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

by Sue Black

looking closely at the surface of the bath or shower for marks left behind by a saw or cleaver.

Defensive dismemberment is generally characterised by an anatomical approach to the process since a body is easiest to handle when divided into six parts:

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.

lying prone (face down)

bisecting the torso, difficult and unpleasant as that may be, begins to seem preferable. Going for that option is usually a big mistake as the ensuing mess is much more challenging to conceal. While the torso is intact, the internal organs will remain contained within the body cavities, but once they are exposed they will leak copiously and create a really noxious stench.

the most common conveyances now are wheeled suitcases or rucksacks.

Offenders then tend to head for somewhere familiar to them to get rid of the remains.

Defensive dismemberment also covers situations where the intention is to obscure the identity of the deceased. In these cases, dismemberment will be anatomically focused. The usual targets are the face (to obfuscate visual identification), teeth (to prevent comparison with dental records) and hands (to destroy fingerprint evidence). Sometimes skin may be cut off to eradicate evidence of tattoos and body parts stripped of all recognisable jewellery.

Increasing numbers of us are having ourselves tattooed, or our skin pierced in all kinds of places, or our breasts, buttocks, pecs and even our calves sculpted with silicone implants – all of these personal modifications provide new opportunities for identification, as long as sufficient evidence of the alteration survives.

if you understand how tattooing works, it takes only a little bit of anatomical know-how to uncover some evidence of inking.

the dermis, the layer tattoo artists aim for with their needles.

The molecules of the dyes used in tattooing are large and designed to be inert so that they are generally not broken down by the body, do not interact with the immune system and can remain successfully trapped in the dermal layer between the epidermis and the hypodermis –

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,

people with tattoos, the nodes eventually take on all the colours of the inks.

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.

Some defensive dismemberers may make attempts to destroy remains completely, for example through chemical treatment or burning. 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.

The acid would have to be super-strong, and the chances of domestic plumbing coping with it are close to zero.

aggressive dismemberment, sometimes referred to as ‘overkill’. This is a progression from a heightened state of rage,

where it manifests in violent mutilation of the body.

In such cases it is not unusual for the dismemberment to begin before the victim is dead and it can therefore sometimes...

analysis of patterns of injury assists in the determinatio...

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.

Necromanic dismemberment, the rarest type of all,

The motivation may be the acquisition of a body part as a trophy, symbol or fetish. Cannibalism also falls into this category.

it can take place, for example, when individuals have access to an already dead body, or involve the exhumation and desecration of corpses.

Finally, there is communication dismemberment, often used by violent gangs or warring factions

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.

facial identification was not possible because the skin and soft tissue were absent, probably, the pathologist believed, due to animal activity.

But our analysis indicated that the individual was most likely to be male, and a superimposition of the skull on to a photograph of the missing person suggested that it was highly unlikely to be a match.

The distribution of body parts, however, was consistent with the most common motivation for dismemberment: ease of disposal. The absence of the hands and damage to the face pointed to the possible additional defensive intent of attempting to obscure the victim’s identity.

Having a body spread over such a wide geographical area caused a bit of administrative hassle. Who should lead the investigation? The force that found the head? The force that found the first body part? The one in possession of most of the body?

We had a hypothesis that didn’t coincide with the police theories and we needed those seven hours in the car to think it through and talk it out because, if we were wrong, we were going to look like the biggest couple of numpties

But if we were right, there were going to be a lot of very hyperactive police officers running around Hertfordshire and Leicestershire.

but the way it had been done was unusual.

would be most likely to attempt to saw through the long bones of the limbs,

But this body looked as if it had been ‘jointed’ rather than sawn into pieces,

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.

the head had been treated differently from the rest of the body. It had been found in a different county, for a start. It had not been wrapped up and it was the only body p...

no sign of the normal scavenging pattern of tooth marks caused by the predations of either domestic or wild animals.

What we believed we would find were cut marks, made by a sharpened blade, in the areas where the different muscles attached to the bone.

The head had been severed cleanly from the neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae, and there was something very unusual about that dismemberment site, too.

We found knife marks exactly where we had anticipated we would find them, at the back and on the side of the head and under the jaw.

Examining the other body parts, we saw that the dismemberment at the wrists had been accomplished by perfectly executed

And they had done this before.

no heavy or serrated implement had been used at any stage, just a sharp knife. Now, that takes real skill. There was no evidence of hacking or sawing even in the removal of the head.

We don’t know what the police have found, we don’t know the outcome of their investigations and so we go into court with only our evidence and often no context within which to place it.

Here the cutter would dismember the body and pass on the pieces to the ‘dumper’, whose responsibility it was to get rid of them,

He had been apprenticed to a senior cutter and learned on the job how to dismember a human in the most efficient manner possible.

The only people with whom I make eye contact are the barristers and the judge. I never, ever look at the accused. If I should happen to meet them in the street, I don’t want to recognise them. I rarely look directly at the faces of the jurors, either, unless I am specifically asked to explain something to them, because I don’t want to be diverted from the question being asked of me by their facial expressions.

The family are victims, too, and their agony is often palpable.