A thin plume of grey smoke and the crackling sound of a bonfire were the only signs of activity in the grounds of the large, isolated detached house on the corner of dense woodland bordering a 500-acre country park in Essex. It was the middle of the summer of 2015. CCTV security cameras lined the driveway, recording every moment, 24 hours a day. And half a dozen bland, red “do not enter” signs could be seen through the late afternoon drizzle nailed to trees on the perimeter of the same property. From inside the house, the muffled sound of two Rottweilers barking furiously could be heard in the distance. They stood on hind legs pawing at the steamed-up double glass doors at the back of the house.
Just then, a young man and woman in their early twenties appeared inside the house and tried to calm the dogs down. Eventually, they dragged them into the sitting room and returned to open the double doors to the garden. Hesitantly, the couple crept out onto the patio shouting “Dad”. When there was no reply, the young man turned towards the bonfire, still crackling noisily in the distance. Behind him, his girlfriend stopped as she saw something, arching her neck to get a better look. Grabbing her boyfriend by the arm, she pulled him around and pointed.
The young man froze momentarily in his tracks before rushing towards the crumpled body of his 64-year-old father; lifeless and contorted, it lay spread across the ground, his torso soaked in blood.
The son straddled the body and started trying to give him CPR, frantically thumping his chest. The young man later said he could feel the life draining out of his father. With the body limp beneath him, he stopped and struggled back onto his feet. Breathing heavily, he rang 999 on his mobile.
Within half an hour, paramedics arrived and were examining the corpse. They immediately noticed very recent “pre-existing wounds” to the body following major surgery and ruled out foul play. The victim had clearly died from natural causes after falling from his quad bike, slewed on the ground nearby.
“Are you sure it’s his heart?” asked a young trainee paramedic, accompanying two senior colleagues who’d examined the corpse.
“Yeah, it’s his heart. I’ve seen dozens like this one before,” one of them said.
Two young police constables then arrived at the scene. They didn’t even bother examining the corpse after being told that the man’s wounds from recent gallbladder surgery had split open when he fell, which had caused him to bleed out. There was no point in even calling an inspector to the scene to confirm their assessment or checking the man’s antecedents on the police national computer. It was, as they say, an open-and-shut case.
If those two police officers had bothered to make the normal checks, they would have discovered that the UK’s National Crime Agency and Spanish police had had the victim under surveillance for the best part of 20 years.
Police ordered an autopsy as a matter of course because the death would be recorded as sudden, even though there were no suspicious circumstances. Less than an hour later, the corpse was gingerly loaded onto a gurney and taken away in a dark van with blacked-out windows to be stored in a morgue to await an examination by the next available pathologist.
It was an oddly muted end for a man feared and loathed throughout the underworld. Most had expected him to die in a hail of bullets after one feud too many. But instead, he’d keeled over in the middle of the grounds of his big house just like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather.
The body was kept in a deep freeze drawer at the Leicester University forensic pathology unit so that an expert could confirm what everyone already knew: that he’d died from what appeared to be a congenital heart defect and the after-effects of gallbladder surgery.
That corpse would remain refrigerated until highly respected forensic scientist Dr Benjamin Swift returned from a few days, leave to examine it, as he was obliged to do because of the sudden nature of the man’s death. The victim’s family were warned this might take four or five days, so they should not make any funeral arrangements for the time being, just to be on the safe side.
Five days later, pathologist Dr Swift returned from his early summer break. Less than two minutes after pulling open the drawer to the refrigeration unit containing the corpse, the medical examiner put down his instruments, walked to the phone attached to the wall in the corner of his laboratory, punched out a number and waited for a response.
“I think you’d better get over here as quickly as possible,” he said.
That corpse had given up the secrets that everyone close to the victim had suspected all along. Dr Swift’s post-mortem examination immediately found the man had been shot six times in the back, chest and arms. The gunmen had used special bullets that left minimal impact marks. When the news went public there was hell to pay.
Essex Police chiefs were hauled into Scotland Yard to explain themselves. This victim’s name was so synonymous with police corruption that there were suspicions the police might have deliberately misdiagnosed the cause of death in order to give his killer more time to escape. When it became clear this was not the case and that Essex Police had quite simply been inefficient, the force’s serious crime squad was given a no-holds-barred brief to immediately launch a major murder investigation.
Essex Police publicly admitted the man’s death now “bore all the hallmarks of a professional hit”. A contract killer had climbed over a fence into the garden and shot his victim at close range.
It was already a classic case of too little too late. The killer was long gone, and if it hadn’t been for the skills of Dr Swift, no one would have even known that the gangland crime boss had been murdered. “Without the pathologist’s examination, we might never have realized that criminal had been killed by a hitman in his own garden,” one of the detectives involved in the case later told me. “Sometimes we don’t give the scientists enough credit. It’s not always about being clever and digging up the truth. Sometimes the truth is staring you in the face.”
That in itself perfectly highlights the across-the-board importance of forensic scientists today. But in addition to this, there is another secret angle to this murder case, which links it directly to the popular television series Silent Witness, that has never before been publicly revealed. Pathologist Dr Benjamin Swift worked for many years as a consultant for the show. The production team behind Silent Witness could rightly point to these sort of professional “overlaps” as further proof that their immensely popular TV series more closely mirrors the real world than any other drama show in television history.
Most importantly, if the bullet-riddled corpse of that criminal had not been properly examined by a forensic expert, then a notorious gangland murder would have occurred without anyone ever being the wiser. “Yes, it was an open and shut case,” added the same detective involved in this murder enquiry. “But that’s not the point. We, the police, need to appreciate and listen to the experts, even when we think we have all the answers.”
At a time when the UK government has already implemented cost cutting throughout the forensic science world, this is a chilling reminder of how people could get away with murder if forensic scientists were not used for each and every unexplained death. The police who attended the scene of that killing had assured their superior officers the victim had died of natural causes. Until 30 years ago, that would usually have meant no autopsy. As one forensic scientist explained to me recently: “If we went back to those dark days again because of cost cuts by the politicians, we might as well give criminals a gun and tell them to shoot all their enemies dead because often they’ll no doubt get away with it.”
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In order to understand how forensic science evolved in the first place, one has to delve into the past, present and future of this most inexact of all sciences. That means revealing the characters that have had a big influence on the forensic world.
These forensic experts are a remarkable bunch. They first started to emerge on the criminal horizon more than two hundred years ago on London’s mean and filthy slum-riddled streets. Those early pioneers were the scientific renegades of their times, in a sense. They broke the rules much more than Nicky or Tom in Silent Witness. But they did all that to further society’s need to bring murderers and other criminals to justice.
In order to appreciate the full story of forensic science, one has to go much further back in time.