JUSTICE AN EXACT SCIENCE
MOVING FROM studying sea slugs on the Isle of Wight to solving some of Britain’s most notorious murders is not a typical career trajectory.
But Angela Gallop’s fateful decision at the age of 24 to divert her expert eye from examining plant and animal life to picking apart the minutiae of grisly crime scenes in the search for vital clues has helped put many of the nation’s most appalling killers behind bars.
Now one of the world’s leading forensic scientists, her job takes her to far-flung places like Libya, Iraq and Somaliland, but her introduction to the world of crime started in a suburban house in Harrogate.
The property, owned by the mother of actor Michael Rennie, was the unlikely Yorkshire base for the Home Office Forensic Science Service in the mid-1970s.
“It was a grand suburban house with a ballroom and stables. We grew cannabis for determining yields in the conservatory and in the stables we had a firing range.
“We used to do blood grouping in a little bathroom on the edge of a marble sink.”
Professor Gallop, originally from Oxford, fell into a career in forensic science by chance. After studying Botany at the University of Sheffield, she returned to Oxford to study a DPhil in Biochemistry, specialising in a project examining sea slugs on the Isle of Wight.
While she found the work fascinating, Gallop began yearning for a career that would allow her to use her scientific knowledge in the real world.
“One day, a friend of mine said there is an interesting advert in the paper for the Forensic Science Service and there was a job in Harrogate. I had enjoyed Sheffield so much, it was a brilliant place and I thought ‘I rather miss Yorkshire’.”
After joining in 1974, she was eventually sent to her first crime scene a couple of years later – what would turn out to be one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.
“We were just beginning to link the murders and were really worried about this man. The first crime scene I ever went to was a Yorkshire Ripper crime scene. It was a baptism of fire, the first time I had ever seen a dead body. I thought beforehand, ‘I hope I’m not going to keel over’.
“It ended up being a bit of a farce because I hadn’t got any scene gear. I was with my boss who is a tall man and I had to borrow his stuff. So I was wearing a huge anorak down to my knees and in size 11 Wellingtons when I have size six feet.”
She said to her relief professional instinct kicked in at the scene, something that has served her well throughout her career. Gallop, back in Yorkshire yesterday to receive an honorary degree from the University of Sheffield, says some crime scenes are particularly difficult to deal with.
“There are some cases where you can’t help having your heart wrenched, particularly with children. It is not that I’m not empathetic to the victims in every case but for some, you look and you think this is terrible, especially when it is children who haven’t had the chance to live a life.
“But the reality is you have got to get on with it and do things really quickly and really well and check everything you are likely to need. You have got to work out what happened, where the offender entered, what they did, what the course of events was. If you don’t do the right things, you might miss all the evidence.”
In 1986, Gallop decided to set up her own company called Forensic Access – this time to help defendants. Gallop says she realised there was a problem with the justice system at the time in which defence lawyers did not have access to the same levels of expertise as prosecutors, leading to unbalanced evidence being presented to juries in some cases.
One of her notable successes in private practice was proving that Italian banker Roberto Calvi, famously found hanging on scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982, had been murdered rather than taking his own life.
Gallop says her painstaking work on that case brought home “the power of forensic science to sort things out for people”. “It was his family who commissioned the work because they couldn’t believe he would have committed suicide. They were staunch Roman Catholics and it was incredibly important to them and were very keen to get to the bottom of it.”
In 1997, she formed Forensic Alliance, an agency supporting police forces and the courts. The company initially struggled to get police to use their services, so offered to start looking at murders that had gone unsolved for years.
One of the cases she took on was the 1988 murder of Lynette White, a 20-year-old Cardiff sex worker who had been stabbed more than 50 times. Three men were convicted of murder in 1990 but their convictions were quashed two years later.
Gallop says: “It was an awful situation – they kept protesting their innocence but a lot of people in Cardiff thought they were guilty. Nobody was satisfied.”
Her team went back to the scene and examined the original woodwork at the property after stripping back paint that had subsequently been applied since the killing. A family search of the DNA database it identified the nephew of the killer who wasn’t even born at the time of the murder – but allowed police to track down the true murderer at long last.
Four years after the review began, killer Jeffrey Gafoor was jailed for life in 2003. Gallop’s company then played vital roles in finally securing justice for the families of both Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence.
Ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in November 2000 and a subsequent trial in 2002 of four youths collapsed against two of the defendants, with the two others found not guilty.
Gallop and her team reviewed the case – finding the vital DNA evidence that eventually resulted in brothers Danny and Rickie Preddie being convicted of manslaughter in 2006.
That success was repeated again in the arguably even higher-profile case of Stephen Lawrence, stabbed to death in 1993 when he was 18. New DNA evidence was central to the eventual convictions of Gary Dobson and David Norris for murder in 2012.
In more recent years, Gallop has gone on to set up Axiom International, a company which provides British forensic science expertise to law enforcement agencies around the world. More than 40 years after starting her illustrious career, Gallop remains passionate about her work and clear about the motives which drive her.
“It is justice, it is fairness. My mum was a great one for fairness and saying you have got to be nice to people. I think it comes from that. The power of science is just incredible, it is amazing what we can do for people.”