The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Until death do us part The couple who helped convict the Rochdale Ripper.
The husband-and-wife forensic science team whose evidence has been key in many highprofile cases talk to Jessamy Calkin about interpreting the tales told by the dead, while an extract from their new book reveals how they helped capture a vicious killer. Photographs by Felicity Mccabe
The Gordon Museum of Pathology in south-east London is a monument to medical science. A treasure house of macabre objects, its several floors play host to shelves of intricately lifelike models stored in specimen jars, like a lurid larder. Here, a face disfigured by congenital syphilis, there, a hand covered in plague sores, in that cabinet opposite, a variety of sinister implements used in early surgical procedures. And over there, in the corner, is a shrouded corpse preserved according to the traditions of ancient Egypt, even though its donor died quite recently, having bequeathed his body to science for precisely this purpose.
Most of the models are wax, created by the artist Joseph Towne (1806-79), but there are real specimens, too (which are not allowed to be photographed), the oldest dating from 1608. The Gordon Museum is the largest medical museum in Britain, and its curator is keen to stress that it is not open to the public but is solely for use by medical professionals and students.
It was here that 15-year-old Derek Tremain fell in love with forensics, when he began his career, in 1964, as a student technician. The son of a welder, Derek left school early with no qualifications other than an interest in biology. His job entailed cataloguing specimens, learning to photograph them, mounting them for display and conducting tours. After seven years he was transferred to the adjoining Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s Hospital as scientific officer, working under the revered Prof Keith Simpson.
On his second day he saw his first dead body: ‘I had to go to the mortuary to collect a specimen. In I went, aged 15, and there was a young lad who’d been run over by a lorry. His head was flat on one side, tyre marks running across his face. It was awful and it shocked me – but the interest overcame the fear.’
Now 71, he says forensic science is a vocation. In 1985 he was made chief scientific officer at Guy’s, leaving in 1999 to become an independent consultant and establish his own business, Forensic Image Services, which he runs with his wife, Pauline, 61.
They didn’t quite meet in the mortuary, but it was close. She had been appointed forensic medical secretary to pathologist Prof Keith Mant. It was, she says, her dream job, and she was undeterred, aged 20, on her first day in the office, by the stacks of plastic boxes labelled ‘kidneys’, ‘liver’ and ‘brain’, or by her new boss pointing to a bucket foaming with a frothy white substance and saying, ‘There’s a head in there. One of Derek’s projects…’
And that’s how she first came across Derek. ‘He came in with his motorbike gear and a helmet and he slouched across a chair – he was so relaxed and easy,’ she says. ‘He created an ambience.’
Together they have written a book, How To Solve a Murder, detailing their long and varied careers in forensic medicine, and the evidence they have provided for court cases, ranging from high-profile murders (Derek’s evidence helped convict the Rochdale Ripper) to accidents such as the Clapham rail crash (1988, when 35 people died) or the Marchioness disaster (1989, when 51 died). It was Derek’s job to establish the nature of injuries and the cause of death, or to identify the causes of seemingly inexplicable accidents.
He might have to analyse anything from the mark on a neck from a makeshift ligature – suicide or murder? – to a footprint on the skin from a particular type of trainer. He can usually tell what kind of knife was used in a stabbing, and whether the wound could have been made in self-defence. Nowadays these types of calculations are helped by software and overlays, but previously they relied on attention to detail, experience and original thinking.
In one of Derek’s cases, for example, the murder of a pensioner, a suspect had been released because no weapon had been found.
But the man’s injuries reminded Derek of a previous case, in which a dumbbell was the murder weapon, in particular the marks made by its screw threads. ‘The suspect was rearrested and his home searched. A dumbbell bar was found, and DNA analysis ascertained it was directly linked to the fatal attack. ‘Along with my weapon and wound overlay evidence, the suspect was subsequently charged with murder,’ he writes in the book.
Aplaque on the wall outside their house in Herne Bay, Kent, announces it to be the home of the Tremain family and their various pets (two rescue cats and two podenco dogs belonging to their daughter). Pauline and Derek have lived here for 13 years, and now work from home.
Derek is regaling me with stories from his early days working in the museum, when people carted brains around in buckets, or you might come across a foot sticking out of a barrel of hydrochloric acid.
A dark sense of humour was essential: they played numerous pranks on each other, and Christmas parties were not your usual wine and crisps around the photocopier affairs. ‘We used to make up this punch with pure alcohol, 100 per cent ethanol – but obviously, being scientists, we knew how to dilute it correctly. We’d brew it up in the basement of the museum with lemons and limes and everyone used to get absolutely rat-arsed. You might step over someone unconscious by the gents, and there would be grunting and groaning coming from the lecture theatre where someone was having a bit of nookie… Everyone would be there, from the most senior to the most junior. There was no hierarchy – we were all the same…’
‘Drunk,’ adds Pauline, sweetly. Pauline discovered her love of medicine aged 10, weirdly, when she was admitted to hospital for an appendectomy. Her first job was as a medical secretary at the National Heart Hospital in 1977. It was a book called Forty Years of Murder, by Keith Simpson, Derek’s boss, that got her interested in forensics. And in 1979 she got her job, as senior secretary to the head of the forensic department at Guy’s Hospital.
Pauline’s job was to accompany the pathologists to crime scenes and write up reports, and to work in the mortuary, where she was revered for being able to dash off between 50 and 100 autopsy reports every day. Was she ever haunted by what she saw?
‘Sometimes. When I first saw a body, I was shocked to the core for a while. Sights and sounds that stay with you – and the smell of decomposition. Sometimes I’d walk into
Derek’s laboratory and see blood and bits on the chopping board, and that was pretty shocking. But as time went on, I got used to it. Though the “death by misadventure” part was very shocking because I had no knowledge that that type of thing existed…’
She means accidental self-asphyxiation, during the course of sexual gratification. ‘Practised in the home, controlled selfasphyxiation might well lead to the mortuary,’ states the book, sensibly.
‘I had heard stories, and then someone frogmarched me down the corridor to have a look at the gas masks and nooses and other implements involved. Once a week there’d be something to make you stop in your tracks.’
When she first met Derek, he was married with two children, Gemma (now 42) and Ross (44), but he and his wife split up in 1984. He and Pauline were friends, then got together and were married in 1990 and now have their own two children – Rowan (30), a musician, and, Amber (27), who has a degree in zoology and runs a day-care business for dogs.
Writing How To Solve a Murder was a result of wanting to explain what goes on behind the scenes. ‘The pathologist is the frontman, and everybody knows about them because of books and television programmes, but people don’t know about the team behind them.’ In a foreword, pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd, author of the bestselling
Unnatural Causes and a regular on Channel Five’s Autopsy, who was a colleague at Guy’s, writes of how mass disasters, high-profile or ‘celebrity’ cases or the deaths of homeless people on street corners would all be investigated with exactly the same determination. The book is written in both their voices alternately, with Pauline ghosting Derek’s chapters, and it took her two years. Editing it helped to occupy her during lockdown, when the lack of court cases meant that business was slow.
Pauline felt the time to be right for the book because between them they had so many stories to tell, and there is such a fascination for the world of forensic medicine. ‘Our friends always want to know what we’ve been doing and if we can give them any inside information,’ she says. ‘It was great to release the stories into the world.’
‘Derek was, truly, the lynchpin of the department,’ Dr Shepherd tells me. ‘He cheerfully turned his hand to anything and at anytime. “No” and “can’t” are simply not in his vocabulary.’
Shepherd himself has suffered from PTSD as a result of his job, but the Tremains say they have been able to cope. They discuss things. ‘It’s kind of like a shared language that you’ve got anyway, which I couldn’t really talk to my family about,’ says Pauline. ‘We are both practised at compartmentalising things, and are very open with each other if something has affected us. And working together allows you to discuss things as they occur, and offload a little bit. So we don’t tend to dwell on things now, that we might have years ago – when neither of us felt we had that support; particularly professional support at Guy’s, as none was provided.’
Derek complained of lack of support after the Clapham rail disaster, when they had to spend days sorting body parts. The police were offered counselling, but not Derek and his team, and they all had dreadful dreams. And suicides, Pauline says, are always very upsetting. ‘You don’t get over those.’ And anything to do with a child.
Forensic Image Services, their pioneering body-mapping and injury-identification business, started out as a small concern but has grown rapidly. ‘We have a lot of competitors out there now,’ says Derek, ‘because they’ve cottoned on to it. A lot of them cut and paste the real injuries, but we don’t – they’re all hand-drawn.
‘I am given the photographs and the post mortem report, and using a combination of avatars, overlays and graphic design, I translate them into a form that can be easily understood by the jury, so that they don’t have to see the real photographs of injuries. There have been cases when people have fainted or run out of court – we sanitise them into a form that’s easy to understand.’ It is also less distressing for the families of victims, who are often in court.
Derek appeared in a programme about the Rochdale Ripper, and provided body mapping for a documentary. What do they think of the way crime is depicted on television? ‘I watched an episode of Silent Witness once,’ says Pauline. ‘It was so preposterous that I couldn’t handle it. But Derek loves it. Waking the Dead is good. We like documentaries in the Crime and Punishment series, but I’m not keen on the dramas unless they’re authentic.’
Their clients now are mainly police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service. Derek’s other speciality is the ‘drowners’: 360,000 people drown annually worldwide, and Derek is one of the few scientists who can analyse the nature of a drowning from
human tissue. He explains to me in detail the difference between ‘dry drowning’ – when cold water hits the back of the throat and the body’s reaction is to shut down – and ‘wet drowning’ – evidenced by the presence of diatoms in the body – single-cell organisms found in every type of water, with an almost indestructible silicon shell. Derek is a diatomic specialist; his expertise in this field is still often called on, mainly as a consultant to a company called Forensic Access, based near Oxford, whose laboratories he uses to study the human tissue.
‘Now there’s all this health and safety,’ says Derek. ‘There was none of that when I started.’
‘We’re not even allowed to have photographs taken in front of exhibits that contain human tissue,’ adds Pauline. ‘It was the Human Tissue Act of 2004.
‘Years ago, if Derek needed to take something to work on it later before he went to court, he could just put it in a tub. There were row of tubs on shelves, all containing pieces of human tissue. And if he rebuilt a head, he could put a brain back in to give it substance, but you wouldn’t be able to do that now…’
What, you can’t even cart a human head round in a bucket any more? ‘Hmmm,’ muses Pauline, ‘would they be able to bring a head round in a bucket now? I’m not sure.’
‘You’ve just got to be careful with what you do with it when you’ve finished,’ says Derek. ‘Nowadays, the tissue that’s left over has to be disposed of properly. Years ago we used to chuck stuff around, even put it down the macerator. They’re so strict now.’
He reminisces fondly about the time they blew up a dead pig in order to study the effects of explosives on tissue (this was during the time of the IRA bombings), and he and his colleague had to dispose of the corpse: they carried it, wrapped up, through the hospital and chucked it in the incinerator, no questions asked.
That could have been the perfect murder. Do they ever discuss that over dinner? How to commit the perfect murder?
‘Nah,’ says Derek.
‘Bit morbid,’ adds Pauline.
How To Solve a Murder: True Stories from a Life in Forensic Medicine, by Derek and Pauline Tremain (Harpercollins, £8.99) , out on 21 January; it is available from books.telegraph.co.uk