Traces: The Memoir of a Forensic Scientist and Criminal Investigator

by Patricia Wiltshire

Most of us do not like to acknowledge, and may never have even given it a thought, that the components making up our bodies and minds, the fundamental things that we think of as who we are, once belonged to something else and that, after we are gone, they will be put to another use. But this does not depress or disturb me. For me, it is the ultimate in recycling and, therefore, reincarnation, and it will happen to us all whether we have religion or not. This is just nature, and there is more beauty in this, cold and ruthless though some might find it, than in any fanciful, and impossible-to-corroborate, stories of the ever-after.

No, there is no life after death – but there is always life in death. When you are alive, your body is a mass of beautifully balanced ecosystems, and so it is in death. Your dead body is a rich and vibrant paradise for microbes, a bounty for scavenging insects, birds, rodents, and other animals, some of which will come to your body to feast upon your mortal remains, and some of which will come, like the tinkers and traders exploiting a ‘gold rush’, to prey on the scavengers themselves. And this too is of significance for a forensic ecologist for the way a body is being broken down, the kinds of scavengers that come for it, and at what rate, can itself provide vital pieces to the puzzle of who, what, where, and how.

Behavioural profiles have worked out that about 100m is the limit of someone being willing and able to lug the dead weight of a corpse.

When I look back on our sheer freedom, I can only feel sad for today’s children who are packaged and sealed up, their flights of fancy being satisfied by electronic wizardry. I marvel at how young we were, how far we wandered unsupervised, how nobody felt the need to walk us to and from school – and how entirely normal that kind of free, wild life was compared to today.

Decomposition is utterly essential if we are to have any life at all.

Until recently, forensic scientists believed that the only way fungi could be used in their investigations was in cases of poisoning, or the illicit use of psychotropic (hallucinogenic) species. But what fungi present is actually a much richer cache of information. The way they grow, the rate they grow, the patterns their growths make – all of these can be recorded and interpreted to help the canny observer put a certain person in a certain place at a certain time, to estimate the length of time that has elapsed since a victim drew his last breath, to ascertain the actual cause of death. Like pollen, fungi leave their testimony wherever they grow.

I have always considered parents and teachers to be the most influential, and the most dangerous, people on the planet, and I felt that I was a victim of both. Parents and teachers can destroy, they can enhance, they have the power to create a victim or a protégé, and the children within their sphere of influence have no power at all.