In Conversation with Sue Black

hello everyone and welcome to our 16th virtual alumni relations event 2020 in conversation with sue black i'm katrina allen head of alumni relations and regular giving here at the university and before i hand over to our host for the evening fellow alum and head of the law school greg gordon i just want to say how thrilled we are to be able to bring this event with sue to so many of our alien friends at this time i know that many of you are joining from all around the world across 27 countries and six continents in fact so a very warm welcome to each and every one of you there is just one item of housekeeping i need to cover before we begin and that is that your questions for sue should be submitted by the q a function that you should see on your screens it's a small speech full icon with q and a in it questions will be moderated by members of the alumni team and although it's unlikely we'll get through all the questions that come in during the event we will try to ensure that a wide range of topics are covered when it comes to the audience questions section so without further ado i am delighted to hand over to our host for the evening greg gordon thank you very much indeed um katrina it's a great pleasure to to host this event um and a great pleasure to welcome uh welcome sue a triple graduate of the university of aberdeen and bsc phd and of course an honorary dsc conferred in 2019 at a ceremony that was also attended by her daughter who was graduating with a first-class um llb and it was it was at that occasion that i first met and sue and and it was at that occasion that i learned that the things she dislikes the most are are rats and lawyers and so i'm afraid you've only got one of them to contend with um or some some would say otherwise some would say that you were repeating yourself there but anyway very much very much looking forward to the uh looking looking forward to the conversation um sue's career um is a remarkable one i could probably take the greater part of the time available to us listing and the the various posts that sue has held and and her achievements i won't go through everything in in detail but i think it's worth what's reminding everyone that that sue has been them professor of anatomy and forensic anatomy at dundee head of the center for anatomy and human identification at the same institution and most recently or her current position is pro vice chancellor for engagement at lancaster and an incredibly um successful and full career on its own but all the more remarkable when one considers that it's run in parallel with extensive work in the field um involving um major exercises um in places like kosovo and iraq and then identifying the the deceased following the tragic boxing day tsunami so a really a remarkable career and amongst all of this she still has the time to write this book among many other things so this is the book that we're fundamentally here to talk there to talk about and written in the bone and we'll get on to some of the some detailed questions about that as we as we go into the discussion but i want to i want to start off so just by um having some just asking some general questions about you about your life and career if we may before we get a little bit more into the detail of the the subject matter of the book so for anyone who might not know what what's the difference between a forensic pathologist and foreign forensic anthropologist about a hundred thousand pounds a year in salary is the truth um that's the biggest difference but when you look at the subject the forensic bit is is common and so the forensic as you well know better than anybody else is that that means pertaining to the court because the forum the courts of rome so anything forensic means that you are an expert witness usually for the court the the anthropology bit is the study of man or what remains of man so the anthropologist is looking at the identification of the human or what remains of the human for medical legal purposes what we are not doing is assigning a manner of death or a cause of death so the anthropologist is predominantly about identification and the pathologist is mainly about the manner and the cause of death and is this um was this something that you um that you entered university with with the idea that this was this was what you were traveling towards or was there a sort of a light bulb moment when you realized that this was going to be the the career path you chose yeah i'm far too lazy to have light bulb moments so everything i've done in my life has come about by by simply you know good fortune and chance being in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time but you know there's a wonderful thing that happens when you reach a certain age and you have that ability to stop and to turn around and to look at the path you've taken and to identify the crossroads where you made a decision and you know you can see how you got to where you are now through the decisions that you made and you didn't always make them for the right reasons but my my maiden name was gunn and my father was a tremendous shot so they were obviously going to go together and i adored my father so much that any time he would go shooting for rabbits or pigeons or whatever it was that was my opportunity to go with my dad so from a very very young age probably of about seven or so i'd be carrying home the rabbits or the pigeons or whatever it was and my mother was terribly squeamish and so i would sit outside with my father and i'd pluck them or i'd gut them or i'd grill look at them if it was a deer and really from a young age i never thought anything about being handling blood and guts and you know dead animals so when i was about 12 my father said to me good classic scottish presbyterian what are you going to do for a job and i thought he meant you know when i grew up what he meant was when i was 12 what are you gonna do for a job and so it seemed logical to go into a butcher shop and so all my friends were in the makeup counter at boots or selling clothes in little woods i was again up to my elbows and blood and and guts in a butcher shop when i i got to the end of my school career i had a biology teacher that i adored he was just the most inspirational man and he was the man who said to me you need to go to university and i sort of looked around and no disrespect to aberdeen whatsoever because i loved my time there but aberdeen was close enough for me to be able to get home if i wanted to but far enough away from my mother and father that they didn't know what i was up to so aberdeen for me was just that that perfect distance and if aberdeen hadn't accepted me i don't know what i would have done but i came for the first two years and find myself bored is the honest truth i was doing things that i didn't want to do but i didn't have the experience and the maturity to know that sometimes you have to wait to find the right thing of course with hindsight those two years were incredibly important but at the time for me that they weren't and i felt as if i was really didn't know where i was going and by the end of second year the the things that i were good at were either botany or a bit of anatomy that we did in terms of histology and so i was never ever going to name and draw plants for the rest of my life so i thought well i'll go and do anatomy not really knowing what it was about and from the moment i stepped into the dissecting room down in what we used to call the drain down in marshall college then i knew i'd stepped into exactly where i was meant to be but i had to wait for that so anatomy was my first love but i wanted to be able to do research that made a difference and i i wasn't biochemistry oriented or physiologically oriented so being an anatomist is quite difficult to find that research outlet and i got involved in a case very early on and was hooked and that was it so i i never physically chose to get where i am but every decision i made about a job that i went for or a course that i went for or a position i found myself in was done from an instinct from a from a gut instinct and it hasn't led me too far astray i don't think so far but forensic anthropology as a subject didn't exist when i was in university there weren't there were no forensic anthropologists and so it was it was a difficult trail blaze but it was also an incredibly rewarding one wonderful and and i think that when i studied forensic medicine as part of my law degree i was very much aware of the role of the pathologist but but the the term foreign forensic anthropologist was not one that was that was familiar to me it was probably quite an early stage of the development of that particular uh career but what you'd find if you'd find yourself at a crime scene next to a miserable old police sergeant you know who'd look you up and down and go anthropologist what the heck do we want an anthropologist for there are no tribes to be found in government was one of the things i was once told and it was this concept that anthropologists were people that looked at tribes and looked at you know indigenous populations and it was it was really quite difficult in those early days to get beyond that stage but there were quite a few pathologists at the time who were realizing that they couldn't be experts in everything and they started to give some ground to other specialties and that probably started to kick in in in i would say around the 1990s more than anything it's interesting it's a trend that i think one sees in other professions as well certainly in law and what one sees specialisms and sub-specialisms now certainly interesting to see that in in this too i think what i think what you have to say there is is really quite i find it reassuring and really quite inspirational because um students often come to me even before i was out of school looking for career advice i think they they used to come to me in particular because they knew i'd been in practice before academia so and this kind of idea that you've somehow got it all down and you understand how it works and you can kind of tell them what the path into this it is and and my answer has always been very similar to what you've said follow your instincts and that will actually take you into the the right job so i i find that but i think careers have changed as well you know what whilst we might have thought that what we were doing was we were entering a job for life that the current generation aren't looking at a job for life they're looking at a job for now and they'll reskill their up skill they'll change and they'll move into something else which you know i think leads to a much more rounded person there's a lot more flexibility in careers now than i think there's ever been absolutely i think i think that's right and talking of of careers or on the topic of careers you know looking at you as i i suspect it's not the type of career not the type of job where um it's particularly meaningful to ask you for a typical day in the life because i suspect there's those extraordinary levels of of variation in it but maybe slightly more useful is to say what's what now or or in the past is is the balance of work between the academic side and and what one might call the practitioner work i think in the past what you you tended to have was that most of the practitioners were also academics and so this balancing act of of some teaching some research and a bit of field work you know whether whether that is research field work or it's actually going out and doing case work certainly south of the border where the forensic science service was closed what you had were a lot of commercial companies that came in to meet the needs of the police services so that we started to find forensic anthropologists being employed specifically in that job by the commercial providers and so there was there was a change if you like between the academic anthropologists and the sole practitioner anthropologists but for me you know a day could range from anything the most boring bureaucratic work as you know that you've got to fill out the paperwork for the university um to going into a class of first years or into a class of fourth years or sitting down with a phd student and suddenly the phone goes and if somebody's in your office when your phone goes there's always this sort of freestyle of excited maybe it's the police and you know sometimes it is and you know you don't ever i think get used to that phone call that says can we talk to you about a case because you don't know where it's going you don't know how it's going to end up and there is that element of the unusual that the case work actually gives you and and that's that's the bit that i think has has no pattern because i say very you know frequently to my colleague lucina i always say to her you know it's like bosses suddenly we'll have six cases running at the same time and then you go into a drought for six months and there's absolutely nothing and a bbc crew at one point said to me can we follow you can we can we you know film you in your lab and i said yeah you know if you're prepared to sit around for six months and watch me fill out the forms for the university knock yourselves out because what i can't do is i can't guarantee you that there will be any case work because you are absolutely at the mercy of the situation whether there is a case for you to become involved in and when that call comes in um how urgent is the response that's that's required from from from you and because i mean obviously almost by definition before before you involve the almost certainly dealing dealing with remains so is it a question of drop everything and go or is it usually something that can be done by appointment by arrangement the full spectrum so you know we might get brought into a case even a decade after the original body was found because the cold case team have hit a a barrier and they can't get beyond it and they'll bring experts in so under those circumstances there's no time pressure whatsoever but when you're working perhaps in mass fatality events and disaster victim identification you're watching that unfold on the news in front of you and you know that what you really should be doing is upstairs packing your bag and for the the 10 years that i worked for the government more than anything it was always about having your passport in your handbag because you didn't know you'd get the phone call that says we need you in heathrow we need you there later on this evening or bryce norton or wherever it may be and then literally everything got dropped so it sounds terribly exciting but it really isn't um it gets very old very quickly when you have to turn your life upside down because you're going somewhere but for security reasons you can't be told where you're going until you get to the airport so you don't know am i going to pack a bikini or a parka quite frankly and and you don't know sometimes how long you're going to be away for it it grows old quite quickly yeah i i can well imagine um you you talk um in in the book quite a lot about um court um appearing in court um and um i don't want to turn this into a discussion about law because i i don't want to kind of dominate and and kind of pull pull things off in that direction just because that's the perspective that i you know that i would see things from but i i thought reading the reading through the book looking at the looking at some of the experiences that you've that you've had at the hands of the hands of lawyers um and and the court process it seems to me that you were remarkably sanguine about your kind of experiences in court and that some of them i i would look at and say you know some of the cross-examinations that you've been subjected to are speculative might be a polite way of putting it and unfair might be a firmer way of putting it but you seem you seem very committed to the idea of of justice um and and the idea of justice being done um and and very conversant with with the kind of the with the principles and surrounding that and i just wondered if you could you know just talk a little you know talk a little bit about that um is is that perception that i have correct that you're quite happy that you're not happy but but prepared to put up with some fairly shoddy treatment largely because you recognize that the fundamental importance of the courts getting the answers right um i'm a great believer in justice and i am even though i find the courtroom a very alien environment and most scientists do because it is a theater where it's not our rules um it's not our game and you go into court and on one side of that adversarial system will want you to walk out as the world's leading expert and the other side would actually prefer you to walk out as a blathering idiot and i've been both i've been both the expert and the idiot and it just does depend how it goes on the day but what's really challenging for all scientists is that a scientist lives on their reputation and if your reputation is lost then as a scientist that you know the game is over for you so there's a really high set of stakes for any scientist to go into a courtroom and many of the scientists i talk to they get to a point of saying i've had enough i'm not going in there anymore you know i don't need to be put through this level of antagonistic examination and i don't need somebody who's trolling through facebook to find something that they can find to hold up against me in court to show that i'm not a credible witness for me that's not about justice that's about playing games and those those lawyers who choose to play games there's not a lot i can do about that but you do have to try and weather it but i have been examined and cross-examined by some of the most incredible lawyers so i think probably the only case where i came out where i thought you know i almost enjoyed that only only almost and that was in the hands of dorothy bain qc and dorothy as a lawyer because she was in the crime office at the time she had this wonderful skill of being able to to take your evidence forward with you and then where she thought she'd lost you you could see she retraced and she brought you forward again and i thought there's skill there this incredible skill but what there also was was an element of trust and there was respect and on the other side i've also been cross-examined by donald finley and i love donald finley because you know exactly what you're going to get from him and i can remember a case where he gave me a really rough time and afterwards i'd spoken to him and i said oh donald you know you're a bit tough on me in there and as only he would do in his accent he went i he said but it's so much more fun with you than the pathologists and and that for me just at the end of the day summarizes it all sometimes you're the hero sometimes you're the goat and it levels itself out if at the end of the day you can keep yourself as the expert witness knowing what your limits are and trying to avoid the bear traps that some often less experienced lawyers will try and set but some experienced ones do it as well and you've got to have your wits about you and it's it's an alien environment it's a horrible environment i hate it but we have to have expert witnesses because our jury need to have that level of evidence that allows them to make the decision so it's a love-hate relationship and then to find my daughter wanted to become a lawyer can i just say how disappointed we were in her no or no the ultimate betrayal shocking and then she did say at one point mom could i cross-examine you in court and i said not if you want my inheritance darling no i remember being at a training event years ago when when jim tierney a very well-known aberdeen practitioner who went on the bench as a sheriff i remember him saying um something along the lines of a person whose job it is to ask questions there's no business being proud of getting the better of someone whose job is not answering questions and i thought it was a very nice way of trying to tell us that there was a need for a certain amount of humility and and then and fundamentally that you're there to serve the interests of justice rather than rather than showboat something else i found quite striking was how um how little you seem to have been told about the outcomes of many of the cases that you were involved in how often where you know the outcome and you don't always know the outcome of cases that you've been involved in it's often been a bit accidental having bumped into somebody at a conference and finding out from them yeah i find that i find that quite extraordinary and and an example of how i think the court system and my professional sometimes are sometimes very poor at looking after the interests of those who those who serve it i found that really quite um disappointing and quite humbling in that in that sense that people who go to all this effort invest all this this time give so freely of their skills don't even get the courtesy of a letter saying what the outcome was and it's worse than that um i mean i because of the way we work we work right the way across the uk so we work through the different legal systems and the care of expert witnesses south of the border is incredible absolutely incredible and you know they look after you from the moment they contact you until the moment the case is finished and i just had a letter in today from thames valley police from from a court case to say just to let you know so and so you know has pleaded guilty and we're heading to sentencing that doesn't happen north of the border north of the border you probably find out what happened in the newspapers or on the television so to working in the different systems i think there's good things and bad on both sides of of the the different systems but i think you're right you tend to get much better looked after in the english courts i'm afraid than you do in the scottish courts well that's a matter that we can maybe pick up um offline because this is an area of interest of mine but as i say i don't want to i don't want to hog the hog the discussion i want to i want to get in and start talking about the boot this of course i mean you've written many books but this of course is not the is is not the first um bestseller book you uh you you also wrote all that remains so why did you why did you come back to to to this particular well and to write written in bone what's what what was the left to say um after after all that remains so i mean i've written 14 textbooks and nobody reads those because that's not why academics write textbooks and so all that remains was a suggestion that was made to me it was really i mean i want to come to it first of all because somebody said to me what's the book you would like to read the most but never will and for me i'd have loved to have read the story of my grandmother's life but never will anymore because you know she's no longer here and so i thought about for all that remains laying down stories that i thought in time maybe my children my grandchildren whoever might want to read to learn perhaps you know what i thought about things or who i was and of course you know thinking i'd written that for my children the little witches what they did was that they went to the index they found the sections that had their name they read the bits that included them and never bothered reading any of the rest of it so that was a bit pointless and i thought well maybe you know when i'm dead and buried they might feel different about it and i had no intention of writing a second book but i got so much response from the public saying oh can i tell you about this funny bit i've got or that funny bit and and people were so open about their own anatomy but i realized that they didn't always have the words to be able the vocabulary to be able to convey it and that sort of made me think as well about you know how many of us go to a gp or go to the hospital and there's a language involved in that sort of medical anatomical terminology that most people probably don't hear because they don't understand it and you come out saying what did the doctor say to you i've got no idea i didn't understand a word and i thought well maybe if i can put anatomy into straightforward words that are easy to understand and link it to the concept that one of the areas of my expertise is in criminal dismemberment that would allow us to look at each part of the body in a section and say if this was the only bit of your body that i found what could i tell you about it what anatomy would be in there what are the words that we'd use and then back it up with some cases that show why that particular part of the body was relevant to that case so for me it was that link between the anatomical engagement with the public which of course is is my new job is about engagement and just getting across in simple terms and understandable terms how little we know about our own bodies in general and people are so prepared to talk about their bodies and everything that's wrong with it that it's you know it's not for the sake of of embarrassment or shame but sometimes it's just because i don't know what to call that bit and and so i've had just the most amazing conversations with people as a result of it and therefore thoroughly enjoyed it but no more two's enough in the book it seems to me that um it seems to me that precision is a very very important part of your of your job precision and description um absolute certainty and i i think um i don't want to put words into your mouth but but perhaps for that reason you you make use of a lot of the the proper anatomical terms in what you're um and what you're doing is it about making sure that that um that you're absolutely clearly understood is and is it in part about educating the public so having having read through this this book i know a lot of words i i didn't know before i'm not sure i know how to pronounce them all and i apologize if i get that wrong later on when we start because i've only seen them written down but um is is it the case that um did you make a conscious decision to to use the um to use the the correct anatomical terminology because because without doing that you would you just thought that that the work would lack a certain degree of certain degree of precision and credibility yeah i i feel very very strongly that in terms of engaging anatomy with the public you need to use the proper words you shouldn't shy away from from what are the real words and in the audio book what i found a lot of people said to me is oh it was great to hear you i wasn't quite sure how you pronounced that now i know that's how you pronounce it so people will now come up to you and they will talk about their femur or they will talk about their radius and words that they wouldn't perhaps have used in the past they now feel really comfortable to and if you go into your gp and you specifically talk about your femur or your radius there's no doubt anymore because you've created that bridge in the language between the the practitioner and the public so it was a very conscious decision to use the real proper words rather than try to in any way make it seem a little bit less than what it is because i think anatomy is the most it's the most fascinating subject in the world i mean you know we're a narcissistic primate quite frankly we we designed the mirror we're the ones who look at ourselves we love to know what we look like on the outside we love to know what we look like on the inside and if you're going to talk about ourselves on the outside of the inside then you have to have a language you have to have a lexicon in which you can convey that in a form that has that leaves no room for doubt and in the courtroom we will use the proper terms and we'll explain to the jury we're talking about the femur which is the bone that's inside your thigh but then once you've said it then you can keep using femur and people will know exactly what it is that you mean and i i just think that honesty is really important yeah and and i think that's exactly the approach that you take that you take in the book um and and um incredibly and incredibly useful and incredibly interesting to to do that um book is is divided up um into chapters that that relate to particular parts of the body but there are there are many cross-cutting themes as well but um the the chapter on the or the chapters that relate to the head i think are particularly striking um and there's something as i think you know yourself there's something really very particular about the human skull and it seems almost to to capture the sort of the essence of humanity although you also point out there are some writers who think for instance the feet are perhaps the most specifically human bit of us so there's not necessarily broad an agreement on that you seem quite concerned or or or troubled by the use that some people put human remains to so you've got something to say about um damien hust's famous piece for the love of god and there's also um you've also got some comments on on on the use of archaeological remains in um in jewelry uh later on in the book um are you concerned that we don't uh we don't treat treat the human body with with enough dignity um are you concerned about it being kind of exploited for artistic purposes on or could you just expand a little bit on that so if i take you to the damien hurst piece which the love of god was the skull that had all the diamonds on it um i've no problem with that as an art piece at all because it was a cast of a skull um and the diamonds were placed in the cast that's that's not a problem where i had the problem was that the skull was bought from a taxidermy shop so the very fact that you can buy somebody else's remains causes me to morally pause would i be happy at somebody being able to buy a part of a member of my family no i wouldn't and therefore if i wouldn't be happy for somebody else to buy a part of my family why on earth should it be okay for me to buy a part of somebody else's family to create this piece of art and and i could have got over that as well if that was as far as he went but when you look at the for love love god um piece the teeth that are in the skull were obviously removed and then replaced into this artistic piece with the diamonds so for me then that was saying there was not only the fact that you'd bought a piece of somebody else but you'd actually desecrated it to be able to create this piece of art and that went too far for me i always look at if this was my mom my dad my granny would i be happy and if the answer is no then that's the moral compass that you need that says it's not okay then to go online and to buy some fingers finger bones from an archaeological specimen and create it into a piece of jewelry if you weren't happy for someone to do that to your father or your mother then you shouldn't be content to do that to somebody else's mother or father and if you do think it's okay then i would question that maybe you need to go away and think about how you really feel about the human and the level of respect that we need to give to each other whether we're alive or we're dead and crossing that boundary from life into death doesn't suddenly overnight make you something that deserves less respect doesn't mean if you're dead an hour you get more respect than if you've been dead 10 years doesn't mean you get more respect than if you've been dead a thousand years time shouldn't make the difference when it comes to the respect and the dignity and the decency that we convey to those who've been alive and who were ancestors of other people it's my view it's obviously not other people's views but they cause me to pause and i think as a human species it's a really interesting philosophical argument indeed indeed so um also in that chapter you talk about um two really quite extraordinary cases i'll i'll take them in and turn the the so-called um head in the shed and case um which which followed perhaps perhaps an unusual course where and 20 years after the event the murderer came forward and you know provided the police with information as to as to where they would as to where they would find a body um do you approach that sort of case and and i presume a certain amount of that information was passed on to you and when you were conducting your work or was that something that you learned was that something that you learned after the event sometimes the police will give you a very detailed breakdown of what has occurred in the case up to that point of your involvement and their background investigations sometimes you will get very little information and in this case i've been informed that a lady had gone into a police station and she'd informed the death sergeant that if they went round to this flat and dug underneath the um flagstones outside in the sort of paved area they would find a body and so you know they they kept her busy and the team got sent round and as they started digging down they'd lifted the patio slabs and started digging down they found some human remains and that was the point of what this they stopped and they contacted me to go down so that we could do a full um excavation so i knew that somebody had walked into the station and said that there was a body there the the back story to it came out later which was that the lady said that she used to look after this old woman and that she had come into the the flat one day and found the old lady dead and at the time she said what had happened was that she had panicked didn't want know what to do and then buried her body now that's an extreme thing to do anyway but people do extreme things under extreme conditions it didn't explain why she then went on and carried on collecting the old lady's old age pension for a number of years afterwards but as we as we start to uncover the body it became very clear to me that there was no head and at the end of the day you know you can have bits of a body missing but nobody's walking around on the planet without a head you can walk around without an arm or a leg or a finger or whatever it may be but you can't walk around without a head and so i turned to the police officer and said we have a problem because there's no head here to which he replied are you sure and i said i'm absolutely certain a head's about the size of a bowling ball trust me it should be on the end of the neck and here's the neck and it's not there but sometimes it's easier to question the anthropologist that it is to to accept what the ridiculousness of the situation is so they went back to the lady and said we've got a real problem because we found the body but actually we haven't found the head and she said well yeah there was a problem there because i just didn't feel that i could bury her with with her head so i took her head off and we said well okay but where is the head now and she said well it's it's in a plastic bag in my garden shed so of course the police get dispatched to go and find the plastic bag that has the skull and every time she's moved house she's taken this head with her now from the body we could tell nothing about a cause of death but from the head we could because there was blunt force trauma to the skull so as it turned out it wasn't a natural death it was actually a traumatic death so whether she had hit the old lady with the spade the shovel whatever it may have been or something else and then buried her but decided to take the head away because that was the bit that had the forensic evidence um you know i i don't know because it didn't come back to me the the details from the court in relation to that case but it's just you know if you wrote that in a crime novel nobody would believe you they'd say well that that's just far too ludicrous to be true but the reality is often what what is fact is is a bit more insane than any crime fiction author could could you know imagine as they write their next novel and on that topic your involvement in the monster of terrazzo cases is is another quite extraordinary um passage from the passage from the from the book can you tell us a little bit about that and then how that gets resolved yeah gianfranco stevening was um he was arrested by the police in in relation to murder and what had hamdi lived near verona in italy and he had his liking was for prostitutes and he would take prostitutes back to his farmhouse and he would ask if he could photograph them and his interaction i'd be very careful with my words his interaction with them escalated in terms of violence and in one particular case the young girl managed to persuade him that she would pay him that she would give him everything out of her bank account and he agreed to that he drove her back to verona when she got to the toll booth she jumped out of the car and ran to a police car and said yeah i'm a prostitute but this guy is seriously dangerous on the basis of that they searched his farmhouse and they found several thousand images of young girls in varying stages of dramatic escalation that he had photographed and one photograph in particular stood out and the the level of trauma to the young lady's body could only have occurred if she was dead and that set up a murder investigation so they brought heavy lifting equipment into the farmland and they started digging around the farm and they found a number of bodies and many of them had bags over their heads with a rope around their neck and we knew that that these were most likely to be prostitutes prostitutes tend to have a fairly chaotic life and tend to have a transient life as well so often people don't miss them when they go missing they're often not missed somebody assumes they've moved on to another patch they've given up the job whatever it may have been and out of all the bodies that we had we had two that were not identified they were at a fairly advanced stage of decomposition and we had two names of individuals that we thought they may be and we had photographs of these young women facial photographs of them and the court asked us if we would be able to do a facial superimposition because this isn't the day um when dna was still in its very early stages of for use in forensic cases and we hadn't been able at that point to track down family of either of the girls so they said could we do a facial superimposition which means you take the skull and you superimpose it onto the photograph and because the proportions should be the same if you've got them in the right angles you can see if the orbits match up if the mouth matches up if the nose match up but it meant that we had to take the heads from verona over to glasgow and that had to be done on an airplane so these these are not nice clean skulls these are badly decomposing heads that are really quite rife with maggots so what they did was they took each head they put it in a sealed plastic bucket and they put each into a very expensive designer couti couturier case for me to carry on paper bags and i won't name which which family house it was but it made me look as if i could afford something i clearly couldn't and i had two two letters one in italian one in english and so you go up to the airport and they say you know put your bags through the scanner and i went no i'm not putting them through the scanner and you need to read the letter and so they read the letter in italian and when threw their hands up in horror and said please go and so i went all the way through security in italy without anybody looking inside these two designer carrier bags when i got onto the plane the air hostess said um you know sorry madam but your bags have to go in the hold and i said no my bags are not going in the hold because this is continuity of evidence here's the letter about what's in there and she threw her hands up in horror and actually moved me down to business class which i thought was a real step up but she put me down in business class to isolate me so it was as if there were there was you know a barbed wire fence around you shouldn't even give me a glass of water throughout the entire flight i was clearly considered to be you know unclean but i got at least to heathrow with my two designer carrier bags and i was brought up properly because when you go through customs you have to decide do i declare or do i not declare and i thought well i have to declare what i'm carrying so i walk through the red channel and there's a man sitting with his feet up on the desk looking thoroughly bored and he sort of looks up at me and he looks at my designer carrier bags and he said i suppose they're both for your own consumption aren't they and i said well i think you need to read the letter so again i gave him the letter to read which said i was carrying two heads he threw his hands up in horror and just sent me off so i'd come all the way from verona to heathrow with these two designer carrier bags two letters and nobody had ever asked to look inside so i now had to get to glasgow and so i go to the security for british airways and they go uh we need to look inside these bags and i thought great and so he goes to open the bucket and i'm going no no no you can't open it here because the bodies you know the heads are really badly decomposed they smell awful they're still live with maggots and he sort of looked at me when absolutely gray and went no i don't need to see them and so i got onto the next plane and that air steward when i gave him did the same thing said they have to go in the hold and i said no here's the letter he this time put me to the back of the plane and ignored me for the rest of the trip but i got all the way from verona to glasgow without anybody ever looking inside these buckets which was just you know ridiculous um we did the matches we then did manage to find family and we identified both the girls um and i had to bring the the skulls as they were by then because we'd cleaned them back to verona and that was that was a much less troublesome flight but i had to give evidence in an italian court and it's it's difficult being in court anyway but in a foreign court it's it's twice as hard and he was he was probably one of the the scariest people that i've ever met um he smiled but a smile never reached his eyes and he had a big scar on the side of his head and his his defense was that you know he was he was not of a sound mind and didn't know what he was doing but when he was coming through the courtroom as he came towards me he slowed down and he turned and he stared at me and i i could just feel my blood go cold and that's i think the only time that in my career i've ever seriously been worried because he had allegedly taken out and taken out a hit on um a reporter who had subsequently gone missing and and i must admit i was a little bit nervous for just a few weeks but then you forget about it but he was sentenced to life there have been many appeals none of which have succeeded and he's still in prison so you know they're sometimes the most ridiculous situations but they're around sometimes the most incredibly complex and sad cases that involve really really dangerous people what one of the things that i find absolutely remarkable in the in the book is that is the amount of information that you're able to to glean from from what to to a lay person would be um well just a bone but to you it's not just the bone this tells you the age of the the the person when they died so i mean it's quite i find it quite remarkable and and much of this i i suppose is due to the the changes that the that the skeleton goes through as we as we age and one of the passages reasonably early on in the book is about i don't know if it's sphenoid or sphenoid bone um and the what that can can tell you about the state stage of development of um of an infant um are there any are there any conditions that um [Music] that can be suffered that would interfere with the normal development and and and progression that could potentially mislead and if so how do you guard how do you guard against that yeah if you think that there are roughly but nobody agrees about 206 bones in the adult skeleton and a newborn baby there's significantly more than that because they're they're formed from these tiny little bits our job is to be able to identify every single fragment of every part of a bone irrespective of the age of the individual or the condition in which it presents to you so it might be fragmented because of a fire or an explosion so we become we're the kids who got jigsaws for christmas you know we like to be able to look at these pieces to try to figure together where they might fit and first of all identifying is it bone because sometimes it's really difficult to know if it's bone especially if you have a fire certain things that melt can look like bone and they just aren't but if it's bone is it human bone so we need to be able to determine the difference between every single human bone at every single stage of its development compared to anything that could be an animal bone whether it's domestic whether it's agricultural whether it's marine animal whether it's zoo pet any any of those we have to tell the difference so is it bone is it human and then we need to know how long has the individual been dead because if the individual has been dead more than 70 years before the present date then tetanus technically they're archaeological so you know my my grandparents who died during the second world war they are technically archaeological material now because they've gone beyond that 70 years before the present date and if they're archaeological the chances of us being able to identify who they might have been or if it's a crime brings somebody to justice for it extremely unlikely but if we've decided it's bone it's human and it's recent then what we have to say is which bit of bone is it where are the other bits of it do they fit together the way they split apart is that a natural split apart or is it split apart because of trauma can we tell if they were male or female how old they were when they died what was their ancestral origin what was their height is there a clinical condition there so many things that run through your mind with every single fragment of every bit of bone that you're just trying to it's like taking a dishcloth and you're squeezing out every single drop of water that you can get out of that bone that is information that might be critical or might not be to the way an investigation progresses or the way in which a jury may form their their decision in the courtroom it's a multi-multi-piece jigsaw and and made all the more complicated i think from from the fact that you you refer at various points to to natural variations so for instance when you're talking about the the sternum you talk about the way that it normally fuses but the fact that it it can fuse in such a way as to leave a hole um and that this is a a classic um examination pieces to is to give us is is to give a student such such a stern and say well what's what's happened here yeah they usually tell us it's a gunshot injury which and of course the sternum is your breastbone so it's this one that sits down in the front here um but yes you're right there's this little sternal foramen a hole that sometimes occurs and we get the most wonderful stories about gunshot injuries and stabbings and all sorts of things and it's a perfectly normal variation so i mean there must be multiple variations on probably all all the bones multiple conditions that you have to think about how on earth does one um keep up with that or or keep in mind all of these different variations is it is it all just in the in the mind through years and years of of working application or is it a question of some sort of super detailed anatomical textbook that one goes back to a combination of both or is it is it really just enormous amounts of knowledge and know-how that and and experience that that is difficult to replicate it all starts in anatomy everything as far as i'm concerned in life starts in anatomy because that's where you learn variation and if you think you have variation in the bones the variation that we have in muscles or blood vessels or nerves is just off the scale but we have to understand that variation because if we are teaching future medics who are going to become future surgeons they really need to know the variation that occurs in every single artery on every part of your body because the last thing you want to do is nick it because you didn't know that that artery could have been there so variation is the stock and trade of anatomy and the skeleton is just one part of it and we've been interested in the skeleton for centuries so there's a huge documentation of literature about variation in the human skeleton and variation across different um ethnic groups let alone differences between male or female or adult and child and you just need to know them all and our best anthropologists in all honesty are our oldest anthropologists because they've had more experience they've seen more variation and things that you think might be really unusual they'll go no no no i've seen a dozen of those and that just comes with age and experience continuing on the theme of the the extraordinary kind of amounts of information that can be gathered from what might seem a very small amount of evidence um the big toe nail and the big toenail can tell somebody's diet i hate feet i hate feet yeah that that emerges quite clearly i have to say so i really hate feet i hate living feet i hate dead feet and i hate dead feet because when a body decomposes most often the foot is decomposing inside a sock or inside a shoe so everything stays together and you know whereas the rest of the body and the fluids will drain away the fluids are retained inside the sock and the shoe so when you have to turn the sock out what you get is this this gloopy soup which is just horrendous with lumps of bone and toenails in it so for me it's it's an absolute no-no but there's a really really clever set of scientists which is not me um a gentleman called professor wolfram meyer augenstein for example who was really pioneered the way in looking at stable isotopes in identification and stable isotopes are the ratio of different isotopes of different elements that exist in nature and depending upon what we eat or what we drink we set down particular signatures of these isotopes and in parts of your body where you have longitudinal growth which you get in your fingernails and you get in your toenails and you get in your hairs then what you can do is you can look the closer you are to the nail bed then the more recent is the the material that's been laid down and the further away you are heading towards the free end of the nail bed then the further back you are in history and what he can do is he can look at the elemental composition of those nails and tell you something about the diet of the person where they are vegetarian where they're an omnivore he can tell you something about the stabilizer ratio perhaps in relation to the drinking water that will say the person in this time frame was drinking water that's consistent with the northeast of scotland and and that just blows my mind and it's because everything in every single cell that you have in your body is made up of what you put in your mouth because the nutrients whether that be food or drink that go into your mouth they're broken down in your gut and they are the building blocks that go to make your nails and your hair and so if you change that signature you change what you drink or you change what you eat then that signature will change and we may not always be able to say what it means but sometimes when you have a change from a diet for example that might be very high in particular foodstuffs that you would find for example in india compared to foodstuffs that you would find in the uk then you can have quite a stark distinction and you can predict the time when that person moved from that particular type of diet to this particular type of diet anyone who thinks that science is boring it isn't it's the most fascinating thing on the planet and then when you link it with anatomy it's just heaven at the end of the book you you recount the the the case of buck broxton um which is um probably really the the foundation i think of the could be said to be the foundation of the field of forensic anthropology um and and that's that's a story of extraordinary innovation i think on the part of the the the investigating police officers to start off with but but thereafter and the various uh the various forensic scientists that were involved in it and can can you just reflect on that and say how much uh clearly it was an enormous kind of step forward in the field but how many of the of the techniques in in the age of dna in the age of the kind of extraordinary kind of scientific um advances that you've just been just been talking about there how much of that pioneering work that they did is is still relevant that's that's a really interesting question it was an important case for a number of reasons um the bodies of two ladies were dismembered and they were dismembered in lancaster which you know talk about um serendipity which is where i now am and the body parts were taken across the border into scotland and dumped off a bridge near moffat and the rationale was that if you cross the border it was unlikely that the police north of the border would speak to the police south of the border and that that was very true at the time and sometimes it can still be true it can it can put a little bit of a delay into investigations if you cross borders when the body parts were found initially the the police went down well they went down a wild goose chase because the anatomists who were brought down from edinburgh and from glasgow made the mistake of saying what the bodies were were that of a man and a woman and so they were looking for a couple so an older man and a younger woman and it was only once they started to piece the body parts together that they began to realize that the injuries to the body or the damage to the body the trauma to the bodies were in areas that might be relevant to parts of their anatomy that would lead to their identification so for example the fingertips were snipped off and that was to make sure that you you couldn't do fingerprint comparison and the teeth had been removed so that you you couldn't compare with it with a photograph also one of the individuals was reported to have very thick ankles and so they cut away the soft tissue around the ankles the other individual had a birth mark on her thigh that bit of skin was excised so that that process of thinking about not only the things that are there but the things that are not there and why are they not there was important so um one of the first things that was done once they started to realize who they thought this was this was likely to be these two individuals they managed to get photographs of both of the missing women and they did that that facial superimposition that i was talking about that we were using for verona back in the 1980s that was the first case where a skull was superimposed onto a photograph and it's remained an iconic image for forensic anthropology from that point forward because you have this this real sort of contrast of a skull but the photograph was of isabella ruxton wearing a diamond tiara so this sort of faded out version of the two images of a skull with a diamond tiara looks very very strange but that was where that first came from and also because the bodies had been dumped in water what happens is you have several layers of skin and on one of the bodies the fingertips had been snipped off but not the other and because the bodies have been in water the top layer of skin had degloved so it comes away like washer woman's hands but you have a second set of fingerprints underneath your your epidermal fingerprint you have what's called a dermal fingerprint and they were for the first time able to compare dermal with epidermal fingerprints because the lady whose fingerprint they did have was the the maid and so of course she'd left her fingerprints around all the areas in the house that she'd been cleaning so they compared her dermal from the body with the epidermal prints that were found in the house this superimposition there was um an entomologist brought in to talk about the bugs and how long those body parts may have been there in relation to the stage of development of the entomology with the pupae and the larvae of the the insects that invaded um also what the police did was they um they partially deconstructed the house where the murder had occurred and then rebuilt it so that they could actually go through the process of trying to identify where the blood stains were where the bodies would have lain you know not at a time where you necessarily had crime scene going into the crime they did the opposite they dismantled the crime scene and took it to their laboratory and and these were all things that had just never ever been done before and to have that level of scientific evidence and expertise in the courtroom was just overpowering for the jury it really was and it remains i think one of the probably one of the best police investigations and anatomical supported by anatomical evidence and then conveyed in the courtroom with simplicity for the juries it really was a textbook case from beginning to end and and just the most amazing story absolutely um well thank you so much um for um for uh coming along to to converse with us uh this evening i think i've maybe dominated proceedings for slightly longer or uh slightly longer than i was meant to so i'm mindful now that there will have been questions coming in while we've been speaking so i'll hand over and there'll be some questions directly from from from the audience now or read out from the uh from those that have gone into the the into the chat facility oh greg thank you very much indeed it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much thank you so much greg and sue that was amazing i can't believe that it's already nearly ten past seven the time has completely flown by um and the questions have been flooding in while you've been talking so we'll get going so the first one i've got is from natasha and she's saying that she's a forensic practitioner herself and is wondering if you have any nuggets of wisdom to make it less anxiety juice inducing giving evidence in court oh if i if i could answer that i'd be on television winning money um one of what i what you have to do is prepare more than anything else you have to prepare you have to know your own limits um i always go into the courtroom feeling comfortable in what i'm wearing i often wear shoes that i can slip off because that then allows me to stand there and feel grounded and one of the things that was taught to me very early on is you have to answer the question you're asked not the answer not the question that you wish they'd asked so it is about listening very carefully and if you don't understand the question being prepared to say can you please ask that again taking the time to think about your answer and then being very being concise about your answer but also being very clear and there will be some attempts inside by some to try to fluster you to get you confused you need to be in charge of the rate of your evidence that you give and being trying to hold that element of control i think is really important but it's an alien environment i keep saying that that's excellent advice thank you very much sue and the next question is from jane and she's asking what would your next project be after this book oh i have no idea um at the moment i'm i'm really busily trying to to run part of a university that's going through covert like everybody else's we have some major projects that are coming to us in lancaster that need my attention for the next uh 18 months to two years of the time i have left on my contract so i've got a lot of work to do there so i've got no more writing planned at this stage because i simply don't have the time i've got a two and a half million research grant that i have to be able to to get that finished and get all the papers written for that but then i'd like to think that when that's done that i can start to think about i don't like to use the word retiring because in my head i'm still 18 and i know i'm not when i look in the mirror but i don't want to retire but i do think i want to do something else and i don't yet know what it is what i won't do is i'll never write crime fiction and that's just not my kind of writing at all if i write anything it's going to have more of a factual basis than it will ever have a fiction but i do enjoy writing because i like the solitary nature of writing i go up into my attic and i i have one window that looks out to the north sea so i get beautiful sun rises and i've got another window that looks out to the west that gives me beautiful sunsets so it's a heaven of a place to write but i'm not quite sure what it is i'd write yet that's great thank you and katie's asking well first of all saying that she started out her career not dissimilar to yours and is asking at what point did you sit back and realize that this is a path and a set of skills that you see yourself comfortably focusing on um i think the moment i walked into the dissecting room at aberdeen university that was the point at which i i was at home um i loved everything that i've done before and i've loved everything since but that moment um when somebody has bequeath their body and the only thing they ask of you is to learn that suddenly it gave me such a weight of responsibility and then when you take a scalpel and you make that first cut through human skin there is no going back it's a rubicon that you cross and it's one that i just delighted in in every single moment that i was in the anatomy department at aberdeen and that was the point of which i started to learn my craft and my skills i wanted to know about those arteries those muscles those bones those ligaments you know you name it it didn't feel that you were learning something hard it felt that you were learning something you needed to know and i've always said if you can make your job your hobby then you never work a day in your life and i've always felt that that if you could strip out the the university bureaucracy side of my job everything else is an utter pleasure so whether it's students i love students i love teaching students whether it's finding something new in research whether it's out there with a puzzle on a body and you're trying to figure out who it is all of those came from the skills that aberdeen university gave me in the dissecting room in anatomy and that for me is that pivotal moment and that's where my gratitude to the university lies at an anatomy department that chose to dissect human remains and that individuals from aberdeen were prepared to donate their body they gave me a career that you know heaven knows what else i would have done if it hadn't been for the university and the people of aberdeen frankly that's incredible thank you and eric is asking as a forensic expert do you not experience a wonderful surge of adrenaline whilst being led in evidence in the high court whilst not leaning towards either prosecution or defense no god there's no adrenaline i get adrenaline when i got a flat jacket and a helmet on i'm running onto the back of a chinook helicopter alongside the marines that's the sense of adrenaline what i have is fear when i go into the courtroom fear that i'm going to that i'm going to do something wrong that i'm going to say something wrong that i'm going to influence the way of what goes on in that courtroom just through my own ignorance or my own naivety it is a fear of letting other people down that i have in the courtroom it's it's definitely not an adrenaline and when you walk into the courtroom and you find it's donald finley that's going to be in the defense you know whilst i love him you think oh here we go i know how this is going to go um that's not adrenaline that you have to steal yourself and it is exhausting and it is nerve-wracking but um adrenaline is something that is addictive and i loved jumping it in off the back of of chinook helicopters i could quite happily never go into another courtroom in the rest of my life so i'm definitely not hooked to adrenaline in that regard well that's safe to say you're braver than i am um so nick is asking are there any cliches that we would all know from tv and film that irritate you most and simply just aren't true thinking of shows like bones or other procedural type content so first of all i don't watch them because i i would be the worst possible person to watch them because i'd be saying you can't do that that's rubbish you know yeah so i i don't watch them um you've got to bear in mind that these television programs have to have a story that completes in 40 minutes and so it can only be as realistic as it can be probably the thing that that is most unrealistic or has been i think it's probably getting better is the role that the scientist plays in the investigation we're a bit part actor in in the whole investigation and it's rare that we are so critical to the whole procedure that you know we're involved from the beginning to the end often we've just got a five-minute appearance in in this whole sort of proceedings and so that's probably the thing that's most unrealistic but it's necessary if you're going to tell a story and if it's going to be entertainment but i have to say that there are a number of crime writers for whom i have a tremendous amount of respect because they do go to a real extreme lengths to understand the subject before they write about it and that's because they they really do have a respect for their reader and they want the reader it to be as realistic as possible so i probably have less truck with the the experienced crime writers than i have with the television producers that want something to be terribly you know sensationalist and of course you know we don't turn up to the mortuary with long fingernails and with diamonds on our fingers and fully made up quite frankly um i think we'd be laughed out of the mortuary thank you very much and peter's asking i mean of course you work um with pathologists in your in your role and he's asking in novels and films the pathologist always attends the scene of a crime but many police say that that's uncommon how important is it that pathologists see a body at the scene of a crime it depends so um where there are suspicious circumstances where the where the body is found the way in which the body is found then it might be really important and worthwhile for the pathologist to attend but the decision will often be made by the senior investigating officer but the crime scene manager that says we don't need to call the pathologist out for this so it really is a decision that's made in relation to the case at the time some pathologists you know want to be out there at every crime scene but if you do that that that does take an inordinate toll on your time as well and sometimes they just don't have that time to be able to attend every case but it is a it's a case by say case-by-case decision base okay thank you very much i'm going to amalgamate two questions here which are quite similar and both dealing with the emotional side of your job and so a couple of our attendees are asking you know how do you deal with the emotional trauma and of the things that you see day to day and do you compartmentalize any of that and how you separate your professional from your personal life um i was given a piece of fantastic advice by charlie hepburn and charlie hepburn was head of cid for northern constabulary before it became police scotland and i i was about to do some work on a case of identification of child sexual abuse and i'd said to charlie do you think i should do this and he said well there's no point in asking me you've already made up your mind whether you'll do it or not but let me give you a piece of advice he said whenever wherever you are whatever the case is don't own the guilt you didn't cause that you're not responsible for it it's not your case to feel guilty about it to feel angry about it to feel that you need to become involved in it you're brought in because you've got a set of skills you need to find the evidence you need to recover the evidence you need to analyze the evidence and you need to present the evidence you're not there to decide if somebody's guilty or innocent you're not there to get angry for the victim because it's not your business and i find that an incredibly powerful way to approach any case that i have but what i also like to think is that inside my head i do have a box and i open the door of that box when i go to work and close it behind me and my two worlds are very separate when i'm at work i'm at work when i'm at home i'm at home my fear has always been that sometime you know maybe i'll just leave the door open a little bit and the two worlds will bleed into each other and under those circumstances that's where you have people who are experiencing post-traumatic strong uh trauma and there's a beautiful book written by richard shepherd dick shepherd um called unnatural causes and dick is one of the country's most experienced forensic pathologists and he talks about how post-traumatic just crept up on him all of a sudden how he went down into the downward spiral and how difficult it was for him to get back up and that was a real a real beacon for a pathologist to be able to admit that and it's allowed others to admit that possibly you know they were suffering from the same thing this isn't a natural job and as a result there is always a casualty there is always a trauma associated with it but you try to handle it you try to compartmentalize it you try not to make it yours but i'm not so naive as to think that somewhere in the future maybe there will be that moment where my two worlds will collide but what i like to think is that i have enough of a close set of friends who would recognize those changes in me and step in to say you need to stop doing this because this is now affecting you and i would do the same for them so having that body system of people who know you and who can tell you honestly if you're behaving in an unusual way is the biggest safety valve that we have that's very sound advice and thank you so jade is asking how has your work with death and human remains changed your outlook or attitude on life um so i i was very fortunate to be with my father um when he took his last breath and that was the the first time where i'd actually physically been with somebody from that moment of living to death and it was a light going out and i would never have left my father whilst there was still breath in his body um but the minute he took his last breath what was left was was his remains my father had gone and so i have a very clear distinction between life and death and and once you're dead for me you're gone what kosovo did was it taught me about the other side of death and it taught me that people can often go through such horrendous circumstances that you can't even imagine and yet still find that spark of humanity so what i mean by that is you might be standing at a graveside with a woman who's all her children have been murdered all her husband's been murdered and she's the only one left her her house has been burnt she has no belongings but as you stand on the grave beside her as you're excavating her entire family she will still have made you a cup of tea that that humanity that spark that says regardless of what the world does to you you know you're better than that and that taught me about the importance of the living and the unimportance of objects so i i genuinely don't care if my carpets don't get hoovered or if my car has a scratch diner i really really don't care because they're just things but i came home from kosovo every single night i sang to my children i read them stories my children got hugged every night my children got told i loved them every night and that was what their deaths in kosovo did for me it reminded me that life is is a very short thing it's fugacious we don't know if it's going to last for 100 years or five minutes and therefore you need to live for the living because when death comes it's gone and i think i have a very sort of almost black and white approach to it thank you so much and dagmar is asking what determines how much background information the police provide and the police decide how much they provide so we try to say to them please don't tell me too much because what i'd like to do is i'd like to to get the evidence and be able to come to you and say this is what i think and if it happens to match what you're looking for then great because we've got to it independently but often um they want to give you the information because they think the information is important so sometimes you will get a tremendous amount of detail and information and sometimes you'll get very little and i have to say i prefer the the less information i can be given beforehand the more comfortable i am when i reveal the information that it matches with what they're looking for and what they suspect but it doesn't always work that way great thank you um pam is asking in your opinion where should we start when it comes to having better conversations with our loved ones about dying um i was very lucky my my grandmother grew up in glenelg in the middle of nowhere in the west coast and as a classic west coaster she had this um vision of the fact that there was a world beyond this one and it involves spirits and those sorts of things which i don't hold any truck with um but as a result and my relationship with my grandmother was just you know you can get a cigarette paper between the two of us um and so as a result she talked to me about death from from being a child and and i don't know why you wouldn't so so my children we've always talked about life and death from the youngest age and when their first grandparent died which was my mother um i asked them did they want to see granny not quite knowing how they would react and all three of them were just so completely comfortable in the room with their dead grandmother pick up her hand and hold her hand they knew what death meant and i think if you can have that conversation as early as possible because death is a perfectly natural and normal thing we're happy to talk about birth we're happy to talk about growing up we need to talk about death because it's coming that's the one thing we're absolutely certain of nobody yet has beaten death it will get you one way or the other and the sooner it becomes a normal part of our life and our conversation then i think the healthier it is and the easier it is for those who are going to be left behind to know that they've done what they what you wanted that you've been comfortable with it that you've been able to talk about it and some of the funniest conversations i've had in my life have been with people coming into my office who are thinking about donating their body to the anatomy department and they want to talk about life and they want to talk about death they're not afraid to talk about it and there's almost a release because it's not taboo here's somebody who will sit across the table from you and have a good laugh and a giggle about it i had one one lovely lady who came into my office totally dolled up you know hair completely done makeup perfect nails on and you know i think she was well into her 80s and she said to me you know well quite frankly she said you know i need to give my body because i'm not going to let this go up and smoke it's far too good to be burnt and i just love the fact that people are comfortable about their own death and what's going to happen about them to actually include it in humor because if it's in humor that tells you that you're naturalized with it it's more excellent advice there thank you um so anne is asking says relating to the head in the shed case and others no doubt how much of a psychologist you need to be to assist your investigations as well as a forensic anthropologist no i never never ever be a psychologist so my my job is not to try and rationalize what somebody has done why they've done it i'm very very clear i am about the physical evidence finding it retrieving it analyzing it and presenting it it's not my job to think why would somebody do this um how did they do it i might have to think about it but not the why so the the forensic psychologists are there that's their business it's absolutely not mine i'm a hardcore scientist thank you and bill is asking you what future is there for the truth given recent history in u.s politics and your experiences of court jousting are you optimistic or dismayed about what is held to be the truth um i i may be naive i'm definitely a glass half full person um i do believe in truth or as close to truth as we can get those those of us who try to uphold truth is the only way to show others how to behave so i i've drilled into my children tell me the truth don't tell me a lie if you tell me a lie the punishment's going to be a whole lot worse than if you just tell me the truth and now that they're grown women all of them say oh yeah we knew whenever we'd done something wrong we just had to tell you the truth and get over with the the right we were going to get because it would be much better than mum looking at me saying i'm disappointed in you they used to hate thee i'm disappointed in you and i think you know the more people can be truthful and honest then the more you know we can hopefully influence i i hate surprises and i hate lies and maybe that's the way we need to be thank you very much um so uh someone's asking you mentioned the fact that that fact story is often stranger than fiction do you get approached by crime authors to fact check their stories yes i do so i have a clutch of of crime writers who are who are my favorites and often what they will do is they will send me a little bit of script they've written to say does that sound right or they will you know val mcdermott is the worst so she's a she's a real culprit for this she will phone me up and she'll pretend that it's just to find out how i am and how things are doing and what she's really doing she'll say oh what are you working on at the moment and so she'll get me talking about research or she'll get me talking about a case and before you know it it's in her next book before you've even written the report um and and i i find that stimulating because that's a mind that's saying i'm looking for ideas i want it to be realistic she'll put a spin on it so it doesn't sound like like that case or or that particular piece of research but she's looking for those nuggets that that that really ground her in the real world stewart mcbride does it as well um and i really love working with them ian rankin does it um harlan cobin does it tess garretson does it i could i could list the list and i get great fun it's a bossman's holiday to be able to read the the parts that they've written and just put it into something that sounds as if it's really embedded in reality perfect thank you so much um we've had someone and mentioned that they went to medical school in 1988 um and they're saying that their parents neighbor aged 90 and said he had something for them and that would be useful and produced a skull from his garage that his son used to study anatomy at dental school years before it is real and has been very useful over the years to study anatomy what should i do with it now as feeling very guilty oh no don't feel guilty because times change and it used to be that you could go and buy a half skeleton and these were skeletons that often came from india and it was rajiv gandhi who put a stop on the export of human remains so anything that is sort of pre the 1960s was a part of the history that it happened so to don't feel guilt about it what we we now tend to do and you find skeletons do appear in in garages and in cupboards but they also appear in schools in the science labs and they appear in um red cross for because they used to be used for teaching and what we now say is contact your local anatomy department because often what they will have is a teaching collection and your specimen can go into the teaching collection it's then governed by the anatomy act so it's properly protected and it's looked after and you don't need to worry about it what i used to do is if the red cross or a school said we've got a skeleton then i would replace it with a plastic skeleton so that they could carry on doing the teaching but they didn't have to feel concerned or guilty that what they had was real human remains to contact your local anatomy department do not put it out in the bin do not throw it in the sea don't try to get rid of it contact your anatomy department and they will find a way to dispose of it for you super thank you and mr kneer is a science teacher and is keen to ask about how lockdown has impacted your teaching and he points out about you speaking vividly and about the benefit of learning through doing in your first book and is there any digital replacement for hands-on learning in your field no but you know these are in very unusual times and so a lot of our teaching is is it's blended so there's a lot of online teaching and a little bit of face-to-face teaching where we're very lucky as i'm sure many universities have done we've made laboratories that are that are safe because of the distancing because of the cleanliness all of those sorts of things so we do keep the face to face to an absolute minimum but we load up the theory and um the practical you know it it just has to wait there's not a lot that we can do about it this will pass it is it will be a year i think of of incredible upheaval but a year is not a long time in anybody's lifetime it will pass and we will get back to normal we just have to see this year through and do the best we can excellent thank you very much uh fiona's asking what would you take with you to the proverbial desert island well i did do desert island discs um with kirsty young and it was a really challenging thing to do when you got to think about i think it was eight pieces of music that you could relate a story to and then you i can't remember what you have to do but you have to take a book with you and of course my book was always going to be grey's anatomy because no matter how many times you read that there's always something new that you'd learn and the object also the music i had to take um i took a version of highland cathedral that was played by lath allen pipe band which is the school pipe band and both my girls were in the pipe band so that's my favorite piece of music ever because they they're playing on it and then i had to take an object and you know if i'm going to a desert island it's going to be hot and i'm a redhead with fair skin so i chose to take a very big hat it's a very wise choice as a fellow redhead i can i can relate yeah um so melanie's uh asking um how have technological advances changed your work as a forensic anthropologist and are there any new approaches you're excited about so the biggest chain thing that changed forensic science was when alec jefferies was working in his lab in leicester and he was doing a project in medical genetics and he couldn't get his experiment to work and he was tearing his hair out as to why he couldn't get the experiment to work and it was his eureka moment was because everybody's dna was different and that point of dna um transferring from the medical field into the forensic field in the 1980s changed the entire field of forensic science so in the cases that we would have done you know prior to that you probably would have had the forensic anthropologist involved in more cases now because dna analysis might um bring about an identification more swiftly you tend to find that in forensic anthropology we tend to concentrate more on the more challenging cases where things like dna aren't able to solve the identification so it shifted the pattern of our working but the reality is in forensic anthropology there are few pieces of technology that really have moved the science forward much other than medical imaging so being able to take ct scans or mri scans x-rays as well of a body without ever having to open for example the body bag that's a real advance particularly in disaster victim identification where you have mass fatalities so you're doing a post-mortem examination from an image rather than actually doing it on the post-mortem examination and for some religions that's a really important virtual autopsy as well because the desecration of the body the opening of the body can be viewed as being quite distressing for some religion so medical imaging has been incredibly important where we go next i suspect us into the world of virtual reality augmented reality and probably artificial intelligence so being able to train computers to do some of the jobs that we do now but be able to do it across a much wider database of information that we simply couldn't do as a human that opens up huge potential for statistics and our ability to give confidence to the jury in terms of the evidence that we'll present absolutely thank you and you just answered one of our other questions um wondering where you see the field going in the future so that was very efficient um so we've got jack and ely are asking how have you found your interaction with the police has changed over the years if at all and how much do you think your field has affected the way that they investigate it's a very good question i think when i started off back in the 1980s i was very much viewed as the girl and a bit of skepticism and you know we don't need anthropology so i think the relationship with the police was actually more challenging in the past just by simply trying to convey that there was information that we might be able to do that would assist them i think where it really changed in the uk was probably as a result of of kosovo and rwanda and all of those areas where police were also being deployed out into the field in these mass fatality events and working alongside forensic anthropologists i think they got a much better understanding of the difference between us and pathologists and what we could bring to the field so i would say it was by the 1990s probably that we'd started to really see a change in the relationship and i think now we've got an incredibly good relationship in that the police will phone up and say we've got this what do you think and we'll say no no don't bother send me a photograph no no you don't need to worry about it and and so that level of uh just touching base i think is is a really important development in the relationship that we have and i think they too have started to understand more about our science and what we can and we can't tell so it's a learning experience on both sides but i think we've come a long way thank you very much and richard's asking which bone gives the most information about identity of the victim and why um you know i'm going to say it depends because it very much does depend on the individual but my favorite bone is the clavicle so the collar bone that sits here and the reason that i like it is that it's the same shape as it's forming in the fetus as it is in the adult so it retains that shape that tells you in terms of its development you know it's fit for purpose it doesn't need to shift it doesn't need to change its shape it's the first bone in your body that starts to form so when you're a fetus inside your mum before she even knows that she's pregnant with you little bone cells have started to form in that bone so i like the fact that it's the first and it gets it right first time it doesn't need to change its shape but it's also one of the last bones to finish growing so the the end right here at your sternum that keeps growing until your mid-20s and so it's a really useful bone for age determination from fetus right the way through until early into mid-20s it can tell us the difference between male and females it's a bone that breaks quite frequently so it gives us an indication that there might be medical records about it and because of the way the bone forms it's got a really unusual way of forming it's a part of the body that persists so whilst other parts of the body might disintegrate often you find that the clavicle is the one that remains so i just like the fact that it's the first it's the last it got it right first time and in the worst of circumstances it's probably the one that's still going to be there and you can tell a lot from it super thank you very much and so tracy's asking will you be donating your body to medical science when the time comes so i have signed my forms um and they will go to to dundee because it was my department that i ran for a number of years and they have a method of embalming there which is called the teal approach which is a soft fix approach and i'd quite like to be tealed when i'm dead so i will donate my body um what i'd like them to do is to give it to scientists and not to either medics or dentists and that's not because i have anything against medics and dentists it's because the science students go into so much more detail and they would literally pull every single part of my body apart so i want them to learn every blood vessel and every muscle and every nerve and everything else medics and dentists just don't have the time in their curriculum to get down to that detail then what i'd really like them to do and this might be a stretch for any anatomy department but i want them to take all the soft tissue and the fat and the skin and everything else they can go and cremate that and that will that will go up in smoke but i want them to get the bones together and you need to boil the bones down because you need to get rid of all the soft tissue and you need to get all the fat out of it as well and ideally i'd like to be re-strung as a hanging skeleton so that i can stand in my dissecting room and i can teach for the rest of my death or failing that you know put me in a box and i will have written every single condition that i've ever had so that anybody who wants to study the bones will know what the facts were of the individual and when i told this to my girls which shows that we're probably not a normal family but when i told this to my girls they went you know actually that's quite cool because when you die normally you know you go to the graveside or whatever and she says you know we can't actually be with you but if you were in the dissecting room we could actually visit you and i thought yeah you could you know i could have visitations from my children and my grandchildren come and see granny in the anatomy department i'd be kind of okay with that that is an excellent plan thank you for sharing that with us um so grace is asking how do you feel about the cases you were involved in where you feel justice wasn't done um i i can't have an opinion on that because justice is in the hands of the jury if the jury says that somebody is not guilty they're not guilty if they say they're guilty they're guilty i mean you know the appeal process and everything else so i i don't involve myself and whether i believe justice has been done or not that simply isn't my my place there are circumstances where things have happened in a courtroom that i've heard which you know perhaps through process has meant that the case hasn't been able to proceed that that angers me because those are mistakes that shouldn't have been made but at the end of the day that's why we have the judicial system that we do is for our peers our members of the public to be the triers of fact the decision makers on what is justice and i'm very glad that that responsibility isn't mine thank you very much so helen's asking as gender is one of the key categories to help identify and sex hormones influence bone how will this affect identification of trans men and women will there be some blurring of characteristics and taken further could you even tell someone who is genetically one sex but appears as another that's a really good a really interesting question so that sex and gender are two different things in our world sex is the the definition of your genetic predisposition so two x chromosomes or an x and a y and that for us determines sex normally what happens is that that particular genetic connotation sets off a set of biochemical processes in your body as you're growing and in the fetus if you have an xy chromosome you get a little surge of testosterone particular parts of soft tissue fall away and other parts development develop which is why you get the external and the internal genitalia those are based on biochemistry but initiated by a switch that was genetic so that at birth when you were born the midwife has a look down in the area that's going to be covered by your nappy and decides whether if the if there's a little appendage there then you're a boy and if there isn't one you're a girl and that's the basis on which sex determination is generally made at birth is a visual inspection of external genitalia what then happens is you go through a surge of hormones in puberty and you get an overproduction of testosterone that creates a very masculine pattern of a body or you get a surge of estrogen which gives you a particular feminine approach to your body whether that's in the in the bones or it's in the soft tissue and we know what these appearances are so we know what a testosterone driven skeleton looks like and what an estrogen driven skeleton looks like it doesn't mean that you are male or female but it's what the biochemistry is doing to the bone now if you were a genetic male for argument's sake and you developed normally as a male in this country hormone replacement therapy in terms of transgender tends not to happen until after puberty and that causes a problem in some um sectors where they want actually to to give hormones before puberty because you get a more successful outcome for a trans individual if you wait to to give to administer the the hormones after puberty what you have is an individual who is genetically male has developed as a male but is now taking doses of estrogen and that isn't going to affect the skeleton particularly but what it will do is it will affect the cartilage and so you get the cartilage turns into bone in a different way if the predominance is estrogen or testosterone so sometimes particularly in the chest plate we can pick up on the costal cartilages whether we've got a pattern that's saying hold on a minute this is an unusual pattern this is a very masculine pattern that's got a very female pattern on top of it and in a particular case i talk about it was a transgender person and so it isn't it isn't black and white it isn't easy obviously if you took the alternative hormones before puberty then what we will see is a skeleton that develops as as in relation to the hormones that are given because they will be in such a significant dose i don't know if i've been terribly clear because it is very complex and the answer is you know it it is a very complicated subject i thought that was very clear thank you very much um so a few people have asked this and they'd like to know what was your most challenging or memorable or favorite case you've worked on so i don't tend to have a favorite because um every case is important because it is somebody's mother father son daughter whatever it may be so there isn't a favorite the ones that get under our skin are the ones that we haven't sold so either it's a body that we can't find but we know the person's dead or it's a body that we have found that we just can't get an identification we can't figure out who they were they they really do get get under our saddle but probably the one that sticks with me as being most memorable was kosovo and it was an entire family um who were taking out 11 members of the family who were taken out by a rocket propelled grenade and eight members of that family were children and what could be found of the bodies um because they were badly fragmented were buried in a hole by the father who survived and when we exhumed what was left there was only enough to fill about one and a half body bags but there were 11 people there and in the mortuary what we did was we we spread out 12 white sheets because we knew there'd be a a a massive material we couldn't separate and our job was to try to find a part of each body that we had confidence in belong to each of those family members because what the father wanted was to be able to bury each of us family members with their name and so we could identify the three adults um quite quite clearly we were okay with that the eight children were challenging because there was a six-month baby two-year-old a four-year-old a six-year-old an eight-year-old a 12 year old and two twin 14 year old boys and we managed to get a little bit of them all and we were left with the two twin boys how do you tell them apart your dna doesn't do it because you know it's familial dna and one of the bodies all we had was the his shoulders and it was entwined in a mickey mouse vest and so we went back to dad and said did any of your children have a mickey mouse vest and we didn't say the twins or the boys and he came back and said oh yes it was so and so because he was absolutely besotted with mickey mouse and that allowed us to separate the two twin boys so so that was a day where i felt i was the right person in the right place at the right time because i just finished writing and the world's first textbook on how you identify a child from their remains and so i just thought i was in the right place uh thank you very much and we've got so many questions also so i'm gonna just give you two more so okay and the next one is uh how did you manage to combine your family life with having to drop everything and leave from for an unknown country for an unknown length of time he's called my husband that that's how i was able to do it my husband and i went to school together uh we went to aberdeen university together we were in the dissecting room together and then he decided that anatomy was not for him he'd go off and do something in the finance world and so um i was very lucky i married my best friend and when we decided we would have a family we decided we'd have a family together and so when i needed to go away he downscaled what he was doing and spent a lot more time with his girls and we just worked it that way it was tough but i think he's ended up with a much stronger relationship with his girls than he would ever have had if i was mom at home and i think they've turned out pretty balanced pretty pretty well normal i'm not so sure but um they have a great relationship with their father as a result of that and they also saw that their mother could be a role model who could go out and do the job but similarly be you know the one that's at home cooking rhubarb crumble and you know making their beds in the morning uh it's just it was our family and it's the way we chose to do it i've just been very lucky it's truly teamwork yeah absolutely so i'll finish with this one because i think it's such a great finishing question and how do you get away from it all i don't because this is my hobby and and if it's your hobby what do you need to get away from and so my husband is always saying you know are you still working but it isn't work because because this is what i do and i and i love doing it so seven days a week 365 days of the year if i'm if i'm not teaching or doing my research or writing my papers or writing a book or on a case work i don't know what to do with myself so this this is my hobby and i'm incredibly lucky that my job is my hobby yeah very lucky indeed and so i'd have to say i'm so sorry to everyone we didn't get to as as predicted questions were flooding in we did our best to get as many as we could but thank you so much everybody for contributing and there to go through these questions that was absolutely fantastic so i will um just hand over thank you um i i lost a little bit of what you said there but i think i think you are handing back back over to me to to to close so um all that really remains for me to to do is is to thank kim everyone who's been involved in this thank you for for tuning in and and for the for the questions um so some really um some really excellent questions there um i'd like to thank um everyone who's been involved in uh organizing this um and um and and in the technical side of presenting it but most particularly i want to thank you sue for giving so freely of your time and expertise it's been absolutely um fascinating to to to listen to you i've enjoyed every minute of it and i wish it could go on for longer but i i think um you know hopefully we'll we'll have the opportunity to to resume this conversation at some point in the future but thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure um and i've thoroughly enjoyed sharing this so with that um i will i will bring this event to an end so thank you all so much thank you and good night

Channel: University of Aberdeen Alumni Relations & Development Trust

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Id: VLn9fPwV6LU

Length: 111min 40sec (6700 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020