Reposted on the 18th of March 2025 as there is now a very good interview on YouTube with the author.
Professor Wiltshire is questioned by an off-screen interviewer "Molly" who asks a series of sensible questions and allows the interviewee to answer fully and as she sees fit. The modern fashion is the interviewer to project both their own personality and their agenda onto the interviewee, which is disrespectful and potentially hides information from the audience. Towards the end of the 28-minute interview, Professor Wiltshire is able to convey the importance of scientific proof and standards in forensic science, because the party which employs a scientific witness might not be the party that's in the right!
She cites a case where a young mother was suspected of harming her own child, and yet she was able to prove not simply the young woman's innocence, but that no crime had actually been committed: one doctor had administered a medicine and other clinicians either hadn't been told or hadn't understood the potential of this straightforward event to generate what they saw as "proof" of deliberate harm being done. The dangers of such medical misunderstanding being mistaken for crime is something currently becoming more topical and more important by the day in the United Kingdom.
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Forensic Ecology on the steep and slippery banks of the river Purwell and other cases.
This review is based on a purchased Kindle edition; other formats are available but the Kindle edition is fine.
Professor Wiltshire uses a number of case histories (some more anonymised than others: the sensitivity level is different for each case) to describe and explain a scientific discipline which she helped create. She discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various forensic science disciplines, in the process making it clear that it is quite impossible for any individual scientist to have a working knowledge, still less a command, of all of them, or even more than just a few. She is clear and honest about where she is the expert and where she is not.
Her text is not just technically-informative and fascinating but ethically-informative too. She explains that as the defence has to find funds for its own forensic science work and the Legal Aid authorities won’t often fund this, she works mostly for the prosecution in criminal cases. (In commercial cases there may well be money on both sides.) But this is not as unfair as it seems: in civil commercial cases the plaintiff has to share, with the defence, anything which might help the defence case or undermine the plaintiff’s own case and this obligation is mutual. In criminal cases, the prosecution is supposed to (not quite unilaterally) tell the defence about everything it has got and needs the judge’s permission to even withhold witness address details. Professor Wiltshire’s preference would be for all scientific evidence to be shared and subject to discussion between scientists (“peer review” in other words) and she doesn’t mind the prosecution paying her to find evidence which, if she is impartial and diligent, is going to favour the truth rather than one side or the other. This didn’t used to be a radical idea: the discussion and testing of theories against evidence in order to get to the truth was once the very definition of science. (When did this change and who exactly decided that it would change?)
This book shows what is possible and what is not, what can be done quickly and cheaply to steer an investigation away from pitfalls and blind alleys and how much more detailed and expensive work has to be done to actually prove something in court. There are many people commenting on the current state of the criminal justice systems in many countries who would benefit from reading it. It is as pleasant a read as the subject matter will allow and she refrains from conjuring up images for the reader of certain experiences which understandably caused her great anguish.
The Natural History of Crime by Patricia Wiltshire is published in the UK by John Blake Publishing (Bonnier Books) , 2024.
The Kindle edition is available on this link:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C2H5PR4Y
Print editions are available from other retailers, for example:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-natural-history-of-crime/patricia-wiltshire/9781789466485
Discussion:
The following more detailed discussion breaks some of Amazon’s rules for book reviews (just by being a discussion of a scientific memoir, which is worrying, really) and will not be published there.
Update: Amazon "couldn't post" even the fully-compliant review above. This is not the first time they have been highly resistant to publishing any intelligent review of a scientific book.
A re-write has been attempted, but since Amazon tells sinners only that they have violated "a guideline" giving no clue as to which guideline has been broken, and many of the guidelines are wide open to subjective interpretation in human hands and completely random rulings at the hands of any AI, the re-write is entirely a matter of guesswork and if it fails, there's no point in trying a third time!
PS: Waterstones just accepted the same review without a quibble and I didn't even buy the book there!
The Banks of the “Purwell”
The watercourse in the living room is that the river-based crime scene in question lies downstream of the confluence of the rivers Purwell and Hiz (but just upstream of the confluence with the Oughton) and strictly-speaking it is known as the Hiz until it meets the Ivel near Langford and becomes part of that. However, it’s part of the protocol for Professor Wiltshire to be shown to the scene by the police and then agree with them what questions need to be answered and her area of operations is determined by that, so she admits that she worked out where she actually was afterwards, by looking at a map. And it seems to me that if the professor, in the light of day and being guided by policemen and scene of crime tapes, wasn’t totally clear as to where she was, then the offenders, working more furtively and almost certainly at dusk or in darkness (it was winter), might have been equally confused. Because none of their apparent actions make any sense at all in their actual location, which lies downstream of a bridge/tunnel carrying the Hiz under the East Coast Mainline Railway.
When I was exploring this area for completely unconnected reasons in August 2023, before the Professor’s book was finished, let alone published, it quickly became clear that everything about the riverbank between that tunnel and the confluence of the Oughton with the Hiz in a meadow in Ickleford, is difficult and hazardous in good light and in summer. I took ONE photograph of the vegetation where the continuing “Hicca Way” riverbank path was alleged to be, and then packed the camera away and concentrated on not having an accident, because passive security measures between the adjoining scrap metal business and the river made it as impossible for me to leave the riverbank as it would have been for emergency workers to reach me should I manage to summon them.
The offence in this instance involved transporting and then (when things started to go wrong) improvising a way of hiding, the body of a torture-murder victim who had been dead for a week and whose head and hands had been removed prior to transport. Whether you are two men or four, all the straightforward ways of carrying a dead man over unstable ground rely on his still having wrists and ankles to grasp: cutting the hands off in advance deprives the covert undertakers of the wrists. It would have been difficult enough to get the wristless body over obstacles and into the riverbed, getting it up the steep, tangled (at that point) and slippery bank would have been more difficult, and if the objective was to employ the industrial resources of the scrapyard to destroy the body in some way, then getting it over the barbed-wire and corrugated iron fencing from the river would have been quite impossible.
And, yes, the reason I am “speculating” that the objective might have been to utilise industrial resources to utterly destroy the body, as in the James Bond film “Goldfinger”, rather than to simply drop the body in the river and try to cover it with bits of random vegetation, is because the car-crushing scene in Goldfinger was actually filmed in that very same scrapyard, using appropriate filters to make the lighting match that of second-unit footage of locations in Kentucky, with which it was skillfully inter-cut! The original crusher may have been replaced by a more modern model, but it will still be a modern equivalent of the same thing, in the same place. So, if someone had spent a week or more coming up with a masterplan that would make them a legend within their own gang, it might well have been along those lines. And beyond the scrapyard lie Cadwell Lane, Wallace Way and Wilbury Way offering dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, other industrial premises containing all sorts of other useful resources.
The anomaly the actual location of the body disposal presents, is that it places the maximum possible number of obstacles between where that body was abandoned and an industrial area containing a wide choice of resources which could have reduced the body to slivers, or ash, or an acid or alkali solution. The safer section of the same steep riverbank in the two photographs, below, may have been much closer to where the criminals planned to be than where they actually ended up. It also gives an idea of how much of a struggle the more overgrown section downstream would have been to negotiate with a dead body in tow!
The first photograph (taken in August 2023) gives the best impression of the bank, the second a better idea of where the steps are (next to the galvanised steel railings) and this was taken in October 2023 during an exercise to diagnose a fault causing the camera to produce usable images only in deep shade. This fault was not apparent on the earlier visit. It was, therefore, the final legible image of that day.
It is just upstream of the big tunnel, where the riverbank path becomes something of a bugger to follow and because of this there is a convenient flight of wooden steps embedded into the bank, (not photographed) to allow walkers to escape onto Cadwell Lane. Unfortunately, the way onwards from there along the Hicca Way seems to be cut-off by the relatively new railway flyover, intended to get trains from the slow “downtrack” of the East Coast Mainline onto the Cambridge Line without trains on the two fast tracks and the slow uptrack of the ECML needing to be held.
But if the headless and wristless body had made its way up those steps, on a day when no-one much was working on the industrial estate in general and the chosen facility in particular (hence the week’s delay?) it could then have been taken in the front entrance (under a bridge) of the scrapyard, or into any one of dozens of workshops, warehouses and tool-stores in the wider industrial area. The probable reason for not simply driving it to the intended destination would be several dozen security cameras operated by perhaps a dozen different entities. Cars have distinctive shapes if not numberplates: men in dark clothing and hoods can keep to the shadows more easily than road vehicles and are less traceable. The body might have started its journey in Arlesey or Letchworth, too. Perhaps even further afield? Coming across the river might have saved a vehicle from driving through Hitchin town itself, where the number of cameras and witnesses, even at a quiet time for the industrial estate, would have been a deterrent.
Regardless of whether “the plan” involved the scrapyard or other industrial premises, and even regardless of whether the intended direction of travel was into the industrial area or out of it, it is perhaps reasonable to assume that the person conceiving that plan and giving the necessary orders expected the journey to involve the convenient flight of steps between the river and Cadwell Lane, rather than the assault-course route it actually took.
Barry George and Bayesian Analysis.
Towards the end of her memoir, Professor Wiltshire suggests that, far from the belated acquittal of Barry George being occasioned by a legal loophole, corrupt or looney-leftie lawyers, unfair exclusion of “perfectly-valid” single-particle evidence and all the other things which allow much of the Metropolitan Police and senior BBC figures to maintain the Barry George is and always will be the only possible suspect in the murder of Jill Dando, that the appeal and subsequent acquittal was actually founded on a comprehensive Bayesian Analysis of ALL the known available evidence, which determined that it was extremely unlikely that Barry George had anything to do with the murder at all.
It makes sense that
this is true, though I have NEVER seen a mainstream media source
even mention this analysis, because “reasonable doubt” only applies in
criminal law during the initial trial. To get a verdict overturned at
a later date requires not just new evidence, but for that evidence to
be extremely strong. None of the accusations leveled at Mr George’s
legal team by those party to his wrongful conviction can
actually be true, because if they were true the appeal would have
been dismissed in much the same way that a senior BBC figure brusquely and impudently instructed
three appeal court judges to dismiss it in a notorious letter which
he sent under separate covers to all three.
Far from benefiting from “reasonable doubt” Barry George has already had his innocence proved to a scientific standard exceeding any normal legal threshold of proof.
One last thought:
Many people, even some barristers, refer to the balance of probabilities used in civil cases and trials of fact, as a “lower” standard of proof than “proof beyond reasonable doubt” as required in any Crown Court criminal trial. This is scientifically illiterate. Probability can be calculated, these days by advanced techniques with great precision if the input data is good. If there is any equation or algorithm for calculating “doubt” can someone please tell me what it is?
The balance of probability has to be used in civil cases because their one and only purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence, nor to lay blame, but to apportion liability. In the first instance between the plaintiff and the defendant, and in the second place between those defendants if there’s more than one of them. Apportioning something is a process of calculation and in this case the probabilities being balanced are inseparable from that.
