UK’s top forensic pathologist on new true crime series: The Truth About My Murder
The Truth About My Murder
When it comes to murder, the truth can never stay hidden for long, and often it’s the victim who gives the most vital clues...
Premiering on Wednesday 21st September at 10pm, The Truth About My Murder explores ten real cases of murder where key evidence is found through the body of the victim. Using ground-breaking technology in a state-of-the-art laboratory, Dr Richard Shepherd will investigate each case, performing digital postmortems to uncover the truth behind these intriguing crimes.
Who is Dr Richard Shepherd?
Dr Richard Shepherd is a leading forensic pathologist who has performed almost 23,000 autopsies. From his wealth of experience, he has written the Sunday Times bestseller Unnatural Causes and The Seven Ages of Death, exploring some of his most perplexing and surprising cases.
But let’s hear from the man himself!
Hi Richard, thanks for taking the time to speak to us today! You've been named Britain's top forensic pathologist, but what originally drew you to the field?
Originally what drew me to the field was that a friend of mine from school brought in a forensic textbook. We were 13, his dad was a GP, and he'd brought the book into school for a sort of unofficial show and tell. And seriously, I opened the book, and my life changed.
I had never realised that doctors could help police and the courts solve crimes - it was just utterly fascinating. I took it home that night, and I wouldn't say I read it – that's perhaps that’s a little over the top - but I certainly looked at it all and was just completely fascinated. And that was it. My life was set. I was going to be a forensic pathologist. And that's what I did through school through university, and I've had a 40 year career afterwards.
In terms of the books you've written, they read almost like mini detective stories. So did you ever consider just being a straightforward detective?
No, I've never thought of being a policeman or a detective. Being a detective, I thought there'd be too many people telling me what to do - I wanted to be the one in charge. But I like solving puzzles: I like putting the jigsaws together all the disparate parts and understanding what's going on. And I've always been totally fascinated by the human body and how it works and how it all fits together.
So what does the day-to-day look like for a forensic pathologist? Where and how does each examination begin?
I always used to say that I never knew where I was going to go to bed, because some days I get up in the morning and the next thing I know I'd be at Heathrow on a flight out to Bermuda or Sri Lanka. That didn’t happen all the time, but it was really exciting when it did.
In general terms, a case starts with a phone call - someone rings me up and says, “someone's been found dead. We think this is what's going on, here's what we know. Now, we'll arrange to meet a bit later on at the scenes.” So we go to have a look at the scene, by which time they'll hopefully have found out a bit more information. And then the body will come away from the scene, and we’ll do a postmortem, and all the while information will be coming in.
If I get the phone call at nine in the morning, it’ll be nine at night that I'm finishing the postmortem and going home, so it can be a very long day. But I'm providing information to the police about what I think has happened, and they're giving me information about what the eyewitnesses said and what they think is going on. Then we begin to build it all together with the forensic scientists who will have taken stuff for toxicology and will have DNA samples. So all of these things build together making it a burst of activity on the first day, and then a bit of a slow run afterwards as we put all the pieces together. It takes time for the scientists to do their tests, so we just have to wait for those tests to come back.
In what cases would you need to go abroad?
There were lots of different reasons actually - I went to Nigeria when a senior politician died suddenly, and that was with the United Nations team. I think my name was put up by the Foreign Office a couple of times, so that’s why I was called. I've also been out with the Metropolitan Police with the coroner and the Foreign Office – with them I’ve gone out to the World Trade Centre, out to Bali, out to Bermuda...
And places like Bermuda, ex-Commonwealth countries, may not always have people on hand with the skill set that's needed to deal with it, especially as Bermuda has very few murders. In one case it was a tourist who had been murdered by a prisoner who was on day release, so it was very high profile, and they needed someone from off the island to come over and do it. So it becomes a lot more wide reaching, whereas a lot of police detectives will be more in their local area, although of course that’s not always the case.
Some of the cases you've worked on have been some really high profile - did the high-stakes nature of cases like that make it hard to stay detached?
I think all doctors have to learn to focus in on the professional aspect. If you're a surgeon performing an operation, or if you're delivering a baby or whatever, you've got to focus on what's there, and try not to let the peripheral things get in the way. So yes, it's hard, but actually, by getting on with the job you're getting on with what's important. So everything else is put to one side – at least for the time that you're doing the job. It's more a question of the reentry into real life afterwards - that can be difficult. It's sometimes hard to get back into normal family life when you've been spending the afternoon looking at someone who's been murdered. Those things can be difficult.
Can you tell us more about The Truth About My Murder?
In the show, we've got 10 cases: seven from the UK, three from the US. The cases we chose were none of mine, as it happens, but they are some of the most fascinating and strange murders, full of twists and turns, backwards and forwards.
We spend time looking at the scene, we spend time talking to the police officers, sometimes family to the forensic scientists, and we begin to put together all of those pieces to tell the story and why someone was, in the end, convicted. And there are some really quite amazing stories that we tell.
In your actual job do you get context and information about the victim?
Yes, it's not all in the lab - almost always we’ll go to see the scene and I'll get lots of information about the victim. It's not like in Silent Witness though - we're not talking to the police officers day-to-day - but if there's something important forensically found by the police or from the scientists, then they will come and talk to us so we can discuss it and see how best it fits. And we’ll ask “what else we can do? Are there any other tests we can run? Is there anything else we ought to consider to prove or disprove or reinforce that particular evidence?” So yes, I'm involved, but at any given time I may have 20 cases running at once, and each one will have something happening on different days. It’s only when you put it together at the end and you have all that information that can you begin to tell the full story.
Were there any cases in this series that really stood out to you that we should look out for?
Well, of course, all of them! All 10 of them were genuinely really interesting. All with twists and turns, all with fascinating stories. It's difficult to pick one out of the 10...but to give you an idea, we've got a case of a dismemberment where the bodies spread all over the countryside. We've got people being put in freezers, and then being impersonated. We've got fires, we've got shootings, we've got stabbings - we've got all sorts. The whole of Forensic Medicine is here in these 10 cases, and they’re all obviously really good stories. Just when you think you're going in one direction, something else happens, and a few of them are quite amazing. In one case, a death was thought to be entirely accidental, then sometime later on someone found something and it completely changed, it and showed that there was in fact, a murderer around.
So it really is proper true crime, and with some pathology and some science built-in as well.
How has the show worked in terms of using technology to give an idea of the body?
These cases are older, so the bodies long gone - but what we did have is this thing called an Anatomage Table – really, it’s a teaching aid. It's a big computer and it stores scans of different people. And so you can have the whole person on the screen and I can say, “I want to look at that bone, I want to take the muscles off, I want to look at the nerves, I want to look at the arteries” - and so I could use it to do a virtual dissection on the cases to show what the pathologist at the time would have done. So it's sort of a post mortem without being a post mortem.
So has an Anatomage Table been seen on television before?
I don’t think it's been on television before... I mean, it's been a teaching tool in a number of universities. Rather than do a formal dissection of a body, they use these MRI scans that are really quite stunningly precise and accurate.
Does it drive you crazy seeing people doing autopsies and films and that sort of thing?
I mean, I've advised Silent Witness a couple of times, and they're great guys, and tell really good stories. But they know, and I know, and hopefully the rest of the world know, that of course, it’s not actually the truth. The truth and the reality are a little boring and slow, so they of course need to speed it all up a bit. But I have to admit, no, I don't watch it myself! I'm afraid that sort of thing really isn't good for my blood pressure.
But hopefully The Truth About My Murder will not only tell some interesting stories, but also show that although forensic pathologists seem to do a rather disruptive job, it’s actually very caring and compassionate, and we’re working to get information that will help families and friends, and also the courts.
Thank you Richard!
Dr Richard Shepherd has a UK book tour for Unnatural Causes coming up soon, and of course, tune into The Truth About My Murder every Wednesday at 10pm on CBS Reality (Freesat channel 135) starting Wednesday 21st September.
Isabelle Grimshaw
