07: Tell me: Why is the crime scene manager crucial to murder investigations? with former CSM Andrew Langley

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Steve Keogh (00:02):
Welcome to murder investigation for crime writers, the podcast where we delve
into the dark world of murder to help bringauthenticity to your stories.
I'm your host, Steve Keogh, a former ScotlandYard detective inspector.
So grab your notebook, sharpen your pencils,and prepare to embark on a journey into a
world few get to see.
This is murder investigation for crime

(00:23):
writers.
Hello and welcome to this episode of murder
investigation for crime Writers.
Today I've got a very special guest with me,
and he performs a role that is one of the mostcrucial roles in a murder investigation.
Gotta be honest.
It's one of those that I don't see an awful

(00:44):
lot in crime fiction, and they probably don'tget the credit they deserve.
The role that this guest performs is that of acrime scene manager.
And today I've got me, Andy Langley.
Andy, welcome.

Andrew Langley (00:55):
Hi, good to speak with you, Steve.

Yeah, good to see you.
We haven't seen each other physically for a
while.
We both were in the Met, and we've both moved
on to different things now.

That's right.

So, Andy, crime scene manager, as I said in the introduction, it's such a
crucial role in any murder investigation.
So what would be good if, for the listeners is
just to introduce you, introduce the role ofthe CSM and how you got there.

Okay, well, as I say, yeah, I'm Andy Langley, or Andrew.
Langley went from being Andy to Andrew when Ichanged, when I changed careers.

Because I thought I should call you Andy.

And I have to cope with that.
It's just that when I, you know, I was, what,
55 when I started my new career, and Ithought, Andy sounds a bit young, so I can't
lose.
You know, depending on where I know people
from, I get called different things, so Iusually just answer to OI or you.

Right, okay.
I can call you Mister Langley if you.

No, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
Some of my students now call me sir and melike that, and I'm still in the habit of
looking over my shoulder to see who's behindme.
Yeah, crime scene management, it's got lots ofdifferent titles.
In London now.
They're known as operational forensic
managers.
But a crime scene manager is somebody that's
got a lot of experience generally in forensicsand crime scene management.

(02:08):
I mean, I started back in 1985 when I answeredan advert in the paper for the role that was
then called SoCo, or scenes of crime officer.
And I think that's a name that sort of stuck.
You know, they call them CSI's, they call themforensic practitioners.
But the term socco is a word that's now sortof firmly embedded in police speak.
So I joined as a Socco.
I didn't have a background in forensics in

(02:30):
those days.
We didn't have all these tv programmes and
films and books that went into forensics indetail, so there wasn't that huge amount of
interest.
I always assumed, like everybody else, that
the role was carried out by a cop.
But I went on one of those take your sons to
work days with my dad, who was a copy, went tothe police station he worked at and met the
SOCO that they had and was surprised todiscover that he was a civilian.

(02:53):
I was interested in what we did, what theydid, so I answered an advert and got a role.
And basically, you're trained into the variousthings you need to carry out the forensic
recoveries from the scene.
Along the way, I also became a fingerprint
expert, which took a long time.
I'm still amazed I actually got to the end of

(03:14):
it.
But I did used to do the comparisons as well
at Scotland Yard, the fingerprints.
But you tended to move around a lot.
I worked in about 18 different locations in 35years and in lots of different roles all
around that sort of forensic work.
But I always wanted to be a crime scene
manager.
Those were the crampsy managers, tended to
respond to the biggest crimes, the murders,the unexplained deaths.

(03:36):
And there's obviously you have a curiosityabout that and an interest in getting to see
these sort of, really the really sort of big,high profile incidents.
It took me about 16 years to get to the crimescene manager role.
Then what you're dealing with tends to change.
You don't.
Not so much dealing with vehicle crimes andburglaries and things like that.

(03:57):
You are really dealing in sort of criticalincidents.
So you're dealing with sexual offences,murders, mass disasters, unexplained deaths.
That's one that everybody forgets about.
Half of your time, you're actually
investigating things that aren't murders.
It's something that people often miss, miss in
that role, that the skills to be able to turnaround and say, no, it's not a job, is in many

(04:17):
cases, as important as turning around andsaying, yes, it is a job, because a murder
team is a huge beast once it gets going, andso you need to sort of make sure you use those
resources properly.
So that's how I got into it.
I did it for about 15 years.
I did the role.
It was one of those jobs that.
That you never knew what you're going to be

(04:39):
doing from day to day.
That's what I always liked about it.
You'd go in and that phone would ring and thatwould completely change what you did.
And again, it could be anything.
I mean, I remember once.
Remember getting the phone call, and then Ispent six months being the forensic lead in
the mortuary for the Grenfell tower fire thathad no inkling that that was going to happen

(05:00):
before.
So that's what I loved about the job anyway.

So in terms of fiction and crime fiction, in introduction, I said that I don't
often, I've gotta be honest, I don't watch anawful lot of crime fiction, but it's not a
role that sort of jumps out at you as somebodythat's portrayed a lot.
Is it something that you've seen?

Yeah, it's not.
You don't see it very often.
I've never seen it portrayed particularlywell, if at all.
As you say, it's.
And again, like you, I don't tend to watch a
huge amount of it.
And I just think that the things I do watch
tend to be the ones that don't go into thegreat detail.
It's because you've had a lifetime of it andyou just spend the whole time criticising it
and you can't.
You can't sit back and enjoy it.

(05:42):
I mean, there's been a couple of instanceswhere people have got close.
I mean, silent witness, I don't like theprogramme particularly.
Again, I think because I've been to so manypost mortems, you know, you can see the
limitations because it makes it moreinteresting.
I understand that.
Know, but there was a thing, there was
somebody called Jack, a character in it.
He did everything.
He was the scene examiner, the forensicscientist, a lot.

(06:02):
But in terms of how he assessed scenes, wasquite interesting because he wasn't too far
off.
Best example I've seen wasn't tv.
It was the Denzel Washington films equaliser.
The equaliser two.
And he ends up in Brussels with.
Where an ex colleague of his has been
assassinated.
And you see him in the scene, I think he sort

(06:22):
of, in his mind in the scene, and he's lookingat the evidence and standing there and looking
at things like trajectories.
Could that have happened?
Where would somebody have had to been to dothis?
And I saw that and I was astonished.
I sort of leapt up when I was watching it
because it was like, wow, this is exactly howI work.
This is, you know, you make little videos inyour head, if you like, where you're standing
in a scene trying to work out what's happened.

(06:45):
So that's the best portrayal.
He wasn't a crime scene manager.
He wasn't there as a crime scene manager, but
what he did was very, very close to what Iused to do on a daily basis.

So a lot of people listening to this are going to be writing crime fiction,
and it will be stories, continual stories andseries of stories.
What I'm trying to give them is ideas aroundcharacters.
And I think the crime scene manager, if you'relooking for a recurring character in a series,
I don't think you can find a better one, canyou?
Because your role as a crime scene manageressentially was the link between the

(07:19):
investigators and the forensic science,because detectives aren't experts in forensic
science.
So that's not our role, is it?
No, but you were that link.
You were our go to when we needed advice for
anything, forensics.
And then it would be your role to understand

(07:39):
what was available, what scientists wereavailable, what experts were there and bring
them into the crime scene.
And without you, not just you and you and your
colleagues, it would have been incrediblydifficult to solve murders.
I mean, you were that important to a murderinvestigation.

I think it's become more and more important the role, because there's an
expectation of forensics certainly within thesort of trial processes, but what you can do
with forensics now is so much more certainlysince the advent and the improvements and
enhancements in DNA and things like that.
And it's very easy to lose a bit of focus.
You know, you go to a murder scene, you haveto have a strategy.

(08:20):
You're working to, you're answering littleindividual questions.
You can't just take all the exhibits and sendthem up to a scientist and say, what can you
tell me about that?Because it's just, it's impractical.
You can't do it.
Which is why we have those sort of strategy
meetings that I'm sure you've sat in many,many of them.
When I had the strategy meetings, I used toalways like to run my first one up at the lab,
so the scientist was there.

(08:41):
So you can actually bring the scientists into
that murder team so they know exactly whatyou're trying to achieve, and you start to
establish those links so that, you know, ifthere's a sudden change in direction, then the
scientist gets told at the right time so theycan stop working on something and concentrate
somewhere else.
But, yeah, I mean, certainly you need to sort
of focus what you actually trying to achievehere.

(09:02):
What are the questions that you want answersto and what are the exhibits you've got, how
you're going to do it with that.
So it is important.
I mean, I was a fingerprint expert, but Iwasn't an expert biologist, I wasn't an expert
in DNA, but I worked with it all the time,really.
I suppose I've heard people say before thatthe benefit you bring to a murder inquiry is
your black book.
It's the contacts, it's the people you've

(09:24):
worked with before.
And of course, things like keeping on top of
research.
You know, when you're dealing with a case, if
you've got a case which is just.
You're struggling to get anywhere with it, are
there new scientific discoveries?What's academia come up with?
I had one case, we had some remains that hadbeen found in a disused factory in east
London.
We got DNA, but it was no hit on the database.

(09:45):
But we couldn't work out when this person hadbeen killed and we couldn't get it down below
about a 20 year range, which was a nightmare,because if you can't pin that down, you can't
use CCTV.
You can't really start looking in detail at
sort of other intelligence that comes in.
And at the mortuary, we recovered some pupae
cases, the little casings from maggots.

(10:07):
Maggots.
And I'd read some research that you couldcarbon date them which would give you an
effective date.
So I got in touch with the contact that I'd
read and they said to me that we're not readyto go with this yet, but the University of
California working on it, they might betterassist.
So I spoke to them sort of mentally packing asuitcase, and they said, no, we're in the same

(10:30):
position, we're working on it, but we've notpublished.
We think Tokyo is ahead of us.
So you can imagine my thoughts at that point.
So I managed to speak to somebody in Tokyowhere we could actually speak to each other.
And they were in exactly the same position,but they said, no, we're not really there yet,
but they gave me the address of anotheruniversity.

(10:51):
So I spoke to the people of Milton Keynes and,yeah, they had a go.
They had to go, but it was still quite in itsinfancy.
They could get an approximation, but it wasn'ta result that they could repeat.
So in terms of science, that's.
It's not really a reliable result.
You know, constantly in forensics, you'repushing on these, on these boundaries, you

(11:11):
know, you're looking to see what's being done.
Can I use that sometimes?
You might use it and it wouldn't be actuallyuseful evidentially, but it might just give
you that extra bit of info that you need tounderstand your results or focus somewhere
else.

So when information comes into a murder investigation, it's classed as
intelligence or evidence.
So if you get something that's an indication
that they wouldn't be able to stand up incourt and say, yes, the carbon date in puts it
this year or whatever, but it still gives theinvestigators a steer, doesn't it, as a way
they probably should be looking.

Yeah. And I think that's useful.
Yeah.

Yeah. Hundred percent, 100%.
I mean, even on DNA, you will get that
sometimes.
If you've not got a full match, you might have
a partial match which make you.
Well, you need to look over there.

Yeah.

I can't say evidentially that that's the person, but if you start looking at
them, we might be able to develop thatsomewhat.

Yeah.

So in terms of, if we stick to London, so the crime scene managers, for
whatever title, there will be an equivalentperson across every police force in the
country.

Yeah.

And in London, I know you started losing numbers, didn't you?
You started off with a number and they kepttrimming you down with budget cuts.
But when you left, how many were there inLondon?

That's a good question.
I think there was.
I think there was 18.
I think it was 18.
Yeah.
Which sounds a lot, but when you think they're
covering 24/7 you spread pretty thin.
So, I mean, certainly night jetty, you'd be
the only one on quite often.

And then.
So from a detective's point of view, we quite
often.
What would happen is we would get a phone
call, we would be the hat team.
So the homicide assessment team.
A call would come in relating usually to adeath, but it could be somebody who's had some
serious injuries who potentially could die.
And we would go to a crime scene and one of
the questions we would always ask is, have youspoken to the CSM or is the CSM on the way?

(13:11):
Or we would go and speak to CSM and make surethat was happening and we would all go
together and we would go to the crime scene.
Can you talk us through, Andy, what your
thought process is?I know every crime scene is different, but in
general terms, what your steps and yourprocesses would be when you were called to a
suspicious death or a murder.

Okay, well, I mean, in those early stages, you've got lots of bits of
information.
I wouldn't call them facts.
None of them are facts at that point.
You know, some of it is potentially
misleading, some of it is well meaning, butwrong.
And it's chaos.
I heard you mention that on a previous podcast
about the chaos when you arrive and there ischaos, that it's a, you know, it often is
quite a chaotic scene.

(13:52):
So it's fact finding.
You want to find out fact finding.
Certainly if I got deployed to a job and it
was some distance away, as it often was, Iwould speak to the tasking unit in forensics
and ask them to send somebody there just tofind out what's going on.
So that when I get there, I can speak tosomebody that's got a forensic head to find
out, to make sure the cordons are possibly inthe right place, just to sort of get that.

(14:14):
That initial information and those earlystages.
Quite often that's all you do.
It's the fact finding which incorporates
things like carrying out an assessment of thescene, making sure the scene is recorded
before you start going in and sort of takingexhibits, you know, photographing it, maybe
laser scanning it, having a look.
Do I need to do other bits?
Do I need to get other experts here to help mebefore, you know, so we can maximise the

(14:39):
potential all the time?Again, I heard you mentioned it.
Before you turn up, you know, quite oftenyou'll have, maybe you'll have somebody that's
there's been an altercation in the street andsomebody's been stabbed and there'll be big
cordon set up and it's all around where the.
Where the victim is lying.
You mentioned it, and as soon as you mentionedit before, I was nodding away because often
that's not the scene at all.
It may be that the suspects have never been

(15:00):
anywhere near that.
You need to start backtracking them to try and
work out where your scene is so you can put inother cordons, you can try and recover areas
if they're not secured by that point.
So it's all about fact finding and setting
things up, because the way it works, certainlyin London in recent years, is that if I'm
night duty and I get a call out to that, tothat case, it's very unlikely that I'm going

(15:20):
to keep that inquiry because I'm going to benights the next night as well.
So quite often, you know, you'll be basicallygetting to a point where anything that's at
risk of being lost due to weather or becauseit's impossible to hold part of a scene is
recorded and recovered.
And getting to that point where you can hand
that job over to the person that's going totake it long term, all the way through from

(15:43):
that day one, plus 6 hours, all the waythrough to trial.
That's what your initial thoughts are.
The assessment is a huge thing, assessing the
scene.
You go into the scene and you've been given
some information, but you're going in andyou'll look.
If it's a house, for instance.
Everybody has their own ways of doing it.
It's got to be very structured.
Humans generally, if you ask them to search or
say something, they flit around without anyreal structure at all.

(16:06):
Well, that's how you lose things, that's howyou miss things.
So you'd always have to do it in a verystructured way.
I used to leave, if I knew where the body wasin the murder scene, I used to leave that room
till last, because if you don't do that, youget sidetracked.
And then you suddenly remember, did I everlook in that third bedroom?
Or, you know, so you.
You look at the whole house and again, it's
all about this.

(16:26):
Trying to work out a phrase that you've used.
I know a lot.
To find out how somebody's died, first of all,
you need to find out how they live.
And it's a lot in that, certainly with
unexplained deaths, because you're just tryingto work out what's this person's lifestyle.
My initial strategy would always be the samething.
Pretty much it was establish the sequence ofevents leading up to the death of whoever the

(16:47):
victim was, because it's wide enough, butthat's what you're trying to do, basically,
you're trying to piece together the last 24,36, 48 hours of that person's life.
And so you need to get all that extra info inas well.

So, I mean, you've said quite a lot there, and some really important things I
just want to go over.
I'm probably not going to do them in order,
but from what I remember them.
So one of the most important things you said
for me there was the record photography.
Yeah, it's hugely important.
And it's something that I don't think a lot ofpeople, even in police, don't understand.

(17:21):
What you need to do before you go into a crimescene, before anything is potentially moved,
disturbed in any way, is capture what thatcrime scene looks like and what it tells you
at that point.
And that's important for so many reasons,
including so you can relay information,because imagine a crime scene, how many people

(17:41):
actually get to go in very minimal, isn't it?Yourself?

It's minimal, but they all interact with it, so they'll.

Yeah, no, sorry.
What I mean is, in terms of you've got a crime
scene, you've got it locked.
The people that would legitimately go into it
would be yourself, exhibits officer, some,some forensics teams helping you out.
But so many more people need to understandwhat is going on in there.
So the investigators, potentially witnesses,and really importantly at court, so we can, we

(18:13):
can reconstruct and demonstrate to the court,the jury, the judge, the advocates there.
This is what the crime scene shows.
So one of the first things that will happen
before anybody starts to try and get anyinformation, any evidence and anything from
the scene is that photography, isn't it?And the recording of what was at the crime
scene.

That's right.
And that's an area that's changing quite
rapidly at the moment.
We're used to somebody, a photographer going
in and taking, you know, spending maybe acouple of hours even just taking pictures of
everything.
So everything in that house is captured.
But of course, we're greatly moving intothings like laser scanning, 360 imaging.
So you basically put a camera in the middle ofthe room and spin it around and you can

(18:55):
interact with that online.
And the next step to that, and it's all, I
know they've used VR in courts, and there's,you know, there's a lot of interest now in
looking at things like using augmented realityand things like that in court.
So again, it's all about the jury.
It's putting the jury in that crime scene as
much as well as you can without being mindfulof how distressing some of these things are.

(19:18):
But, yeah, I mean, certainly I've had caseswhere we've done sort of laser imaging, and
it's really useful if you do it well, it cannot just be there for the jury, but sort of,
certainly in laser imaging, you can, ballisticscientists can use that to actually carry out
their examination because you can move around.

I mean, that's fascinating.
I've seen the 360, and I always loved the 360.
You didn't have to been at the crime scene.
You got your computer and you can move around
a bit.
Like if you go on right, move and you want to
buy a house, and it's that same technology.

Exactly.
If you can use it to buy a house, then we
should be using it to educate juries and notjust juries, as you say.
It's investigators take the forensic scientistto the scene from his own laptop.

Pathologist, if you're looking at a post mortem and I'm just fascinated by the
thought of the virtual reality.
I'm going to come across this in you too,
where we're going to think, if only we hadthat.

Oh, yeah, it's frightening.
I went to a conference recently where there
were lots of people demonstrating what theywere doing and completely recreating crime
scenes.
And they even had, it was an international
conference and some people, they actually usedalmost movie techniques.
They could recreate actions sort ofeffectively, a human that just appears as a
mannequin.

(20:41):
So they could actually start moving around,
interacting with the scene, which they couldthen show a jury.
I think that might be a struggle and currentlya step too far for the UK, but certainly other
legal systems, it can work and there's a hugelot of potential there.

One of the other things you talked about is it wouldn't be your job, you
wouldn't be.
So every murder has a crime scene manager
assigned to it and so they would be, as I saidearlier, the point of contact between every
scientist and the murder investigation team.
You're that point of contact and the advisors
really, of the investigators.

Yeah, yeah.
You know that you'd come in the morning and
you look to see what had happened the nightbefore, you'd read the reports from the
homicide assessment team and then, you know,you to work out who's best placed to take this
job because of the small numbers.
If I was about to go on nights in two days
time and it was a job that looked like it wasgoing to take a few weeks, then clearly I

(21:37):
wouldn't be the best person because you getjobs and jobs, don't you?
I mean, I quite enjoyed the jobs that wouldtake weeks or months.
I like those.
I got a reputation for doing those.
So quite a few of my cases were like that.
Find out the information from the night duty
crime scene manager and then you start to workout what you're going to do.
You're obviously going to go to the scene,meet up with the inquiry team, sorting out

(21:57):
post mortems, looking at any sort of reallysort of urgent, what we used to call quick
winter items, where, you know, there was anitem that if you made a quick submission,
there was a chance you could get a usefulresult quickly.
And then, you know, go to the scene and thenit just, you know, it all just keeps on.
The process starts to roll and can go on for,as I say, from a, you know, a day to several

(22:19):
months.

So on a couple of these podcasts, I refer to this as proper whodunits so they're
the ones I like.
All murders are important as each other.
Obviously.
Somebody said someone's lost their life and
it's important you find it.
But as a professional, as the challenge to you
as a professional, those proper who've doneit, they won't really get you going, aren't

(22:40):
they?

That's right.
Oh, you get.
I mean, the buzz you get from.
You go to one of these jobs that's a proper
whodunit and you suddenly come up with someevidence that's going to break the case.
I mean, you can't beat that.
I had one a long time ago when I worked over
embarking.
There was quite a high profile case at the
time.
A nurse was stabbed when she was on a

(23:01):
cigarette break from work.
There were lots of witness descriptions about
this chap wearing an Aussie Osborne style wigand acting very strangely.
A dog walker.
Later on that day, it's always a dog walker.
Dog Walker found a bag that looked like it hadbeen thrown into a river in a country park.
Now, this country park, you automatically havethese visions of a van idyllic sort of rural

(23:24):
setting.
No, no, no, it wasn't like that.
I've been there since and it's quite nice now.
But then, you know when.
You know when you say, whatever happened toall the old Ford Sierras and things like that?
Well, most of them were burnt out.
And I was alongside this river listening to
the rats jumping in and out of the water.
And I went through this bag and you'll know
you can't just turn up and just grab the bagand go.
So it was in the middle of a country park,about 800 metres from any road.

(23:47):
And so I had to set up lighting, I had to getgenerators and all sorts so we could actually
work.
And so I started to take items out this bag.
One by one.
A wig came out that could be described as an
Aussie Osborne style wig.
So at this point, you know that this is
important.
And then you find a knife, a bloodstained
knife.
So it's all starting to.
And this is rucksack.

(24:07):
And you're taking things out, very structured,
packing them all individually, going away to asafe working area, clean working area.
I could see the last thing in the bottom ofthe bag was a brown taped parcel.
And all the time you're thinking, what isthat?
What's that down there?It looked like the classic kilo of coke, you
know, with parcel tape wrapped around it.

(24:27):
And it was the bottom thing in the bag.
And I thought, maybe it's a weight.
Maybe it's something to make the bag sink in
the river.
And it was the last thing that came out, the
bag.
I'd been there probably two or 3 hours going
through this stuff, and I pulled this thingout and it was virtually weightless.
So I thought, oh, it's not a weight.
What is it?
And I picked it up and I turned it over and itwas the box.
The knife had come in and it had been sentthrough the post and had a name and address on

(24:49):
it.
And I've never had a buzz quite like that,
that because you suddenly realise there's onlytwo people in the world that know who did this
murder.
Him and me.
And by this time it's probably.
I don't know, it's 203:00 in the morning.
So you frantically phone the inquiry team andthen we've gone home.
It's like getting this bit of information.
And it was the murderer.
Wow.

(25:10):
He'd use his mum's credit card to buy this
knife off of eBay.
Wow.
So, yeah, it's, you know, whodunits there.
You know, you get some tremendous.
You can get some tremendous results on thatwhen nobody knows.
And you say, well, actually, it's this person.

So just going back as well to what you're talking about before, one of the
important things you mentioned is aboutidentifying a crime scene.

Yeah.

Now, when we use the words crime scene immediately, what people are thinking of
is, where is the dead body?

Yeah.

But a crime scene can be so many different things.
When you get down to there, to the crimescene, that's going to be one of your first
jobs.
What crime scenes do I have and are they
properly preserved?Because, I mean, on the podcast you listen to
so many times I used to look down at my feetand I'd be standing in blood.

Yeah. Yeah.

I should not be standing in blood.
Right, let's.
Let's reconsider where we stand in.
Let's widen the crimes.
The cordon tape and let's put in a proper
cordon with inner cord and out cordon and makesure that we're not destroying evidence
because we haven't got our cordons in theright place.
So crime scenes could be where some suspecthas ran, potentially discarding a weapon could

(26:23):
be a tax site itself, and the victim haswalked or run a certain distance before
collapsing.
This could be a deposition site, it could be
an area where a weapon has been discarded orsome other incident.
So your initial job is to get as much of thatinformation because the bare facts are, if you
don't get it right at this stage.
You've lost it, haven't you, when it came to

(26:44):
forensics?

Yeah, it's.
Yeah. And you have to.
I mean, I can think of so many cases whereI've had that.
Where you turn up and.
Exactly.
You've got.
Where somebody's collapsed in the street, been
worked on and pronounced life extinct.
And that's the scene.
But, you know, I had one.
It was in Sydney, I think it was where this
chap, Sunday evening, this chapter, knocked onthe door, trying to get some help, because he

(27:06):
was mortally injured.
And he basically went back out onto the street
where this person lived and just died.
So you're turning up at the scene, well, who
is this person?That's how important it is.
And you discover that it's somebody that livesin Dagenham.
And you think, well, what's he doing here?Why is he come here?
And so there's obviously lots of fast timework going on.

(27:26):
And it turned out that he'd arranged to sell acar to somebody and so he'd driven from day.
And so you think, well, hang on a minute,where's his car?
Again, lots of other inquiries.
You come up with the car park.
That's about 500 yards away.
And the car's not there because it has been
stolen, but there's signs of a disturbance.
There's a bit of blood in that car park as
well.
So you've got another scene there.

(27:46):
The suspects for that one, the address of oneof them, about two streets away.
So there's another scene.
The mum decided she would help them and take
their clothes to the laundrette to wash themstraight away.
So the mum is a scene, the laundrette is ascene.
You know, she drove there, her cars are seen.
So it can really can grow exponentially.
And each one of those scenes might provide youthat single piece of evidence that's going to

(28:10):
break it.

And that's the point around what a scene.
So a scene could be a place, a person, and Ithink sometimes don't.
People don't understand that, that a personcan be a crime scene, could be a vehicle,
essentially.
It's any person, vehicle, location.

Yeah.

Where there's potential of recovering evidence that is a scene, isn't it?

I had one in.
A body was found a long time ago, and our body
was found in a holdall in a car park atHeathrow.
They did some inquiries that linked.
Linked it to a flat in marble art some early,
a while ago, but there was some CCtv work andthey saw somebody carrying a heavy bag, get
into a taxi, track down the taxi.
Where did you drop the man off?
Paddington.

(28:49):
So we're thinking, okay, Paddington, Heathrow
airport.
Has he gone on the Heathrow Express?
So they did some work on the Heathrow Expressand found that he had.
They isolated the carriage and that became acrime scene.
But because it was part of Heathrow Express,they couldn't take it off to a siding
somewhere.
I had to examine that crime scene whilst the
train was going backwards and forwards toHeathrow.
And it goes quite quick.

(29:09):
And I was cutting samples from a carpet, so I
couldn't work when the train was movingbecause the scalpel.
No, no way.
So I had the stationary time at Heathrow and
the stationary.
I think I went back with the forwards about
five doing that crime scene.

And like, ambulances as well, when you take a victim in an ambulance, they
often will become crime scenes as well.
Little nuances that people don't think about.

Yeah, they're a problem because, you know, you don't want to take an
ambulance off the street for a long time.
So, you know, when you hear there's an
ambulance preserved, that tends to sort ofjump up the priority list because obviously
that ambulance should be out.

And also, as well, it's built on braces.
When the reality is, I mean, I've never comeacross anything that's been discovered in an
ambulance.
I mean, it can happen.
You're covering all your bases, aren't you?Doing things properly?
Yeah, just in case there's that.

I think in the back of your mind, there's that thing.
Well, if I just say, no, don't worry, let theambulance go, that will be the one time when
there was something in there.
There was, you know, a small piece of.
An item of clothing that's been cut off that,you know, so, yeah, you have to cover it, but
you have to cover it, you know, appropriatelyso that you don't stop that ambulance being
used for what it's designed for.

So we're at the crime scene, you've been called down to a murder, you've
done that process of gathering information soyou understand exactly what's going on.
So you can put in the cordons and the securethe crime scenes that are required.
The photographer goes in, all the photographywork is done, be it through video, 360
photographs, or all the new posh, fancy stuffthat's coming in.

(30:44):
And then it's a case of going in andidentifying the evidence that's in there and
retrieving it.
So talk us through that, Andy.
How would you go through that in general, Iknow scenes are different and they can change
from scene to scene, but in general, whatwould be the process there?

Well, as you say, scenes are different and each scene would have a
different sort of strategy, really.
You know, if you've got a lot of it is you're
looking at, what do I need to recover?That's going to degrade, either because it's
outside or, you know, and it's the mercy ofthe weather, or are there items that I would
want to recover ahead of schedule becausethey're at risk of contamination?

(31:22):
In a lot of the DNA type sampling, you need todo, you need to do that quick, but then you've
got other considerations.
Fibres.
People forget about fibres.
There's very few reporting scientists that do
fibre work now because it was always very timeconsuming.
Of course, time is money, but it's veryexpensive.
And I think when DNA came in, people thoughtthis was the answer to everything.
So an awful lot of the focus and theinvestment and the money went into DNA.

(31:47):
And it's an incredibly powerful tool.
But as it's become more and more sensitive,
it's probably become less evidential, becausethese days it's very rare to get a single sort
of clear profile.
It's always mixtures and it's trying to
interpret those mixtures.
But I think what that meant was that a lot of
the traditional forensics started to take abit of a backseat.

(32:08):
So things like fibres, if you're going to do afibre job, you need to know right at the
start, and that's finding that balance betweenrecovering the fibres without losing them and
the DNA work.
So it's the whole time you're going to try and
work out exactly what order am I going to takethings in.
You know, you might have a body in your scene.
Historically, there was always pressure to get
that body out as quick as possible, off forthe post mortem, for good reasons.

(32:31):
But things don't always work like that now,and it may be that you need to leave that body
in the scene and work around it, or maybe abiologist needs to come out and see the body
in situ to assist them in determining the sortof blood spatter that's in the room or other
occasions I can think of.
You might not get the body out the scene
because you can't get it out without damaging,you know, physically, without physically

(32:52):
damaging other evidence.
So, you know, I had one double murder in a
hotel at Heathrow, where the body was in theback room of this star flat but the floor was
a complete mess of blood, footprints,handprints, and there was no way that you
could easily get that body out without, youknow, without damaging that.
So you had to clear all that first.

So that wasn't the one with the suspect in the bed, it was the.

One with the suspect in the bed.

Tell us about that one.
Tell us that story.
I think people want to hear that.

Yeah, well, obviously a tragic incident and one that was memorable for lots
of reasons, but I was the first person calledout to that.
It was the week of the London riots, and I'dbeen dealing with riot sort of crime scenes
and managing that sort of response.
And I think it was the first day where it was
really started to quiet down.
And so I was in the office catching up because

(33:43):
I had a mountain of things that I needed tosort of get updated.
And this call came in.
My office was in Croydon at that time, and
this call came into this double murderer overat Heathrow.
So, you know, so I was late turn.
So we got to get.
Try and get over there.
And of course, crime scene managers don't have
blue lights, they don't have all thatassistance to get them through the traffic.

(34:05):
So you get over there.
And again, it's that assessment process.
I remember being in there as soon as youopened the door to this star flat.
It was just blood everywhere.
So it was a question of using stepping plates.
And I'm sure you've come across steppingplates before, but you've never got quite
enough.
So it's.
You know, and if there's two people, it'squite difficult to move around the flat.
But I put stepping plates on down and we'll berecovering, looking at the scene.

(34:29):
And one of the things that I do is that Iquite often.
I'll talk to myself, I'll talk out loudwhether that's a sort of a self protection
mechanism.
You know, you'll be in the room, there's a
dead body there, and you'll say, what onearth's happened to you?
You're just having the thoughts out loud.
In the back bedroom, there was this poor chap
who'd been stabbed, and he was lying on thebed.

(34:50):
He was posed.
It was weird.
It was an unusual one.
He wasn't lying in a. I've never seen anybody
in that position after they've been stabbed.
It was.
He was just lying on the top of a double bed.
And so I was making sure that we recorded
everything before disturbing things.
The inquiry team were phoning me at the time
and they were saying, but his phone's stillpinging in the same cell.
Have you found his phone anywhere?They had a suspect who also worked at the

(35:13):
hotel and the suspect's phone.
Suspect's phone was still pinging.
I'm sort of.
I'm looking around, but I'm not going to
disturb my scene to do things in a structuredway.
But no, I've not heard it ring.
And then there was a call.
Can you see if his travel documents are in thebedside table?
Because he lived in that flat.
And sure enough they were, because they were
worried that he was possibly a flight risk andthey were trying to track this man down.

(35:37):
So I got to the point where I thought, all I'mgoing to do is get this thing recorded,
preserved, get somebody standing on thecordons, cordon off the car.
There was a car involved that was in the carpark, make sure that was sorted and then leave
it for the next person to come in.
And then I got a phone call that afternoon
saying, did you move the bed?No, it wasn't that morning, it was the day
after that.
Did you move the bed?

(35:57):
And what had happened was after I left and thenew crumsey manager took over, the.
All the scientists started attending.
The pathologists attended to have a look
because they realised they couldn't get thesebodies out for a while.
Following day, scientist goes back and he's abit annoyed because there's some disturbance
in the scene and he immediately thinks thatsomebody on the cordon has gone in and just

(36:18):
had a bit of a nose around.
It shouldn't happen, very rarely happens, but
it has been, though, didn't get any joy there.
So he carried on to the scene and the bedroom
door to the final room at the back was closedand he thought, we opened the windows
yesterday.
So the winds blowed.
Blowed the.
Blown the door shut.
So he went to open the door and somebodypushed back from the other side and sure

(36:39):
enough, that was the suspect who had a craftknife sticking out of one of his buttocks,
naked.
I'm quite glad I wasn't there.
But when we had a look at the photographsafterwards, there were two photographs that
showed one side of the bed and next to the bedwas a small bottle of Evianne water.
And the second photograph that was taken a fewminutes later, the bottle's not there anymore.

(37:00):
And we discovered that the suspect had reachedout.
He thought he was going to have a coughingfit.
So he's reached out while I was in the roomand taken this bottle in.
Now, I always wondered I've never stoppedwondering, what would I have done if the
suspect had.

You know, that's a worry, isn't it?
And he had a craft knife on him.

Yeah. Well, I know full well that I'm not hero material, so.
But we don't need to worry about me layinghands on this suspect.
I'm going to run.

Yeah.

And there's only me and the photographer, and I remember, so he's quite a
young man, quite fit.
And I'm thinking I'm going to have to go with
something to keep, to keep up with him.
But this is assuming I didn't just die on the
spot, which is also quite likely a fright.
But I thought afterwards, and I think I'm so
indoctrinated into forensic methods that I'dhave run out on the stepping plates, Tom and
Jerry style.

(37:48):
But, yeah.

How long was he in that bed for? So it was like a divan type bed.

It was two single divans.
And what he'd done is he pulled them apart,
cut a slot down and climbed inside the base.
He upstated.
He updated his Facebook status while I wasthere.
I mean, I think it was something.
Will this nightmare end?
And I always wondered whether that was justgeneral or my crime scene examination, but,
yeah, I mean, we laugh obviously.

It'S a tragic case.

Very tragic case.

It's a tragic case, but an unusual one.
It's a unique set of circumstances.

I can honestly say that every time I ever went to a scene in a bedroom where
there was a bed like that, you were just togive it a kick.
I don't know, it was just sort of a mentalthing, give it a good kick and, you know, the.
Actually, the.
There was a. The pathologist that went to the
scene was an advisor for a silent witness, Ithink it was.
And I don't usually watch silent witness.

(38:38):
This is a long time ago, but I watched one of
the episodes once and.
And it started off.
It was the first one of a new series and itstarted off with the suspect.
You were.
The camera was the eyes, the suspect, and he
was looking out from under the bed and thecrime scene manager or crime scene examiner,
and it basically.
It all went wrong.
And the crime scene examiner was brutallymurdered.

(38:58):
And I thought, this is very familiar, all ofthis.

Yeah, that's a bit close to the.

End of the programme.
And looked at the credits and there was the
pathologist listed on there as the advisor.

So essentially that was you, the victim.

Yeah, I know.
Yeah. So I watched myself be murdered.

So what I'd like to do is just for the benefit of the listeners, just briefly
because there's so much that we could go into.
And I don't want to go too far into these but
I've got listed as a number of different typesof evidence that you would likely to come
across in a murder scene and if we could justbriefly touch on how they would be dealt with.
So first off is blood.
So when you've got blood at a scene, what's

(39:38):
your thought process there?

Obviously, it's a means that you might be able to identify somebody.
It could be your victims.
But quite often you'll find you've got suspect
blood mixed in there as well.
Certainly if the attack has got any sort of
frenzied nature to it.
If you're, if you're stabbing somebody with a,
with a knife, like a kitchen style knife,which is the sort of knife we tend to get, you
know, obviously you do see these other typesof knives but kitchen knives are far more

(40:01):
common.
So if you stab somebody and they're bleeding
the blood gets on the handle of the blade orhandle of the knife and then your hand slips.
So quite often you'll have suspects withbleeding wounds as well.
So it's a useful identifier because the otherthing though, is that, is to interpret what's
gone on in that scene quite often where thatblood is, how it's moved around you can

(40:22):
interpret the actions.
What's happened in that room?
Where were people standing?Is there a void on the wall where there should
be some blood spatter but isn't?Is that because that's where the suspect stood
while he was doing part of the, you know, ofwhat he did?
So there's an awful lot you can tell fromblood.
So, you know, that's, you know, you, you'dcall in an expert for that.
You'd call in a biologist or somebody had, youknow, some expertise in the analysis of blood

(40:47):
spatter to provide you some of those, some ofthose pointers and those answers.
They would identify, you know, things thatthey thought were likely to be, you know, the
particular areas that you needed to sample.
If you go into a scene and there's 5000 spots
of blood, you can't sample every one.
So, you know, it's working out how you can
maximise potential from that scene.
And of course, the other thing always, you've
got to remember in those scenes and peopleoften forget is that crime scenes are not 2d,

(41:11):
they're 3d.
So always look up because quite often if
you've got, you get lines of blood spatteracross the ceiling.
And that can give you more pointers as towhere somebody was.
Yeah.
You never forget to look up in a crime scene.

Yeah, no, 100%.
This is something I talk about is I quite
often see detectives and they kind of runaround almost like blue *** flies.
They're not just.
Just stop, stand still and look.
And you look up, you look down, you lookeverywhere and just try and take in and read
what you see.
I attended to, if I was going to watch a crime
drama type programme, I tend to watch americanones because they're a bit of escapism.

(41:46):
I've got that frame of reference.

Yeah.

And one of the programmes I used to watch was Dexter, and he was a forensic
scientist, expert in blood pattern analysis,who could walk into a crime scene and
interpret exactly what happened just bylooking at the blood.
It's not quite that detailed, is it?It's not quite as simple as being able to
build up a complete picture just by looking atthe blood.

I think it's because these, these incidents are dynamic that, you know,
you know, somebody doesn't just stand therestill and somebody comes up and stabs them.
It doesn't work that way.
There's a fight, there's.
There's people rolling around, coming intocontact with the wall, furniture, bits and
pieces.
And quite often when you get scenes like that,
you also got the added complication ofparamedic intervention, because of course

(42:30):
they'll be coming in and they'll cause someblood spatter themselves by some of the work
they do.
Yeah.
They can to be really, really complex.

So the next one I wanted to talk about is fingerprints.

Yes.

Now, you mentioned this, and it's something that I've come across an awful lot,
is that people seem to really focus on DNAlike it's this sexy new technology that we've
got and ignore fingerprints.
But as an investigator, I always preferred
fingerprints for a number of reasons.
Firstly, there's less chance of contamination,

(43:05):
cross contamination, etcetera.
A fingerprint is a fingerprint.
And also, as well as an investigator, thereare quicker way, if you could get a good
finger mark, there are much quicker way ofidentifying who left that.
And it is from DNA, which can take days,whereas a fingerprint, you could turn around
in hours.

In hours, yeah.

So obviously these are your baby, being a fingerprint expert, but just talk us
through briefly around how you would isolateand get that fingerprint evidence from a crime
scene.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, fingerprints, it's never really gone away.
It is useful evidence, especially as DNAbecomes more sensitive.
You find somebody's DNA.
So say I found somebody's DNA in your kitchen.
It doesn't mean they've been in your housewith fingerprints if it's on a fixed item,
generally you can't.
You can't accidentally leave a fingerprint on
somebody's kitchen worktop unless you've beenin the kitchen.

(43:54):
Yes, you can leave one on the stuff that's inthe cupboards in the kitchen because, you
know, shelf stackers from.
But if it's a fixed item in a house, so it's
quite useful for that because it puts somebodythere at a location.
But every scene you're going to, you need towork out sort of, you know, is it.
Is it a crime scene where you've got somebodythat's climbed in?

(44:15):
Is it a burglary type situation?Now there, you know, you've got.
You can not only just put a name to somefingerprints, you can attribute to an action.
If you think about how you're going to climbthrough a window or breaking a window, picking
out those pieces of glass, you know, if youcan attribute actions to it, but you do get to
the point.
So, you know, you'd maximise on those sort of
areas.
If you've got weapons, if you've got things

(44:36):
that are left lying around, obviously you'd belooking at things like that.
But you do quite often get to a point whereyou just need to wait.
You're in a crime scene, in a house or abuilding, and you just want to work out.
You get to that point where I just want tofind all the fingerprints there are that are
in here and then we can go through them ifnecessary, one by one.
You know, is there a fingerprint in anotherroom that actually puts somebody that later

(44:57):
transpires to be a suspect in that address?Because that's really quite important.
Then you look at different methods.
The traditional one that you often see is
powdering.
You know, it's what you do for vehicle crime
burglaries.
It can be a bit destructive, so you have to be
careful with how you use it.
Flicking that powder around everywhere.
But there's lots of chemical methods and waysyou can look for finger marks using light

(45:20):
sources, lasers, uv lights, lights atdifferent wavelengths.
And then you go through a whole sequence ofdifferent methods from using superglue in
somebody's house.
It's unusual because there's health risks
associated with it, but you can effectivelybuild a superglue chamber in somebody's house.
I've done that before.
And you'll be looking at items that are not

(45:42):
really readily transportable.
You can fingerprint entire cars, drive them
into a chamber and use superglue.
And there's a whole number of different
chemicals you can use in a sort of prettysequential order, because some of them are
quite destructive.
So you can.
You know, the last one is a chemical we'veused for years, chemical called ninhydrin.

(46:03):
It tends to get used for.
On paper and things like that, but it works on
walls.
And so you'd have.
You'd spray somebody's house with ninhydrinand then you'd have to leave it sometimes for
a couple of weeks, depending on what time ofyear it was.
To actually develop the marks, it needs a bitof warmth and a bit of humidity, so it's the
middle of winter, then it can take a longtime.
I can remember one of your cases from your tvprogramme, Eudan Hastings.

(46:26):
We did an in Hydra on the walls in there.
And it took.
Because it was so cold, it took quite a longtime to.
To get that to go.
So it's very useful and powerful evidence, but
it's not the examine.
The identification can be quick, but getting
the finger marks can be quite slow.

And you've not mentioned it, but.
But there's like the holy Grail, really, when
you go into a crime scene involvingfingerprints, and that's a fingerprint in
blood.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Fingerprint blood.

Yep.

You can't.
You can't date, you can't time a fingerprint,
can you?But when it's in blood, you've got that
opportunity.

Yeah, it's.
Right.
It's. It puts somebody there at a specifictime.
You know, sometimes you might find a newspaperof a certain date and things like that, and
you could, you know, you can use that to someextent to get some sort of time around a
fingerprint.
But, yeah, generally you can't.
But fingerprints in blood, I mean, they, asyou say, it's the holy grail, isn't it?
It's, you know, whose blood is it, though?Is it a finger that's going on into blood or

(47:18):
is it a print of blood from a finger?There's lots of different ways of looking at
it and different connotations around.

So the next one that was wanted to talk about is DNA.
So we touched on it.
Yeah, but DNA is.
When I first joined in 91, and it was verymuch in his infancy, and for me, it's become
almost more complicated.
Yes.
So, as an example.
So, firearms, I am out of shootings, I had
where we recovered the firearm, and quiteoften they would be gangs.

(47:49):
And these guns have been passed around thegangs and you'd come back with basically a
soup of DNA with at least six contributors.
And it made it really difficult to identify
and isolate any DNA.
So DNA now is very, very sensitive, isn't it?

Yeah, very sensitive.
When I started using DNA, because I go back to
pre DNA, where we just use basically likeblood grouping, the same that you get if
you're going to donate blood and you find outwhat your blood group was.
There was a couple other things we did aswell, but it was essentially blood grouping,
which useful, but not very discriminating.
You know, you might find that the, you know,
blood left in this.
This scene matches 25% of the population, so

(48:28):
it's not particularly useful.
You can use it to eliminate somebody, perhaps,
but not.
It's not good evidence.
And then DNA came in and when we firststarted, you needed certainly a blood spot.
The guide we were given was the size of a 50pence piece, you know, and then you'd send it
off and you'd get results coming back and itwas single profiles and they could always tell
you that it's blood, it's saliva, it's *****,whatever.

(48:48):
They could tell you what the actual substancewas.
And it progressed and it progressed and itprogressed and to some extent automated as
well.
And we got to the point now where basically
what they will find is cellular DNA, whichmeans that it's unusual to bear to attribute
it to a particular source.
So, you know, you've got DNA, but you don't

(49:09):
know what it's often you don't know what it'sin, whether it's blood or whatever.
The transferring of DNA has become a big, bigissue.
So you get to the point now, sometimes italmost seems like the most important person in
the court isn't the scientist that's foundthis sample or identified this sample.
It's the statistician who explains all thedifferent possibilities and likelihoods and

(49:31):
likelihood ratios to a court.
So it's gone to a point now, it's very
difficult to understand.
I mean, I work in it and you.
Sometimes you look at it and you just think,oh, so this is a billion times more likely
than that as a scenario.
And it gets.
Yeah, it gets very complicated.
It's immensely powerful and it's still
obviously an incredibly useful tool, but notin the same way that it used to be.

(49:52):
I mean, it's moved things on enormously and itstill has, but it's now come with, you know,
with challenges.
I think when they started, when they I don't
know if you remember the.
When you were first told about DNA, but they
called it genetic fingerprinting.
That's a phrase they used at the time.
And I think, looking back, that's caused someproblems because I think people associated it

(50:14):
then with a fingerprint and with everythingthat comes around a fingerprint.
And we've moved away from that because findingsomebody's DNA inside a house or in a victim's
car doesn't mean they're necessarily thekiller or they were there at the time.
It could be the mechanic that worked on thecar four months before.
You know, it's.
So.
It's.
It's immensely powerful, but has big

(50:34):
challenges.

And so I've done a couple of episodes now where I talk about fall barry
clothing.
So when.
When you're going into a crime scene.

Yeah.

You're wearing overshoes, the paper suit, two pairs of latex gloves, masks,
put up, hood up.

Yeah.

And it's vital because it's so easy to introduce that DNA when you're talking
about that molecular level, it's so easy tointroduce DNA and just as easily to bring out.

Yep.

And if you're then going.
And so I've just published an episode today on
Luther and I was looking at that to try andunderstand the authenticity around it and that
there's protocols and crime scenes areatrocious.

Yeah.

And it's so easy if you're.
If you were going to a crime scene and then to
deal with a suspect later on, you can see theproblems there.
If you're.
If you're bringing out my microscopic levels
of DNA and transferring them over here andthey're trying to.
And they're finding them on a suspect, it.
It can be a false reading, can't it?

(51:40):
It can be that potentially somebody hasbrought that DNA to the suspect rather than
the suspect being at the scene.

Yeah. I mean, it's.
You know, certainly if I was, you know, if I
was ever advising defence counsel and they hada. Certainly not while I was in the.
In the Met, but now I've left.
But if they had a case where they had that
DNA, you know, in the situation you described,I would straight away be looking at who's in
that log, who went into that, you know, didanybody go to both.

(52:08):
But the barrier clothing.
Yeah, it's vital.
And of course, every time you touch anything,you've contaminated that outer pair of gloves.
So you have to go and change your glovesagain.
If the inquiry team phoned you when you're inthe scene for a start.
You haven't got pockets in a paper suit, soyour phone's usually tucked away somewhere
where you can't quite access it.
So you have to go out, get half the barrier

(52:29):
clothing off, make the phone call, change yourgloves, clean everything down.
It wouldn't be uncommon for me, when I assessthe crime scene, to get through 100 gloves
easily.
And of course, it's not just two pairs of
latex gloves, because if you're in a scene foran extended period of time, you tend to wear
cotton gloves underneath, because otherwise,by the end of it, your hands would just be a
mess because you.

(52:49):
You know, so it's.
You end up then with a pair of cotton gloveson, two pairs of latex gloves, and you tend to
lose quite a bit of dexterity.
It feels like you have flippers at times when
you're trying to pick things up.

So in terms.
In terms of retrieving the DNA, just briefly,
how would you go around doing that?

Again, there's lots of different ways.
If you had sort of blood, for instance, on awall, or even things where you thought there
was likely to be contact, you might not beable to see any blood.
But has this person opened this cupboard oropened this, used his door handle?
You'd swab it.
It's a swab.
It's a moistened swab.

Like a cotton bud that you stick in your ear.

Yeah. Bit like a cotton bud that you should never stick in your ear.

No, you shouldn't stick in your ear.

His arteries in there.
But, yeah, it's like a cotton.
It's like a cotton bud that you moisten oneand then you use a dry swab afterwards and you
take a control swab as well, so you can get ageneral background, so they can see what
general areas, as opposed to what you'reswabbing.
A lot of the time with DNA, it's actuallyrecovering items.

(53:59):
It's taking.
It's taking things because it's far better to
do that in laboratory conditions.
Certainly, if you're thinking about clothing,
if you're recovering clothing that you thinkmight have been used in an offence a lot of
the time, it's virtually impossible to screenthat clothing effectively at a crime scene.
It needs to be done in a. Which does introduceanother layer of complication, because if you

(54:21):
think about it, if you're recovering, sayyou've got some victim's clothing in a scene
that's been removed by paramedics orsomething, the temptation is to stick it in a
bag, seal it up so it's not nice and secure.
Nothing's going to get contaminated and then
take it away.
Now, you can't open that anywhere other than a
DNA clean environment.
So if you've not searched the pockets or if
you've put a lady's handbag in a plastic bagjust to get it back to the police station, you

(54:45):
can't then open, even in an exhibit suite, youcan't then open it to look through, to see, is
there a phone in the handbag?Is there, you know, or a letter.

Posted to the killer?

Yeah. So it's quite complex because, you know, you have to.
You didn't have to go to the lab and they'dhave to open it.
All the DNA precautions, so it does introducethe DNA introduces lots of complexities on
different.

One thing I didn't mention I wanted to touch on is the test that you can do
to identify for red stain in the blood.

Yep. Yeah.

You can do that at the scene, can't you?

There's a number of different tests you can use.
Some people use hemosticks, which are like amedical product, or there's carceral Mayo,
which is a three step process where you look,you know, you get a philtre paper and you fold
it to a point and you just basically barelytouch a questioned area, a question stain, and
then you use the chemicals and it willindicate that it may be blood.

(55:38):
It's a presumptive test.
Or the hemosticks is just a question of
scraping the hemosticks and then dropping somedistilled water on it and you get a result
there.
But the reason.

Sorry, I was like, the reason I brought it up there.
As you mentioned, clothing and sometimes it'svery difficult.
You can see some staining on clothing, but isthat blood or is it some food or other stains?
That testing is really helpful on clothing.
I would suggest modern.

If you think, you know, if you get somebody say, oh, we know the suspect was
wearing black tracksuit bottoms and they go tothe address and there's 20 pairs.
And so, you know, I mean, when you look atwhat the laboratories find, they're finding
spots of blood that are smaller than amillimetre.
You can't do that in a crime scene.

(56:23):
You couldn't have 20 pairs of leggings, of
attractive bottoms in a crime scene and screenthat effectively.
That's.
That's sort of really laboratory work.
But, yeah, if you had some samples that youthink, or like a pair of trainers and you
think, is that a blood spot on the side of thetrainers?
Yeah.
You can do a little presumptive test on that.
Just to say, yeah, there's.

It just sparked something in my mind there that always amused me is these
killers that would get rid of their clothing,but not their trainers.

Yeah, yeah.

They become emotionally attached to their trainers for some reason.

Yeah.

Right.
So the next thing I wanted to cover was
fibres.
I know you touched on this.

Yeah.

But fibres is one of those things that's been around for a long time.
It doesn't really get our focus.
But just as an example, the Stephen Lawrence
inquiry.

Yeah.

And people were convicted on the basis of fibres.
It's not something that we run normally.
And as you mentioned, sadly, it comes down to
money, essentially, doesn't it?Because it can take an awful lot of work to
first off retrieve the fibres and then lookfor the fibres elsewhere to match them.
It is a lot of work, but it can be effective.

(57:24):
Can it?

Can be effective.
But the trouble is you have to go into that
process not really knowing what going to be atthe end.
You know, you might find, yes, you've gotfibre transfer, but it's a Marks and Spencer's
t shirt, or when you identify what it is.
So again, you don't know at that stage whether
it's going to be useful evidence.
Sometimes you might find something that's
admitted by somebody's great arm and it's theonly one of it type of clothing in the world.

(57:46):
So, you know, it's sort of the value of thefibres that you recover can be enhanced.
One of the things we started to move into whenwe were still using it occasionally was
something called one to one taping, whichlooked at, rather than just looking at the
transfer of fibres, it looked into trying towork out what the physical actions were that
led to the transfer.

(58:06):
So if you imagine normally you might get some
tape, like two inch tape, and basically justdab it is the wrong word, but basically just
to cover an item of clothing, to recover theloose fibres, one to one taping, if you
imagine you've got a victim lying in a crimescene, you would use hundreds of pieces of
tape, so.

(58:28):
And you would record where every single one
was, so you could number those tapes.
And it might only be a one inch wide piece of
tape.
If you imagine covering an entire body with
one inch wide pieces of tape, each oneindividually numbered, each one individually
packed and exhibited, because then you canlook at, yes, I've got transfer of fibres, but
you can also say you can assign an action toit.

(58:49):
I had a case in south London where a lady wasfound dead in her kitchen.
Looked like a burglary gone wrong.
Very nice area, nice house.
But they did the one to one taping there andthey managed to assign actions.
They could see how the suspect had approachedher, so that they realised that he'd
approached her from behind and put an armaround her neck because of where the transfer

(59:09):
of the fibres was incredibly powerfulevidence.
Incredible.
But the amount of work to do was astonishing.

But it's not something that we were done routinely, is it?
You wouldn't do that?

No, not now.
I think I'm picking up there's a bit of a
ground, well, of interest in it sort ofbecoming, you know, more useful again because
of the value of it, you know.
Yes, it costs a lot of money, so you're not
going to better use it everywhere.
Of course, the problem is as well, is that if
you're going to use it, you need to decideright at the start.
You can't make a decision two weeks in becausethen it's all, you know, it's too late.

(59:41):
But I think, and I certainly, I'd like to seeit used a bit more because it, you know, it
can be incredibly powerful.

So footwear, footmarks, is another thing that possibly gets overlooked
when we're thinking about evidence, forensicevidence from a crime scene.
And so essentially, all our shoes, when we buythem, are they all look the same?
Whatever brand and make of shoes you buy andmodel of shoes, they all look the same.
But as we start to wear them, we wear themdifferently, don't we?

Andrew Langley (01:00:10):
We do.
And in fact, although it never really makes
much difference that although they all lookthe same when they.
When you.
When they come out of the box, they're not
necessarily the same.
They've all got manufacturing marks.
There might be bubbles in the.
In the.
In the rubber or whatever, it's on the sole.
So again, they're potentially unique right
from the start, but as soon as you've gone outand walked, you know, ten steps, then, you

(01:00:31):
know, you trod on a piece of glass, you put alittle nick in there, or, you know, if you.
If you trod out a cigarette or something likethat, you've got a little burn mark.
And these things can persist quite a longtime.
And the more you wear the shoes, the moreunique they become to you.
And of course, it's not just the other thingto remember is a bit of an aside.
It's not just the outside of the shoe, theinside of the shoe is quite important as well.

(01:00:52):
Because you can look at where people's feetcome into contact with the shoe and you can
start, because not everybody wears their shoesin the same way, so you can start to get.
And looking at things like gait analysis andall these different sorts of things.
But, yeah, shoe marks, incredibly useful.
And because we all leave them, you can't put,
you know, effectively, you don't put glovesover your shoes.
So it can be.

(01:01:13):
But there does come a time where if you don't
get that shoe within, you know, months, thenit's too late.

Steve Keogh (01:01:18):
It'S gone, because they continue wearing it and it gets new marks, etcetera.
So one of the complications when you turn upat a crime scene, when we get there, yes,
there's chaos, but in terms of the crimescene, generally, it's closed down.

Yeah.

But what you don't know is how many people have trodden through that.
And so many times I used to, when you actuallywork out who's been in there, quite often what
you'd find is police officers just want tohave a look.
There's been a murder, there's a dead body,and you have half of the team, the relief, the
uniform relief coming.

We've all had jobs like that.
Yeah.

And throwing the ambulance crew and anybody else that may have been through it
can come quite complicated.
Working out which shoe belongs to who.

Yeah. I mean, in those early stages, you have to accept it.
There's no such thing as a perfect crime scenebecause somebody's got to find it.
Somebody's got to discover it.
But, you know, in those.
Those.
Those first officers that arrive, the
paramedics, they're all in there.
Yes, it might be a crime scene, but their
primary focus is the preservation of life.
So you have to, you know.
Yes, it'd be nice if they had someconsideration of what might happen afterwards.

(01:02:25):
And generally they do.
But the important thing there is, you know, is
that preservation.

Yeah. Preservation of life is number one when we talk about the five
building blocks, and preservation of life isnumber one.

I mean, you get.
You'll see us often, shoe covers.
So you'll be aware of the shoe covers you getoften with scene examiner or forensic written
on the bottom of them.
I'm in two minds about those.
Yes, they're important so you don't leave yourshoe mark in there, but people put those on
and they think it makes them hover and itdoesn't, because if you've got a shoe mark in
dust and you walk through it with thoseovershoes, you're going to destroy it because

(01:02:57):
the shoe marks are everywhere.
Most people now would have wooden flooring or
sort of laminate flooring.
Fantastic for Schumachers.
You can't often see them.
You need to use a really oblique light, a
powerful light.
You don't do it in your own house because it's
terrifying, because you'll find all sorts ofstuff.
You'll find, you know, it's a food thatdisappeared years ago or that's where the dog

(01:03:19):
hid that.
And you know, because you just see everything.
There's an advert on the moment for a Dyson,latest Dyson Hoover, and it's got a laser on
the front, a really oblique laser.
And so you can see all the dust, but it's a
bit like that.
But what you can see is you can see the
Schumacher in dust.
How do you recover a Schumacher dust?
You know, if you try and powder it like youwould with some.

(01:03:39):
No, you've just brushed it all away.
You can photograph it.
But then you get into things likeelectrostatic lifting where you apply static
electricity, thousands of volts and it makesthe dust particles jump onto what, onto the
foil?You're using that.
But, yeah, Schumacher, hugely important.

Right, so the last bit of evidence I was going to talk about is
ballistics, which is important if you've got amurder involving a firearm.

Yeah.

So that would add a different dynamic, wouldn't it, to your crime scene
examination?

Definitely.
And again, you'd be calling in an expert.
If you had a ballistic discharge inside aroom, you'd be looking to get trajectories and
all that sort of information from that scene.
But of course then you've got recovered bits
of, you know, casings or bullets.
You don't often recover bullets because
bullets tend to degrade and basically becomeso distorted if they've hit anything hard or

(01:04:36):
completely, virtually disintegrate.
I made a scene where I couldn't work out what
these little bits of foil were in my crimescene.
They looked like bits of foil on the floor andit was a shotgun discharge, but it's where the
pellets had hit the.
Hit the ground at an angle and at such speed
that they'd melted.
So you had these tiny little shotgun pellets.
So, yeah, the information you can get from,from a spent round or a casing, you know,

(01:04:56):
every gun leaves, again, uses its own uniquemarks.
So you're looking for casings, which sometimesbrings another element.
You speak to witnesses.
How many shots did you hear?
Oh, I heard six or I heard four.
And what they often hear is they don't hear
the first one because the first one is thesound that alerts them and then what they do
hear is subsequent shots, but also echoescoming back from buildings.
So, you know, if you always take what you'retold in terms of number of shots, as with a.

(01:05:19):
With a pinch of salt, but, you know, you'relooking for recovered casings and things like
that.
And of course, the other side of it is the
residue that a gun juices when it's fired.
That's a bit separate, but gunshot residue.
You know, if you fire a gun, you're going tobe covered in particles of this.
Of this residue, which, again, is very useful.
Trace evidence.

Yeah, very much so.
So, I mean, Andy, I feel, because we're
literally skimming the surface of forensicscience.

Yeah, I know.

Well, I'm doing that consciously because otherwise we could be here for hours
and hours.
So. So essentially that I think we've covered
what your role would be at the scene.

Yeah.

And then we've discussed the fact that you would be the ongoing.
If you.
If you were assigned a particular murder
investigation, you would be the ongoingcontact for investigation team all the way
through to the trial and would be the point ofcontact for the forensic scientists,
entomologists, whatever kind of scientistbring it into an inquiry.
It would be via you to do that.

(01:06:19):
That's the practicality just really touching
your job.
We could spend hours doing that.
Tell us some old war stories, Andy.
Tell us stories that people are going to be
interested in and potentially wouldincorporate elements of it into their writing.

Okay. Yeah. There's a couple of cases that spring to mind, one a lot of
people will have heard on.
There's been lots of documentaries on.
It was the murder of Tia Sharp in Addingtonaround the time of the London Olympics.
It was an unusual case.
It was a missing person.
There's lots and lots of missing personscases.
There are a number of searches in the addressand the searches didn't go well.
Tia had been in the loft, dead and wasn'tfound.

(01:06:57):
And I think it's partly because I wasn'tinvolved at that stage, I'm glad to say, but I
think it's partly because they weren't.
They didn't go in there with the expecting to
find.
They went in just thinking it was a missing
person case.
There was reason to suspect that Tia may have
gone somewhere else with a friend on holiday.
And it's memorable as well for me because it
was a bit close to home.

(01:07:18):
I don't mean geographically, although I don't
live that far.
From there.
But Tia was the same age as my youngest and Ilater found out that she went to primary
school with most of my daughter's classmates.
They'd moved on to secondary school, so it was
a bit close to home and they're always a bit achallenge, as you say, somebody the same age
as one of your kids, you can't help but drawparallels.

(01:07:39):
I picked the case up about three days in.
It had gone to a murder team because it was a
high risk missing person and I wanted to getinto the house.
But for some reason, possibly because of theOlympics, possibly because there was no other
news, it was summer, the press were all overit.
I've never seen press intrusion to thatextent.
They were everywhere.

(01:07:59):
And I spoke to the SIO at the time.
I said, I want to have a look at that house.
And he says, well, yeah, if I put forensics in
there again, the press are going to think, youknow, and they just.
There were so many possibilities at thatstage.
And every day I went back up to the SIObecause he was in the same building as me.
And I said, any chance I can get in thathouse?
Eventually, he said, yes, what we're going todo?

(01:08:22):
He said, we're going to do a full forensicsearch of that house.
He said, and unusually, he said, I'm going totell the press.
I'm going to tell the press what we're goingto do.
So he said, I want you to go away and write mea strategy.
You know, exactly what you want, he says, andit needs to be quite, you know, I want public
to see that we're looking.
So I did that.
Part of that meant that the family had to bemoved out because the family was still living

(01:08:45):
in the house.
Obviously, I was going to go with chemicals
and lasers and things like that.
So they had to go along with their pets, apart
from the snake neck terrapin, never seen oneof those before.
Now, when they were trying to move them out,Stuart Hazel, who was eventually convicted,
they found he disappeared.
He wasn't anywhere to be seen.
Nobody knew where he was.
And the house was unusual in that.
The only place you could get a mobile phonesignal was on the landing.

(01:09:08):
So one of the flows, one of the family liaisonofficers went up to the landing to make a
phone call to call the inquiry team and say,hazel's gone missing.
And Marcia was up there.
She just got this smell, a smell that she
recognised, but nobody else did in the house.
And so she said, actually, I think I can smell
decomposition.
So it's an unusual one for me, because I then

(01:09:28):
went and met the SIO in a car park about threeor 4 miles from the scene.
Because the whole of the estate was full ofpress.
They'd taken up positions in people's houses,looking out windows with these satellite dish
microphones.
So I had my briefing with the Sioux somewhere
away, and he basically said to me, she's inthe house, Andy.
Go and find her.

(01:09:48):
Which is a bit unusual for crime scene manager
because you usually come along and you'vealready got that information, so.
Okay.
So I turned up and ran the gauntlet of the
press and I said, I've never seen anythinglike it.
Two news helicopters above me.
It was quite useful because we were in the
house and we could see who was coming up thegarden path.
So we knew, you know, which obviously we wereexpecting.
I ended up searching this house and ended upin the loft.

(01:10:12):
And it was the middle of summer.
We logged the temperatures in there.
It was over 120 degrees.
Wow.
And of course, you can smell it by this stage.
So you think she's in it some.
But you can't just go clashing, crashingaround.
And the loft wasn't boarded, so I had to go inall my ppe clothing in these temperatures, on
my knees, on the joists, thinking all the timeI'm going to fall through this ceiling.

(01:10:33):
And she was right in the far corner.
So that was a memorable one.
And we spent a lot of time there.
The house was eventually taken apart, got some
good evidence, and he ended up getting a 37year sentence.
He changed his plea during the trial.
It's the only time I've ever been to court for
a sentencing, because normally I would go andgive evidence if required.
But you would be moved on by that point.

(01:10:54):
But because of that one, I actually went and
was quieting when they said, he's changed.
His plea come up for, you know, he's going to
be sentenced.
So I saw him get 37 years.
We've already mentioned one war story, thehotel.
That was fairly memorable.

That one's notorious.
I mean, that went around the wet met like
wildfire.

I know, but the thing is, the officers that went there didn't do anything
wrong.
If they'd have taken that bedroom apart,
they'd have destroyed all the evidence.
I just, you know, I don't know what the answer
is to that one because it's a difficult one,unfortunately.
It's incredibly rare.
But, yeah, that was.

Unfortunately didn't kill anyone.
I mean, that's the fortunate thing, isn't it?

That's right, yeah.

It already killed two people.
So, yeah.

So, yeah, that was a strange one.
The last.
The last big case I got involved in is quite
an interesting one and does give some insightinto what a crime scene manager does.
There was, again, a long term missing person.
Quite high risk.
He got missing in the spring.
There was evidence on intelligence that came
in that he had come to harm, but nobody was.
You know, there was no. We couldn't work out

(01:11:55):
who by or where he was, what had happened tohim.
And some information came in which led us to acountry lane alongside the m 40 in
Buckinghamshire.
Bit unusual because normally, if it goes
outside of the Met, it's another police forcethat deals with it.
But this one, because it was a met case and itwasn't that far, it stayed with us, although
all the cordons were controlled by the localpolice force.

(01:12:19):
We ended up looking at this, about a mile ofwoodland alongside this country lane.
And we could work out some bits.
We could discount some bits because we knew it
was a lower level somebody had to climb down.
So we knew we could discount the bits that
were up.
And so we ended up with an area probably

(01:12:39):
several hundred yards square.
And we thought, let's put a dog through.
Let's just see what the dog can find.
Because it was just a woodland.
The dog went through and within minutes founda skull on top of the leaf fall, which was
odd.

And then on top of the least fall?

On top of the least fall, yeah.
But then looking around, you could see therewas another few more bones dotted around.
So at that point we thought, well, okay, thisis, you know, potentially a runner.
We could see from the skull we had that therewas dental work, so we knew we'd be able to
establish whether it was who we were lookingfor or not.
So that was a country lane in the middle ofnowhere.
There was nothing there.
But within a couple of weeks, there were three

(01:13:17):
or four porter cabins.
There were marquees and tents.
We had temporary traffic lights to control thetraffic flow in the street.
We erected scaffold so we could get down tothis.
This area.
It was also used as a viewing platform so the
family could come down and the family wouldcome down and go onto the viewing platform and
look over this woodland where.
Where their relative, where their loved one

(01:13:38):
had met his end.
It was complicated because apart from the fact
that the.
All the leaves, you know, he went missing in
spring, he was found in the winter.
So all the leaves that were there, invisible
were potentially post incident.
So I did have to get a search team to pick up
each leaf one by one.
Yeah.
They were happy, yeah, because we needed toget to what was underneath that leaf fall.

(01:14:02):
So we quickly established who it was, so weknew it was our missing person.
It's not just about getting the evidence, it'sabout families, a lot of it.
So the family obviously want as much of theirloved one back as we can possibly get.
So in a situation like that, somebody had goneto attempt to bury him, but made the mistake
that lots of people do in that it's not easyto dig a hole to bury somebody, especially if

(01:14:23):
you go into a woodland, because it's full ofroots.
So they looked.
They'd found a depression and sort of laid him
at the base of this depression and covered himwith soil and leaves and bits and pieces, but
they didn't realise that the depression wasthe main drainage channel that comes off the m
40.
So the next time it rained, it just washed
everything away, so you ended up with a bodywhich was exposed.

(01:14:46):
So then, of course, the local wildlife decidedto get involved.
Now, the interesting thing for me there, I'mused to foxes and rats and badgers and things
like that, but this one had red kites.
Red kites are a bird of prey that was
introduced into that area a few decades ago,and it's been very successful in establishing
itself.
The problem I had with that is that you can

(01:15:07):
work out how animals will move remains and youcan quite often find them.
You have to go back to where the animals areliving and they'll either be.
They're usually, they're outside that, wherethey're.
Where they're.
Where they're sleeping and living.
But of course the red kites would come downand pick things up and fly away with it.
So that's, you know, never something I'd hadto contend with in the past, but the sort of
predation of.
But we got, I think we got about 95% of his

(01:15:29):
remains back and it took a long.
I mean, that was in 20, late 2019, early 2020,
and only came to a conclusion this year incourt, gentlemen.
Got 25 years.
There's some other people involved who weren't
convicted of murder, but they were convictedof lesser offences.
And I think it was four of them got imprisonedat the end, but that was.
That was a, you know, that was anotherexample.

(01:15:51):
You've got no idea what you're going to bedoing.
You end up spending millions, literallymillions of pounds setting up, you know, a
little self contained village that can support40, 50 people on a daily basis, carrying out
that crime scene work.

So everything that you do everything.
Everything you did, Andy, I've talked aboutthis on a previous podcast, is you're doing a
job that most.
I'm doing bunny ears.
But you don't see that normal people don't do.
You're dealing with death on a day to day
basis.
As a crime scene manager, you would go to road
traffic accidents, where it could bepotentially death by dangerous driving,

(01:16:31):
unexplained deaths, where potentially it couldbe homicidal or not.
Your job essentially involves death.
How did that impact you?
What were your coping mechanisms for this?

I think the biggest one.
I mean, things have thankfully moved on a bit,
but when I started, there was no real.
I suppose there would be support available,
but the support tended to come too late.
It was after a crisis had happened, but so.
And there wasn't really the understandingabout the effects that it had on people.
I think the biggest support was the cattle.

(01:17:08):
It was the people you shared the kettle with.
I worked in an office with five or six othercrime scene managers who all were exposed to
exactly the same thing.
They all knew the pressures.
And I can remember one when I was in.
When I was in east London, I dealt with a
succession of infant deaths.
There was a lot of focus on that at the time.
I think only one out of about four wasactually sort of suspicious, but they all had

(01:17:33):
to be investigated.
I did about four of them in two weeks.
And I came back to the office and I just sortof said, you know, over a cup of tea, I said,
look, the next one that comes in, somebodyelse can go and do that because they're
difficult to deal with, not because of whatyou're seeing, but because of the environment
you're going into, because of the grief andthe tragedy, it's you.

(01:17:53):
So I think you absorb it to some extent, andit was never a problem.
You know, people would hear that and then, youknow, when the next one came in, it would be.
They'd make sure that it didn't come rightaway.
I think, as I've gone on, I think they doleave a mark, these cases.
You mentioned in a previous podcast aboutlocking things in a way in a different part of
your brain, and I think you have to.

(01:18:13):
If you didn't do that, I think you would
crumble under the stress.
But it was worries me, though, that we've got
this locked area in your brain.
What happens if it gets unlocked?
Yeah, but I've always likened it to cookies.
When you go onto it on a PC, when you're.
You're looking at websites and it puts cookieson your computer and unless you get rid of
those cookies from time to time, it all slowsdown and comes to a halt.

(01:18:35):
I think crime scenes are like cookies or theseincidents, and I think they do.
They do leave a mark.
You just, I think, being aware of the
potential.
I mean, looking back now, looking back at
pictures of me when, at some points when I wasworking, I look awful, I look again.
You've got the factor in shift work as well,so you've got lack of sleep, disturbed sleep
patterns, this constant exposure.

(01:18:56):
And I can think some nights where I've dealt
with three or four night and literally you'rerunning around.
So I think they do leave a bit of a mark.
There is support now, you know, looking, and
people nowadays would be assessed on annuallyas to whether they're fit to continue.
Generally people are, but it's a concern Ididn't do.

(01:19:19):
I mean, a crumsey manager not being a cop, wedon't tend to retire so early, so obviously
cops has changed now.
But I think you did 30 years, didn't you,
Steve?I mean, I would be expected to do 40, at least
I made it to 35 and I just thought.
I just couldn't see the rest.
I couldn't see the rest.

(01:19:40):
I'd also gone for some screening after
Grenfell Tower.
There were concerns about some people who'd
been working in Grenfell Tower, about how itmight have impacted them.
And I wanted my team to go for it.
It was made available, it was separate from
work, so it was all done very well andproperly.
And I thought, well, I want to encourage myteam to go and have this screening just to

(01:20:00):
cheque.
And I thought, well, I can't really encourage
them unless I do it myself.
So I went first.
It was uncomfortable.
You know, I remember being in this quite a
depressing building for a couple of hoursover.
Over a couple of weeks with a consultant fromthe NHS.
And I went through all the things.
You know, you walk in, it's quite a foreboding
place, and you go through all the things like,are they going to let me out?

(01:20:22):
What if they find there's something wrong withme?
You know, I've left my van on a yellow lineand all sorts of things like that.
But at the end of it, she said to me that shecould find no, no signs of PTSD at all.
But she said, but if I were you, I wouldn't.
If I were you, you might consider a career
change.

Really?

Yeah, because I had been honest and I'd.
You know, explained my work pattern, what Idealt with, you know, and she just thought,
you know what?It's sort of.
So I did.
That's why I left.

You're teaching now, is that right?

Yeah. I'm down at the University of Kent teaching the next
generations of forensic science scientists andscene examiners, trying to teach them what not
to do based on my mistakes.

Listen, Andy, it's been a fascinating conversation with you.
I've been.
I'm conscious that we've been here for an hour
and a half.

Okay.

And we could literally.

I know.
Yeah.

It's such.
It's such a fascinating area.
And I'm sure people are listening, would haveso many questions.

Yeah.

Maybe we'll have you back on again if we.

I'd love to.
Yeah. And of course, if people want to get.
I don't know how it works.
If people want to get back in touch with you,
if they want to speak to me or converse withme, that's absolutely fine.

Yeah. So I've got a membership site, so I'm looking to do Q and A's with
experts.
It'd be fascinating to get you along and so
people can put questions to you directly.

Yeah. And I want to put you in front of my students as well so they can
actually do that.
A real, real live ex cop.
Yeah.

No, Andy, listen, mate, it's been fantastic.
I really enjoyed talking to you.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming on.
And I'm sure people are listening, have
learned so much about the role of CSM and thework you do.
Thanks, mate, and take care.

Cheers.
Thanks.

I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Andy.
I certainly enjoyed interviewing him now.
I could have spent so much longer with Andy
covering, going into so much more detail aboutthe work he does, some of the forensic
recovery and more of those war stories.
If you have questions too, then the perfect
place to ask them is within the murderinvestigation.

(01:22:25):
For crime writers online community.
For 15 pounds a month only, you get access to
me, where you can ask as many questions as youlike.
In the forum, we have a monthly live Q and A,like a clinic where you can go through your
storylines, questions you have about murderinvestigation, and you get to have live Q and

(01:22:46):
A's with the guests we have on the podcast.
So I'd really encourage you, if you're not a
member, join up.
Just 15 pounds a month.
I think that's fantastic value.
For the sake of authenticity of your writing.
Details of this site are in these show notes.
Or you can go to stevekill.com.
i'll see you next time.
Take care.

(01:23:06):
Thank you for joining me on another episode ofMurder Investigations.
Crime writers.
I'm your host, Steve Keogh, and it's been a
pleasure delving into the world of murderinvestigation with you.
Authenticity is key for crime writers, and Ihope this podcast has provided you with
valuable insights and inspiration for yourstorytelling journey.
If you found value in what you've heard today,I encourage you to share this podcast with

(01:23:28):
your fellow authors.
Together, we can elevate the standards of
crime fiction and bring realism to theforefront.
If you have a moment, I'd also appreciate ifyou could leave a review on your favourite
podcast platform.
Your feedback helps others discover the
podcast and join our community of passionatecrime writers.
Thank you for listening.
Until next time, keep writing, keep

(01:23:49):
investigating, and keep bringing your storiesto life.
I've been Steve Keogh.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Are You A Charlotte?

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}07: Tell me: Why is the crime scene manager crucial to murder investigations? with former CSM Andrew Langley

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Are You A Charlotte?

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

07: Tell me: Why is the crime scene manager crucial to murder investigations? with former CSM Andrew Langley

Are You A Charlotte?