Murder Most Florid by Mark A. Spencer

Author:Mark A. Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Quadrille Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Several years ago, I was suffering from some self-doubt about my ability to do forensic casework. One of the more challenging things about what I do is that, in many respects, I’m never in familiar territory. Each case is very different. Not only are the awful things that people do to each other varied but the circumstances under which they occur are always unique. This scenario is amplified when the casework is outside of the built environment. This is simply because the natural world is very complex. The landscape and the plants that I work with are nearly always different in some way or another. This can lead to moments of uncertainty when approaching a new scene. I found myself feeling that there was an expectation that I was arriving, fully prepared and capable of resolving the burning issue that the investigating team needed investigating. And sometimes that led me to feel less than qualified to do the job. As is often the case, these sort of emotions are born of a degree of insecurity, because it can be very challenging to be surrounded by very experienced people, especially at a crime scene! Sophie very kindly and effectively told me that I was wrong to feel that way. She pointed out that most detectives will work on a serious crime involving landscape and plants only once or twice in their careers. Most serious crime happens in the built environment and most murder victims are found within a few days of their death at most. By the time that I was having my wobble in self-confidence, I had worked on around twenty serious crime cases of this nature, so, relatively speaking I was an old hand! As I have become more experienced, these feeling have waned, but I am careful to not allow them to be replaced by hubris. By degrees, over the last few years I have started to feel the odd wince when I experience something that I don’t feel is best practice. Part of the problem for most police forces and, to a lesser extent, some forensic service providers, is that because of the relative rarity of these sort of cases they are not always geared up to deal with them.

It came as quite a shock to me that many churchyards in England and Wales do not have accurate information on where the burials in their grounds are. This is not entirely surprising for those that are hundreds of years old but, for more recent burials, it is. In typical British style, the requirements concerning burial grounds are a patchwork of national law, Church of England tradition, local authority rules and the best practice of the many other secular and religious bodies. Ordinarily, only local authorities are required to maintain maps of burial grounds. This seems to me to be rather extraordinary and deeply unhelpful for those of us working on a criminal investigation.

Several years ago, a ‘cold case’, the murder of a teenager who was believed to

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