Sexual crimes can be notoriously challenging to identify—but professor Sue Black can track down perpetrators using just their hands. (From 2017) Via WIRED UK
, received a phone call from a man called Nick Marsh. He was a forensic photographer who had worked with Black 17 years earlier as part of a team sent by the Foreign Office to examine the bodies of victims of war crimes in Kosovo. Marsh knew that Black had a talent for identifying people from scraps of flesh and bone. Now he had evidence of a different kind and wondered if she could help.The piece of evidence was an eight-second-long digital video clip.
"I asked the barrister if there was something we had done wrong or something in the science that I had not been able to convey," Black recalls. "She said, 'No, there was no problem with the science. The jury had just not believed the girl. They thought she didn't seem upset enough.'"Black was dumbfounded.
Nevertheless, it was a turning point for Black. During Operation Ore, she became fully aware of a problem that she didn't realise existed and that she might be the person who could do something about it. Black grew up the youngest of two daughters in a blue-collar Inverness household, and was the first of her family to attend university - she studied biology then human anatomy at Aberdeen. She began her career teaching at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Stints of body-identification work for the police, then the Foreign Office, led to her working in Kosovo, for which she was awarded an OBE in 2001.
Many images featured men abusing the children of friends. A key photo - later known as "the Hogmanay image" - showed one of the two ringleaders, Neil Strachan, 41, attempting to rape an 18-month-old boy whom he was babysitting on New Year's Eve in 2005. The only parts of Strachan's body visible were his penis and left hand. It was this image that Black analysed.
Black analyses mainly the backs, or the dorsum, of hands, as these tend to be predominantly visible in the footage she works with in criminal cases. She first maps a grid of 24 cells on to the hand, covering everything from fingernails to wrist. Then she analyses each cell, looking for identifying marks and studying vein patterns, drawing dark lines over them on-screen to make them more visible.
The video was so distressing, recalls Black, that when judge Hilary Manley left the courtroom to view it, she returned visibly shaken. Was Black affected herself? "Images of child abuse affect everyone who views them," she says. "I feel anxious watching video because you don't know what's coming next. But you have to stay objective. It's not my place to go back to analyse the incident, it's my job to find something of value to the investigation.
When Black analyses the backs of hands in footage she maps a grid of 24 cells, then looks for identifying marks and highlights in the vein patternsincluding the FBI, Interpol and Europol - and works on 30 to 50 cases a year. In the cases Black has worked on since 2006, the percentage in which the accused have changed their plea to guilty in response to her analysis stands at 82. Black also takes on cases related to circumstances such as those in which the perpetrator has disguised their face.
Even with clear images of a suspect's and perpetrator's hands, it is impossible to scientifically guarantee a match, as that depends on all the anatomical features present. A suspect can be excluded with 100 per cent certainty, but a match can only carry a grade of "strong support" that the suspect and the offender are the same person. This equates to between a 1-in-1,000 to 1-in-10,000 chance that it could be someone else.
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