COLD CASE QUEEN
The world’s leading forensic scientist tells JANE WARREN how she found the vital evidence that helped solve many of the UK’s most challenging investigations, including the deaths of Stephen Lawrence, Damilola Taylor and ‘God’s banker’ Roberto Calvi
TELEVISION dramas tend to give the impression forensic scientists spend a lot of time crouching in ditches imagining things, according to forensic biologist, Professor Angela Gallop CBE.
But the woman who helped bring the killers of Damilola Taylor, Stephen Lawrence and Rachel Nickell to justice says in a new book that the scrupulous examination of crime scenes is just a tiny part of their work.
The expert who proved to Operation Paget that Princess Diana was not pregnant when she died in Paris in 1997 after testing a sample of her stomach contents says: “In that case, we knew what we had to do and did it. But cold cases are generally much less straightforward. The best bits have already been taken if you are doing DNA profiling for example, and you have to be careful not to assume that investigating officers fully understood the crime scene.”
In such cases, elaborate reconstructions need to be staged – sometimes years after a crime was committed. And so it was that Professor Gallop found herself directing her then husband Russell, also a forensic scientist, as he teetered upon the same scaffolding upon which Italian banker Roberto Calvi had been found hanged beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge in June 1982.
Only this time, it had been erected in the bungalow of Professor Gallop’s garden in Newbury, Berkshire, a decade later. “At the instruction of his family, we set out to answer: Had Calvi committed suicide as the autopsy had claimed, or had he been murdered?” The experiment showed Calvi could not have hanged himself from the scaffolding. The lack of paint and rust on his shoes proved that he had not walked on it.
“Since then, I’ve designed all sorts of reconstructions,” says Gallop, 69, who founded Oxfordshire-based company Forensic Access in 1986. “From dripping blood into a phone to work out how an injured person interacted with it, to shooting a pig carcass to ascertain where the shot went.
“It’s a little bit divorced from the activity that gave rise to it – calmer, more analytical and normally helped by not meeting the people who are involved, until you see them in the dock that is. I remember seeing Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper in whose case I was involved, and thinking how inoffensive he looked. Evil can come with many faces.”
In 2008, her team’s recreations of Rachel Nickell’s final moments, as well as examination of body samples such as fingernail cuttings, led to the conviction of Robert Napper, 16 years after he murdered her on Wimbledon Common in 1992 as she was walking with her two-year-old son.
“In our search for ‘foreign DNA’ that could have come from Rachel’s attacker, a scientist put on clothes similar to Rachel’s and a colleague – acting as the
attacker and with black powder on his hands – pulled and pushed them until they resembled the distribution of Rachel’s clothing when her body was found,” she explains. “Residues of black powder indicated where contact had been greatest and where we should focus our testing.”
This revealed male DNA missed during the initial investigation and which turned out to match DNA from Napper, incarcerated in Broadmoor Hospital since 1995 for the murder of another young woman and her son.
When Gallop re-examined some hair combings from Rachel’s son she found a tiny flake of red paint that matched that on a steel toolbox that was among Napper’s possessions at Broadmoor. The evidence, which took more than two years to collate, fully exonerated Colin Stagg – tried in 1994 before his case collapsed.
During her remarkable 45-year career, Gallop has also been involved in solving some of the UK’s most challenging cases. In 2006 she and her team discovered the evidence that led to the convictions of the Preddie brothers for the manslaughter of 10-yearold Damilola Taylor in November 2000, putting the four youngsters originally charged with the crime definitively in the clear.
“The police got all the flak, but in fact the original forensic scientists had missed a bloodstain on the back of a pair of trainers that matched Damilola’s DNA,” she says. “A textile fibre embedded in it matched fibres from Damilola’s jumper. That meant it must have been transferred when the blood was wet.” And in 2003, she presented critical evidence in the new investigation of the 1988 Cardiff murder of Lynette White. Three men had been convicted but then had had their conviction overturned in 1992. Angela’s evidence led to the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor.
Then, in 2006, she was approached by the police about the Stephen Lawrence case, at that time the most high-profile unsolved crime in the UK.
LAWRENCE was 19 when he was killed while waiting for a bus in south-east London on April 22, 1993. When the five white suspects – including Gary Dobson and David Norris – were subsequently released without being charged, the Met was accused of not trying hard enough to solve the murder because the victim was black.
Eleven years later, when it seemed the trail had gone cold, Gallop was approached to review the evidence. Her team began a detailed analysis of the clothes Stephen was wearing and also examined garments, seized by the police, belonging to the suspects.
“Inside the back of the neck of Dobson’s jacket we found a tiny bloodstain measuring approximately 0.5 by 0.3 millimetres,” recalls Angela of that breakthrough moment. “When DNA profiling showed it matched Stephen’s profile, our loose end had suddenly been tied up. When the jacket was first examined, DNA profiling was not so advanced and you wouldn’t have been able to get a profile out of a tiny stain on a jacket.”
A microscopic search – akin “to finding an earring on a football pitch” – turned up several tiny pieces of cut hair on the suspects’ clothing that matched Stephen’s hair. Then came a lengthy process to check that none of this evidence had been caused by “cross contamination” during historical forensic tests. This was a huge additional undertaking, but Gallop wanted her evidence to be as bullet-proof as possible. “We had all the usual reasons for wanting to ensure the scientific evidence and our interpretation of it was watertight, but we were also acutely aware the Lawrence family had been through such a lot already.”
But on January 3, 2012, on the basis of the new forensic evidence produced by Gallop and her colleague Ros Hammond, Dobson and Norris were found guilty and sentenced to serve 15 and 14 years in prison, respectively.
“To get justice for Stephen was particularly satisfying,” says Gallop. “I’ve been to two memorial services for him and was invited by his mother Doreen to the second one. I said to her ‘If you ever want to understand the science just ask’, and she wrote back to say one day she would.”
Although Gallop comes across as hard as nails, she admits that sometimes the work can be harrowing – and indeed, her book should not be read by anyone of a sensitive disposition. “Some colleagues do get badly affected so we introduced counselling,” says the woman who started her career as an academic examining sea slugs and is not sure – if she had her time again – that she would choose a career in forensic science.
“The fall-out of trying desperately to be right all the time has ruined my small talk. If someone asks what I think about something I can’t make an unqualified statement, even about a cake I’m about to eat. To relax I love the drama of opera. I know it’s mad, but then life is mad.”
And after a career spent examining the worst that humans can do to each other, she would know.
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