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August 24, 2025 39 mins

In this episode of Real Crime with Adam Shand, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. David Ranson takes us inside the world of crime scenes, cold cases and the science that helps solve them. From the myths of the “perfect murder” to the reality of domestic violence cases, Ranson reveals how forensic pathology uncovers not just causes of death, but the human stories behind them. 

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Appote production.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shand I'm your host.
Adam Shand the idea of a perfect murder as long
fascinated people that someone could conceal a cause of death
from the forensic pathologists and the police, to make it
look like suicide or misadventure, or to so meticulously cleanse
a crime scene so that they could evade detection. He

(00:36):
either held his victims or washed them repeatedly so that
any trace DNA would be removed from their skin. An
old underworld contact of mine used to say that you
only get away with murder when you yourself have died,
because there's always someone coming after you trying to solve murders.
Twenty three years later, DNA under a victim's fingernails finally

(00:58):
tied the killer to the crime. Because forensic science kept
catching up. The science of forensic pathology and DNA science
has come a long way, making the chance of getting
away with murder even more remote. And I wonder the
way it's going with science, whether there'll be any secrets
in the future.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
In another breakthrough, a new DNA tool is being used
to revisit a nineteen ninety six murder testing evidence that
technology couldn't crack at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
I'm joined by one of Australia's most respected forensic pathologist,
doctor David Ranson, to discuss this and other aspects of
the trade. Welcome David, Hello Adam, how are you very well? Indeed,
thank you so much for joining me. Have you ever
seen a perfect murder? Well?

Speaker 1 (01:44):
No, I mean I think it's it's a great idea.
And I do a lot of work with crime shows
and TV shows and films and writers, and they're all
looking for making murder harder and harder to detect. And
one of the challenges sometimes, of course, is they want
you to give them the perfect murder scenario that will
almost impossible to solve, and for various professional reasons, I

(02:07):
don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
How many murders did you cover doing your distinguished career
with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Well it didn't start there. I started doing cases in
the UK as a sort of an assistant, you know,
holding the note sheet for my boss and following around
seeing what they did. I went to my first murder
I suppose in nineteen seventy eight actually, and I worked
with various people in the UK and then did a

(02:35):
few of my own casework in the UK before I
came to Australia in eighty eight. So during that ten
years I was studying further as a pathologist, generally in
hospital pathology and that sort of thing, and getting exposure
to forensic cases. Part time, I worked a bit as
a police surgeon or clinical forensic physician as well during
that era, looking at victims of crime, live victims of crime,

(02:57):
and of course taking samples from offenders and things like that.
So that broad background working with you know, coroners, were
with police things like that was something that I sort
of did throughout my professional postgraduate training and so when
I came to Australia, I was able to sort of
step into that role reasonably quickly and easily because I

(03:19):
had that background. But you know, since nineteen eighty eight,
it's hard to know the numbers, but it would be
several hundreds of cases that I would have dealt with.
Plus of course it's not just the cases that you've
dealt with. You know, forensic pathology is working as a
team and so you all discuss case work with your colleagues,
you learn from each other, you get somebody's eyes to

(03:40):
look at something for you, you look at things for
other people. So you build up a picture of many
more cases than just the cases you've personally been responsible for. So,
for example, we get around sixty seventy homicides a year,
so over thirty forty years, haven't certainly haven't looked at

(04:01):
all of those, but it's a fair number.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Any of those were you unable to establish a cause
of death. I think the actual cases where you don't
get a cause of death, even if you take that
work generally across coroners are around five percent when it
comes to homicide. That's probably a bit less. Actually, you
actually solve a few more in terms of the actual cause,
the medical cause of death. But there are a whole

(04:26):
range of cases where it's going to be almost impossible.
You know, you get some you know, scattered bones that
are washed up on a beach from someone who's been
had their body disposed of at sea and it's been
eaten by sharks and sea lies and kinds of things.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
You know, the soft tissue is all gone. So if
the cause of death lies in the soft tissues, then
you're not going to see anything. So those are ones
where you don't have what I call a strictly medical
cause of death. You might find, you know, some bones
in the bush somewhere and there's a what looks like
a very deep, you know, knife notch cut in the bone,

(05:02):
in the ribs over the heart. You might say, well, look,
the chances are there's been a stab wound in the
area of the heart, and that will be a satisfactory
cause of death. But I can't absolutely medically prove it
because the heart's not there.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
How much does intuition and experience play when you're looking
at a corpse, I could, ever, and something strikes you
as not quite right? Or is it really that? Mostly
the cause of death is bleedingly obvious.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, look, mostly in those sorts of cases, it is
bleeding obvious. If you've got gunshot wounds and they're in
areas of the body where a bullet going through is
going to cause death straight away, heart, brain, things like that,
then absolutely there are other parts of the body where
you may survive for a period of time following a
gunshot wound. So yes, a lot of cases it's straightforward.

(05:53):
I always say that the most complicated forensic cases are
not homicides. They're the complicated death associated with complex medical
treatments that's gone in hospital. You know, scenario where there's
overlapping of natural disease, overlapping of drugs, overlapping of trauma
or coming together. You know, teasing that out is a

(06:14):
real challenge and a lot of times people think that
forensic pathology is about a cause of death. Actually it's
not really. When you get to court, the cause of
death issue is usually very very straightfought. The issue is
how can forensic pathology help reconstruct the circumstances in which

(06:35):
the death occurred. I mean, take your gunshot wound case.
You know some of the shot in the chest. Well,
that's a fairly straightforward cause of death. But where was
the victim position? How were they positioned? Were they lying down?
Where they're standing up?

Speaker 2 (06:47):
There?

Speaker 1 (06:47):
Were they sitting down? Where was the offender? Were they
above them shooting down? Where they below them shooting up?
You know, all of those dynamics. Had there been a
prior fight, were there situations where there's you know, drugs
involved or something like that means the person wasn't adequately
able to defend themselves.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
I mean did they themselves and.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
The bullets actually nicked through their part of their hand
as they put their hand up, meaning that they were
certainly conscious and able to respond at the time they
were shot. So all of these sorts of factors come
together in this reconstruction of what were the circumstances surrounding
the moment of death.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Because the police and prosecutors come to forensic pathologists and say,
we believe that we have a suspect who's committed this murder,
and they're trying to elicit evidence from you and data
to support that.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Well, yes, sometimes, I mean sometimes you genuinely have the
body where there's literally no suspects, no even knows who
they are, and that, of course you're starting and with
that sort of methodical way of looking at it. And
the reality is that whilst people talk a lot about
intuition and they talk about experience this context, a lot

(07:58):
of it's about painstakingly following proper protocols covering all your basis. Certainly,
the more experience you've got you see more things before.
But that can both be an advantage and if you like,
a blessing, but also a curse because you tend to
see the case through your previous experience, and this might

(08:20):
be novel.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
So you've just.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Got to be really careful not to say, oh, you've
got all this huge experience and therefore you're going to
more easily know the answer. Now, that's not the case.
What really saves your bacon later on when you're being
cross examined in court is being thorough and covering all
your bases, even the ones that you think are probably

(08:43):
unlikely to be relevant.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Correct, because we have seen in recent years a tendency
for the creation of expert medical witnesses who are paid
well for their services, who sometimes can be accused of
producing answers that suit their employers.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Sure, I mean that's always the case really for all experts,
all disciplines. In reality, whether you're you're an architecture expert
or whether you're a drug expert or whatever, there's always
that risk, clearly if you're an employee of government and
a state government sort of organization where you've got a
lot of independence, which is certainly a situation that we
had in the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. When I

(09:23):
work there, people have sort of said, well, you could
have this bias in this direction or that direction. Well, yeah,
anyone could be biased of course they can, but there
was really nothing in it for us. I mean, you know,
it didn't earn any more money because you expressed a
particular view. You didn't get any more particular cu dos
because you expressed a particular view. And really what was
valuable for me when I was practicing was the view

(09:47):
of the judge in the case or the view of
the defense barrister, because I think understanding where they were
coming from in dealing with the case is really important.
The other thing I think is really useful is even
if you're doing most of your work within if you're
like the crown prosecution side of the equation, getting involved
in cases involving defense work is really important. It's very

(10:11):
grounding in understanding where the other people are coming from
or alternative views. And once you understand what alternative views
can be and how they can be relevant, it actually
sharpens you up in the way that you're doing your work.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
How much do we have to blame CSI and shows
like that for misinterpreting what the forensic pathologist actually does?

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yes, look, I mean this is one of the topics
I actually sometimes talk about, and I've given a few
talks to U three A's and propos clubs and various
community groups are around this, and it is really very
interesting what those shows do. And I bring it down
to what I call three condensations. The first condensation is

(11:00):
the character sets. So most TV shows and so on,
you can really only have perhaps a half a dozen
key characters doing the things that need to be done.
An audience can't hold more than about six key characters
in mind. In fact, it's probably a bit less than that.
So what happens in the TV shows is you have
to have one character who does the job of fifteen

(11:23):
or twenty people in the real world, so you can
have the audience identifying with that person. So you have
these ubiquitous forensic scientists who sort of cover every branch
of forensic science, whereas in fact the real world there's
you know, sort of three hundred out there, and they've
got little teams working in different areas, but they really
don't work in the other If you're a chemist, you're
a chemist. You're not a ballistics person. If you're a

(11:45):
blood spatter DNA person, you're not the same as the
motor vehicle examiner. Or so this is condensation, and that's
quite fun. The next conversation is about time. You know,
your results have to come back at the by the
end of the TV show and usually after the ad break.
That's been strategically placed to allow on a morphous period
time to go past. Whereas the real world it takes time.

(12:08):
It takes time to get the science right, to not
only do the test, but then validated, have it audited,
have it checked, and so on. And these are complex
processes to make sure that the evidence is reliable. But
you'll never see any of that in the sort of
in the TV show side of things. And finally, it's
a geography. You know, all these things sort of happen

(12:28):
in one multi center where all these tests are done,
where the autopsy has done in this room and the
chemistry is done over there. Sometimes it's all in one
big room actually, whereas in fact specialist labs are very
specialist and they have their own areas, they have their
own places. It may not be unlikely to be the
same building. The moltuary might be here, the chemistry laboratory

(12:51):
for this aspect might be over there. There might be
a university department doing some analysis somewhere else. So it's
this it's bringing together and if you think of it
like an orchestra. You know, there's all these different sections
in the orchestra, and they each got their specialist role.
They're each particularly relevant to the right sort of music.

(13:11):
And for one piece of music, one group of instruments
might be really powerful important, but for another bit of music,
it's a different group of instruments. But they're all working together,
and the conductor is the person that's making it all
come together. Now, when it's a death investigation involving complex
medical issues, you know, the forensic pathologies is very much

(13:32):
the conductor in that process, but they're not the only
person giving the evidence or making the final result that's
relevant to the particular case.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
And also, I guess the other misconception that comes through
shows like CSI is that murders are always underworld related
or some high drama, when the sad reality is the
vast majority are domestic violence related murders.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, I'm trying to think back to us the other day.
That's absolutely right. I think the first case I ever
dealt with was a domestic violence between partners, and I
think the last one was the same thing, and probably
the majority of the cases in between have been that.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
How does that accumulate in your soul, your conscience?

Speaker 1 (14:16):
You know, it's funny. I mean, people talk a great
deal about the stresses of a job, and there's obviously
quite significant issues in people being traumatonized by the work
that they do, and people often say, well, how can
you cope with this? I actually think that coping with
death in the context of my work is a bit
easier than some of the work that you do as

(14:37):
a clinician. Dealing with patients who are alive, who are
struggling with medical issues, who have pain, who have you
limited lifespan because their illnesses, working with them their families,
I think is incredibly challenging, and I think much more
emotionally challenging than dealing with the deceased persons. That's not
to say that we don't talk to families. I remember

(14:58):
a case or quite a few years ago now where
I was up at the Supreme Court giving evidence in
a difficult again type sort of case, and I've finished
my evidence and I was away and are walking out,
and the family of the disease came up to me
and said, you know, shook my hand and said, you know,
thank you. But with something we've always wanted to know
we could never And I went off and had a

(15:20):
cup of coffee then with them and talk to them
about the death of their loved one. Nothing to do
with the case in terms of what happens on, but
just the experience. They wanted to know what their loved
one would have experienced and did they feel pain? And
those are really important conversations and they're critical sometimes. And
something that we did do a lot of at the incident,

(15:42):
and we still do, is meet with families at families
request to take them through those sorts of issues. And
sometimes it's not just the immediate family, it might be
a more distant family. And often what you're doing is
you're giving the most intimate family member the language that
they can talk to their families and friends. People find

(16:05):
it very hard to talk about what happens to their
loved one, and family and friends will ask them and
they don't have the language to express it easily because
it's all strange and novel to them. If you give
them that language, it actually takes a great deal of
stress off them in those next weeks and months. And

(16:27):
I suspect from a point of view of a journalism
it's very similar you're giving people a language to understand
what's gone on so that discussions about it can be meaningful.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
As a journalist, if I was seeing a body in
the mortuary, looking at the injuries that suffered that cause
their death, I'd be wondering about that person their life, Yes,
who were they? Yes?

Speaker 1 (16:50):
And actually, in investigations into a death, it's very important
to get a concept of the person's life because what
you will see when you examine the body is, if
you like, the imprint of those years of life and
all the things that happen to them. So there will
be the old injury, the old broken arm, the old

(17:11):
disease that they've had and been treated for, and things
like that. Not that those necessarily explain the death per se,
but they give you a framework about that person, you know,
tells you something about that person's ability to do work
or to actually move simply and easily, you know, and
things like that, what's their vision like? You know, you
can't test these things after death, but you can sometimes

(17:34):
see the markers in the body, which would give you
some insight into what that person would be like and
what their abilities would be to do things. And that's
why we'd like any doctor. Where you go to see
the doctor, the first thing they're doing is taking a history,
understanding you, understanding why you've come there, understanding what's important

(17:55):
to you. And it's those issues that help them with
their diagnosis and treatment. And it's exactly those same issues
that help you interpret what you see in the ceased.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
But also when you're looking at someone who may have
suffered unreported domestic violence over a long period, and the
police are trying to establish a motive and a history
behind a murder, so you can paint a picture through
previously unreported healed injuries through.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Well, that may well be the exactly so. But also
are we talking to the police and saying, well, look,
I've seen some things here that tell me there's something
gone on in the past. What I think you should
do is find this person's gp, find out where they've
lived in various places. Find out where which hospitals they
might have attended if they got an injury. Let's get
the hospital records from these five or six hospitals when

(18:45):
they've moved around, whatever. Let's look at their admission history
for that hospital. How many times they come in with
broken ribs, how many times they come in with them fractures, skull,
facial trauma or something like that. And I'll tell you
it jumps out at you very very quickly when you see.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Those sorts of cases. This is sounding more like CSI
my faith is restored, or maybe that sort of investigation
going on, you.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Know, But that is part of the job. I mean,
it is thinking about the possibilities. A lot of people
think forensic's all about introducing from what you see. The
reality is what you're doing is you're creating possible hypotheses
based on knowledge and experience for sure, and then testing those.
If you can't conceive of it in the imagination, you're

(19:31):
probably not going to easily diagnose it.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Right. Fascinating. Let's get back to the future by going
to the past. Yes, you've had an amazing career. I
could pick out of all the things you've done from
identifying Warded in Kosovo MH seventeen, but one that I
want to talk about is twenty eleven. You were involved.
You were the lead scientist in identifying the remains of
Ned Kelly Well.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
I wouldn't told myself the lead scientists at all. This
was a team at Victornian's for forensic medicine where we
saw the opportunity, and it did. There was a bit
of a necessity to try and solve some of these issues,
but we saw the opportunity of saying, well, how can
we apply modern forensic science to help resolve a historical issue.

(20:19):
And the great thing about that is it's a real
test bed for all of the techniques you're doing. You know,
how can we improve our ability to get DNA out
of bone samples, how can we improve our ability to
analyze remains radiologically and so on. So the opportunity is

(20:40):
that these sorts of activities reinforce the multidisciplinary team context
of what you're doing. So everyone gets together, they sit
in the room, they work out ways of doing this.
Who's going to do what first, let's triage this, let's
work out how we're going to do this. And you know,
these are jobs that you know take place over months,

(21:01):
and we've still got our day job to do. So
we get on with the day job, and those other
moments we sit down and we try to think about
other ways of doing these things and look at these
historical cases. And this has real application when you get
the bones of the wood, you know, the bones out
of the bush somewhere, the bones in a river somewhere,
Because you're applying these same sorts of techniques, and the

(21:23):
more the teams are integrated, work with each other, break
down those general communication barriers we have in all jobs
that we do. Then it's a powerful way of managing
resources and delivering them to the task in.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Hand because you're able back in twenty eleven to identify
those remains, Yeah, through examination of mitochondrial DNA. Yeah, so
explain what that is for, yeah, certainly.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
And Victoria and that in those earlier days of DNA
work was one of the first, well one of the
only places for a while in Australia that was able
to do a lot of much control DNA work at
that forensic level, and so we took cases from all
the other states as well. So in our cell we
have nuclear DNA which is inside the nucleus of the cell,

(22:09):
but out in the cytoplasma cell we've got loads and
loads of mitochondria. These are the little powerhouses of the cell.
They make the energy if you like that they need
to keep the cell alive and operating. And each of
those little michochondria has a little bit of DNA. It's
only a tiny bit of DNA. But the interesting thing
about it, you only get your mitochondrial DNA from your mother,

(22:29):
so it's an maternal line inherited. So you know, men
have the never pass on their mitochondrial DNA. They get
it from their mother and they don't pass it on.
So we have to go back to find those maternal chains.
And by doing those maternal chains, you can show a
potential linkage. Now, it's nothing like the refinement of and

(22:53):
detail that nuclear DNA will give you so often you
can't use it necessarily as an absolute identifier, but it's
a great excluder and that's a very powerful tool in itself.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
That was successful. You identified poor old ned. Still can't
find his head, by the way, we'll still outstanding. Yeah,
we found a little bit, but.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
The actual skull, the remainder of the skull, is not
in what was recovered. And look, there's lots of good
historical suggestions from various reports at the time that the
head might have been used for various purposes and it
might have been sent off for particular examinations and things
like that. You know, those times, people still believed on
the you know, the phrenology and the bumps on the head,

(23:33):
and they used to make death masks of executed prisoners
in plaster and so on, And indeed there was the
mask in the old Melbourne jail. Number of these death
masks and they're there. There was a skull on displaying
the old Mobile jail was said to be mid Calis skull,
but we proved it is not and was not his
skull turned out to be Frederick Deming. Well it was

(23:55):
once a Jack the Ripper. Well they didn't it didn't
turn out to be Fredrick. We actually thought it might be.
And I was going over to the UK actually to
see family, and we made an arrangement to actually exhume
Frederick Deming's brother while I was there. Interesting holiday occupation,
but you know, we wanted to see whether that was

(24:18):
an explanation for where that skull in the old Melville
Jail came from. Now, I mean, it was a very
difficult thing to do in exhumation that we needed to
talk to family, We need to get that approval, and
we actually had to go to the ecclesiastical court in
the UK to get permission. They weren't interested in it.
From the pond of the scientific side of it. It

(24:39):
had to have a moral dimension in order to make
that exhumation reasonable, and there were certain moral issues here
in relation to what should happen to these remains, and
who should they be, what great should they go in,
and things like that. So eventually we made that case
and got permission to do that. Unfortunately turned out that

(25:00):
the deer I didn't match that skull, so we don't
know whose that skull was. But the other interesting thing
we did, which I think is a fat aging and
a good example of modern forensic pathology, and it probably
represents the biggest single change in my professional lifetime in
the work of forensic pathology, is we were able to
use our molituary CT scanner. Now people may not realize,

(25:22):
but every single death it gets reported into that forensic
and coronia process has a whole body CT scan. We
started that in two thousand and five, one of the
first centers to do that. And what we're able to
do was we took these death masks that were in
the old Welbourne jail, we set scanned, then we set
scanned the skull that have been on display and then

(25:45):
did a physical trigu or physical sort of chicksaw fit,
does this skull fit inside the plaster head, And that's
where we came up with four or five that might
be the plaster castle of the skull and althose Frederick
Demian was one of those sort of physical fits, but
there were others that could have physically fitted us well.

(26:05):
Fascinating because in the intervening years DNA science has come
forward in leaps and bounds. I was involved in a
case up in New South Wales where a jawbone washed
up on r Minor Beach. It was blackened, it had
been in some mangroves for a long period of time,
but they could not connect it to any existing cases
partial recoveries of people, and in the end a new technology,

(26:27):
forensic investigative genetic genealogy was used to the FIG system
to reveal that it was poor Henry George Coleman had
fallen off a cliff back in nineteen eighty and it
wasn't recorded that his jawbone was missing. So at the
end of all that that they discovered who it was.
And by the way, we'd made all these podcast episodes
seeking information about this murder and abduction whatever it was

(26:49):
going to be, turned out it was much more every
day than that, and they were able to bury that
jawbone with his remain. Yes, and that's where I think
that sort of moral and ethical concept comes in. It's
really important, but those cases fascinating. I had a very
very similar case to that when I was actually in
the UK. I was sitting there as a lecturer in
pathology and police walked in one day with a jaw

(27:13):
that had been found in the in the estuary and
they showed to me and asked me to have a
look at it and you know, help them with this.
And it looked as it had been there a long
long time. And I looked at this and it was
a very robust jaw, more much more robust than you'd
expect in a Caucasian and I thought, well, that's a
bit interesting. It looked almost Negroid sort of, you know,
that very pronounced bone formation and structure. And I sort

(27:37):
of thought, well, okay, there's not much we can do
because DNA wasn't really talking about the early eighties, it
wasn't really in the same sort of usage at that time.
So I took up went up to the anatomy department
at the university where I was working and found the
one of the older anatomy professors who did a bit
of work in the past for police and things like that.
And I said, look, police have brought me this jaw.

(27:59):
What do you think And he agreed with my sort
of initial thoughts. He said, you know, he said, that
reminds me we had a case. Oh, it would be
twenty years ago. I remember they brought me something they
founded the estuary. I don't find it. And he went
along to the next room. Since said old days of
Native Department, we had all these collections and things. He
pulled a cardboar box off the shelf and inside this

(28:21):
car boxes is a skull and a smattering of different
very heavy bones, and we picked up this mandible lower
jaw and we just put it on the skull and
it was a perfect fit. So this was almost certainly
the jaw that had come from that that remains that
had been found.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Twenty years ago.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
And you know, there was a bit of a story
to that, and so we were able to wrap that
case up really because of that physical fit. Now today
we would have gone on and done DNA and things
like that wasn't really available in quite that same way
at that time, but we were able to do dental matches,
We were able to do a whole variety of things,
which made that quite a reliable fit.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Because you see the sibilities with the application of this technology.
This FIG, which is literally Layman's terms high high level
DNA matched with family ancestry searching to create a list
of suspects or possible people human remains, and then you
can narrow it down to a using investigative. Now have

(29:25):
new investigative leads to find the answer. Will there be
no secrets in the future with this technology?

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I mean the answer to that in the sense
is that it's almost hard to predict the future, but
absolutely will be much more refined over time about those
sorts of things. So one of the things you're doing
in FIG essentially is saying, we've got these remains, we
don't know who they are. Can we find a family
person linked to that person by looking at what people

(29:52):
have done when they've sent off their mouth swab or
whatever it is, to these various genealogy sites to find
out your ancestry. So they can use those big databases
of people and it may well be there's a remote
cousins somewhere who's on one of those genalogy databases, and
we can find links and open up the possibility of

(30:13):
identifying that person by now knowing a family contact, exploring
the genealogy of that family to see who this person
might be within that family's genealogy. So and what it does,
as you rightly say, is it opens up opportunities for
further investigation. Doesn't solve the case specifically, But if there

(30:35):
may be a story and that family of you know,
Uncle Fred who went missing and never returned home, you know,
and that police never found out why went missing, and
so on, and all of a sudden, you've actually helped
that family understand what happened to Uncle Fred or whatever.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
So those are important.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
They've they've got a social context as well. However, there
are other techniques that are becoming important. The techniques where
you say, well, let's look at some DNA and see
what that DNA and this unknown body's remains is coding
for in terms of physical characteristics of the body. So
let's look at this piece of bone and look at

(31:15):
its DNA and say, well, is the is the person
likely to have had, you know, blue eyes or brown eyes,
or blonde hair or black hair, or were they like
to be over six feet tall or less than six
things like that. Now, these are all very their guestimates
in a sense, they're not quite guesses, but they are
statistical analyzes. So it might be, well, the person's got

(31:36):
a seventy percent chance on our current databasis of having
this characteristic of blue eyes. Let's say whatever. Now that's
our current databases. What was the database as that relevant
to that might be twenty thirty, forty, fifty years ago,
it might be slightly different. So precision is not possible
as yet, but it's likely that we will start to

(31:57):
get more and more precise about these things, and the
more data we have about the human populations, the more
acciate some of these analysis are likely to be. They're
not good enough yet, I think in criminal processes. I
don't think they're going to appear in criminal case work
for decades, but eventually I think there will be important

(32:20):
issues that you can get from some of these things,
perhaps less about physical characteristics things like that, but perhaps
about diseases that the person may have suffered from. Now,
is this person got markers for a particular type of disease? Again,
it's not going to bee hundred percent of a match,
but it can give you a link and you might say, well,
if this person has a risk of getting this disease,

(32:42):
let's look at people from twenty years ago in this
particular area. Let's look at the hospital records. Let's see
if there were people with that disease. And again, that
might help you narrow down the pall because that's what
detectives want all the time. You know, if a dead
body or person lying there could be anyone from multiple
generations going back, and that's millions of people. You just

(33:03):
need a way to start, So narrow that down to
a smaller and smaller subset. Searching for a car. You know,
look at all the white vans. It's a nightmare. But
a white van with this brand of tire on it,
with this particular tread. Wow, now you start to narrow
it down.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Because fig was used to uncover the identity of the
Golden State Killer in America, Joseph James DeAngelo, who stopped
his offending, his murdering, and raping at a time when
he felt DNA was now starting to catch up on him.
He was wrong because it was going to advance right,
and he was identified through that process. Do you see
a situation in Australia where we go from unidentified him

(33:44):
and remains being identified to criminal suspects being identified through this?

Speaker 1 (33:50):
It's certainly possible. The question is what's our happiness or
a comfort with that sort of analysis, because when you
start doing that, you're exposing vast numbers of people to
be incorporated within this sort of case, most of whom
will have nothing to do with it. So it's a
bit like you know, ID cards or having everyone's fingerprints

(34:10):
on record, or having everyone's DNA on record. I mean,
in one sense, if you're saying we want to solve
more crimes and we want to solve it easier and cheaper,
then that will be a great thing to do. But
of course you've got a whole heap of issues where
once all that's available, could it be used for another purpose? Well,
sure it could, and then you're stuck with these situations.

(34:33):
What is our comfort level as a society about having
all this public information, private information about a person sorry,
out there within government agencies or commercial organizations and so on.
And that's a real challenge for the community, you know.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
And that's a good point because in my experience, police
always want bigger guns and more powers and they never
give them back. Well, that's I think that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
It's true because you know, having come from when I came,
when I left the UK, you know police weren't armed
and a lot of general police are still not armed
to the UK. And once you do arm, you know,
if you looked at, say some of the policy shooting
events that occurred, many of them would not have occurred
if the police weren't armed, and in fact there might
have been other ways to solve those instances. Now I'm
not saying that there's not a reason to have armed police.

(35:18):
I mean they're really from a public safety body, and
given the changing world, there are times when that is
absolutely critical and it's important. I think that police are
trained and skilled in the use of controlled managed force,
no question about that.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
But you do have to sort of look, you know,
recognize the fact.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
That once you get stuff out there, as you say,
it's really hard to wind that back. We have very
good and tight legislation of Victoria which talks about what
could be on the DNA database and what can't be
left on the database and things like that, and they're
important balances, if you like, between individual privacy and public safety.
And at some point, you know, government makes the call.

(36:00):
Government part of the legislation, and you know they advance
what they believe is the right thing to do in
the community and votes the men or votes them out.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
It's as simple as that. It'll be a fascinating discussion.
I mean, one case that I've been intimately involved with,
and you don't need to comment on its actual content,
but the mister cruel series of inductions that led to
the alleged murder of Carmen Chant and I discovered in
my research that there was two sets of DNA from
eighty five through to ninety one which police held, and

(36:29):
they did compare them back in the day and they
didn't match. So we have at least two offenders involved
in that spree. Do you see a situation where those
sort of samples that were taken back in those days
could be useful to identifying but also prosecuting a potential offender. Oh?

Speaker 1 (36:46):
Sure, And I think one of the interesting things about
DNA samples is their stability if they're kept in a
correct way. Now, those early days, DNA wasn't particularly widely
available for analysis and so on, we sort of imagine
it was always there because we have it today, but
it wasn't always there.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Forms.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
You need a lot of biological material to get a
DNA result in those very early days. Now you need tiny,
tiny amounts of DNA to get a result. So even
with DNA results that failed years gone by could be
looked at again with more sensitive techniques and get a result.
That The problem is when you were able to work

(37:27):
DNA on tiny, tiny samples, the risk of analyzing the
wrong bit of DNA is heightened. How was those how
are those samples stored? Who stored them, and you know
who handled them, and all those things then start to
become an issue. But absolutely we've you know, they're historical
and ancient DNA labs deal with mummy fied remains from

(37:47):
thousands of years and ago, and they can get good
DNA results. So the capacity to do that in the
future exists. It also will be strongly depended on how
well those DNA samples were kept and stored.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
So your message to any cold case murderers, sexual assaults,
and so forth is they should not be relaxing because
the future is coming to tap you on the shoulder
again one day soon in the future, it's certainly possible. Absolutely,
thank you for your time today, Dr David Ranson. Thank you,
and that was Dr David Ranson. That's a fascinating area,

(38:28):
this one, and I think listeners can get involved. They
can actually upload their DNA if they have a missing
person in their family or they're a victim of crime,
they can actually upload their DNA to jed match, look
it up and that could be something in the future
that could help resolve these cases. Thank you for listen.
This has been real crime with Adam shanned and if

(38:49):
you have any information, don't forget to share it with
me at Adam shand writer at gmail dot com or
if you want to go to crime Stoppers one eight hundred,
triple three, triple zero. Thanks for listening.
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