BACK IN TIME

The word “forensic” originated from the Latin word “forensis”, which stands for a forum. The idea was that a forum of experts would examine subjects, collect evidence and jointly form a concrete opinion. The earliest known use of forensic science dates back to the ancient Greek and Roman societies, who made significant contributions to the field of medicine, in particular pharmacology. They uncovered and studied the production, use and symptoms of toxins, which went on to be particularly helpful when it came to studying past murder cases.

Today, scientists believe that the first-ever “autopsy” was performed in 3,000 BCE in the Egyptian civilization that ruled the world back then. But that only happened because it was a prerequisite for their religion to remove and examine internal organs after death.

In 44 BCE came the first “official” recorded autopsy, when a Roman physician called Antistius dissected the body of Roman politician and general Julius Caesar. That examination revealed that despite his having been stabbed twenty-three times, Caesar’s death was caused by one knife wound through his chest. Antistius came to his ground-breaking conclusions after testing a selection of blades on animal carcasses and eventually matching one of the wounds to the one in Caesar’s corpse. This showed that a specific type of dagger was the actual murder weapon.

Antistius got every participant in the stabbing of Caesar to hand in their knives to him. Legend has it that the killer eventually (and proudly) confessed when the smell of blood attracted swarms of flies to his weapon as he gave it to Antistius. No one was ever prosecuted for the murder of Caesar because those very same assailants took over the Roman Empire.

Centuries later came the earliest version of a polygraph test in ancient India. This involved the examination of the saliva, mouth and tongue of a suspect. After the suspect’s mouth was filled with some dry rice, they were asked to spit it out. If the rice got stuck in their mouths, they were found guilty.

Four hundred years ago, the first reported autopsy in North America was performed by French colonists desperate to determine what was killing them as they endured a rugged winter on St. Croix island near what is now Portland, Maine. Nearly half of the 79 settlers led by explorers Pierre Dugua and Samuel de Champlain had died over that winter from malnutrition and the harsh weather. All this was uncovered when the skull of one man was found during excavations by the National Park Service just fifteen years ago. The top of the skull had been removed to expose the brain. It had been put back in place before the body was buried. It was the exact same procedure that forensic pathologists use during autopsies to this day.

Less than two centuries ago, crime scene investigators in London would taste the body fluids they found at a crime scene because it was the only way to identify what they were. Those supposedly upholding law and order at that time saw murders in strictly black and white terms. There was a body, which was usually followed by a confession or another body. If there were no bodies, solving these types of crimes was a mission impossible.

London back in those days was rife with crime and violence, and the continual inability of the police to solve heinous crimes left the upper classes horrified. They wanted to crack down on the criminals, so they started to fund the study of forensic sciences. As a result, a big breakthrough for forensics came shortly after that, when a fingerprint analysis system was developed by Sir Edward Henry – the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London. He established that the direction, flow, pattern and other characteristics of fingerprints gave them unique identifiable characteristics, and this established fingerprint analysis. Today the Henry Classification System remains the standard for criminal fingerprint analysis techniques across the globe.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were other big forensic breakthroughs that combined the use of basic logic and science. The first occurred after the arrest of a man called John Toms in Lancaster for the murder of Edward Culshaw with a pistol. The wadding left by the murder weapon perfectly matched that of a weapon owned by Toms. There was also a torn piece of newspaper in Toms’ pocket that matched a page that the victim had been reading. Encouraged by this discovery, one of Scotland Yard’s most “pioneering” officers, Henry Goddard – who eventually became commissioner – established that it was possible to match a bullet to a murder weapon under detailed examination.

Other aspects of forensics began to bear fruit, thanks to the rich citizens of London funding these scientific investigators. In 1816, a farm labourer called Warwick was convicted of murder after police forensics collected and analyzed footprints and cloth impressions left on the damp soil of the crime scene near a pool where a young maid had been drowned. Those impressions matched boots and clothes belonging to Warwick and proved he was the killer of the maid.

It wasn’t until 1836 that an Act of Parliament officially authorized payments towards forensic experts and the cost of post-mortems. In that same year a forensic scientist called James Marsh – based at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, south London, close to the River Thames – invented a reliable test for that most deadly of poisons – arsenic.

Marsh had been infuriated when he’d earlier been called as a chemist by the prosecution in the murder trial of a man who was accused of poisoning his grandfather with arsenic-laced coffee. Marsh had performed a standard test by mixing a suspected sample with hydrogen sulphide and hydrochloric acid, but by the time he showed the results to the jury, the sample had deteriorated and the suspect was acquitted on the basis of reasonable doubt. So Marsh developed a much better test by combining a sample containing arsenic with sulphuric acid and arsenic-free zinc, resulting in arsine gas. The gas was ignited, and it decomposed to pure metallic arsenic which, when passed to a cold surface, would appear as a silvery-black deposit. Marsh’s cleverly devised test was so sensitive that it could detect as little as one-fiftieth of a milligram of arsenic.

In 1845, a man called John Tawell fled to London after the death of a former lover. It was only after detailed examination of the body that traces of cyanide were discovered and a murder hunt was launched. Tawell eventually became the first criminal arrested through the use of an electric telegraph. But even more importantly, an expert forensic witness was called for the first time at a criminal trial, and his evidence that the body contained traces of cyanide ensured Tawell was found guilty.

But these developments in forensics were relatively few and far between back then. For many subsequent years, a combination of restricted scientific data and sloppy detective work continued to make forensic medicine the most neglected side of worldwide law enforcement.

Forensic scientists were often treated as the opposition by police officers, who accused them of spending too long reaching their conclusions while the police remained under intense pressure to arrest anyone they could lay their hands on. As a result, these two crucial investigative forces were often frozen in a classic stand-off, and the cause of truth and justice suffered untold damage.

At the start of the twentieth century, interest in forensic science suddenly took off. New techniques began to be developed, mainly in laboratories in Britain, Europe and the United States. For the first time, law enforcement agencies started to appreciate how important forensic examinations could be when it came to murder.

In France in 1910, Professor Edmond Locard opened the world’s first-ever fully equipped crime laboratory. His favourite phrase was “everything leaves a trace”. This was to become what’s now known as Locard’s Exchange Principle, which was based on the idea that evidence was always present at the scene of a murder, whatever the circumstances. Locard also believed that everyone and everything takes some piece of the crime scene with them when they leave.

By the 1920s, bullet analysis had improved enormously thanks to the use of a powerful microscope, which further helped connect the relationship between bullets and the shell casing from which they were fired.

But despite all these developments in forensic science, crime continued to thrive. Soldiers with post-traumatic stress from the First World War were arriving back in UK cities penniless and suffering mental health problems. This, combined with a worldwide recession, saw many of them join criminal gangs throughout the country. As a result, the following two decades were probably the most murderous years in the history of the UK’s twentieth-century crimelands. Many forensic scientists honed their skills during this period of time. But there was little else to celebrate in those interwar years.

In 1940, London was being carpeted with bombs dropped by the Germans during the early stages of the Second World War. Numerous murders were being committed in the capital, but few of them were being properly investigated because of limited police resources. The war had also led to a lack of funding for forensic experts and, as a result, the use of its scientists seemed to take a huge backward step.