Take a look behind the scene at Victoria's high-tech crime-fighting forensic science unit
COLD CASE FILES: MEET the real CSI, the "geeks" who say they are on the verge of big advances in policing technology.
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THEY have brought down some of Victoria’s biggest and the baddest crooks.
They know who you are, and where you’ve been.
But for the most part, members of the Victoria Police Forensic Services Department consider themselves “geeks”.
Established in 1903, Victoria’s first dedicated forensic unit was a five-man crack-squad that specialised in the then cutting-edge techniques of fingerprinting.
Today nearly 400 full-time forensic staff attend crime scenes across the state, based at St Kilda Rd Police Station, or the Victoria Forensic Science Centre in MacLeod.
This is basically were science fiction is becoming science fact
With 23 years’ experience both here and in the UK, Assistant Director of Chemistry John Doherty is one of Victoria’s top forensic scientists.
He said members of Victoria’s forensic science team were motivated by a love for science, and the knowledge their work helped put crooks behind bars.
“People get satisfaction knowing they’re helping to keep their communities safer, and contributing to society in that way,” Mr Doherty said.
“But pretty much we’re science geeks as well.”
Cops have a hit-list of 30 'highly solvable' cold cases
The Cold Case Files is a database of every unsolved homicide in Victoria since 2000. Search by name, date, location, reward and map, and alert police to clues. Read more reports here.
One of Australia’s first forensic triumphs was when police put away Melbourne jewel thief Ed Parker in 1912.
Parker, 38 years old and well known to police, probably would have gotten away with breaking into Webster & Cohen’s jewellery store on Little Collins St if safe-breaking wasn’t such thirsty work.
After emptying hundreds of pounds worth of jewellery from a safe, he downed a bottle of ginger beer the store’s owner had left sitting on his desk that day.
Detective Lionel Potter, head of the state’s fingerprint unit, dusted the beer bottle for prints and Parker was arrested at his North Melbourne home the next day.
Parker was found guilty in court despite one fingerprint being the only evidence against him.
The Supreme Court upheld the ruling on appeal, which set a precedent that forensic evidence could be used to secure a conviction, and ushered in a new era of policing.
100 years after Parker’s conviction, fingerprinting remains a powerful weapon in solving crime.
About the Cold Case Files database
It’s what Dexter does, at its simplest level
The 100-member Victorian fingerprint squad attends nearly 3,000 crime scenes across the state every year.
But as new scientific discoveries emerged and technology developed, police have never been far behind in applying them to their investigative work.
John Doherty’s background in chemistry lead him to working in the front line against drugs.
He said much of his work involved identifying drugs and their purity, so dealers and traffickers could be charged with a specific offence.
He also examines the chemical signatures of different samples of seized drug, searching for a link to a shared source.
“When you’re looking up the drug chain to Mr Big right at the top, he doesn’t necessarily have lots of drugs in his possession, so it’s about trying to find ways to link those people in,” Mr Doherty said.
The MacLeod facility is home to about 290 scientists, technicians and assistants, who work in a range of fields depending on their area of scientific expertise.
Thanks to TV shows like CSI, the team whose work is most familiar to outsiders is biology.
These scientists pick up traces of body fluids and skin cells to identify who has been at a crime scene.
In cases of someone being attacked with a weapon, they examine blood stains and splatter patterns to interpret what happened.
“It’s what Dexter does, at its simplest level,” Mr Doherty said.
Two teams specialise in guns: the ballistics unit, which matches guns with bullets, and the gunshot residue unit, which picks up traces of powder left on people’s hands after firing a weapon.
But most of us don’t actually tell people what we do – we make up some story about having a boring government job
The Chemical Trace unit picks up tiny paint fragments or broken glass from a suspect’s clothes, which can be used to place them at a crime scene.
And far from being just about bodies and bullets, there is even a team of plant experts at hand.
This botany team can pick up pollen and plant material on a suspect or victims’ clothes, which can reveal where they’ve been, and even what time of year they were there.
While major advances have been made in all fields of forensics over the years, Mr Doherty said the by far the biggest breakthrough to date has been DNA testing.
“It was the biggest thing since fingerprints,” he said.
“Crooks got wise to fingerprinting and started wearing gloves, but now their gloves are a source of DNA.
“It’s very difficult not to leave DNA at a scene when you commit an offence.”
Before DNA tests started being used commonly in the late 1980s, police could only hope to find large amounts of blood for them to use for “A-B-O blood typing”, which could marginally narrow a field of suspects.
“What DNA did was give us a much, much higher discriminating power,” Mr Doherty said.
“We’re now talking about millions, billions, even septillions to one probabilities of matches based on DNA alone, and that’s all happened in the last 15 to 20 years.”
He said Victoria Police was on the verge of rolling out a new DNA testing system that would be more sensitive, and produce results from old or damaged DNA, which may have broken over time or been damaged by fire.
With science and technology moving at an ever quickening pace, Mr Doherty said he expected to see major advances in forensic investigators’ capabilities over the coming years.
One advance he predicted to see was family DNA matching, something already used by police in the UK.
Currently, DNA found at crime scenes is feed through a police database in the hope of finding a match.
With family matching, even if the person police are looking for isn’t in the database, the search will bring up anyone who is related to them.
In other words, once one member of a crime family is added to a DNA database, crimes committed by other family members can be traced back to them through that DNA sample.
Another advance on the horizon is “predictive” DNA testing, which Mr Doherty expected would be used in Australia within the next 20 years.
“This is basically were science fiction is becoming science fact,” he said.
“They’re going to be able to look at some DNA and say what colour someone’s hair is, how tall they are, and what colour their eyes are, what size their shoes are, those sorts of thing.”
With that sort of technology, someone could commit a crime in the morning, and police could release an image of the offender to the media by the afternoon, based solely on the DNA they left behind.
Mr Doherty said Victoria’s white-coat crime-busters took pride in their work, but that most forensic scientists kept their involvement under wraps.
“It seems like a reasonably glamorous job to people,” Mr Doherty said. “But most of us don’t actually tell people what we do – we make up some story about having a boring government job.”
And as for shows like CSI and Dexter, Mr Doherty said television’s rendering of their profession was tenuous at best.
“They’re not a million miles away in terms of the capability, and the sorts of things they can do,” Mr Doherty said.
“But most of us can’t bear to watch them though, because other parts are so completely off the mark.”
