‘I hunt killers, spending my days as a forensic scientist covered in mud and blood, looking for used condoms and cigarette butts – and my dream is to find Madeleine McCann’
A YORKSHIRE Ripper prostitute, a mum stabbed 49 times and Stephen Lawrence: these are just some of the shocking cases Britain’s leading forensic scientist Angela Gallop has worked on.
She collects evidence from the lifeless bodies and scours crime scenes for clues that will identify cold-hearted killers.
And there’s one case she’d particularly like to crack: the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
With programmes like Silent Witness and Unforgotten, forensic science has never been more popular – although Angela, 69, says the pristine labs in which TV scientists work bear very little relation to the reality.
“Of course they start that way but the truth is that you spend a lot of your time up to your neck in mud and blood,” she tells Sun Online.
She admits that finding out what happened to Madeleine, who was three years old when she vanished from a hotel apartment in the Algarve in 2007, would be “extraordinarily difficult because it’s in a different country and you don’t know what’s happened to the exhibits”.
But after spending the past 45 years helping to put some of Britain’s most notorious killers behind bars, she remains determined: “I’ve been involved in cases where it looks hopeless, so I’m not too daunted by anything these days. Every contact leaves a trace, it’s just finding it.”
“I don’t know if we’d be able to find anything… But it feels as though there’s been too much focus on standard scenes of crime, and not enough on what one might be able to do with what remains – however little – in the laboratory.”
While this case remains a mystery, there have been thousands that Angela has worked on and subsequently.
Her first crime scene was that of an 18-year-old prostitute called Helen Rytka who had been brutally bludgeoned and stabbed to death and left in a timber yard by none other than the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.
“You are looking for anything that might have been left behind,” Angela, whose evidence also helped solve the brutal murders of Damilola Taylor and Rachel Nickell, tells us.
“Clothing fibres that might have been snagged on pieces of wood, or left by someone leaning against a wall or other surface.
“Shoe marks, cigarette butts, hairs, condoms, tyre marks – anything can be potentially significant and no detail is too small – justice can turn on a speck of blood or microscopic piece of thread.”
Angela has chronicled her experience in a fascinating memoir, When The Dogs Don’t Bark, in which she looks back over her lengthy career and the part that forensic science has played in getting justice in some of the country’s most shocking murder cases.
The woman stabbed 49 times in front of son
In 2002, Angela was brought in to re-examine the horrifying death of Rachel Nickell, who in 1992 was brutally stabbed 49 times while walking on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex.
“We started off very methodically looking through the items of Rachel’s clothing, looking for any traces that might be useful as well as re-examining what the original forensic scientists had done before us,” she tells us.
One of the samples that caught the team’s attention was an adhesive strip that had been taken of Nickell’s genital area to capture any alien material.
“One of the original scientists had taken a sample from the strip and tested it for DNA that might be foreign but they got no results at all,” Angela recalls.
“This was very unusual as you would expect there to be enormous amounts of Rachel’s own DNA – so we realised there was a chance the test hadn’t worked properly.
“We knew we had to go back and reanalyse the strip for ourselves, and when we we did, we managed to show that not only was there Rachel’s DNA but there were traces of male DNA too.”
Although it was not enough to identify anyone, further investigations using other techniques pulled out more information – which, when input in to the National DNA Database matched with the name Robert Napper.’
Later, a previously unexplained footwear mark at the crime scene was also shown to match one of Napper’s shoes, and red paint in hair combings from her son was found to match red paint flaking off his toolbox.
Napper, who was already serving time in Broadmoor for the brutal murder of mother and daughter Samantha and Jasmine Bisset in 1993 – would go on to be convicted of Nickell’s murder – while the case underlined to Angela that sometimes the absence of evidence can be as significant as its presence.
“It’s the reason I called the book what I did – sometimes it’s when the dogs aren’t barking that you need to pay attention.”
Catching the Lawrence killers
In 2006, Angela became involved in the re-investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the teenager who was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in April 1993.
Angela – who had briefly worked on the case in 1995 – was approached again in 2006, when it became clear that some earlier assumptions about the nature of the attack were wrong.
“Medical work on the stab cuts in Stephen’s body to work out the dynamics of the attack showed us it might not have been as swift as we had been assuming earlier – which meant rather more contact between the perpetrator and the victim than we might have envisaged.”
Moreover, while in the past the focus of forensic efforts had been on looking for fibres that had transferred from his attackers clothes on to Stephen’s, Angela focused on the opposite.
‘‘In the past we had worked on the assumption that if somebody attacks someone else and fibres have been transferred from the victim to the attacker such fibres were likely all to drop off the attacker(s) as they are running away,” she recalls.
“We had slowly become more aware that wasn’t necessarily the case – and, of course, it could all depend on what they’d done with their clothing afterwards.”
After painstaking study, Angela’s team found not only red fibres which matched those from Stephen’s polo shirt on the clothing of suspects David Norris and Gary Dobson but fibres from his jacket and trousers too, and a flake of blood with two textile fibres running through it that matched the fibres from Stephen’s cardigan.
“We then DNA profiled some of the blood in the flake, which showed that it matched Stephen’s DNA,” she recalls. This would form part of the later successful prosecution of Dobson and Norris for Stephen’s murder in 2011, finally bringing justice for his grief-stricken family.
The murder made to look like suicide
Sometimes families have approached Angela for her services directly, including that of Italian banker Roberto Calvi – who was famously found hanging from scaffolding beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.
A first inquest ruled that he had committed suicide and a subsequent one recorded an open verdict, which his devoutly Roman Catholic family refused to accept.
“By the time they approached me ten years had passed which meant that the scaffolding was long gone,” she recalls. “All we were left with was his clothing, the rope and the bricks and stones.”
Through a series of structured experiments Angela and her team tried to work out the most likely route onto the scaffolding.
“By a process of gradual elimination we couldn’t see how he could have got onto the scaffolding by any of the routes he would have had to take if he was by himself,” she recalls.
“For example, by examining the scaffolding and access ladder, and then the foreshore and looking at tidal patterns we established he couldn’t have walked there without causing damage to his shoes which didn’t match anything on the footwear he was wearing when found.
“The simplest explanation was that he had been brought there by boat. Our conclusion was that he had in all probability been murdered.”
The conclusion took her to the Italian courts where she gave evidence as part of a prosecution into five men.
They were later acquitted, but the case underlined for Angela what she calls “the power of forensic science to sort things out for people”.
As any crime drama fan knows, luminol can do the rest. “Blood that isn’t visible – on dark patterned carpets for example, will show up instantly when sprayed with luminol, even if someone thinks they have done a good cleaning job,” says Angela.
When The Dogs Don’t Bark by Angela Gallop is published in hardcover by Hodder & Stoughton.
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