of satisfaction that you've been able to bring somebody home and you know working in international fields being able to bring perpetrators of these crimes to justice that becomes very rewarding as well so it happens on all sorts of levels I think every cases is complicated in its own way and there are some that are more difficult than others simply because of the nature of the death or the nature of the situation of which you're operating but probably for me the most challenging takes me back to Kosovo and I've just been writing a textbook with my colleague Louise Shore about identification of the child because there wasn't any such textbook so we decided we would write it it took us ten years to write it which is a long time but in the middle of that I find myself in Kosovo in a case where we had a family who lived in the village but had chosen to to move up into the hill site to keep the children safe to keep them out of the village which is where the Serb troops were coming into and then on odd occasion when they needed to refuel or they needed to get provisions they would come down out of the hillside into the villages and they were doing that one day dad drives the tractor and there's a trailer behind and on the trailer is his wife her sister their mother and their eight children and a rocket-propelled grenade took out the entirety of the trailer dad was sniper in the leg and he managed to crawl away into the undergrowth knowing full well that nobody had survived on the back of that trailer and then under cover of darkness bear in mind he was still injured and shot he managed to find the remains of his family and a do mean remains because we only ever find the bottom half of his twelve year old daughter we will never find one side of his wife so if you imagined the the foresight that he had and the sheer determination and bravery that he had to grub around in the undergrowth looking for what was left of his family because he knew he couldn't leave them out if he did then the dogs would use them as a food source so he needed to bury them to protect them and so he dug a hole and he buried everything that he could find and then about a year later we come along as part of the international criminal team and say we want to exhume these remains and I think you know if it'll be me I'd have told us where to go but he had a real problem and his fear was that because his family were all mixed together in one whole his fear was that his god couldn't find them his god needed each one to have a named grave to know who that person was so he was quite happy if he can use the word happy for us to come along and exhume the remains and identify them because he wanted to know that this was the body of his 12 year old this was the body of his five year old and so when the team excavated the hole we only ever found enough to fill one and a half body bags so we knew it's going to be challenging to give him back the 11 people that he was looking for so in that day I spread out 12 white sheets in the mortuary in Kosovo and send everybody else away kept the photographer kept the radiographer because we needed to be able to record what we were doing and we so slowly sifted through what we had within those body bags and the youngest which was a little baby of a few months he was still intact he was still in his romper suit so that was really easy and it was easy to identify the wife and her sister and the their mother because she was a on the elderly adult and indeed we all never found one side of his wife as he as he had said he had find and then we were left with the seven other children and these ranged from we've got the baby so it ranged from a child of about two right the way to two 14 year old twin boys and our job was to try and find a bit of everybody because you wanted to be able to say here's what happens at this event this is a war crime this is something that can be used against milazzo vajura blood at your carriage it's your whomsoever and we were able to find a part of every child until we got to the two fourteen year old twin boys and how do you separate two boys of the same age and so what we had was the the arms because we only ever had the top of their body the arms of one of the young boys was it was inside a Mickey Mouse vest and I said to the police officer go and ask dad which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest don't say it's it's one of the twins which of the twins which the boys who had a Mickey Mouse vest and when dad came back with the information then he gave the name of twin fourteen-year-old boys because he seems absolutely obsessed with Mickey Mouse so we could tentatively then assign a name to that body part and therefore by exclusion the other body part had to be his twin brother so we were able to hand that man back twelve body bags eleven that all had a name and a twelve that we simply just couldn't separate because our job in the International Criminal Tribunal is to be able to say in this body bag is the body of and if what we've done is we just separated it out between all the eleven because nobody will know then what will happen is that our evidence will be thrown out of court because if they can't trust us they can't trust our evidence and therefore we become witnesses that are that are not to be allowed in the court so you have to be very specific and it was a really challenging day to be able to separate out these children given the state of decomposition they were in but the really really difficult thing was we wrote the name of each individual on the body bag so as we handed them back to the father we could name this is and he was so grateful and being grateful just felt wrong in that situation when you think that a man had gone through the enormity of the trauma that he had and he was thanking us for what we've done that stayed with me in that that will simply never ever go I'm often asked how do you cope with the things that you do how do you protect yourself and of course we we know that uh that in many ways what we do is rather unusual and we have been likened to the modern-day senators those individuals who consumed the sins of the rest of the world so that the public don't have to look at it and that that will have a toll and it eventually does have at all I think on everybody it effects the way in which you interact with your life but you can either try to view that positively or for some people of course with post-traumatic then they really do suffer dreadfully from it and we're not we're not silly enough to imagine that we're immune to it but we are aware of it and being aware of it I think is the first step of ensuring that you protect yourself because if you can't protect yourself and you can't protect the case so there isn't an easy answer to it and I think everybody deals with it in their own way for me I was very lucky that I almost had a gradual buildup of a skin a skin almost like a rhino thick enough that I'm able to keep things out and keep things in but when I go to work then what I view in my own head is that I have a clinical box and I physically open a door and enter that clinical box and in there I'll do the cases so if I'm working on a body that is very badly decomposed I find a space in my head where I can't smell anything if I'm working on images of child abuse then I find myself the furthest corner away from the door so that I don't listen to the videos I don't look at the video as being a child I'm looking at it as evidence and you find a way to cope with the different types of cases depending on what they are and that just comes I think with age and with experience and what I then try to do is when I leave work I close the door behind me and I lock it so if I've got demons then they're encapsulated within there my fear would be that somebody comes and opens my door for me and rummages around in there and that's when your demons escape and people who suffer from post-traumatic say it's like that it's like being able to contain this powder keg and then suddenly there's a breach and it allows it to escape and they just can't put it back and I think I've been very lucky so far in that I've been able to compartmentalize everything that I do I know that when I go into a scene I did not cause it I'm not responsible for it I don't have the guilt of it and my job is not to feel empathy for the victims or to feel that I want justice against those have perpetrated the crime that's not my job I have to do just my job and my job is to find the evidence to collect the evidence to analyze the evidence and then to present the evidence and if I do anything more than those then I become somebody who is no longer objective who is no longer dispassionate is no longer impartial and I will have stopped doing the professional job that is being asked of me I'm not being asked to investigate I'm not being asked to empathize and just been asked to do a specific task and for as long as I can focus on that as being my job then my demons stay inside my own clinical box and I cope with it that way I've never lost sleep I've never find myself spooked by the dead the living are much much more scary than the dead are trust me they don't move around they don't make noises they don't sit up all of the things that we want them to do in films they just have to do and so they're much more reliable in many ways than are the living humans and so I think I'm in the right profession but it's very difficult when you've got young trainees coming through because you don't know how they're going to react to it so that you eventually adopt the sort of maternal role as well is about making sure that they can cope with it making sure that they're not suffering from it and as a team we will sit and we will talk and we will watch each other and if one of us has got a night of character behavior that you haven't seen then we'll address it because we will see it we understand it more so than perhaps an external counselor might being part of a team is really important in any stressful situation when you're a loner you're less likely to be able to cope with the stresses around any developing situation but as a team you might not like your team members you know have to like them but your job is to be a part of that team and your job is to look out for them so that we would often sit down and just chew the fat literally chew the fat and in that conversation things will come out and you can if you know that you're releasing it into an environment that are safe there's never going to be used against you because what happens with your team stays with your team and you build a bond with that team that nobody else can understand and you know if you're discussing it with other people who've not been there they can't comprehend the enormity of what you've just seen and what you've done whereas the people that I worked with in Kosovo in 99 and mm 18 years ago I know that if I go into a room with any one of them will pick up the relationship exactly where we left it off because they understand something about me that nobody else does and I understand something about them and it's okay for us to break down it's okay for us to show our weaknesses it's okay for us to hurt it's okay for us to show our fear as long as it's within that team because that team is like the pack instinct it will protect and it will support and that makes it's the kind of camaraderie that you see in the military for example in wartime it's exactly the same thing you're doing unusual things in unusual places with really almost unbelievable cruelty in the world but these people who are there are experiencing experiencing it with you and that makes them special and it makes your relationship with them exceptionally special and very very strong if crime is a really interesting thing because if you look at television or you look at our novels people love to vicariously watch crime they like to be slightly scared by it's it's sort of hide behind their finger so that there's a good safe distance between the brutality and the reality of what happens and what we portray so that the public are really engaged with crime because it's not them it's removed from them it's somebody else who's bad it's not me that's bad and we like to read the stories because we like the the anxiety and the free soul that comes with it but we're not scared by it because it's not personal so that people think you know forensic science is really interesting and it is really interesting but when you're doing it when you're in it what you actually see is the end product of that aggression and that's not pretty and that's not exciting and there is a very different feel to the reality of forensic investigation than there is to what is portrayed either in the newspapers or the television because until you're actually faced with it you can't interact with it in the same way when you look at dismemberments dismemberments are the kinds of thing that make huge headline news because everybody think it's always not awful it's dreadful they took that young girl they cut her body into six pieces and they did it with a tenant's or whatever it may be that there is a an abhorrence of the situation but when you think about it and we know dismemberment SAR relatively rare we maybe get three perhaps even four in the UK in any single year it's really really rare so the chances that a police officer is actually going to to investigate one of these in the professional lifetime is extremely unlikely the chances that a pathologist is going to have to look at a dismembered remains is again you know maybe one or two in their entire career so for them it doesn't have that same sort of fear or excitement that a public might get and reading it for them it's a I've never done one of these before what am I looking at it's a different kind of anxiety in a different kind of fear because it's an unusual situation for them dismembered as they just happens to be one of our X areas of expertise in Dundee and in my career I've probably looked at maybe eight to twelve but that's really focused and extensive so I don't see anything at all exciting in December meant but I can understand why people do I can understand why it makes good crime novels because it's about shocking people into accepting the reality of what man can do any that the generic term but what man can do to man and certainly when we were in in Kosovo and our first crime scene was a night I swear we had 44 men who had been murdered in there then you know a lot of people would say how did this happen how could we allow in the world this to happen in an area of the world that is is right on our doorstep we're not talking about utterly deprived and depraved parts of the world we're talking about an area the world that people used to go to on holiday how can that happen and I think in human nature there is there is a really unseemly dark core to humanity that's just below the surface and I think it's in all of us and we want to deny it we absolutely want to deny that we could never kill somebody we could never dismember somebody we could never be cruel but reality shows that put into the situation you can turn people's nature actually very very quickly and I think people recognize that and are scared of it and want to suppress it and want to be able to say no that's in somebody else it's not in me so I can afford to look at it for curiously forensic science is an interesting science because there is no such thing as forensic science it doesn't exist all there is is science and the forensic bit of it means all we've done is we've taken our science into the courtroom because forensic comes from the Latin word for rensis which means pertaining to the forum and the forum were the courts of Rome so anything the word forensic in front of it means we've taken it into court so all our sciences are our sciences we take into court now I know that in in don t there in life sciences there are subjects that are so easy tarik i don't even understand the titles of the lectures that they put up i've never understood what ubiquitination is and never will kinase errs pass me by but because forensic science has to be played out in the courtroom and the most important person in the courtroom or people in the courtroom of the jury because the jury are there to decide they're the Trier of fact is this person guilty or are they innocent they have to understand the science so forensic science and forensic scientists have to be able to convey their science in a language that anybody can understand you don't have to be a scientist to do it whereas in much more easy Taric parts of mathematics and physics and chemistry the public can never hope to understand it because it's so focused and I think that element of using science and balancing it with the law and being able to pass it to the public to make a decision is a really sexy combination but of course the media are going to pick up on films are going to pick up on it's really it's part of a storytelling process and you can see it building up in that courtroom scenario to a perfect climax where the jury are going to decide guilt or innocence so as it's no surprise that it's been really latched onto by those who write fiction but also for those who are portraying facts because there's as much interest in in forensic fiction as there is in forensic fact unless a forensic fact but those forensic factual programs are the ones that are particularly well researched that's not necessarily going to be those that are most popular with the media so for example the CSI and the CSI type effects often those are simply about entertainments they're not about portraying the science in a realistic concept so my students were asked to review an episode of CSI and it was a baby had been found the skeleton of a baby had been found and they took the skull and they have apparently I've never seen it but they have this 3d hologram box and so the skull was put into the box and what they did was they aged the skull to make the individual look like an adult because at this point my students are falling about the floor killing themselves laughing and then what they do is they they reconstruct a face over the skull and they walk out of the building of course they bump into a woman who looks exactly like the face that they just reconstructed and of course it's the mother of the baby that was find so it is so far-fetched and so far out of left field that it has left science really in in the dirt and in the dust now maybe there's an element of science future science and there are things that we might be able to do and I'm a great believer in what I call the Star Trek effect so if you look and you go back through those early episodes of Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry he identified things that became a reality it's the first place in television that we saw somebody walk up to a door and a door automatically open when you think of their tricorders which were so like our first mobile phones all of these things these sensors that we can now use to detect human disease they were all there in science fiction so I think science fiction has a lot to play in terms of being able to influence science future but I have to say that the forensic ones are by and large bad and our chances of being able to use anything that we see on CSI our bones is extremely unlikely ah now if you were to ask my husband and my children what do I do away from work and what are my hobbies they would say she's never away from work and she doesn't have any hobbies and they'd probably be right I am a workaholic but I think that the reason I am a workaholic is because my job is my hobby and that makes me extremely lucky so when our youngest daughter who's now 21 was about 7 or 8 she said to my husband and I mommy daddy have we ever been on holiday and we thought wasn't that's really not very good because my husband's just as bad as I am at taking holidays and he's right we're going to go on holiday and bless him he booked us a villa somewhere in the south of Portugal which was just her Brenda's heat and a lovely swimming pool of the girls had a great time but by day - I was so mind-numbingly board that I started to write a textbook and so I would sit at the side of the pool typing away writing the textbook whilst they were in the pool having fun and that for me is as much of a relaxation as anything else so there isn't really a hobbyist such because when I have time I set my rights and I write about the kind of things that I do I mean I've written 14 text books now and each one's a pleasure it's not a chore because that's what I like to do so maybe I maybe I'm a writer but I'm a writer in a very very narrow field the one that I've just finished reading which I adored from its beginning to its ends is a book by Richard Holloway and Richard Holliday Holloway was the exhibition of Edinburgh and Richard has written a book called waiting for the last boss and riches now in his 80s and he can see his life as is dwindling away and he knows that he's not got line long left and he wrote the most touching intimate delicate but hard-hitting book on his beliefs on his his anticipation of death his interpretation of death and it signs as if it should be something that is really morbid but it's not it's beautifully written as only Richard can beautifully written and really uplifting and I wish I'd written it I really wish I'd written out have been so proud of it but it's just he has the most he has the most amazing heart and the most amazing mind and both of those are just across every single page of what he's written I just I just loved it from beginning to end so it's the one that stays on my bookcase and I know that it will come out time and time and time again I think you know it has to be the Ripper murders I'd love to be able to go back into that time because there's so much conspiracy around what happens it would be great to go back and to be able to look at the anatomy and say you know cuz I'm part of my area of expertise believe it or not if that's an area of expertise is in dismemberment and embodied disfigurement so being able to go back you know because we don't have great photographs we don't have great crime-scene notes going being able to go back and look at those in a new I would be really interesting and very recently we've reenacted the trial of a chap called William berry in Dundee and there is the conspiracy that of course William berry was Jack the Ripper because he was in Whitechapel when the Ripper murders were occurring and he left Whitechapel and moved to Dundee and of course when he moved the murders stopped I'm sure thousands of people left London at that time and all of them can't have been the Ripper but when he came to Dundee very shortly after being Dundee within two weeks he'd murdered and dismembered and eviscerated his wife and so it does lend some credibility to him being Jack the Ripper I don't believe he was but we reenacted his trial because he was the last man to be hanged in Dundee and part of his remains were in my department so they'd retained his neck that showed the hangman's fracture and so we used the mooting society from Aberdeen University in the mooting Society from Dundee University which were trainee lawyers and they presented the case both of them being mentored by Scotland's top legal minds which was a great opportunity for them and believe it or not the Aberdeen University mooting Society won and he was fine not guilty so we had a lovely moments where lurid humour Hughes who was our judge when our William Barry was asked to stand up in court because we'd reenacted it in the court he'd said to him we've got good news and bad he said the good news is they didn't find you guilty the bad news is I think you're guilty is sin and you're still gonna die so we had a lovely moment we had that that ability to actually look at the historical record analyze the historical record and allow the public to of today to make a decision which was different to the one that they made a hundred and thirty years ago so I'd quite like to go back and see whether the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel did have any semblance to what happened in Dundee as to why that our William Barrie really was Jack the Ripper [Music]

Channel: Glasgow Science Centre

Views: 9,634

Rating: 4.9312716 out of 5

Keywords: Glasgow Science Centre, forensic science, foresnic anthropology, sue black, anatomy

Id: HA8r1CVU0fw

Length: 31min 2sec (1862 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 20 2018