Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective sy aside of life the average person is never
Speaker 1: exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Speaker 1: Join me now as I take you into this world.
Speaker 1: Today's guest Professor Roger Bayard is a forensic pathologist. One
Speaker 1: of the many cases he was involved in was examining
Speaker 1: the remains of eleven murdered victims, eight of which were
Speaker 1: stilled in barrels in the South Australian Snowtown murders case.
Speaker 1: He has seen more death than anyone should, but still
Speaker 1: manages to have what I found to be a practical
Speaker 1: and compassionate view about life. And death. He has conducted
Speaker 1: thousands of posts, more than examinations examining the remains of
Speaker 1: people who have died of unnatural causes, been murdered, victims
Speaker 1: of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or even killed by animals.
Speaker 1: We spoke about his career spanning more than forty years,
Speaker 1: including some of the truly bizarre cases that he has
Speaker 1: seen and the work that he does to prevent death.
Speaker 1: It's probably appropriate to give a content warning up front.
Speaker 1: What we talk about here is quite confronting. Roger. You
Speaker 1: are the pathologists on the Snowtown murders. That's one of
Speaker 1: Australia's most horrific cases. We'll talk more about that later,
Speaker 1: but first help me understand what is the role of
Speaker 1: a forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2: Well, as you know, it's variable. Sometimes it's really critical,
Speaker 2: other times it's not. If somebody is shot on the
Speaker 2: head in front of thirty witnesses, you don't need a
Speaker 2: forensic pathologist to tell you what's happened. But other times
Speaker 2: we act as a team, so we're working together. So
Speaker 2: the police have worked the scene and we have a
Speaker 2: body and they want to know what's a likely cause
Speaker 2: of death? What do I think has happened, what are
Speaker 2: non possibilities, so it guides them so they're looking for
Speaker 2: a samurai saw, not a pistol sort of thing. Time
Speaker 2: of death is always a very difficult issue, and we're
Speaker 2: often called in the past for that, but that's become
Speaker 2: I think we've become more aware that it's not as
Speaker 2: accurate as we used to think it was. You know,
Speaker 2: we had those incredibly interesting scientific charts and you'd plot
Speaker 2: this and that and they died at two minutes past
Speaker 2: midnight and as I say, poss and minus a week.
Speaker 1: But from a to take this point of view, crucial
Speaker 1: to an investigation if you can get the time of
Speaker 1: time death for when the incident occurred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if they're warm, the body temperatures of
Speaker 2: thirty seven degrees, that means has happened very recently, which
Speaker 2: means that the perpetrator may be in the area. If
Speaker 2: you can give them a time frame, then it cuts
Speaker 2: down on the number of people that may be evolved.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the importance of it as well.
Speaker 2: You know, the police come to the autopsy as well,
Speaker 2: so that we can chat about stuff and work our
Speaker 2: way through. People have said we should record all of
Speaker 2: our conversations. Well, I disagree with that because it's a
Speaker 2: work in progress. You know, we're coming up with all
Speaker 2: sorts of theories, and we're bouncing off each other and
Speaker 2: using each other's experience saying no, I don't think that's
Speaker 2: likely all.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think that's possible, and that's appropriate from a
Speaker 1: policing point of view. If we've got well, this person
Speaker 1: was last sight that we know for a fact that
Speaker 1: this person was at the shopping center at nine am
Speaker 1: in the morning, that type of information could be helpful
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, But strange things happened. I remember I went
Speaker 2: to a stabbing and those have been stabbed multiple times.
Speaker 2: But he had drops of blood on his back. So
Speaker 2: I was very excited by this. I said, look, I
Speaker 2: mean the only way he could get that is if
Speaker 2: it had dropped from a height. Must be the perpetrator blood.
Speaker 2: So I worked up for about forty five minutes, and
Speaker 2: then one of the crime scene cops came in and said,
Speaker 2: I'll actually passed the bloody T shirt over the back
Speaker 2: of the body. But the usefulness of that is getting
Speaker 2: information from each other so we don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you got any case, Well, you've done over
Speaker 1: six thousand posts more than so when I say have
Speaker 1: you got any cases, I assume that there's a lot
Speaker 1: in that memory of yours, ones that your initial thoughts
Speaker 1: on it changed to be completely different to what the
Speaker 1: final analysis was. Well.
Speaker 2: I think probably one of the most recent ones was
Speaker 2: Jasmine Korr, a young Punjabi woman who was buried alive
Speaker 2: by her ex boyfriend. He had a story that they
Speaker 2: had a suicide packed and she had cuts on the
Speaker 2: side of her neck. So the initial assumption was that
Speaker 2: he'd cut her neck and then buried the body. But
Speaker 2: the cuts are very superficial and so the assessment of
Speaker 2: the crime scene was inaccurate. It wasn't cuts. She had
Speaker 2: actually inhaled soil. She'd be buried alive. So that was
Speaker 2: completely different from what we originally thought and horrific.
Speaker 1: Of course, Yeah, I want to talk further about that
Speaker 1: case because that is quite quite horrific. And in your
Speaker 1: role as a forensic pathologist, did you go out to
Speaker 1: the crime scenes or it was on a need basis
Speaker 1: When you attended the crime scenes, you do.
Speaker 2: When you don't, For example, Snowtown, which we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about, I didn't go to the crime scene there
Speaker 2: because that was a bank fault for me. The crime
Speaker 2: scene was in the barrels, and so we'll talk about that,
Speaker 2: how the evidence was inside the barrel So he brought
Speaker 2: those down to Adelaide with Jasmine. I went to the
Speaker 2: crime scene and assisted with the exhumation, just to see
Speaker 2: the process. Also to be able to tell the court, yes,
Speaker 2: I was there, I saw these injuries or not, because
Speaker 2: if you're not at the crime scene sometimes it can
Speaker 2: be put you. Well, clearly these injuries occurred post mortem
Speaker 2: when the body was being moved. But if I could say, no,
Speaker 2: I was there and this is what I saw, and
Speaker 2: I document what I saw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the crime scenes can be misleading. I recall
Speaker 1: one where I've turned up the crime scene, called out
Speaker 1: to it on a Friday afternoon. Going to the crime scene.
Speaker 1: There's a person naked with a cord wrapped around their
Speaker 1: neck and blood all over the walls, with finger marks
Speaker 1: and all that looked like there'd been a violent struggle.
Speaker 1: We set that up as a murder investigation that was
Speaker 1: running for twelve hours until we could get the forensic
Speaker 1: pathologist to examine the situation. This person had a ruptured
Speaker 1: a orta really and was making a phone call. The
Speaker 1: called around his neck was a cord to the telephone
Speaker 1: and was writhing around in agony with a ruptured a order,
Speaker 1: coughing up blood and the blood was hitting the wall.
Speaker 1: So that taught me, and that was very early in
Speaker 1: my career, the importance of getting the opinion of a
Speaker 1: forensic pathologist because we'd still be looking for the murderer
Speaker 1: on that case. What led you to this.
Speaker 2: Field, basically laziness.
Speaker 1: I liked your on the sensors.
Speaker 2: I was going back to Canada. I trained in Tasmania,
Speaker 2: and I've been going to Canada and I've done family
Speaker 2: practice training there. But I was going back to emergency
Speaker 2: medicine and I was in Belize and having great time snorkling,
Speaker 2: and spent so much time snorkling. By the time I
Speaker 2: got back to Canada, all the emergency jobs were taken,
Speaker 2: so all I had left was pathology.
Speaker 1: And you didn't get a career as a snoggl.
Speaker 2: No, So then I went from general pathology to pediatric
Speaker 2: pathology to forensic pathology. So it's fascinating. I mean, it
Speaker 2: covers so many areas of medicine and life and law.
Speaker 2: There's nothing quite like it.
Speaker 1: Well, I see that you're passionate about it, and you've
Speaker 1: been working in it for a very very long long time.
Speaker 1: From it the impact it has on you. You're looking
Speaker 1: at death, causes of death. What's the toll it's taken
Speaker 1: on you.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm only twenty eight.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say you're doing well for thirty.
Speaker 2: That's right. Okay. It's an interesting question, and it's one
Speaker 2: that I've for considered, as you know, and I've called
Speaker 2: it the right to mourn and say that nobody talks
Speaker 2: about post traumatic stress with forensic pathologists, and yet every
Speaker 2: month of every year we go out to scenes. We
Speaker 2: see dismembered bodies, incinerated bodies, we see children that have
Speaker 2: been staffed to death, vehicle accidents, dreadful scenes, and we
Speaker 2: have to not only immerse ourselves in it, we have
Speaker 2: to then describe it in great detail, understand it. Then
Speaker 2: we have to present it sometimes to a jury, and
Speaker 2: be attacked, have our credibility attack while we're doing it.
Speaker 2: So we are so close to this. I think one
Speaker 2: of the things that saves us is the science of it.
Speaker 2: We're focusing on the science, We're not focusing on the
Speaker 2: horror of the situation. But I'm nearing the end of
Speaker 2: my career now, in fact, I'm nearly dead.
Speaker 1: Probably well, actually, if you died on the podcast.
Speaker 2: That would be a spectacular finish.
Speaker 1: We could do something with it. It wouldn't be forgotten.
Speaker 2: But that going sort of television bloopers.
Speaker 1: Or look, we'll find the place for this social media. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm starting to come to terms of it. We'll find
Speaker 1: the place fore you'll go viral.
Speaker 2: I feel comfortable there, okay, But as I get to
Speaker 2: the end of my career, I've been thinking more and
Speaker 2: more about the toll and what I've seen, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't get easier. You know, my area's children pediatric forensics.
Speaker 2: When I first started, I knew I was going to
Speaker 2: find courses of these deaths and gung ho. And then
Speaker 2: as I got further and further into my career, I
Speaker 2: realized that, no, I'm not going to finances all the time,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to have to sit down with families
Speaker 2: and say I have no idea. All I can say
Speaker 2: to them is it was nothing that you did. And
Speaker 2: also a lot of the times they just want to
Speaker 2: meet the person that looked after their baby between the
Speaker 2: time when they saw the baby last, and when they
Speaker 2: saw the baby at the funeral home, and to know
Speaker 2: that the it wasn't just a case. And of course
Speaker 2: I always refer to the babies by their name and
Speaker 2: just so this was not just a case for me
Speaker 2: or for the mortuary stuff. You know, a baby who
Speaker 2: has died, or a little child has died is a
Speaker 2: tragedy and there's no getting around it.
Speaker 1: And that commit because they're very sensitive at that stage
Speaker 1: and you say the wrong word or forget the child's
Speaker 1: name or.
Speaker 2: Call the child. I've seen people do that. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean just terrible things.
Speaker 1: And that they're real triggering for a person grieving. So
Speaker 1: I think I can see what you're saying, and we'd
Speaker 1: have a great benefit to the people knowing that the
Speaker 1: person handling their child or that loved one is someone
Speaker 1: that's compassionate.
Speaker 2: Well, I remember the first pediatric autopsy I did, a
Speaker 2: little French Canadian girl called Genevieve, and that was back
Speaker 2: in ninety eighty four. I think, and I often wonder
Speaker 2: whether because I use her case for teaching, I've often thought,
Speaker 2: should I get in contact with the parents and let
Speaker 2: them know that you know, somebody remembers Genevieve, but I
Speaker 2: don't know. I mean, it's it's so long ago, and
Speaker 2: maybe it's better just to let it let it go.
Speaker 1: The perception of what is involved in the post mortem
Speaker 1: can Yeah, you've done over six thousand post mortems. Can
Speaker 1: you just describe to our listeners what is involved in
Speaker 1: the post mortem?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a basically, it's a scientific medical examination of
Speaker 2: the body. So if it's a suspicious death, it'll involve
Speaker 2: the clothing and the surroundings. But if it's just a
Speaker 2: natural death somebody's just sort of fallen over in the street,
Speaker 2: we bring them in. We video the bodies with the
Speaker 2: clothing and possessions so that there's a record of that.
Speaker 2: We take the body into the mortuary and then we
Speaker 2: do a really detailed external examination. So essentially we're looking
Speaker 2: for any signs of injury, because that's what we want
Speaker 2: to exclude, you know, it's something that's unexpected that shouldn't
Speaker 2: be there. And we're looking for signs of disease as well.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you can identify disease from external examinations. And then
Speaker 2: we do a three cavity dissection, and this is a
Speaker 2: traditional autopsy. We've moved away from that now with radiological investigations.
Speaker 2: But in the traditional form you would open the head
Speaker 2: and examine the brain, you'd open the chest and examine
Speaker 2: the lungs and heart and the admin, liver, intestines, all
Speaker 2: the orbits are taken out in wighe they're carefully dissected,
Speaker 2: looking for tumors, looking for inflammation, looking for some sort
Speaker 2: of disease. We've moved on now we have CT examinations,
Speaker 2: So all of our cases, most fronsic mortars around the
Speaker 2: world get a CT which is just a very sophisticated
Speaker 2: X ray that gives us very good imaging, the same
Speaker 2: as the clinical cts and hospitals. So we can see
Speaker 2: if there's a ruptured order blood around the heart, we
Speaker 2: can see if there's a florid in pneumonia, we can
Speaker 2: see if there's a brain hemorrhage. So in those cases
Speaker 2: we will then say, okay, we've got a cause of death.
Speaker 2: We'll do an external to make sure we don't see
Speaker 2: anything untoward, and then the families don't have to go
Speaker 2: through the whole process of having the autopsy done. We
Speaker 2: have the information we need, so it's I think, in
Speaker 2: a way kind of to families. Some families want autopsies,
Speaker 2: families don't, and if they don't, this is a way
Speaker 2: of sort of getting their loved ones back to them
Speaker 2: as soon as possible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you find now that's progressed into getting CT
Speaker 1: scans and the science has improved along lads lines. The
Speaker 1: findings that you had prior to T scans were correct,
Speaker 1: because quite often I'd be standing there at the post
Speaker 1: more than and we'd be looking at the say it
Speaker 1: was a bullet wound. What was the direction of the
Speaker 1: bullet stab wound? That type of thing looks like it's
Speaker 1: come from the left. Did that change the thinking on
Speaker 1: determining what the nature of the injuries were?
Speaker 2: Yeah, CET's been excellent. It's interesting, as you know, with
Speaker 2: stab wounds, you will the knife will be taken out
Speaker 2: and then you'll do a careful lad dis section and
Speaker 2: you can say this is the way it was going.
Speaker 2: A friend of mine in Sweden a number of years
Speaker 2: ago did a CT on a stab wound with the
Speaker 2: knife in place. And what the knife had done is
Speaker 2: had come in from the left side and pushed all
Speaker 2: of the organs to the right. But when you took
Speaker 2: the knife out, everything came back to the midline. So
Speaker 2: the careful dissection was say, knife was coming from the front.
Speaker 2: The CT told us a different story. And sometimes cts
Speaker 2: will tell you something that's not at all obvious. I
Speaker 2: had a poor detective. He'd had a body and this
Speaker 2: fellow had cut his wrists and arms and bled to
Speaker 2: death in the bath. And so I was looking at
Speaker 2: the CT and lo and behold there was a collapse
Speaker 2: lung and there was a stab wound in the chest
Speaker 2: which this bloke had missed. And so I presented it
Speaker 2: to Major Crime and I said, fancy missing that, I said,
Speaker 2: and look at the body. I missed it too, because
Speaker 2: what had happened is that the wound had closed over,
Speaker 2: so you couldn't looking at the body externally. Very hard
Speaker 2: to see CT two seconds.
Speaker 1: Wow, well there's a science, said. Were you a believer
Speaker 1: in having the investigator at the post more than absolutely?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, all the time. I mean it's with OCKH
Speaker 2: health and safety rules. Now, sometimes the police have to
Speaker 2: stand on the other side of the observation screen. I
Speaker 2: prefer to have the police in there so that we're
Speaker 2: talking about the case, working our way through it. When
Speaker 2: I find something, you know, if I show you through
Speaker 2: a glass window. It's not the same as pointing out
Speaker 2: to you directly.
Speaker 1: No, I always found it beneficial to be at the
Speaker 1: post more than if I was on a particular investigation.
Speaker 1: I tell this story and that probably dates me. But
Speaker 1: the first post, more than I went to, and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to name the hospital, and I'm sure the
Speaker 1: pathologist is long gone, was smoking, standing there smoking, Yes,
Speaker 1: no gloves on. And I walk in as this young
Speaker 1: copy shook my hand and then I look where his
Speaker 1: hands had been with no gloves and standing over the
Speaker 1: body smoking. We've come a long way.
Speaker 2: Well, i wear a full protective suit, so I've got
Speaker 2: a respirator, you know, I've gloves, sleeves, food smoking, nothing
Speaker 2: like that in the mortuary. No, it's a much more.
Speaker 2: It's a process that could be videoed and used to
Speaker 2: show people that it's done scientifically now and with respect,
Speaker 2: with respect.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the important thing. And I think that's a
Speaker 1: fear that the victim or the deceased families have, is
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. Who's caring for our loved one,
Speaker 1: regardless of the fact that they're now deceased. I want
Speaker 1: to talk on this is. I think it's played prominently
Speaker 1: in your career. Not the only case, obviously, but that's
Speaker 1: the bodies in the barrel case. We talk about the
Speaker 1: Snowtown murders. Eleven people I believe were murdered. Where the
Speaker 1: bodies were disposed. I think there was eight bodies disposed
Speaker 1: in a disused bank in a small country town. I'd
Speaker 1: call them forty four gallon drum type barrels. You had
Speaker 1: just started as a forensic pathologist, yep, down in South Australia.
Speaker 2: My first week on call.
Speaker 1: Actually, I don't know what it is about South Australia,
Speaker 1: but whenever South Australia police I find me, it was
Speaker 1: never good news. There's something about South Australia, but it's
Speaker 1: a special place. Your second week and you get a call,
Speaker 1: do you want to talk us through the process of
Speaker 1: that case? It was a horrific and what you uncovered
Speaker 1: and the role that you played in that case.
Speaker 2: Well, when I started, my colleagues in Eastern States, we're
Speaker 2: talking about adelaide As being the city of churches and
Speaker 2: serial killers, and there's there's a certain truth to that.
Speaker 2: There's Snowtown. I was called by head a major crime
Speaker 2: one night I think it was a Thursday night, and
Speaker 2: I was so green. I didn't realize that when the
Speaker 2: head of major crime calls you, it's pretty serious.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He said he was in a little place called Snowtown
Speaker 2: and he described the barrels and they said, do you
Speaker 2: want to come up? And so you know the evidence
Speaker 2: is in there, you know, why don't you just bring them?
Speaker 2: Bring them down to Adelaide. So I didn't go to
Speaker 2: the crime scene because for me, the crime scene was
Speaker 2: actually within the barrels. So they were brought down and
Speaker 2: the next day we had to work out the mechanics
Speaker 2: of how to handle this because they're very heavy. We'd
Speaker 2: been told our full of acids, so it could be toxic,
Speaker 2: so we had to test the fluid. Then we had
Speaker 2: to work out how to empty the barrels and not
Speaker 2: lose evidence because you know, you could be bullets are
Speaker 2: inn in there. So there are eight bodies partially dismembered
Speaker 2: in the barrels.
Speaker 1: What did you know at that stage?
Speaker 2: Well, I tried to convince Paul Schram that was probably hydroponic,
Speaker 2: and he said what should he do? And I said,
Speaker 2: We'll take a lit off and if you find remains,
Speaker 2: give me be a call, and you know, ten minutes
Speaker 2: later said yes, there were feet poking out. So I said, dear,
Speaker 2: how many barrels? Eight barrels, and I said, let's bring
Speaker 2: them down. But there were two bodies buried at Waterloo Corner.
Speaker 2: Clinton's recise had been murdered. He was the first one
Speaker 2: buried up at lower Light. And there was a case
Speaker 2: that was a hanging that originally thought to be a suicide,
Speaker 2: but they'd actually forced their spoke to hang himself. So
Speaker 2: there were a number of them. But the mechanics of
Speaker 2: taking the bodies out was extraordinary.
Speaker 1: So okay, and I hadn't even thought about the logistics,
Speaker 1: but yeah, moving the barrels and all sorts of potential issues.
Speaker 1: You don't know what's in them. So you work out
Speaker 1: the mechanics to get the barrels to your laboratory or
Speaker 1: and then how did you what was the process?
Speaker 2: Well, we took the lid off, had to look inside,
Speaker 2: got some idea what was going on, and they were
Speaker 2: in various states of decomposition. Some are actually quite well preserved.
Speaker 2: Then we put the lid bag on, turned them on
Speaker 2: the side on a bench and used sieves, you know,
Speaker 2: the sieves were archaeological and just sieved all the fluid
Speaker 2: as it came out. We found well, we found thumb
Speaker 2: locks and gags and all sorts of things. So we
Speaker 2: didn't we didn't want that material to be lost because
Speaker 2: it was very important. So then when all the floor
Speaker 2: was out, we brought the bodies out and we just
Speaker 2: gave them letters f and then put them on taps
Speaker 2: and then just matched up. We did DNA testing, which
Speaker 2: didn't work. Which is interesting is that, well, that's what
Speaker 2: people said, you know you can get you can do
Speaker 2: DNA testing on dinosaurs. Why not this because of the
Speaker 2: nature of how it was the bodies were stored. They're
Speaker 2: in an oxygen deprived environment, which was originally a and
Speaker 2: DNA just doesn't survive that. We got a foot in
Speaker 2: a gumbot that came up in a fishing net in
Speaker 2: the bit. We could do DNA on that, and it
Speaker 2: was from a fisherman who had overboard ten years before.
Speaker 2: But the condition was obviously much better for preserving DNA
Speaker 2: than in these barrels.
Speaker 1: Had the bodies that had the flesh decomposed in.
Speaker 2: The yes, No, some hadn't, some had, Some were very
Speaker 2: well preserved and we could. We could see tattoos you
Speaker 2: could use to identify, We could do dental records. And
Speaker 2: also the police had a fair idea who they were,
Speaker 2: which is obviously important because if you have no idea
Speaker 2: who somebody is, how can you actually then you know,
Speaker 2: do dental records, you know, how can we.
Speaker 1: Where these stay? Yeah, that's right, you've called out identification,
Speaker 1: but also the cause and manner of death.
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, what did you find? It was difficult because
Speaker 2: of the or preservation. The bodies had broken down. We
Speaker 2: were looking for natural diseases, but sometimes the augments were
Speaker 2: missing because that decomposed. We found gags and things put
Speaker 2: in their mouths, you know, suffocation was was likely. As
Speaker 2: I said, they had handcuffs and thumb locks, so we
Speaker 2: didn't find any evidence of torture, probably because of the
Speaker 2: state of preservation. There's been stories about they've been inserting
Speaker 2: sparkles into their penises, and we could find OVID into that,
Speaker 2: which doesn't mean it didn't happen. Happen. And the cannibalism,
Speaker 2: you know, the last victim, apparently forgotten which perpetrator might
Speaker 2: have been Bunting, took a slab of thigh and cooked
Speaker 2: it up for his mates.
Speaker 1: Where where did where did that information come from?
Speaker 2: Jimmy of Thesarkus was one of the perpetrators Bunting Wagner
Speaker 2: of the circus, and he gave the police a lot
Speaker 2: of evidence. He gave that story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how did that impact on you?
Speaker 2: Again? You hide behind the science. You know, people generally
Speaker 2: are just terrible dealing with death now. But because we
Speaker 2: do it all the time, and because my aim was
Speaker 2: to see if I could find physical evidence of this
Speaker 2: to corroborate or disprove the story, then I'm focusing on that.
Speaker 2: You sort of remove yourself. It's like surgeons in the
Speaker 2: operating room sometimes leaning on a chest and then takes
Speaker 2: a breath. They realized it it's actually a patient, not
Speaker 2: just an appendix. You know, you focus.
Speaker 1: I understand and that one of the interviews that you did,
Speaker 1: you talked about it didn't impact because you had a
Speaker 1: job to do. You're looking at this person is okay,
Speaker 1: this is my role, this is a job.
Speaker 2: I think that's true. I mean with Thailand, with the tsunami,
Speaker 2: when I was in body identifications, I was offered a
Speaker 2: chance to go back a second time. I couldn't do it.
Speaker 2: There were so many dead children, and you know, these
Speaker 2: piles of bodies, truckloads of bodies. That was and you're
Speaker 2: just seeing the whole scene. You're not focusing on a
Speaker 2: knife wound and the horror of it all.
Speaker 1: How long were you involved in the Snowtown investigation? Did
Speaker 1: you give evidence at court? Yes?
Speaker 2: I did. Snowtown went on for years actually, but initially
Speaker 2: we were asked about the state of the bodies and
Speaker 2: you know how they putrefy, what sort of does this
Speaker 2: do to the evidence? And then the case that I
Speaker 2: went to caught with. I mean, I assisted getting all
Speaker 2: the bodies out of the barrels, but then I was
Speaker 2: overseas for a couple of weeks. So the one that
Speaker 2: I was involved when was a body, a skeletonized body
Speaker 2: found at Waterloo Corner. Two bodies found there. Again, could
Speaker 2: I exclude the fact that she had died of a
Speaker 2: heart attack and they just hidden the body? No, I couldn't,
Speaker 2: because I don't have the heart. You know, if you
Speaker 2: don't have the organs. And that's I've done a study
Speaker 2: on concealment of homicides and quite a significant percentage, as
Speaker 2: you know, are concealed hoping they won't be found, or
Speaker 2: if they are found, I'd be so decomposed that a
Speaker 2: lot of the evidence will have gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I find that then. I don't want to say
Speaker 1: too much. You don't want to give people idea is
Speaker 1: but the amount of bodies that go into the water,
Speaker 1: that surface come to the surface, and that gives us
Speaker 1: something to something to start the investigation with.
Speaker 2: Time and time again, I think we can talk about
Speaker 2: it because I think that the people who do this
Speaker 2: sort of thing are so into the internet. I did
Speaker 2: a study a few years ago. They do surgical studies
Speaker 2: on pigs, and I got the carcasses and I took
Speaker 2: a broken wine glass, I took a quantus plastic knife
Speaker 2: that i'd bitten, and I took a Stateler pen and
Speaker 2: I could stab straight into the carotids. So what I
Speaker 2: was saying with that is that all the security measures
Speaker 2: at the airports, you know, if you really want to
Speaker 2: do it, you can do it. And I wasn't informing
Speaker 2: terrorists they know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, obviously, why do we use pigs?
Speaker 2: They're quite like us. I mean, the most similar, of course,
Speaker 2: would be primates. But that's no go territory.
Speaker 1: I'm not going.
Speaker 2: Not at all. So that is not done anymore. There
Speaker 2: have been some horrific experiments in the past, but with
Speaker 2: pigs they can be anesthetized. Their tissues are pretty similar
Speaker 2: to humans. We did a pig study with the series
Speaker 2: I did with Lawless, looking at the Canniff brothers up
Speaker 2: in Queensland. You know the classic story. The two bush
Speaker 2: rangers had killed a station owner and a cop and
Speaker 2: then the dismembered remains were found in saddle bags and
Speaker 2: they'd been put on a fire, and so the prosecution
Speaker 2: turned it around from being shot to actually these horrific
Speaker 2: creatures dismembered these poor men and then burnt them. So
Speaker 2: we got a whole pig carcass and a dismembered pig
Speaker 2: carcass put on the fire. The dismember pig carcass disappeared,
Speaker 2: the whole carcass turned into what we had seen with
Speaker 2: the Caniff, so we could show using the bodies there
Speaker 2: that their story was actually correct. They hadn't dismembered them.
Speaker 2: And that's that's historical forensics. It's not important nowadays, but
Speaker 2: it's interesting.
Speaker 1: No, it is odd experience. How often would you find
Speaker 1: yourself in court?
Speaker 2: Ah, it's interesting. I never kept a record. I mean,
Speaker 2: sometimes you know, you know what it's like. You get
Speaker 2: three in a week. Other times you get nothing for months, so.
Speaker 1: You never won the see the inside of a cord.
Speaker 2: Again, that's right. Other times, you know, it can be
Speaker 2: a breeze. I mean the last one I went to,
Speaker 2: I think it was a shooting, and both prosecution and
Speaker 2: defense agreed that yes, it was a shooting. And they said, well,
Speaker 2: what did you find? I said, A gunshot wound? What
Speaker 2: did they die of? Gunshot wound? Thank you very much?
Speaker 2: You know that. I like that when and it happens
Speaker 2: more with experienced lawyers, when they're not trying to make
Speaker 2: points or you know, pursue some odd story, you know,
Speaker 2: taking what's obvious and then moving on.
Speaker 1: We talked before we started recording about being involved in
Speaker 1: trials where there's a lot of medical evidence and how
Speaker 1: confusing it is for myself that I have an understanding
Speaker 1: of what's occurred and you've got the jury there and
Speaker 1: people like yourself, eminently qualified people are coming in and
Speaker 1: giving them very scientific explanation. Do you get a sense
Speaker 1: how difficult it would be for juras on some cases,
Speaker 1: not cidely any particular case, but some case to absorb
Speaker 1: all the information that's put for lock.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and it's interesting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I'm giving the most interesting information in my career
Speaker 2: and the juries asleep and the judges gone to sleep.
Speaker 1: They realize how long I studied.
Speaker 2: Other times I'm almost sleep myself and they're writing it
Speaker 2: all down. So yeah, it's fascinating, and I think it's
Speaker 2: particularly difficult with experts. You're an expert if you say
Speaker 2: your life. Sometimes you don't have to have a background
Speaker 2: in it, and so you can get somebody being diametrically
Speaker 2: opposed to you and they look like, you know, an
Speaker 2: old guy that's been on the traps for one hundred years.
Speaker 2: You know, who do you believe? Also, now part of
Speaker 2: the problem is in publishing. There are these journals called
Speaker 2: predatory journals, and they look absolutely kosher. But you pay
Speaker 2: to get your stuff.
Speaker 1: Published, Okay, so I can get ability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can give two thousand US and I can
Speaker 2: get a paper published on my theory and that can
Speaker 2: be produced in court and it looks.
Speaker 1: And then you represented as have been published. You find
Speaker 1: these zoo impact.
Speaker 2: I had a friend in a colleague in Malaysia that
Speaker 2: happened to in the middle of the trial, I said,
Speaker 2: what about this? It goes completely against what you said.
Speaker 2: So the way I handle that is, you're on I
Speaker 2: haven't had a chance to read this. Could I have
Speaker 2: a ten minute recess? And then I go out and
Speaker 2: I frantically google is this a predatory journal? And if
Speaker 2: it comes up as one, then I go in and say,
Speaker 2: well it's not worth the papers. Predial Okay, interesting, but yeah,
Speaker 2: thank god for Google. I don't know how we survived
Speaker 2: up until when you talk about strange steps, different things
Speaker 2: that you've come across with the examinations. If you've done
Speaker 2: animals killing people. I heard you talk on the podcast
Speaker 2: Guardians of the Death and talking about animals that kill.
Speaker 2: What's your experience with animals because some of the stuff
Speaker 2: that you were saying was quite bizarre that I never expected. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I've been collecting animal deaths. I mean your death from dogs, snakes, sharks, roosters, mackerel,
Speaker 2: bloke fishing in the dar And Harbor, and sharks from nearby.
Speaker 2: So this twenty five kilogram mackel jumped out of the
Speaker 2: water and sideswiped him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wrong place, wrong time.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you can't be unlucky. And the rooster death.
Speaker 1: Yeah, please tell me about the roosters.
Speaker 2: It's just a little old lady out the back collecting
Speaker 2: eggs and roosters. I understand, the nasty creatures. It went
Speaker 2: for her and she had Varica's veins and pecked her leg.
Speaker 2: And I've had a number of deaths of people with
Speaker 2: Varka's veins who have just had minor trauma. There was one.
Speaker 2: There's a cat scratch and people don't realize. And this
Speaker 2: is the reason that I actually publicized this this stuff.
Speaker 2: It's not because it's bizarre and weird. It's to let
Speaker 2: people know that if you've got Varka's veins and you
Speaker 2: get a small hole, lie down and put your finger
Speaker 2: over it and elevate it, right, you will survive. What
Speaker 2: they tend to do is wander around panicking and they
Speaker 2: bleed to death, completely unnecessary deaths. Okay, but you never
Speaker 2: trust a rooster.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, take some advice there. Part of the stuff
Speaker 1: that you do too. And I found that interesting because
Speaker 1: people often look at forensic pathologists where you're only looking
Speaker 1: at death, but part of your attraction to the work
Speaker 1: that you do is that you can also prevent death.
Speaker 1: Now you've given us all a warning about watching out
Speaker 1: for roosters. If you've got Barricker's fanes, we'll take that,
Speaker 1: take that on board. What what are some of the
Speaker 1: things that you've looked at And I know that you
Speaker 1: had a high level of expertise in Sid's death, and
Speaker 1: how has that what you've learned helped prevent those deaths
Speaker 1: down the track.
Speaker 2: What's interesting My clinical colleagues call me doctor Death because
Speaker 2: they don't understand forensic pathology. So I've they don't understand
Speaker 2: all that much.
Speaker 1: Really the area we won't delete that, we'll stand stand
Speaker 1: by you.
Speaker 2: But it's an area called preventive pathology. And so I
Speaker 2: was taking cases from the mortuary and examining them and
Speaker 2: seeing what went wrong and what you can do to
Speaker 2: prevent it. And this is one of the joys I
Speaker 2: find of pediatric forensic pathology. People say, how can you
Speaker 2: do it so well? If I can actually find something
Speaker 2: that caused this death and then let people know about it,
Speaker 2: Like unsafe cots, unsafe costs. Years ago, they were all
Speaker 2: over the place and kids were hanging themselves and getting
Speaker 2: stuck in them and wedging. So I work with Kids
Speaker 2: Safe and we lobbied the federal government and now there's
Speaker 2: a standard. All cots in the secondhand ones have to
Speaker 2: follow the Australian standard, so you cannot sell an unsafe
Speaker 2: cut and that's safe lives. Can't remember the last unsafe
Speaker 2: cut I've seen, so that's really heartening. The SIDS story
Speaker 2: is interesting. I've been involved with SIDS groups for decades
Speaker 2: and we did a collaborative study with Harvard and we
Speaker 2: showed that the SIDS babies have a deficiency and a
Speaker 2: chemical in the back of the brain that controls they
Speaker 2: head and neck movement substance P. So we've always said,
Speaker 2: why do they you know, why are they dying face down?
Speaker 2: Why don't they just lift their heads? They don't lift
Speaker 2: their heads because they can't. So we're looking at genetic
Speaker 2: markers of that. So maybe we can have a diagnostic
Speaker 2: market to show kids at increase risk. So that sort
Speaker 2: of thing I think makes this job really rewarding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you talk about the cots and wasn't the
Speaker 1: old school thinking about laying children I'm talking young infants
Speaker 1: laying them on their stomach and that that changed with.
Speaker 2: The medicine is an interesting area and if you look
Speaker 2: at the history of babies sleeping patterns. Babies used to
Speaker 2: be put to sleep on their backs, and then people
Speaker 2: said no, no, no, well I'll vomit. No last break,
Speaker 2: Let's put them face down, and so there was a
Speaker 2: really strong push to have babies sleeping face down. There
Speaker 2: was a pediatrician Abrams in New York, so don't do this,
Speaker 2: I'll suffocate. And there was a study that showed that
Speaker 2: by putting babies face down, probably sixty thousand babies died.
Speaker 2: Don't hear that very often that medicine is responsible for
Speaker 2: that because it was a health initiative that didn't have
Speaker 2: evidence and they saw you put them on their back,
Speaker 2: they're going to vomit and inhale that they don't. So
Speaker 2: it was just well intentioned but wrong.
Speaker 1: I understand now what you're saying about the work of
Speaker 1: forensic pathologists. It's not all about Okay, the death's happened,
Speaker 1: there's nothing we can do, move on to the next step.
Speaker 1: There is things that you can pick up in the
Speaker 1: science and the medical science that can assist.
Speaker 2: And that's why talking to you like I think is
Speaker 2: important because it gets it. It tells people what forensics
Speaker 2: is about. So it means that you know when I retire,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get you know, leather bound seat
Speaker 2: of my autopsy reports. You know, I've put another notch
Speaker 2: on the wall. I've actually done something to have an
Speaker 2: impact in medicine. It may be because I am qualified
Speaker 2: general practitioner. I qualified in general practice in Canada before
Speaker 2: it started forensics, and so that maybe has given me
Speaker 2: an idea of what the community deserves.
Speaker 1: So you're looking at prevention, a couple of other little
Speaker 1: side I won't say site hustles, that's not the right words. Careful, careful, Okay.
Speaker 1: You had an interest in going back and look at
Speaker 1: the historical cases involving bush Rangers, and I thought that
Speaker 1: was that was quite interesting. Do you want to talk
Speaker 1: us through that and what inspired you to have a look.
Speaker 2: Well, the two areas that I findancially bush rangers and respute.
Speaker 2: And I don't know whether you've seen my paper on
Speaker 2: the death of rescue. You can you can take us
Speaker 2: through you like that one? Yeah, I know the bush Rangers.
Speaker 2: I got involved with a Foxtail series, Lawless, and we
Speaker 2: looked at Ned Kelly, Captain Moonlight, Ben Hall and the
Speaker 2: Kenniff brothers and basically trying to see what the what
Speaker 2: evidence there was for the historical story. If you look
Speaker 2: at Ben Hall, the popular theory is that basically the
Speaker 2: police snuck up on him and shot him in his swag.
Speaker 2: The police version some things don't change. Be careful, it's
Speaker 2: a bit different. They said they were waiting for him,
Speaker 2: They called him to stop, he didn't, and then consortable
Speaker 2: hip Kiss shot him through and through with a point
Speaker 2: five six went through his gun belt. So we had
Speaker 2: the gun belt at the Powerhouse Museum. Nobody had ever
Speaker 2: looked at it properly. I put it together and it's extraordinary.
Speaker 2: The bullet hole, it was a bullet hole shelving and
Speaker 2: the only place you could have shot him to do
Speaker 2: that would have been standing behind him, to the left
Speaker 2: where hip Kiss was. Then we did scanning electro microscopy
Speaker 2: which looks at sort of particles, and we found accelerant
Speaker 2: and part of the bullet that killed Ben Hall, which
Speaker 2: got lost in the cutting room floor. Because I thought
Speaker 2: it was the most fascinating part.
Speaker 1: Of the story and your interpretation from that that the
Speaker 1: police story was absolutely correct, supporting supporting the place. Another
Speaker 1: one that you looked at, Ned Kelly that's been put
Speaker 1: up there as this folk here, you've got different in views.
Speaker 2: I'm amazed. I mean, you know, we had a stamp
Speaker 2: issued on the one hundredth anniversary of his death. You know,
Speaker 2: he was the Sydney Olympics, and yet he was a
Speaker 2: bloke who very proudly stole cattle and horses from sharecroppers.
Speaker 2: He wasn't stealing always from squatters, so people whose livelihood
Speaker 2: depended on it he was taking.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a Robin Hood.
Speaker 2: As I say, Robin Hood did not steal from the
Speaker 2: poor and keep it fro himself. Yes, you only have
Speaker 2: to look at the Drillery letter where he says he
Speaker 2: wants the blood of the brains and the police to
Speaker 2: rain down, where he wants to tie people who oppose
Speaker 2: him over ant heaps and pour their fat boiling down
Speaker 2: their throats. If the glen Rowan train crash it occurred,
Speaker 2: it would have been the biggest killing of police to date,
Speaker 2: set up to kembush twenty eight police by derailing the train.
Speaker 2: I don't think killing serving police officers is a good thing,
Speaker 2: and I don't think the person who has done it
Speaker 2: should be treated as a hero. People will say to
Speaker 2: me meetings and stuff, Well, you know the Americans do it.
Speaker 2: Billy the Kid didn't see Billy the Kid at the
Speaker 2: LA Olympics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, true, true, it's funny.
Speaker 2: And we named so many things after Nick Kelly. He
Speaker 2: was as sociopath and the thug.
Speaker 1: Well part of our history, isn't it? And yeah, what
Speaker 1: other things about Ned Kelly did you learn looking into
Speaker 1: the history?
Speaker 2: Well, it was interesting when we were filming Lawless up
Speaker 2: at Stringy Bark Creek. Stringy Bark Have you been a
Speaker 2: Stringy Bar It's actually quite an eerie place because of
Speaker 2: the history of it. Yeah, and it's just kind of presence.
Speaker 2: But what they wanted to do is they wanted to
Speaker 2: have relatives of people on both sides. So Leo Kennedy,
Speaker 2: who was the great grandson of Sergeant Kennedy who was
Speaker 2: executed by Ned Kelly, he actually initiated the whole project
Speaker 2: by saying how terrible it is to go to his relatives'
Speaker 2: graves to find kelly memorabilia. You know, we're more yea
Speaker 2: giving a memorial to the killers, but not to the
Speaker 2: serving police officers. But one of Kelly's relatives was there
Speaker 2: and I was asked what I thought of the killing
Speaker 2: of Sergeant Kennedy, and I said, well, when you shoot
Speaker 2: an unarmed maned point blank in the chest with the shotgun,
Speaker 2: it's an execution. And this fellows. Oh, I don't know
Speaker 2: about that. You know, none of us were there. I said, well,
Speaker 2: Sergeant Kennedy was there, and Kelly came out with a shotgun,
Speaker 2: so he could have put him on a horse and
Speaker 2: send him back.
Speaker 1: Because the the narrative that's been fed is that he
Speaker 1: was dying and he put him out of his misery,
Speaker 1: so it was a noble action. But you're you're suggesting otherwise.
Speaker 2: Well, I wouldn't trust things that Ned said.
Speaker 1: Yes, you're so judgmental, right, yeah, I am.
Speaker 2: I just this is what.
Speaker 1: Robert Robert a couple of banks and chewed a couple
Speaker 1: of people. And what about his arm or what's your
Speaker 1: take on that from would that that protect him from
Speaker 1: a forensic pathologist point of view?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, it's interesting because if he'd actually successfully killed
Speaker 2: the those police with the train, would have been the
Speaker 2: biggest killing of police officers to date in Australia. But
Speaker 2: I thought it was just a somewhat irish approach to armor,
Speaker 2: that he'd only had the upper part of his body protected,
Speaker 2: but it was actually well thought out. He that's probably
Speaker 2: a racist slurtion. Yeah, my great grandmother was Irish.
Speaker 1: Okay, you can balance that out then.
Speaker 2: But the plan was that the carriage would go over
Speaker 2: the bank and he would be protected by the embankments
Speaker 2: so his legs wouldn't have to be covered. And of
Speaker 2: course it was made out of plowshares. It was very heavy,
Speaker 2: so if you could reduce as much as weight. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The other thing too, is you know, such his life.
Speaker 2: He didn't say that really. Yeah, no, it's just myth.
Speaker 1: So with all those people that have such a life,
Speaker 1: it was you, wasn't it that identified if you've got
Speaker 1: ned Kelly tattoos? Yes, to talk us through that, that's
Speaker 1: another obscure fact that came from well so obscure.
Speaker 2: But no, I just noticed that a lot of the
Speaker 2: people coming into the watary with ned Kelly tattoos that
Speaker 2: died violent death. So I did a retrospective study, and
Speaker 2: then I did a ten year prospective study, and sure enough,
Speaker 2: something like eighty percent of them have died of accidents
Speaker 2: or suicides or homicides or all sorts of strange things.
Speaker 2: That's in a forensic context that doesn't mean if you're
Speaker 2: in the community and you've got a Ned Kelly tattoo,
Speaker 2: you're marked. But it's just it's a I think a
Speaker 2: mark for sometimes drug associated lifestyles or risk breaking.
Speaker 1: Risk taking. It's interesting. But I remember when I looked
Speaker 1: at or heard you say that, I thought.
Speaker 2: You're a Kelly tattoo taken off.
Speaker 1: Now I'm taking off straight away. I had had an
Speaker 1: informant that was pretty hard to hide, and he's passed
Speaker 1: away now so I can talk about him. But he
Speaker 1: had a bald head and the tattoo of ned Kelly
Speaker 1: on the back of his head, with the helmet and
Speaker 1: the two guns, he was hard to hide. Needless to say,
Speaker 1: Oh interesting Respute, Oh yes, please do.
Speaker 2: I've always been fascinated by Respute. And the story is
Speaker 2: that he was invited around to Prince Yusupov's house. He
Speaker 2: was given enough sign not to kill a horse. They
Speaker 2: bludgeoned him and then they shot him, and then they
Speaker 2: threw him into the Neva River, and the autopsy showed
Speaker 2: that it actually drowned. So I thought this sound was
Speaker 2: not plausible. So there's one crime scene shot and there's
Speaker 2: a contact gunshot wound in his head. You don't get
Speaker 2: that underwater. You don't get that running across the courtyard
Speaker 2: yelling out, I'm going to tell Zarina. You get that
Speaker 2: when you walk into the place and the toxicology was
Speaker 2: negative for the sin ard as well. You get that
Speaker 2: walking into the place they want to get rid of in.
Speaker 2: What do they do. They put a gun to his
Speaker 2: head and shooting. I mean, you know, they want to
Speaker 2: get it over with quickly. So just that one photograph
Speaker 2: on the historical record could show that all of the
Speaker 2: mythology around resputants death was wrong. It's an interesting applying
Speaker 2: modern techniques to that.
Speaker 1: Well, it is interesting. And look, eye catch skills. Here
Speaker 1: we are on the podcast and we're solving something unraveling.
Speaker 1: There was another and I think it was a recent
Speaker 1: article that you did about again, it's just the bizarre
Speaker 1: world that you look at that your observations of the
Speaker 1: world that mummified males dying in their house in South
Speaker 1: Australia tell us about that.
Speaker 2: I was sitting one Sunday night and there was an
Speaker 2: SBS program on this thing called kotakushi in Japan, elderly
Speaker 2: folk without family or social contacts being found dead after
Speaker 2: months or years in their huh, And so I thought
Speaker 2: that's interesting. I wonder where that happens here. So I
Speaker 2: did a study looking at elderly twenty years ago elderly
Speaker 2: now and the percentage of cases that had decomposition and
Speaker 2: increased markedly. The major group is sixty to sixty nine
Speaker 2: year old. This is in Salustralia, sixty to sixty nine
Speaker 2: year old males. And it makes sense because they're the
Speaker 2: ones whose relationships have fallen apart, their kids have moved out,
Speaker 2: their friends have all gone, they're getting into alcohol abuse
Speaker 2: and they're lonely. So when they die, nobody knows.
Speaker 1: You're getting or they've been referred to examinations. People are
Speaker 1: being called and or coming across an abandoned place and
Speaker 1: finding these bodies.
Speaker 2: Well we see them the news all the time, don't
Speaker 2: you know. Somebody has found they had been seen for
Speaker 2: three years and nobody cared. The way around this is
Speaker 2: to have communities. And where I live in North Adelaide,
Speaker 2: there's a coffee shop that will go to and about
Speaker 2: two years ago one of the old fellows used to
Speaker 2: come every morning didn't turn up, so people went around.
Speaker 2: He'd had a stroke and he was in his bed.
Speaker 2: He hadn't had that contact, he'd be yet another statistic.
Speaker 2: So we've just got to get back to understanding importance
Speaker 2: of community very much.
Speaker 1: The way life can live these days, you can not
Speaker 1: have contact and those little things like you're not going
Speaker 1: down to the local newsagent to buy the paper in
Speaker 1: the morning. Yeah, that could be a simple thing, but
Speaker 1: we've lost all that, and we can sit on their
Speaker 1: phones or on their computers and not have that human contact.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting that you identified identified that. What's the
Speaker 1: most bizarre case you've come across.
Speaker 2: There was a sharer talking about animal deaths who basically
Speaker 2: got his throat cut because the electric shears and the
Speaker 2: sheep kicked the shears. You know, something you wouldn't expect.
Speaker 2: I remember one fellow had I think thirty cats in
Speaker 2: his house of cause animals, when you're dead get hungry
Speaker 2: and they feed on you. So these cats are just
Speaker 2: stripped this body. Of course, I don't know how he
Speaker 2: died because there are no organs left. If you have
Speaker 2: a suspected homicide by shooting, say dogs have been at
Speaker 2: the body, you need to get the youngest probationary constable
Speaker 2: to go around and pick up all the dog scouts
Speaker 2: in the dog dropping Yeah, to X ray and look
Speaker 2: for bullets, and you need to look at the dogs
Speaker 2: to see those bullets inside there. I suppose the worst
Speaker 2: would have been Jazzmine Core. The most bizarre probably would
Speaker 2: have been Snowtown.
Speaker 1: Okay, with the Snowtown, I know that you've made a
Speaker 1: comment that that stuck with you for a bit, that
Speaker 1: you were getting the dreams.
Speaker 2: About a week. Yeah, okay, coming back alive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, talk us through that, because not many people talk
Speaker 1: talk about that.
Speaker 2: No, it's just it's only happened to me twice once.
Speaker 2: It was with Snowtown, and I just was having these
Speaker 2: nightmares that the bodies were all coming back alive. The tsunami.
Speaker 2: I had nightmares after that, only for a short time.
Speaker 2: And Jasmine I didn't have nightmares. I just couldn't get
Speaker 2: her death out of my head. It really weighed heavily
Speaker 2: on me because it was so horrific.
Speaker 1: Another said case that the murder of Samanthro Riley, that
Speaker 1: she was too thousand and three, schoolgirl, fifteen year old.
Speaker 1: What was the circumstances surrounding that case? And this sort
Speaker 1: of demonstrates why the forensic pathologists can bring to an investigation.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean I can talk about this as you know,
Speaker 2: because I've been through the courts and everybody knows what happened,
Speaker 2: and the perpetrator has been convicted. Her body was found
Speaker 2: semi clad beside a road north of Adelaide, Humbug scrub.
Speaker 2: It was, it was, it's a strange scene. Her underwear
Speaker 2: had been obviously taken off and put on again. So
Speaker 2: we don't undress bodies at the scene because you'll lose things.
Speaker 2: So it took her into the mortuary and she'd been strangled,
Speaker 2: and underneath her underpants I found a tuft of green
Speaker 2: carpet and all these brown flakes. It turned out to
Speaker 2: be paint flakes. I also took a lot of DNA swaps.
Speaker 2: I will swab anything because if I get a negative result,
Speaker 2: who cares. If I get a positive result, great, And
Speaker 2: I did get a positive result the DNA from the
Speaker 2: outside of her genitalia, and so the police announced they
Speaker 2: were going to test all the men in the district.
Speaker 2: He perpetrator. He tried to kill himself but failed and
Speaker 2: turned himself in. If we hadn't had the DNA. The
Speaker 2: carpet came from the back of his car and the
Speaker 2: pain flakes came from his backstep. It shows you that
Speaker 2: we've got modern scientific techniques, but we could have also
Speaker 2: had something to fall back on, and just shows you
Speaker 2: just a tiny tuft of carpet is one of the
Speaker 2: most important parts of the autopsy. You know, my mother
Speaker 2: could tell that she had been strangled, but she might
Speaker 2: understand the significance of the carpet.
Speaker 1: Did you feel the pressure when you're doing autopsies on
Speaker 1: cases like that, in a very sad case of fifteen
Speaker 1: year old girl, did you feel the pressure that when
Speaker 1: you're looking at this doing the autopsy, making sure that
Speaker 1: you're not missing missingthing.
Speaker 2: Well, that's why I think the police help. Actually, you
Speaker 2: know when they're in the autopsy room, because we're working
Speaker 2: through it together. So and the police have never put
Speaker 2: pressure on me to be the case through or to
Speaker 2: come up with a particular conclusion. They've always been incredibly
Speaker 2: reasonable and I do appreciate that. But it was it
Speaker 2: was very sad because at the end of the autops
Speaker 2: he was about three in the morning. The mortue tender said,
Speaker 2: if you noticed something about her, I said, yeah, she
Speaker 2: doesn't have her ears pierced. She was quite a naive
Speaker 2: little girl, and she used to go up to the
Speaker 2: bride shop at the shopping center and look at bridle
Speaker 2: gowns and imagine being married in BALI.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just in your take on that situation that
Speaker 1: sort of brings at home. What we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Is does and I feel sad twenty years later.
Speaker 1: Still it's horrible.
Speaker 2: And if you don't feel sad, then I don't think
Speaker 2: you should be doing the job.
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, look you say that. I agree. I've been
Speaker 1: surprised when working homicides that some people just seem to
Speaker 1: have a disconnect. And I'm thinking that you actually understanding
Speaker 1: what we're doing here, the importance of it and the
Speaker 1: impact it should have on you, and something I'd think
Speaker 1: chip's missing if you don't pick up on.
Speaker 2: I do too. And one other thing that I just
Speaker 2: we can do that it's useful as forensic pathologists, you know,
Speaker 2: if you're in court and the family are there. And
Speaker 2: I remember going through a horrific assault this young woman
Speaker 2: and her father was. She was Irish and her father
Speaker 2: was he'd come out and I went out to him afterwards,
Speaker 2: and I said, you realize, of course that she had
Speaker 2: quite a significant head injury. So it's quite likely she
Speaker 2: was unconscious right at the beginning and felt nothing. I
Speaker 2: don't know that, but it's possible, and at least that's
Speaker 2: something he can hold something to hold on to, rather
Speaker 2: than listening to all of my description of the horror.
Speaker 1: I've found families want to be informed, and there's a
Speaker 1: time and place when they can be informed if the
Speaker 1: investigation's ongoing. Sometimes you've got to protect the integrity of it.
Speaker 1: But I in my dealings, and I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: it's across the board, but in my dealings, at some
Speaker 1: point in time, I say I'll sit down and I'll
Speaker 1: tell you everything that I know, and they appreciate it,
Speaker 1: because otherwise, as you said, it's just circling around in there.
Speaker 1: He had one under A lot took place, get.
Speaker 2: The wrong end of the stick sometimes and so easy
Speaker 2: just to correct it. And I've had I've had a
Speaker 2: woman contact me twenty five years after I autopsy her
Speaker 2: daughter really just to go over it again. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was lovely actual because she sent me a poem this
Speaker 2: little girl had written with a photograph of her afterwards.
Speaker 2: So that that's what makes it worthwhile.
Speaker 1: It must mean a lot to you, little things like that,
Speaker 1: we might we might take a break here when we
Speaker 1: get back. We've got we've got so much, so much
Speaker 1: to talk about. I want to talk about the tsunami
Speaker 1: and the process and what your involvement there in disaster,
Speaker 1: victim identification, also balley bombing, and a couple of other
Speaker 1: cases that you've lent your expertise to get into the
Speaker 1: bottom of it. I also want to talk about your
Speaker 1: thoughts on life and death, because I find it fascinating
Speaker 1: someone like yourself that has seen so much death, what
Speaker 1: your your take on the whole? Are these our purpose here,
Speaker 1: so we might delve a little bit deep into that,
Speaker 1: if you don't mind that, h
Speaker 2: M hm