The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.