I don’t watch crime shows on TV... I’d be shouting ‘No! That’s wrong!’
As one of the world’s foremost forensic experts, Dame Sue Black confronts death and horror on an almost daily basis... and has learned how to shut out the demons
THERE is a room inside Dame Sue Black’s head where she goes to do her job. Fortunately, it has a sturdy door which she closes securely at the end of the day before walking away and trying not to think about what is behind it.
It is her way of compartmentalising the horrors which count as a normal day at the office for one of the world’s foremost forensic anthropologists.
‘My biggest fear,’ says the Inverness-born 58year-old, ‘is that some day I actually don’t close the door properly and all the demons in there leap out and I can’t cope with them.’
Certainly the body count behind the door is huge and many of the cadavers are mutilated. They include 11 members of the same family blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade in Kosovo – and dozens more herded into an outhouse which was sprayed with bullets and torched by Serbian troops.
There are haunting images of Barry Wallace, the teenage victim in the 1999 Limbs in the Loch murder which established killer William Beggs as one of Scotland’s most notorious monsters. And there are the ghosts of bodies never found – Renee and Andrew MacRae, the missing presumed murdered Inverness mother and son who have not been seen since November 1976; Moira Anderson, the 11-year-old Lanarkshire girl who vanished after boarding a bus driven by her suspected killer in 1957. Now the Dundee University professor who became a household name through the BBC documentary series History Cold Case is offering a guided tour of this most macabre of headspaces. It is in the form of a memoir – All That Remains: A Life in Death.
And while the book may not be for the squeamish, it is nowhere near as grim a read as her profession might suggest. Rather, it is a humane, respectful and, at times, even humorous chronicle of a scientist’s lifelong relationship with death: from working in a butcher’s shop in her teens to being confronted for the first time with a human body to dissect at university – right through to dealing with the aftermaths of wars, natural disasters and crime.
Naturally, that close working relationship with death has informed Professor Black’s attitude to her own mortality, stripping away some of the mystery and all of the fear.
‘There is an inevitability I’ve never shied away from,’ the mother of three told Radio 4 this week. ‘It’s going to happen, be in no doubt.
‘You go into huge preparations if you’re going on a long journey. We need to prepare for this one as well, it’s just another journey and it isn’t something that causes me any fear.
‘When it happens it’s going to happen and the chances are there’s nothing I can do about it, so let’s experience it.’
Professor Black had barely entered her teens by the time she took a holiday job in a butcher’s shop where the sight of carcases in various states of intactness became second nature to her. If there could be a preparation for a degree in human anatomy and being presented with a dead body at the start of the academic year this teenage work experience was perhaps as good as any.
Not that those who donated their bodies to science were ever treated as pieces of meat.
PROFESSOR Black recalled: ‘You start at the beginning of the academic year in September and you finish around about May and in that time you have to dissect this person from the top of their head down to the bottom of their toes.
‘It’s a moment you can’t relive when you suddenly realise this person in front of you chose when they were alive to give this gift of their body so you could learn.’
Much more troubling sights awaited her as she embarked on a career in forensic anthropology while working as a lecturer in anatomy at St Thomas’ Hospital, London.
Typically, police forces reached out to experts such as Professor Black in gathering evidence at crime scenes where a body or partial remains had been recovered.
The role of the forensic anthropologist in the investigation was to provide details of the dead person which, at best, might identify them and, failing that, at least give key pointers to who – or what – they were. She recalled: ‘Soon I was working with pathologists all over London. The first time, I remember the police brought in a carrier bag full of bones. I knew immediately they were sheep bones.
‘They left the bag on a radiator while they had a cup of tea and, sure enough, before long everything began to smell of roast lamb. After that, the police kept coming back, wanting me to identify remains and tell them if they were human. I mean, there’s no point in setting up a murder inquiry for a cow, is there?’
HAVING made her name on numerous Metropolitan Police investigations, she was contracted by the Foreign Office and United Nations to apply her skills to identifying victims in international conflicts. Forensic evidence found on such excursions could be used at war crimes trials – such as that of the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic – to corroborate witness statements about massacres.
But the process of gathering it could be overwhelmingly bleak. There is no forgetting the horror of 44 Kosovan men murdered in an outhouse by Serbian troops and left to decompose as spring temperatures rose.
She writes: ‘They were boiling with maggots, fragmented and partly scattered and eaten by the scavenging animals.
‘The heat was ferocious, the smell almost unbearable and the constant drip of sweat down your back, into your gloves and off your forehead into your eyes, which left them constantly stinging, was unpleasant in the extreme.’
On a later trip to Kosovo she met a father who had fled with his family when the troubles started and tried to return home in 1999, thinking it would be safe. He drove a tractor while his mother, sister, wife and eight children, aged six months to 14, rode in the trailer it towed.
All in the trailer were killed when a rocket-propelled grenade struck. Though shot in the leg by a sniper, the father managed to return to the scene to bury what was left of his family before they could be picked at by packs of dogs.
Eighteen months on, it was Professor Black’s grim task to exhume the body parts and decide which family members they had belonged to, thereby allowing individual burials.
She remembered: ‘We laid out 12 white sheets in the mortuary that day. What we wanted to do was give back something that was certain for each of the 11 people who had died.’ She writes that the father accepted the separate bags of remains with ‘incredible grace’.
‘It was an extremely affecting day and we were physically and emotionally exhausted. When [the father] shook hands with us all and said thank you, we found it hard to comprehend just how he could thank us for the job we had just done. But, as my granny used to say, fate isn’t there for our convenience.’
Back in Scotland, having helped police forces all over the UK to crack murder cases, Professor Black was asked to help in one of Scotland’s
oldest and most baffling – that of Renee MacRae and her three-yearold son Andrew.
Since the day her BMW was found ablaze with a solitary spot of blood in the boot there has been no trace of either. Professor Black, who was 15 at the time, has a clear recollection of the police inquiry in full swing. ‘I can remember the police coming round and asking my father to look in the outhouses,’ she said. ‘Throughout my career I have always thought I would one day work on this case.’
She did in 2004 when she took part in the excavation of Dalmagarry Quarry, a few hundred yards from the layby on the A9 where the burning car was found. For years the quarry was considered the likely choice of spot for the killer to dump the bodies.
Yet, despite moving some 20,000 tons of soil, the only bones discovered belonged to rabbits and birds. It was not the result she had hoped for in a case which she had considered a kind of homecoming.
As she writes: ‘It was hugely deflating for the team that had gone into this mammoth operation with such high hopes, but we knew we had done our best and we were confident that, wherever they had been and wherever they were now, they were not in Dalmagarry Quarry.’
There was more disappointment a few years later when a team led by Professor Black exhumed a family lair in Coatbridge in the search for 11-year-old Moira Anderson’s remains. The girl is thought to have been abducted, sexually abused and murdered by bus driver Alexander Gartshore and there was circumstantial evidence to suggest he had secreted her body in a graveyard plot which had been opened for a burial.
Alas, there was no trace of the child. Attention later switched to the Monkland Canal in Coatbridge where more bones were found. They belonged to a large dog.
Professor Black writes: ‘Given that she has been missing for 60 years, the number of people alive who might hold key information is diminishing.
‘It is unlikely that we will be able to prosecute anyone else now in connection with her disappearance, but the race is on to provide some peace to her elderly sisters by finally bringing home their wee sister.’
There have, however, been many notable successes.
Today, much of the work she does concerns the living, not the dead – and because of it, some of society’s biggest monsters are in jail.
In the past decade, Professor Black has become a specialist in identifying paedophiles from the videos they make of their abuse. It may be a freckle, a skin crease or the pattern of veins on a hand that gives the game away, but if there is the tiniest distinguishing feature, she will find it.
It was her team’s analysis which helped snare Richard Huckle, who was given 22 life sentences in 2016 after admitting 71 counts of serious sexual offences against children while posing as a teacher.
She also worked on Operation Algebra, which uncovered Scotland’s largest paedophile network and resulted in the conviction of eight men.
Crucial to the case was a photograph partially showing a man sexually assaulting a child.
Professor Black noticed a distinctive thumbnail and told a court there was ‘strong evidence’ the hand belonged to Neil Strachan, who was sitting in the dock.
Little wonder that crime writers such as Val McDermid and Ian Rankin see her as a kind of guru with decades of experience to tap for verisimilitude in their novels. Yet she says she does not read their work.
I ENJOY hanging out with crime writers, but no, I don’t read their books. It’s the same way I don’t watch crime shows on television. I’d only spend my time saying, “No, no, no that’s all wrong.”’
Yet crime writers will surely be among the most avid readers of her own memoirs in the weeks to come. Other readers will find the tour of Professor Black’s ‘work room’ poignant and thoughtprovoking – and some, no doubt, will keep their visits to it brief.
As for the writer herself, she is ‘very good at compartmentalising,’ says her friend Val McDermid. ‘It’s that ability to not bring her work out of the building that makes it possible for her to survive.’
But there is a mantra which helps too. ‘You didn’t cause this,’ she tells herself when confronted with scenes of horror. ‘You’re not responsible.’ Her job as a scientist is simply to gather the evidence.
It is her book’s humanity, however – not its scientific rigour – which will connect with readers.
In one passage she tells of the police officer who broke down in a field in Kosovo at the sight of a dead little girl in a sleepsuit who had been shot repeatedly by Serbian soldiers.
His colleagues stood around him, hiding him from view until he could compose himself.
But, as Professor Black writes: ‘The mother on a team can’t allow that to be the way to handle such a situation. So, without a word, I took off my gloves, rolled my suit down to my waist, walked behind the cordon of men and threw my arms around him until he had finished sobbing his heart out.’
Then she told him it helps to have a little room in your head.
All That Remains: A Life in Death by Sue Black is published by Doubleday on April 19, £16.99