How to Solve a Murder

Derek Tremain, Pauline Tremain

• Publisher: HarperElement
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008404895
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Forensic Medicine

As gripping as it is gruesome, How to Solve a Murder is a fascinating insight into the career of a pathologist told by experts in the field. Includes a foreword from Dr Richard Shepherd, bestselling author of Unnatural Causes.

Fractured skulls. Gas masks. Brain buckets.

Not your typical workspace, but for forensic scientist Derek and his secretary Pauline, it was just another day at the office.

The husband and wife duo have been behind some of the world’s most pioneering forensic science techniques. Their work has played a pivotal role in extremely high-profile cases across the years, putting murderers behind bars, discovering causes of seemingly inexplicable freak accidents and salvaging victims of tragic disasters.

While the business of unnatural deaths may not be the most romantic of trades, it’s also how Derek and Pauline’s unusual love story began. After meeting on the job, the inseparable pair became a force to be reckoned with, unfailingly cracking cases one body part at a time.

Warmly recalled and brilliantly told, this must-read will teach you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about death and life, and all their brilliant peculiarities. Although, be warned: it’s not one for the faint-hearted.

Chapter 1

A Nightmarish Restoration of Identity

At the end of a working day, when everyone around you has left and is probably almost home, the forensic department at Guy’s Hospital in London isn’t the ideal place in which to find yourself working late. But as a forensic medical scientist I would often be there as the light faded.

As shadows appeared, my perceptions were heightened. The lights in the corridor outside would begin a series of erratic clicks as they cooled down following the departure of my last colleague, leaving me in a dimly lit environment. I would pick up on every footstep as staff vacated the other floors, their welcome human presence fading into the distance, leaving me feeling even more isolated and alone. Instinctively, I would work more quietly, hyper-aware of every sound I made, as well as the sounds around me, the hum of the constantly running fridges and freezers …

I would have more awareness of processes which, in daylight, would give me little cause for alarm, but which, as night fell, became just that little bit spookier. The familiar smells I would breathe in warmly and comfortingly every morning, as I reached my daily workspace, would become less reassuring: remnants of chemicals now safely stored away for the night, warm wax used to coat and fix tissue specimens, musty old cupboards full of distinctly strange objects.

The occasional flecks of dust that had filtered through the shafts of sunlight during the day had long since settled, leaving stillness in the air. Everything had shut down for the night. Except me.

During the day, the Department, as we called it, was a busy and industrious place, full of the humour and vigour of people who loved their jobs and couldn’t wait to get to work. But as night fell, that light and carefree environment gradually darkened and became an entirely different place.

Everything took on increased significance. A lone skull on a nearby desktop, an otherwise everyday sight, and part of the head pathologist’s collection of curios, now took on a more ghoulish aspect. Indulged as a quaint, even appropriate feature for a forensic department by day, it gradually turned into a more menacing escort into the night, as shadows passed over it, highlighting the empty eye sockets and the presence of two holes: entry and exit wounds from a bullet. A reminder of murder. A reminder that this skull had once served as the shell covering the brain of a living human being.

A skull, of course, has always been viewed as the ultimate reminder of mortality. However, in our department, a skull was viewed as evidence, highlighting the fact that so much of our workload was directly associated with violent endings. In the dim laboratory, this one also reminded me of why I felt such a huge amount of job satisfaction. I played my own part in these investigations. I had skills which contributed to solving violent crime. But such visible reminders still sent the occasional chill down my spine.

‘Here, Trogg, have a look at what I’ve got!’

Dr Kevin Lee, our second-in-command pathologist, had returned from working in the Thames Valley during the last hour of my working day, as he tended to do. His long journey in from St Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey, Surrey, took several hours.

A joy to be around, Dr Kevin Lee (left) and Dr (now Professor) Stephen Cordner (right).

On this occasion I was just taking off my white lab coat and collecting my motorcycle helmet from my locker, ready to make my half-hour journey home by motorbike. But that would have to wait.

‘I need your help,’ Kevin said, setting down the extremely large white ‘brain bucket’ he was carrying.

As the chief scientific officer, I was used to receiving anatomical items by bucket. A bucket usually indicated a messy job. This particular job would turn out to be a highly unexpected departure from any of my more routine laboratory processes. To say it required skill and anatomical knowledge would be an understatement.

Inside the bucket was the extremely mangled head of a female murder victim. There was no body, just the decapitated head. The body, with the head still attached, had been placed on a railway track the previous afternoon, with the apparent intention of it being run over by a train, rendering the face unrecognizable.

The railway track in question was located on a busy link between Surrey and London, and in due course an Intercity 125 smashed into it at great speed, causing catastrophic damage that had rendered the face almost unrecognizable. Almost, but not quite. This was the basis for the unexpected task I was about to be given that evening.

What remained of the external structure and skin of the head was a mass of large splits and shreds. The exterior of the head itself was covered in blood, and very little content remained inside, as any remnants of brain had already been preserved at the mortuary for further scientific reference. The skull had mostly been shattered upon impact with the train and some of the more splintered remnants had also been left at the mortuary for observation at a later time. So the head I was looking at resembled a bloody, shredded, mangled empty sack … and Kevin wanted us to reconstruct it.

He was well known in our department for his pranks and, looking at the head, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was another of them, but I automatically knew he meant business. His request had a highly practical and necessary purpose. Once we had a more recognizable structure, the idea was to photograph it so that the injuries could be recorded, given a description and allocated a numbering system which could be used as a reference. From this, a post-mortem report could be produced for a murder trial – assuming the police investigation ever reached that point. This would depend on whether it was possible to find any further evidence, or indeed witnesses, and whether the police could track down the perpetrator. Meanwhile, I found myself involved in one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

First, we cleaned the skin. Then I realized we needed a base on which to mount the head, so that there was something solid to hold the scalp in place while we rebuilt it. For this, I used one of my larger laboratory beakers. Then I decided that a brain would be useful as a prop around which to shape the head. In a forensic department there were always items of this nature around, and I was able to locate an old one fairly easily in one of the tubs on the shelving behind me in the cutting room. Fresh brains are very soft and yielding, but the brain I chose had been pickled in formalin, the preserving liquid I routinely used at work, for a very long time, so it had a certain firmness, which created the ideal full and oval shape required for our purposes. We began to manoeuvre it into the cavity inside the head, wrapping the deflated remains around it as best we could.

Having got the overall shape of the head, we now began work on the more specific features of the face, painstakingly stitching together the remaining pieces of skin strip by strip, like a grisly patchwork quilt.

This was an unnervingly ghoulish task, but the fact that Kevin and I were very much at ease with each other meant that it was not completed without a lot of banter. There’s no doubt that, to an outsider, we had the appearance of your typical mad scientists. There we were, at night, in a tiny, artificially lit lab surrounded by a dark and deserted larger laboratory, laughing and joking as we reconstructed a human head. It started out as surreal and became rather macabre as the identity of the deceased emerged. Let’s face it, it’s not every day you are asked to rebuild someone’s head. If we hadn’t kept each other’s spirits up, I suspect we would have become increasingly sad at the thought of the victim’s unfortunate end.

It took several hours, but in due course we were able to observe, with a sense of great satisfaction, that every last strand of flesh had been joined up. All we could go on was skin, as no bony remnants of the skull remained, but we had produced a recognizable face. Certainly one which would have been identifiable from a photograph.

I then proceeded to take shots of the head with the departmental camera, capturing every injury from every possible angle. These photographs, if necessary, would accompany Kevin’s post-mortem report, which he wrote the next day.

Once I had finished the photography, Kevin made notes on all the injuries. One was due to the metal bar that acts to clear any debris from the line before the train runs into it. The forehead had received a particularly hard blow from this, making a very deep laceration. Kevin’s notes also included the direction of impact, and he took and recorded measurements. This took at least another hour. We finally totally immersed the head in a large specimen container filled with formaldehyde, which would preserve it as evidence pending any future murder trial.

I was still reeling from the experience the following day. It had been particularly macabre, even in my line of work, and had the quality of a dream about it – though not one you would welcome if it returned to you in the middle of the night.

Amazingly, further police investigation did bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion. Very quickly, the husband of the murder victim became of interest to the police, not least for being the person closest to her. His position as prime suspect solidified when a neighbour came forward to report seeing him in the vicinity of the railway line on which the body had been discovered. The railway, in fact, bordered both their properties.

At his subsequent trial, the husband was found guilty of his wife’s murder and received a sentence of life imprisonment.

Chapter 2

Museum of the Macabre

Even today, I still regularly ask myself: ‘Why do I perform such a gruesome job?’

It all started quite by chance, when I was 15, which was then the school-leaving age, and I bumped into a friend who lived a couple of hundred yards along my road in Belvedere, north Kent.

‘Hi, Shovel, how’s your job going?’

In my neck of the woods, everybody had a nickname and I knew that Shovel had been working for three years at Guy’s Hospital’s medical school.

‘Well, Trogg, I’m really enjoying it. I’m working in the biology department at the moment and it’s really interesting.’

Immediately fired up by what I was hearing, I joked, ‘Got any jobs going?’

‘Yes, actually, the museum next door’s looking for a student technician.’

‘Ooh, well, put a word in for us, then. I love biology. I wouldn’t mind getting into something like that.’

Within days, the museum’s curator had given my friend the task of offering me a date to attend for interview. I hastily borrowed my eldest brother’s smart suit and took the half-hour train journey into London.

I knew I really wanted the job even before I’d walked through the grand square colonnade of the hospital, down the stone steps, across the large square park, with its flower borders and ancient trees, and over to the far right-hand corner, to a magnificent building covered in ivy, which took on a range of vivid dark pinks, even in the spring. This was the medical school.

The imposing view greeting us every morning at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. For much of the year, the frontage was enveloped in beautiful fuchsia-coloured ivy.

I walked up the steep, wide, white limestone steps, flanked at the bottom by two old-fashioned tall black lampposts, to the imposing entrance. This was where it became real.

The heavy wooden double doors opened onto a cool, grand, marble-floored entrance hall. On a series of pedestals stood a variety of marble and bronze busts of Guy’s most famous surgeons and physicians, serving as a reminder, for staff and visitors alike, of the eminence of the place they were about to enter, and the part these alumni had played in its history.

As there was no reception area or security officer at that time, I simply took a route to the right, following the signs to the Gordon Museum.

Once inside the museum office, I was introduced to the chief technician, Joe, who had been given the responsibility of interviewing me. Friendly and personable, he was the ideal person for the task. He tried hard to sell the job to me, although I didn’t need any persuasion.

At the end of the interview I was taken to the third floor of the medical school to meet the museum’s curator, Professor Keith Simpson, who was a slim, athletic, balding man with a very professional, respectful ‘old school’ manner, who called everyone by their surname.

‘Aaah, Tremaiiiin, pleased to meet you.’

The job was mine, and a start date was agreed for a few weeks later: 15 October 1964.

I have no idea where my interest in medical science came from, but it certainly wasn’t from my parents. During the Second World War my father had been a welder, working on tanks and military equipment in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, south-east London, and my mother had driven a crane, loading and unloading at the Erith docks. Later, they worked at our local pub, the Leather Bottle, while my two elder brothers and I lived a free-range existence, making camps and climbing trees in the ancient woodland behind Lesnes Abbey, at Abbey Wood, which dated back to 1178.

Now, on my first day in the job, the presentation of my first white laboratory coat brought home the fact that I was a student technician, joining the three technicians already working in the museum. There was actually no job description for me; my working day would be dictated by Joe as it unfolded.

It was on only my second day of work that I was asked to go over to the mortuary. To be honest, I found the idea really rather daunting. I was still only 15 and hadn’t had many opportunities to experience anything significantly challenging, especially on an emotional level, and I didn’t quite know how I felt about this type of environment and how it might affect me. I went over to the mortuary in great trepidation.

If you were to imagine someone dressed for the role of working with the dead, chief mortician Len Beaney would be that person. As I shook his proffered hand, he seemed to embody what I had expected. A very short man in his early fifties, he was dressed in a black suit and tie, beneath which was a crisp white shirt. You could see your face in his highly polished black shoes. His style of clothing seemed to have come straight from the undertaker’s.

I had never seen a dead body before, especially not one on which a post-mortem had already been conducted and which was therefore open, awaiting some final stitching before being slid back into a fridge. I was intimidated just by that sight alone, but Len went to great lengths to make my visit to the mortuary so involving that my aversion and fear were quickly replaced by overwhelming interest.

Of the four bodies in view, one in particular stood out: that of a boy of only about 10 years of age, who had been run over by a lorry. At not many years older myself, I felt such sadness – and alarm, because of the degree of flattening to his head. Tyre marks were still present down one side of his face. The whole image was a stark reminder of the worst scenarios that can befall a child, and his devastated family. But I have to credit Len with making the whole experience a far less harrowing one for me than it could have been.

One thing I later learned about Len came as a total surprise. He showed me a card game he was attempting to sell and explained that he was a bit of an inventor in his spare time and had had a degree of success in selling similar games to a range of companies. I wouldn’t have guessed that this quiet and unassuming man, with his sombre and formal way of dressing, was a highly creative inventor. If ever there was a reminder never to judge a book by its cover, it was Len Beaney.

I would spend seven years, in total, in the Gordon Museum, an awe-inspiring square structure housed to the right of the medical school. It covered several floors – both upwards from the entrance level and downwards into the basement – linked by a central spiral staircase, with large skylights in the ceiling aiding the huge glass chandeliers in lighting the interior. It was divided into four square areas running off this central staircase. The higher floors consisted of walk-around galleries complemented by a series of small square glass tiles in the flooring and decorative curved wrought-iron railings, inset into which was an occasional official Guy’s crest. The basement floor was more like a standard museum.

Shelving along the galleries housed...