A forensic specialist who helped capture the terrorists who killed 52 people in the July 7 London bomb attack says killers all underestimate how science can identify them.
Jo Millington – one of the UK’s top experts in the dark art of blood spatter analysis – told how murderers can even forget well-known crime-busting techniques such as fingerprints.
Speaking to the LadBible podcast, Jo recalled how one killer had practically signed his name after committing a particularly bloody murder: “I once dealt with a case where the perpetrator had taken the blood of his victim and he’d written a really horrible word on the wall and then done an exclamation point.
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“And in that point was his fingerprint in the blood of the victim. And you think to yourself, what an idiot!’”
(Image: Facebook)
Jo explained how she used animal blood to simulate how human body fluids would behave during an actual assault. She clubs or stabs pigs’ bodies in a controlled environment to study how droplets of blood will splash under different circumstances.
No matter how hard the culprits try to clean up a crime scene after a murder, they will always leave a trace of blood behind.
“The thing about cleaning, is we’re not very good at it, especially from a blood point of view,” Jo explained. “If I was going to chop something up, I’d do it in the bath, because then I can get the shower-head and I can hose it down. Clean as a whistle – or so you think.”
(Image: Getty Images)
But it’s almost impossible to clean a crime scene thoroughly enough to beat the forensic investigators. “Between the tiles of the bathroom, there’s grout that soaks up blood like a sponge. The blood is pushed into the nooks and crannies of the bathroom. It can seep into the tiles of the floor. And so, all of the spaces that you clean may look clean, but they’re not clean forensically.”
Sometimes, though, killers don’t make any effort to clean up. She recalls one particularly grisly crime scene where she saw some pots and pans on the cooker hob, and just thought that the occupants were a bit behind with their washing-up. She then realised that one of the saucepans was filled with partially-cooked human brain.
Thinking back to her experience of investigating the 7/7 bombings, she said dealing with the aftermath of murder can be incredibly traumatising. She continued: “You’re asking people to pick bits of body tissue off buildings, out of buses. You’re asking them to work in spaces that are just, beyond imagination.”
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