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Homicide Forensics This is a repository copy of Homicide Forensics. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/64234/ Version: Published Version Article: (2011) Homicide Forensics. Wellcome History. pp. 1-24. ISSN 1477-4860 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Issue 47, summer 2011 Wellcome HISTORY HOMICIDE FORENSICS The scientific investigation of murder in 20th-century England Bodies, traces and spaces Feature: The shifting landscape of forensic homicide investigation in 20th-century England Ian Burney Searching for evidence in the Crippen murder case, 1910. “When it is discovered e are, by common consensus, and agreeing universal thresholds living in a new paradigm of tolerance for accepting DNA that a murder has been Win forensic investigation. matches as evidence, this literature committed, the scene of that Since the introduction of DNA has made DNA profi ling the best- profi ling in the mid-1980s, the forensic historicised forensic technique of the murder should instantly landscape has altered dramatically. 20th century, perhaps of all time. become as the Palace of It has created new iconography (the By contrast, we know very little white-suited and anonymous Scenes about forensics in the decades the Sleeping Beauty. Not of Crime Offi cers, SOCOs), new preceding this genetic turn. This has a grain of dust should be challenges (hypervigilance against resulted not merely in a gap in our material contamination), new synergies historical knowledge but in a distorted moved, not a soul should be (between academic biomedical research understanding of the forensic era in allowed to approach it, until and applied forensic science) and which we now live – one that contrasts a new set of spaces (especially the the scientifi cally advanced, mainstream the scientifi c observer has highly disciplined crime scene and its discipline of contemporary biomedicine seen everything in situ and promise of yielding biotrace evidence). against earlier practices that are now This new forensic world has been dismissed as “untested assumptions absolutely undisturbed.” the subject of a substantial body of and semi-informed guesswork” (Saks critical scrutiny, which has drawn and Koehler, 2005). This is at best R Austin Freeman, ‘A Message from the Deep Sea’ (1909) attention to the historical challenges oversimplifi ed and at worst dangerous, facing the adoption of DNA profi ling as it misrepresents the signifi cance and as a credible practicable forensic complexity, in theory and in practice, technology. Covering debates ranging of pre-DNA forensics, and obscures from population genetics and abstruse potential continuities between Cover image: Artwork illustrating forensic science. probability theory to the processes debates and diffi culties in forensic Alex Williamson/Wellcome Images of standardising laboratory protocols practice across the ‘great divide’. 2 | Wellcome HISTORY My current research project on courtroom battles between Spilsbury the trace body of the criminal, using homicide investigation in 20th-century and his contemporaries focused critical reconstructive techniques drawn England, funded by the Wellcome attention on the practices of pathology from other scientifi c disciplines. Trust Medical History and Humanities itself, which threatened to undermine “The criminologist,” according to programme, seeks to redress this the whole edifi ce of body-centred Locard, “re-creates the criminal from ahistorical picture. It focuses on the forensics and, at times, tarnish the traces the latter leaves behind, just shifting relationship between two reputation of its celebrity fi gurehead. as the archaeologist reconstructs models of forensic investigation: The ‘crime-scene’ approach to prehistoric beings from his fi nds.” a body-centred forensic medicine homicide investigation was grounded By the 1930s–40s, trace inherited from the 19th century, and in a diff erent set of imperatives: fi rst, investigation had become a standard a trace-oriented forensic science the need to suspend the crime scene and routine part of forensic that supplemented the pathological investigation, and this in turn entailed investigation of the whole body with changes in professional expertise and an interest in the analysis of matter practice. The new emphasis on trace found on and around the body (blood, collection and analysis enabled criminal hair, fi bres, ‘dust’). The forensics of investigators to forge new evidentiary bodies and of traces both took on a links between the victim’s body, the new impetus at the start of the 20th perpetrator and the crime scene, and century. The post-mortem encounter in this to assess the operation of a new with the body, to be sure, has a long analytic gaze, one that decentred the historical pedigree, but it was only in traditional forensic authority associated the fi rst decades of the 20th century, with the pathologist’s autopsy. in England, that the encounter Homicide investigation was no longer between the body and the pathologist oriented by the focused medical gaze became a high-profi le, celebrity- of one medical authority; instead, a saturated practice – with Bernard dispersed and multifaceted analytical Spilsbury (known as the ‘people’s gaze operated across several sites (crime pathologist’) as its most prominent scene, mortuary slab and laboratory), exemplar. However, alongside this and belonged to a multidisciplinary there was another, in some respects structure that interrogated the visible opposing, trend developing. First and invisible traces of inorganic and discernible in the writings of turn- organic matter swabbed from clothing, of-the-century continental theorists fl uids, suspect weapons and the body such as Edmond Locard and Hans (of both the victim and the accused). Gross, a ‘crime-scene’ approach to Modern crime scene investigation. The increasing complexity of Marina Bartel/iStockphoto criminal detection emerged that trace analysis, then, demanded drew upon the practices and ideas specialised knowledge and equipment from a variety of scientifi c disciplines in time and space, with the aim of beyond the conventional autopsy (archaeology, entomology, serology constructing an analytical space practices at the mortuary slab, and and other forms of biochemistry), and in which the body and its physical this imposed strategic and logistical a newly disciplined regime of police context could be subjected to a demands that would transform the investigation – constituting a regime sequential and diff erentiated set of role and responsibilities of the forensic of detection in which pathology was investigative practices undisturbed by pathologist. In principle, forensic no longer the exclusive authority. decay, degradation or contamination. pathologists were relegated to the Body-centred forensics depended Nowhere is this more strikingly role of harvesting trace material from on pathologists’ success on two evoked than in the passage in R Austin the body for analysis by other experts fronts, in two domains: fi rst, securing Freeman’s detective story that serves as in other domains that might call the corpse as a source of forensic the epigraph to this article. Freeman’s into doubt the results of their own knowledge in the mortuary; second, self-consciously ‘modern’ approach to autopsy fi ndings. However, in practice, gaining recognition for this knowledge crime scene investigation was echoed pathologists still maintained overall in the courtroom. Both of these facets in an emergent textbook literature: command of the expanding forensic of forensic pathology entailed work guarding the “Palace of the Sleeping investigative matrix. For example, they on the part of its adherents, and both Beauty” entailed, in Hans Gross’s were commonly put in charge of the faced serious challenges. Pathologists, view, “the exclusion of everything new Home Offi ce-sponsored police for instance, were forced to deal with happening after the moment when laboratories, which were themselves a the inherent instability of the corpse the crime is committed”. The core means of institutionalising a trace- itself, which turned the problem of suspension of the moment of crime oriented forensic model. This in turn decomposition into a disciplinary in time and space enabled the second presented sources of potential tension concern in the forensic imagination, feature of the forensics of things: the – between the forensic pathologist’s and which led to proposals such as analytical ‘excavation’ of crime scene established role as a custodian of a specialised freezing chambers designed as ‘archeological/ecological’ space. This time-honoured medical practice, and to suspend further decay of bodies can to some extent be characterised as the newer role as manager of routine, and tissues. Furthermore, high-profi le a shift from the body of the victim to and tedious,
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