‘Face the press without make-up? Over my dead body’… inside life of glam pathologist who inspired Silent Witness

IT was two o’clock in the morning, in the days before mobile phones and satnav.

Once again, forensic pathologist Dr Helen Whitwell had got lost on the way to a murder scene.

Stopping at a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, she called Nottinghamshire police headquarters, who sent a detective to find her.

A while later, as the cop car she was travelling in finally reached its destination, Dr Whitwell spotted that TV crews and Press photographers were already swarming.

Quickly, she ordered the detective at the wheel to pull into the drive of a nearby house.

As she opened her bag, the officer expected to see it packed with the tools of her grisly trade.

Instead, the Home Office pathologist pulled out make-up, a hairbrush and perfume.

“If you think I’m going to face the Press at 3am without my slap on, think again,” she told her bemused driver.

Adding the finishing touches, she then stepped out of the car to face the cameras as she dodged inside the police cordon to examine the corpse.

Nigel McCrery, a Nottinghamshire policeman at the time, recalls: “The pathologists I had dealt with up until then were crusty old men with beards and socket sets.

“And then Dr Whitwell turned up.

"She was young, beautiful, blue-eyed, with long blonde hair — not at all what you would expect.

“She was probably the cleverest woman I’ve ever met, with the intellect and the brain of a planet.

"But she was also eccentric.

"Helen loved Champagne and parties, but would often get lost on her way to murders.”

A decade later, Nigel had left the police to become a writer, but he could never forget Dr Whitwell.

And she became the inspiration for the world’s most famous fictional female pathologist, Sam Ryan, in TV’s Silent Witness.

Now approaching its 28th series on BBC One, it is among the longest- running television crime dramas ever, alongside shows such as the Seventies US detective classic Columbo, and has spanned more than three decades after the first episode showed in 1996.

For the first eight years, Sam Ryan was Silent Witness’s leading lady, played by actress Amanda Burton.

'Female Sherlock'

Emilia Fox is now the star of the show as pathologist Dr Nikki Alexander.

She has also been modelled on Dr Whitwell, who died from cancer last month, aged 69.

Paying tribute to Helen, who went on to become Britain’s first female professor of pathology, Nigel says: “I think she was quite flattered to be in Silent Witness.

She [Dr Whitwell] was probably the cleverest woman I’ve ever met, with the intellect and the brain of a planet

Nigel McCrery, a Nottinghamshire policeman

"She was this incredible combination of things which makes a wonderful character.

“A mixture of good-time girl, if you like, and this dedicated pathologist.

"It was a privilege to see her work, a female Sherlock Holmes, there’s no doubt about that.

"She was an elegant woman in every respect, who enjoyed Champagne breakfasts, fine dining and high-quality wines.”

Dr Whitwell, daughter of the mayor of Kendal in Westmorland, trained as a doctor before lecturing on the study of brain disease.

But she became fascinated by causes of death and, in 1988, was appointed as a Home Office registered pathologist.

For the next decade she worked with police forces in the Midlands, carrying out up to 60 post mortems a year in cases of suspicious deaths.

She said: “I used to have dreams of people waking up on the mortuary table.

“I know many think it’s a macabre way to earn a living, but it’s a lot easier than dealing with someone who’s alive and suffering.”

Dr Whitwell married senior police officer David Stokes in 1990, but they divorced four years later and had no children.

In 1995, when Nigel came up with the idea for Silent Witness, which started out as a series of novels, the doctor became his script consultant as well as the star character.

He says: “There’s one case I remember where I sent her the manuscript and she came back to me and said, ‘I find it very unlikely somebody would be garrotted in a graveyard at night?’.

"I said, ‘Yes, but it’s just a book. You can exaggerate these things a little’. So I went ahead and didn’t think much more about it.

“She rang me some time later and said, ‘I’ve just dealt with a murder, and the victim was garrotted in a graveyard at night’.

“I thought, ‘Christ, we’ve got a copycat killer, someone reading the book and killing people’. But there was never another one.”

Passion for science

When Silent Witness began on TV, Dr Whitwell would visit the set to check that mortuary scenes were accurate.

But she revealed in a 2016 interview that pathologists never go out interviewing suspects, like on the show, which is aired in 235 territories around the world.

They examine a body and prepare evidence of how the victim died for the courts.

Writer Nigel, 70, says: “She would not take the side of the police and she would not take the side of the defence.

"It wasn’t for her to cast an opinion. She presented evidence.”

Dr Whitwell also became a world expert on shaken baby syndrome and, in 1995, she helped Kevin Callan, a lorry driver, overturn his conviction for murdering his disabled four-year-old stepdaughter by shaking her.

She would not take the side of the police and she would not take the side of the defence

Nigel McCrery, a Nottinghamshire policeman

She gave evidence that helped nail murderer Tracie Andrews, who stabbed her fiancé Lee Harvey 42 times with a penknife in 1996, but claimed they were attacked in a road-rage incident by a “fat man with staring eyes” who killed Lee.

In 1999, Dr Whitwell appeared as a witness for the defence in the case of Sally Clark, a solicitor found guilty of murdering her two infant sons.

Her conviction was overturned in 2003.

The professor was also an expert adviser to the inquiry into serial killer Harold Shipman, the Greater Manchester GP.

And she testified in the case of deputy headmaster Sion Jenkins, from Hastings, East Sussex, who became the first man in British criminal history to be acquitted after three trials for the same crime — the alleged murder of his 13-year-old foster daughter, Billie-Jo, in 1997.

Dr Whitwell’s home was a 17th- century thatched cottage near Pershore, Worcs, where she grew flowers with strong scents.

Each plant was selected for its aroma. Nigel says: “I hadn’t realised she was such a keen gardener.

"To my surprise, she replied, ‘I don’t like gardens, particularly’.

“Pathologists tend to lose their sense of smell and taste.

"Not because of the bodies. They’re unpleasant, but the smell is natural.

"It’s all the chemicals. As soon as she could no longer smell her garden, or the strong aromas dimmed, she’d retire.

"Some years later, she did.”

Dr Whitwell packed away her scrubs for the final time in 2009 after osteoporosis in her hands meant she could no longer hold instruments to do autopsies.

But she did not leave behind her passion for science.

Instead, she wrote books on pathology and continued to travel the world giving lectures.

But, Nigel says: “In her final moments, her biggest regret was that she couldn’t quite taste the Champagne any more.”