Forensic human identification | The Search

my name is procesor black I'm director of the center for anatomy and human identification at the University of Dundee and I'm also the deputy principal for Public Engagement at the moment we're sitting in the dissecting room within the University and about 70 to 80 bodies are bequeathed to us in the anatomy department every year that come here for dissection and we train forensic anthropologists as well as other forensic experts and it's really important for a forensic anthropologist that they don't just understand the bones they have to understand the soft tissue because that's a really important incredible part of that identification process so their training starts in here in the dissection of the human body bones are really important bones and teeth because they survive and that makes them of particular importance when we have an individual that we don't know who they are if we can take DNA off a body if we can take fingerprints of a body we've got a good chance of identifying them but if the bodies decomposed or its skeletal the amount of information is obviously diminished so our responsibility is to take that bone and it may only be a part of a bone it might not be a whole skeleton and try to determine something about the identity of the individual and there are four primary identifier x' that we can all relate to so you have a sex you're either male or female but there is a gray area within that as well you have an age at which you go missing or an age at which you die you have an ethnic origin now that doesn't mean where you're born that means about your ethnic history so where did your ancestors come from and you have a height so that when you hear the police on on the television for example describing a suspect they'll say he's a male is between 25 and 35 foot six to five foot eight and height and white and those are the basic biological identifies it's the first thing that we start to look at when we have a skeleton in front of us but you can imagine that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals that could fit into the one profile so our next job is to say what's different about this person what can we see within them that would allow somebody who's listening to Crimewatch or whatever the program may be that goes oh my father had that my brother had that my mother had that it's about saying what kind of pathological condition did they have had they broken a bone many years ago do they have dental work is there any evidence of surgery would they have walked with a limp did they have an abnormality of a finger all of those things that are the anatomical individuality x' if you like off of each person it's our job to try and extract as many of those as possible from the skeleton and that's the really difficult part DVI stands for disaster victim identification and it's where we have mass fatalities for example so if you were to think about the plane crash in Ukraine very recently that's the kind of situation when a forensic DDI team would go in forensic anthropologists can be involved in a number of places so they may be involved at the scene of the incident if particularly if the bodies are burnt or if those explosions so that in the London bombings and again in the Ukraine plane crash their job on the ground will be to identify these small parts these fragments are the human are they not human which part of the human may they be and they will get bagged up and then sent to the mortuary you might have an anthropologist at the triage part of the mortuary because when these bags come in it will be opening them up again to say is this human is this animal if you think of the World Trade Center they had restaurants so there'd be bits of peg there big bits of sheep we need to separate those out and also from the anatomical perspective we'll be able to say in fragmented material this is the top part of a left thigh this is the bottom part of a right forearm and it allows you to start putting the jigsaw perhaps together the human jigsaw back together if you have fragmented or exploded remains and then the anthropologist is also in the mortuary in the station associated with identification so when the body or the body part is coming through is it male or female is it a young individual is it an elderly individual what's the ethnic origin of this person how tall are they what sort of other indicators of their identity are present do we have previous fractures do we have these disease processes and so the anthropologist is in a multiple number of the places within the scene if you like there's no doubt that what we're exposed to is traumatic you don't see the best side of life and as a parent you become rather more protective perhaps than most because you see the volume of child abuse child pornography you see murders you see mass fatality events all of these are obviously going to influence the way in which you lead your own life and for me my desensitization or sensitization depending which way you look at it really came about very gradually so part of my job as a teenager was working in a butcher shop so I was used to dealing with bone and muscle and blood and viscera and it didn't upset me in any way moving into a dissecting room was if you like the next stage of that but it does take quite a lot of courage to make that first cut in human skin but once you do and you're inside the human body it is just such an amazing world that you marvel in it you're not repelled by it so the first time you see your forensic case where that body that beautiful body is disrupted whether it's disrupted by fire by decomposition by trauma whatever it may be you almost look beyond that to what it was and you compare the two and in comparison of the two it allows you to determine what happened what happened between that perfect intact body you know what it should look like and what you have in front of you so it becomes the investigation it becomes the puzzle and we all love puzzles Kosovo was unquestionably a turning point in my career I got the phone call that said what are you doing on Saturday and I made the mistake of saying nothing and Peter vanessa's who was the forensic pathologist said we need you out here I didn't know what I was going out to hadn't got a clue and it was really quite scary but you don't think about these things you just get on the plane and you think I'll figure it out when I get to the other end it was incredibly traumatic I do have to say but also incredibly rewarding because you you really got to feel part of an integral team you were really working at the junction to help the local communities address that necessary judicial aspects of what went on and to help the world recognize what had occurred in that country probably the one that that made the most impact on me was a family and it was a family who came out of the villages to go up into the countryside and they would come back into the town for provisions and on a particular day dad was driving the tractor whole family was on the trailer behind him and an RPG rocket-propelled grenade took out the trailer the father who was driving the tractor was sniper din the leg so he was shot and he managed to crawl away into the undergrowth but everybody who was sitting on the back of that trailer died and that included his wife his wife sister their mother and their six children and so when we came back almost a year later to exhume the bodies that he had buried so if you imagine under cover of darkness having been sniper Din the leg he still went around and found what was left of the parts of his family and buried them because he knew if he didn't the dogs would get them and it's a tremendous foresight as a tremendous strength I think to be able to do that so we come along and say we want to exhume the body of Europe bodies of your family because this is important for indictment against Milosevic and when we dug the hole that he'd created we find enough to fill two body bags so all those people not enough to fill two body bags we went back to the mortuary and we set out 11 pieces of fabric to say we're going to put something of each person into each of these and we know we're going to have an area that we can't separate and part of my expertise that I develop because we'd written the book on it was the identification of children and so it was one of those things about feeling you were in the right place at the right time so I was able to identify a bit of each of the children now be very tempting to put just a bit in each and no one would know you can't do that because morally and ethically that's completely wrong but in addition to that the courts are going to say right we're going to exhume that that bag and if what's in that bag is not what's in your report you're not a credible witness and we're not going to take any evidence you've given so it's extremely important that you uphold the standards or forensic practice regardless of where you are in the world so I had bits of every part of every individual my problem was that there was two 14 year old twin boys and how you separate two twin boys you can't do it through DNA because we have got any matching there's no fingerprints all we had of the the twin 14 year old boys was the top part of their arms but one of them had a Mickey Mouse vest associated with it and I said to the police officers go and ask dad which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest don't say which of the boys which of the twins which of the children and if he comes back with a name and that name as one of the twin boys we've got something and that's exactly what happened so he came back and he said oh my son was absolutely mad about Mickey Mouse that was his pride and joy that would be that boy and so just something as simple as a piece of clothing that was so important to the child led us to being able to give that man back body bags for each and every member of his family plus an element that we couldn't separate and for us to be able to you know to even imagine what he went through and for his quietness for his dignity for his sheer courage it was the most humbling experience that any of us had come across with in Kosova and if I'd felt if there is any reason why I was there it was to help that man get some element of closure given the enormity of what he'd been through he felt that whilst they were all in one grave and one hole in the ground God would not be able to find them God could only find them if they were reaching their own grave with their own name on that gravestone so if we helped him in any way then everything we did in those two years was worth it for that you

Channel: Wellcome Collection

Views: 73,536

Rating: 4.9542856 out of 5

Keywords: Forensic Identification (Organization Sector), Forensic Science (Field Of Study), University Of Dundee (College/University), Sue Black, Anatomy (Field Of Study), death, murder, DVI, Anthropology (Field Of Study), anthropologist, human identification, DNA, fingerprints, crime, dissection, autopsy, post mortem, police, bones, Skeleton (Anatomical Structure), embalming, medical, surgery, mortuary, morgue, cadaver, dead body, child sexual abuse, paedophile, Kosovo (Country), War Crime (Field Of Study)

Id: o2UgIMQ_lII

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2015