Bringing death to life
Dr Shepherd peels back the skin of new true-crime series The Truth About My Murder.
Over the course of his career, forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd has conducted over 23 000 post-mortem examinations, worked for the UK Home Office on high-profile cases like the death of Princess Diana, and he advised on the management of UK fatalities following the September 9/11 terror attacks.
Now he cuts into 10 of the most notorious murder cases from the United States and UK – including the killing of 69-year-old professor Peter Farquhar by his 31-year-old fiancé Benjamin Field – in the new CBS Justice (*170) true-crime series The Truth About My Murder. Using an anatomage imaging table (which displays full-body digital images of human anatomy) and detailed real-life forensic reports, Dr Shepherd guides viewers through the cases. And interviews with family members and friends, journalists, psychologists, detectives and others in the criminal justice system reveal the motivations and actions of the killers and their victims. Read on as Dr Shepherd peels back the skin of the series…
A LIFE IN DEATH
You learnt late in your career how to process the stress of the job. How do you do it? The most useful thing for me was seeing a psychologist in the depths of my anxiety and depression. And talking through how to bring up, from my memory, some of the images and my thoughts of cases I’ve been involved in and look at them professionally. But then remember I’m always going to put them away. She described it as putting them back in a box and putting the box back on the shelf. You had to consciously do that; you couldn’t just walk away from it. The time pressures before had meant that I’d hop from one thing to another, so shutting down was a struggle. I also have hobbies: I fly aeroplanes, keep bees – things that occupy my brain, practically and
intellectually. And when I’m doing those things, the pressures of work naturally get pushed to one side and shut down.
How do you handle such painstaking work in cases where there’s national attention and pressure for work to be done quickly? Managing time is always difficult, but when it comes to a murder investigation, by and large you always make time. You can’t not do anything about it for six or nine months when someone’s waiting in prison on remand. But if you feel that another test is justifiable, there is always that time. Sadly, in baby deaths where there’s a need to examine the brain of the child, time is crucial when you’re working on that case. But in England there’s a real shortage of specialist brain pathologists who can do this, so there can be a huge delay within the system itself.
THE TRUTH ABOUT MY MURDER
How did you come into The Truth About My Murder? When the production company phoned and asked if I’d like to do it, I waited probably 10 seconds before I phoned back and said, “Yes! That sounds like a great show.” I tell the whole story that runs through each case, and when we get to the forensic pathology, I get quite excited and do my bit. I offered some guidance as to what sort of things they should look for. When they got it down to a shortlist, I looked through the cases trying to find ways we could talk about the body, talk about what the forensic pathologist did, and use this wonderful table that they found.
STUDYING THE BODY
Outside of the show, had you worked with a tool like the Anatomage Table before? In a strange sense, I actually have one on my laptop. But it’s very much a digital representation, not the MRI images of real people that you can get on the Anatomage Table. I use it when I’m trying to remind myself of important bits of anatomy that I forget. The Anatomage Table is a fantastic piece of kit. Its main field now is teaching anatomy to undergraduate students. But we have an issue in forensic pathology with presenting evidence to juries in court. We used to give them photographs, but that’s now felt to be rather challenging to people who’ve never done forensic pathology. And to be suddenly presented with, let’s say photos of someone who’s been bludgeoned with a hammer, is a traumatic experience. Now we can use MRI imaging to present information to juries in a gentler way, but knowing that it’s still accurate and allows them to come to the correct verdict. What might people not realise that you can tell by looking at the body? An examination of any dead body is a complete examination. If someone has been stabbed in the chest, we don’t just look at the stab wound and say, “Yeah, they’ve been stabbed. That’s it.” We look at everything both with our naked eye and microscopically. Then we do toxicology and maybe bacteriology so that we have a full understanding of this person and why they’ve died. People are quite surprised at the peripheral things we might find out about someone and what they went through during their final moments of life. It’s terribly demanding.