Crime Scene Investigation: A Cold Case | Full Episode

[Music] Britain's finest unit for forensic investigation is embarking on a new and groundbreaking mission they're experts in human identification using the full arsenal of modern technology but now for the first time they're applying these skills to bodies from the long distant past it's very exciting for us to be able to take the skills that we use on the daily basis and apply them to look at historical skeletons to see just how far we can go forensic anthropology facial reconstruction and painstaking research will open new windows on history as dramatic personal stories emerge from long-forgotten bones historical researches allowing me to investigate people's experiences at different times throughout history we certainly had a nasty crack to the top of his head that must have been so painful so we got the face the boat'll reconstruction and we added some textures this time the cold-case team is heading back into a dark corner of the 19th century when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch their subject the strange mummified skeleton of a child it's brain has been removed with blood vessels filled with wax a child who deserved a better fate can they give him back a home a face a name [Music] this is history cold case [Music] the Center for anatomy and human identification part of the University of Dundee the forensic unit is about to take on a challenging new case surrounding an extraordinary set of human remains the mummified skeleton of a child its identity is a mystery [Music] for professor sue black leader of the cold case team this is much more than just a set of bones it's the start of the story with her colleague dr. Xanthi mallet she begins with the first observation of the body the skeleton was donated by a colleague sue thinks it's over a hundred years old and is some sort of anatomical specimen dissected for the purposes of display a very good friend said you know I've brought you a present well you know chocolates would have been nice but you know this is what we get as a present probably a little boy somewhere rounds but eight and I have to say I've never seen anything like it before I really haven't to transform the body the top half of the skull has been sawn off and the chest prized open to remove internal organs but some of the blood vessels are still preserved carefully filled with a wax and resin no I don't think so because because what you can if you can see yes see these these red bits that are sort of poking out here these are resin and this is a process that's called perfusion where you place a substance into a vessel to make it stand out so that you can see it until well into the 19th century anatomist and Surgeons commonly dissected and preserved human bodies as part of their training a specimen like this one could have been used as a teaching aid but look at the cross with the flow and the life that yeah very artistic and when you hold them lift him up it's really quite it's pretty solid isn't he well it is but it's really right there impressive that's how he would looking like that sooo never forgets that our subjects were once living people there is a certain 'since there is no dieting there is a sadness this was somebody's son this little boy did have a mum where they had two dad at home or not where we don't know but he certainly would have had some family but did anybody care enough when this happened to him but we don't know I need to know who he is I need to find that out he needs that respect the initial examination confirms only the basic facts he's a boy probably around 8 years old but can the cold-case team discover anything about who he was where he came from when he lived in of course how he came to be hanging on a wall as some a carb display zoo calls the first briefing yes this is what's been rather affectionately become known as the problem child of our department so it's a little boy between six and eight doctor Wolfram Meyer algún Stein will hunt for chemical signatures in the boys bones which could reveal information about where he lived and what kind of life he had dr. Caroline Wilkinson will perform the important task of giving the boy back his face is there enough face there for you to do something with yeah yeah what about the fact that there's still some some soft tissue on a nose and his ears are still there you can see who thinks the red wax found in the boy's blood vessels could provide crucial physical clues in the case this resin this wax when you you mold it so if you take a little bit out you put it in your fingers in your smeller my father was a cabinet maker so constant smelt of linseed oil and waxes and those sorts of things that's so it smells like the inside of my father's furniture bath so it must be oils or wax or same kind thank these tasks is to get out on the road to gather evidence from historical records and experts in other fields starting with the history of anatomy but where do you get a seven year old 8 year old boy from at what point in history have we got access to children that we could do that to and my mind's automatically taken back to when the anatomist had access to bodies that were coming to the anatomy departments from the poor houses [Music] bizarre as it seems to us today sue knows that the display of human bodies was once considered perfectly acceptable if I'm gonna put money on any of this I could see him late 18-hundreds even into the early 1900's the cold-case investigation will focus on three key areas the history where does our boy fit into the strange story of human deception the body they will do stable isotope analysis on his bones and test a sample of resin used to preserve his blood vessels and facial reconstruction will hopefully give him back his identity donkeys first stop will be a museum collection she's heard may have some specimens that could shed light on the boys story no idea really whether he's literally won on it in his own or whether there are more like him somewhere so I'm gonna go to Edinburgh and see if I can find some evidence as to how unique he might be [Music] Edinburgh surgeons Hall Museum has housed artifacts belonging to the Royal College of Surgeons in Scotland since 1804 here's out these meat and curator Andrew Connell he wants to show her a bizarre collection donated by the pioneering Scottish anatomist John Barclay oh wow now that is a young trout though these are from the Barker collection and John Barclay deleted his car installation to the College beautifully done look at that all the tiny vessels it's possible to pick him up is he very few words building a pair of cloths and almost almost baby like if you support him under his spine of the bank on his death in 1826 Barclay left more than two and a half thousand specimens some of them children just like our cold case [Music] it's quite beautifully hmm there's something again the soft tissue of the face has been left intact doesn't it the nose needs primarily it's just case he's amazing as well many of these specimens have waxy resin in their blood vessels just like our boy there's one exhibit in particular the clutches Sam please attention oh he's really really interesting very similar to our boy except he's got less soft tissue on his face but visually it's very similar don't mean sure you are my final voyage but it is pretty hostile there we are that's our young man I'm sorry look at the window here right well certainly I can see similarities between them I think in terms of when he would have been dissected and naturally mummified that might be quite a similar match with 1702 well [Music] so the Dundee case isn't the only surviving specimen of children whose bodies were turned into exhibits but confirming the date and provenance of the Dundee mummy will involve a lot of hard science [Music] for Sue the next step is to take detailed measurements of the child's bones and something doesn't add up what I think is happening here is that the top half of the body the teeth and the collarbone are telling me this is a child over by two eight the other parts of the body so built the long bones are telling me that if this was a normal child then they're gonna be much younger they're gonna be five I can't believe those those are going to be wrong he's got short little limbs short little legs and short little arms simply because there's been some disturbance there's something going on the boy is several centimeters shorter than he should be phased age to see if she can discover why Xanthia ranges for him to be scanned at a hospital just up the road the remains of a mummified child aren't what they used to [Music] the CT scanner takes a series of x-rays that can be built up into a three-dimensional picture allowing us to see inside the child's bones [Music] the data will hopefully reveal why the boy is significantly stunted in snapchat as well as forming the starting point for Caroline's facial reconstruction oh look at that huh hey oh wow [Music] with the scan complete the images of the boys leg bones provide sue with a big clue about events in his early life the foot and the lower end of the tibia and the fibula which is just down at the ankle joint and that very dense white line is where the bone is growing but if you look above it you can see just a ghostly white line that runs across above that there's another one above it and another one above it and again and again these are the Harris lines and what they tell us is that when that bone was growing for whatever reason it went into a stutter and so that rather than laying down bone and getting bigger it's gone into a stutter and it leaves behind a line of dense white bone and this is telling us that this child has gone through episodes of either malnutrition or episodes of disease or something that will affect his growth and it would be very easy to fit that picture into the work houses of the eighteen hundred's very very easily it's really rather sad doesn't it these Harris lines tell us that his bones stopped growing more than once during his childhood if he was among those living in the work houses set up in the 1830s he could easily have lived in squalid conditions barely surviving on starvation rations many who entered the workhouse died and shocking as it may seem the bodies often ended up on the anatomist table it will be a pitiful end for a small boy but despite the emotional tug of the case sue has to keep a professional distance my job as ER as a forensic scientist is to be able to provide objective evidence if I become involved personally in the case I start to have my own opinions that somebody should be found guilty that somebody needs to pay for this then I am no longer an objective scientists and I should be removed from that arena [Music] in Edinburgh historian owen dudley edwards is showing Xanthi a chilling example of a place where corpses of the poor were taken [Music] we have to be very careful here isn't it nice nice he's taking Xanthi into what was once a secret tunnel underneath the University of Edinburgh where dead bodies were brought in under the cover of night basically yes well the fact was that there was great hostility among the ordinary people of the city because they believed the doctors were killing the poor to kill the diseases of the rich so this tunnel existed and the bodies would be taken in secretly by night on the grounds of that were what the crowd didn't know despite public hostility it seems that the harvesting of bodies was all perfectly aboveboard in 1832 the government had passed the Anatomy Act which made it legal for anatomist to claim any unclaimed corpse from the workhouse that is our boys story really so simple was he donated to an anatomist for dissection under the chilling edicts of the 1832 Anatomy Act [Music] Zonk he is following a new lead to London the historical picture that's beginning to emerge for the boys pulling her deeper in taste story you're doing forensic cases all your training tells you to remain objective and to actively not engage with the person you're looking at and their history in their story but we're getting to know the little mummified boy a little bit more now so you find yourself wondering how he would have lived and you're engaging with him on a personal level [Music] shanthi is heading to the Hunterian Museum in London home to Britain's largest collection of human and animal specimens Simon Chaplin is showing her an extraordinary set of exhibits we're surrounded three and a half thousand specimens here these are all the work of John Hunter and John Hunter was an anatomist obviously did a lot of dissection he was an anatomist he was a surgeon he was a teacher of surgery in anatomy but he also had a much wider interest in Natural History John Hunter was an 18th century celebrity who entertained the London elite in his salon in Leicester Square he was so influential the Bishop of Durham donated his own rectum to the collection some of hunters preservations were mummified others pickled in alcohol like this rare specimen of an unborn horse but Simon Chaplin let's slip something that could really shake up the investigation supposing this one is unusual the raised hand is something that occurs quite often and it harks back to earlier anatomical textbooks oh that's interesting we haven't found anything about the position of the hand yet and that's one of the things we thought was probably really key about this individual so that's really probably an earlier specimen well it reminds me of seventeen to the early 18th century anatomical textbooks where anatomical figures were often shown with one hand raised in a kind of classical pose could this be evidence that our boy in fact lived before sourcing bodies for dissection was made legal by the Anatomy Act of 1832 more clues lie in a book by John Hunter's brother William from 1784 which points to how widespread the appetite was for human specimens and he says here I must likewise earnestly recommend it to every student to make and collect as many anatomical preparations as he can and he goes on to say what preparations for specimens of student to have and he says they should have a preparation of all the blood vessels in their natural situation and two preparations of the trunk of a child in other words exactly the kind of preparation what Simon reveals is just how sought-after these specimens were before the Anatomy Act made the supply of corpses legal then they could fetch huge sums show you some of an amazing collection of auction catalogues from the late 18th early 19th century and what we have here is the catalog of anatomical preparations the property of a surgeon who was declined lecturing in about 1769 and if we look down here we can see a whole subject in a Wayne Scott case glazed with the archer is completely injected and dissected and then a lot 67 a child with the archer is injected we've sold accorded the annotation here six pounds [Music] if he'd been sold today our boy could have fetched eight and a half thousand pounds in life he might just have been a boy with a bleak future ahead of him but in death he could have been a very valuable commodity [Music] back in Dundee Caroline begins the painstaking job of reconstructing the child's face she's reconstructed the faces of the dead from Ramses the second to bark of the boy represents a new and different challenge the first thing that I'll do when I look at facial reconstruction is to go through and make records take measurements and specifically with this one I want to try and establish which is the soft tissue which is the hard tissue because that's quite difficult to see on the CT data especially around the nose where we've got quite a lot of preserved mummified soft tissues I think it can be important to try and see this as as a living person because obviously there's been quite a lot of dissection that's been taking place and there's been quite a lot of conservation of the tissues and one of the nice things about doing reconstructions we should be able to see him as a living individual again and that will as well give him back some some dignity because obviously this is relatively undignified it will take several more weeks before Caroline can fully reconstruct his face [Music] at a team debriefs antfee updates the others about our discovery she thinks that the anatomical books from London and the mummified children in Edinburgh could point to the boy being a much earlier specimen than they first thought to find out more about him went over to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum which one Edinburgh and what we found was they have a number of mummified children over there oh yeah and this is one of them and this is a little child he probably I would say 2 to 3 years old these are pre the Anatomy act hands everything will depend on forensic tests to pin down an accurate date for our boy the results of radiocarbon dating a sample of the boys leg bone proved inconclusive but could they gain any information from analyzing a sample of the waxy resin found in his blood vessels [Music] so are always saying there's a possibility of getting almost like a signature out of the resin possibly that could match you to the person who did it that's interesting which is maybe the next name it's a long shot a small sample of resin will be subjected to mass spectrometry to decipher its chemical makeup at the Hunterian Museum in London Simon Chaplin has offered to donate a sample of resin from one of John Hunter's own specimens to see how it compares with the resin in our boy this is an ox heart from John Hunter spectrum so from the 18th century it's been injected we found that these extrusions are still quite pliable we've taken two specimens a day for testing Sofie also needs to pinpoint the ingredients used in the various recipes for resin developed by anatomist Simon provides the first piece of the jigsaw in a two hundred and twenty year old book here we have this is Thomas pols anatomical instructor published in 1790 and then here what we have is the recipe for a coarse injection to make a red course injection the crimefighter okay yellow beeswax 16 ounces white resin 8 ounces turpentine varnish 6 ounces 4 million 3 ounces and these were very expensive artists pigments that they were using we see oh okay so these would have been readily available to most people if expensive ingredients they still have been available to the students and the doctors they would have gone along to a color shop the kind of place that sold artist supplies and they would have bought them oh I see Oh fantastic more research leads to 15 different recipes for resin the 15 recipes chef 13 common ingredients [Music] and she's found an artist supply shop which still stocks the ingredients used by anatomist s-- two centuries ago she's meeting color man Nicholas Wald I'm not sure how you'd say that isn't gas I think fish blue fish blue okay comes from the bladder of sturgeon okay also yellow beeswax that was definitely these facts isn't it so that's all familiar it's poisonous pigment it was carmine Wow which again is absolutely stunning color really vibrant paraffin wax Japan wax all of these things we're definitely gonna boy that's a gumbo gumbo oh wow look at that young DOMA which is used for making varnish thank you very much armed with all the ingredients xanthi can now organize the chemical analysis of our boys resin the results might just be able to pinpoint when and where he was originally preserved [Music] in Dundee our child's face is beginning to come back to life well the first thing we needed to do obviously was to add and the crate the missing bit of the cranium and what we've done there is we've taken in a template for similar aged and ethnicity skull and that we already have in our database and have more fat to fit this skull to fit with the contours of this skull I've also done is to copy the missing area of this super orbital bone on the right hand side and flipping it and putting it above the right orbit also just because if it's a little strange I filled the hole that's on the frontal bone on the forehead there which was a mounting hole with the skull complete Caroline can start adding some of the facial features now with the with the eyeballs we can import spheres of approximately the right size which is about 22 millimeters in diameter for someone of this age in order to recreate the nose I've taken measurements of the width the nose and some measurements of the nasal aperture so what I've then been able to do is to import her and those model and alter it to fit this particular skull and we can also see in profile that we use those two tangents to tell us the most projecting point on the nose we can see by the angle of them that this individual would have a concave nasal root which means a curve an upward curve to the nose which is also very common in individuals of this age most children have little upturned noses I think you can start to see what he's going to look like so as soon as we start to see some of his facial features then we can look at him as a boy rather than a specimen Carolyne now needs the results of Wolfram stable isotope tests which could confirm the theory that the child was malnourished it doesn't give us any information about facial features it won't make any difference to the shape of the face but what it will do is enable us to choose which tissue depth data to use whether to use emaciated normal or overweight and I'm waiting to find out [Music] the analysis involves sampling a small section of the boys leg bone wolfram is particularly interested in the relative values of isotopes of nitrogen and carbon found in the collagen part of the bone called stable isotope testing this process can reveal crucial information about a person's background largely it can say where does someone come from it can then tell us perhaps something about their diet what sort of diet they had were they herbivores where they carnivores was it a mixture of that and when you know the diet then that gives you some indication of a social status as well so really those are the three things the geography where the person comes from a bit about the diet and then we can infer from that maybe a bit of the social status while wolfram hunts for ounces about the boys diet Xanthi continues her mission now armed with a third sample of resin from the Edinburgh mummies prepared by John Barclay she's come to Northumbria University where all three samples of resin will be tested I was hoping you can tell me a little bit about the waxy resin that we took out from the mummified child through his arterial system the 13 ingredient shield picked up in the artist supply shop will provide the baseline samples for the mass spectrometer meanwhile in Dundee Sue and her student Scott used some of the ingredients to actually recreate the waxy resin from an 18th century recipe they're cooking up a mixture of beeswax pine resin and turpentine it may be the first time this has been done in a couple of centuries we do it very gently yeah so there's a slow and gradual process and then at the very last minute what we're gonna do is put the Vermillion in oh look it does actually look very like blood you can see why they believe that Thomas pols book of 1790 also advises on the best sort of body to use and it says for this purpose which is injecting adult subjects are seldom used oh how interesting on the account of the difficulty in completely filling the vessels with injection so that the suggestion there is that to do this article it's normally done on children sue isn't content with just making up a recipe she wants to inject it into a blood vessel and see how it works in this case it's a pig's a water from a local butchers if we try and suck it up ok it is a bit if you can leave that if you can hold up the aorta let's see if we can inject to end no watch was a Lada quite hot [Music] she's trying to get a flow going [Music] feel that heart and click towards the blanks I'm not burning your fingers that don't know and ty was the injection that's not gonna take much more because it's right at the top there and then it says yeah this is put it in before that okay we're just supposed to slow too but and I don't even help - no it's quite hard yeah it's quite matter if you take a plug of the - for example like that's that's the sort of thing that we were finding inside his blood vessels it does work the last of the forensic tests are now in so sue assembles the team [Music] wolfram has drawn a blank in terms of pinpointing where the boy comes from but has found something exciting from the nitrogen values in the bone sample [Music] as long story short all the nitrogen values point at somebody who had definitely not a protein deficient diets whether the protein came from lots of cheese and whatever cream cheese or lots of milk I don't know all over diet came for meat or fish or poultry but it was definitely not meat efficient this is not a porpoise diet is it ELISA Missa died in the arms houses in porpoise houses was much better such a protein rich diet means our child is unlikely to have lived and died in a workhouse and it would follow unlikely to have been the victim of the 1832 Anatomy act the stunted growth that sue discovered in his bones could have been a result of disease no one was immune to the epidemics like whooping cough and measles that raged through the population the news that our boy was well nourished means Caroline can press on with recreating his face from my point of view in terms of the amount of tissue depth every we can we can use with the facial reconstruction then the best thing for me to you to do is to use the average there's no point in using emaciated it's now time for xanthi to drop her own bombshell she's got the data back from the tests on the resin in the boys blood vessels we sourced a sample of the berkeley collection and the hunter collection so they actually could add the samples yes yes well done so we had more than just the recipe to go on because there would have been some variation as people kind of tweaked it just like any well sorry so the hunter the hunter materials all in London London the Berkeley material Edinburgh yes so after the two that they were compared to it was hunter that was the closest good guru but it was close enough that it could have been a slight variation on hunters own recipe so I mean a long shot but it could have been done hunter himself that did the actual dissection so when you when you go to the Hunterian Museum yeah is there something else that matches this so that what you could be looking at for argument's sake if we were absolutely going to take this to the limit beautiful it is the first and only example belonging to the Hunterian collection yeah of surviving approach possibly outrageous yes that makes it very very important yeah so our boy could be one of the first examples of this kind of specimen and the result that his resin is similar to one of John hunters recipes would place our boy in a time well before the 1832 Anatomy Act made obtaining bodies legal we're looking at late 18th century early 19th century in London an anatomical specimen yeah a child that's not particularly undernourished we're not looking at a probably we're not looking at a poorhouse tonight what's happening in London on the anatomical scene at that time for the Anatomy act before the Anatomy act there was no legal way of obtaining children was there an it was it illegal well that's the question I you know you need to speak to somebody who has a good understanding of the anatomical society within London at that time a good historian if our boy was illegally sourced to be experimented on this is a major turning point what's happening in this case is that we thought this is going to be a post 1832 no it's not it's a pre 1832 completely different set of evidence completely different paths that we want to go down so you can't predict when something is going to change and this case has given us quite a number of twists and turns that we just simply couldn't have anticipated [Music] does a boy well-nourished and from London point to an even darker side of the history of anatomy is he a victim of a period when the demand for dead bodies far outstripped the legal supply [Music] when the grave robber was society's bogeyman [Music] Dunphy's about to find out [Music] she's back in London at the Royal College of Surgeons where she's discovered that they have first-hand evidence that bodies like our boys were stolen [Music] she's meeting archivist Louise King okay so this is a diary of a Resurrectionist from 1811 to 1812 it just covers a few months and Resurrectionist would have been grave-robber essential okay February 2nd went to Lookout met at 5:00 in the evening went to the green got 7 large and three small and three features same night went to wise games you know why gate yeah for large and too small took them to Bothell news so he's going and basically digging up Graves them taking seven large to seven adults I guess or seven large children no I think she don't use for adults three children and three fetuses so he's looking probably for newly buried newly covered as I understand it they had lookouts who would let them know that they've been very yeah and what was potentially being buried yeah always like a shopping list yeah and then taking them to hospitals for the dissection that's right yes and this is the only book of its kind like this as far as we know yes it is oh how odd isn't it just saying like seven large and three small yeah oh it's a fantastic piece of evidence but this diary is just one man's account to find out more xanthi must immerse herself in the world of the Resurrectionist will she be able to place our boy in this dark and largely unexplored chapter of British history [Music] in Dundee armed with the information that the boy had a healthy diet Carolina's beginning the process of adding flesh to the bone I placed these pegs on that represent the tissue depth now because we found out that this individual wasn't emaciated didn't have a starvation diet we've used contemporary seven eight year old measurements from a British population and that really helps us after we've done the muscle structure to put the correct amount of tissue over and above the muscles so a next thing is to import each of the facial muscles and distorting and deform it to fit this particular school Caroline uses haptic or tactile technology that allows her to mimic the experience of building a face from clay a mechanical arm gives her the sensation of feeling the surface of the head she's reconstructing when you touch something on the computer screen it gives you this what's called haptic feedback so in other words you can feel what you're touching on the screen it enables you to do things with speed but also look back at what what's underneath as well which is something you can't do with real clay when she put a muscle in place you can't then have a look at the bone underneath again so this system allows you to constantly check what you've done so it's kind of exciting work we're working with new technology like this having placed all the muscles she can now add the tissue everything she's done so far is based on the scientific information the team has gathered I'd say that the areas where there's most artistic interpretation will be the final additions related to age and texture and color and hair and all those details that we don't know from the school the facial reconstruction is almost complete caroline is on the verge of showing us the face of our boy [Music] in London's Oakley's digging deeper into the sordid history of the grave robbers she's come to the very heart of the city to meet author Sarah wise who spent five years researching the world of the resurrection might give me some insight into how common this was I mean if she's not any information which could help us that's what I'm hoping for and just lead us down that path were learning more about his identity really Sarah wants to show zanthia london's street that runs from the Old Bailey to Smithfield market this was the centre for a lucrative trade in fresh corpses driven by demand from nearby medical schools every student going through the schools needed at least one body to practice on said the demand is high some of the corpses were mummified for display so why have we come here specifically this whole stretch really was the center of the resurrection trade north of the river in London in the early 19th century just going to take you up here and show you the settlers church and in 1791 they were so worried about the amount of bodies that were going missing from the graveyard that used to be over the back that they did what many people even in small villages they plugged together and by themselves construct a watch house for this watch house been looked out over onto the graveyard of susceptible which is at the back though specifically to stop the resurrectionists coming in and so it's willingness but unfortunately a watch house was really only as useful as there's a man who was running it and one of the other reasons that body snatching was able to flourish for so long was that a lot of the sextons the watch men were corrupt and for significant payments would well not just turn a blind eye but would open the gates and help that's really grim isn't really across the road is the reason why this graveyard was particularly at risk is hospital which was one of the largest teaching hospitals in London and a very much in need of as many bodies that the body snatchers could supply them with so much so that they would the air the porters would leave campus large campers outside or within their courtyard for the snatchers to run over pick up the hamper in order to bring their corpses form up here over to there because this was the size of the fortune of war pub which was the major meeting place and safe house for Body Snatchers north of the river all the remains now is a chilling inscription landlord used to show the room where on benches around the walls the bodies were placed labeled with the Flash's names wait until the surgeons at st. Bartholomew's could run around and appraise them oh wow this is not exactly you know underground then was it this was it was very it was very out out in the open so this was a good lucrative trade very much so [Music] but was our boy simply stolen from a graveyard or was his fate even darker in a former Resurrectionist pub next to Smithfield market sera reveals just how far some Body Snatchers were willing to go taken the day before his execution from a very prolific Body Snatcher called John Bishop the document explains how Bishop and his accomplice lured a 14 year old boy from a smithfield Park back to his house we like to candle and gave the voice and bread and cheese and after he'd eaten we gave him a cup full of rum without half a small file of laudanum in it is that certain sure of opium okay was it illegal then Norden wasn't at all illegal in fact many people in the 19th century used it quite openly and respect respectively as a sort of tonic or pick-me-up or you know some sort of relaxant the boy quickly passed out we took him directly asleep and insensible into the garden tie the cord to his feet so neighbors to pull him up by and then I took him in my arms and then him slide from them headlong into the well of in the garden whilst Williams held the cord prevent the body going all together too low into the well he was nearly wholly in the water of the well his feet just above the surface Williams fast on the other end of the cord around the pale paling to prevent the body getting beyond our reach the boys struggled to look up with his arms and legs in the water and the water bubbled for a minute oh this is really horrible yes they trick to this little boy they got him drunk partially drunk they drugged him they drowned him yes and consequently they had an extremely fresh body to start counting around to the surgeons the next morning which is exactly what they did and it's exactly what led to their arrest unfortunately it was not the first time they'd behaved in that way James May who's his co-defendant at the Old Bailey he shouted across the bishop you're a bloody murdering bastard and should have been topped ie hanged years ago which indicates strongly that may believe that Bishop had been murdering for years and the other strange thing xanthi is that the body was in fact noted and the word that was used was stout oh this boy was not so emaciated he hadn't gone hungry oh that is interesting Wow records prove that bishop snatched up to a thousand bodies and he and his gang may have murdered many more than the three victims he confessed to in and around Smithfield market [Music] the panic unleashed by the bishop case of 1831 highlighted the disappearance of thousands of children many of them as young as our boy [Music] I had no idea that the area surrounding Smithfield market where all of the meat trades take part this is the center of the human meat trade children were being sourced here literally for murder to furnish the anatomist and it's a shocking and horrifying end for these lives [Music] whatever the fate of our eight-year-old child once handed over to the anatomist he could he became faceless and anonymous but the team is about to give him back his identity [Music] the team's forensic evidence and historical research have revealed that our mummy is an eight-year-old boy who they believed died in London before the Anatomy Act of 1832 which made acquiring dead bodies legal he was well nourished but he had lived through periods of ill health he was either a freshly buried corpse dug up by grave robbers or he was murdered like the boy in the bishop confession [Music] it's like he picked up this boy took him home and killed him yes wait till he got a bit sleepy yeah choke him in the well I just think it's getting more tragic as we go along this tale it started out as an anatomical specimen and then we kind of realized it was you know it was a boy and it was may have been illegally obtained and now it's looking more likely it's a murder and all for the sake of an anatomical specimen that's anatomies history I know it's just this particular case I'm expecting that we're going to have an happy outcome with a dissector seven year old Anatomy has a very very murky past and we know it's got a murky past and ultimately I think he's a representation of that murky past the time has come for Caroline to reveal the final piece of the jigsaw so we got the face the facial reconstruction and we've taken that and added some textures he's been given quite not neutral but common hair color and eye color and references from that period of time in terms of hairstyle have been used [Music] actually they're nice-looking boy but the reveal and the end of the investigation presents the team with a dilemma we're good at decide I suppose what we do than that and and I think there are there are three choices that I can see it remains in the department we live under under circumstances which I don't think are appropriate we asked the haunt Aryan museum or whichever whether they would be prepared to house the specimen appropriately but with a full story as to how this has unfolded or we decide he goes back into the ground maybe we have an opportunity here to educate people about what he wants become an educational specimen oh oh now you ain't we found really hard I don't like display cabinets I never really have I must admit so if we have any doubt we burying things barium hmm then I think our decision is that he should be buried would he have felt the same before you saw his face yes wouldn't have made any difference because I do feel very very strongly about human remains and I do feel very strongly about their display and as an anatomist I feel a responsibility after more than 170 years the history cold-case team has given our 8-year old boy back his face and his dignity pursue the case of the mummified child can now be closed I think the fact that in this case we've gone from something about which we knew absolutely nothing to a point now that we can almost pinpoint and dive in time that we we know which Anatomy house he's most closely related to and we can start to place him within the context of that time that's an incredible achievement in a very short space of time and I must admit it's not something that for a moment if I'd been honest at the outset I didn't think we were going to get very far we have gone much much further than I could ever have anticipated [Music] this is just about as good as it gets [Music]

Channel: Banijay History

Views: 928,102

Keywords: cold case, cold case detective, cold case files, cold case files clips, cold case files episodes, cold case files new episodes, crime investigation, crime scene investigation, documentary film, documentary full, documentary history, facts, forensic science, full documentary, full length documentaries, history, history channel, history documentary, investigation, top documentaries, true crime, true crime show, watch cold case files, world history

Id: IQL53GRyiZ0

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 28 2018