Murder and the Making of English CSI

"They write the history of this notion of a ‘crime scene’—as a special place, a social creation, as an idea. They explained something to me that I’ve always struggled to explain to other people, which is: what’s a crime scene like? What can a crime scene be? My answer now would be, well, a crime scene is an idea, a concept. It can be anything you want. It can be a spaceship, it can be a car. As a scientist, I work very closely with social scientists; much of my research nowadays is in the hinterland between natural sciences and social sciences. And this book explained things to me that I’ve misunderstood for a very long time. They take only two crime scenes, but they look at them in a great deal of detail. They point out words and phrases that we now use routinely and assume that everyone understands them. So: the whole notion of a crime scene as a geographic location where something happens. They talk about how we demarcate it and start to look at it; how different roles start to develop for looking at different bits of it; how people start to take notes and record diagrams. How all that requires some kind of cooperation and discipline and structure—counter to most crime novels, or at least a certain genre of crime novels where you have the ‘great man’, the detective who comes in and somehow sees things that no one else can see. “Crime scenes are not just procedural. They’re cognitive, too” Burney and Pemberton point out that it is, in fact, a collective enterprise. Yes, people have insights, but the bottom line is: people can get it wrong. The way you keep on track is usually to expose your ideas to some kind of reflection or criticism, to talk to people. And they say something very explicitly: that crime scenes are not just procedural. They’re cognitive, too. You look at them and think: ‘how would somebody get in here?’ or ‘how would you get out of here?’ You can come up with some really crazy theories, test them and then abandon them…. That’s quite a complicated business to do in a group. I’ve been in briefings where people have come up with absolutely wild ideas, and you want to say that to them—but you let it run. The evidence will eliminate it eventually, and they will quieten down. Between the 1920s and 1950s, you get the development of the murder bag: the case, the kit with forceps, bags to put things in, and labelling, and the chain of custody. These are all ideas that were consolidated in this period. Continental Europe was way ahead at this time. A man called Hans Gross—whose name seems to have been forgotten in the UK—was really the first person who thought about the whole business of a ‘crime scene investigator’ who pays attention and thinks and hypothesises, and then tests those hypotheses. A very rigorous, rational kind of process. Yes. As I’ve written myself, a body is a defining feature in a crime scene. If you go to a murder scene and there’s no body, then it’s a murder scene and you get on with it. But if there’s a body there it changes the whole thing. Firstly, it brings in a certain practical urgency, because everyone’s waiting for the body to be taken away for a post-mortem examination. Also, you see the context and—as a blood pattern expert—I would always say I need to be there when the body’s there, to see exactly where it was. But quite often this isn’t possible. The body—in a homicide—is the literal embodiment of the crime. So there are all these practical and cognitive, imaginative things associated with it. Yes. As a biologist, I would. Most of the work I’ve done would be in what are legally termed ‘offenses against the person’. If I were a chemist, I would do more road traffic accidents, blood alcohol analysis or burglaries (shoe marks, glass fragments), whereas most of my work was in sexual assault and homicide, all of which is dealt with in the higher courts. So, yes, I worked with pathologists and I would very often want to know what injuries a person had sustained, to make sense of how blood was distributed on clothing or on a weapon. Sometimes I worked with them very closely, at the post mortem, and sometimes remotely via phone call, or reading a statement or report."