Conversations: Xanthe Mallett on skeletons, forensics, crime and body farms

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Xanthi Mallott is here today.

Xanthi is a forensic anthropologist and a criminologist,

and she lectures at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales.

Xanthi is a specialist in the identification of human remains

and her research has focused in the past

on understanding the biometric details of the human face in particular.

Xanthi's work has also contributed to identifying sex offenders

by comparing a suspect's anatomy to an image of the offender

to determine whether two people are one and the same.

Her work has led to criminal convictions and prosecutions,

but she's also used DNA evidence to help exonerate people

who've been wrongfully convicted over the years.

And she's particularly interested in how human bias can play a part

in cases where mothers are accused of killing their children.

Now, just a heads up, we are going to be talking, of course,

about some cold cases that are a bit grisly in nature,

just in case that's not your cup of tea.

Xanthi is the author of several books on crime and forensics,

and she was a contributor to the UK crime TV series History Cold Case.

Hi, Xanthi.

Hi.

So, in the nature of your work over the years,

some remains are found, the police are brought to the scene,

the cause of death is not clear.

At what point are you typically brought into cases like these?

So, forensic anthropologists generally are experts

in helping to identify somebody from their bones largely,

so they would normally be called in either to a scene

if the police need assistance with the recovery of those human remains,

or in the lab to determine some biological factors such as age, sex,

geographical ancestry, and height,

because that helps the police narrow down those remains

against a missing person's database

to see whether they can help identify them.

And we also look at things like pathology and trauma,

evidence of those on the remains themselves.

So, if somebody's been stabbed, for example,

even if there's no soft tissue left,

there may be evidence of sharp, forced trauma

on the remains that a forensic anthropologist could identify.

How small in particular, and my mute can this get,

because there's a whole universe in human bones, isn't there?

There is. Everyone's got a story in their bones, it's true.

So, yeah, the evidence can be absolutely my mute.

We could look for fractures in the hyoid bone,

for example, in the throat to demonstrate

that somebody may have been strangled.

So, yes, the evidence can be very small.

Great attention to detail is required.

And human disease as well, that can be found

within the remains of human bones, can't it?

It can if the disease has been present long enough

for there to be actually uptaken in the bones.

If you think the bones, everyone thinks of them

as kind of static tissues that don't change,

but actually they're very dynamic.

They're changing all the time, they heal,

and they do show evidence of pathology and trauma and disease.

But you've got to survive a disease long enough

for it to actually show in your bones.

If it kills you too quickly, there won't be any evidence

for a forensic anthropologist to identify.

If you're brought to the scene of the crime,

do you have to sort of steal yourself before you go in?

Do you have to sort of go, oh, God, here we go?

I've always been very good at compartmentalising.

So I've seen some things that, I guess,

people would consider very unpleasant over the years,

but I'm very good at doing my job.

It's a puzzle.

I have questions to answer.

I have evidence to provide that can assist the police.

And then I don't think about it afterwards.

I'm good at kind of shutting that off.

You want to think back to things,

incidents in my life which have been, like,

really horrible or bad or painful,

there's always a tiny part of my mind,

even in the most fraught situations,

going, this is interesting.

Is that the bit you have to kind of listen to?

Yes. I've always loved puzzles.

I've always loved figuring out what happened,

why it's happened, who's responsible.

I've always been kind of drawn to those puzzles

and a forensic anthropologist,

somebody says, you know, you help solve a crime,

but ultimately, whatever evidence you provide to the police,

you are providing one little bit of a puzzle

that they put into the bigger picture.

And it's very much that accumulative knowledge of the police

that ultimately leads to people being prosecuted

and found guilty or otherwise,

but we just have our little bit and we hand that over.

But that little bit of the puzzle is fascinating.

I'm going to put a shocking proposition to you now, Santhi,

which is that shows like CSI might not be exactly like real life.

No, that's why I learnt all my skills.

What are you talking about?

How far from the truth is a show like that,

where the forensic anthropologist sweeps in and goes,

ah, there it is.

And then five minutes later, they nab the guy and that's that.

Well, you know, I'm going to, you know, have to agree.

It's not real. Not at all. I can't watch them.

I love Midsummer Murders and some of those British dramas.

Right.

But CSI, you know, not all people attending scenes are,

they're all hot and they're all young and they're all made up

and they're not wearing the hot, I would call it a bunny suit,

like the Tyvek white suit that you cook in in summer that's really hot.

They're not wearing any of that.

So, you know, why would they want to protect the scene from contamination, right?

So now it's not real.

And yeah, I can't watch it because I just end up shouting at the television.

Very furtive.

Yeah, no, it's not for me.

I suppose you're looking for a story in the remains, aren't you?

But do you find often that the remains seem to be telling you

like several different stories?

It can be confusing sometimes when you're trying to pick apart

some of that evidence that can be presented to you.

I mean, even determining somebody's biological sex,

I'm talking, you know, are they categorically kind of male or female?

What evidence is there from the skeleton to help us narrow down that category?

Isn't that easy?

Isn't that the easy bit?

Well, no.

I mean, sometimes you have to categorize different features

to determine whether they are more male or more female.

And some people are hyper-masculine and that's easy.

But you get hyper-feminine too, and that's kind of easy.

But in the middle, you've got this whole range.

And for example, I always thought that if my bones were found,

I've got really broad shoulders.

I've got really narrow hips.

I know that my skull is a mixture of male and female characteristics.

I think they might mistake me for what I would class as a grassile male

because my remains would not look typically female.

I imagine becoming a forensic anthropologist.

Is this not something you imagined for yourself as a kid or is it?

I don't know. Or was it for you?

No, I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid.

I just didn't think I was clever enough.

So I was always destined to be a dancer, actually.

My mum was a professional dancer and my dad was an engineer.

And my mum was very keen that I followed in her footsteps.

I had some natural ability, but I don't think I was that good, to be honest.

But I followed that path and I thought that that was what I would do

until I got a little bit older and thought I wanted to do something more academic.

Your mum wanted you to be a dancer instead of...

You kept giving her pictures of your hand inside a cow or something like that?

Well, I do remember when I was about ten, I was reading this book about Jack the Ripper.

And I used to go to the library every weekend with my dad and get books out.

And I remember looking at it and it was obviously a factual book about Jack the Ripper.

There were photos in it and I was just fascinated with who he may have been.

And I remember thinking then, I'm not sure mum and dad are we too keen about this

because I wasn't disturbed by it.

I thought it was interesting, but the images were probably pretty graphic

for a young kid to be looking at.

The story of Jack the Ripper is fascinating.

There are many possible people he might have been.

Everyone's got their own theory on who that person might have been.

But it seems to me like watching the ritual of those ghastly murders

that there was some kind of magic right at work in the killer's mind.

Is that something you need to be mindful if you're working on a potential murder case?

That there's some kind of hidden language that's going on that's relevant to the killer

that might be very hard to discern?

Well there generally are with serial offenders, serial sex offenders or serial killers.

We would just class it as a ritualistic behaviour.

So they add things in that really add a signature as it were

that you can help identify who that person is

because they will adapt that signature and maintain it across their crimes

and that can actually help you identify them once you've noticed

what key elements there are in that signature.

But it doesn't mean it'll always be the same because as they offend

they try different things, their method of crime actually improves

because people get better at things when they practice.

And then they adapt different things and they go,

oh I really enjoyed that so I'll keep that.

Oh they get interested in new things?

Yeah and they'll try that but maybe they didn't enjoy it

so they won't do that next time.

So there will be variations in the expression of those signatures.

So you're looking at books of Jack the Ripper as a kid

and you want to be a vet and doing all that sort of thing.

What kind of a kid were you then?

This is England or Scotland we're talking about.

So I was born in Scotland but I moved to the border of Wales

so I was there until I was seven and then I was in England

so I moved around a little bit.

I was a total tomboy.

I was doing all the things that the boys were doing.

I was climbing the trees, falling out of the trees,

driving my mum crazy because I was always doing things to injure myself

and come home with knees with no skin left on them and all of that

and playing football with the boys.

So I was an honoree boy when I was a kid.

I was just doing all the things the boys loved doing

and I loved animals as well and she never wanted to empty my pockets

when I was a child because I would always have rescued a worm or something

and I'd have that in my pocket and she'd put her hand into my pocket

to wash my trousers or something and pull it out with like trepidation

because who knew what would be in there that I would be caring for.

You don't mind if we frisk you for worms before you leave the building today, do you?

No, frisk away. I don't save worms anymore

and I'd get her off on the ground but then I thought I could care for that.

I don't know what I thought I was going to do with it.

Your grandparents you've said were a very big influence on you.

How were they such a big influence on you?

So my mum's parents I was very close to when I was young.

They were basically a second set of parents really.

They lived down in Cornwall and for anyone who doesn't know the geography of the UK

I spent most of my time I guess just outside of London

in kind of green space just outside of London, the Green Bout

but they lived down in Cornwall and that's that little tip

right down in the corner of the foot as it were of kind of the UK

and I spent a lot of time down there.

They lived on the top of a cliff overlooking the sea

and I had this life of freedom when I was a kid.

I was either down there or they were with us

and yeah I had a great life with them.

They spoiled us obviously that's what grandparents do

but yeah it was like having two sets of parents. It was amazing.

So now tell me about an accident you had when you were in your late teens

and the accident that helped you change direction in life.

It did yeah so I was studying for my A-levels at this point

I decided I didn't want to continue to be a professional dancer

I wanted to go to university so I was doing the exams

that you need to do to get into university

which are called your A-levels in the UK

and one of my friends who I was studying English with

actually had a head trauma during the course

and so he had a little bit extra time

and so I waited behind to see how he did in the exam

and on my way home I was waiting at some traffic lights

only about five minutes from my house

and there was a house on the right that was having its drive retarm act

and so there were temporary traffic lights

I had gone through that morning on my way to my exam

and they weren't there but in the afternoon I got stuck at these traffic lights

waiting as we pull off a car came round the bend the other way

it was actually a van and fell to stop at the lights

because there was traffic building up on his side

he came on to my side and squashed my car

I was in a little car he was in a two ton van

so my car was kind of concertinaed backwards between him and the bank

and all I actually remember from that

I don't remember seeing him coming

I just remember a blue van

like the blue front of a van with black bull bars

and that's all I can remember from that

and then I hit my head I broke the window with my head

which is not an easy thing to do

I must have a very thick skull because I didn't crack my skull

I damaged my knee really badly though on the steering column

but the guys working on the road actually got me out of the car

and I remember looking at the car which was squashed

thinking that looks pretty bad

and I was looking at me thinking well obviously my knee's a mess

because it was an open compound fracture of my patella

so I had a big six inch open wound on my knee on my left knee

but I thought the rest of me doesn't look too bad

given what the car looks like

It's funny the thoughts you have in those situations

I was just sitting on the road and everyone's like staring at me

and I felt really self-conscious

and the car that was at the back of the queue he would have hit

had this little old couple in it and a dog in the back

they had a retriever in the boot

and I remember thinking if he'd gone straight on

he'd have killed that dog for sure

and the little old lady had come over and she was holding my hand

and I had glass all over my hands and between my fingers

and she was like squashing my fingers and I was thinking

but I didn't want to tell her that she was hurting my hand

because she was trying to be really nice

and I was just like could you just not squash my fingers

because I had all these glass

and she was cutting my fingers but she was trying to be nice

You had a very badly damaged knee

and there's a gigantic cluster of nerves in the knee

so that's why the practice of knee capping is done

is because it's so particularly painful

It doesn't sound like you were aware of pain

or were you in the knee?

I mean you must have been in agony

No I wasn't in pain at that point

there's probably so much adrenaline bounding through your system

I wasn't in any pain and so I just waited

ambulance came obviously, went off to hospital

I had emergency surgery that night

it was a very long night because I woke up after the surgery

in the middle of the night and nobody could tell me

if I was going to be able to walk again

because that was the question before I'd gone into surgery

they couldn't tell me

so I had to wait till the surgeon came around in the morning

and then I've had 11 surgeries on it since

and one of my surgeons told me I'm never going to do a marathon

but I've done a half marathon and I still run

I'm one of those really stubborn people

tell me I can't do something

and I'm absolutely going to give it a go

What do you think that protracted period in hospital did for you?

Basically life fell apart after that

I was in hospital for I don't know a few days

then went home

I'd always had a tense relationship with my mother and sister at this point

and now I'm in full leg plaster

I also had quite a serious head injury

which wasn't really looked at in hospital

but as I said I broke the window with my head

and by the time the ambulance crew got there

you couldn't put your hand over the lump on my head

so they probably should have looked at that in hospital

because I could well have had an organic brain trauma as well

but certainly everything changed

all my social life was around sport

all my friends played sport, I played sport

everything was very active

I was always very active

so suddenly I couldn't do the things my friends were doing

I was in plaster

everyone gives you chocolate

they just bring you chocolates

and I'm used to burning off all this energy

and I can't burn it off

and for people listening who exercise regularly

that's a nightmare

when you're literally just stationary

and you can't do anything

and so I was at home with my mum and sister

and my grandfather actually got really sick

when I was in plaster

and actually died while I was in plaster

and so my family went off to Cornwall

and it was decided I wasn't well enough to go

and I was really close to him

my grandmother had died when I was 13

but I was 20 at this point

and I obviously felt really guilty

about not being able to be there

but I couldn't make that trip there

it was like a four hour drive down to Cornwall

and I ended up moving out of my house

when I was still in plaster

about two weeks after my accident

moved in with my boyfriend

which was probably not a good idea

because that was like an enforced moving in

rather than an excited let's move in together

so yeah it was very difficult

and I've had a very difficult relationship

with my mum and sister ever since

What kind of decision did you make about your future though

at that time?

Well at that time I didn't know what I was doing

I was meant to be going to university in the September

this would have been in the June

and I was meant to be going in September

to do a sports degree again

very active

and I wanted to work with disabled kids in sport

and then suddenly that was gone too

so my whole future had just imploded

my family life had imploded everything

and I couldn't go

I needed a letter saying I was fully fit

to go and do that degree

and I was never going to get that

given I think six months after my initial accident

and the first emergency surgery

I had another one

and then I had another one a year later

and it just went on like that

every few months I was having another surgery

but at some point the word Australia

crept into your head

Yeah well just because I needed to

I just needed to get away

so my dad has a brother and sister

who both came here as ten pound poms

so I probably hatched the plan with my dad

my mum wasn't too keen on it

she didn't think I was in the right headspace

to go off on my own to Australia

but I absolutely was

I've always been I think more independent

than she really understands

so I came over and I stayed with my dad's

brother to start with up in Queensland

and then travelled around Australia a bit

and then stayed in Perth with my aunt

and it was the best thing I could have done

How at home did you feel?

I mean Australia's like to imagine that

oh you walk off the plane and go

oh I love it straight away

In fact it can be flies and humidity as well

but no it was like that

It was literally like that

I got off the plane and it was like I'm home

and I knew then

I mean as I said I was only twenty

I went back for my twenty first birthday

and I knew then that I'd come back to Australia

and I was pretty sure I was going to live here actually

I loved it, yeah I just felt totally at home

as soon as I got here

So when you got back to the UK

you began studying archaeological sciences

found a new path for yourself

and you began to look at human skeletons

and the human body

what did you like about that work?

I liked evolution, I liked understanding

adaptation, how the body adapts

individually as well as on a population level

but it wasn't really my desire to start

I didn't kind of come back and go

oh archaeological sciences is my future

I just needed something to do

so I just needed to choose a degree

Right and that was in A

Maybe it was that simple you know

I just came back and went

what am I going to do

I've got to do something

so I thought yeah that looks interesting

and when I got there

I didn't expect to love it the way I did

and I loved learning

I always loved learning

I was that little geeky kid who

did my homework on time

but I did extra

and not because I wanted to like

get the teachers on side

just because I really loved learning stuff

so I loved university

I get to spend like three years

just embedded in something

that I really enjoyed

so yeah anything to do

with humans adaptation

I'm not interested in pots

or buildings, no

but if you bury someone

or they're dead

or I can look at their bones

you go hello

I'm in

Right there it is

So then for your masters

you went to Cambridge University

and you decided to hone in on

research into the human head and face

in particular

what aspect of that

were you trying to discover

that you were researching at Cambridge

So I wanted to look at

how the human head and face

adapts to extreme environment

on a population level

so for example

I looked at a lot of

cold adapted populations like Eskimo

so those from Greenland etc

and I looked at a number of populations

from very hot places

and what I found was

certain features of the face

specifically the nose for example

adapts on a population level

so if you think about an Eskimo's face

you will imagine a very broad face

with a very flat broad nose

right that's what everyone thinks

well that feature

the nose being broad and flat

actually allows the air

when you breathe in

to be warmed slightly

before it hits the lungs

so it has an evolutionary benefit

so therefore the flat noses

have been genetically bred

into that population

because they're beneficial

to that population

and so the head and face

is very plastic and adaptable

as is the rest of the body

but I want to look at it

on that big scale

rather than on an individual basis

It's kind of fascinating

how much human beings

culturally have invested

in that different looking face

from a different part of the world

when in fact it's one of the most

plastic parts of the human body

that if anything

it sort of misleads us a bit

it sort of shows

it tends to indicate

we're more different than we really are

underneath the skin

yeah we're all the same underneath

but look at the differences in dogs

they're pretty much all the same

but look at these different traits

we've bred into them

I don't know

some of those things I've seen

poking the Ted out of a handbag

that's not like a wolf at all

but we've done that to that dog

if you think

I like Rottweilers

but I've got friends

who've got these dashhounds

and they're like very very close

genetically

but you stick a Rottweiler

next to a dashhound

and tell me that they look like

very close siblings

this is all very true

so then you move on to a PhD project

which was a project

to map the human face

in what way

what was this work involving?

so this was partly funded by the FBI

and they wanted to know

firstly the question was

improving methods of CCTV identification

so we were looking at basically

landmarking a lot of faces

by landmarking I mean

putting points on certain

anatomical areas of the face

so the tip of the nose

corners of the eyes

corners of the mouth

the breadth of the face as well

so the ears

so trying to basically measure

the differences between faces

and they wanted to know

if there was an average face

in the population

so we actually photographed

we used eight cameras

to build a 3D model of faces

then we landmarked them all

so you're looking for an average face?

we were looking for an average face

and then say so then

in the case of this person

the ears are longer or shorter

the nose is flatter

longer what have you

exactly how far they are

from that average face

and we photographed 3,000 people

so this was a big study

not just me

I didn't do all of them

but I did photograph

a significant number

and then we landmarked those twice

so we had 6,000 samples

and the conclusion was

there is no average face

so but we did

we obviously had all of that data

that we could draw on

to determine the variability

the maximum variability

across all of those features

and how individual faces really are

and did you go to the FBI

to present your findings?

yeah I did

I got to go to Quantico

it was awesome

X-Files Quantico

like Silence of the Lambs Quantico

Silence of the Lambs Quantico

so we went there

and I was in awe

everyone's seen the movies

and everyone knows Quantico right

and is it like the movies?

yeah it really is

really

so they've got this big compound

and you're driven through it

and an FBI agent

showed us around

and all he wanted to show us

was where the Silence of the Lambs was filmed

oh this is where Clarence Starling

made that phone call

and it was so odd

because he obviously thought

that was super cool

whereas I thought

being Quantico was super cool

and did you see people

jogging in hoodies with FBI

written in big letters

you saw that?

yeah and I saw

we drove past the firing range

and they were like

this is the firing range

the targets are over there

and I was like

you mean the bit we can't even really see

it's so far away

I was like

serious people can shoot that

like it was amazing

I loved it

it was the best trip I could have done

as a PhD student

imagine me

and then we're sitting around this oval table

and I get to present my results

to all these FBI agents

and they have to listen to me

right but I suppose

what they want is scientists

to provide them with some kind of a magic wand

to say well we can now

scientists can give you this tool

that makes your work a lot easier

but is your doctor say

there is no typical

prototypical face?

well we said there was no typical face

but ultimately

you know facial reconstruction

and recognition

has come so far since those early

we're talking 2005

2006 I was doing that

so it was the building blocks

of where we are today

with automated recognition etc

and it's kind of gone into some dark places

where various authoritarian nations

are using those kind of biometrics

to build surveillance states

in various parts of the world

yeah there will always be those kind of uses

but ultimately you can use it

when you're looking for terrorists at airports too

so the application

that comes down to the government of the day

but really it's the science

helps us to identify people

and exclude people

if we don't believe

that they are actually the person in the images

so you went back to Scotland

and started working in a forensic lab there

what was the nature of that work?

so that was at the University of Dundee

it was in the Centre for Anatomy

and Human Identification

and I was very lucky to get that

lectureship pretty much straight out of PhD

and I was working with

some of the best forensic scientists

in the country

it was probably one of the best known

forensic science provision

provided in the country

and now it's a Leather Hume Centre for Forensic Science

so yeah it's really done great work then

I was very lucky to be part of that team

and some of the cases that we worked on

were the standard skeletal identification cases

others we were asked to compare images

that were found on somebody's computer

or on their mobile phone

showing various elements of their anatomy

and a number of those were alleged

child sexual abuse cases

so they had somebody's hand

for example abusing a child and they wanted to know

is the person that we have the suspect

the same as the person who's in those images

or are they holding and potentially

distributing those images

and when you're looking at that photograph of a hand

what are the kind of determining factors

you can look at in that image

to see how they might pertain to

the hand of a suspect

so anything on the surface anatomy

so if you look at your own hand

you can see vein patterns

on the back of your own hands

now the superficial vein patterns

in everybody are unique to you

and they are partly genetic

so there will be a similarity

in the patterns between the back of your hands

if you look at those

but the superficial ones

they're not driven by any particular anatomical function

the deep ones are

you need veins in certain places

and arteries

but if you look at them

you can actually map those

and everyone's will be different

and your right and left hand will be different

because they are partly result of

pressure and the

embryonic pressure in the uterus

so they're going to be different

fingerprints are different for the same reason

even your own fingerprints, identical quins

they're different

so we look at vein patterns

we looked at knuckle creases

we looked at the back of the nails

and so yeah we compared all of those features

what kind of weight can be brought

to bear with that kind of evidence

is it as good as a fingerprint

or does it fall short of that?

it would definitely fall short of fingerprint evidence

although fingerprint evidence is now

classed as opinion evidence as well

so you will have an expert

that will give an opinion in court

as to whether two fingerprints or more

in a case are

originate from the same person

so with all of these

kind of novel biometrics

so bio means life, metric to measure

so with all of these novel kind of biometric techniques

I would never say that it is this person

categorically that's not really the role

what you can say

when you do these comparisons

is that there's a number of features

that are comparable that are similar

nothing that excludes that person

so you can give an opinion as to whether

the two sets of images could have originated

from the same source or the same person

can you use it to rule people out

by the same taken?

yeah you definitely can use it to rule people out

and you can also look at

the kind of knuckle creases and nail beds

and scars

and so if there's a feature there

that indicates that it's not the same person

that can be really powerful because the police can obviously

exclude suspects

or persons of interest from their inquiry

because we can say it's not that person

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you were brought in as an expert

you were brought in as an expert

you were brought in as an expert

you were brought in as an expert

for the BBC TV series History Cold Case

tell me about this fascinating case

you were brought in which concerned

a whole lot of skeletons

that were found in the middle of Norwich

the town of Norwich, the city centre there

yeah well we did loads of great cases

and in fact that was when I was at the University of Dundee

and my boss professor

Dame Sue Black loved doing rados

she hated doing television but

like you mentioned CSI earlier

it was a research based course

it's a biology driven course

but they'd watch CSI and they'd go

oh you just push a button right

and it gives you like the last known address

and their name and everything else

and go well no

and so they wanted to become forensic anthropologists

with no clue as to what the scientific background was

so Sue's great idea

the BBC in the UK came to us

and she went we can use this as a platform

to educate people about what forensic science really is

and I want to do it but I don't want to face it

right okay

right

right okay alright this is what we're doing now

so yeah I got to go all over the UK

and all the cases we looked at

they weren't famous they were just skeletal

remains and they were archaeological

some of them dated back hundreds of years

but if there's one thing the British are good at

it's keeping records and we did go

I did go and look at all of the

archaeological records to determine

how much we could learn about these people

historically as well as from their

remains we applied all the forensic techniques

we reconstructed their faces

we looked at stabilisotopes which can

tell you about diet so we take bone

samples and tell us what those people

were eating when they were alive

and not eating it by the same time

and not eating so was it

or were they eating predominantly a marine based diet

it can tell you all that kind of information

so we did all of that

yeah and we found some amazing stories

each one of them even though they weren't famous

people always go oh what are these big famous stories

well each set of remains

was a story in itself and they were

fascinating and there was one

there was one set or group

of remains from Norwich that ended up

being probably Ashkenazi Jews

and they were in this well

in Norwich

I was at a pogrom there was some kind of

attack on the whole Jewish community

we were never really sure because the Jewish

community were telling us when we looked

into this that there were no Ashkenazi Jews

but the DNA was telling us

for sure that they were

that particular subgroup of the population

because they tend to intermarry

so genetically

they're really tight

so you could actually take their genes back

to a religion which is unusual

and were these medieval remains

yeah you're testing me now

I did that a long time ago

I can't remember what like

that seems to have really sinister overtones

it did and we just didn't know

we didn't know why they were there

but it was a fascinating story

and certainly we learned all these kind of

bits of history that were hidden before that

I found this other one that was probably a night

we found

we looked at some juvenile

remains and children's remains

so we all sorts of things

were uncovered during that

it was amazing doing that

all these stories under the soil

of these kind of quite everyday

stories under the soil

stories under the soil you know

knowing about their shopping and walking over

the graves of these people

who've died in extraordinary

and probably horrific circumstances in the past

but you always wanted to come back to Australia

when did you finally make it back here for good

so we had the global financial crisis

in 2008

and really that really affected

especially academia in the UK

in terms of funding etc

so I was married but I didn't have any children

so still pretty agile

and flexible and I'd always wanted to come back

so in 2011

I suppose I started thinking about it

and

the end of 2011 I was offered a

position at the University of New England

in criminology so I decided to move

sideways into kind of behavioural sciences

rather than sticking with the hard sciences of

forensics although I still work in that

space as well and now combine the two

so yeah I was offered a lectureship

and haven't looked back

in 2014

you went to cover a story for a TV show

in Australia in the Belanglo Forest

tell me about this case

so yeah in 2014 I was working on a series

called Wanted for Channel 10

I was one of the co-hosts of that series

and my role was really as a kind of

forensic expert and criminological expert

so I was asked to go and look at a case

of a young woman whose remains were found

in Belanglo State Forest and everyone kind of assumed

Ivan Malat because that's what they think

when they think Belanglo

an unidentified woman?

an unidentified human arraign, she was in her 20s

discovered by trail bike riders in 2010

she wasn't a Malat victim

because he was already incarcerated

they knew that when she died

her remains were skeletonised

they knew her height

they knew that she was Caucasian

they knew

they had DNA, they had dental work

but she was not on a missing persons database

so they hadn't identified her

so we arranged to have her face

reconstructed as part of the program

we put that out, it was really to generate

new leads for the police because this case had gone cult

so you helped the facial reconstruction

of this body

so I didn't do that

a woman called Susan Hayes

Dr Susan Hayes down at Wollongong did that

but we used that in the program

the young woman's hair was also recovered

so we had distinct lengths of hair

that were built into that reconstruction

and I explained on the program

how a facial reconstruction works

so part of my role was educational

but we didn't get her identified ultimately

and then maybe in 2013 actually

and then in 2015 the news broke

of a toddler's remains

being found in a suitcase in South Australia

South Australia, quite some way

from the Blangley State Forest

Thousands of kilometres away

and so that child's remains

she was around two

and there was a blanket in there

that was homemade in the suitcase

with the remains as well as this little

pink dress

and so this was publicised to try and generate

some leads as to who this toddler

this child may be

and somebody called from the Northern Territory

to say I know that dress

they sent in a photo of a child wearing the dress

at the right age and they also

knew the blanket because it had been made

for the child by her grandmother

and so the child was actually then identified

via a Guthrie or Heal Prick Test

back at a sample that was held

at the hospital from when she'd been born

Alright the Heal Prick Test, the newborn babies

they still had it so they did a DNA analysis

to confirm that the child's remains

were in fact

Candelice Pierce who was the child

the question was then, well where's Carly

where's her mother, we've found the child

and so they did

a comparison

they looked for basically a biographical profile

of all of the unidentified diseases

across the country and Carly

came up in New South Wales

and so then a familial DNA link

was made between Candelice

and Carly to identify that they were

mother and daughter

Now the killer was later found to be

a man named Daniel James Holdham

tell me how he'd been trying to throw

the police off the scent

of the

DT perpetrated

Yeah so he'd killed Carly first

and taken her to Blangalow Forest

then he'd taken Candelice

he'd picked her up, he was staying in the ACT

at the time and taken her

down to South Australia

and in the interim he was accessing

Carly's social security

he was sending what I would call

proof of life messages to her family

so they did initially make a missing persons report

and then

they get these messages, she was kind of a strange

from her family

so she wasn't in close contact

with them, they weren't on the phone

but he sent enough proof of life messages

asking for money which they provided

so it was partly

financial, the motivation

but he was proving basically that she was

in close contact with her bank account was being accessed

so the missing persons report

was closed, so that's why no one was looking for her

no one knew

anything about what had happened to this mother and daughter

until those remains were found

and identified then they started to look at

who were the last people she was seen with

they looked at social media

who were they in photos on social media

with and they came across Daniel Holdham

and he's now

serving two life sentences for them

I was in court actually when he was sentenced

and so were her family

Candelise and Carly's family were in court

and they were incredibly stoic

and brave

throughout the sentencing

and yeah I sat there and watched him

I wanted to see that one through, I felt connected

to that case having tried to identify

in 2013 and failed

but I was very pleased she was

identified and she could be returned to her family

as could Candelise

So on the one hand

such people like that

satisfying to see such people being brought to justice

but there's a flip side to your work

you

also set up a thing called the justice clinic

at the University of Newcastle

looking into

wrongful convictions using DNA

DNA and other evidence to

look into cases of wrongful convictions

what are some of the common causes

of these maddening

wrongful convictions Sandy

Sometimes it can be

expert evidence that goes wrong so experts

either

misrepresent evidence or

the weight that's attached to evidence is

wrong and it kind of

misleads a jury to thinking that something is more

influential than it should be

it can be that the police

get tunnel vision, I've seen that a number of times

and I'm not disparaging the police at all

I think they do amazing work but that has

I have been known to produce verbal confessions

in the past that has been

that has happened yet you do get these kind of

renegade officers who

sometimes follow the wrong path

and eyewitness testimony is also

another huge problem

and also withholding of evidence

at trial like when the prosecution

doesn't disclose evidence

to the

defence that could be

exculpatory as I would describe it that could actually

provide a good defence to

the accused so there's a number of places

it can go wrong but those are really some of the

systematic ones that we see commonly

These cases are maddening

and I can't imagine how maddening they are for the

poor person who has been wrongfully convicted and sent to jail

do you find that such people

are they able to

hang on to some hope of justice

for themselves down the track

or do they quite commonly lose all hope

of

being found innocent of this terrible

miscarriage of justice? Well the ones who

come to the justice clinic at work

obviously are holding out hope that somebody will help them

we only look at cases where all the

appeals have been concluded

so not you know whilst there's an appeal potentially

outstanding we don't get involved we kind of

come in at the end of the process when all hope

has kind of gone I guess

and so the ones that have come to us

they are the battlers and the ones that

the cases I've seen overturned are

people who never gave up fighting

but also they have a white knight on the outside

it's a family member it could be a journalist

it could be somebody from the legal

professional it could be somebody like us

there are other

innocence initiatives around the country

but we call ourselves the justice clinic

instead because we do work

with the potentially wrongfully convicted but

we also look at long term missing persons

cases cold cases

so our work is broader than

just innocence but they need

that battler on the outside

More recently you've been looking

into the cases where

doctors and nurses healthcare

people

have turned out to be killers and in fact

serial killers now

you hardly need to say that these people are extremely rare

in the healthcare system we should

make that point though nonetheless

what did you learn though about such people

who are perpetrating such

utterly creepy and violent murders

Well this came about because in the UK

recently a woman called Lucy

let be was found guilty of murdering

6 neonate she was a neonatal

nurse and she's been accused

newborn babies sorry she was found

guilty murdering 7 and found

guilty of attempting to murder a further

6 and I heard in just the last couple of days

that there will be an 8th child

that she's going to be accused of having murdered

and she's an interesting

an interesting character and I kind of picked this apart

with my good friend and colleague Tim Watson and Rose

a criminal psychologist on we do our own

podcast and we did a special episode on this

we talked about all of the

different types of medical serial killers

so the doctors

the Harold Shipmans of the world

who are those angels of death

as we call them and that is

when men like that kill it's really power

over life and death that kind of

God complex and

partly financial in his

case as well but with Lucy let be so

she was convicted just

very recently she was

a very is a very quiet

character very diminutive

she kind of blends into the background

she's really you know nothing

special as you would say and I think she

did it partly for attention

so that we see that commonly with

female healthcare serial killers the attention

they get when a baby dies

so remember she's on this neonatal

war she's got primary care

for these incredibly vulnerable children

and when they die

everyone gives her sympathy

all this drama

exactly that she is the centre of attention

so for men typically what you're

saying then is it's like this little filthy

secret they've got I have this power

and no one knows what I've been doing

it's this kind of creepy story they tell themselves

of power and dominance

but for women typically it's

more typically it's about getting attention

getting attention and in Lucy let be's case too

there's the potential

that she was also in love with one of the male

doctors who was the emergency

responder in the neonatal unit

one of them so he would be the man who would show

up when an emergency

took place so he's the guy

that would be called when one of

these deaths or almost

deaths happened in six cases and

she was found guilty basically on the basis

that she was the only one who

had access to all of those children

in all of those emergency scenarios

you wrote a book

called Mothers Who Kill

now we all know now the

truth of Lindy Chamberlain's

innocence the

very poor way that the

case against her was put together

when there are such

cases where

a woman is suspected of

having killed her own children

why are people

so quick to hang the crime on the mother in these

cases there seems to be something going on

there that oh she must have done it because she doesn't

look right she doesn't have the right

facial expression she doesn't she's not

weeping openly what's

going on in people's minds why are they so

quick to burn the witch

in these cases and I think that's exactly it it's the

Lindy Chamberlain effect isn't it we

all remember the footage of

Lindy Chamberlain going into court after being

accused of murdering Isaria all those years

ago grim faced yet

stoic grim face not emotional

not crying not doing

all the things that people expect and I think

that a number of other women have been

basically judged

by the public on the same ground

so I'm talking about Kathleen Fulbig

Kelly Lane all these women they didn't

cry they didn't they didn't do you know they weren't

the weeping mother

that that the public wanted to

see and ultimately in Kath's

case I mean I raised problems with that case in

2014 in Mothers Who Murder

but it was also Mothers Who Murder

colon and infamous miscarriages of justice

and I actually started with Lindy Chamberlain's

case because I wanted people to read the book

with an open mind and I raised out

in Kathleen Fulbig's case as well as

Kelly Lane's case and it was a really

unpopular thing to do then I got totally

vilified I got trolled

and because people want to silence

you it's like how dare you stick up for

quote a baby killer there was

always reasonable doubt in that case always

and so now the science

has eventually caught up and shown us that

a genetic abnormality is likely responsible

for Sarah and Lois deaths the two girls

in the Fulbig case yet

reasonable doubt was always in existence

in the Lindy Chamberlain case

how did you find that the expert

witnesses in her case had acted

oh well that was a whole big

mess it was a hot mess wasn't it that case

the the the blood evidence

in the car that wasn't even blood

the timeline that never worked

people still ask me if Lindy Chamberlain

did it and I was like

she didn't kill his area any more than

I did it's not possible in any

world that we exist in

and so the experts in that case

you know there was very damaging

evidence as there was in the Fulbig

case you sometimes

work at a place called a

tephonomy facility have I pronounced that right

yes what is it tephonomy

facility tephonomy relates

to what happens to the body

after death so decomposition so there's

a facility on the outskirts of Sydney actually it's run

by UTS just across the road

from where we are today and

we look at human decomposition and all

the elements that go with that so chemical

biological we

look at the environment in which these remains

decompose to the point

of looking at decomposition is better

establishing time since death because that

is a key factor the police need answered

when they find a set of remains

they go well how long have they been there

so how do you examine

do you photograph the body over time

as it decays well that's what my particular

project with a number of colleagues from

UNSW we actually

have mapped two sets of remains

now to bequeath remains donors who

have donated the body to the program

UTS and we have photograph

them in time lapse and so have

the whole process from

freshly deceased laid out

at the facility with all of these cameras

capturing all of that activity

including quite a lot of movement actually

that happens after death the arms move and stuff

you'd be amazed what serious the arms move

more than we would have imagined we're watching

it in time lapse going what is happening

it's to do with the foreshortening of

various tissues as the body decomposes

but I'm talking quite a lot

of movement that we never we didn't know about

oh god are you losing your mind when you

watch this stuff like it's hard enough

it was so it was supposed to move while it's

decomposing that's that's that's doing my head in

so interesting it's like

we would have thought that maybe a creature

had moved it but no because we've got it on

time lapse the arms actually moving

away from the body amazing nobody

had done that before so this is obviously

a critical factor knowing about

the rate of decomposition in bodies when they're found

in the wild so to speak

isn't it what are all the variable

factors at work here oh we could be for the next year

talking about all the variable factors it's

to do with the individual themselves are they

clothed are they unclothed what

how much activity insect activity

is available at the scavenger

activity are they in a car

is it hot is it cold what

what height are they at in terms

of you know above sea level

literally we could go on forever talking about

variables that affect decomposition but we

didn't have before this facility any way of

mapping that in an Australia Australian environment

at all all the data we relied on was from

the US and we're very different

environmentally to the US obviously

there are two ways of looking at such events

on the one hand you have

the ghastliness of it the horror of it

the smell must be just extraordinary

but there's another way to look at it too

which is to see this kind of extraordinary

natural process at work where

bacteria and insects and whatever else

are

breaking down a body returning its components

to the soil or to

wherever are you able to keep those two

things separate in your mind when you're looking

at these things totally I mean it's an organic

process isn't it and we're learning again

we're trying to figure out what happens

why in this particular environment and

again to help the police in identifying

human remains so

to some I guess there would be horror in that

to me there's a humanitarian

element to that when we're trying to help people

now I know people can donate

their bodies to science for

anatomical research at universities a friend

of mine has done that for her own body

can people donate their own bodies

for such research? Absolutely

people always ask me for the creed or forms

to tell them about the work that we do

so at UTS you can choose to leave

your body through the creed or program

to the medical side or you can actively

choose to leave your body to the

forensic side and you'd be surprised how many

people want to do that because they understand

that when somebody has died and they're unidentified

ultimately we're trying to give them their name

back and return them to their family

so they understand the power of that

and we incredibly respect for we

we consider them our silent teachers

and you know we really value

them and feel very privileged for

people to donate their bodies. They're going to have mine

when I'm done being an organ donor

UTS to get in my body. Really?

Yeah for sure.

I suppose there must be people who think

that doing this line of work would

make you somewhat unusual

a bit weird but then

like I just can't even imagine walking

into that room. I think I

could maybe watch it on a video but I don't know

how I could walk into that room

but I'm also thinking at the same time

on the other hand thing going on

that it's only recently we were so severed from

the natural process of death and human beings

have witnessed these things

throughout the entirety of human history

Are we the weirdos and are you the only normal one

here? Do you think

are we the strange people who've gone

a bit too squirmish around death

and the natural process surrounding death?

Well death is a natural part of life isn't it?

I think maybe I'm just better at

doing that and eating my lunch than

some other people are

You do have to be able to not think about it

you have to be able to separate

and when people start taking it home

then you can't do it anymore

and it's actually an outdoor facility

so there's lots of remains out there

and if you wonder out you look at your donor

and see what's happening.

During the Renaissance there were public autopsies

that used to take place in the open air

which would attract thousands of people to come

and watch and some of the most noble ladies

in the land would come down and sit down

and watch the process take place.

What kind of sense of your kind of really burrowing

sort of curiosity?

What primarily drives you is that sense

of curiosity or is it a strong

and powerful desire for justice in this world?

I think it's the combination.

I think I have this

very powerful interest in puzzles

and understand I want to know everything

I want to understand everything

it drives my partner crazy because I'm always like

well I don't understand that

I need better words

I need very specific words around that

and a really powerful sense of justice

and I really hope that we instill that

in our students at the University of Newcastle

because they're going to go out into the world

and be the next police, community corrections

etc and to send them out into the world

with those positive ripples

of having a really strong sense of justice

I think is something that hopefully I can contribute

to in a very small way.

It's been amazing speaking with you

thank you for sharing your story with us today.

Thank you.

We've been listening to a podcast of Conversations

with Richard Fidler

For more Conversations interviews

please go to the website

abc.net.au

slash conversations

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