University of Adelaide forensic scientist Roger Byard is the best in the world

Adelaide forensic scientist Roger Byard has a lot of accolades. Now he can add ‘best researcher in the world in his field’.

The global leader in his field … forensic pathologist Professor Roger Byard in his laboratory at the University of Adelaide. Picture: Matt Turner

University of Adelaide forensic scientist Roger Byard is known for a lot of things. He identified the bodies found in barrels in the notorious Snowtown murders in South Australia. He played a key role in solving the riddle of sudden infant death syndrome. And he discovered how bushranger Ben Hall actually died.

But Professor Byard now has a new accolade. The Australian’s 2021 Research magazine names him as the world’s top researcher in his field of forensic science, based on the number of citations his papers attract from fellow ­researchers around the globe.

To most people, his work sounds horribly gruesome but he manages to finds its uplifting aspects. For example, he is very proud of his work on sudden infant death syndrome, during which he and his colleagues realised that babies sleeping face down were most at risk, sparking a successful campaign to sleep ­babies on their backs.

“I think something like 8000 babies are alive in Australia who wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for that risk campaign,” Professor Byard says.

After the notoriously gruesome Snowtown murders in the 1990s, Professor Byard and his colleagues had the awful task of emptying the acid barrels in which serial killer John Bunting had put the bodies.

But he says he was most affected by his work in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami.

“After I came back from Thailand, I used to get tears in my eyes when I’d see people’s presentations on the body identifications. I found it very confronting. But you push on and you do get over it,” he says.

Trauma aside, Professor Byard says his work is endlessly fascinating because of the breadth that it covers. “My laboratory is my mortuary and cases come in all the time with extraordinary things that nobody’s ever thought of or haven’t considered.”

He relates a case in which the body of a person struck by a car had the tyre mark imprinted on it. “The fine lines on the side of the tyre and the tread had been transferred as a sort of a rubber stamp.”

It taught him to always check for a tyre imprint in cases when a pedestrian is hit by a car, before the body is washed. “That may be the only thing linking that body, that person, to a particular car. Very simple observational stuff.”

He also noticed that about 85 per cent of people in his mortuary who had died a violent death – suicides, homicides, drugs or motor cycle accidents – had Ned Kelly tattoos. The observation led to a research paper.

Then there is the Ben Hall case. Popular belief had it that the bushranger was shot in his sleep, while the police version was that he was trying to escape and one of the bullets went through his belt. Professor Byard examined Hall’s belt in the Powerhouse Museum. The position of the hole in the belt, and the residues of propellant from 19th century weapons which were found, convinced him the police version was correct.

-

Listen: Guardians of the Dead podcast

Roger Byard knows what death looks like. How it feels to the touch. He can tell you how it smells. In many ways, Roger Byard has given his life to death. In this podcast Prof Byard opens up his case files and trawls back through his personal recollections, shedding a light on the macabre but fascinating world of forensic pathology.

Read more

-