All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

by Sue Black

One example is the case of the shoe rapist, who raped at least four women in south Yorkshire in the 1980s and attempted to do the same to two others. After attacking them he would steal their shoes. Some twenty years later, the DNA sample of a woman charged with a drink-driving offence was placed on the DNA database and a familial genetic link to the rapist was highlighted. She was his sister.

Many people have more than one set of dental records. Not everybody stays with same dentist and, with many procedures not available on the NHS, records of private treatment may be held by a different dentist from the one with whom we are officially registered.

given that many dentists only keep documentation for audit purposes, the information available may be hard to interpret in relation to the mouth that is being investigated.

A recent additional complication arises, ironically, from advances in dentistry. In common with others of my generation, I do not have a straight tooth in my head. I have a palate typical of my northern European ancestry which is not wide enough for all my teeth, so they are all crowded in, higgledy-piggledy, like headstones in an old graveyard.

although my mouth may not be pretty, it is highly unlikely to look like anybody else’s, especially after root-canal work, veneers and wisdom-tooth extractions over the years. If my body needed to be identified, my dentist would be able to confirm without hesitation that it was mine.

many of today’s teenagers have perfect teeth. Their dental braces have ensured that every tooth is straight so that they can flash their bleached Hollywood smiles (teeth are supposed to be slightly yellow, not white), and if they have any fillings at all, these are likely to be white as well and really difficult to spot.

As long as we have biological parameters and a likely identity for remains, one or a combination of these three INTERPOL-approved identifiers will usually enable us to confirm personal identity.

It is only in relatively recent times that desecration of the human form by dismemberment has come to be seen as repugnant and synonymous with criminality, usually murder.

Of the 500 to 600 murders a year that take place in the UK – fewer than 1 in every 100,000 members of the population – approximately three are recorded as involving criminal dismemberment, so it is certainly not common.

if a murder is perfect, no body will ever be found and no perpetrator punished – the only crimes we hear about are those that are imperfect.

There are, however, many practical problems to be addressed. Can you safely move it intact? If not, where are you going to cut it up? What are you going to use? What are you going to wrap the pieces in? Because they are going to leak, believe me. What type of receptacle will be big enough? When do you move it? Are you likely to be seen? There may be CCTV cameras everywhere or passersby who might notice you. What kind of transport are you going to use? Where are you going to take it? How are you going to dispose of it when you get there? Can you do it on your own?

Once the perpetrator realises the victim is dead, whether or not it was intentional, all these questions and more are likely to flood into an already panicked mind. As a result, the solution arrived at is often poorly thought through and executed on the spur of the moment.

The fact that those incarcerated in Her Majesty’s prisons on whole life tariffs are all there for murder and aggravated murder demonstrates how seriously society takes these crimes.

There are five main classifications of criminal dismemberment, based essentially on the intent of the perpetrator. Defensive dismemberment is by far the most common and occurs in about 85 per cent of cases. This odd term reflects the functional requirement to get rid of a body as quickly and conveniently as possible.

Statistics tell us that most killers and dismemberers are known to their victims and that the murder is most likely to occur in the home of either the victim or the offender. The dismemberment usually takes place at the murder site, using tools generally available in our kitchens, sheds and garages. Not surprisingly, the bathroom – designed to deal with a lot of fluid and to be easily wiped down and cleaned – is the most frequently chosen domestic site. It also has, in the bath or shower, a receptacle specifically tailored to the size and shape of the human body.

Investigating the contents of the U-bend can also be productive, as is looking closely at the surface of the bath or shower for marks left behind by a saw or cleaver. It is hard to cut up a body without the blade catching somewhere.

Defensive dismemberment is generally characterised by an anatomical approach to the process since a body is easiest to handle when divided into six parts: head, torso, two upper limbs and two lower limbs.

Cutting through bone isn’t straightforward, either, because it is so hard – in life it must be strong enough to support our body weight day in, day out and to withstand knocks and falls. Knives will not do it. Mostly implements such as saws, cleavers and even garden loppers are used.

The head is more problematic to remove as the neck is comprised of a series of interlocking and overlapping bones, a bit like child’s building blocks, making a clean cut difficult to achieve. The real challenge here, though, is a psychological one. Most perpetrators will inflict this ultimate insult with the body lying prone (face down) rather than supine (face up): it is assumed that having to look at the victim’s eyes may deter them from decapitating a supine body.

Unless the body parts are going to be hidden in the dwelling, they must then be removed from the bathroom and taken out of the premises. Most perpetrators will wrap the pieces in plastic bags or bin liners and clingfilm is also sometimes used, as are other forms of household plastics or linens like shower curtains, towels or duvets.

The notion of the body in the rolled-up carpet generally belongs to the days of Ealing comedies – the most common conveyances now are wheeled suitcases or rucksacks.

Killers may think they know the areas of the body that are key to identifying remains, but the reach of forensic science is greater than many of them imagine. As we have seen, there is almost no part of the body that cannot be used in some way to assist with identification. And over the last generation, the rise of a culture of artistic experimentation on the canvas of the human form has provided forensic experts with a wider range of potential leads.

A perpetrator may remove jewellery from piercings, but if the skin is still there, the presence of the puncture marks have a value. The silicone remnants of implants – and if we are really lucky, a visible and still decipherable batch number – can be most helpful in tracking down where surgery has been performed and upon whom. A tattoo might be removed through skinning or dismemberment, but if you understand how tattooing works, it takes only a little bit of anatomical know-how to uncover some evidence of inking.

Beneath the epidermis lies the dermis, the layer tattoo artists aim for with their needles. This has lots of nerve endings but no blood vessels, which is why having a tattoo is going to be painful, but it shouldn’t bleed. Think about how a paper cut, which doesn’t always even draw blood, can hurt like the devil.

Tattooing too far into the hypodermis is futile as the cardiovascular system will remove the ink as waste material and the body will excrete it.

Each of the lymph vessels within the dermis will eventually connect into a terminal swelling. We have many of these lymph nodes scattered throughout our bodies, but there is a high concentration of them at the top of our limbs, in the groin and armpit in particular.

as the ink molecules are too big to pass through the nodes, the dye accumulates there. Which is why, in people with tattoos, the nodes eventually take on all the colours of the inks.

Imagine a dismembered torso is found, with no trace of the upper limbs. If it is still sufficiently fleshed, we can look for the lymph nodes in the armpits, analyse any dyes found there and they will tell us whether tattoos have been present on one upper limb or two, and what colour the tattoos were on those missing limbs.

Dissolving a body is not as straightforward as some people think. Strong acids or alkalis are dangerous liquids to work with and obtaining them in sufficient quantity will arouse suspicion. Finding a container they won’t corrode in the process would not be easy, either.

His claim that he dissolved her in a bath of vinegar and caustic soda and her liquefied body disappeared down the plughole was rather let down by his dodgy grasp of chemistry. Vinegar being an acid, and caustic soda an alkali, they would balance and cancel each other out.

This one then said that he had chopped up his mother-in-law’s body and placed the pieces in rubbish bins around the city. We never did find any evidence of her, and there was certainly none to support the urban myth circulating in his home city about her postmortem presence in his kebab shop.

The second most common dismemberment classification is aggressive dismemberment, sometimes referred to as ‘overkill’. This is a progression from a heightened state of rage, often reached during the homicide itself, which continues into the dismemberment phase, where it manifests in violent mutilation of the body.

Disappointingly, there is little evidence to substantiate the claims made for William Bury, the last man to be hanged in Dundee, who was executed for the murder and mutilation of his wife Ellen and had lived in Bow, near Whitechapel, at the time of the killings. But if it was him, I have the neck vertebrae of Jack the Ripper sitting on a shelf in my office.

Offensive dismemberment, the third type, often follows a murder committed for sexual gratification, or results from the sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain on the living or meting out injury to the dead. This type of dismemberment frequently involves mutilation of the sexual regions of the body and may be the primary purpose of the murder. It is, thankfully, very rare.

Necromanic dismemberment, the rarest type of all, receives undue and disproportionate attention in films and novels because of its huge scope for the portrayal of gruesome and horrifying acts of violence and depravity. The motivation may be the acquisition of a body part a...

necromanic dismemberment is not always preceded by killing: it can take place, for example, when individuals have access to an already dead body, or involve...

Finally, there is communication dismemberment, often used by violent gangs or warring factions as a threat to persuade their enemies to desist from a particular activity or to coerce others, generally young men, to join their gang and not a rival one.

Two days after this discovery, a horrified farmer in Leicestershire came upon a human head that had been tossed into his cow field. Because the report of the head was made to a different police force, a link with the previously matched leg and forearm was not made immediately.

The Leicestershire police, too, made a fruitless search of the DNA database and for a few days two separate forces were independently hunting for missing body parts in their own areas. The following week, back in Hertfordshire, a right leg, cut into two pieces at the knee, wrapped in plastic bags and concealed in a holdall, was found in a layby on a rural road.

Those who have never dismembered a body before – and let’s face it, that is the vast majority of the population – would be most likely to attempt to saw through the long bones of the limbs, the humerus in the arm and the femur in the thigh. Research at our centre has indicated that, when faced with the necessity of dismantling a body, most people would reach for a sharp kitchen knife first of all, and only when they found that, while it could cut through the soft tissue of skin and muscle, it could not cut through bone, would they head to the shed or the garage for a saw, usually either a wood saw or a hacksaw.

this body looked as if it had been ‘jointed’ rather than sawn into pieces, and that is very rare. In fact it was a first for us. We needed to see the surfaces of the bones to determine what type of tools had been used because there was definitely something odd going on.

Tool-mark analysis is, in principle at least, very straightforward. If two objects come into contact, the harder of the two may leave a mark on the softer surface. If, for example, you cut a block of cheese with a serrated bread knife, then the knife, the harder object, will leave little ridges on the softer object, the cheese.

the level of expertise demonstrated by the disarticulation around the humero-ulnar joint at the left elbow screamed at us that whoever had undertaken this task knew their anatomy well. What is more, they knew their human anatomy. And they had done this before.

Shortly before being sentenced, he confessed, through his somewhat shell-shocked lawyer, to being responsible for the dismemberment of at least four other men. This came as a total surprise to the police but he refused to elaborate on either the identities of his victims or the location of their bodies.