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Casting light on dark science at scene of crime |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 18 May 2005 |
JULIA HORTON
WITHOUT warning, Professor Allan Jamieson claps his hands together in mid-conversation and beams broadly.
"Now you can see what a murder scene looks like," he says, opening his hands to reveal the unfortunate victim, a now very dead fly.
The forensics professor places the insect under the new miniature microscope he has just been enthusing about, plugging the gadget into his laptop to display the fly’s lifeless body on the screen.
Having worked as a forensic scientist for his entire career, the new microscope, which he is currently developing for use at crime scenes, is exactly the kind of thing that Prof Jamieson gets excited about.
"Oh look, that’s its guts spilling out," he says, pointing as he demonstrates his latest toy, zooming in to the maximum magnification of x140 on the fly’s tiny corpse.
But as the former head of Lothian and Borders Police Forensic Laboratory in Edinburgh and now director of the independent Forensic Institute, he is more used to seeing the victims of gruesome crimes.
Among the first murder scenes he visited was that of "body-in-the-drain" victim Deirdre Kivlin, battered to death in an Edinburgh flat ten years ago before being dumped in a nearby drain.
A few years later he was at the scene of the equally grim Elphinstone double murder of Henry Nisbet and William Lindsay, whose charred bodies were found riddled with bullet wounds on a remote farm track.
That neither case has resulted in a conviction does not cause sleepless nights for Prof Jamieson, 48. He says his focus is purely on the scientific aspect, a viewpoint he believes saves him from being traumatised by his harrowing work.
"I remember one of the scientists at the Elphinstone murders saying to me on the way back to the lab: ‘That’s a shame, two young boys,’ and I told him not to think like that," he says. "I can remember all the crime scenes which I have seen but I can’t remember a single face of any of the victims.
"For me it is all about making sure the science is good and valid and that the use of the results is fair.
"I am not interested in innocence or guilt or whether there is a conviction."
That said, he is proud of the successes of his staff both at the police lab during his tenure from 1995 to 2002, and now at the Forensic Institute, which he set up in Glasgow in 2000.
Forensic evidence from the police lab was key in helping to convict the notorious Safeway poisoner, whose case was the first Prof Jamieson dealt with.
Paul Agutter, a former biochemistry teacher at Edinburgh’s Napier University, tried to kill his wife Alex by lacing her gin and tonic with the deadly poison Atropin in 1994.
Agutter, originally from Athelstaneford, East Lothian, tried to cover his tracks by putting bottles of tonic spiked with the same drug on the shelves of Safeway at Hunter’s Tryst in Edinburgh, sparking a food safety scare as seven people took ill.
But simple chemical forensic analysis of the drink in the glass which Alex had sipped from showed the concentration of the poison in her drink was vastly different to the concentration found in the spiked supermarket bottles, disproving Agutter’s claim that his wife had been a victim of the food scare.
Using this vital evidence, prosecutors were able to build up a case against Agutter, who was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 12 years.
In 1996, painstaking analysis by Prof Jamieson’s team of fragments of paint and glass helped police to track down the driver of a hit-and-run truck which killed a cyclist on the Forth Road Bridge.
The scientists matched paint found on South Queensferry cyclist Alan Linn’s clothing and shards of glass from a broken headlamp at the scene to trace HGV driver Brian Mercer, who was then convicted of careless driving and failing to report an accident.
As an expert adviser on hit TV programme Waking the Dead, Prof Jamieson is well aware of the public’s obsession with forensics and crime - though with his interest confined to the scientific processes, he says he doesn’t understand the fascination with the end point of using such evidence to catch the criminals.
He is quick to point out that such programmes can be misleading and fuel a damaging common misconception that techniques like DNA testing make forensic evidence clear cut.
Prof Jamieson, who lives in Dullatur, outside Cumbernauld, Lanarkshire, with his IT consultant partner Karen Brodie, says: "The reality of forensic science is very different from how it is portrayed on TV. These programmes have led to a halo effect, where doctors and scientists who come into the witness box are treated as God-like beings."
HE adds: "You can get evidence such as a semen sample [on a rape victim’s clothes] which supports the prosecution’s story that the accused raped the victim, for example. But you have to think about how many other stories that evidence also supports."
Unsolved cases like that of body-in-the-drain victim Deirdre Kivlin also highlight his point.
The 24-year-old karaoke singer was battered to death with a brick in the stair of a flat in South Clerk Street in 1995 before her body was dumped in a drain.
DNA analysis revealed that a bloodstain on murder suspect Scott Ballantyne’s jacket contained a mixture of his own blood and Deirdre’s.
However, Ballantyne, who was homeless and used to doss down in the stair, was cleared of her murder after his defence lawyer successfully argued the blood could have come into contact with his jacket while he was sleeping there. A jury returned a not proven verdict in 1996 and the case remains unsolved.
The Jodi Jones case also pointed out the difficulties surrounding forensic tests.
Forensic scientists using the most sensitive DNA test in Britain failed to identify Jodi’s boyfriend Luke Mitchell as the murderer - although he was convicted and sentenced to life after being found guilty of murdering her. During the trial there was criticism of the way the investigation was handled.
The High Court heard that the first forensic scientist to examine the area arrived more than eight hours after the schoolgirl’s naked and mutilated body had been found, and that it was "not an ideally managed crime scene".
Prof Jamieson was not involved in the forensic work in the case, but was asked to look over the scientific findings by Mitchell’s defence counsel, Donald Findlay QC. While not saying the verdict against Mitchell was wrong, Prof Jamieson believes a lack of forensic evidence is something that will be used in future trials as proof that the accused is innocent.
He says: "There was a prolific amount of scientific work in the Jodi Jones case with zero result.
"One of the things you don’t see happening much is much being made of the absence of evidence where one might expect to find it.
"If someone is supposed to have been involved in a violent assault involving transfer of fibres and body fluids and these are not found on the suspect, that is rarely used as evidence [that the suspect was not guilty]. But forensic science is still a relatively new science - that may well change."
Prof Jamieson decided to set up his own forensics centre to allow him to continue carrying out police work while branching out into research, consultancy and education - including giving talks to schools about forensic science.
He is also gaining a growing international reputation, with recent work including helping to set up police forensic labs in Pakistan.
But while his expertise is set to bring justice for victims of crime around the world, it is clear as his attention returns to the dead fly that his focus will always be on the science.
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=542932005 |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” Helen Keller
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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