It's stabbings. Stabbings, stabbings, stabbings.
They are the commonest cause of death,
and the person most likely to stab you
is a friend or a relative.
There is a very simple step that occurred
that took me from nowhere
to forensic pathology
in the space of about two hours.
A friend of mine's father was a general practitioner,
and in his office he obviously had
lots of medical textbooks.
And one of those textbooks,
my friend had spotted.
It was a textbook called "Forensic Medicine"
by a man called Keith Simpson.
And in it were all sorts of photographs of dead bodies.
It just amazed me
that doctors could help
the police and the courts
to establish why people had died.
I thought doctors made people better.
That's what doctors did.
But suddenly, here was another role for doctors
that really, really interested me.
[MARYANA] Can you explain to me what a forensic pathologist actually does?
Right.
A forensic pathologist helps the police,
he helps the coroner,
who is the person who is actually in charge
of all sudden and unexplained deaths in England and Wales.
Some people are known that they're going to die.
Some people are in a hospice.
Perhaps, if I could take the queen, she was 96.
It was quite clear she was going to die
in the relative near future.
Not that day, maybe not the time
when she actually did die,
but at some point very soon at that age,
96 year olds, very few of them
go on to live much longer.
But an unexpected death is one
where you look round and you go,
"There's no good reason
why this person should have died
at this time.
And so we need to investigate that death."
And we do this by examining the body.
We look at the external surface of the body.
We look at the internal organs of the body.
We sometimes take samples of those organs
to look at them under a microscope.
We sometimes take samples of blood,
and of urine, of liver, of other tissues,
to examine to see if there's any drugs present,
and then we build up this picture.
How and why did this person die?
So important that everyone understands
the family and society
know why their members have died.
And it's building this puzzle up.
So we do it by looking at
all of those different aspects.
Maybe we'll go and examine the scene,
where the person was found dead.
Maybe we'll go and examine the vehicle,
if they'd been involved in a road traffic accident.
We'll try and see what
the points of damage inside, outside,
and around the vehicle were.
So all of these things,
it's building up this jigsaw,
solving the puzzle of why the person has died.
[MARYANA] Do you remember how it made you feel, that first time, dealing with a body?
That was very stressful.
Very worrying, for two reasons.
One is, I didn't want to make a mistake,
but secondly, I knew if I was going to continue
and progress to my career as I wanted to,
as a forensic pathologist,
I had to be able to do this.
Now, was I actually going to be able to
get over that sense of destruction,
that sense of violation of another human being?
That was definitely there
when I came to do that first examination.
So I didn't sleep much the night before.
I was very worried.
It took me a long time to actually do the examination.
Took a long time during that day.
But, at the end of it,
there were the realisation
that my fascination for the human body,
how it all fitted together,
how it all worked,
what it looked like,
perhaps when things began to go wrong,
was still there and was still really important,
and really, really fascinated me.
[MARYANA] I’m going to ask several questions which are probably, like, those annoying questions everyone asks you.
I can probably answer them, then.
[MARYANA] When you perform an autopsy, how do you deal with the smell of a dead body?
What smell?
[MARYANA] Is there no smell?
There's a lot of smell,
but when you've done 23,000 autopsies,
you don't notice the smell,
or you don't take any notice of it.
There's other things that are much more important.
What you're dealing with,
what's it feel like?
What does it look like?
What's the touch?
How's it cutting?
What's it, what is it telling me
about this person's life and their death?
The smell is, is a transient thing.
It's not there for any significant period of time.
And the people who come into the,
the autopsy room are really worried about the smell.
But it simply is not an important component
in 99.99% of post-mortems.
[MARYANA] Do you listen to music when you work?
No. I work in silence.
Some of my colleagues have music on.
Some have heavy rock,
some have light rock,
some have classical.
I like to work in silence
'cause I want to focus.
So we'll often find that as in operating theatres,
a lot of surgeons like to have
some sort of music on to lighten the atmosphere.
I don't. I need to focus.
What I'm doing,
I think is so important
for what that family and society generally,
I need to concentrate.
[MARYANA] What are the most common causes of death you deal with?
Heart disease, by far.
That's the thing that kills most people.
Then, respiratory disease.
Fortunately now, fewer people are smoking,
and we are beginning to see the tail off
of diseases associated with cigarette smoking.
But what vaping is going to do,
we still don't know.
Remember it took us 30, 40, 50 years
to work out that cigarette smoking was as dangerous.
So vaping, at the minute,
okay, said to be fine.
But we'll see in years to come,
whether there are any long-term diseases.
If we're thinking about accidental deaths,
it's probably drugs,
with or without road traffic accidents.
If we're thinking about murders,
it's stabbings. Stabbings, stabbings, stabbings.
They are the commonest cause of death.
And the person most likely to stab you
is a friend or a relative.
[MARYANA] So, you worked on some very high profile crime cases.
Which ones stood out for you and why?
Well, not the high-profile ones, funnily enough.
The high-profile ones are high-profile
because it's a famous person.
There's lots of... Celebrities die.
But they die often in rather banal and boring ways.
And if I'm going to pick on cases that are important,
it's cases where I'm dealing with people privately
and helping them through their grief.
Not the major World Trades, Princess Diana.
They're important.
But they're not the ones that stick with me
as part of my professional pride.
[MARYANA] Talking about Princess Diana’s case, ‘cause I will have to ask about it.
What can you say about it? What’s your view, what’s your outtake of it?
Okay. I wasn't the pathologist who
performed the autopsy on Princess Diana
or Dodi Al Fayed.
That was a colleague of mine,
who was the pathologist on call that day.
I was called in as part of an expert review team.
This was a year, 18 months, maybe two years.
Later on this team was put together,
because the conspiracy theories
just went on, and on, and on.
And social media was beginning to develop,
and it was just getting worse and worse.
And it was felt there really, really needed to be
a proper investigation into what had happened
in the Alma tunnel on that night.
Now, three people died that night.
Princess Diana, Dodi Al Fayed,
and a man called Henri Paul, who was the driver.
And in many ways,
Henri Paul is the most important,
because he was the one driving the Mercedes.
He was the one that was
possibly the cause of the accident,
or certainly did things that contributed to
or failed to prevent the accident.
So his post-mortem was most important.
But in the whole analysis,
when we look up the injuries that Diana had,
they were very minor injuries in her left lung.
A tear of a relatively small blood vessel.
Now, when I look at that injury
and the knowledge that she was actually
alive and talking when the first people stopped,
these were people just passing by.
One of whom happened to be a doctor.
She was talking when they first saw her,
stuck down the back of the seat
behind Trevor Reese Jones,
who was her security officer.
He had just managed,
he realised what was going on
and just managed to get his seatbelt plugged in,
before the impact with the central reservation
of that tunnel.
Now, Mercedes are fantastic cars.
Mercedes have passenger compartments
designed to cope with 60, 70 mile an hour impacts,
have crumple zones front and back.
But inside the passenger box,
if you wear your seatbelt,
you should still be safe or relatively uninjured.
And the reason that three people died,
was that Henri Paul and Dodi didn't wear their seatbelts.
So when they hit the central reservation,
Dodi Al Fayed hit the back of Henri Paul's seat
with a weight of about four elephants.
And so he hit the back of the seat
and completely crashed Henri Paul
against the steering wheel.
Trevor Reese Jones had his seatbelt on.
And so when Diana,
who wasn't wearing a seatbelt, hit him,
she was partially protected by him.
The injury that she had
was one of these hidden injuries.
She was okay.
She was chatting.
I think she had a broken arm.
She had some other minor injuries,
but not immediately life threatening.
They had to get Trevor Reese Jones out of the vehicle.
He was severely injured,
had to be got out first.
And she was okay.
It was only on the journey to the hospital
that her condition tipped from being
increasingly unstable to serious
and she had a cardiac arrest,
and when they got her to the hospital,
major thoracic surgery couldn't save her.
But if only she'd worn a seatbelt,
she would, I'm sure still be alive today.
[MARYANA] What’s your view on all the conspiracy theories surrounding her case?
There's nothing that I've seen
that was a deliberate attempt.
And I've examined hundreds and hundreds
of road traffic accidents,
and this is a tragic one.
It killed Princess Diana.
It killed two other people as well.
But there's nothing different about this,
other than, and if it,
if I was talking about someone,
Mr. And Mrs. Joe Snooks
who had a crash on the M6,
and they weren't wearing their seatbelts,
I'd say, "Well, they contributed to it
significantly themselves by not wearing a seatbelt."
[MARYANA] You come in contact with death everyday.
Do you think it changed your view on death?
Well, I've just had my 70th birthday,
so I'm beginning to look at death in a different way,
because I'm now 70.
Although, hopefully it's still a long way away.
But yes.
So many of the deaths that I've seen
have been unreasonable.
That life shouldn't have ended
in the way that it did.
People have taken drugs,
four pills at a party,
a pink one and a blue one.
And they take them,
and they think it's a hoot,
and then, they're dead,
or they're on a ventilator in a hospital
and then they die.
I find them very, very sad.
But if I, if I do see someone
who's 90, a hundred,
who's lived a good life,
and whose physical skills
are just gradually fading away,
then maybe that's a good death.
[MARYANA] There is obviously a lot of new technology.
I was wondering how the new technology is changing the world of forensics?
Well, there's all sorts of technologies
coming up now in medicine.
The dissection of a human being
has stayed pretty much the same since the 1500s.
Actually, even going back before that,
when Julius Caesar had a post-mortem
after being stabbed in the forum,
there are 23 stab wounds,
and the the man who did the post-mortem
said it was the second one that killed him,
which is all good.
Quincy stuff as far as I'm concerned.
But it stayed pretty much the same
because the human body hasn't changed.
The heart's still on the left hand side.
You still have two lungs, one brain,
two arms, two legs.
All these things have stayed the same.
So the techniques for examining it
have stayed pretty much the same.
But what we have now, in clinical medicine,
coming in when I was really beginning my training,
are CT scans, MRI scans,
other ways of looking inside the body
without actually opening it up.
This isn't my case.
It's a case that belonged to a colleague of mine.
And it sort of typifies,
in a sense, forensic medicine and where we are.
A man is found severely injured
by the side of the road.
He's got a head injury.
It's assumed because of his lifestyle,
which was a bit itinerant,
that he's probably been hit
by the wing mirror of a lorry,
that's come past him on the road
and just dinged him on the side of the head.
No chance of tracing that lorry.
There's no paint,
there's no other things about that lorry
that you could possibly identify.
He goes into hospital.
He has a CT scan.
He has quite significant head and brain surgery
where the fractured skull,
the bit of the skull that's fractured,
is actually cut out,
which is what the surgeons do,
with its pushing in on the brain,
and it's thrown away.
A bit later on, someone says,
"Oh, no. Actually, we think he may have been
hit by a hammer."
But by this time, he's dead.
And the bit of skull
has been disposed of as clinical waste.
Using the CT scan of the original injury,
they were able to look at the skull as it was,
and using 3D printing,
they were able to re-construct
the fracture in the skull,
and match it with a hammer,
and prove that this man
had actually been murdered
and not killed by an unfortunate accident.
And someone is in prison serving time for that murder.
So these techniques,
the forensic techniques,
building with modern digital image techniques,
using them also to examine the body in TV series,
but also in real life,
just takes us that step further forward.
[MARYANA] What would you say is the best part of your job?
The best part of my job
is when I can communicate to families,
because they're the ones,
whether it's been a murder
or whether it's been an accident,
or a drug overdose,
or a sudden collapse of natural causes,
they're the ones that are left bereft.
They're the ones that are wondering what happened.
And people have to go through this grieving process
to put it in its place,
so that they can carry on with their life.
And an understanding of how and why
their relative died, is a part.
It's not the whole, it's a part.
Where do you begin
to say, "Your son has been stabbed in a pub fight.
And if that person hadn't had the knife,
or the knife had been half a centimetre
one way or the other,
he would be in hospital
perhaps having had the serious operation,
but he would be alive."
It's that, that communication
is both the best and the worst component of this job,
but it's that part that I can give.
And if I give it correctly,
then they can move on with an understanding.