My name is Professor Sue Black, I'm director of the Centre of Anatomy
and Human Identification at the University of Dundee,
and I'm also the deputy principal for public engagement.
At the moment we're sitting in the dissecting room within the university
and about 70-80 bodies are bequeathed to us in the anatomy department every year
that come here for dissection.
And we train forensic anthropologists as well as other forensic experts
and it's really important for a forensic anthropologist
that they don't just understand the bones,
they have to understand the soft tissue
because that's a really important and credible part of that identification process.
So their training starts in here in the dissection of the human body.
Bones are really important, bones and teeth, because they survive
and that makes them of particular importance when we have an individual
where we don't know who they are.
If we can take DNA off a body, if we can take fingerprints off a body,
we've got a good chance of identifying them.
But if the body's decomposed or it's skeletal,
the amount of information is obviously diminished.
So our responsibility is to take that bone,
and it may only be a part of a bone, it might not be a whole skeleton,
and try to determine something about the identity of the individual.
And there are four primary identifiers that we can all relate to.
So you have a sex: you're either male or female,
but there is a grey area within that as well.
You have an age at which you go missing or an age at which you die.
You have an ethnic origin, now that doesn't mean where you're born,
that means about your ethnic history. So where did your ancestors come from?
And you have a height.
So when you hear the police on the television, for example, describing a suspect
they'll say, "He's a male, aged between 25 and 30, 5'6" to 5'8" in height and white."
And those are the basic biological identifiers.
It's the first thing that we start to look at when we have a skeleton in front of us.
But you can imagine that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals
that could fit into the one profile
so our next job is to say, "What's different about this person?
What can we see within them that would allow somebody
who's listening to Crimewatch, or whatever the programme may be, that goes,
'Ooh, my father had that, my brother had that, my mother had that.'"
It's about saying, "What kind of pathological condition did they have?
Had they broken a bone many years ago? Do they have dental work?
Is there any evidence of surgery? Would they have walked with a limp?
Did they have an abnormality of a finger?"
All of those things that are the anatomical individualities, if you like, of each person.
It's our job to try and extract as many of those as possible from the skeleton
and that's the really difficult part.
DVI stands for Disaster Victim Identification
and it's where we have mass fatalities, for example.
So if you were to think about the plane crash in Ukraine very recently,
that's the kind of situation when a forensic DVI team would go in.
Forensic anthropologists can be involved in a number of places,
so they may be involved at the scene of the incident
particularly if the bodies are burnt or if there's explosions,
so that in the London bombings and again in the Ukraine plane crash,
their job on the ground will be to identify these small parts, these fragments.
Are they human, are they not human?
Which part of the human may they be?
And they will get bagged up and then sent to the mortuary.
You might have an anthropologist at the triage part of the mortuary
because when these bags come in it will be opening them up again to say,
"Is this human? Is this animal?"
If you think of the World Trade Centre, they had restaurants
so there would be bits of pig, there would be bits of sheep.
We need to separate those out.
And also from the anatomical perspective we'll be able to say in fragmented material,
"This is the top part of a left thigh. This is the bottom part of a right forearm"
and it allows you to start putting the jigsaw perhaps together,
the human jigsaw back together if you have fragmented or exploded remains.
And then the anthropologist is also in the mortuary
in the station associated with identification.
So when the body or the body part is coming through,
is it male or female? Is it a young individual, is it an elderly individual?
What's the ethnic origin of this person? How tall are they?
What sort of other indicators of their identity are present?
Do we have previous fractures? Do we have these disease processes?
And so the anthropologist is in a multiple number of places within the scene, if you like.
There's no doubt that what we're exposed to is traumatic.
You don't see the best side of life and as a parent
you become rather more protective perhaps than most
because you see the volume of child abuse, child pornography,
you see murders, you see mass fatality events.
All of these are obviously going to influence the way in which you lead your own life.
And for me my desensitisation or sensitisation, depending which way you look at it,
really came about very gradually.
So part of my job as a teenager was working in a butcher shop.
So I was used to dealing with bone and muscle and blood and viscera
and it didn't upset me in any way.
Moving into a dissecting room was, if you like, the next stage of that.
But it does take quite a lot of courage to make that first cut in human skin.
But once you do and you're inside the human body, it is just such an amazing world
that you marvel in it, you're not repelled by it.
So the first time you see your forensic case where that body,
that beautiful body, is disrupted,
whether it's disrupted by fire, by decomposition, by trauma, whatever it may be,
you almost look beyond that to what it was and you compare the two.
And in comparison of the two it allows you to determine what happened.
What happened between that perfect, intact body - you know what it should look like -
and what you have in front of you?
So it becomes the investigation, it becomes the puzzle.
And we all love puzzles.
Kosovo was unquestionably a turning point in my career.
I got the phone call that said, "What are you doing on Saturday?"
and I made the mistake of saying, "Nothing."
And Peter Vanezis, who was the forensic pathologist said, "We need you out here."
I didn't know what I was going out to, hadn't got a clue,
and it was really quite scary but you don't think about these things,
you just get on the plane and you think,
"I'll figure it out when I get to the other end."
It was incredibly traumatic, I do have to say, but also incredibly rewarding
because you really got to feel part of an integral team,
you were really working at the junction to help the local communities
address the necessary judicial aspects of what went on,
and to help the world recognise what had occurred in that country.
Probably the one that made the most impact on me was a family
and it was a family who came out of the villages to go up into the countryside,
and they would come back into the town for provisions.
And on a particular day dad was driving the tractor,
whole family was on the trailer behind him,
and an RPG - rocket propelled grenade - took out the trailer.
The father, who was driving the tractor, was snipered in the leg
so he was shot and he managed to crawl away into the undergrowth
but everybody who was sitting on the back of that trailer died,
and that included his wife, his wife's sister,
their mother, and their six children.
And so when we came back almost a year later
to exhume the bodies that he had buried,
so if you imagine under cover of darkness, having been snipered in the leg,
he still went around and found what was left
of the parts of his family and buried them,
because he knew if he didn't the dogs would get them.
And it's a tremendous foresight, a tremendous strength, I think, to be able to do that.
So we come along and say, "We want to exhume the bodies of your family
because this is important for indictment against Milosevic."
And when we dug the hole that he'd created,
we found enough to fill two body bags.
So all those people, not enough to fill two body bags.
And we went back to the mortuary and we set out 11 pieces of fabric to say,
"We're going to put something of each person into each of these
and we know we're going to have an area that we can't separate."
And part of my expertise that I'd developed because we'd written the book on it,
was the identification of children.
And so it was one of those things about feeling you were in the right place at the right time.
So I was able to identify a bit of each of the children.
Now it would be very tempting to put just a bit in each and no one would know.
You can't do that because morally and ethically that's completely wrong,
but in addition to that, the courts are going to say,
"Right, we're going to exhume that bag
and if what's in that bag is not what's in your report,
you're not a credible witness
and we're not going to take any evidence you've given."
So it's extremely important that you uphold the standards
of forensic practice regardless of where you are in the world.
So I had bits of every part of every individual.
My problem was that there were two 14-year-old twin boys
and how you separate two twin boys.
You can't do it through DNA because we haven't got any matching.
There's no fingerprints.
All we had of the twin 14-year-old boys was the top part of their arms,
but one of them had a Mickey Mouse vest associated with it,
and I said to the police officers, "Go and ask Dad,
which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest.
- don't say which of the boys, which of the twins - which of the children,
and if he comes back with a name,
and that name is one of the twin boys, we've got something."
And that's exactly what happened. So he came back and he said,
"Oh, my son was absolutely mad about Mickey Mouse, that was his pride and joy."
That would be that boy.
And so just something as simple as a piece of clothing
that was so important to the child, led us to being able to give that man back
body bags for each and every member of his family,
plus an element that we couldn't separate.
And for us to be able to even imagine what he went through,
and for his quietness, for his dignity, for his sheer courage,
it was the most humbling experience that any of us had come across within Kosovo.
And if I'd felt, if there's any reason why I was there,
it was to help that man get some element of closure
given the enormity of what he'd been through.
He felt that whilst they were all in one grave and one hole in the ground,
God would not be able to find them.
God could only find them if they were each in their own grave
with their own name on that gravestone.
So if we helped him in any way
then everything we did in those two years was worth it for that.