Expert Witness

We explore a case that encompassed the biggest fingertip search in British history and required the help of a digital forensics expert to apprehend the suspect. But it would take the skill of a forensic pathologist to secure a conviction. In the summer of 2018, the body of 13-year-old Lucy McHugh was found in woodland near a sports centre in Southampton. Lucy had died after a frenzied knife attack, and police quickly honed in on a suspect, a 24-year-old acquaintance of Lucy called Stephen Nicholson. Police were able to use CCTV to track Lucy's movements on the night of her murder, but were unable to ascertain exactly what happened when she entered the woods. Hoping to fill in those blanks, they turned to forensic pathologist Basil Purdue, whose evidence offered a unique insight into the cold-blooded nature of the crime and provided pivotal evidence to the jury to secure Nicholson's life sentence for Lucy's murder. In our next case, three forensic specialists are called in to help Police Scotland identify a murder victim and uncover the killer, after a decomposed male body is found in an abandoned warehouse in Glenrothes. Soil specialist Professor Lorna Dawson and mite expert Alejandra Perotti were tasked with giving police a time frame on how long the body may have lain at the warehouse. Meanwhile, facial recognition expert Caroline Wilkinson provided a profile for the man, allowing the police to make a public appeal for a name. Caroline's work paved the way for the identification of 60-year-old Ean Coutts. From here, the police investigation was able to connect an associate of Ean to the murder and convict David Barnes for this horrendous crime.