“Better than CSI”. How can you use contradictory and incomplete data to solve cold murder cases? With Professor Angela Gallop, CBE

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles meets Professor Angela Gallop, CBE, the forensic scientists’ forensic scientist. Over the past four decades, the teams she’s led have solved some of the most complex, difficult, and intransigent cold cases in British criminal history: Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, Roberto Calvi under Blackfriars Bridge, and Damilola Taylor in Peckham. And perhaps most notoriously of all, Stephen Lawrence, stabbed by a gang of racist thugs on the streets of Eltham.

The details of how Angela and her teams cracked these cases – often bringing pioneering new techniques into play – are recorded in (ahem!) forensic detail in all manner of media. They’re in Angela’s 2019 book When the Dogs Don’t Bark, her 2022 book How to Solve a Crime, and in any number of TV documentaries and specials. Most recently, this included the three-part ITV1 series, Cold Case Forensics, in February of this year. Not to mention Angela’s appearance on the legend that is BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs last November. Links below.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Friday 15 September 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Angela tells us how her interest in solving crime was perhaps first kindled by the lurid stories in the now-defunct British tabloid Sunday newspaper, The News of the World, and her love of science was enflamed by an inspirational, sixth-form biology teacher at school “just in the nick of time”. This passion for working things out combined with an intense sense of natural justice saw forensic science take over her life after she joined the Home Office Forensic Science Service in 1974.

As her skills developed and as she founded and scaled some of the country’s first and most successful private forensic science businesses, Angela became an international expert in blood and other bodily fluids – who they could and couldn’t have come from, and the patterns they make and leave behind at crime scenes.

Forensics cover so many different areas in “offences against the person” – bodily fluids, of course, but also weapons, clothing – textiles, fibres, and fragments – toxicology, drugs, footwear, documents, and firearms. Increasingly, criminals leave digital traces of their activity, but the biggest single development in Angela’s long and stellar career has been the rise to prominence of DNA evidence.

In perhaps the most memorable, moving, and intricate part of our discussion, Angela details how – after repeated examination and failures to identify the killers – she and her team unpicked the evidence that led to prosecution in the Stephen Lawrence case.

Angela also maintains that real forensics is much more subtle, time-consuming, interesting, and collegiate than the CSI TV drama series are ever able to portray.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Angela’s books https://www.waterstones.com/author/professor-angela-gallop/4009171

A ‘Long Read’ on Angela’s career, from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/24/queen-of-crime-solving-angela-gallop-forensic-science

Angela on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs from 4 November 2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dmpl

2023 ITV1 series Cold Case Forensics covering how Angela and her team cracked the Rachel Nickell, Lynette White, and Stephen Lawrence cases https://www.itv.com/watch/cold-case-forensics/10a1535/10a1535a0002

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