this is a further interview of jeremy
and ketch
who's been arrested
on suspicion of rape where did those
incidents take place
no comment
shhh
is that you in those clips
someone who is going to abuse a child
will often record the incident
because they want to relive it or they
want to be able to sell on the black
market
the area of the perpetrator that is most
frequently in view is the back of their
hand can i have a look at your hands at
the moment
can you put your hands out on the table
for me
i help the police to identify
individuals from images there are an
estimated 50 to 60 000 suspected
pedophiles in the uk requiring
investigation on an entirely different
scale we've helped the police to secure
over 40 life sentences
for abuse against children but also
about 500 years of prison sentencing we
think of dna as being the absolute
pinnacle of forensic science research
let's not underestimate the human hand
i'm sue black i'm a forensic
anthropologist forensic anthropology is
about the study of the human or what
remains of the human for identification
purposes
so whether that's working with the
police and a body that is found
unexpectedly might be a homicide it
might be working in war crimes
investigations as i did in kosovo are
following the the tsunami where we have
a mass fatality event wherever a human
needs to be identified and linked back
to their name then that's the work that
we do
the human veins are variable
look at the vein pattern on the back of
your right hand and the vein pattern on
the back of your left hand and i
guarantee
they will be different and we know it's
different in identical twins so that
tells us that we can say to the police
we can match the pattern of veins in
your suspect and if they don't match
then we can say with a hundred percent
certainty it's not the same person
because your veins don't change
we had a case back in 2006
which was a young girl who alleged that
her father came into her bedroom at
night and he sexually abused her and we
had some images of a hand and a forearm
come into a camera view because she left
her camera running on her computer
and the police said to us well we've got
this image what can you do with it
we did the comparison
and we could show that the vein pattern
between dad and the offender matched
perfectly
so we go into court
and the judge says well i've never heard
this kind of evidence before and i need
to decide whether this is science or
this is witchcraft
and he decided for the first time in the
uk he would allow the evidence to be
heard
i gave my evidence the jury went away
the jury came back
and they found dad
not
the guilty
said something to me that will stay with
me for the rest of my life she said you
did nothing wrong
your evidence was absolutely perfectly
understandable
they just didn't believe the girl
she didn't break down and cry
that set up for us a real determination
to say we need to have the underpinning
research we need to be able to say it's
a one in a million chance it's a one in
a thousand chance
sometimes we only have one anatomical
feature sometimes we will have multiple
features and the more features we have
the more confident we can be both in
terms of exclusion but also in not being
able to exclude the suspect and the
offender from being the same individual
jeremiah ketch was alleged to have
abused a young girl and to take videos
of it happening
we were asked to look at the videos
we were able to link up his vein
patterns we were able to link up his
skin knuckle crease patterns across all
of the fingers that we could see
but he also had a clinical condition he
had something that's called melanonecia
a melanoma nature is something that is
often found in dark colored skin
and it's where the pigment cells are
also found in the nail bed and he had
that in one finger he didn't have it in
any of the other fingers that allowed us
to compare it between suspect and
offender
can you put your hands out on the table
for me
[Music]
no comment
82
of the cases that we take on
result in a change of plea
once the report is there that evidence
is now so strong
that they will change their plea
something like a million images go onto
the dark web every day in relation to
child sexual abuse
hands
are the part of the perpetrator that are
most
frequently in those abusive images that
was the logical place to start we just
can't take on all of these cases if
we're working in the process of me
physically doing a comparison and
writing a report that will take me a day
a week a month and sometimes even longer
we need computers to help us
we launched the app in february of 2020
and the response that we've had has just
been amazing we need lots of images of
people's hands so that we can train
computers and we need your help
please go to the h unique website to
upload photos of your hands to be able
to train our computers we need about
5000 images we have not found any two
vein patterns that match
we've not found any two freckle patterns
that match we've not found any knuckle
skin patterns that match
once the computer is trained the
algorithms get handed on to the police
they can then start to run those
algorithms
through their database and they have
databases of millions of images
and what we're looking for is saying
can we find the image of the suspect and
if we can
can we link that case to other cases
that might have happened somewhere else
in the world and that's really exciting
because that allows us to make the world
a much smaller place
so one of the questions that is most
frequently asked of me is how do you
cope i'd be lying if i said that it
doesn't impact of course it does the
most important thing is it's not your
job to investigate it it's not your job
to find somebody guilty it's your job to
look at these images to find the
evidence to analyze the evidence and
then present it
and you need to stop and close the door
at that point i'm just a small part
of a cog in a very very big wheel
[Music]
you