by Sue Black
It is a subconscious response, originating, I suspect, from the need to maintain perspective. Compartmentalising, on the other hand, is a cognitive choice, something you train yourself to do. I don’t believe I am uncaring and cold but I do consider myself level-headed. Hard as nails when I want to be, especially when I go to work, where I make every effort to keep visceral reactions and emotional investment to a minimum by opening an imaginary door into a detached, clinical box inside my head. If forensic experts allowed themselves to dwell on the immensity of human pain or on the gruesome spectacles we encounter, we would be ineffective scientists. We cannot take on the suffering of the dead. That is not our job, and if we don’t do our job, then we help nobody.
The actor and advocate of communicating science Alan Alda says that sometimes the greatest things happen at thresholds, and it is by consciously stepping across a threshold envisioned in my mind that I move from one world into another. There are probably several very self-contained compartments lurking in there – I think of them as rooms – and I know them all so well that I automatically choose the one that best suits the job at hand that day.
If I am working with decomposing human remains, I find a room where smell doesn’t register. If I am dealing with murders, dismemberment or traumatic events, then I spend the day in a soft space where there is a sense of calm and safety. If I have material to examine relating to child abuse I will take myself to a far corner of the room where there is little sensory connectivity so that I do not transfer what I am seeing and hearing in that alien landscape of incomprehensible violation into my personal space. While occupying each box I am aware that I am striving to be an inert observer, albeit one proactively applying scientific training to observation, and not necessarily a psychologically sentient participant. It is almost a form of analytical automation. The real me remains outside that box somewhere, removed and protected from the sensory bombardment of the work that goes on inside.
When I have examined, recorded, formed an opinion and completed my task, all I need to do is open the door of the room, step back across the threshold, lock it behind me and I am back in my ordinary life. I can then go home and be me – a mother, a grandmother, a wife, a normal person. I can sit and watch a film, go shopping, pull weeds in the garden or bake a cake. It is imperative that the door is kept locked and that I don’t let anyone else inside the box to poke around, or in any other way allow one life to bleed into the other. They need to stay completely separate and each must be protected.
Only I know the access code to the door; only I know all of the experiences that reside within the box, and all of the potential demons that might be lurking there, trying to look over my shoulder while I work. I can live alongside those experiences comfortably when I inhabit their forensic world, but when I leave it, they must remain locked inside. I do not intend ever to release them. I feel no need to ‘address’ them or talk about them in counselling. I will never commit most of them to paper or record them in any way, other than in my forensic notes. In some instances, I am bound by confidentiality, but even when I am not, I hold myself responsible for safeguarding the vulnerability of others, living or dead, and not betraying their secrets. There are things, too, I have seen and done of which my family and friends simply do not need to know, and should not know. All of the cases I have discussed in this book are already in the public domain. Those that are not are incarcerated in their own private box.
It is also a matter of protecting myself. It is only realistic, in my job, to fear the prospect of a Pandora’s box-type meltdown one day. If that door is not closed properly, and someone goes snooping around where they haven’t been invited, there is a risk that some or all of the demons might escape. Fortunately, I have thus far managed reasonably successfully to keep my two worlds apart. If they ever collide, and I fall victim to the clutches of post-traumatic stress, I will stop doing the work I do, because I know I would no longer be effective as an impartial observer.
We must respect the potential effects of our work on ourselves and never underestimate the crippling nature of that clinical condition, which can manifest itself without warning and to which we must never consider ourselves immune. It could be triggered in any of us by some incident, big or small, that nobody could ever see coming. I have seen the devastating impact of post-traumatic stress on colleagues who have become so haunted by what they have experienced that they have been unable to work and how it has destroyed lives, relationships and careers. Good mental health requires regular attention, so we must remain vigilant and keep guard on those incarcerated demons. But whenever one or two of them do manage to escape, the havoc they cause cannot be attributed to any weakness on the part of their owner.
Since I believe there is nothing to be feared from death herself, in my case any such lurking demons are more likely to be associated with the crimes of those still living and breathing. I have only once been aware of my work threatening to creep into my private life and the trigger was probably the subconscious effect on my psyche of the terrible things humans are capable of doing to other humans, rather than any ghosts of the dead.
It happened when our youngest daughter Anna was invited to a school dance by a boy. She looked gorgeous in her long gown, with her hair styled into a grown-up ‘do’. Tom and I were present at the big event as part of the posse of parental chaperones, watching to ensure that propriety was observed, that no alcohol was surreptitiously consumed and that the only thing smoking was the barbecue. At one point, scanning the dance floor for Anna, I saw her dancing with a middle-aged man I didn’t recognise. It was a small school and I thought I knew everyone. Nobody was able to tell me who he was.
I felt my pulse start to race, my stress levels rise and a flush envelop my face. It took every scrap of willpower I could muster not to run across the dance floor and demand to know who he was and why he was dancing with my daughter. Forcing myself to remain on the sidelines, I monitored every single step of that dance. I watched where he put his hands as the two of them twirled and waltzed, gauged just how close they were dancing and scrutinised his physical interaction with Anna as they talked and laughed. The poor man never put a foot (or hand) wrong, but that did not stop the alarm bells going off in my head.
Acknowledging that my reaction was completely over the top, not to say way out of character, I slowly talked myself down and rationalised the situation back to normality, even though my heart rate wasn’t listening. I told myself that we were at a well-organised school event, with parents and teachers everywhere, I was standing just a few feet away from my daughter and there was no sign whatsoever that she was in any danger. It didn’t prevent me from going across after the dance was finished and asking her, as casually as I could, if she was having a nice time and, by the way, who was the man she’d been dancing with? It turned out that he was the father of the boy who had invited her. I felt such a numpty but I was definitely still rattled.
Is that what post-traumatic stress feels like? I don’t know, but it was a sense of threat and panic I had never experienced before or, thankfully, since. You could put it down to the standard fears of an overprotective mother, but I knew that I was definitely out of sorts and this was not normal for me. It was a crazy moment but the fact that I caught it, and saw it immediately for what it was, reassured me that, should I ever be struck by post-traumatic stress, there is a good chance I would recognise it.
We had handled four paedophile identification cases that week, so maybe that could explain my uncharacteristic response. Although most of our work is, naturally, with the dead, the reach of forensic anthropology now extends to the identification of the living. One important innovative strand is the assistance my team at Dundee is able to offer, nationally and internationally, in cases of child sexual abuse. This came about as a result of our efforts to answer a question posed by a particular investigation.
Research into identification is often driven by such questions, which present us with an exciting opportunity, because, very
occasionally, an entirely new field may be unveiled. With much of the early work on identification having been in use for over a century, it is a rare and wonderful event when something fresh comes along. The prime example of this is DNA profiling, where the system invented and developed by Sir Alec Jeffreys at Leicester University eventually became the forensic standard worldwide and changed our domain for ever. So much so that we often forget that we did not have DNA analysis in our forensic toolbox until the 1980s.
For me, such an avenue opened up when the police contacted us for help with a tricky case. Although neither the methodology nor the underlying principles to which we turned were new, the ways we found to apply them were. Sometimes it takes a change in societal circumstances to bring about the rekindling of a lost art or for a particular approach to become ‘of its time’, and that was indeed what happened in this field.
In 2006, I was contacted by Nick Marsh, head of the Metropolitan Police photographic service, with whom I had served in Kosovo. He had a problem case he didn’t quite know where to go with, and thought he would see if I could help. The Met were investigating a father accused by his teenage daughter of sexual abuse. They had some images they felt could be useful but they didn’t know how they might extract evidence from them – and, frankly, neither did we.
The girl alleged that her father would come into her bedroom in the middle of the night and touch her inappropriately as she slept. She told her mother, who was not prepared to believe her and dismissed her complaint as attention-seeking. But this smart, brave young lady, determined to demonstrate that she was speaking the truth, set up the camera on her computer to record through the night. At 4.30 in the morning the camera captured images of the right hand and forearm of an adult male who entered the room and proceeded to interfere with her as she lay in her bed – just as she had said.
In the dark, the camera had switched to infrared (IR) mode and so the picture was in black and white. When the image of a live body part is recorded in this way, the near-IR light is absorbed by the deoxygenated blood in the superficial veins. As a result, the intruder’s veins were clearly delineated, looking a bit like a map of black tram lines. The question we were asked was: could we identify someone from the pattern of veins on the back of their hand and their forearm? Absolutely no idea was the answer, but we would think about it and do some literature research to see what was already out there.
The number of publications relating to human anatomical variation is extensive. As well as having great importance for the medical, surgical and dental worlds, it has translatable value into the forensic realm of human identification. Andreas Vesalius knew in 1543 that the veins in the extremities of the body were highly variable in their location and pattern and that, in terms of finding a vein in the upper limb where you expected it to be, nothing between the antecubital fossa (the pit of the elbow) and the fingertips could be relied upon with any great certainty. Some 350 years later, at the dawn of the twentieth century, another professor of forensic medicine at Padua University, Arrigo Tamassia, offered the opinion that no two vein patterns seen on the back of the hand were identical in any two individuals.
Tamassia was critical of the Bertillon system of anthropometry that was starting to gather momentum as a means of recording the physical measurements and appearances of criminals. Bertillonage, in tandem with fingerprinting, predominated in the scientific criminalistics world at that time. Given that vein patterns could not be disguised, did not change with age and could not be destroyed, Tamassia considered there to be a place for vein-pattern matching in the identification of offenders. On the basis that, while fingerprint analysis required lengthy training, the six basic patterns of vein analysis, and their many subclass variations, could be observed from a photograph or drawn on to paper, he argued that examination of the veins would be an easier test for law-enforcement officers to perform.
Tamassia’s new technique was quickly picked up in the United States. Newspaper articles in the Victoria Colonist in 1909, and in The New York Times and Scientific American the following year, hailed it as revolutionary.
Tamassia rather sweepingly described vein patterns as ‘infallible, indestructible and ineffaceable’. Perhaps this was a little rash, as his pronouncement quickly became immortalised in crime fiction by Arthur B. Reeve, author of a series of detective stories featuring Professor Craig Kennedy, who was dubbed by some the American Sherlock Holmes. In ‘The Poisoned Pen’ (1911), Kennedy confronts the criminal with the words: ‘You perhaps are not acquainted with the fact, but the markings of the veins in the back of the hand are peculiar to each individual – as infallible, indestructible, and ineffaceable as finger prints or the shape of the ear.’
Somehow science fell out of love with vein-patterning and its shine faded. However, like all good ideas, it did not die but merely lay dormant, waiting for opportunity and happenstance to bring it out of hibernation. In the early 1980s Joe Rice, an automation controls engineer at Kodak in England, believed he had invented vein-pattern recognition. He hadn’t, of course, because Vesalius and Tamassia had blazed that trail. What Rice did invent, using infrared technology, was a biometric vascular barcode-reader which could store his own vein pattern and, by extension, those of others. He came up with the idea after his bank cards and identity were stolen, and developed it into a method of identification that he claimed was more secure than a PIN number.
Rice patented his Veincheck system, but the world was still wedded to fingerprints and his innovation, like Tamassia’s before it, fell into relative disuse. By the new millennium, however, biometrics and security were a boom industry. With the expiry of the patent on Rice’s work, both Hitachi and Fujitsu launched security products using vein biometrics, hailing vein patterns as the most consistent, discriminatory and accurate of biometric traits. Today security experts view vascular pattern recognition (VPR) as a valuable biometric because, they say, it cannot be destroyed, it cannot be mimicked and it does not change with age. Isn’t it wonderful how history hums a familiar tune?
For the vein pattern to be used as a means of identification it must first be recorded and stored in a searchable database. When the individual then places his or her hand on an IR viewer, the image is compared automatically with all the patterns held on the database and is matched to its owner. There is no risk to health and, since the hands are always on show, there is no stigma or inconvenience attached to presenting this part of our body for examination.
To see the variability of the vein patterns in the human body, just take a look at the veins on the back of your left hand, compare the pattern to that on your right hand and then go and check them against someone else’s. If your hands are a bit hairy or chubby, you may be able to see the patterns on the inside of your wrists more clearly. They will all be different, even in identical twins, because our veins are formed before birth in a way that makes them unique to us. In the fetus, blood vessels develop from small isolated ‘puddles’ of blood cells. When the heart starts to pump and then relax, the arteries and veins begin to assemble as the puddles coalesce. Arteries are fairly consistent in their location and patterning; veins are much more variable, and the further away they are from the heart, the more variable they will be. That is why, as Vesalius observed, the veins in the feet and hands will show more pattern variation than those in the legs or arms.
By 2006, we had the benefit of the accumulated work of Vesalius (from anatomical specimens), Tamassia (from forensic research) and the advances made by Rice, Hitachi and Fujitsu in biometrics. Could we translate it all into a technique that would answer the question posed by the police investigating this particular accusation of sexual abuse?
What we did not have was the opportunity to compare a vein pattern extracted from an image via a mathematical algorithm with its counterpart stored on a database. We had to compare the image from the young girl’s computer camera with a custody suite photograph of her father’s forearm and hand. So in that sense our method was more akin to Tamas
sia’s than to those of his successors. If the vein pattern was not the same, we could be certain that the arm and hand could not belong to the same individual in both images, and therefore we would be able to exclude the father. If the pattern was the same, we could not, however, say with equal certainty that it was the same man in both images because we had no information that would allow us to make the necessary statistical inferences as to exactly how variable a vein pattern would be, and whether two people might share the same pattern. We could hardly ask Vesalius, who had been dead for 500 years, or Tamassia, who had been gone for nearly a hundred, so we were fundamentally looking to be able to exclude the father. I wonder whether Vesalius or Tamassia could have given us an answer. At times I feel that collectively we may have forgotten more anatomy than we remember.
It is important in forensic science that we do not overstate the capabilities of any technique. It is not our job to find someone innocent or guilty, it is our duty and responsibility to examine the evidence dispassionately and give a valid professional opinion, honestly and transparently expressed, on the reliability, accuracy and repeatability of our methods and our findings.
Having compared the veins on the offender’s right hand and forearm with those of the girl’s biological father, we went to court with our results and opinions, such as they were. Since this was the first time that such evidence had been heard in a UK court, there was a lot of discussion between the judge and the legal teams about its admissibility. The jury were asked to retire from the courtroom to allow voir dire – a preliminary examination of a witness by the judge or counsel to assess the admissibility of the evidence. The judge ultimately decided that, because vein-pattern analysis was based on sound anatomical knowledge and a prior, albeit limited, research history in the biometrics industry, it would be admitted into the court and so the trial went ahead and we presented our evidence. There was an understandably robust cross-examination from the defence team, but it was survivable.