SAGE SAGE SAGE Video (c) SAGE Publications Ltd., 2017 Forensic Science & Investigation

Video Title: Forensic Science & Investigation Originally Published: 2017 Publication Date: Feb. 15, 2017 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Ltd. City: United Kingdom ISBN: 9781473961210 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473961210

(c) SAGE Publications Ltd., 2017

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[Forensic Science Investigation]

ANGELA GALLOP: I'm Angela Gallop and I've been a practicing forensic scientist for over 40 years. [Professor Angela Gallop, Chief Executive, Forensic Access] I work with a company I set up in 1986 called Forensic Access. And its sister company, Axiom International, which provides forensic services for overseas jurisdictions. I'm going to talk today about a really important case.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: It was the murder of Lynette White. [Lynette White] I might not have heard of Lynette White, but this case made legal, policing and forensic history. And so you'll certainly have known about some of the effects of the case. So it made legal history because it was the first case where someone was convicted of the crime, was then

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: acquitted, and then the real murderer found and convicted. It made policing history because it demonstrated the need for some better record of interviews in police stations, so it resulted in the introduction of video cameras for interviews. [Caused introduction of video recording of police interviews] And it made forensic history-- forensic science history

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: because it was the first time that someone was convicted of a case or of an offense using familial searching of the national DNA database. [Conviction brought about by familial searching of DNA database] And so it was an amazing case altogether. [Case Outline: Lynette White] This case involved the murder of a young prostitute in Cardiff

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: called Lynette White. It happened in 1989. And it was a particularly vicious attack. Lynette had suffered 50 stab wounds to her body and her wrists had been cut and her throat slit. It was really absolutely horrific. But the interesting thing about this case, and even in 1989, it was discovered that there was some foreign blood

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: at the scene. [Foreign blood at scene] And a lot of attention was paid to this because it was assumed that this could well have come from her attacker. Because with that many stab wounds, it's quite likely that they cut themselves on the knife, and so quite likely that some of their blood got sprayed around the scene and got mixed up in the pattern of Lynette White's own blood.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: Anyway, blood typing tests were applied to this because that was the normal way of analyzing blood in 1989, just before DNA really began to take hold. And the blood was shown to belong to the same collection of combination of groups, as a woman who was of interest-- the police-- one of Lynette's friends. And this woman said that Lynette's boyfriend

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: had been at the scene and been responsible. And so the police arrested him and one or two of his associates. And eventually they confessed to the crime, and they were charged and then eventually convicted at court. But they protested their innocence, and they were known as the Cardiff Three and I think a lot of people have heard of the Cardiff Three. ["The Cardiff Three"]

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: They were known as-- they were protest their innocence, and two years later they were released on appeal. And that was when the whole business of videoing interviews-- police interviews in police stations was introduced, because of the allegations that these confessions were forced out of them. But then there was a whole series

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: of attempts to analyze this foreign blood in more detail, using each successive new DNA technique that was developed. So this case virtually described the history of the development of DNA profiling in the UK. But none of these were successful. And so after a few more years, we

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: were asked whether we would have a look at the case. And the

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first thing that we needed to do was to understand the sequence of events, because it's really only through understanding that and understanding the precise contact the victim has had with their assailant that you can start understanding the forensic opportunities that might be available, and start looking in the right places

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: for the right sort of traces. [Analyzing Blood Patterns] We started with looking at the all the circumstances. And everything that was found-- all the records made at the crime scene, but then particularly the blood patterns. And luckily, the police had stripped off large pieces of wall paper because they wanted to do fingerprint examination of it. But so we had these great sheets of paper,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: and so we could re-erect them and recreate parts of the crime scene, which was incredibly helpful. And so we could see, for example, where Lynette White had been in this room where she was killed, the various points where the different sorts of injuries were inflicted. And we could see from the blood patterns how the murderer had made their way out and then

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: along the passageway, down the stairs, and out through the front door from the blood smearing that was there. And so there was some really interesting blood patterns to follow, so that was extremely helpful. But of course, we were going to focus on the foreign blood. Understanding with that we were going to focus on the foreign blood and look for more of it. Because the problem was, there was very little of it left.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: So many tests had been applied to it. For example, one place where it had been found was on the bottom of Lynette's jeans because her murderer had pulled her body from one part of the room to another. And so that was there, but by the time we got to the jeans, they actually just looked like latticework because of all the holes that had been cut out. And the other thing was that some of the foreign blood

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: had been damaged, so a little bit had been found on the walls. But because the wallpaper strips had been sprayed with a chemical for developing fingerprints, that had completely ruined any DNA on them. And so we couldn't get any results from that. And even with items like some of Lynette's clothing, particularly jeans-- the jeans dye came out and that, too,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: upset the DNA profiling processes, which is probably why scientists before us didn't get any results when they tried all their various tests earlier on. [Discovering New Blood Samples] So the next thing for us to do was to find some new samples to test that might have this foreign blood on it. And so we went back to the Forensic Archive and we asked for the samples, and they gave us what they had.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: And then we said that there must be some more. We've got a list here which says it should be those. We went back again and they gave us-- they found one or two more things. And then they said that's really it, and we said no, no, I think there's probably that thing you ought to have or that-- so going back again and again. It was quite complicated for them. But eventually, they gave us quite a number of new samples. Things like the cellophane end of a cigarette package,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: and an old biscuit wrapper and stuff that had been lying around on the floor that hadn't been examined recently. And the cellophane wrapper turned out to be really important. We had a look at it and it was smeared with blood stain. Of course, we knew that a lot of that would be Lynette White's blood, but there was one discrete spot on it. And that was terribly interesting to us,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: because if the foreign blood had come from Lynette's attacker, it would-- probably some of it anyway-- would've been transferred as airborne droplets of blood as the blood flew off his hand or his or her hand into the air. And then landed on different items, one of which could have been the cellophane wrapper.

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ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: And so we just tested this one discrete spot. It was probably less than a millimeter in diameter. And we got a nearly full profile, male profile of someone completely new to the case, so that was really interesting. But then of course, that could've been put there at any time, didn't have to be anything to do with the murder.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: So then we had to find more of this foreign blood around and about on Lynette's body and around and about on the exit route and so on. And so by carefully looking at other things, and we did some very imaginative things, we had the crime scene photographs of what the blood patterns looked like at the time, and we tried to separate out those blood elements that looked as though they were definitely from Lynette White,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: from things that might just not be, that might just have come from her attacker. [Unearthing Further Samples] We identified some interesting blood staining on skirting board. And we also were always very interested in the front door because there was a smear across the front door as the attacker was fumbling to find the catch to get out. There was no light on at all. So he had to do it by hand, as it were.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: And so we were always very interested in that. And so we got the police, first of all, to take the skirting board off in the room where Lynette was killed, and we scraped away the paint on the skirting board. The place had been re-decorated twice in the intervening time because it was years since the events happened. But anyway, we scraped away the paint, being terribly careful, looking for this blood underneath,

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: being terribly careful not to scrape too deeply-- in which case we'd lose everything-- but to scrape deep enough so we actually revealed anything that might be there. It was quite tricky, all done under a microscope. And we eventually revealed some of this blood. And we got a full male profile, which matched the stuff on the cellophane, which was absolutely brilliant. We were calling him cellophane man at this point. Incidentally because you've got to have

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: a handle for these people. And so we found this. We were very pleased about that. And then we did exactly the same thing with the front door but this was much more complicated, because the original smear had been swabbed off. And so here we couldn't see anything, but we could just detect where the blood had been from a very sensitive chemical test. And so we re-swabbed where we got the chemical tests

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: underneath the paint. And we managed to get a mixed profile of this unnamed cellophane man and Lynette White, which was very interesting, obviously, for us. And then we found one or two other bits and pieces. There was a stain on a cardboard box. We managed to find some more blood on Lynette's upper clothing. She'd been manhandled.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: Her jacket was facing the wrong way on her body, indicating roughly how she'd been manhandled. And so we found some of this foreign blood on her sweatshirt and on her jacket and on a swab taken from a wall somewhere and one or two other things. So in the end, we had a complete picture of this foreign blood on and around Lynette's body and on her exit route

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: and including the front door. So it was really very good evidence to show a connection with her murderer. [Obtaining a Full DNA Profile] So at the end of the day, we had this foreign blood on Lynette's body and all around it on the walls and other surfaces around it, and on the exit route. And so this absolutely demonstrated that it had something to do with her murder.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: And that was the key part of that. So then the next step was to find out from whom the blood had come. We knew it didn't match the Cardiff Three or anyone else that we had reference of from in the case. So we had to look for someone else. So we submitted it to national DNA database, and it didn't match anyone on there. So then we decided that perhaps the best thing to do

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ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: was to see if there was any familial link, some family member on the database that couldn't could conceivably lead us to who was the source of this blood. And so we did-- we ended up with a very early familial search of the database, and we didn't have any fancy computer algorithms in those days.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: So we had to do it all by hand. And so we took the rarest component of this the unnamed profile that we got. I think it occurred in something like one in 100 people. And we narrowed down our search to males living in the Cardiff area. And when we did that, we came up with a total of-- I

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: think it was 600 people that it could come from. Now that's far too big a number for the police to investigate, so we had to do a little bit better than that. So we then looked at each of those 600 people, and we looked to see how many of them had at least six matching components with our unknown profile. And this narrowed it down to 70 people, which was getting

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: slightly more manageable. We then looked at each one of these 70 people. And we looked at each of the components that they had matching the unknown profile. And we looked at the rarity of each of these components, and then we multiplied rarities together to get the overall rarity-- or really, you

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: could look at it as the overall closeness of match with the unknown profile. And one particular profile stood out well above the others as being much closer. And this was from a boy who wasn't even born at the time the murder was committed. He had had his DNA taken in relation to some minor offense.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: I think something to do with stealing a bike or something like that. But anyways, his profile was on the database and that's all that mattered. And so then the thing was to find out whether or not this blood could've come from one of his relations. And so obviously, the father was the place to start. But I do remember that we did the mother's blood before we

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: went to the father, just make sure that we were still on the right tracks and everything. And that was fine. We then did the father's profile and it didn't match, but it was very close. We then discovered that the father had a brother. And we did his profiling on his reference sample. That didn't match either, but it was very close. So by this time, we were quite convince we

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: were in the right family. And then there was a discovery that there was another brother. And so a sample was taken from him, and this time it did match. And that man was Jeffrey Gafoor. And so the police had some very good evidence against Jeffrey Gafoor. And eventually that was presented to court and he was convicted.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: [Subsequent Justice Procedures] In 2004, there was an inquiry into the original police investigation because of the difficulties with the confession evidence, the original evidence. Then in 2008, three witnesses at the original trial pleaded guilty to perjury. In 2011, some police officers were put on trial

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: for perverting the course of justice. All part of that original investigation. And now, there is a court case pending, where they're taking the Chief Constable of South Wales to court. It's all connected to the same thing. So sometimes these things have huge ramifications. In this case, no less than any other that I've ever

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: had anything to do with. [Lessons Learned] I think the lessons we've learned from a forensic science point of view from this case, is first of all, make sure you understand the crime scene. Because that's really helped us in identifying which samples were still around and which samples we should go for-- which samples we do test and how we should test them.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: So that was really, really important with that, particularly for things

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like the way in which Lynette White had been manhandled, because that told us exactly where to go to look for the offender's profile. So it probably took us about three hours to work out how her jacket had become tangled around her body in the way that it was and where to go for these samples.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: But it did mean then that we only needed to do two or three samples because we were pinpointing the exact right area. It's always important to think about what you're doing, and not just scattergun with forensic testing. Another lesson we learned was to be very persistent in searching for the items to test, and not necessarily assume because someone's told you that you've had everything that you necessarily have.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: So you've got to be very persistent about that. Be imaginative about what to test. [Be imaginative in testing] And don't put things in the too difficult box. I remember when I suggested that we take woodwork out of the flat, which actually had been newly painted when I saw it. And then start scraping away at paint. I think there were some eyebrows raised, but don't worry about raised eyebrows.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: I think that's a really important point. And the other thing is that if there is an unsolved case, it's really, really important to leave the case file-- forensic case files in very good order because it's quite difficult anyway to work out what's happened in the past with all the various testing and examinations that have gone on with individual items. It's really important to understand that before you

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: start retesting, and to help you make sense of what you find. And so I think those are the main lessons there. With every case there are new lessons to be learned. So we're just adding them all up together, and we've got a whole catalog of things that you've got to remember about when you're analyzing these cases these days.

ANGELA GALLOP [continued]: nbsp;

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