"I feel like I've just destroyed evidence!"

0:00 I have a challenge for you.

0:05 The students weren’t quite back from summer break

0:07 as I arrived at the University of Lincoln.

0:09 So, it was fairly quiet at the Think Tank,

0:12 the university’s business centre,

0:13 where I met up with Hilary, Dan and Heather,

0:15 who teach at Lincoln’s Forensic Science course.

0:18 Tucked away behind an unassuming door is the Crime Scene House,

0:22 which is where they do some of the hands-on teaching

0:24 for Forensic Science students.

0:25 I was going to have a crime scene to investigate, a break-in,

0:29 and you can watch along, try your own bit of detective work,

0:32 and see if you can spot what I missed.

0:34 What do we want to do before we go in?

0:36 Okay.

0:38 Not contaminate the scene, I’m guessing.

0:40 -Absolutely.

0:40 -Okay.

0:41 -Absolutely.

0:42 -Alright.

0:42 Protective suit, gloves, overshoes, and hairnets.

0:45 And over the rustling of us donning those protective suits,

0:48 Hilary told me about one of the most important rules.

0:51 And so, my job is not to solve the crime.

0:54 My job is to document everything that’s happened

0:56 so that someone else can solve the crime.

0:58 -That’s absolutely right.

1:12 The one thing I know is that you haven’t set up a murder scene.

1:15 That’s correct.

1:16 Which YouTube monetisation thanks you for.

1:18 There is not blood everywhere.

1:19 But other than that...

1:20 Sometimes they do set up murder scenes,

1:23 complete with gruesome mannequin cadavers.

1:25 Or some students might get taken to an explosives test facility

1:28 to look at blast damage.

1:29 It’s not like that’s an everyday thing,

1:31 the same way that’s not an everyday thing for crime scene investigators.

1:34 Most of the time the students will be in a lecture hall,

1:37 but there are some exciting parts.

1:40 In a break from reality, could we keep the masks off?

1:43 Just because then we’ll be able to hear each other and we’ll see faces.

1:46 -Yes, absolutely.

1:46 -Okay.

1:47 So, this is the downfall of most CSI programs.

1:51 Yes!

1:51 And this is the thing that I’m looking at the TV going,

1:53 “Why have you got your mask off?”

1:55 Yeah.

1:58 -Yep, there you go!

1:59 -There we go!

2:00 -That’s why I said lean on something.

2:02 -Yep.

2:02 -It’s the forensic scene hop.

2:05 -(chuckles) Before I take on the crime scene in the living room,

2:07 I’ve got to learn the very basics.

2:09 We start in the house’s kitchen,

2:11 with perhaps the easiest bits of evidence to spot.

2:13 -So, we’ve obviously got...

2:15 -Yeah I think I can see the evidence here.

2:17 That one’s pretty clear.

2:19 -Okay.

2:20 -Hold on, that said,

2:22 we’ve got the smashed glass.

2:23 -Yep.

2:24 There’s also a very obvious lipstick mark just here.

2:26 Yep.

2:27 And you said “yep” in some...

2:28 there’s a bite mark.

2:30 There was a “yep” that implied

2:31 there was definitely a third thing to be found in here.

2:33 -Yes.

2:33 -And that would be the bite mark.

2:35 -Yeah.

2:35 -Okay.

2:36 There’s one other thing, if you look at the glass in a little bit more detail.

2:40 Fingerprints?

2:41 Possibly.

2:43 Oh, blood!

2:44 Yeah, so there’s a bit of blood on the edge of the glass.

2:45 Somebody’s broken a bottle and cut themselves on it for some reason.

2:48 So, it could be just falling off the surface.

2:50 It could be that they...

2:51 oh, am I doing Hemastix?

2:52 So, this is what we do, is we’d obviously test that blood.

2:55 This is an alternative way that we do, this is something called a Hemastick.

2:58 This is what...a lot of CSIs would use these.

3:01 And you just rub the pad against the blood

3:03 and you add the water and it should turn green.

3:05 Green is blood?

3:06 Okay.

3:06 So, what I’ll do is,

3:07 let’s say we’ve recorded all of this and we know it’s in situ,

3:10 we can start messing around with it a little bit now.

3:12 So, you’ve got a bit of blood on the...

3:14 It has only just occurred to me that this is not real blood.

3:17 This is fake blood.

3:18 -No, this is real blood.

3:19 It’s animal blood.

3:20 Animal blood?

3:21 Okay.

3:21 Hold on, you have to fake up the blood in the way that reacts to test.

3:24 Animal blood is the obvious solution to that.

3:26 Yeah, yeah.

3:26 So, we rub a little bit onto there.

3:28 Yeah.

3:28 And then we would just put a little bit of water onto here just to soak it in.

3:32 Obviously, this is...

3:34 It should, as you see, go green?

3:36 Yes, it does.

3:38 Okay, so we’re positive for blood.

3:39 Like all good fictional CSIs:

3:41 let’s freeze that shot, zoom in, and enhance.

3:45 Definitely green.

3:46 One of the things I learned here, over and over,

3:48 is that forensic science is slow and painstaking

3:51 and involves a lot of tiny things that don’t show up well on camera,

3:55 much as Hollywood might tell you otherwise.

3:58 The other thing we’ve got, of course, is the glass itself.

4:01 Because glass itself will transfer in very, very tiny amounts.

4:06 -To the person?

4:06 -To the person.

4:07 So, if I break a window...

4:08 You’re going to have shards of glass on you.

4:10 And then we can test that and we can compare it with the broken object.

4:13 So, studies have been done where they’ve looked at

4:15 glass being made over a number of days

4:17 and they look at the properties and they change quite significantly.

4:19 And the more obvious things here,

4:21 we have a bite mark in the apple down there.

4:23 Yep.

4:23 And we have, over here, lip print on the glass.

4:27 Which I assume is, as evidence goes, pretty easy to...

4:30 Wait, how do you lift a lip print?

4:32 Just photos?

4:33 So, this one, you’d be interested in the lipstick itself.

4:36 Oh, the actual chemical makeup of it.

4:38 Because, again, cosmetics can have variation in their chemical makeup.

4:44 The number of times I’ve gone,

4:45 “Oh, well, it’s obvious what you do with that.”

4:47 No.

4:48 No, it’s not.

4:49 The bite mark, you can look at potentially the teeth,

4:52 the odontology of it,

4:53 and also swab it for DNA.

4:54 -The what of it?

4:54 Odontology.

4:55 Odontology, okay.

4:57 So, for the teeth positioning.

4:59 I assumed that the bite mark would be the obvious thing there,

5:02 but it turns out odontology is really controversial.

5:05 Almost all bite marks are just too vague an impression to be reliable evidence.

5:10 But there’s a much better option: swabbing for DNA.

5:13 Apples are really good,

5:14 because the skin of the apple cleans the tooth off quite nicely

5:17 and leaves behind all the cellular material.

5:20 Okay, this feels like an obvious joke to make,

5:23 but how do you do DNA testing for that and not get “apple”?

5:27 I thought that was a silly question at the time,

5:29 but apples have DNA.

5:31 And so, if you take a swab for DNA sampling from a bite mark in an apple,

5:35 and put that in a machine, surely it just says “apple”.

5:39 That sounds like a gag from a comedy show.

5:40 Well, Heather’s the DNA specialist there, and she was happy to answer that one.

5:44 We would extract the DNA from the swab.

5:46 And when we do that, it does clean up things like apple or food

5:50 or things like that.

5:51 -Huh.

5:51 So, it removes that from the sample.

5:55 And then when it goes on to be replicated, so it’s detectable,

5:58 because usually we’re looking at quite low levels of DNA,

6:02 then that replication is only going to happen on the areas that are human

6:07 or match the areas that we’re looking at.

6:10 So, it’s like a key and lock mechanism.

6:13 We have primers that are specific to certain parts of the DNA strand.

6:19 It won’t connect if it doesn’t fit.

6:21 Wow.

6:22 And the reason we’ve set an apple up here

6:24 is because sometimes in burglary scenes,

6:26 burglars like to snack.

6:28 I think Heather and I have both dealt with cases where

6:30 they’ve submitted things like a burger or an apple

6:33 or remains of something that the burglar has, opened the fridge,

6:35 eaten something and left the remains behind.

6:37 Which is brilliant for us ’cos we can swab it and get a result, you see.

6:41 They love to drink beer or alcohol or stuff like that as well.

6:44 ’Cos why wouldn’t you?

6:44 If you’re already in, you’re already burgling, you know...

6:47 You’ve already taken a huge amount of jewellery or electronics.

6:51 -Yeah.

6:52 -What’s one beer?

6:53 Yeah.

6:53 So, they’ll sometimes do that.

6:55 Burglars do weird things.

6:57 Sometimes.

6:57 Different parts of the English-speaking world

6:59 use different words for “the thing that burglars do”.

7:02 Some countries say that a house can be “burgled”,

7:05 others say “burglarised”,

7:08 and both of those sound really weird if you’re used to the other one.

7:11 Next stop: the bedroom,

7:12 which had been the subject of what the police would call an “untidy search”.

7:16 -This is Heather’s room, all right.

7:18 -(laughs) No, it’s not Heather’s room.

7:19 That sounded wrong, you know what I mean!

7:21 So, we’re going to start off at the bedside cabinet.

7:24 Okay.

7:25 Okay, well, cigarettes.

7:27 -Yes.

7:27 -That’s the obvious one.

7:28 This is presumably a smoker?

7:30 -Yeah.

7:30 And there’s going to be DNA all over that, I’m guessing?

7:32 Yeah, DNA.

7:33 Again, also we can look at whether the manufactured ones have any...

7:39 -Brand logo.

7:40 -Brands, yeah.

7:41 So, these ones obviously are roll-ups,

7:44 so, they wouldn’t have any brands on them.

7:48 But what we can do is when you make a roll-up cigarette,

7:51 you obviously lick the seal.

7:53 -Oh, yeah.

7:53 So,

7:54 sometimes you’ll have different DNA on the seal than the person who smoked it.

8:00 ’Cos somebody could have rolled it and then given it to somebody else

8:02 and smoked it.

8:03 -Right.

8:03 Like, the smokers I know tend to smoke either cigarettes or roll-ups?

8:07 Yep, so that could indicate that there’s two people smoking.

8:10 So, could it be that the owner smokes roll-ups

8:13 and the burglar smokes manufactured?

8:16 Over here we have a dressing table as well.

8:19 -Cosmetics again?

8:20 -Yeah.

8:21 DNA evidence.

8:22 -Cosmetics.

8:22 -We’ve obviously got a lipstick.

8:23 -Yep.

8:23 So, we know that there’s a lipstick mark so, you can compare.

8:26 So that could match the one on the glass in there.

8:28 The odds of a burglar putting on lipstick during a crime are low,

8:32 but I guess not technically zero.

8:33 Now, on to the bathroom, which was put together by Hilary.

8:36 I think I can see a little bit of evidence quite early here

8:39 by the fact there’s a knife on the floor.

8:41 -That feels like evidence.

8:43 -Yes.

8:43 I feel like even an idiot...

8:45 There shouldn’t be a knife in the bathroom.

8:46 Exactly.

8:46 What do you think it may have been used for?

8:49 Prising open the cabinet, perhaps?

8:51 Okay, so why would someone have a locked cabinet in their bathroom?

8:54 -Medicines?

8:54 -Medicines, yeah.

8:55 So, the first thing about the knife is that we wouldn’t just put that

8:59 in a plastic evidence bag.

9:00 ’cos it would fall through the bottom and stab yourself in the foot.

9:03 -Yeah, okay, that’s fair.

9:04 -So, we have a special sort of collector.

9:08 Okay.

9:08 Called a weapons tube.

9:13 -Right.

9:13 -It can go in there.

9:14 The weapons tube has metal caps on each end,

9:17 so someone can’t stab themselves while screwing the lid on.

9:19 Okay, shall we look and see what’s in the cabinet?

9:23 Ah.

9:24 Oxycodone.

9:26 Those are painkillers.

9:27 -Correct, yes.

9:27 So, we’ve got...

9:28 -Those are extremely strong painkillers.

9:30 Yes, and they are prescribed, but they also have quite a high street value.

9:35 Yes.

9:35 We wouldn’t necessarily assume that that’s what it says on the tin.

9:38 So, we would perhaps start from that and check if it was oxycodone,

9:43 but it could be something else,

9:44 could be something that’s been misrepresented as oxycodone.

9:47 We would also be wanting to see, is the name and address on the drugs?

9:51 Is that related to anyone who lives here?

9:53 Or it could just be sometimes you find a random person’s medication

9:57 because it’s been sold on the street.

10:00 We may also want to be looking at the resident.

10:03 So, is the resident positive for oxycodone?

10:07 The real-life drugs in that container are just vitamins,

10:09 or over-the-counter painkillers, but it turns out that sometimes

10:13 the forensic students do get to see the real thing.

10:16 -We do have a licence here.

10:17 -Yeah.

10:17 -Yeah?

10:18 So, the students get to, as part of their course,

10:20 they get to actually examine...

10:22 -Small amounts.

10:23 ...real, under supervision, real samples.

10:26 So they can actually see how it works when testing in the lab.

10:28 We’ll give them an unknown powder that we’ve got from Border Force

10:31 and then we’ll ask them to tell us what it is.

10:33 So, they do the testing themselves.

10:34 I was going to ask where you got the drugs from,

10:36 and Border Force makes sense, okay, yeah.

10:39 And the other thing is sometimes a drug has been mixed with other things.

10:43 So, it’s less of an issue for tablets, it’s more for powders and crystals.

10:46 So, we’re looking to see if it’s been adulterated.

10:48 So, adulterated means another drug added.

10:51 Or it might just have been diluted down with something, you know, talcum powder,

10:54 brick dust, all those things you might want to put in your body.

10:57 -(laughs) -So, that’s another thing.

10:59 And if we have a pattern of adulterants being added,

11:02 it can help us to link drugs to other scenes or cases.

11:06 I also can’t help but notice that there’s a

11:09 lot of red staining in the grout there,

11:11 which I assume is not relevant to any investigations today...

11:14 -No.

11:14 -No.

11:15 ...but may have been relevant to ones in the past.

11:17 Oh, yeah, we might do a bloodbath,

11:18 which is where somebody’s been in the bath.

11:21 Oh!

11:22 That passed by very quickly, so just to flag it,

11:25 when Hilary says she makes a bloodbath,

11:28 she is not speaking metaphorically.

11:30 She means a bath where the water also contains a lot of blood,

11:34 and presumably one of those dead body mannequins they have.

11:38 Forensic investigation is not for the weak of stomach.

11:41 And I don’t want to seem like I’m treating the subject too lightly here.

11:45 But most of the time:

11:46 forensic investigation does not involve drama or death,

11:50 it is just meticulous work.

11:52 So, that’s the three rooms of setup.

11:55 That’s the sort of things that I needed to look for.

11:57 In the lounge was the actual crime scene,

12:00 and my job now was to be the investigator,

12:02 to be the naive first-year forensic student.

12:05 The bits of the investigation you’re about to see

12:07 have been shortened quite a bit

12:08 because forensic science is painstaking and slow

12:11 and requires careful decision-making

12:12 and, frankly, torturous amounts of paperwork.

12:15 I actually did two passes round the room,

12:17 first logging everything I could see,

12:18 and then investigating each thing in detail,

12:21 in the order that was least likely to disrupt other bits of evidence,

12:24 which is a really important decision to make.

12:26 But we’re going to show this as just one pass through,

12:30 so don’t worry if the little yellow forensic markers

12:32 seem to move around in the background sometimes.

12:34 That’s not the mystery.

12:36 Here’s your challenge.

12:37 I missed something at the Crime Scene House.

12:40 All the evidence you need to spot it is in the next few minutes of video,

12:43 the clues are all there.

12:44 And there is a twist at the end.

12:46 Right after this.

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14:17 I think we got that?

14:18 I think we got that!

14:19 -Cool.

14:20 Nice.

14:21 -Nice.

14:22 Don’t worry, that ad read was not part of the evidence.

14:25 Although, in hindsight, I could have charged a lot more if it was!

14:28 Right, let’s go investigate a break-in.

14:30 Good luck.

14:31 Let's see if you are a better detective than I am.

14:34 Now, I don’t even know what I’m looking for here.

14:37 I appreciate the book there is Great Unsolved Mysteries.

14:40 -Yeah.

14:40 -Which is...

14:42 -(laughs) -Yeah, someone’s had some fun.

14:43 So, the way to start to process it is to think about,

14:47 how would somebody do this?

14:49 Okay.

14:49 And in the process of doing what they’re doing,

14:51 what are they going to leave behind that we can find from them?

14:53 Okay.

14:54 They’re going to come in through the window, I assume.

14:57 Mm-hmm.

14:58 Which means they might have left some evidence on here

15:01 that looks a lot like blood.

15:02 So, we might want to use that.

15:04 Hey, I’ve got a number!

15:06 Right, so number one just there.

15:08 -Yeah, that’s fine.

15:09 We did a simple test to check, and, yes, it was blood,

15:12 which needed swabbing for DNA.

15:14 -Do you want to do it?

15:15 -I’ll do that, yeah.

15:15 If I can hand the camera off to you, and just vaguely...

15:18 Point it in your direction.

15:20 So, because the blood is dry, you’re going to want to wet your swab.

15:23 So, this is DNA-free water.

15:26 Because obviously some water will have background DNA in it.

15:30 So this...

15:32 Yeah, no, it’s just a hell of a phrase.

15:34 So, pour on?

15:35 Just a couple of drops, you don’t need loads.

15:38 The swab will sometimes be a little bit, that’s it, as long as it, sort of...

15:41 A little bit hydrophobic there, isn’t it?

15:42 And then you just need to swab up the blood.

15:47 Oh.

15:48 -It’s okay.

15:48 -I didn’t do a great job on that, did I?

15:50 It’s okay.

15:50 I feel like I’ve just destroyed evidence there.

15:52 No, when you’ve got that, that’s more than enough.

15:54 -Okay.

15:54 That’s all you need?

15:55 -That’s it, yeah.

15:56 That’s such a tiny, tiny amount.

15:58 And that’ll give you a perfect profile.

16:00 That would be almost guaranteed to give you something.

16:03 Wow.

16:04 This is more than I would get on most blood swabs.

16:06 Heather has done a lot of lab work for actual criminal investigations,

16:10 she’s the expert in this,

16:11 and I was astonished at just how good the technology is.

16:15 Just a small amount of blood has quite a lot of DNA,

16:17 less so than like touch DNA,

16:20 which is when you just touch something and leave your DNA then.

16:23 We’re able to get DNA profiles from really small amounts of blood.

16:26 Wow.

16:27 So when you say profile,

16:28 is that enough to match a person

16:30 or is that enough to say it’s someone who...

16:32 what can you figure out from that?

16:33 So, we don’t look at any DNA features that are phenotypic,

16:38 so, code for your hair or your ethnicity.

16:42 We look at specific areas that vary between individuals quite a lot

16:46 within the population, so there’s a lot of variability.

16:50 But they also don’t code for anything that we know of.

16:53 Forensic DNA analysis is not like those companies that go,

16:56 “Oh, probably has green eyes, and a gluten allergy,

16:58 “and their great-great-great-grandad’s from Algeria.”

17:01 They’re testing for what used to be called junk DNA,

17:04 but is now known as non-coding DNA.

17:07 It’s not junk, it’s just got a more complicated job than eye colour.

17:10 The DNA database itself continues to be controversial,

17:13 particularly how long the police can keep DNA samples

17:16 from anyone not convicted.

17:18 Even just accepting a caution for a minor offence in England and Wales,

17:22 means your DNA will be on the database for life.

17:25 Balancing civil liberties and potential crime-solving

17:28 is always going to be difficult.

17:29 Turns out there’s also a ballistics database,

17:31 a footwear database, and of course,

17:34 a fingerprint database.

17:35 Which brings us to the next bit of evidence.

17:38 What I would tend to do is look around the point of entry.

17:40 -Okay.

17:40 -So, how would you imagine getting in?

17:44 What would you do?

17:45 I’d have to climb up and come in.

17:47 -So, if we go around to the...

17:48 -We go around to this side.

17:49 -Let’s start with the outside.

17:50 -Yeah.

17:50 Okay.

17:51 I had jumped the gun a little by going straight in and spotting blood.

17:55 I should have checked the window first.

17:57 If you get the lighting right, you can maybe see where people...

18:01 There are some marks here.

18:02 You’ve got some marks there as well, haven’t you?

18:04 And a clear fingerprint just there...

18:05 I placed a marker under the window.

18:07 There are several techniques for dusting for prints,

18:10 but the basic idea is to use very, very lightweight powder

18:13 that will stick just to the oil and gunk left behind by fingerprints,

18:17 and enhance them so they can be seen.

18:19 Because I’m not very good at dusting for prints,

18:21 I wasn’t trained to do it,

18:22 I tend to cheat.

18:24 -Okay.

18:24 So, what we do is I use something called magnetic powder.

18:28 So, we’ve got a little wand here

18:31 which has a magnet in the end

18:32 and you can pull this tab and the magnet moves up and down inside.

18:35 Oh!

18:36 And then this powder, which is black powder,

18:38 that has magnetic material in it.

18:40 So, if I dip...

18:41 What, black powder like the thing that goes into explosives or...?

18:44 Oh!

18:44 -As in carbon black.

18:46 Right.

18:46 So, then you’ve got the magnet, sort of shows you that,

18:50 and if I pull the magnet away it just drops away.

18:51 -Yeah.

18:51 -So, it makes it a lot easier to...

18:53 That makes it a lot easier than having to do the very fine work of dusting on...

18:57 And the good thing about the magnet brush

18:59 is that you don’t get any contamination

19:00 because there’s no bristles to contaminate.

19:03 This is much, much more difficult than you might think.

19:06 Although I didn’t realise until later that,

19:08 while setting up the simulated crime scene,

19:10 one of those three had to actually put their fingers,

19:13 and, it turns out, their entire face, against that window to create those marks.

19:18 I’m definitely not doing that right.

19:20 That’s just, no, I’ve completely messed that up.

19:23 That’s all right.

19:23 I’ve completely ruined that.

19:25 So because it’s magnetic powder, we can just hoover it up.

19:28 Of course you can.

19:29 (chuckles) Yeah, I absolutely demonstrated that on purpose.

19:33 It wasn’t just plain incompetence.

19:35 You’ve got possible stuff here, maybe?

19:38 You can just about see something there, look?

19:41 Just about.

19:42 Once the prints are enhanced,

19:44 you photograph them, and also perhaps try to lift them.

19:47 Essentially what you do is you just roll over the top

19:51 just to make sure you’ve got it.

19:54 Get rid of all the air bubbles ’cos they can be a real pain.

20:00 And then slowly, what I tend to do is just lift it off.

20:04 And it should hopefully line up over the...

20:10 over the sheet.

20:13 Like that.

20:15 That’s a bit clearer, isn’t it?

20:17 And any CSIs watching this will be telling me that my technique is awful.

20:20 -(laughs) -Which I know it is.

20:23 But it’s all about the powder.

20:24 But you can see you’ve got this sort of pattern here.

20:28 This sort of area here within the ridge.

20:31 And that might be enough to match to a fingerprint.

20:32 And that might be enough to match to a fingerprint, yeah.

20:34 There were also several other fingerprints I missed,

20:36 including a couple of big obvious ones.

20:39 Never mind.

20:39 I did successfully spot some hairs and clothing fibres caught on the window,

20:43 those were marked as number three.

20:45 And the next bit of evidence would have been difficult to miss.

20:49 So on the inside...

20:50 Hold on, hold on!

20:52 I hadn’t spotted that.

20:53 In the right light, there’s a very clear footprint just there.

20:58 In fact, two...

21:00 one very clear just here,

21:02 and one faint just here.

21:03 If I can get number four please.

21:05 -Lighting is important.

21:06 -Okay.

21:07 So I’ve got a little torch here if you want to see

21:08 if it might show up with a bit of oblique lighting,

21:10 which I’m sure you understand what that is.

21:11 Yes.

21:13 Oh, yes, it does.

21:15 If you bring it further down to the plane, you’ll see even better.

21:18 Oh, wow!

21:20 That really does make a difference, doesn’t it?

21:22 Just like the fingerprint, once it’s documented in place,

21:25 that can also be lifted from the surface.

21:28 So, we could use something called a gel lift

21:29 which is kind of like a bit of gelatin

21:31 and it’s slightly adhesive, slightly tacky.

21:34 So then that will lift the print onto the gel.

21:36 So you’ll see that.

21:37 But what we’re going to do is I’m going to do something called an ESLA.

21:40 Because it’s good for dusty prints.

21:41 An ESLA is an Electrostatic Lifting Apparatus.

21:45 And if you remember that high school science experiment

21:47 with a Van der Graaff generator that makes people’s hair stand on end:

21:51 it’s that, but more precise.

21:53 Apply a Mylar sheet to the print, make sure everything’s earthed properly,

21:57 and then the ESLA generates a static charge

21:59 that sucks the Mylar sheet down to the surface.

22:02 And then you get the roller and what you see,

22:03 you can see the print almost on there.

22:05 And then you just roll out any air bubbles

22:09 to make sure that you’ve got contact with the print.

22:11 We literally peel back the film and there’s the mark.

22:14 That’s incredible.

22:15 That’s like a magic trick.

22:17 This is obviously the best possible circumstances,

22:20 but still, to me, that was staggering.

22:22 And it might just match up to the suspect’s shoes.

22:26 That’s the point of entry done.

22:27 Time to investigate the rest of the room.

22:29 I’m going to, I think, start with the outside and go round.

22:32 That seems...

22:33 -Okay.

22:33 That’s cool.

22:34 I’ll leave you to it.

22:35 I’m just well aware of how much of a fool I’m about to look

22:38 as I miss something obvious.

22:42 I looked at the little bag that was stopping the door from opening.

22:45 I looked at the couch.

22:46 At the lamp.

22:46 At the walls.

22:48 There is a couch cushion just splayed down there,

22:51 which should be over there, but I don’t know if that’s...

22:53 is that just someone who’s messy?

22:54 Is it disturbing the scene if I just pick it up and have a look?

22:57 You would record it and then you can move it.

22:59 -Okay.

22:59 -So, you’ve recorded it.

23:01 -Recorded it.

23:01 -Yeah.

23:02 And then just have a look underneath.

23:03 Nothing of interest.

23:04 Nothing of interest.

23:05 No, just a couch cushion, okay.

23:08 We’ll ignore my GoPro and the security camera.

23:10 The artwork didn’t have anything of interest,

23:12 I did briefly look at and mark a solitary earring that was left on the side,

23:16 just in case, but, no, turned out that wasn’t important.

23:19 And we have some paperwork.

23:21 Notice anything about the paperwork?

23:24 -It’s financial paperwork.

23:26 -Mm-hm.

23:26 I’ve got to remember, I don’t know anything about this scene.

23:29 There are all sorts of things that you may or may not know,

23:31 but quite often you’re dealing with limited information

23:33 and that comes to light as you go through the scene.

23:35 So, okay, I will log that.

23:37 Do I need to put a number next to it?

23:40 And that paperwork had a few alterations on it.

23:42 Including some correction fluid, or as it’s known in the UK, Tipp-Ex.

23:46 That’s a zero that’s been changed to an eight.

23:48 -And then...

23:49 -Tipp-Ex on that one.

23:51 I missed all of those completely!

23:54 Unless you stare at that with a torch,

23:56 and someone clues you in that this is what you’re looking for...

24:00 or you’ve had a lot of study and you’re an expert in this sort of thing.

24:04 So, different pens might react in different ways

24:06 under different lighting conditions.

24:07 So we would take the pens and the document.

24:10 Yep.

24:12 Your wording was really nice.

24:14 You said, “Altered.” So we wouldn’t be looking at that and saying

24:16 it’s been tampered with as fraud,

24:18 because at this point they all could be just an accident.

24:22 -That could be just little notes.

24:24 -Somebody made a mistake, they changed it.

24:26 So we wouldn’t be trying to, at this point,

24:28 trying to be saying what we think had happened.

24:29 I poked around the rest of the room,

24:31 but I’d found pretty much everything that the team had put together.

24:34 I did wonder about a single hair, and a glass that was slightly askew,

24:38 but again, not actually relevant here.

24:40 The amount of stuff you have to...

24:42 And this is a carefully curated, planted scene

24:46 on easy mode for a student.

24:48 The real world is so much more complicated than this.

24:51 So what did I miss?

24:52 And what did you miss?

24:54 So we’ve got a bit of information that’s just come through.

24:56 That’s handy.

24:58 And this is helpful.

24:59 And that we know that the occupant of the house is a non-smoker.

25:03 Okay.

25:04 Okay, so that’s another hint you can have a look for things.

25:07 In this room?

25:08 Or just in general.

25:09 Just in general.

25:11 I haven’t seen any cigarette burns.

25:13 I haven’t seen...

25:14 Have I seen cigarette ash and completely missed it?

25:17 Do you want to come back out to the point of entry?

25:19 So if you’re unsure, have a look on the way in.

25:21 Oh, the cigarette stub!

25:23 Right, sorry.

25:24 (laughing) The stubbed out cigarette that’s by the door!

25:28 Thank you.

25:29 -Thanks.

25:30 -So, that may or may not be useful.

25:32 That’s, that’s, yeah, no, that’s, that’s on me, I’ll, I’ll...

25:36 So it’s worth having a think about what kind of evidence

25:37 you think you might get from that.

25:39 Oh, that’s DNA evidence.

25:41 Yes, DNA evidence, yeah.

25:42 -Okay, so...

25:43 -Anything less high-tech you might be able to get from...?

25:46 -If you try turning it over.

25:47 -Oh, the brand of cigarette.

25:48 -Right, yes.

25:49 -Yes.

25:50 It’s really interesting with our students

25:52 because they don’t understand cigarettes to have brands

25:55 because they’ve grown up in an age without advertising of cigarettes.

25:58 Oh!

25:59 Because when you go into a shop, it’s all behind doors.

26:02 There’s no sports advertising,

26:04 so it’s not an obvious thing that they would...

26:06 They wouldn’t check for the word Mayfair printed on that cigarette.

26:09 Yes.

26:10 Did you spot it?

26:11 Not the cigarette.

26:12 Well, I mean, not quite the cigarette.

26:14 I mean, the twist.

26:15 Let’s just do the wrap-up first.

26:17 That was the crime scene.

26:18 A very, very simple simulated crime scene.

26:20 What I learned, mostly,

26:22 is that forensic science ain’t like the TV shows.

26:25 We want people to be realistic.

26:26 So the ones who’ve been watching the telly,

26:28 they come in and do their first crime scene

26:30 and it’s not quite what they anticipated.

26:33 It’s like how Jurassic Park caused a whole generation of palaeontologists.

26:36 -Yep.

26:37 -Yeah.

26:37 CSI has done the same and it’s not realistic.

26:41 It has, yeah.

26:43 It’s a very different experience I would say.

26:48 It’s painstaking detail work.

26:50 Yeah, it’s painstaking detail work.

26:51 I mean the things that we’ve shown you today,

26:53 so, you know, things like the trace evidence,

26:56 like the glass and all those sorts of things,

26:58 are not done as much these days.

26:59 Because of budgetary constraints

27:01 and the police focus on more things like CCTV and stuff like that.

27:04 So there is a risk in the UK at the moment,

27:07 we’re going to lose some of our traditional forensic science capability.

27:10 It is funny that he mentions CCTV there.

27:13 Because my editors noticed something

27:16 when they were going through the footage for this.

27:17 It’s only visible very briefly in a couple of shots, but...

27:21 you know that cigarette that I missed?

27:24 I didn’t miss it.

27:26 It wasn’t there.

27:28 Is it too much to put, like, Ocean’s Eleven heist music

27:31 over the rest of this?

27:32 (atmospheric heist music) In their defence, this was clearly a mistake.

27:37 This was not a deliberate attempt to mess with me,

27:39 I don’t want them to look bad or feel bad about this.

27:42 I just think it is quite funny.

27:44 We started early in the morning,

27:46 and presumably they’d set the crime scene up the night before.

27:48 Which means that they only noticed that the cigarette was missing

27:51 when I was already in the room.

27:54 I’m just well aware of how much of a fool I’m about to look

27:56 as I miss something obvious.

27:59 (whispered:) The cleaners must have come by,

28:03 and while they’ll have been told not to disturb inside the crime scene rooms,

28:07 that cigarette stub was not in the crime scene rooms.

28:10 You can see in this shot,

28:11 the only shot that I have of that entrance before I walked in,

28:14 that the cigarette wasn’t there.

28:16 I don’t have a shot of anyone running back

28:18 to the bedroom to grab a Mayfair stub,

28:20 but I can only assume that’s what happened.

28:22 And then while I was looking the other way...

28:25 There is a couch cushion just splayed down there...

28:28 Almost out of sight of the cameras.

28:29 Professionally done.

28:30 It’s not until several minutes later...

28:32 Quite often you’re dealing with limited information

28:34 and that comes to light as you go through the scene.

28:37 Which means that when I made it back round to the entrance...

28:39 Oh, the cigarette stub!

28:41 Right, sorry.

28:43 (laughing) The stubbed out cigarette that’s by the door.

28:47 Thank you.

28:48 Thanks.

28:48 -So, that may or may not be useful.

28:50 That’s, that’s, yeah, no, that’s, that’s on me.

28:52 My thanks and my apologies to everyone at the Crime Scene House,

28:56 The story was just too good to tell any other way,

28:59 and in my defence, you could have told me.

29:00 Congratulations if you spotted the twist at home,

29:03 if you’re less like me and more like my editors,

29:06 then perhaps forensic science at the University of Lincoln might be for you.

29:12 Next time, or right now on Nebula,

29:14 I join a rescue team

29:15 for an exercise that could have been made so much worse.