In conversation: Ian Rankin & Professor Sue Black

I mean I did fit when I got elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh I did feel like a complete fraud because I was sitting in a lecture theatre and people kept going at the front together you know to be become fellows and it was people who were inventing things and people who were trying to cure cancer and people who were doing important work overseas and it was this guy who sits and tells lies for a living and with me you know just making stuff up and suddenly I'm them I don't I shouldn't be here must be a mistake very flattering very fashioned how many of you here watched CSI come on be honest Oh shame on you many of you have seen this program that's even worse called bones double shame onions we're going to talk this evening about the interaction between science and writing we'll do that for a little bit because I suspect what we really want to do is put the microphone out there to the audience because I'm sure there are things that you want to ask you in and that's probably what we'll spend much of the evening doing but we do need to talk a little bit about science and it's very interesting what was said at the outset about how important it is to enthuse young people well you know the modern 60 is the old 40 don't they say and they do say that you're only as old as no we won't go into that one and we just run a MOOC which is called a massive open online course on forensic science and we did a murder mystery someone got murdered on the top of the law in Dundee something that happens very frequently in Dundee and we had twenty one and a half thousand people on this massive open online course our youngest was 12 because that's the age limit that we have to put on it the top end of that was what really matters to us more than anything and she was 91 and there is no limit to learning and that's the most important thing was it's great to enthuse young folk let's not forget us folk in the middle let's not forget us folk heading towards that other end as well because age is not something that that dims your enthusiasm dens your ability to learn and I think the partnership that we find between forensic science which is an understandable science that the science goes on in my building that I don't even understand the title whatever ubiquitination is of proteins are think of no idea and it's difficult to engage with that kind of science when the kind of science we do listen to the kind of writing that somebody like Ian does then I think you get a magic you get something that can capture everybody's imagination regardless of whether you're 12 or you're 91 is that true I would think so I mean I would hope that's true and I do think I mean you know the people who put their hands up because you watch CSI or their watch bones probably I mean there's a lot of people out there you probably think then they know or know that they've watched on the TV and the TV must be right because it's on the TV and it sounds right it sounds like it's alright and I'm you know with we know scientists people who work in this profession who would watch that and just laugh at these beautiful glass-walled you know sort of offices with all the latest high spec equipment and nobody sitting there going are you can t afford to do that piece of work that machine's not working or that machine's not working or we can't you know with not pay the electric bill this week so let's not to go there um but you know real police forces and real forensics there's always a cost involved an investigation of course that'd be very tedious if half of CSI was just I'm gone through the bills and gone where I'm sorry I know you've got a severed ear there but we're kind of do anything with that this week because they've got no money um but so there's actually the sense that the public know more than they've ever known about what goes on behind the scenes because TV programs especially have this pattern ER of realism you know the people are using the right slang words the right technical language they're dressed the right way for going to a crime scene or whatever but it's always always at the heart of that is telling a story and if there needs to be a shortcut because the storytelling is involved there will be a shortcut and see a sign they always solve the case in 42 minutes because 42 minutes is how long they're on screen but this stuff can go on for weeks months and years and and sometimes what creme is waiting for it's for the science to come along that can catch the killer for example with the World's End murders were to wait an awful long time for the DNA the ability for DNA analysis to give you something that you could actually take to court couldn't been done inmate 77 and when the murders actually happened not even knowing the chance but what's amazing is the police kept everything they kept the clothing they kept a bitsy rule they kept everything you know in a in a way that meant that later on it could be produced and was valid in court part of our our problem is that forensic science the forensic bit comes from Latin which means pertaining to the forum the forum where the courts of Rome so everything that a forensic scientist does is geared towards the courtroom it's not geared towards the police or an investigation it's about the courtroom and the Trier of fact in our courtroom argue it's it's the public and so when as a scientist you go into court and you have to try to explain your science in a way that's understandable often what I say may be very different to what somebody not like you because you don't you don't include a huge amount of forensic science in the way that you write but other crime writers do and the public are they are swayed by what is written in fiction and so as a real scientist you have this constant battle that's going on between can you please not write that because I know that you know two million people are going to read your book and I know that at least three of them are going to end up in my jury and they're gonna go has nobody in rankin says and as this sort of expert witness you find yourself pitted against the likes of a crime writer and there is a responsibility I think on the scientist to make sure that we make our science as understandable in the court as possible we had a lovely and we did a public engagement event in Dundee and it was funded to reach hard-to-reach communities the kind of communities that wouldn't normally interact with the University and wouldn't normally come in to science it's fun DC you do a murder and everybody felt completely at home with that and so we did the murder mystery and we had the most wonderful quote that we almost if we paid for it it couldn't have got any better and it was a lady who said that she had been involved in a trial as a juror and it was a serious case it was a rape case and she said we came back with a not proven verdict because we didn't quite understand what was going on and she said by the time I'd finished the course I'd have come back with a different verdict now that's really worrying but that really worries me because that says the public can be swayed by having a bit more realistic knowledge of the science do crime writers have a responsibility to write good science and realistic science or is it that it's a fiction that there is no responsibility on them at all and I think I stopped each individual writer I mean I think some writers would feel they had a responsibility other writers would feel that what it was all about was narrative and storytelling and then they were just continuing a tradition of storytelling where sometimes the facts get in the way and they're inconvenient facts I mean for example there's an awful lot of stuff that would happen in a murder enquiry in a in a forensic lab or in a pathology suite that would just get you know that would slow the action down in a book to the extent that you get really bogged down the reader could get really bogged down and when I found out early on in my career because when I wrote my first crane over I was a student I didn't know anything about process at all but an you know fairly early on offender this collaboration all the way through Scots law which means it's got to be two pathologists maybe not for much longer maybe not for much longer that's true but two pathologists numerous two characters but really I only need one to tell the story and sudden there's got to be someone else in the room who's just dead meat as far as the storytelling aspect goes but just meet in the room you know so I can do it I mean I sort of take that on board but I just think the mass of your pain it's a pain that the the realism should get in the way there then I think you know there's only about a dramedy handful with people who would read my books who would notice that who would be annoyed by it and most of all wouldn't I remember when you know rebus had to remove police stations because I've been told by a cop that the real police station where he works and Leonard's was no longer going to have a CID so I shifted him and publisher said why and I said because it's about 20 people who would know that there's no longer a CID there and that would annoy them and then they didn't share Dennis the idea after all but you know always stuff excitement police Scotland yeah I mean honestly these people at the top of police Scotland do they never think of the crime rates how do you write longevity in to or do you look at longevity into a story so you know if you were writing something just before the referendum for example would would you fit something that is is a pivotal historical moment into a book does it date it it does data I mean it definitely dates latter I don't think it marks too much I mean the the early my early books could stand as historical documents you know no more about phones no laptops very few computers available to the police rebus has to stop his car a telephone box to make a phone call the fax machine is a new thing everybody's excited about getting the facts sounds like Dundee really but you know a few years later when I was all gone I was all dead in the water and new technology had come along so the technology dates very quickly and it seems like this date and even quicker but in some ways you know crime is very much it crimes an old story crime goes way back to the beginnings of storytelling I mean skinny goes back to myth and legend that goes back to folktale and fairy tale you know Red Riding Hood is a classic crime story and just cuz somebody looks right it doesn't mean they are rape that could be a wolf in your granny's clothing as it were and there's an authority that and crane fiction is very much about very basic questions that or that an audience has always wanted to know on you know why do we keep doing bad things to each other through history people have wanted to keep asking that question to try and work out what it is about human beings that makes us so you know the possibility for us to be nasty as well as nice and that's something that we don't need forensics for that or anything else oh it's a very basic piece of storytelling but since I am writing about professional Corp and the books do exist in something close to real time that is problematic that you know rebus is no.65 in fact it's probably but other than that but if Kenny slowed the clock down a bit so he said to retire again in the new book that comes out next month he's gone it's a consulting detective so as long as so much I can do with a 65 year old consulting detective that's realistic or even semi-realistic that's necessarily true anymore because certainly when when you speak to the police forces writing up up and down the length and breadth of the country they are retiring very early they're going out into the world in a different job and we're losing so much experience from the police forces that they are coming back and then they they keep coming back because that experience eventually people do realize has a value yeah I think I think the thing is that the operations of the Scottish police wouldn't want rebus compact necessarily he's not the kinda cop their wake he sees the Kenney cop who should be getting investigated by internal affairs more than as Billy's worn in previous books but not me so I think that that longevity thing I didn't think about it when I start with the books you know the first rebus novel was meant to be the only rebus novel and so I didn't think about it at all and it was only really when it became a series I mean two things one when it became a series I thought and I was making money from I thought oh well then I owe it to the professions I'm talking about to actually properly framed out what they do because my first novel which I wrote when I was a student I am I wrote to the I've no idea how the police works I wrote to the Chief Constable of law the new borders police did you love his Avenue his secretary returned replied and his secretary said go at least police station talk to these two detectives never answer your questions knowing great so I headed off down there looking like a and these two very smartly dressed detectives came out to talk to me and they they said you're writing a book you know young trampled man and because it was like second-hand clothes from Oxfam shops and stuff and I'm a doctor whose scar from the line it was mentally when you know and am what's your book about they give him the plot in knots and crosses and not realizing that it was almost identical to something that just happened and with police station was the Kinnear where they were within inquiry was based so they they've managed to hold a computer intern interview room and sat me down at the wrong end of it and said we'll ask you a few questions let's let's pretend that you know suspect and our ongoing police I have no idea let's pretend you're a suspect and an ongoing police investigation named the aborted Reyes occupation what you didn't a v baltoro I'm 15 October another escapee powerful we're in the lash you know you make up next more you come over just give us some you know and now only half I was answering their questions and that was that I was put in the system I went home that weekend told my dad I told my dad that study went you silly bugger yeah they thought you did it because I had this was a lots of them she went missing from a frontier in Portobello and and then there were six more victims after her and it was a guy called Robert black yeah and but it was that case but at this time it was just a missing-persons case and in knots and crosses children are being abducted and killed and so I can he stumbled into it and I became a suspect so that's why I didn't go near the police four years after that they didn't want become a suspect in a police inquiry again thank you very much is there a risk when you're writing that that it does gel with with a community with a population that is going through something like that of its time so you know what we do have right the way throughout the year we have key cases that come up we see them in the courtrooms is is that something that as a writer you try to avoid or is it something that you can use if it's a type of case that's coming up I might be thinking well what sir what does that say about us what does that say about us as a culture as a society as a country that this kind of thing is happening and that may I might then explore that as a possible theme for a book I have occasionally actually used real cases I'm gonna use Bible John and black and blue with her thinking tries to make him after me if he still were there when I thought that I thought my edition written the book and I've used the war crimes suspect and he was actually living in Edinburgh an old you know an old German who was living in Edinburgh and had was suspected of being a war criminal and any luckily he died before he could sue me natural causes and them when they found I know the phones what was that they found in red the Scottish Parliament there's no which was Queensbury house which was an old hospital and whenever I certainly read jigging it they they told me the story of the act of cannibalism that took place there centuries ago where jukka Queens Barry's nephew had killed a servant and eaten them on the day that Scotland and England joined together and it was seen as a very bad omen in the Jukka Queensbury or whatever was chased through the streets I just thought great idea I'm gonna pick that in the book and so I've done that occasionally and things like you know asylum seekers in Glasgow for me start getting asylum seekers and when they were getting you know kids were getting locked up kids of asylum seekers were getting locked up and not getting any proper schooling and stuff I mean these of off drip fed into the books because the books have tried to say something about us and who we are and you know why does this stuff happen and and you know how do we feel about that how do the readers feel about the stuff for this stuff happens and our very midst but of course if it's a real case you can get in trouble and things like you know I thought about Lockerbie for a long time and I supported professor Antony Boozer till amongst others and cops who were there and he was there on a day or that people who were there in the day there were a lot of really interesting stories to be told about that that told us a lot about the people involved the people who came afterwards and were having to deal with it in their heads you know having to deal with the fact that they were finding bodies that had fallen at the sky everywhere and what the Sierras just thought that's a really interesting thing but I couldn't do it was just too raw it was too wrong I couldn't and you know you know there was a paedophile case and I thought was going to do from the pedophiles point of view couldn't do an act of moral cowardice I would suggest so I couldn't I didn't want to go and say the head of a Peter farm we of course do so there's a lot of work that we do in relation to to pedophiles and it's a it's a strange fact of science that we think of science as being very much a laboratory based new thing that is forensic science but the basis of what we do in terms of our approach to identifying pedophiles is very anatomically based and our best and atomists were from the 1500s in terms of force alias we we've known as much as we ever needed to know about Anatomy then as we know now so I challenge you look at the back of your right hand look at the vein pattern on the back of your right hands now look at the vein pattern on the back of your left hand on en Rankin's life I'll bet they don't match if you're a redhead and you've got her NMR one gene about the freckle pattern on your right hand doesn't match your left hand how about the scars you've got in your right hand that you use with a kitchen knife iron on your left hand the pattern of the skin over your knuckles will be different on every single finger and right across both of your hands anatomy is known that since the 1500s and pedophiles it is one of the most horrific and really heinous crimes that you can imagine on society preying upon the vulnerable and it's one of the few crimes where the perpetrator actually films themselves committing the crime and there are various parts of the perpetrator that can come into the image but frequently it's their hands and we were involved in a case in London and it was a very brave young girl a young teenage girl who alleged she was being abused by a biological father and I don't if you know it but if you leave your skype camera on on your laptop overnight it clicks into infrared mode and you can see at night and she left her her skype camera on and a half past four in the morning we see an arm just coming into view in the camera it's one of the spookiest things I think I've ever seen and interferes with a young girl and under infrared light it interacts with a deoxygenated blood in your veins and your veins stand out like black tram lines so we get a beautiful pattern of your veins we can compare the pattern then on the suspect was a vein pattern on the accused and on the perpetrator I should say and in this case he was fine not guilty and we were horrified and we said what do we do wrong with the science and we asked our lawyer to go back and talk to the courtroom to the jury and they said no no with no problem of the science we just didn't believe the girl she didn't cry enough she wasn't upset enough so it doesn't matter sometimes even if your science is good sometimes in the courtroom you still can't win but that science that little link into science allowed us to really start to do the research that's required and you can get an idea from a case but then what you have to do is to research it and to research it what you need is a database and you need a database that you can go and say how frequently does this happen so right the way throughout 2007 2009 we had about 550 police officers come through Dundee as we trained the national team and disaster victim identification and what we persuaded almost all of them to do was to strip down to their underwear and we photographed them every part of their body just about hands and feet and legs and thighs and backs and fronts and everything under visible light and under infrared light which gave us a tremendous database and it means now we're in a position five years forward that we couldn't have done five years ago that we can say with a degree of certainty what the variation is so what is the likelihood of two people having that same vein pattern what is the likelihood of people having those scars in the same place what is the likelihood of those freckle patterns and 82% of the cases that come to us now on pedophiles being identified from images result in a change of plea and that's really important because what that does is it saves the courtroom a tremendous amount of money but what it also means is that the children are protected from having to go and give evidence in court against their dads their granddad their mom's boyfriend whoever it may be and that becomes a really social socially important part so I understand why you don't want to go into the heads of these kinds of people we don't have that choice and we have to go into those areas and some of the most horrendous things that I think I've ever seen in my career have been in video clips from cases such as that do you feel me when you take all this stuff this kind of stuff in the court and you come up against one of these smarmy lawyers Oh Ben they're animals rip it up against Donald friendly I mean that must drive it is in the audience tonight though it's a lot I know Donald Wuerl he's a Rangers game or a codon beef and anyway um oh it's killing codon booth and no I mean honestly it's because you can have all the all the fantastic science and everything you've done everything you're ready to go and you get into that courtroom and a lawyer can act they're great actors and it can persuade a jury that don't listen to that la la la la la la la listen to me that's really frustrating it's really hard and you've got a bear in mind that when you go into court the first the first bit that you do in court is the person who's usually on your site because we're usually there for the crime so the first bit of the day is easy the cross-examination comes when you've already been standing for five hours and you're tired and you just want to go home and that's when you've got the defense lawyer usually although we do do defense work as well and it's very very difficult to keep that coolness that detachment that unbiased scientific approach that you need to have all the way through the day when you've been standing solidly almost for seven hours and the tough bits coming right at the end and it isn't you you can't take it personally although it's really hard not to but you can't it's what they're doing and I can remember a case that we did it was a lady who went missing in Helens burrow and we found just a tiny bit of her skull inside the filter of a washing machine long story and Donald Finley was the defense lawyer and so you know I've done to the crown I'm feeling fine and Donald of course with big mutton sideburns sort of leans underneath the desk and he pulls I'm great drama drops the new edition of Gray's Anatomy on the table in front of me and he says now I don't doubt you for a moment and you know exactly what's coming and he says I'm sure you know this book better than I do I'd never seen that edition of Gray's Anatomy but whilst little showmanship he spent the next four hours cross-examining me on how that bone forms what it's like in the child what it's like in the adult how it fractures so whilst there is a tremendous amount of of acting there is a huge amount of skill in the defense lawyer and in the prosecution lawyer as well and so for us it's really challenging when you're in that courtroom because you're not just doing or someone who's acting you are dealing with someone who's done their research yeah yeah but you just want to jump up and say look it was in the bloody washing machine yes exactly Mauro's well I had a dismemberment case now how did this remember me case okay with us dine scythe and you try really hard to be this professional in court and you're trying to be very sensible about it and this guy he was a what was called a cutter and the cutters are professional dismembers if you're looking for a new career you can work for a drug gang in London as a cutter and your job is that when they've tortured somebody they've murdered them it comes around the back of the nightclub and his job is to dismember and so the dismemberment was done with a most incredible skill what he didn't do was he didn't do the second part of the process terribly well which was the dumping and you had to pay 2,000 pounds to the dumper to get rid of the bits so he thought he'd saved money so they did a great job on the cutting but did a lousy bit in the dumping because the body was found two days later and when I was in court they said you know wouldn't you need terribly sharp knives to do this and I went well knows as long as you know what you're doing you don't it's but these aren't the kind of knives that you'd find in a kitchen that's about yeah find them in Mike and though I went warmed up coming round to yours for dinner and you think should I laugh should I not laugh I'm in court I can't do that and sometimes they do catch you completely off-guard and I think that's part of the act as well it can be a it can be a place remember when when you know haven't had my nasty run-in with the police with my first attempted research a few years later a cop that came up to sign and he said though you make a few mistakes in your book C in procedural mistakes and I say to her can't go near you guys you know otherwise I want to come off murder suspect again and he became a friend still is and he helped me a lot introduced many people show me case notes and such like explain how things worked and and then it needs I needed I needed a pathologist I needed to ask a few questions about drowning for a book and he said or talked to Tony Boozer to the University he's the pathologist sees a guy talk to so I wrote him and I got an appointment and I turned up and he secretary said oh he's teaching me he'll be here in a wee bit just go and sit in his office and I went in sat and was just a big a4 brown envelope on the desk and I said sorry and eventually Tony comes bustling in and all my questions went out my head because he's about yea high yeah and Danny DeVito they're doing it right and I'm just thinking how does he reached the slab he has a point I know that is a box really little slab maybe on some D shooters anyway so he comes busting around he said they said I'm sorry to keep you sorry to keep you so you can see from the photographs that the neck is the heads been severed on was completely from the body you can see so sir a head pro a serrated knife you can see and he looked at me no anyway oh sorry you know Detective Sergeant Brian right no so those sort of all the stuff went back in a drawer again and that was my introduction thinking a you know pathology pathology 101 and but he was great he said you oughta come and see the see that the mortuary and you know he took my render more chili and stuff you wanted to see a post-mortem examination I said no no really I mean just you know I didn't I didn't I mean it was enough for me to see where it harms you know seen where it happens and watching Silence of the Lambs I was framed I mean you know I mean I had a few textbooks and takes me to go of can it right okay that's what happens but if I had a question he was always brilliant I mean it specific when like droning how do you know if somebody's being dead when they go to war or not I mean these days are what folk know that kind of stuff but I didn't know at the time and I think then the internet must have stolen in its infancy I think these days there's actually lazy tendencies do you think I can just go to Wikipedia or I can google it and I'll have an absolutely concrete answer and that's a dangerous way to do research you've got a bear in mind as well that what the Defense Council do is they Google you so if you're an expert witness they will Google you to find out what you did last or if there's anything out there on Facebook which I don't do for a very good reason that you know is there a photograph of you blind blazing drunk on the on the sidewalk or whatever it may be and you've got a bear in mind they will check you out what is that could never have happened before now you're in the scrutiny in the courtroom that says well we didn't do so well in the last case did you really that's scary now you were saying earlier that that that bones is perhaps not as factually okay no snowman at one episode okay one episode explains everything you ever need to know about bones and it was an episode that was given to my students to to critique and by the time I could get them off the floor because they were rolling around laughing it was they'd find a baby's a newborn baby's skeleton okay and they have this wonderful three-dimensional reconstructive hologram bit of equipment okay so they took the baby's skull okay they aged it they did a facial reconstruction on it and when they walked out of the room they walked straight into a woman that looked exactly like the baby ya know the reason of where the help the reason I brought that up is because that apart Kathy Reichs is actually pretty good friend she does her other books or Tempe drennan books yes because she's a yeah she's a forensic anthropologist her heroines a forensic anthropologist and the the and it's not that that stuff is not I think sensationalized I mean it is it some of the you know some other writers have sensationalized the way that a pathologist that a forensic anthropologist might work case got a pair but she is you know I think the details there and it's not sensationalized because she actually lives it and work so I mean in danger abouts what she does Kathy was very funny because being in the same profession I've known her for a long time and she sent me a first copy of her book her first one which was called deja dead and she let me read it and I I tend not to read crime novels and she said to me what did you think of it and I was very polite I said it's it's really not for me it's not my kind of thing and she said to me she said normally should I be really upset by that but they've just paid me a million dollar retainer to write the second so I really don't care what I think the first one wasn't the best and 10 people yourself in dangerous positions that I think realistically Sharon had done but knew the sciences always believed the science and always believed the way that that character act as part of a case okay she sometimes stumbles into trouble and otherwise do you think I it seems to happen over and over again with you I would be possible and but the actual science I think is good and I mean it right any other writers that I mean I know you said you don't read much crime fiction but so anybody you think of those where the science is right is spot-on I've had the privilege over the last few years to actually work with quite a lot of crime writers very kindly they they got together as a group to support me in a project called million for a morgue which was raising a million pounds to build a mortuary in Dundee which we did and I spent a lot of time then obviously working with Val McDermid and the Stewart McBride but all Jeffrey Deaver and a few others and I've always been incredibly impressed at just how much care and attention they take in terms of science so for example Stuart was writing one fairly recently I don't know if it's out yet I don't know which involved a dismemberment and what he didn't know was how it felt so our dissecting room happens to be named after Stuart McBride because he raised a lot of money for us and so I said why didn't you come into the dissecting room that you helped us build and you remember for we've never been in and I've never seen him so nervous in my life going in there and it's like our students for the first 10 minutes they are incredibly nervous and then when you see what is the absolute marvel that is the human body you forget to be scared of it because it is just the most wonderful construction you could imagine and so for him it was about being able to feel what does cartilage feel like he was okay with what bone feels like what does characters feel like what does dead skin feel like what does muscle feel like and and for me somebody who wants to put themselves into that sort of a position to be able to write about it then I think that that's that's good research Valor's is shameless absolutely well many things voloshina but she's famous cuz your phone up and she'll just say oh I'm just phoning to find out how you are what you're doing you know she's on a fishing trip she wants to find out what your latest case is because she wants to Nick the science that's going on so that it will appear in her book before it appears in any of my papers that are published so nature say you stole it from her yeah so you know you read a profile book and you go yeah I recognize that one oh yeah and I recognize that one so the stories end up in there but but that in itself is fine because I think if if the science is going to be there then it should be reported well and I'd rather there was good science and I'd rather spend the time with crime writers explaining something to them than to see something go out that that is not believable and I think that that's that's a that's a duty as well that they take very seriously as you do to the people for whom you're right you know it should be believable yeah and if you're making a good living from writing about real professions you probably should get the facts of the jobs rape or as right as you possibly can get them I mean a lot of older cops used to tell me oh there was this terrible pathologist and he would if it was your first time in a dissect and would always try and make you faint make you run out and vomit you know the bit doing stuff they wouldn't really need to do peel and skulls back and pull and faces back and dissect and penises and you name it they would do it too just watching the young cop and just say can we keep going you know you're gonna keep going you're gonna keep going there was one there was a pathologist absolutely remain nameless in London we used to keep a tally board and so every time a policeman hit the floor you'd get the tally board yeah wouldn't happen these days all right no absolutely wouldn't happen these days I can't there's been a huge change in culture in relation to what goes on within a dissection room and I can remember when when I first started this and it was back in the 1980s we were able to go into the mortuary and take any samples of anything that we that we needed for research purposes and quite rightly now you can't do that and I can remember Ian West who's a pathologist who's in sadly deceased now telling me the story about how they were able to this is not funny but it is but it's not funny is that they were doing some research on ageing bones so they were taking out sections of the thigh bone and what they would do is they put a doweling bit of wood in sight so that you know the legs would be back to the same length when you sewed the body back up again all perfectly legit to do the body unfortunately then was going into a particular area of London that had a high-rise flats and the only way to get the body up onto the 30th floor was on the lift so it meant that the coffin went from being horizontal to being vertical and of course when they opened the coffin all you had were two bits of wood sticking out of the front of the thighs and there was a huge explanation had to be done in relation to that but that was permissible and there's so much that changes quite rightly changes I can remember in our Anatomy Department in London we would have glass bottles full of babies stillborn babies aborted fetuses and that was research that was done on that that was acceptable and time changes and you have to keep changing with it so that when the dinosaurs do come back the likes of rebus into these sort of situations the culture has changed and you've either got to change with the culture or you come into conflict with it yeah yeah I mean sergeant's Harlan ed Murphy still do not but they used to have Easter call a black Museum and it was just for looking at grisly things and bottles and jars and some they had the job of topping up the formaldehyde weekly or monthly affair arts a hell of a job there and but now I think there's no opened up to the public in general yes I read the majority they had a similar Museum in London and the one that always struck me was well why we do it but I don't know as a suicide and as a chap who tried to commit suicide with a circular saw and he didn't get it right the first time so that what you have is the first cup that wasn't successful and then the second cup that was why is that in a museum no I that's horrid absolutely horrid but times change about what's acceptable and what isn't there's a hunt Area Museum in London which is fascinating because it's a dr. hunter who was a Scottish guy Ennis his brother was also a doctor told hunter and as a haunted Museum in Glasgow but the one in London I mean he was a he was based in Leicester Square I think it is now and some people think he was the template for dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde because he consulted with Body Snatchers and his wife was a socialite so she'd be often hidin they can pose a run for the drinks and then run the back the chap at the door and they were bringing new bodies and stuff and he tried all kinds of medical experiments he tried growing teeth on cockscombs he tried all kinds of transplants and things but it was all done the name of science and what always fascinated me was that barking hair the Body Snatchers rewardin Body Snatchers they decided to cover the middleman and just kill people and pretended dug the bodies up that they led to the Anatomy act yes before that the only people you were allowed to do scientific research on were people who were convicted murderers who'd been hanged because I weren't going to go to heaven anyway and because of the the public's outrage with art we've got the Anatomy Act which meant people could leave their bodies to science and science you know scientific research could be it brought God eventually to the point that people would leave their body to science but there was a bit in between so that there was an jerk reaction amongst the public that said this is not right that the granny's body can get stolen or that my son can get murdered to do this we need to legislate against these anatomist s-- there were really surgeons not the anatomist and so that legislation was brought in to stop doing that but what they then did was that they realized that there was still a need for cadavers and what they did was they said well where do we find them and you find them in the poor houses the prisons and the mental institutions and so the anatomy act shifted the dissection from the murderer to the poor and there was another outcry that the poor said we'll hold on a minute you are equating us to murderers and there there was a the amount of bodies available eventually started to dry up because we did away with poor houses people were living in prisons because our health conditions so we've always had this problem and anatomy of where do you get bodies from and one of the the things that happened was that we had two world wars and in those two world wars what we had was was a tremendous outpouring of support and so for those people who couldn't go away and fight you could still do your bit at home you could still donate your body that meant that surgeons the doctors could all learn so that your grandson who's out in the battlefield has got a better chance of survival and the bequeathal the whole aspect of bequeathal really took off in the wars and we've never had really the same volume of bodies bequeathed to us that we had at the Second World War at the end of Second World War so that that act of leaving your remains was actually quite late Jeremy Bentham was the one who was the only one who really pushed that forward but at the time he was considered to be a real rebel but it was the poor that it was based on unconsciously I know when I talk to questions I know we need to attack remotes I know we do need to have more decorations and I can't Rover got roving mic I forgot a micro mics yeah we have well well just a wire got one there yeah we've got one there go to excellent alright well we'll get we'll just throw all them and if somebody sticks our hand up we will get a microphone to you they're all gone oh there goes the front they're gone oh you're numb well no with all those stories is any-any rebus is any of me in him any of him and me I mean we've got similar Kenny we grew up the same place we've written card and then I'm went to the same school to certainly extend here Wescoe 15 joined their or me then during the police so that's the point at which it stops and we've got same taste in music was drinking the same pub he's a different generation from me I think he's a much more of an Old Testament Kenny guy you would see me as being a wishy-washy liberal who's never had to do a hard day's work in his life and has been suckered by the state thank you very much the state so we wouldn't really get on if we may but the same time widget characters come from all your characters are aspects of your personality so rebus and Siobhan and cafe and mark and Fox they're all coming from inside my head they're not people that I know but weirdly I mean a lot a lot of cops so I got underwater with them there's always a cop in the audience so usually company audience know then differently go I know a guy just like rebus or I used to work with a guy just like rebus or you must have based him on this guy who I've never met that guy even cops and Edinburgh see he must be based and so-and-so no he just came from inside my head and I didn't realize I was gonna be sticking around them quite this alone I've known him almost as long as I've known my wife to write sentences and one she's not here you can tell you can tell so no I mean answer that there's no I don't think there's much in me in him but I like I like the fact that he can say things I can't say I mean he's you know I'm quite safe and what I do in life and he's a bit of a risk taker and a bit of a rebel and about my maverick and all the rest of it and he talks he speaks back to Authority in a way that I've never done and he's always got a great comeback going I'm like most people I think of the great comeback lying to you anybody else got a question yes along there hang on we'll get the microphone to you I mean that's what all claim fixes over I mean I don't know how you take it from there oh that's really really hard got a good question I'm I'm always viewed as being Pollyanna my glass is usually always half-full I like to believe that there is good in people I am very fortunate that I don't think I have met ever met anybody who is inherently evil I think you become a product of your background your circumstances your attitudes everybody is unique in that I like to think that there is a goat in everybody and I like to think that it's our job to try and find that but unfortunately we're not always as good as we should be yes there are people out there some of the things that that we've seen that you think you know they must be inherently evil but I'll bet they were good to their mum and I bet they're like their dog and I bet there was something about them that was still good if if you lose hope in that little spark that there has to be something worth finding in everybody then you lose hope and that's that's my glass houseful I'm really hard I am a years ago I made the TV series on evil for channel 4 it was actually channel 4 religious programming who knew that channel 4 the head of religious program and and we got funded and we did a three-part series and it was gonna be a three part series on crime but when I started talking to the director we just started Bensimon ago we can't talk about crime without talking about what that actually means and got back to evil good level and it was three programs in the first program said what do we mean what does that term mean does it mean anything does it mean the same things to different cultures at different times in history and the second program was where does it come from nature or nurture people born by other made birds a chemical reactor was talked to psychiatrists psychoanalysts spoke to a Exorcist about the devil and I was actually exercised which was interesting and I think it's weird enough about that and and in program free would never do about it and you know rehabilitation incarceration and a view to game death row in Texas he'd been on death row for 12 years just waiting for his appeals to run out and then it was going to be the lethal injection and at the end of that entire process with we looked at Loughborough so we looked at this we looked at her and then end of the entire process I was I couldn't point a person and say that were evil but I could point an action yeah and say at that moment you committed an act of evil which I think it's kind of what you were saying with one exception and one exception was Ian Brady the director wanted me interview in Brady's mom so he'd contacted iam Brady's mom she had contact Liam Brady and he said no if he and Rankin wants to talk he talks to me not you and director was very excited about this and I was less excited I said there's no way I'm letting that guy get inside my head because once he's inside your head he ain't leavin but I did read the book he'd written called the gates of Janus which was an apologia for serial killers saying we should be in all of serial killers because he had a higher form of life and it's the only bit of a read that regardless he burned so I came a real understanding it there are may be a few cases out there where you can say you can't be fixed yeah you're unfixable and probably always wearing unfixable but very very rare very rare but it's a fascinating this whole thing about why why we don't do why wasn't don't do bad things is interesting even we get the chance to do it we're doing you know we're all capable we're social animals all capable of good and all capable of evil I think and it's what stops us doing it that's fascinating anybody else right they're bad good for gets around upstairs yeah she's written he was as well either really maybe she's just really told when you reconstruct a face underneath the face is a skull and that skull in terms of the openings is what you're reconstructing so you're reconstructing eyes you're reconstructing nose you're reconstructing mouth and you're reconstructing ears so any opening that you have into your face is the thing that we're constructing around and all of our faces that's the bits that we look at and our skull underneath does dictate how that looks so the shape of our nose is very much reflected by the shape and size of the bones that are underneath so there is an inherent face that we can reconstruct what we can't know is whether you are 15 stone or 8 stone and so when we reconstruct you we can reconstruct you to a middle size we don't reconstruct you generally with a skin color if it's certainly if all we have is is skeletal remains so you will see the facial reconstruction go out in black and white it's a gray color the hair that we put on is going to be just a sort of fairly basic style and all you're trying to do in a facial reconstruction is to jog somebody's memory to say you know that looks a bit mrs. Jones and I haven't seen her in three years and when we put that face out all the police are trying to do or get leads and then they will follow that up now sometimes we can get incredibly corrupt clothes frightening lis clothes that it looks a bit like magic but if we are far enough away we never know whether the face we've reconstructed was a poor reconstruction or whether that person actually was never going to be found anyway there might have been trafficked into the country they might be here illegally so we have a great difficulty identifying what our our accuracy rate is because when we get it right we get it really right but when we get it wrong we can't always explain why it's wrong but there's an inherent face underneath and and when you look at your own face whether it's at the age it is now or 10 years ago or 20 years ago and you look at your mother your father your brother's your sisters there'll be a similarity in there and that's the underlying bone structure and genetics so all we're trying to do is just jog a memory not make a perfect reconstruction you're one person time for one or two more if you're quick yes madam what's your opinion sue of the sue what is your opinion of the court we have expert witnesses in this country got a subpoena back in court in 2006 the National Academy of Sciences in America wrote a report on the state of forensic science and by and large it said it's the shoddiest science imaginable and part of the reason for that is that there is very little funding for research in forensic science so most of our forensic science does not fit for purpose probably the only bit of forensic science that passes a true admissibility test for court is the but DNA is starting to be thrown out of court and starting to be questioned so for example we've now got so clever at extracting DNA we can do it from a single cell so now my DNA is on Ian when he in goes home tonight and murders his wife then my DNA will be at that crime scene but I was never there and part of our difficulty is being able to explain contamination explain transfer and as a result of that your expert has to be really good at things like statistics and mathematics and logical reasoning and that's not the kind of things that often people think that that is an inherent scientific need so some of our experts are incredibly good some of them are incredibly bad and there's a few others that are going to sit perfectly in the middle but they're dealing with a set of tools that by and large are not fit for purpose and there's a huge amount of work needs to be done in terms of research now when you think at the end of the day the most juries finds most court cases boring as anything and the only thing that brightens our up is the prospect of a good forensic witness then the importance of that science in court actually becomes exacerbated and you have to be very careful that it doesn't become the showcase because it isn't we have to be realistic about it so there's a there's a move towards accrediting our experts that says we have to sit the exams now to prove that we're fit to go into court now a lot of the old guard are kicking and screaming about that that says I've been doing this for 40 years why do I need to sit in exam yeah but have been doing it bad for 40 years then you do need to sit the exam so that so there is a there is a big there's a big wind of change coming in forensic science and in this country we certainly were viewed as being leaders in the world and I used that as the UK and then something tragic happened in the UK and it happens in England and Wales which as they shut down the forensic science service in England and Wales and all the forensic science went into commercial providers Scotland and Northern Ireland's were very very sensible and they didn't do that so we retained National Labs and we I think now Scotland and Northern Ireland are in fact probably leading the way over the rest of the UK at the moment and that's the way it should stay I think England and Wales bitterly regrets the decision that they made but it's not finished playing out yet so that there's there's big problems in forensic science okay last question one last question yes sir excellent that was good answer our biggest deficiency in forensic science is understanding it's in mathematics and in statistics so it's the likelihoods and it's the probability ratios and that that's where we're weakest because we don't have the ground truth databases that allow us to test the methods fingerprints we've been using for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and fingerprints went without question until the fingerprint inquiry which became that the Scottish fingerprint inquiry in relation to Shirley McKee and what that did was that downgraded fingerprints from evidence of fact to evidence of opinion and what's important is that there is no forensic science that is immune there is nothing that is the the golden bullet that will solve everything and it means that you actually need to use a multiple approach in terms of science and in identification we we tend to be following the biometrics industry because there's a huge amount of funding in biometrics we're a community in a culture that are scared of our security and in fact one of the the highest rising crimes in the UK is identity theft and identity fraud so that we start to use our biometrics as a currency so any of you who've got a mobile phone or a laptop that requires your fingerprint to gain access please don't do that you don't know where your fingerprints going you don't know where it's being stored and if you give up your bit of your a biometric as part of your identity if I lose my credit cards they can issue me with a new one and they can issue me with a new PIN number you steal my fingerprint you can't issue me with a new fingerprint and so we're very very blase about giving up our identity because and teenagers are probably the worst for it so that if you want the latest I whatever it is in terms of a phone or an electronic device than to be able to access it the companies are asking you to give up a biometric over my dead body will I give over a biometric into the biometrics industry when identity theft is the biggest rising crime in the country there you go so all those new forward you're getting for Christmas no just say no and we're going to wrap up there soon I will be hangin around for a bit if anybody has the core extra questions or wants to talk to us before we head off I want to thank you for coming out tonight it's been an amazing session I really enjoyed it I've learned a lot some of it might crop up my next book and thank you for coming in thanks very much

Channel: irvinebay

Views: 13,859

Rating: 4.9115043 out of 5

Keywords: Ian Rankin (Author), Professor Sue Black, crime, conversation, Rebus, Forensic Psychology (Field Of Study), Forensic Anthropology (Field Of Study), St. Matthew's Academy, Saltcoats, Irvine Bay Regeneration Company, science, talk science

Id: D2OAo58k4vU

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2015