I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin podcast: Forensic detective Steve Horn reveals secrets of the job

Our most experienced forensic detective honed his skills by investigating war graves and some of Australia’s most horrific crimes. On Gary Jubelin’s new I Catch Killers podcast, he reveals how he did it. LISTEN NOW

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When you’re searching for a body, digging is too risky. You must scrape the ground, ever so gently, using the bucket-edge of a backhoe like a razor blade.

Senior Sergeant Steve Horn at work on the Keli Lane murder case.

If you suspect a killer has meticulously washed his clothes and scrubbed the floor and walls clean of blood, always rummage through every item of clothing and examine every table-leg and skirting-board for the microscopic splatter-marks he might have forgotten to wipe away.

And when you’re speaking to a suspect, no matter how vile the crime, always be meticulously polite. You never know when a confession might be about to spill out.

These are among the countless secrets of Australia’s most experienced forensic detective, Steve Horn, who spent 44 years as a crime scene officer and honed his craft excavating World War II mass graves in the former Soviet Union. He found the bodies of Matthew Leveson and Lateesha Nolan, murdered by her cousin Malcolm Naden, by using his careful excavator techniques and a veteran’s instinct for where secrets lie.

Senior Sergeant Steve Horn takes part in a search during his long career with NSW Police.

Now a modest, moustachioed 71-year-old, Horn joins former homicide detective chief inspector Gary Jubelin this week in his new podcast I Catch Killers to discuss his career investigating crimes across Australia and the world, ranging from horrendous trainwrecks to family murders, from baby deaths to gang-rapes.

He is, in many senses, the last man standing: he’s watched the gore and horror claim the serenity of scores of forensic colleagues, just as in the late 1960s he saw fellow National Service soldiers succumb to the terror of being deployed to Vietnam by slicing off their fingers and deliberately sabotaging their own weapons.

Steve Horn during his Army days.

He knows you investigate a bushfire from the most burnt spot to the least to find an arsonist’s handiwork, and a house fire in the other direction.

He spent years setting up fake crime scenes for the homicide detectives training course at the Goulburn Police Academy, dumping mannequin corpses in surprising places and splashing pigs’ blood around the walls, then wiping the words away and waiting to see if any of the prospective super-sleuths would think to turn out all the lights and spray a fine coating of luminescent paint.

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Catching a gang rapist: How I got Anita Cobby’s killers

A young Steve Horn pictured early in his decorated career with NSW Police.

The now retired detective with I Catch Killers host Gary Jubelin. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

As a junior officer in the notorious 21 Division vice squad in Sydney’s Kings Cross in the early 1970s, Horn learnt the lesson that’s carried him through five decades in policing: be kind to everyone.

“If you treat a human person like a human person it’s much better, you get on better with them, they’ll talk to you, they’ll listen to you,” Horn tells Jubelin.

“Some (sex workers) would run and hide from some 21 Division officers but I remember I was chasing an offender who had stabbed one of the prostitutes one night and I was running down the back streets of Kings Cross and I lost my notebook and something else fell out of my pocket and there was a group of girls following me.

Gary Jubelin has written about his career as one of Australia’s most celebrated homicide detectives. Picture: Supplied

“I grabbed him and had a bit of a wrestle with him on the footpath and people thought I was trying to assault him. (The girls) all came to my rescue.”

When Horn started out as what was then known as a scientific officer in the mid-1970s, his job was quite literally a mixture of art and science. He learnt to hand-draw faces from witness’ descriptions of offenders, and developed his own crime scene photographs in the darkroom, using black-and-white film because colour crime scenes were considered too confronting to be used as evidence in courtrooms.

Listen, subscribe or follow I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin at truecrimeaustralia.com.au, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast

Pre-order his book here