Crime Scene Forensics

This programme contains some strong language and scenes viewers may find disturbing.

Forensic science is at the forefront of every major criminal investigation in the UK.

Detective work and science in general are very much the same.

With exclusive access to a scenes of crime unit,

our cameras go behind the police tape.

The reason that forensic science is so powerful is that it's almost impossible

to argue with what we've got.

We follow the trail of evidence as the forensic experts piece together the hidden puzzle,

unlock the secrets of the crime, and get inside the minds of criminals.

Where we're standing now is where the shot's gone in from.

We see how science and detective work come together.

Our victim got a good beating in here, and was lucky he didn't die.

To bring the guilty to justice.

'Move forward, please, move forward.'

PHONE RINGS

'Police, emergency. What's happened?'

'Someone's shot the front and back of my house with a gun.'

'Right, OK, when did that happen?'

'Just now, literally a couple of seconds ago.'

'And explain to me why you think it was a gun. What's actually happened?'

'Well, there's a big blast hole through my front door, might be one to look at(!)'

'OK, and you think it was the front and the back of your house?'

'Yeah, the front door is completely obliterated. Fucking bastards.

'I've got two children in the house, do you know what I mean?

'This is fucking ridiculous. It ain't got nothing to do with us.'

-'Are you OK?'

-'Yeah.

I'm not to touch anything, am I? Just leave it exactly how it is, yeah?'

-'No, just leave it as it is.'

-'OK.'

-'OK.'

Within minutes of the call being made, police arrive at the house.

They're closely followed by officers

from the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Scientific services unit.

It's around about quarter past six on Saturday morning,

and I've been called out to reports

that someone's shot into someone's house,

so I'm here, in Luton, at this hour in the morning.

Let's see what we've got.

Just getting protective clothing on,

largely so that we don't take any of our fibres or any bits of evidence

that we've picked up at other crime scenes into this crime scene.

This is the fourth shooting in Luton that Mark and his team have had to investigate in the last two months.

You can see in the front door of the house, there's a very large hole.

It's consistent with someone having shot a shotgun into that house.

We're thinking about what sort of parts

would have been left behind from firing that shot.

Shotguns are unique amongst weapons

because when fired, they leave distinctive clues behind.

This is the sort of damage I'd expect to see from a shotgun

that's been fired, probably from around about the pavement,

thereabouts.

Basically, what you have is a column of pellets

that's exiting the barrel of the gun, roughly the size and shape of my finger.

All it would have needed is someone to be stood behind or walking past the front door

at the time the shot went in, and they would have got almost all of the shot from that shotgun cartridge,

plus bits of the door flying as shrapnel, you know...

So yeah, someone could have died here.

When the shot exits the gun barrel, it begins to scatter.

The further away from the target, the wider the scatter of pellets.

Looking closely at the hole in the door,

there is more of an angle to the shot than we'd first seen,

so it is possible that we've actually got someone shooting from over here.

With an idea of where the gunman may have been standing in the attack,

Mark goes on to comb the muddy ground in search of footprints.

Over here, we've got...

..a footwear pattern.

So we'll capture that, as it's got some potential to be

the person who's been here and done what they've done,

and we'll see if it continues further up,

because we know another gunshot's gone into the back of the house.

The size of the damage to the patio doors is enough to give a good idea of where the gun was fired from.

So what we've got on the back French doors, here, of the house,

is a very different pattern, but still a shotgun.

Whereas on the front door, we had a quite close discharge into the doors,

here, the shot has gone in from quite a long way away.

So what's happened is you've gone from a little ball of shot, like my fist, coming towards the door,

to that ball spreading out and becoming quite a big cone

and, as you can see from the damage, it's a cone about a metre across,

so where we're standing now is pretty much where the shot's gone in from.

Yeah, you've got someone coming down here, officer.

I have been at scenes where we've had three lines,

three cordoned lines, all with that tape up,

and still people have gone through and got in to the inner cordon

because they're just...

..people.

The nature of the shooting suggests it was designed to send the occupants of the house a warning.

We're aware that it's feuds that generally spark these sort of incidents,

so it's about either recovering money,

or making someone do something that the other side want them to do.

If you wanted to kill someone with a shotgun, it would be very easy to do so.

What they're doing here is actually damaging the property

as a scare tactic.

The team move inside the house to look for any physical evidence related to the attack.

What they want is the actual gunshot that was fired.

What we've got here are some of the pellets

that have been discharged by the shotgun.

We'll take a representative sample of pellets,

just so the scientists can give us some information about the type of cartridge that's been used.

We're looking for a piece that comes out from the shotgun cartridge called a wadding.

It should be in there somewhere.

We need to try and find that, because that could be something we could link to the gun, potentially.

The wadding is a light packing inside the gun cartridge

that separates the shot from the gun powder.

When a gun is fired, the wadding follows the shot out of the barrel.

If found, it can often be matched to the weapon it was fired from.

We've just found the wadding.

It's come through the door,

so we have got that, it could tell us the type of ammunition that's been used,

if it's been fired from a modified gun, so one that's had the barrel shortened by sawing it off,

a sawn-off shotgun.

The little burrs that are created in sawing off the barrel

will leave marks on the wadding as it comes out of the end,

and those marks are unique to that barrel, to that gun,

so we're hopeful that maybe it is a sawn-off shotgun that's been used

and we'll be able to link that wadding to that gun.

CID now have a race against the clock to track the culprits down

and stop them disposing of the weapon.

Back over at Luton police station,

every available officer is assisting in the hunt for the gunman.

Because a firearms incident in the town

has got potential to be really worrying for the vast majority of people,

then we need to put the right level of resourcing into it.

The suspects have been classified as armed and dangerous,

so a firearms team have been placed on standby to make any arrests.

It's not long before the police get a tip-off.

We've had some information that has directly implicated someone.

If this person can be found by the police,

Mark's forensic evidence from the scene will be crucial to the investigation.

It's always very important to me to get the person that did it.

Because ultimately that's what I'm paid for, but also that's the real kudos that you get

out of doing any of these jobs.

Otherwise, why do them?

The 62 officers who work at the Beds & Herts unit are on call 24/7.

And there's no let-up today as a call comes in about a vicious attack.

There's a man in the underpass at Crawley Green Road who's being attacked.

The police get down there, and there is a man

and he's very badly injured.

He's scooted off to the hospital at Luton, and is being cared for.

He's got serious head injuries.

He appears to have been burnt with some sort of liquid.

He's also, as we investigate further, got a stab wound.

And various other injuries about his person.

Assisted by fellow officer Caroline Morgans,

Mark heads straight to the crime scene.

A bedsit, close to where the victim was found,

is reported to be covered with blood.

The essence of our job is looking at that crime scene

and saying, what has gone on here, can we show through the blood that's at the scene

who's been attacked and who's been responsible for it?

The reason that forensic science is so powerful

is that it's almost impossible to argue with what we've got.

There's a trail of blood from the pavement

where the victim was found leading into the building.

There's a spot of blood on the doorstep here.

The first thing a Scenes of Crime Officer, a SOCO,

does at a crime scene is to visually map out the area.

First things first. Let's see what we've got.

Then we'll start to put ourselves

in the mindset of the persons that have been in here and what's gone on.

You've got to start by finding all the things to be found.

Mark is looking to isolate the areas

that immediately stand out as hotspots.

In the corner of the tiny one-room flat,

there's an armchair covered in blood.

A small table is littered with potential evidence.

And on the floor, a broken kitchen chair, also covered in blood.

Of the three main hotspots, Mark starts with the kitchen sink,

which is crammed with seemingly innocent household items.

It's possible they may have been used as weapons.

We know our victim has a nasty injury on the top of his head, and there's another one slightly further back.

And they're circular, or at least part of a circle.

And if you look here,

at the bottom of this oven cleaner, you can see it's covered in blood.

And also, you can see, it's slightly deformed.

These aerosol cans are meant to take a lot of internal pressure,

so they don't buckle easily.

And to make it buckle like that,

that's taken quite some physical force to do that.

One of our initial queries was, where did he get injured?

Well, it's looking increasingly like he got injured in here.

One of his other injuries is a very sharply angled triangle,

a mark on his chest.

Well, the iron's missing its base plate.

If we can find that, that just further adds

to what we're already seeing,

evidence that it happened here.

And there looks like spattered blood. Can you see right up inside there?

So it looks like whatever's gone on

has continued to go on after that bit's come off.

And then, the caustic soda bottle, covered in blood.

Our victim has got burns, and they don't appear to be burns

from a flaming source, they appear to be chemical burns.

And caustic soda is corrosive

and very, very nasty if you get it on your skin.

The extreme violence of the crime

has left an overwhelming amount of potential evidence.

It may take days to gather it all.

On the other side of Luton, there's been a dramatic development

in the hunt for the gunmen involved in the shooting.

Two men wanted in connection with the attack have been tracked down.

They have been named as brothers Zahir and Waseem Baig.

The firearms team is closing in.

After giving up peacefully, both brothers are arrested

on suspicion of carrying out the shooting.

In the bedsit,

the team have spent several hours sifting through the room.

More blood on that.

In fact, they've gone as far as to break it into parts

to make it sharp to make it more of a weapon.

It's significant that we're getting no comment

from the people that have been detained.

The questions they can put in further interviews are around

"Why is the broom handle broken in pieces, with blood all over it?

"Why is the iron broken in pieces, with blood all over it?

Whilst the people in custody don't have to answer,

they don't have to incriminate themselves,

if they chose not to comment at that stage,

well, what does that say to a jury?

There's a silver, curved bar over in the far corner

in the area of all that blood over there.

And it's apparent that it's the missing leg from this chair.

That's got some really interesting blood patterns on it.

This chair, we're going to take away

to have a look at in the laboratory,

because we could be looking at fingerprints,

we could be looking at DNA, we could be looking at blood pattern.

So it looks as if this has been deliberately unscrewed

and then taken and used as a weapon.

The SOCO team keep up a constant dialogue

with the detectives heading up the case,

as they are not allowed inside until the team

have gathered all potential evidence.

When we're doing this, we don't let anyone else in to the crime scene.

We don't want to contaminate it

before we've got the forensic science evidence out.

You've got to be mindful that there could be stuff here

that could let the detectives

go and follow a line of enquiry that's new

and could lead them to something good.

So whilst we're going around poking, looking for blood

and things like that, we'd also be looking to see

if there's something that will give us a name for someone who might have been here,

or might give a reason why this has happened.

It looks as though any household appliance

that came to hand may have been used as a weapon.

Now I've taken it out of the wall, I can see that there's blood

on one of the pins. So this has clearly been plugged into that wall

after our assault started

or, you know, after our victim started bleeding.

The fact that it's now bare ends of the wire

just makes it even more sinister.

Mark is still looking for the knife

that may have been used to wound the victim.

Well, it hasn't got obvious blood on it, has it?

It's not the one that's been used to stab our man in the chest.

Mark and Caroline have already identified

and catalogued 17 pieces of evidence.

But the sheer volume of material means the team will return tomorrow to continue their investigation.

We've had a good day.

Got a load of exhibits, a lot of very good exhibits.

Time now, really, to take it back to the police station.

Some of it, we'll take in the laboratory

and start work on it, and the rest of it, we'll use

with the detectives to see what the detainees have got to say about it.

A policeman will stand guard at the property overnight.

At the Baig brothers' house, a major search is underway.

CID have made a discovery in the boot of a car on the driveway,

and SOCO Ruth Precious has been called in to investigate.

We think we may have some firearms in the boot of the vehicle,

but until they've been photographed, they obviously can't be recovered.

I can't recover them if they're loaded.

So we have to give the firearm officers the equipment

to actually do the recovery.

Lying in the boot is a Beretta 12 gauge shotgun,

-designed for shooting pheasants.

-Excellent news.

This one has been modified for use by the underworld,

with both its barrels crudely sawn off.

Alongside the gun is a plastic carrier bag, filled with cartridges.

When it goes off to the laboratory,

they'll be able to say when it was fired

and whether that matches the other incident that we've got connected.

I believe this morning,

the actual damage it did to the front door was quite,

quite bad, so it could have been a person

and it'd have been a body we were going to,

not just a recovery of a firearm. So it's nice to get one off the streets.

Whilst the gun is sent to the lab, the car it was found in

is sent to the police station for fingerprinting.

What I'm going to do is a fingerprint examination

of the vehicle, starting off with the boot area.

Now that all the DNA sampling has been done,

I can do the fingerprinting.

We always do the DNA examination first,

so we don't contaminate the DNA with our fingerprint powder.

As you can see, the vehicle's quite dirty, so that kind of limits

our chances of finding fingerprints, but it's always still worth a try.

Fingerprint powder is made of aluminium dust.

Effective on a variety of surfaces, the fine metal particles

attach themselves to the ridges of even the faintest fingerprint.

There's some ridge detail in that print there,

so what I'm going to do is lift that.

I can see some characteristics in that mark there,

so it's still worth me lifting it

and I'll let the fingerprint experts make the decision.

It's always quite rewarding when you find a little bit of evidence,

knowing that it might identify somebody.

It's like playing a game of Cluedo, but it's actually the real thing.

The suspects Zahir and Waseem Baig

are offering no information to the police.

This means that Ruth needs to try

and prove the Baig brothers handled the weapon.

Ruth starts swabbing down the gun

and its case, looking for any traces of DNA.

Whoever pulled the trigger will leave their DNA on here,

but also fingerprints.

Maybe more than one person may have handled it.

Vijay has finished dusting the car, and has now moved on

to testing the cartridges

and the carrier bags they were found in.

The whole purpose of fingerprinting these carrier bags

and DNA swabbing those cartridges is to try and determine

who's had contact with the carrier bags and the ammunition.

It's always quite reassuring when you get things like this

being submitted for examination.

You know you've actually taken these cartridges off the street,

and that firearm as well.

Potentially, they could have been used for anything.

The SOCO team have carried out as much work

as they can on the retrieved items, with only limited results.

For more definite answers,

items are sent to the high-tech scientific services lab

at Police HQ in Welwyn Garden City.

Over 6,000 items of evidence are examined here

every year, making it one of the busiest in the world.

Technician Jamie Haworth sets to work

by putting the gun in a fuming chamber.

We place a small amount of superglue in this foil tray.

The heating plate will warm up and vaporise the superglue.

The fuming process relies

on the vapours released from heating the glue

spreading around the chamber.

The sticky fumes then attach themselves to any sweat or grease

left behind in a fingerprint.

You're always fully aware in the lab what part we play

within an investigation,

and how important our jobs are every single day.

There's some ridges here,

so we'll have to have a closer look.

Ridges are the contours that create a unique fingerprint.

Any mark Jamie finds needs to have sufficient detail within the ridges

for them to be of any use in making a positive ID.

It could be, obviously,

that somebody's touched it,

but they've probably touched it so many times

that any kind of ridge detail has just been swamped.

OK, so the gun's negative. There's nothing on that.

So the best chance of linking the Baigs to the shooting

lies with the gun case,

or the carrier bags the ammunition was stowed in.

Jamie has subjected both to the superglue chamber for treatment.

Seeing some marks that could be prints,

Jamie uses a high intensity magnetic laser light known as a quasar.

The light creates a fluorescent effect

under which even the faintest trace of a fingerprint will glow.

There's kind of a series of five or six fingerprints.

You can see that there's some ridge detail,

with some characteristics and beginnings of a pattern.

The vital find is photographed,

so that it can be sent to an independent examiner.

Richard Luckcraft is one of the UK's leading dactyloscopists,

or fingerprint experts. His job

is to test the lab prints

against those provided by the Baig brothers to see if there's a match.

It's an old-fashioned machine, but very effective

in that it does the job.

The technology he is using may appear antiquated,

but the results mean that it remains

at the forefront of any forensic investigation.

No two fingerprints are the same.

Computer evidence for fingerprints is inadmissible in court.

A positive fingerprint identification

still has to be made by eye.

We're just looking for the quality of the characteristics.

As soon as we're satisfied

that the ridge characteristics agree with, are in the same position,

the same relationship to each other,

in both the mark and the print, then we're happy,

we're satisfied it's an identification.

No-one else in the world has this type of formation of characteristics.

Yep. I'm satisfied that that's an identification.

Richard's work will be checked by two further independent experts,

as a confirmed fingerprint on an illegal weapon

is enough to send someone to jail.

He passes his findings to the detectives leading the investigation

who are now confident Zahir Baig has handled the gun.

Clearly now what we have, evidentially, is that

Zahir Baig is in contact with the bag that held the ammunition

and the gun in the case, or the case that held the gun.

What we need to prove now is that gun is responsible for discharging the round

cos then we can prove not only possession of a prohibited weapon,

we can also prove their involvement in discharging a firearm

with, you know, intent to endanger life,

so it is a very important step still in the inquiry.

GUNSHOT

Dr Philip Alexander is a forensic firearms expert.

With over 25 years' experience, he's worked on over 5,000 cases.

Detective work and science in general are very much the same.

He links ammunition and casings from a crime scene

to the guns that fired them.

No two weapons will ever be the same.

The test on the range is designed to prove that the wadding

found on the crime scene has the same markings as the wadding

left behind from any cartridge fired in the lab.

At this point you might want to turn the volume down on your instrument

to prevent any damage.

These are on laboratory ammunition fired in the case gun.

Stand back. Firing.

GUNSHOT

And there's the fired plastic wad that was part of the cartridge.

The theory is that the sawn-off barrel of the weapon

places tiny unique tear marks in the fabric of the wadding

as it passes out of the barrel

and could be used to prove there is a direct match.

Recovered from the crime scene itself were these four items.

Two 12-gauge plastic cup wads

and two samples from separate locations

of impact-damaged lead shot pellets.

You can see that we have a particular type of 12-gauge wadding,

and I've examined these cartridges

and I have noted that this one has that type of wadding loaded within it

and it's a very unusual cartridge because it's a tracer cartridge.

It contains a single tracer bulb.

Tracer cartridges are often used as a training aid for clay-pigeon shooting.

The tracer bulb creates a visual trail when the gun is fired,

enabling the marksman to perfect his shot.

Because I had never seen this before in a criminal cartridge case,

the fact the materials recovered from the crime scene

are the same as the materials recovered in this cartridge,

that is evidentially significant.

The evidence against the Baig brothers appears to be overwhelming.

Both are charged with the attack and kept in custody.

In the bedsit case,

the forensic team are spending their second day in the flat.

Three suspects are now in custody.

Tenant Jennifer Collins, her friend Jackie Kerr

and her neighbour Barry Medlock.

The trio claim they had nothing to do with the attack

and that the victim came to the flat seeking first aid.

What we're hoping to achieve today is that

number one, we'll have been able to prove

whether the victim was assaulted in the flat at Crawley Green Road

or whether that's somewhere he's gone to after he's been attacked.

They need to work fast because the bedsit presents a health hazard.

There's a blue bottle that's come in

and they're attracted by the smell of the decaying blood.

And they'll actually start to lay their eggs very shortly, I would think.

Analysis of blood markings is one of the SOCO's key skills.

When blood is spilled, it can leave crucial evidence behind.

Not only relating to who the victim was, but how the attack evolved.

Someone with blood on their hands has put their hand against this door

and their hands, because it's got so much blood on it, has slipped.

That's why you've got these marks here.

So either it's our victim,

he's got blood on his hands, he's trying to escape,

he's stumbled, or perhaps it's an offender who's done the same thing,

who's slipped and put their hand against the door frame.

Swabs are taken of the door markings

for any DNA that may have been left behind.

The analysis moves onto other patches and specks of blood,

which are all around the room.

Mark is looking for what is known in the trade as blood-spatter patterns.

It would appear that that is a spatter pattern.

That's someone who's been bleeding already

and has then been repeatedly hit with something,

causing the blood to just flick off in spatters, just like that.

And hit on the wall in these characteristic sort of arcs.

On the previous visit,

Mark identified a chair with a leg broken off.

His theory is that the leg may have been used as a club

to beat the victim about the body and the head.

Looking at this sofa more and more,

that really looks to me like someone's head.

Given his injuries - he's got one stab wound here,

side of his left chest.

Most of the rest of it is his head,

and head wounds bleed really heavily, really quickly,

and so my judgement at the moment

is that that is where his head's been for quite a sustained attack.

The direction of the blood flying upwards and sideways across the wall

directly correlates to the way blood would spray

had repeated blows been rained upon the victim's head.

The DNA is certainly going to give them a lot of questions

that they've got to answer, as to why there's so much

of the victim's blood deposited - if it is the victim's blood -

on the wall in that pattern.

At the end of the day, our victim got a good beating in here

and was lucky that he didn't die,

so I'm satisfied that we've got a lot of evidence

that can help find out who did it.

Mark's hoping that now the delicate forensic evidence has been gathered

he can make a final search for the missing knife.

We're carrying on the bits we haven't already searched

because they were inaccessible or we didn't want to move other stuff.

Just seeing what we've got, really.

Well, that might be it.

It's a Stanley knife, down the side of the bed.

Shall we get a blood test?

It's not got a very long blade. It's a very sharp blade

and without the medical notes to say exactly how deep his stab wound is...

That would fit with some of the other wounds he's got,

particularly across his fingers.

We're trying to see whether the stains we can see on the blade,

that might be blood, are blood.

And that's indicating that there could well be blood on it.

So we'll package that up and send it off with the other exhibits

to the scientists, to see if we're right.

It's always good to find things that are useful to the inquiry.

Mark has spent two days painstakingly combing the bedsit

for clues and evidence.

He now has a comprehensive picture of what happened.

He thinks that the victim was attacked

while sat in the corner armchair.

There is evidence he was kicked and punched.

The attackers used a variety of clubs in the assault,

which left a series of distinctive blood patterns on the wall.

On top of this, the already bleeding victim was attacked

with a number of items Mark found by the sink.

He was beaten with the iron so hard that it broke,

battered with an aerosol can,

and whipped with a piece of flex.

At some point in the night-long ordeal the beatings turn to torture,

as the victim is covered with caustic soda

and then soaked in water from the kettle,

giving him severe chemical burns.

He was also slashed and stabbed

before being manhandled through the door and left in the road.

His life was saved when a passer-by called the emergency services.

It makes the hard work of the five or six hours we spend in here,

dressed like this, worthwhile.

It's now time for the detectives to make the best use of the evidence

and bring the case to court.

In the case of the intimidation shooting,

fingers were pointed immediately to the Baig brothers

but it was up to Mark and the SOCO team

to prove the brothers carried out the shooting.

The intended victim no longer lives at the address.

Although the weapon found in the Baigs' car was clean,

fingerprints on the gun case were proved be those of Zahir Baig,

and the unique markings on the cartridge wadding

found at the scene,

combined with the unusual tracer ammunition,

proved it was this same gun that had been used in the shooting.

A tip-off placed Waseem Baig at the scene

and faced with all the evidence, he pleaded guilty

to using the shotgun for intimidation,

and two other weapons charges.

He was sent to jail for five and a half years.

His brother Zahir also pleaded guilty to firearms charges

and was sentenced to five years.

Once the full forensic evidence was put to the three suspects

in the torture house,

only one, Barry Medlock, denied his part in the assault.

But he was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm with intent

by a jury at Luton Crown Court.

Tenant Jennifer Collins and her friend Jacky Kerr

both pleaded guilty to the sustained attack in the bedsit.

A judge said he was satisfied that Kerr had initiated the beating,

kicked, punched and clubbed the victim,

before pouring caustic soda and water over his head and body.

Kerr was sentenced to eleven and a half years in jail

for GBH with intent.

Collins was sentenced to six years and three months.

Medlock was given eleven years.

Though severely traumatised by the attack,

their victim recovered sufficiently from his injuries to give evidence.

In the past 12 months, the Beds and Herts SOCO team

have helped to crack more than 8,000 cases -

almost 20% of all crimes solved in the two counties.

It's always satisfying, as a scenes of crime officer,

to find that the evidence you picked up at that crime scene

and spent hours getting back

has ended up either making someone admit their guilt

or being found guilty.

It's bringing the scene to life for the jury the court,

so that they can understand, in simple terms,

exactly what's gone on and what we, the police,

say the person in the dock is accused of having done.

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