The folks at Planet Science love a bit of crime solving drama on
a Sunday night. We enjoy it so much that we got on the case to find
a real life crime scene investigator. Planet Science managed to get
an interview with Abi Carter.
Abi is the director of a forensic company based in Cardiff,
Wales. They have provided crucial evidence in many well known
cases, some that you may have heard about on the news!
Planet Science: Hello Abi! How are you? Tell us a bit
about your job and how you got into forensics.
Abi Carter: I am a forensic Archaeologist; I am
the person who digs up bodies that have been buried after they have
been murdered. This can be one grave or perhaps a large grave with
more than one person in it. In the UK, thankfully, we do not have
many buried bodies to discover so I decided I needed to have
another job in forensics that would keep me working every day. I
decided to set up my own business in 2008 called Forensic
Resources.
The folks at Planet Science love a bit of crime solving drama on
a Sunday night. We enjoy it so much that we got on the case to find
a real life crime scene investigator. Planet Science managed to get
an interview with Abi Carter.
Abi is the director of a forensic company based in Cardiff,
Wales. They have provided crucial evidence in many well known
cases, some that you may have heard about on the news!
Planet Science: Hello Abi! How are you? Tell us a bit
about your job and how you got into forensics.
Abi Carter: I am a forensic Archaeologist; I am
the person who digs up bodies that have been buried after they have
been murdered. This can be one grave or perhaps a large grave with
more than one person in it. In the UK, thankfully, we do not have
many buried bodies to discover so I decided I needed to have
another job in forensics that would keep me working every day. I
decided to set up my own business in 2008 called Forensic
Resources.
PS: What does your company do?
AC: It's a forensic science consultancy firm.
We work with solicitors every day who defend people. When a crime
is committed, the prosecution analyse a crime scene, they are the
people wearing the white suits. The evidence that they collect is
then sent to a laboratory where different people will analyse it
and produce a few reports.
The solicitors who are helping the defendant will then have to
have these reports re-analysed because they are not in favour of
their client. This is where Forensic Resources comes in. Our expert
scientists will review the reports and if necessary they will
re-analyse the evidence and write their own report. Both sides,
prosecution and defence, have a report each. Everyone then goes to
court and our experts explain their evidence to the jury.
PS: Wow, sounds like a lot of work, do you do it all
yourself or do you have a big team of different
scientists?
AC: I work with lots of scientists who are all
experts in different things such as DNA, fibres, fingerprints etc.
PS: From looking at your website, we saw that
you guys analyze a lot of different things. Is there one that
you find particularly clever? How does it work?
AC: I find handwriting and audio analysis very
interesting indeed. Handwriting analysis is looking at people's
signatures and handwriting to see if they have been forged by
someone trying to copy them on a contract for instance. It is very
intricate microscopic analysis and our expert also looks at forged
documents to see if someone has made a fake registration for things
like an MOT certificate for a car. The audio analysis is very
interesting because it can look at lots of different things. Our
expert can enhance phone call recordings or he can enhance the
video from CCTV footage perhaps. He can analyse anything that
involves video or audio, which covers a lot of information.
PS: Have you worked on any cases that we may have heard
of?
AC: We recently worked on the Raoul Moat case.
Our audio expert and our ballistics expert (gun expert) worked on
the noises that the guns made. Mr Moat was holding a shot gun,
which he shot himself with, and the police had taser shot guns. Our
experts were able to tell how many shots were fired and in what
order.
PS: Is working on such big cases as exciting as it is on
TV shows such as CSI, Waking the Dead and Bones?
AC: Every case is exciting for me because you
don't know what will come in and each one is so different. However,
it is far from Hollywood and is nothing like the TV programmes.
PS: How similar would you say the forensic work that is
portrayed on TV is to the real life stuff that you do?
AC: On the TV all the analysis happens in a few
minutes and the answers are always exact. This is not the case in
the real world. Some analysis can take weeks and sometimes it is
not a 'yes or no' answer - it has to be interpreted, which is where
the expert skills of our scientists come in. TV shows also portray
one expert who has many different skills. This is not the case for
experts in the UK because they have to be so highly skilled to work
for the courts that they can only be an expert in one
profession.
PS: What advice do you have for any budding forensic
scientists out there?
AC: Go to university or college and study a
science course and then if you want to take it further you can
apply that science to forensics by doing a Masters Degree. I did
Archaeology at Cardiff University and then Forensic Archaeology at
Bournemouth University. If you only study a forensic science degree
then it is harder to specialise later on. This way you can
specialise and then get into forensics, which is a more secure
route to a job, in my view anyway.
PS: Thanks Abi! And good luck with cracking all those
cases!