Only Murders in my Mind
Episode 27 Crime Writing and Forensics: Balancing Fact and Fiction
[Music] Welcome to Only Murders in My Mind. A random thought production. Hi, I'm Carol Bissett, a crime writer. And I invite you with my co-presenters, Liz Hedgecock and Mike Jackson, each week to our conversations on All Things Murderers. Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Only Murders in My Mind. And I have with me as normal this hedgecock. Hello, I'm Mike Jackson. Hello both. You're both well. Oh, thank you. Yep. How's your novella coming along, mate? Oh, well, I'm surprised you should mention that because I think it started raining. It started raining. It's been a wet day today. Yeah, I think pigs, I can see flying over there. Oh, they're very soggy pigs, if they are. But you have got a boot recently out. I have a book of drabble, 100 worst stories. And lots of people die. Lots of people die. And we recently were at a sort of a literary festival at Stockton Heath. And we did actually promote your boot. Oh, thank you very much. And tell people about it. I read some out of it. Great, thank you. So, you know, even though he wasn't there, he wasn't. I don't need to be. Obviously. So, today, are you working on anything by the way? Well, it is finished now. Mike, my warranty detective is out as an e-book and it will be published as a paperback of this week. So, you'll be able to buy it. And it is a very good read. Yes, well, I have seen it. Yes. And I don't know what I'm going to do next. I have started writing the fifth one at the back of the fourth. Well, if you started writing it, I mean, that's it. You know, and I, it's cast all of us. Yeah, and then because of the prompt I gave myself, Mike talks about prompts all the time. And it has sort of started things going round in my head that might develop into a plot because all I'm going to die. All I've got at the moment, I think, is two pages of script. And that's it. Nothing, Kate. You've got to start somewhere. And on that, the one of the things I do use a lot in my books is forensics. And that's what we're going to talk about today. The forensics, modern forensics, old forensics, how it's used in crime and in fictional crime. Sometimes it's a little bit too flashy and fictional crime. And the forensic pathologists and the police would go, "Oh, it's just nothing like that." But it does in my book. It was really quick. Everyone's on speed dial. Yeah, you don't have so much forensics in. You talk about it now and again, don't you? I do occasionally, yes. I think because I tend to write the cozier end of the mystery spectrum, all of that stuff tends to have more sort of off stage. So they might hear about a toxicology report from their police contact, but it won't be foregrounded and they probably won't get to actually see it. So it's less detail. I mean, in the kind of historical stuff I write, it's a different sort of thing, of course, because a lot of stuff just wasn't around. But they did do a lot more than people think of where it came to. There were people moving forward with forensics at the time, sort of, we go back to the era of your Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson. My Sherlock. Well, I suppose the thing is, all the people who've written different versions of Sherlock, yeah, we've each got our own Sherlock. I mean, that's true. I mean, if you think about what Sherlock Holmes is very first appearance in a study in Scarlet, he's in a lab and he's really excited because he's found a test that will be positive for blood and nothing else. Yeah. So, you know, right from the start, he's showing the kind of guy he is and he is very into the scientific side. What do you think about forensics in when you're watching it on the television, et cetera, Mike? Is it sort of a thing you think I don't really want to watch this? It's a bit, you know. I tend not to watch programs like Silent Witness, which are heavily forensics. It does nothing for me. When I watch other programs such as, the Cozy Mystery, my mind's gone blank, whether it be some emeritus, sorry, with some emeritus, I get sort of tie into the forensic part of those, even though it's fairly low key, because the character is as important. The person doing the forensic is the chap who ends up marrying one of the detectives. Was that mid-summergers or am I thinking another one? No, I'm not thinking. Sorry, it's not mid-summergers. It's Lewis. Oh, yes. In Lewis. Yes. The forensic lady ends up marrying. The doctor burberries. Yeah. He's Lewis from the forensic lady. I'm going to sit in mid-summergers that have had a variety of pathologists. Some have been very attractive, some have been all men, and the lady who got at the moment is very famous actress, and she's been in Doctor Who and all sorts of things, and I can't remember her name, but it will come to me. Oh, I can see her face. I know that's not much help if you listen to her podcast. What I have found when I've read murder mystery crime stories is that I've read a couple where it was quite obvious that the author had done a lot of forensic research to make sure that he or she got it right. And I got to the point-- Were they determined to tell you all about it? And they were determined to tell you, you know, and I got to the point where I thought so, no, there's an hour or so. I'm not going to get back in my life. Because sometimes you don't, as a reader, you don't need all that information. It doesn't move the story on at all. It might show that somebody has done the research, and it's all very accurate, but it doesn't move. We're not going to give you a gold star for that author. No. But yeah, it's kind of like the iceberg principle, like when you do research or something, about 10% of that actually needs to show, and the rest of it is all just like in your brain for the next time or beneath the surface. I think the thing, as the general public expect now, there to be instant results because of the way forensic science has developed. And we all expect there to be DNA. And DNA can be the thing between sometimes getting a conviction, and not getting a conviction. And it is very modern, but it's been used in real life crimes from the past, the lady in the lake in Kumbria. Her convictions against her killer was got, I think, from new forensic evidence. I can't guarantee that's what it was. Well, which it was, but it probably was DNA, because I don't think the first time around they had. And then there's always this thing, isn't there about disposing of the body, and the criminal wanting to have the person cremated? And then you can't dig them up again, can you? Not really, no. Well, to be fair, we create more people than we bury these days, don't we, for lots of reasons? So you've not got that. Because they're always digging up bodies when you look at these forensic, you know, they've got a cold case or something like that. And, you know, we'll exhum them sort of thing, which in itself is a massive undertaking, must be. You have to have the mission of so many people, and it has to be done at a certain time of day, and there's got to be so many people there. It's got to be a minister there. Yes, we've done it at a certain time, don't we? Think it's got to be done just at the dawn, you know, just as it starts to get light. So that people, it's light enough for the people to work, but it's not going to upset passers-by, right, type of things. But they don't have a screen over it anyway, they don't have a tone over it, yeah. But in terms of writing, if you're as a writer, or as a reader, myself as a reader, or somebody watching on television, I don't need to know all that, do I? Yeah. I just need to know the body was exhumed. Exhumed. Oh, I see, I quite like the idea of, you know, the mist over the fields and the sun coming up. But you don't need all- The people in the suits or whatever, you know. You don't need all- And the tents, like a wedding tent or something, but it's not a wedding for boating, et cetera, more mist. If Liz had a way, we'd have more exhumations than we usually do. [LAUGHTER] Personally, just in books. Yeah, they're taking photos. Yeah, they're a church bell tolling for no readily apparent reason for a bit more atmosphere, you know. But you don't want to know the nitty gritty about this. You just want to know where the clue came from. Yes. Yeah, I don't need to know. I personally don't because I need to know. Yeah. I mean, it puts a lot of people off. When they see a body on a slab, and somebody's like elbow deep in it, you know. Yeah, I'd probably be looking away at that point. Yeah, I might be interested, but I don't think I want to watch it. You know, whereas, as I say, I always thought I'd like to actually be at a real post-mortem book. It's often the smells. Oh, that's bad. It's usually not with Vaseline or Vic. Yeah, Vic. Yeah, so you can't smell it, yeah. They can't smell it sort of thing, because it is often the smells that make people feel ill. Yes. I think I probably fall into that camp where, for example, I'm like DNA. I don't need to know what it means or anything, but in a story, if somebody says, "Oh, DNA proved that you must have been there, or that you were his brother or whatever." That's enough for me. You know, there is science out there that can do this. I know there is science out there that can do this. Good enough, but you don't need to come into close contact with it. I don't need to know the ins and outs of it. As long as I know that DNA is something that can do all sorts of things. So you're more about the characters and personalities than the facts. I mean, one of the things that we hear more about is cross-contamination and traces of DNA. Because DNA can stay somewhere like on the steering wheel for a long time, but you've got to prove that the person was in the car at a certain time and moved the body and all this sort of thing. So you can only take it so far. And of course, you've got to have the other person's DNA on file. And unless you charge somebody, they're not forced to give you the DNA. They don't have to volunteer. So you've got to go down that road to have a charge. Right. I mean, a lot of detectives would turn around and say, "Well, what have you got to hide?" But then somebody would go, "Well, I'm just against having all my information on databanks everywhere. I'm totally against that." And a lot of people are. A lot of people think we've got too much CCTV in this country. You know, personally, it doesn't bother me. Because you can see when they're looking for somebody to follow them around the city. Yes. We're using the CCTV. But, you know, I mean, it's a lot of information together. But the DNA, we didn't have DNA before the 80s and it was a... So we probably mentioned this before in previous episodes. It was Alec Jefferies, he wasn't a sir then, he got made a sir because of his work on DNA. And because of his work and the massive police work where they took 5,000 swabs from men of a certain age, they convicted Colin Prichard in 1988 for double child murder. And that is a case that will stand there in the history books as one of the first cases that was proven by DNA. I've said a few times down, it's actually a simulator spook that even twins have slightly different DNA. Now, this depends. I apologize if anybody reads and goes, "That's not true." Depends what research papers you read. Some will go. There is a very, very slight tiny, tiny difference in the two identical twins. But the fact that they're identical makes you think, "Well, is there?" Yeah, so I went off the last paper I read when I put this in my later spook. The one way you can get confused is if somebody's had a bone marrow transplant, they might have different DNA going through the body because they've had a transplant off bone marrow transplant off somebody else, which is interesting. Oh, there's a plot point for somebody. Oh, definitely, yeah. Yeah, so as I say, the thing about the identical twins, some scientists will go, "It's like chicken pucks." I was at a conference once and I said to one specialist, "Can you get chicken pucks more than once?" And he went, "No." And then I asked the same question and I'll later, "This is over coffee." This wasn't like on the, they weren't on the same. "Can you get chicken pucks more than once?" Definitely. And these were two really, you know, well-known virologists who were completely disagreeing. In fact, they did have a row about flu viruses, but that was at the point. I'd go off on one again. Fair enough. So in your series of warranted detective, you've got a very prominent character, John Barron. Yes, I've got, John, John Barron is, is the pathologist that works with the Cheshire series, Crime Squad. And he is very good at his job and will go to, you know, he will send off swaps, health, you know, it doesn't matter about the price. He'll send them off and get lots of information. And in this latest book, he even takes DNA off a dog, a dog bite off the dog that had bitten somebody. And that is a thing you can, you can scrape the dog's teeth. As long as it's like not bitten anybody else in between. And this dog didn't. So he managed to extract some DNA from the dog's mouth. And I believe he can also get DNA from the vitreous humour in the eye. So you stick a needle in the eye and draw a thing. I'm not sure he can get time to death off the vitreous humour as well, but, you know, as I say, there's a sort of things that make people go, well, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty much going, right? Yeah, yeah. I like sticking the great big thermometer in history. Oh, stop it. And that gives you a better reading. She's winding me up now. A better reading of when they're actually died. Oh, Carol. But if we go back to fingerprints, how long have fingerprints been about? They've been about a while, haven't they? Yeah, we're trying to think. It's not what we do now, where we've certainly, certainly early 20th. Yeah, possibly a few people were looking at it very late in the 19th, I think. But yeah, it took a while for them to be universally adopted. I mean, now I think you just scan your finger on a computer. Yes. And then they usually do a few fingers and then they cross match them with the data bank to see if there's anything that comes up. But of course, going back a few years, they had to look at all the swirls and hoops and everything through my ass. A magnifying dress. And the types are worlds, arches, tentararch, double loop, left loop and right loop. They're the sort of things they were looking for. And I did an observational thing once with a university looking at fingerprints. And you imagine doing that all day, Mike? I'm trying not to. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much fun. I'm just looking at, you know, fingerprints have to fingerprint through. It sounds like a fun day. It does, doesn't it? But the other things that we have used and it's still used now is blood groups. Not so much because, you know, we've got something, we've got O positive, which is 35% of the population. O negative is 13, A positive is 30%, A negative is 8. B positive is 8. And me and B negative and 2%, A B positive is 2%, and A B negative is 1%. So if you're one of these high ones, it's not much of a link. But if you've got a rare blood group, that can be another pointer towards it being you or the victim's blood. You know, because sometimes we have a lot of blood and nobodies. Going back to fingerprints history. Yeah, in 1880, guess where I've been on the net again, Henry folds a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with printing. Return is great Britain in 1886. He offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London, but it was dismissed. There you go. Up until the early 1890s, police forces in the US and on the European continent could not reliably identify criminals to track their criminal record. And then Francis Gordon published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis in his book in 1892. And he calculated that the chance of a false positive, two different individuals having the same prints, was about one in 64 billion. That's pretty good. It is, yes. In 1892, an Argentinian chief police officer created the first method of recording the fingerprints of individuals on file. In that same year, the first known murder case was sold using fingerprint analysis. So 1892, and in Calcutta, a fingerprint bro was established in 1897. That's... There you go. So it was going on elsewhere. Yes, it was. It was not in the UK. And it just turned it down. One of the things I was told by Next Police Detective was the type of fingerprints that always give them problems. Obviously, if you've got these sort of scarring burns, the sort of person that does heavy manual work because the fingerprints get like some paper off. If they have... I'm just trying to think... I'm trying to read Millen writing, actually. Yeah, and we would say before somebody made... The biggest mystery. Yeah, somebody may have left fingerprints on something that wasn't involved in the crime because it will possibly stay there for a long time. But they really do all this dusting and lifting on with it. It looks like celery, sticky tape anyway. Yeah. And then they tape them back and you hear them saying, "Oh, I've got a partial." And they get them from inside gloves now, you know, people... Really? Yeah, when people were like the surgeons, gloves, so that they won't leave any trace where they've gone to kill somebody. They'll just say, "Kill them, not burgle." That's the first thing that comes into my head. Yes, you can actually take a fingerprint from the inside of the glove. If you're looking enough to have the glove. Yeah, so... Mike sat there with a piece of paper. Well, it always means something. When I knew we were talking about forensics, which obviously you've probably realised by now, it doesn't like my... Yeah, it's not your thing, is it? I thought I'd better do some research. And in the late 19th century, a chap called Alphonse Bertillon. Oh, yes. Developed it. That's your measurement. Anthropology system. Blimey. Which was a way to identify individuals based on physical measurements. So they used to measure the head length, head width, length of the middle finger, length of the left foot, length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. And apparently this guy was the first person who started doing mug shots. Oh, yeah. So to go with those measurements, they used to take mug shots. Yeah, there was a whole thing though in the 19th century of like, you know, the shape of your head could tell people the sort of person you were. So you had Lombrosos criminal man and you'd have photos of what they call all these criminal types, you know, notably whatever it is. I think this was more scientific though, because I think his system was adopted across Europe and across America. Did he do the ears as well? Did he see one of the people that... Because nobody has got the same ears. Oh, yeah, you're big on it. He does not say it, yeah. But you can imagine they started to pull together these measurements and these mug shots. They could identify people who may have been involved in other crimes. I mean, I suppose the thing is, it's not like the burglar is going to hang around the scene and go, "Oh, yes, you can measure my finger." No, but I suppose if they've caught somebody and they can take all these measurements, if the person comes back again, then they've got that record of... And they've got the mug shots to say, "Oh, hang on, you've been here before." I was going to say people that volunteer their DNA, sometimes worry about how long it'll be kept. If they're completely innocent, it isn't kept, it's taken off the computer. People with a criminal record, it will stay up indefinitely, I presume, if you've got any sort of criminal record. It's that in America, they have things wiped, don't they? They have them. If they do a certain crime before a certain time, they can have it completely wiped off their records. I tell you, it's been watching suits. I wonder why it is. When you're thinking in the past on this podcast, we've talked about Sherlock Holmes and our great friend Herq Quaro. Now, Praro wasn't interested in any sort of forensics. Grey cells, that's what's the work. Grey cells, where they needed to remind all this running. Sherlock Holmes possibly slightly more. He was more scientific, wasn't he? He was more scientific. But why is it that we've got so hung up on it today as writers? I mean, why is it that the forensic background... Is it hung up on it? I think it depends on the type of crime that you're writing. I personally know police officers who knew that somebody had committed a murder. They knew, but they could not prove it. And then forensics came up and that gave them the evidence that they needed to put that person who'd been living the life of rarely for all two years, saying that they didn't do a particular thing. When the police knew. I spoke to one individual about a case, and he goes, "We know it's him, Carole. We know it's him, but we can't prove it. We've got no proof whatsoever." But that... I suppose what I'm getting at is that's real life, I don't accept that. That's not what we're about as writers, because we won't write a story about. If we're writing a murder mystery story, crime story, we're going to have a victim, we're going to have a protagonist, and we are going to hopefully have some sort of conclusion at the end. I think the thing is, if something was all forensic, it might appeal to some people, but I think you'd lose a lot of readers. But I think combining the two and having that kind of scientific rigor as well as the, "I feel it in my gut, it's this person and I've got to hunt them down or whatever it's going to be. I have to find the why or the how or the..." You've got that balance with Rosalia Ailes, because Ailes is the pathologist, the detective, the clever person, who is only the gut feeling detective. She knows when something's wrong, and she will go after somebody. She's like a terrier, she won't let them go. I suppose in a way, this is what's happening, isn't it nowadays, that whereas you go to Poiro, his companion, his sidekick, was somebody like Hastings, who really had neither a place or place, he was just there. Well, he was there for, you know, to show what a smart poet Poirot was basically. Whereas nowadays, sometimes to carry a bag, you've got detectives who are investigating murders, and their sidekick quite often is the forensic person. Yeah, you know, the two need to work in tandem. Yeah, yeah, and they do, and a lot of the times, the forensic pathologist would not actually be at the scene. Socko would, or CSI, depending on what you call it, but the pathologist might have just flitted in, and now, you know, that type of thing. I've seen ones where they've been on them, shuttles, and the pathologist has gone, yep, they're dead. Take them back to the lab, and I'll see them there, but I mean, in some of them, they're looking at the surroundings, you know, and all this sort of thing. And it's really difficult if the body's been frozen, or it's been immersed in water, it's been extremely cold, or extreme, to get a time of death back. Then they usually go on things like contents of stomach, how far digested is it? When did they have the last meal, that sort of thing? All the nice smells again. Yeah, lovely. But it absolutely fascinates me, and I'm a great reader of Valmeterm at Boogs, and there's some of her books are quite gritty, and she actually wrote a book on forensics, and I've told this story before, so I do apologize, but because Val is Val, and she writes what she writes, and she's very, very successful, she has over the years, got lots of contacts in police, in pathology, and science, and made some friends as well. And she was having a drink with one of her pathology friends, or some who was in forensics, one that she told her about another way of getting DNA, that's what's making me think about the eye. Oh, yes. And they both had a couple of whiskeys, so anyway, Val thought she would use this in her next novel, which she did, much to the distress of the pathologist, who's about to print a paper in a medical journal about it, but it didn't come out in Val's book first, and the other one was, she was discussing with an explosive expert how to build a bomb, and he showed her, and then he said, "Please don't put any of this in your book." Bessie basically got a recipe here for blowing up things, so she had to alter it when she put it in the book, and she told these at writing conferences, so I know she said it sort of thing, but it did make me laugh, it really did. Because while in the blood, that's more psychological, which is one of my favourite series, but that's more the psychologist trying to get into the mind of the person, rather than the friends inside of it. So when you were writing, the Warren did detective, I don't know, he's still writing the series, was it a conscious decision that you were going to have forensics as a reasonably important part of the story? I think it's because I'm an ex-nurse, and I just love the science behind it, I read anything to do with forensics and detectives, especially when it's fiction. I just swallow them up, I just sit there and watch them, and a lot of it, I will then go, I'll make a note, I wonder how that worked, because I want to know. And a lot of the things that happen in silent witness can happen, but they need such delicate machinery, such extensive machinery, and it's so expensive to do what they do in a week. I'm sure it's all based on science, but it's like, as I say, they can wait weeks for a DNA to turn around, you know, a DNA sample to turn around, it doesn't happen overnight, sort of thing. So very often, the poor police are doing all the looking at CCTV, phoning people up, going and looking at people's doors, all that work, that isn't exciting, isn't it? So it's not really in my boot smudge. And when AI takes over the water. Oh, yes, indeed. But that's going to happen, isn't it? Because we've got all face recognition now. I mean, I read a book, I talked about it way back in one of our early episodes, to the point that I can't even remember what it was called now. But basically, it was a detective who had a sort of almost holographic AI type robot assigned to... A sign to blink of an eye, that's right. And this AI hologram could look at CCTV footage within, you know, in five minutes, whereas it would take a team of police officers to do it in, it would take them a week or two weeks ago. Yeah, and I can see how that is really useful. Yeah, and it's like when you have AI going through thousands and thousands of like options or whatever to find the matches. And it's like, well, yes, obviously that's a great way to use it. And that is happening. That's probably happening to us to a certain extent now, but we'll be happening a lot more in the next two or three years. Yeah, I think it was fascinating to me when you see it. Usually the CIA or somebody like that, and they've got a face on the screen, and it's just rotating through thousands of thousands of effects until they can think of that sort of thing. I mean, when you do things like face recognition now, it's done by computer. So we used to get a sketch artist in, and apparently they made a really good living out of that, because they'd be going to the person giving them the details. Would you like a break? You seem upset. We've been charged by the hour. So yeah, I think things will come a long way. Talking about artists taking, they're doing these e-pictures. I watched an episode of Monk recently, which is one of our favourites, and they got Monk to describe to the police artist this picture. These are, and after about three hours, all they had was an ear. So that, but it was a good ear. He said, well, that's the important part. That's the thing I noticed, did he? Yeah, I saw that one, I was thinking, he had made a lot of money that sketch artist. But Monk was a super recogniser like you. I think so. I think he probably was. So yeah, we all use forensics in a different way. I'd say Liz Hers is like in the background, but it's mentioned. Mike, I just killed people off so quickly that it wasn't time for dinner or forensics. Yeah, you'd have to go in there and get some forensics. I mean, maybe in your novella, we'll see a more exhaustive treatment. I'm thinking of doing a novella, all about forensics. Again, they're getting out of hand. I'm going to bring this to a call. So it's another episode in the bag. Thank you for listening. Mike, do you want to talk about the blog quickly? Just very quickly to say that we do have an only emergency in my mind blog, which you can find on WordPress. And it's got lots of important information in there. In particular, there's a weekly picture prompt that comes out encouraging you to write a story. I must have a go at one of these sometime. Yes, if you'd like to have a go, then please feel free to stick your story in the comments. And every now and again, we like to read one out on the on the podcast. Fabulous. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for listening. And as they hit the all the bells and buzzers and things that's on the bottom of the YouTube and the Spotify. Very technical. Yeah, that's me. But until next week, thank you all very much. And goodbye. You have been listening to only murders in my mind. A random thought production produced by John Bissett. The music in peril was composed and recorded by O.M. Studio Strings. [ Silence ]