Please NB: the following article discusses distressing subjects, including suicide and murder
There’s something that wallops me straight between the eyes as I read Jo Ward’s book, Every Contact Leaves a Trace: My Life as a Crime Scene Investigator. (Note that I didn’t add an adjective: it’s because I couldn’t find one. Jo Ward’s page-turning book? Well, definitely. But that sounds almost callous. Fundamental? Hmm — absolutely; but that sounds basic. Yet that’s kind of what I mean, in a hugely admiring way: for what she writes drills so deeply into our DNA, physically and metaphorically.)
Anyway.
The story that gets me is this.
Her first suicide.
It’s an act that’s unspeakably common. (My visit to the Office for National Statistics informs me that, in 2023, there were more than 7,000 deaths in the UK ‘officially’ registered as suicide: 19 a day.
Even that dry office adds the lonely-sounding phrase: ‘marking the highest suicide rate in England and Wales since 1999’.)
Anyway. Again.
Jo and her team are called to the home of a lad in his early 20s. In those days, they videoed suicide scenes — evidence often used at inquests. It’s the job of forensics, of course, to help establish that a death such as this really has been purposefully self-inflicted. No trace of third parties. No sign that, perhaps, this was an altogether different intention that went tragically askew.
But, no.
He had unequivocally hung himself.
Jo’s hands shake slightly as she holds the camera. This young man — his life ahead of him — doesn’t look dead at all: ‘he appeared as though he might be playing a prank that he might jump down and walk away from at any moment’.
He has written a note: it leaves no room for doubt.
He’d threatened suicide before. And his own dad had killed himself some years previously.
Any such scene is appalling and heartrending. But what particularly moves me is Jo’s description of the effort this boy/man had made in his final moments.
‘He had got up that morning, put on a fashionable pair of jeans and a fitted shirt, carefully gelled his hair in the latest style…’ and deliberately ended his own life.
Even then… a care for how he would look to those who found him. A concern, as he penned the note, that there should be no ambiguity.
And then what strikes me is this.
That how we die tells us so much about how we live.
It’s a stark, life-affirming contrast to the things Jo so often has to see during the course of a normal working day: ‘Things that no human being should ever have to see’.
‘There’s blood everywhere,’ is one beginning to a 999 call on the BBC documentary about her work: Forensics: The Real CSI.)
‘In the last two weeks, I’ve dealt with three murders,’ she tells me.
Three?
She nods. Fewer staff; more violence. But, even for Jo, that’s a lot.
During her 25 years-plus with the West Midlands Police, she’s seen it all. Ordinary homes on the outside: scenes of extreme violence within. An elderly man who looked as if he’d died — as so many do — alone, on the floor of his dining room … until a careful examination showed where a ligature had tied him to a chair for God knows how long…
Puzzles: such as a discarded trainer on the ground (more on that later): its lonesomeness a clue to the very strangest of deaths.
Jo has the stomach for it.
She has the brain for it, too. A determination to get answers for loved ones; to stop perpetrators committing more atrocities.
Most scenes — even the unimaginably brutal — she can cope with nowadays.
‘But it’s like a drip-drip effect. We’re dealing with more and more younger victims… and I think it’s also where you are in your own life.’
Such as when she found herself processing a 15-year-old lad in preparation for a forensic post-mortem: ‘My lad was 15 [at the time].’
She lost her dad just before Christmas and took a month off work. ‘Had the funeral and went back. And, literally, within the first week, I had the death of an old gentleman, who suffered a fractured skull.’
The real kicker was the fact that the deceased had the same disease that killed her dad. ‘I came home and said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it. The pathologist was describing all this cancer, and it’s exactly what my dad had’.’
‘But do you see what I’m saying? You can’t control what you’re going to go out to. And that’s why I say: you really need to be on top of your game; 110 percent to go into work.’
Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Not just splatters of blood or helpful traces of DNA on a death scene; but a psychological trace on the professionals who have to deal with it.
IT’S FUNNY, I say to Jo Ward. How both repelled and fascinated we all are by seeing the human body come apart.
Take that BBC programme she’s on, Forensics: The Real CSI (recently repeated).
‘That is an absolute hit with everybody because everybody, like you say, is so intrigued: they think it’s horrendous, obviously, what happened; but they’re so intrigued by blood and gore.’
Rubber-neckers on motorways. ‘Nothing to see here’ crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of real-life horror.
‘They want to see the gore. But, actually, if they saw it, they’d be horrified. That’s the bottom line.
‘They see us on the TV; on the news with our white suits on: ‘Ooh my god, that’s an absolutely amazing job!’ And it is — don’t get me wrong. But, you know, it’s a job you’ve really got to have a strong stomach for. You’ve got to disassociate yourself with everything and just carry on.’
All the more amazing, then, that Jo instinctively knew — some quarter of a century ago — that forensics was work she’d be able to handle.
She instinctively knew, yes… but she tested herself, nonetheless.
No problem, her boss said. I’ll call the mortuary.
(‘I was so lucky back then. I don’t think they’d offer it now.’)
A week later, Jo was watching the corpse of an elderly gentleman being cut open by a pathologist. ‘Someone’s beloved husband, probably. Someone’s dad, grandad, best friend.’
She’s never lost that compassion; that acknowledgement that this was once a person.
But she compartmentalised from the beginning. It’s what allows her to do what she does.
And, yes, that first experience was all shockingly new: skin opening like a zipper; a smell like meat mingled with disinfectant.
‘You’ve no control, really: because, if you feel faint, you’re going to go whether you like it or not. But I found it absolutely amazing. People laugh at me when I say that, even now, I learn so much from each post-mortem I go to. Because the pathologist will find something we haven’t seen before. Like perhaps they’ve got a certain cancer or tumour or growth or cyst.
‘Or a certain condition.
‘And I just find it amazing that everything fits into your body! When it’s coming out, you’re thinking: ‘Oh my god! How did all this fit in?’
‘And it’s got its own place. It is like a jigsaw puzzle.’ The phrase she repeats again and again is, ‘It’s amazing.’
As technologies ever improve, those significant ‘somethings’ become smaller and smaller.
But sometimes, too, criminals have overlooked somethings that are more obvious to meticulous investigators. In 2006, for example, in the aftermath of Christmas, the team was called to a quiet road in a West Midlands town where a man in his 60s had been slashed and battered; he died of head injuries the next day. Although CCTV and witness accounts pointed to three local men, there was no evidence linking them incontrovertibly to the scene.
Until the team noticed that one wore glasses. Who’d have thought? A tiny flake of dried blood on them matched that of the victim.
Take another case: that of an elderly lady who’d been killed, with no clear evidence as to who the murderer might be. No obvious clues.
As ever, Jo and her team photographed the scene.
‘We obviously knew something untoward had gone on. And then, when these photographs were shown to the daughter of the deceased, she straightaway said, ‘This isn’t how my mum’s garage is normally’.’
That new intelligence — which anybody unfamiliar with the normal domesticity of the property wouldn’t have noticed — helped lead to a conviction.
Other puzzles would have made Conan Doyle seethe with envy.
Such as that lone trainer, found by the caretaker of a big block of flats, who dismissed it as discarded rubbish…
Until a resident noticed a broken manhole-cover nearby, peered down, and saw a body wedged inside. Jo and her colleague examined further, only to discover it was the body of a slender young man, wedged so far down it would have been impossible for him to have put himself there… or, indeed, for anybody else to have managed it.
That’s just one side of Every Contact. The other, of course, is Jo — and the heroic members of emergency services who, like her, have to stare into the unseeable; think about the unthinkable: deeply, forensically.
Her book is searingly honest about her own hard times, too. Illness; family difficulties; and — in as technicolour a portrait as the scenes she draws — the PTSD she suffered at one of the lowest periods of her life.
It flared into being as she investigated a domestic murder, where the blood was so prolific Jo and her colleague had no choice but to walk through it. Watching them from photographs were the woman’s two children.
But to say it caused Jo’s breakdown is too simplistic. It was — as she said earlier — more the drip-drip effect of scene after scene.
It’s a long time ago now; her recovery and subsequent resilience are remarkable.
But — while nobody would wish such an episode on their worst enemies — it has opened her mind to even more compassion and understanding.
‘My view, certainly, on suicide has changed over the years. When I first joined and I was very naïve, I thought it was a selfish act. But when I was at my lowest: in that kind of mindset, you can’t see any other way. Your brain is very powerful, and that frightened me; I didn’t realise that my mind could completely take over. It got me to think things that I’d never thought before.’
Jo was lucky: she has a supportive husband; loving family; understanding colleagues.
‘But some of these people haven’t got anybody. And I think that’s where the failings are — and I don’t think there’s enough [help for mental illness].’
Nobody’s fault, as such.
But a reality.
For the public. And for those who work at the sharp end of the violence that mental illness — among other issues — can provoke.
ADVANCES IN FORENSICS are only going to improve. So, I guess, are the techniques of career-criminals.
And there’s the other side of the coin, too. Infamous crimes of the past — even the relatively recent past — that Jo would love to have been involved in investigating. Madeleine McCann.
Jill Dando.
Back in Jill’s time, there were no camera doorbells; no CCTV.
‘It was obviously an assassination. Forensically, I don’t think there was an awful lot because it was a shooting in the street.’
But Jo would love to have tried.
Above all, though, Jo’s grateful to be here now; investigating crimes of today.
‘I’ve had one hell of a rollercoaster-life. Many times it’s got me down. I’ve thought: what did I do in a previous life to deserve this deck of cards!
‘But… I’ve learned to be positive. What will be will be. You’ve got to enjoy the life you have and live every day as if it’s your last.’
Because you just never know.
Cheltenham Science Festival runs June 3-8. Jo Ward will be speaking about her life and work — The Real CSI — on Saturday, June 7: cheltenhamfestivals.org/science
Every Contact Leaves a Trace: My Life as a Crime Scene Investigator by Jo Ward is published in paperback, price £9.99.
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