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WORK TITLE: THE NATURE OF LIFE AND DEATH
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
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PERSONAL
Born 1942, in Monmouthshire, South Wales; married (divorced); children: one daughter (deceased).
EDUCATION:King’s College London, B.S. (with honors); King’s College, University of Aberdeen, Ph.D.; University of Gloucestershire, D.Sc.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, writer, and scientist. King’s College London, England, researcher, 1973-80, lecturer, 1980-88, honors lecturer, 1988-93; Birkbeck College, University of London, England, lecturer, 1978-91; University College London, senior research fellow, 1988-98, honors lecturer, 1998-2004; Forensic Alliance Ltd., London, forensic ecologist, 2003-04; University of Gloucestershire, England, research associate, 2004-15; University of Aberdeen, Scotland, research fellow, 2005—; Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, England, research associate, 2013—; University of Southampton, England, professor. Has served as an expert witness, registered through the National Crime Agency.
MEMBER:Chartered Society of Forensic Science (fellow), Royal Society of Biology (fellow), Linnean Society (fellow).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Patricia Wiltshire is a British scientist, educator, and writer. She has served as a lecturer at educational institutions, including King’s College London, Birkbeck College, University College London, the University of Gloucestershire, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Southampton. Wiltshire is perhaps best known for her work in forensics and as an expert witness in criminal cases. She has used her knowledge of botany, ecology, and palynology to contribute to murder cases that have been followed closely by the media in the United Kingdom. In an interview with Maureen Paton, contributor to the London Guardian website, Wiltshire explained: “I’m the only person in the world, I think, who does what I do to corpses: I sample them and get information from them. I’m looking for clues in the earth surrounding them to work out where they were killed or stored.” Wiltshire also told Paton: “For me, they [the bodies] are not people … because the people have gone. A scene of crime is very business-like and you are working against the clock. But when I find out afterwards about the cruelty, pain, anguish and misery that put them there, it upsets me deeply. It’s like a dagger, I can’t bear it.”
In her first book, an autobiography called The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace, Wiltshire recalls the forensic cases she has worked on. She also shares details about her childhood, her personal life, and her studies.
A writer on the Niklas’ Blog website suggested: “This book is written in a dry, factually correct, and sadly not-very-well edited way. The writer must be expert at what she does. … Sadly, being able to ride a horse does not mean one should be a horse-race commentator.” The same writer added: “There’s a lot of morality thrown into Wiltshire’s musings. Taut sentences give very little leeway to expanse in thought or literary structure, which sadly puts a tight lid on what this book could be. A good editor might have turned that around.” In a more favorable assessment, a Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “an autobiography well supplied with personal opinions along with entertaining if sometimes squirm-inducing triumphs of criminal investigation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2019, review of The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace.
ONLINE
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 10, 2005), Maureen Paton, author interview.
Niklas’ Blog, https://niklasblog.com/ (July 10, 2019), review of The Nature of Life and Death.
University of Southampton, https://www.southampton.ac.uk/ (August 15, 2019), author faculty profile.
Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, botanist, and palynologist, and also has a background in environmental archaeology. She has worked with every police force in the United Kingdom, and on many high-profile cases. She regularly lectures at conferences and scientific meetings all over the world, and is active in research and publishing, as well as university teaching. Wiltshire is an experienced expert witness for both the prosecution and defense, and is a registered expert with the National Crime Agency. She is a fellow of the Chartered Society of Forensic Science, the Royal Society of Biology, and the Linnean Society.
Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, botanist, and palynologist, and also has a background in environmental archaeology. She has worked with every police force in the UK, and on many high profile cases. She regularly lectures at conferences and scientific meetings all over the world, and is active in research and publishing, as well as university teaching. Wiltshire is an experienced expert witness for both the prosecution and defense, and is a registered expert with The National Crime Agency. She is a fellow of the Chartered Society of Forensic Science, The Royal Society of Biology, and the Linnean Society.
Patricia Wiltshire
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Professor Patricia Wiltshire (born 1942[verification needed], in Monmouthshire, South Wales)[1] is a forensic ecologist, botanist and palynologist.[2] She has been consulted by police forces and industry in approaching 300 investigations spread throughout England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and abroad.[3] She has been instrumental in helping solve some very high-profile crimes. These include the murders of Sarah Payne, Millie Dowler, and Christopher Laverack (a case that was unsolved for three decades). She was also able to help provide proof for he guilt of Ian Huntley for the Soham murders and give valuable intelligence in the Ipswich serial murders.[4]
Contents
1
Early life & Education
2
High-profile cases
3
Noteworthy Publications
4
Sobriquets
5
References
Early life & Education[edit]
Wiltshire had an unconventional early education: encyclopedias formed her major source of learning from age seven, on account of an injury which was followed by repeated chest infections which damaged her lungs.[5] This broad approach to knowledge provided a strong foundation for her future career. Starting as a medical laboratory technician, she moved on to a career in the business world but, eventually found her niche studying botany at King's College London. She lectured there for several years in microbial and general ecology before taking up a post at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.[6][7] She was later responsible for setting up a masters' course in Forensic Archaeological Science which ran successfully and continued after she left UCL.
High-profile cases[edit]
Soham murder inquiry, 2002. Her analysis of soil and plant evidence from clothing, footwear, and a vehicle, yielded trace evidence that linked Huntley to the place where the victims (Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells) were found. Observation and experimentation of plant growth at the deposition site enabled her to estimate the time that the girls had been placed in the ditch very accurately. Her evidence was important in the conviction of Ian Huntley.* In the Christopher Laverack murder case, In 2007, three decades after the nine-year-old's murder, Professor Wiltshire linked the unusual pollen and other plant matter on the victim's clothing, along with the ornamental brick used to keep him submerged after death, with that found on the property of his uncle, Melvyn Read, thus providing substantial evidence to implicate Read.
Patricia Wiltshire has provided valuable intelligence to police forces involving timing of events, and location of places (including clandestine burials). The analysis of fungal growth on bodies, and materials associated with victims, has also enabled her to provide accurate estimates of post mortem interval in murder cases. She has also helped to find the bodies of missing people through envisaging their resting place from pollen and spores retrieved from suspects' belongings. The analysis of pollen, plant spores, and fungal spores has enabled her to contribute many kinds of temporal and spatial evidence in police enquiries. However, Patricia Wiltshire also works on defence cases wherever necessary.
Noteworthy Publications[edit]
Wiltshire is the author of The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace, released September 2019.[8]
QUOTED: "I'm the only person in the world, I think, who does what I do to corpses: I sample them and get information from them. I'm looking for clues in the earth surrounding them to work out where they were killed or stored."
"For me, they [the bodies] are not people ... because the people have gone. A scene of crime is very business-like and you are working against the clock. But when I find out afterwards about the cruelty, pain, anguish and misery that put them there, it upsets me deeply. It's like a dagger, I can't bear it."
The crime of her life
Forensic botanist Patricia Wiltshire played a key role in jailing Ian Huntley for the Soham murders. For the first time she talks to Maureen Paton about how her work affects her
Patricia Wiltshire
Mon 10 Jan 2005 00.04 GMT
First published on Mon 10 Jan 2005 00.04 GMT
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Patricia Wiltshire lives in spotless domestic tranquillity in one of Surrey's chintziest villages, the greatest possible contrast to the muddy soil in which she scrabbles as a forensic investigator for some of the most high-profile murder and stranger-rape cases in the country. Wiltshire, the only forensic ecologist and botanist in the UK to specialise in the location of human remains and the linking of offenders to the scene of crime, first registered on the public radar when her environmental evidence proved crucial in helping to secure the conviction of Ian Huntley for the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
It was Wiltshire who the police called in after the bodies of Holly and Jessica had been discovered by a gamekeeper. By noticing new sideshoots on a section of nettles leading into the ditch, she was able to identify that as the path the killer took into the ditch. Such sideshoots only grow if a plant has been trampled on, and she was able to work out that the nettles had been stepped on 13 and a half days before - soon after the girls had gone missing.
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It was she who established that pollen from Huntley's shoes and his car exactly matched the type found in the ditch near Lakenheath where the girls' partially-burnt bodies had been discovered on August 17 2002.
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Wiltshire, a miner's daughter from the Valleys with a slightly subversive sense of humour, sits in her dining room by a painting of a crone in Welsh costume with black stovepipe hat. She giggles and says in her high melodic voice, "Sometimes the police call me a Welsh witch because of the way I process a mass of data and come up with ideas; but it's not intuition or foresight, it's analysis.
"They also call me a cross between Miss Marple and Mary Poppins, and that's because I'm very strict - I have been known to make grown men cry by telling them the truth, being outspoken. My tongue can be like a viper. Being small and vulnerable, it's the only weapon I've got, isn't it?"
Her left foot is currently in plaster after an operation to replace damaged cartilages with an artificial joint, the result of years of wearing high heels to make her look taller (she is only five foot). Although now retired from her main job as a London University lecturer in forensic archaeological science, hardly a week goes by without Wiltshire being called out on crutches to a scene of crime; it happened 40 times last year and her caseload keeps growing.
"I'm the only person in the world, I think, who does what I do to corpses: I sample them and get information from them. I'm looking for clues in the earth surrounding them to work out where they were killed or stored."
The world of forensics is full of women - although most work in the lab. Women, argues this deceptively dainty-looking 62-year old, tend to have stronger stomachs for the messier side of life. "A woman will change a dirty nappy without thinking twice about it, whereas a man goes, 'Errghhh'," she points out derisively. "I got called up to a case in Yorkshire of a person who had been battered to death with baseball bats and a hammer. While three policemen with visors were cowering in a corner, my female student assistant and I just got on with taking samples from the corpse. Women are well suited to minutiae because they're meticulous, neat and tidy, and men sometimes forget the lateral bits that women remember."
Yet though she claims to be less moved than men by the sight of dead bodies, Wiltshire does find herself affected by the tragic stories behind the human remains. "For me, they [the bodies] are not people," she explains, "because the people have gone. A scene of crime is very business-like and you are working against the clock. But when I find out afterwards about the cruelty, pain, anguish and misery that put them there, it upsets me deeply. It's like a dagger, I can't bear it."
Two cases have particularly affected her. Not so much the high-profile ones, such as Sarah Payne and Milly Dowler. And not the mutilated bodies ("When a victim looks as if she is just sleeping rather than dead, that's when it really upsets me.") "One was a 22-year-old prostitute who was abused as a child with the most horrible upbringing. She had three kids and a drug habit, which she fed with prostitution, and she ended up dumped in woodland by her killer. I was heartbroken over that girl because of all that she had gone through.
"The other case was a 15-year-old girl, an utterly perfect physical specimen who was killed because of one man's sexual desires. He was a complete stranger to her. I looked at her on the slab and thought, 'She's so beautiful, so young'."
Wiltshire uses traditional female skills to develop ingenious techniques for extracting pollen from a body: she washes its hair and uses a crochet hook to retrieve fragments clinging to nasal passages, a trick that has earned her the nickname of "the snot lady". Her painstaking work is about to be shown on TV in a documentary called The Body Farm. For it Wiltshire was invited as an expert to Tennessee to watch the crime-detection experiments on decomposing murder victims by American scientists. The scientists in the documentary are demonstrating new methods of dating the time of death, working out the cause of death from clues on the body (strangulation, for instance, causes a blood flow that gives the corpse pink teeth) and showing how insects such as flies are much more accurate than tracker dogs in picking up the odours of decomposition and thus leading to the discovery of clandestine graves. It's not a programme for the weak of stomach.
Back in Britain, Wiltshire's unusual role as what she calls "a jigsaw puzzle-solver" began 10 years ago when police in Hertfordshire rang up Kew Gardens for help in identifying pollen surrounding a murder victim in a ditch. They said they couldn't help - but they knew a lady who could. She had never seen a dead victim of crime till then, and she says that her experiences in forensic investigation have "formed" her: "I don't think I thought at all before; I was in an academic environment and detached from life."
Anxious to avoid causing distress for Holly and Jessica's parents in this, her first press interview, Wiltshire won't talk in detail about the Soham case but says: "When I went to Jessica's home and saw her dog and stroked its head, that really brought it home to me." At first, that sounds eccentric, even for a self- confessed pet-lover. But Wiltshire also lost a little daughter - though to illness. She has found much comfort in animals ever since.
"Having lost a child myself, I'm very acutely aware of what that loss is like. And when I went back to Soham two years later to make [The Body Farm], I was still badly affected by the thought of the agony of the girls' parents.
"Although most murder victims are men, it is the young girls in the headlines because they're so vulnerable," she points out. "When some body loses their little girl, it hits everybody's heart, doesn't it?" Her daughter was just two when she died. "Because my daughter suffered a lot, I have transposed these feelings on to suffering children and animals. I think my daughter's illness coloured my life a lot; unfortunately, I had no other children and it's a big regret."
Wiltshire lives alone now with her "brown boy", her cat Mickey. "He's the love of my life now," she says. "I feel just as acutely for animals as for humans; I don't differentiate. I've just worked on a badger-baiting for the RSPCA, and that to me is as important as any other case."
If she had had more children it might have been more difficult to get to where she is now. It can be hard for women scientists to take career breaks to raise a family because of the constant pressure to publish research breakthroughs in order to be taken seriously in their field. And in Wiltshire's work at scenes of crime, it would have been almost impossible. "I have to think, breathe and eat what I do," she explains. "At a moment's notice I have to fly somewhere, and it's bad enough trying to find someone to look after my cat."
One scientist on The Body Farm jokily warns her not to die alone with her pet, relating the story of an old man who was eaten by his 12 cats, but Wiltshire is so close to nature and its realities that she doesn't bat an eyelid. "I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted them to starve," she chortles.
One thing that makes her furious is the fact that the vast majority of killers are men. "Sometimes I have to fight against feeling angry about that," she admits. "Although there are evil women in the world, there are more evil men. Is it their hormones, their physiology, their genetics or their lack of nurturing? I can't believe there are more abused male children than abused female children, therefore there must be some other factor that makes males the main perpetrators of crime. I think testosterone is the most dangerous molecule in the world, quite frankly, because it appears to be associated with aggression and all sorts of things that probably made men very good hunters and protectors in the past. But now they don't have to be hunters and protectors - so the testosterone is directed towards other things."
She identifies feminism as a kind of special pleading that she doesn't need. "I prefer integration, because I like to see women relating to men and to other women. I think it's pretty rotten if a woman doesn't get a job because she's a woman or gets paid less than a man in the same job, so I'm a feminist to that extent. But should women's rights be more than people's rights? Women have benefited from feminism, but, to be perfectly frank, I don't think about it because I'm treated equally." And not all the results produced by this pioneer are the kind that feminists would welcome: her environmental evidence in three rape cases showed that the women had given false stories. "Evidence," she says, "is genderless."
Perhaps her dogged individualism is down to her unconventional career path. After giving up her job as a medical laboratory technician repulsed by animal experimentation - "I couldn't take it; it finished me" - she finally made it to university at the late age of 28 to study botany and geology. Her education before that had not been conventional either. A double dose of whooping cough and measles when she was six had left her with a chronic weak chest that interrupted her schooling. So instead her parents bought her a set of encyclopaedias which she still loves to wade through - "I like facts" - and which encouraged the eclectic interests that make her such a tireless investigator.
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"People are quite shocked when they realise I'm a little old biddy with quite a lot of ill health, because I don't come over like that. I can't stand namby-pamby wimps; it's my working-class background. And if I think I'm right about something, I'll always fight for it."
· The Body Farm is on Channel Five tomorrow at 10.55pm
Professor Patricia E.J. Wiltshire B.Sc. (hons), Ph.D., D.Sc.(hc), FCSFS, FRSB, FLS.
Visiting Professor in Forensic Ecology, Botany and Palynology
Professor Patricia E.J. Wiltshire
B.Sc. (hons), Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FCSFS, FRSB, FLS
Professor of Forensic Ecology in Geography & Environmental Science.
Experienced expert witness and forensic practitioner in ecology, botany, and palynology. Provides advice and services to criminal and civil investigators, other forensic scientists, lawyers and coroners. Specialises in complex investigations and cold cases. Active researcher and collaborator. Extensive publication record.
UK Register of Expert Witnesses: Registered Expert (vetted)
Listed with National Expert Witness Agency: Registered Expert
National Crime Agency: Expert Advisor
Over the last two decades, I have been developing forensic ecology, botany, and palynology. These areas of study have proved to be invaluable for the provision of intelligence and probative evidence. I am an experienced expert witness and presented evidence, under cross examination, in Crown and High Courts, Magistrate Courts, and Coroners’ Inquests in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Eire. I have worked with every police force in the UK and Ireland and am concerned with providing guidelines and protocols for best practice in various branches of forensic ecology for practitioners, as well as for the police at crime scenes, and pathologists in the mortuary. I feel it is important for every aspect of work to be of the highest standard, and aim to continue demonstrating the power of botany, zoology, and soil science in forensic science.
Qualifications
King’s College London - B.Sc. (hons) Botany
King’s College, University of Aberdeen – Ph.D.
University of Gloucestershire – D.Sc. (hc)
Employment
King’s College London (1973-1980) Research
Birkbeck College University of London (1978-1991) Part-time Lecturer
King’s College London (1980-1988) Lecturer
King’s College London (1988-1993) Hon. Lecturer
University College London (1988-1998) Senior Research Fellow
University College London (1998-2004) Senior Research Fellow & Hon. Lecturer
Forensic Alliance Ltd (2003-2004): Forensic ecologist
Freelance: Forensic Ecologist, botanist, palynologist (2004-)
Research Associate of the University of Gloucestershire (2004-2015)
Research Fellow of the University of Aberdeen (2005-)_
Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (2013-)
Research
Contact
Research interests
(1) Environmental reconstruction of ancient environments through analysis of palynological sequences in sediments, buried soils, and riverine deposits (palaeoecology and archaeology).
(2) Taphonomic processes affecting palynological surface ground patterning
(3) Pollen taphonomy: factors affecting the distribution and frequency of palynomorphs on clothing, footwear, vehicles, and other items.
(4) Effects of palynological processing on the survival of fungal spores and other fungal structures that are useful in forensic examination
(5) Environmental reconstruction at the Happisburgh Early Palaeolithic site in Norfolk, using palynological analysis of submerged, marine peat deposits. This site has evidence of a human presence dating from 1,000,000 years before present. It is the earliest site of Homo brittanicus in Europe.
(6) Ecosystem approach to crime scene evaluation.
(7) Interdisciplinary contributions to trace evidence, estimation of post mortem interval, deposition times, and elimination of irrelevant locations.
(8) Evaluating testimony through physical evidence.
(9) Provision of intelligence from biological and physical particulates (trace evidence).
Research group
Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory at the University of Southampton (PLUS)
QUOTED: "an autobiography well supplied with personal opinions along with entertaining if sometimes squirm-inducing triumphs of criminal investigation."
Wiltshire, Patricia THE NATURE OF LIFE AND DEATH Putnam (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 9, 3 ISBN: 978-0-525-54221-6
Colorful, often gruesome stories from one of the pioneers of forensic ecology, a profession that "utilizes and interprets aspects of the natural world to aid detectives in their business of solving crime."
As evidence to identify a criminal, fingerprints came into use in the late 19th century, DNA in the late 20th. Forensic ecology arrived soon after, but it remains an arcane specialty that involves more sheer drudgery and knowledge, often at the doctorate level, than technology. Raised in a poor Welsh mining village and often too ill to attend school, Wiltshire makes it clear that she was always fiercely ambitious and curious, switching careers when she grew bored. Settling later in life on botany, she went on to specialize in the arcane field of archaeological botany, examining plant remains as well as microscopic spores and pollen from excavations to reveal a surprisingly detailed picture of ancient landscapes, climates, diets, and agricultural practices. A 1994 phone call from a police officer led to the next detour in her career. A dead body had been dumped in a field; there was a suspect but no evidence except his car. Could she help? Carefully examining dirt from the floor mats, she found spores and pollen from a selection of plants that allowed her to point out the exact spot where the body was found. Word got around, and more phone calls arrived--many of which are reflected in the steady stream of anecdotes that fill the book. Wiltshire displays a remarkably strong stomach as she closely examines bodies in various states of decay, and she shows no patience with the belief that a human is anything more than a product of nature that treads the Earth for a time and then returns to it.
An autobiography well supplied with personal opinions along with entertaining if sometimes squirm-inducing triumphs of criminal investigation.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wiltshire, Patricia: THE NATURE OF LIFE AND DEATH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efef80e0. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279059
QUOTED: "This book is written in a dry, factually correct, and sadly not-very-well edited way. The writer must be expert at what she does. ... Sadly, being able to ride a horse does not mean one should be a horse-race commentator."
"There’s a lot of morality thrown into Wiltshire’s musings. Taut sentences give very little leeway to expanse in thought or literary structure, which sadly puts a tight lid on what this book could be. A good editor might have turned that around."
Review: Patricia Wiltshire – “The Nature of Life and Death: Tales of a Forensic Ecologist”
2019-07-10 07:00By NiklasIn Culture, Health, People, Reading
The best thing about this book is its cover.
I’m not joking or trying to seem clever: it’s the truth.
This book is written in a dry, factually correct, and sadly not-very-well edited way. The writer must be expert at what she does; I’m even convinced that she possesses skills that have affected her profession.
Sadly, being able to ride a horse does not mean one should be a horse-race commentator.
This is one of the first pieces in the book:
I am not frightened of dead bodies. To me, corpses have ceased to be people; they are repositories of information where nature has left clues that we might follow. Very few times in my career have I let my guard down and been affected by the cadavers in the mortuary.
The first was a 22?year?old prostitute found dead in a wood, leaving three children behind. I was deeply sad for that girl, not because she was dead, but because of all she had suffered. She had been rejected by her parents at 16 and forced to make her own way. She became insidiously controlled by a pimp who purposefully made her addicted to cocaine and then put her to work to support him and her drug habit. She bore three children, not knowing the identity of any of the fathers, but she would not give them up and her scrawny, scruffy little body bore testament to its neglect as she serviced men so that she could keep her children and cope with the rest of her existence. I cried over that girl as she lay exposed and cold on the stainless steel surface of the mortuary table, not because she was dead, but for all the struggle and misery she had suffered in her pathetic existence, while keeping steadfast in her loyalty to her children. I so admired her for that.
There’s a lot of morality thrown into Wiltshire’s musings. Taut sentences give very little leeway to expanse in thought or literary structure, which sadly puts a tight lid on what this book could be. A good editor might have turned that around, I believe.
The good bits, then, are actually quite a few. Wiltshire points to the fact that she is an expert palynologist—somebody who analyses pollen grains and other spores—and has been one for decades; there’s plenty of evidence of this, and she is not afraid to tell of how she was once a novice in the criminal-cum-palynological field:
So much has been on a steep learning curve. The chassis elements of vehicles vary greatly, but I now know the most likely nooks and crannies that might collect relevant evidence. Back then I knew nothing—I had never even seen the underneath of any motorized vehicle, certainly not at first hand with my face about five centimeters from the oily, grimy metal of the various pipes and struts. I soon came to realize that I would just have to do my best and, by trial and error, find the best way to sample these things. I was used to scrubbing the dirt from various artifacts to find out what they had contained. Could this be so dissimilar?
So, I just used my common sense; I started with the most easily removed items and asked that they be brought to me—footwell mats, pedals, bumper, air filters and radiator. Initially, I ignored the wheels because they could have picked up material from a multitude of places. On the other hand, the inside of the car would contain mostly material that was transferred to it from people’s feet, and the objects they carried in it. Simple logic guided me and, in any case, if I were wrong, the rest of the car would still be in the garage and could be resampled.
There’s a lot of old-person’s ponderings littering the book:
When I look back on our sheer freedom, I can only feel sad for today’s children who are packaged and sealed up, their flights of fancy being satisfied by electronic wizardry. I marvel at how young we were, how far we wandered unsupervised, how nobody felt the need to walk us to and from school—and how entirely normal that kind of free, wild life was compared to today.
Other times, her terse sentences work well:
The girl had been missing for almost a year when, in the dying days of summer 2001, she was discovered in an excavated depression on the borders of a Yorkshire forestry plantation. She was still wrapped in the duvet which her killer had hastily put around her body. Not yet 15 years old when she had vanished, her disappearance on the way home after a shopping trip with friends had sparked one of the largest missing person’s operations in the history of Yorkshire policing. Two hundred officers and hundreds of volunteers had fanned out through the streets and along the bus route she took home, knocking on thousands of doors, searching 800 houses, sheds, garages and outbuildings. Search warrants were issued, 140 men with past convictions investigated, collections of household waste curtailed while refuse sites were searched—and a local benefactor even offered a £10,000 reward for information leading to her return. But none of it mattered: she would never return home.
She can be funny and disgusting at the same time, bless:
While I was preparing my samples, a voice called out across the mortuary. “I’m sure you’d like some lunch, wouldn’t you, Pat?” I looked around and there was the friendly face of the Senior Investigating Officer who had called me into the case. “Oh, yes please,” I answered. When we got to the staff refectory, there was little choice because I had taken so long in sampling the body. “What would you like, Pat?” I was too tired to bother and, to be honest, I really did not feel all that hungry anyway. But, I had a long drive back south and needed to have something to keep me going. “Why don’t you choose for me?” I said. “Anything that doesn’t have meat, please . . .”
Moments later, he returned with a laden tray and started placing the plates on the table. I looked, smelled and immediately felt nauseous. It was cauliflower cheese, a dish I usually relish, but it smelled of butyric acid, with a whiff of hydrogen sulfide; in short, it smelled of the corpse. The color was of flesh in livor mortis, with slightly gray tinges at the edges of what looked like bits of brain. Well, of course it did—butyric acid came from the cheese and the sulfur compound from the cauliflower.
The cabbage family, which includes the cauliflower, produces many sulfur compounds and I suppose this is why some people hate cabbage, cauliflower and sprouts. Butyric acid is formed by bacterial fermentation, and the bacteria involved in cheese?making are the same ones involved in both corpse decomposition and the smell of sweaty feet. I tried to be objective but, as I tried to eat my meal, it was coming up as it was going down. I mentally slapped my own face and could imagine my grandmother saying, “Stop whingeing and get on with it!”
So that’s what I did. Clutching my precious bag of samples and equipment, I set off on the long drive south. It took over seven hours because of all sorts of hold?ups on the motorways. I eventually got home, flopped down in front of the TV at about 1:00am with my darling Mickey, my one?eyed, silky, Burmese cat, on my lap. I was next conscious at 4:30am with a crick in my neck, and Mickey’s whiskers tickling my cheek. The discordant music of some ridiculous horror film was screeching away on the TV. I switched it off, Mickey still in my arms, and we both went up to bed, not waking until about 10:00am the next morning.
It’s always obvious to me that the person who’s written this book teaches in some capacity:
Soon after your blood ceases to flow, your body will cool until it reaches the ambient temperature of the place where you died. These environmental conditions will have a significant bearing on what is to come. The blood in your capillaries and veins, no longer being pumped around by the beating of your heart, will settle and pool, leading to the first discolouration of your skin, a phase called livor mortis, and, after that, your muscles will inevitably stiffen, first in the face and then in the entire body, as your muscle filaments begin to bind together. This is the phase referred to as rigor mortis.
Wiltshire writes a bit about her seemingly acrimonious divorce from her husband, about visiting the world-famous Body Farm, different exciting/weird deaths that she’s investigated for police… It’s a few different twists and turns, and I wish that I could say it differently, but this book really does need to be edited.