The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective sy aside of life, the average person is never exposed her I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. In part two of my chat with forensic pathologists Professor of Roger by Art, we discuss the murder of twenty one year old Jasmine Kor, who is buried alive, the horrors of the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Balley bombings.
We also talked about the work Roger does that prevents death and how Roger looks at the way we deal with death. Roger, You've seen so much death, and I was interested in a quote from yourself, and I'll just read it out and get you to comment on that if you could. I think that recognizing death as part of life, as a transition is really important. It's something we fail these days. We sanitize it. What do you mean by those quotes.
We're frightened of death nowadays? I mean we've always been frightened to death. But in the old days, I think there was a lot more acceptance of death as part of life. A lot of children died of diseases, and the bodies weren't just whisked away and you know, cremated. You'd lay the body out and have a wake. You'd celebrate the person's existence. In the nineteenth century leads to take photographs of the you, mum and dad dressed up and the baby dead in a coffin as a memento.
And that's not creepy. That is just remember, bring the person so that you've got some sort of token to take with you. Whereas we just we don't talk about it. We're more and more frightened of it. Whereas it is part of life, it's going to happen to us all. I went to a writer's Week in Adelaide, and they were talking about death and they just weren't getting it. And I just said, the last time I was in the tent as big as this, as hot as this, with as many bodies, it was Thailand, the tsunami, and
they're all dead, I said. And the tires had a very The monks would wander around the bodies at night, chanting, helping them on their paths. So there was an acceptance that they could actually commemorate these people, which is something we don't do.
And do you think that has a detrimental effect to the way we deal with death? And I think so.
I think it's just we're becoming more and more sanitized and more and more closed off. We're closing off from human interaction with our computers and social media. Just the I see people down the beach with their dog when I take my dog for a walk, and they've got headphones on. I mean, why not stand hard? You know, what's the point of being down there? And they're not. They're just focused on what they're listening to, probably your podcast.
Well, I was going to say, the one proviser there, if I catch kill this podcast, they're doing well, But yeah, I know what you're saying, and the fact that the sanitized it where we're more aware of death and now I look at it, it just gets push pushed away.
So in the work that you did, do you have your colleagues that would support support the people that you worked with, because I know in the homicide world sometimes I couldn't go home and talk about what we've seen or done that your colleagues you do brief Did you have that support from colleagues.
It's interesting. We were talking earlier just about how you deal with cases, and you know, I was saying, you focus on the science. I remember one case of a little boy who had been punched by the de facto boyfriend, and this fellow had actually videoed this little boy dying, that's how bad it was. But when I opened his abdomen, I got this stench of you know, rotting parisanaitis, and I brought tears in my eyes. I was just leaning over and I was sort of just I had to
actually put that behind me. I was seeing the big picture. I had to focus on what I was doing. And what had happened is that he'd been punched really forcefully and his intestines had ruptured, so they'd torn, so all the contents gets into the abdominal cavity causes this really vile inflammatory action, and so that was the smell and
talking to my colleagues as well. When I had Jasmine and I found all the soil and the upper airway, I called my colleagues in to have a look at it, and they still told me that they're shattered by just just seeing that. But we it's like soldiers in the trenches, like police. You know your colleagues know what you're going through, and you can talk to them. I went to see
a counselor after Jasmine. The manager said, you really need to get this scene too, because I was I was going to bed at night thinking over I was waking up in the morning and at the end of the council said, I said, well, you know, I just wanted some techniques of getting this out of my head. And she said, it's very difficult, isn't it. You told me something I don't know.
You've mentioned that Jazz main call and obviously it plays on you pretty heavily. Can you tell us about that case? The details of that case.
I can because it's gone through the courts, And he pleaded guilty. So she was a really lovely young Punjabi woman who's working in a nursing home and she'd had a relationship with a young Indian fellow and had told him very nicely that she liked him, but he wasn't the one for her, and so he just flipped out and the day before went to Bunnings on CTV footage buying cable ties a shovel. It was so well thought out,
was so stupid. He gave a mate his car with his phone in it to go south when he was kidnapping her from her workplace, tied up, put her in the boot, drove around for five hours. Yeah, and a lot of terror for her. Imagine what it was like five hours in the boot, and then took her up north and dug her grave and put her in it and buried her alive. It's most horrific thing that I've ever come across.
Yeah, I'm just comprehending what you've.
I'm outraged by it. Yeah, there were no drugs. She did never hit injury, so she was completely conscious.
The examination when you examined her body, did you find this out at the time.
Well, it's interesting because she had some cuts on the side of her neck that I thought, as I said, were the cause her death. But then we found the soil and yes.
It was just then the soul was in her.
In her right down into her, and she also swallowed some as well. It's the only time I've been to a sentencing because I didn't get a chance to see him in court because he pleaded guilty. So I wanted to actually just look at him and just see what sort of monster this was. And he looks so ordinary, He looks so bernal, you.
Know, and that's funny. But that can freak you out more than if you're looking for this monster.
I want to see Charles Manson, Yeah, that would have made you want to see that understandable.
Yeah, what is it about that particular case that stuck with you so heavily.
I think that she was just such a sweet, young, innocent She was over here, she only had a mum in India. She was staying with her uncles, so he would feel responsibility for it. Her mother's lost her only child. It's just there's nothing good about that story.
Now I can what can you say? She had come from India, But you did some interesting work again, horrific work stemming from a conference that you attended over in India and you came into contact with someone about the acid attacks on women in India.
Yeah, pret Core is a she's a PhD lawyer, academic and she co founded the Lasmi Foundation, which is a foundation for acid attack victims. And acid attacks are very common in India. Acid so furry gasid particularly is very cheap. They use it in the cleaning drains, they use it for cleaning equipment. And it's usually a spurned lover or a jealous male and to get his revenge, he throws acid on these young women's faces. Only four percent of
them die, but they're completely disfigured. They often go blind because their eyes have been burnt. They can't breathe because their nose is gone. They can't hear because the ear canals are gone. They may have tremendous deformity, so they can't speak or eat properly. They look horrific. So this person has condemned them to a life of suffering pain
medical procedures. Sometimes their families shun them because they can't afford to support them, or they just don't want them as part of the family.
Shun the victim.
I wanted to do a study with Navpret on the suicide rate in these women, but of course there's no data there. But what these organizations are doing, like the Laxmi Foundation, they've got a Shiro's Cafe in Agra. These young women actually front the cafe. They serve and they work there and they put themselves right out in front
of you know, it's remarkable. I did meet the young woman need To who was the subject of a film as a director in Melbourne, who did this film called Geta because kneed To, Her sister and her mother were asset attacked by her father because there were no boys in the family and knit Too's got tremendous scarngh a very poor vision, but it's interesting. Aw for about half an hour with her, you don't see the scars.
You know.
Resilience is a word that's abused. She is one of the most resilient people I've known. And again it comes back to why you do forensic pathology. It's such a privilege to be able to meet with these people and to try and help. So what Gravpret and I do is we've written a number of papers for the medical community on asset attacks on dowry deaths, you know, people being murdered for their dowries, on child labor, all sorts
of sort of human rights abuses that occurring in India. Now, what right do I have to do to do that? Navpret's got the information and we work together very well disseminating it, letting people.
Know, okay, to get that get that story out again. Preventative And how prevalent is it?
Like extremely prevalent. There are thousands of cases of this in Pakistan and Bangladesh and India, and it happens all over the world. It's in the UK it's called face melting and it's often often rival gangs who do it to each other. So bloke, So it's not it doesn't have that sort of sexual element.
No, it's brutal.
It's it's a palling.
The fact that it's happening over in India. So prevalent there is it almost a cultural thing that the education you've you've got to change the narrative.
That's exactly right. And what navpreta since they go around the schools and she once sent me a text and it would I like to write a paper about menstruation? So I texted back in two pico seconds. No, but then she started telling me that you eighteen percent of women in India have access to sanitary products. They're using newspapers and leaves, and so we wrote that paper to draw attention to it so that the authorities can then
do thing. I mean, the boys and girls don't have separate toilets, but they are going to the schools and they're trying to educate the youth, because that's the way to go about just treating people with respect and giving people a go.
Roger, where do you find the time and the passion to pursue these things?
Well, I don't sleep, okay, well's yeah, no, I've worked out. Actually recently, I've worked more than sixty hours a week for four decades. I'm a bit tired.
You can happen that after we've finish. Happened that. But look, if you're doing a job that you're passionate about, it's not like working.
It's not working. That's what my boss is to say. If they pay you for doing stuff you like, then you know you win.
Have there been any good role models that you've learned a lot from.
A couple not pathologists actually, but my first mentor in Ottawa when I was training in pathology was a blow called Irving Dartik. I did research term with him and he said, you know what I want is I want my students to do better than me, and he meant that. And another fellow Grant Sutherland, he's a geneticist. He climbed the fragile extremee. I personally think he was in line for a Nobel prize. But once he had achieved what he wanted to achieve, he retired and started up a
small farm. A man very happy with himself. But also just shows you you don't have to be toxic to get to the top. You know, if you treat people properly, you can still mentor people and encourage people. And that's the way, and that's those two are being great.
It's good to have those type of role models or people that you can learn things from. What's the messaging you give when you're teaching people that are starting out in the field that you're worked in. What's the type of message you would pass.
On give up now you've got a chance. No, I tell them that it's if you're going to do You've only got one shot at life. And so you know, you've got to do stuff that you enjoy doing, and that's important. I mean, it may be flower ranging, if it's important to you and you do it well, excellent. My boss's retired now in forensics, so he hadn't written a paper in his life, but he's a very good fisherman, and so I respected his fishing prowss.
You know.
So it doesn't matter what you do, just as long as you do it with enjoyment.
Is compassion an important part of the type of work that you do.
I think, yes, you've got to have credibility and you've got to have compassion. If you don't feel the need to help people, then you should be in something else. And I think this is part of the problem with medicine. It's one of the reasons I got out of clinical medicine. It's becoming a bit of a factory, you know, to make a few extra bucks to put your kids from your third family through private school and buy another Mercedes. You well, not not using caricat.
I understand exactly what you're saying, but credibility and compassion, you do need that combination. Because I think we've all gone to get medical advice and there's someone that they've got the academic skills, they've got the science, but the delivery of the message is yeah, it's not what I need. If someone's are the important part talking about their health or their future, you need someone that's got the compassion
understanding then can deliver the message. Because I think the days are going where we put the same for policing, but for doctors, where they're put on the pedestal and we never question. You go see your local doctor growing up and Okay, that's what the doctor said, that's what you do. But it's readily available on the internet that doctor Google. Well, doctor Google diagnosed yourself, so they can question. But you need that communication skill.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm going to talk about the two thousand and four tsunami, which Asian tsunami. I remember it was a horrific, horrific day and hundreds of thousands of people were killed as a result of that. What was your role in responding to that.
I didn't think i'd be asked to go, but I went in the second rotation, so I was there in the second week. And essentially because of the AFP's experience with Australian Federal Police experience with the balley bombings. The ties were working with them. The ties were excellent. They really did an amazing job. But essentially, teams would come
over basically the body to be brought in. You would do examinations, not full autopsies, just adult male tattoo, dental examination, DNA fingerprints, and then compare it to people who are known to be in the area. Part of the problem is I wrote a paper and I called it DVII tourism because so many teams arrive around the world, around the world, and you know, they have to be accommodated, they have to be fed. Sometimes their language is not English.
So you know, I always said, when I was on the state, dv I commit the first thing I would do is put signs around the state saying keep out. Take forty eight hours just to work out how we were going to do it. Processes, yeah, hasten slowly.
Because I'm trying to comprehend. And if you could paint a picture, you know, when we're talking hundreds of thousands of people killed, and yeah, we all saw the images of the waves washing in the floods and the sharp metal floating around that people drowning. People have horrendous injuries. It's in the tropics, so a body is going to decompose very quickly. I would imagine what were the processes that were put in place to and the purpose of
it was to identify as many people. That's correct, you weren't going there. This person died specifically that it was identifying the bodies. So what were the processes that were put in.
Place identifying and repatriating. Well, in Thailand, the bodies were brought into Buddhist temples because they had space to put containers, freeze and frozen containers, and the the Thai troops volunteered to work on it, so you'd have the bodies and the containers. They'd be wheeled out. They were spraying all this stuff around to reduce decomposition and everything. And my mortuary tendant was really worried about this stuff and I said, I don't worry about it's probably water. And he said
one day said look, the naggots are dead. And I said, oh, nothing kills makets. You can freeze them. And so I went out and these folks from their full suits spraying around and I said, what is this stuff? No idea, but it really works, so God knows what.
We were exposed to could be the age and orange probably.
So anyway, the body would come in and they would they'd be fingerprinted by police officers. They'd come to us and we would do the identification and detail what we thought. Then they would go to the dental people and we'd take specimens of DNA and so we put all that together and yeah, they'd be found in areas of tourist hotels, so we'd have a list of people. So that's the
then you get the anti modern stuff from them. And we developed the system there too, which was rather than just identifying each body on its own, we started to identify children against identified parents, so that you know, you had the parents' DNA in the database and the children you can actually identify through that. But it's a lot of interesting things happened. And I wrote a paper recently called Hiding in Plane Sight, and I was just talking about how best to hide a homicide if you can
put the body amongst others. And I was called out the back and there was a coffin under a whole part of other coffins full of rotting bodies and they'd taken those and there was the body of a young woman that was fresh and so clearly she didn't die in the sin, but in three days she would have been writting like the rest. So handed her over to the tire authorities. But I was talking about the blitz in London. I think the crime rate went up like
forty seven percent. How easy would it be to follow somebody home from the pub, hit them on the head, chuck them into a bomb site.
I'm starting the wonder about you, Roger. You've come up with you're obviously thinking too much about to get away with murder. Yeah, well this I catch Killers. That's the name of the podcast.
So I'm on your radar.
Yeah I've got another case. Yeah, I looking at that. With what you're saying with the body body turning up there, what a golden opportunity. You talked about the monks walking around and that, and then dealing dealing with death. What was I'm trying to get the sense of what the feeling was for everyone involved in that, because it must have been.
It was er, it was horrific. What the Tie did at one stage is they had a ceremony to honor the two thousand dead at Carlak and they diverted planes around this so you had a whole stadium of monks and we're on an oval with candles, and they had these rice paper lanterns, each one representing one person that they let go into the sky. It was you can see it on the internet. It was like the Milky Way overhead. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever
seen with the chanting. And yet the next day you go back to basically trucks pulling up and just decomposed bodies being being pulled out of them, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
How did it impact on you?
I found it really difficult the first day I got there. That the smell was extraordinary, the heat, the humidity. Yeah, I as I said, I was offered the second chance to go back the second time. Some people went back five times. I couldn't do it. And I used to get quite emotional when I saw people's presentations on Thailand showing the pictures.
You know have.
A family member, you know, in their bathers with their child. And I remember when one father was he knew that we had his child, but the child hadn't gone through the formal process of identifications. They couldn't be released, so he was beside himself with anger. As you can imagine, my little boy he is in there. There was one picture, because the tires got boards, you could put pictures up of your loved ones, and there was one little boy with these beautiful, big blue eyes and had his name
and everything. I thought, you know, even if you get him back, he's never going to be like that.
Yeah.
Yes, then the tires were I mean they had photographs of the decomposing bodies, their faces, and families were coming around. They had the seed easy you could take home and go through them. You know, maybe it was some weird shaped tooth or something that you could pick.
So do you think from disaster Victim Identification DBI, where there's been multiple casualties to identify all the victims, do you think we learned things from that practices?
You know we did, And there were there were some teams that came that you know, weren't practicing pathologists, and you know they were taking off the jewelry and putting under the body, or not filling out the forms correctly and taking the original forms with them. It was just you know, coordinating that was was not easy.
Do you know you talk about bringing the bodies back how many Australians You got an idea of the rough figure that caught up in them.
I don't. Actually, one of the important things for me was the last week I was there, there were two Australian bodies and a couple of containers that weren't refrigerated. I found them. And then one of the women came from Adelaide and so I represented forensic science going out to the plane when she came back to get the body and met the family. So I thought that was a sort of a nice finishing off. I'd been with them in Thailand and I was there, come she came back.
Yeah, those things mean a lot.
I think they do.
Circumstances. Did you get was it mandatory for you to sit down with a psychologist and talk these things? We have that at homicide we'd have to go every six months and sit down and talk. But it was that part and parcel of it.
Yeah, I did, and the psychologist I said, what was one of the worst things? I said, We're just not being recognized and he said, yeah, that's that's what happens with me. So really, how do you deal with this? I'd drink off headmen, I said, what do you drink and whiskey. So we discussed whiskeys and then about two weeks later I got an email from him saying, what was that whiskey? You recommended Highland? So that was the extent of the psychological support.
Okay, okay, you've talked and you've mentioned a couple of times in while we've been sitting down the smell and the smell of death, and unless you've smell that, you can't you can't really describe it. It's hard to describe. Does that have an impact on you, the amount of death that you would have smelled.
It's something you do, you do get used to, and after a few decades inhaling formalon, your smell's not as good as it used to be. But we were down. We had a ceremony at Patong Beach and one of the mortue tenders and we walked over and there was a remnants of a Japanese restaurant, and sure enough that clearly little bodies under that. So I was thinking, you know, he'd probably be cheaper than a sniffer dog. Maybe we should use him.
It's not your first first experience in these type of things, and the barley bombing, you're also had some involvement in that, and that's I look at that from a different perspective because that was an active evil murder court. Cause that what was your experience dealing with the Barley bombings.
I came in later in that, so I was sort of more auditing. But I had a fair bit to do with Ikbar one of the suicide bombers at Paddy's Bar, so I was repatriating his his remain.
Again, when you say you had a fair bit to do with him, you were looking at his remains, so that put all the pieces together. Basically, basically you find out what happened.
The problem with Bali was interesting. I was watching it when it first happened, and you know it was chaos, but you had people trying to help, so they were sweeping up stuff, so they were destroying the crime scene. But of course, again with a DBI, the important thing is not so much the deceased. It's to get the
injured and wounded out and looked after. But yes, Barlei was particularly nasty because the bomb that went off at the Sari Club was in a vehicle outside and there was cast iron grating and glass, so there were secondary projectiles that went into the nightclub, and of course there was fire, so there was monoxide inhalation as well as the injuries. People were crushed trying to get out of
the doors. So there were a whole lot of different things that went on there, and the bodies were fragmented, unlike Thailand, where mostly in Thailand the bodies were intact. But you do occasionally find strange things. I was in mortuary in Thailand and colleague from Zealand and said, look at this, and it was an adult woman and her head had exploded. And I said, have you found pellets because it looked like a shotgun. Yeah, but she must have just been going through the water at such as
speed and hit something. So that's the thing really you're looking for. Is this something that doesn't fit you know? And as I said, what a perfect way to hide crimes in amongst that.
Put your body in there with the Bali bombings. What's the effect on the body where it's caught up in the blast.
It varies, but if a body is in the blast, they'll have burns, but they also have characteristic sort of internal findings. If the body is still intact, you know where the lungs have expanded up against the chest wall. The intestines have sort of blown out, so you can see things to support it. But if it's if they're
close to the epicenter, basically it'll be fragmented. So they always say that, you know, and it didn't apply in Barley, but with suicide bombers you need to look around the rus for half a kilometer because their head has gone.
Are you When you're going through the bodies on a situation like that, you're also looking for the physical evidence of support the police investigation.
You're going through looking for ordinance. And that's one of the dangers of dv I in the sale war zone is that the body has been booby trapped. I mean, what better way to actually cause further problems.
Thinking about how to commit crimes again.
Not just relating, right, I must admit though the bombings in London, I was told this by a forensic pathologist and I don't know whether it's a pock fall, but they've taken the bodies to a parade ground and they're looking for a gunshot residue, and they were getting incredible hits until I realized that a cannon had been fired at noon every day for the last hundred years in that quadrangle, so they had to peel that back.
Yeah.
Yeah. I also said to the fellows in England, I said, why didn't they let a dirty blob GoF with anthrax or something? I mean, I said, we can talk about this because terrorist not a see. If they've done that, we couldn't have coped. I don't understand why they just do the one hit, not a couple. I'm pleased they don't, but the.
Type of impact that.
Do you destroy the support worker is coming and then you really cause the problem.
You've been in this field for the years, changes, improvements and different things. We used to rely on facial recognition. You can see some problems with facial recognition if you reconstruct a face from a skeletal remain.
I think, and this is just my personal view, that facial recognition what it does best is remind people of memories they have of the time, so that brings in and you would know this too, that brings extra information forward. But when I see a face reconstruction and the skeleton, what I have to do And apparently this has been done as people have done studies where they've taken donated
bodies so they've got what the face looks like. They've then taken the skull, they've given it to facial reconstruction people, and then you compare the two. So that is something I need to look at because I'm sure that they're quite different. I mean, this is flash, you know, he is hair, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, so I think that facial recognition is sort of not as exciting as we once thought. It was a bite marks again. You know, you used to be able to tell an individual from a bite mark.
Now you can't well talk about that because I've been involved in investigations where the bites have come into play.
Ye, very hard to actually pin it to a particular person. If it's a small bite, it's a child with large bidet's an adult. But it really the importance of bite marks is swabbing for saliva DNA. That's the most real. So there are a lot of things that we used to think were important that you know, ant is reliable. One of the best things I find in court is to be able to say I have no idea and the jury, you know, will then make eye contact and
you can see them thinking, well, he's honest. So when he does say he knows something, then we can probably trusted.
Have you seen and without the specific examples, experts at sort of stray outside their lane of expertise in court.
Yes, your honor, And that's one of the problems is you know people are experts because I say they are, you know, and some people will go all over the place with and I've had experts who have been accused of knowing we misleading the court and it just seems to bounce off them. I think that people like us are in no man's land because we're prepared to say that nothing's absolute, this is possible, and not half as convincing as saying clearly this is the cause of death and nothing else.
Yeah, if but you talk about credibility to like, if you make that comment, then that other evidence comes in that can dispel what that person's saying. Definitely happened.
You need to do so, mister, they call me mister. They want to, you know, diminish my status in the court. I mean my father was mister. So they dropped the professor. Yes, mister, can you definitely exclude that?
That's Have they ever got you down to Roger? Roger?
What were you not as such?
Well?
That's outside the court. I've been called worse.
But yeah, if they're talking me up, if I'm in the witness box, detective chief inspector, the very experienced, once they start to talk me up, I know I'm about to be hit, be brought down. So I imagine you the experience experience that. What's the longest time you've spent in the witness box.
Well, it's not chronological. The following trial, I was only in for an afternoon, but that was a very long afternoon probably I suppose day or two.
You know, Well, we've had we've had a guest on that wrote the book about Catheline Folbing and what's your take on them. It's a very complex matner. It's probably a hard question to yeah, for you to answer, but just in your area of involvement in the matter.
Well, I appeared for the defense back in two thousand and three, and I've always said that I think there was reasonable doubt. I think all four kids had significan potentially significant conditions. Caleb had a soft larynx, he was having trouble breathing. Patrick was epileptic. Sarah had a very strange shape at the back of her soft Palette and Laura had my carditis. So I mean people now looking
at this genetic material. For me, I don't need genetics to say there was no evidence of inflicted suffocation and that they had conditions that could potentially kill them. Could they been suffocated, yes, they could, but they also could have died of this. I think there was always reasonable doubt.
Yeah, and that's a thing that's played out. It's a fascinating case, but.
It's a tragic case.
Yeah.
No matter which side you're on, you've got four dead, lovely.
Children, no one, no one wins. You've talked about in the views that you've done a right to mourn and talk us through that, because we're getting deep into the emotional side of the type of crime that you've done. And my observation.
I've observed.
Slip, So what other crimes if you've done, I'll just start cautioning you. But my observation, you've kept your sense of humor. You've seen a lot of darkness in life, and you also talk about the right to mourn, that there's nothing wrong with mourning and feeling the pain that the things you've seen. Talk us through through your thinking there.
Well, I think anybody exposed the tragedy needs to mourn. He has said if you if you don't, then I think that you're knowingly or unwittingly just cutting yourself off from an important part of emotional processes. The reason I've survived, I think, is because I understand how important these deaths are the families in the community, and it's something I think. Forensic pathology is more than just dissection and report writing. It should be integrating into the community to help people.
And that's It's bizarre though, the cases that get through, And I don't know how we do it in the police. I don't know how we actually we're not taught to warl ourselves off, but we do somehow. But some cases just I remember there was a case of a he was an execution of one of the biker gangs, and he committed suicide on a lonely beach and I was sitting there with my wife that night and she said, what's wrong with you? I said, really really upset about
this case. But you see murdered children, you see this, this and this. I don't know. There was just something about this that got to me. It's very strange.
It's interesting isn't it. Is there something particular about that, because given all the things that you've seen, I'm just wondering why that sort of jump jumped out.
I don't know. I talked about it with my wife and we wonder whether it was because he was a bloke about my age and he'd gone to this isolated beach that was very like some of the beaches I used to go to as a kid in Tasmania. So they just seemed to be a lonely poignancy to it. But yeah, it may be that it was just somebody strangely I could identify with.
It's interesting how different cases have different different impacts. What about your faith in society?
I like dogs?
Okay, what about killer dogs?
Killer dogs are usually the product of killer owners. You know, if you treat a dog badly, it'll.
Be well, you see the most terrifying looking dogs and they're placid them. That comes down to the owner generally. But have you seen many situations of dogs that have killed.
I've seen a few. There was a fascinating case in Canada that I wasn't involved with, but the pathologist who did the autopsy said the child had been a stab with scissors and the mother went to jail and there was a pitbull in the house that actually had a bloodstained in front. Subsequently came out and it was a dog attack. He just got it completely wrong. But there are certain breeze yes, you know. I mean, I've got
a golden a Trita. I don't think it's been one report of Golden A Tria licking somebody, leah.
But anyway, before we got off on the dog track a society.
I'm worried. I think that a couple of reasons. Methamphetamine is everywhere, as you know, that that's a toxic drug and it just destroys people. And we've done studies showing the percentage of meth with homicide victims and homicide perpetrators, and as you know, it's very high. Also, I think that the Internet trivializes violence. You have kids just watching this stuff and they think that this is normal. Some
of those computer games are outrageous. You know, they train troops now on computer games when they're taking out soldiers and stuff. So it's the same process.
You can embedd it in the actions and the thing.
I think it just it makes quite violent horrific acts seem normal.
No interesting, interesting take on that than what you've said about the drugs too, And I would imagine that you've done some post more thans and seen the results of heavy use of drugs.
And I was walking past a group of houses in my neighborhood just around the corner the other night, and the fellow the allegations of myth selling there, and there was a fellow inside who'd broken down the doors and stuff. That was nine o'clock on Saturday night. By six o'clock the next morning, he had murdered the bloke in the park.
No role or reason.
So it's everywhere now, Okay.
I think I mentioned Guardians of the Dead, a seven part podcast series that you did. How did you get involved in that.
One of the media people, Lisa Black at the university, was interested in forensics and we just got chatting one day and she said, well, you know, the local paper might be interested in doing a podcast. I'd done a full podcast. We just sat down and chatted about stuff that I'd done and seen, and it was an interesting process. I find getting involved with the media and assemblitting information interesting, you know, whether it's film or whether it's radio or whatever.
So it's just something different to do that I think can be useful.
Well, I think that ken, then it's not glorifying, not glorifying crime. You're explaining, explaining situations in preparation for this podcast, I think I said to you before we start, I sat down to listen just to get a sense of what you're about, and I listened to all episodes.
So and as I said, you need to get out, I probably shouldn't.
I probably shouldn't be talking up on the podcast big sitting here here doing my own podcast, But yeah, it was. It was fascinating. And what I did like about it that you take on that because quite often you could be called an academic, but you've also got that let's.
Say, how do you well?
Academic can be a compliment, but it can also be said if it said with the right tone. But you're explain it in layman's terms. And I think that's important because quite often science puts itself up up there that you don't need to know. We're not going to explain it to the common person, but you've got a way of explaining what you come across.
My philosophy is if you can't explain something simply to somebody, then you don't understand it yourself.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at I'll think of that next time the computer per and comes out to fix my computer. I don't care.
Why just fix it and don't don't change that.
What are you doing with yourself? Now?
Still working halftime at Forgics. So I'm on call in a couple of weeks time, but winding back. Actually, yeah, I've I got I had a goal to get a thousand peer reviewed papers, and I got that a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so that was I mean, it's it's like a golf handicap. Who cares except yourself, But you know it was important to me.
You're you're under underplane your success and you're standing within the field that you've operated into a lot of awards and different things. So full credit to you.
Thank you.
I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed the chat.
I wish I could say the same.
Maybe you're not that funny. I thought you were funny, but maybe maybe you're not. Maybe you are a horrible Roger. Look, I'd like to thank you for not just coming on the podcast, but also for the work that you've done, and because I know it's difficult work and doing it with compassion. I think that's so important. I saw that in the homicide, and if people didn't have that empathy and compassion, they do cause more damage to people that
shouldn't be damaged any further. And you've kept your sense of humor and you seem seemed like quite a reasonable person.
That's the medication, all right. Thanks Roger,