The queen of crime-solving

A man was found hanging from the scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. The man who died was carrying two watches, one on his wrist and one in his top jacket pocket. 5 kilogram of bricks and rubble were found in the pockets and seams of his suit trousers. He was carrying about 10,000 in cash and a forged Italian passport. Police in Rome confirmed the man's identity the next day. Roberto Calvi was the chair of an Italian bank with close ties to the Vatican. Calvi was missing for at least six days. He was due to appear in an Italian court next week to appeal against his conviction for illegally transferring billions of dollars out of the country. The press referred to him as God's Banker.

Calvi's death was recorded as a suicide, but his family believed he had been murdered. The family of Calvi hired a private detective company in 1991 to investigate his death. To review the evidence, Kroll hired a forensic scientist named Gallop. In the previous five years, Gallop had gained a reputation as an expert prepared to go beyond the methods used by her peers in order to solve a crime. There weren't many other people doing it in the same way as she did.

Gallop believes imagination is the key to her work. She told me that they think you have been inventing your results. If Calvi had climbed down a ladder from Blackfriars Bridge and on to the scaffolding in order to hang himself, wouldn't the paint on the poles have transferred to his shoes? Wouldn't the movement of the bricks inside his trousers have caused scratches on his thighs? The postmortem did not find either. Calvi's body might have been put there by someone else.

Gallop wanted to test her theory. She would need the original scaffolding from under the bridge, clothes similar to those Calvi was wearing, and a man of a similar build to re-enact the scene. It was easy to find the man. Russell Stockdale, Gallop's husband, had the right proportions for the job. The company that built the scaffolding kept the poles and knew which ones they were. Gallop asked the family of Calvi to give him a suit and shoes. Carlo told me that the family would have given Gallop anything she wanted if they had hired private detectives.

Gallop stood in her garden in 1992 as scaffolding was rebuilt on the lawn next to her pond. Gallop and Clive Candy, a colleague who specialized in forensic chemistry, watched closely as Stockdale climbed on to the scaffolding. Gallop wrote down the difficulties her husband was having as he climbed, and how the bricks in his clothes were affecting his movements.

Gallop and Stockdale went to London to check out the scene at Blackfriars Bridge. Stockdale was asked to climb down a fixed iron ladder that led from the embankment next to the bridge down to the foreshore, from where it would have been possible to walk to the scaffolding at low tide. Gallop wanted to know if it was possible for a 62-year-old man like Calvi to do it without slipping and dislodging the bricks and rubble in his clothes.

I was terrified. Stockdale told me that he was not good with heights or water. Stockdale died last year.

Gallop concluded that it was almost impossible that Calvi's death was a suicide. Gallop did what she set out to do, which was to prove that God's Banker had been murdered, despite the fact that the case has never been resolved. Carlo told me that Gallop's findings are still important to Calvi's family, even though they are still waiting for his killer to be brought to justice. I was very impressed.

Over 50 years as a forensic scientist, Gallop has seen many gruesome cases. Murder, bestiality, rape, incest, the contents of Princess Diana's stomach, war crimes, alleged alien abductions, and an elderly woman stabbed in both eyeballs are just some of the crimes that have been committed. There is a good chance that Gallop was involved in the investigation of a famous crime that took place in Britain in the 1980s. The murders of James Bulger, Stephen Lawrence, Damilola Taylor, and Rachel Nickell took place on the Pembrokeshire coastal path. A retired defence lawyer told me that she is the doyenne of her profession.

Imagine a forensic scientist in a white lab coat, or a pseudocop stalking around a crime scene in a leather jacket. Gallop is not one of these people. She is stylish. We first met in a converted barn, where she does some of her work. We met several more times and I never saw the same nails or earrings twice. She has a jolly, mile-a-minute energy and being in her presence brings to mind old-fashioned phrases like "chatterbox" and "go-getter". A colleague described her as a human dynamo. Gallop is the clue.

The way the science of crime-solving has changed in the past 40 years has not been seen by an individual. Gallop started out in the 70s at the FSS, which conducted all forensic work for the police. She led the charge in dismantling the FSS's monopoly by establishing rival companies in the 90s, cracked some of the UK's most notorious cold case murders, and now finds herself at the forefront of what sometimes looks like a losing battle to save. England and Wales are in a crisis because of a lack of funding, lack of leadership and poor research and development. Gallop sees herself as one of a dying breed of scientists who have been given the training, time and money to solve complex crimes. Her fear is that she and her peers will take those skills with them.

F orensic science is young. The world's first crime investigation laboratory was opened in 1910 by a Frenchman who was inspired by the still-fictional techniques he read about in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Every contact made between two objects leaves a trace. This idea is still central to forensics. Most of us are aware that there are traces left by fingerprints, hairs and body fluids, but that principle goes much deeper. Wherever we go, we give ourselves away. We pick up clothing at the pub and the office and then we brush it on to other people. There are tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes in everything we eat and drink, which are retained in our bones, soft tissues, nails and hair. Scientists can trace someone's movements across their entire lifetime by analyzing the isotopes in their bones.

There are many specialisms in forensic science. The time of death can be determined by examining the insects on a dead body. The forensic ecology can tell us where the person died. Because every brand of matches uses slightly different chemicals to make their product, forensic fire investigators can track down an Arsonist by finding a single match head in a burned-out building and establishing where those matches are sold.

Gallop came to forensics by mistake. There were only a few people in the world who cared about what she was doing. She still likes sea slugs. Gallop applied for a job with the Home Office's FSS in 1974 in order to apply her scientific training to something of greater consequence. She started working at the lab that had been cobbled together in a grand Edwardian house after she got the gig.

All the air in the room is replaced 20 times an hour, and forensic labs are made of wipe- clean surfaces. Gallop said that in the 70s, things were different and that they used the ballroom for their big X-ray. Gallop was almost nostalgic when he recalled this era.

The work in the early years was tiring. The police could send as much evidence as they wanted, and the government would foot the bill.

Gallop and her colleagues moved out of the converted house and into a lab in West Yorkshire in 1977. Gallop felt understimulated by the facilities over the years. She decided to go it alone. Her first company was to provide forensic expertise to the defence. Lawyers for the prosecution had access to FSS expertise. If defence lawyers wanted to challenge evidence, they could hire independent consultants, but many did not have accreditation. Stockdale said they were hired guns who would say whatever they were paid to say in court. Gallop hoped that forensic access would change this. She set up a small laboratory in her own home.

At first, it was very difficult. Gallop advertised her services as a forensic Biologist in the Yellow Pages in order to drum up customers. She was getting calls from jealous husbands who wanted her to find out if their wives had been unfaithful. Gallop would test a piece of clothing for semen. The easy part was that. There was bad news to clients. Gallop recalled a time when a client became incredibly tense, his knuckles were white and he was frozen in the doorway. She had a panic button in the laboratory after she thought he could take it out on the messenger.

Gallop had a reputation for her trustworthiness and skill. More customers arrived. She was asked by an officer from the Department of Health to confirm that a reddish-brown stain on a cheese and tomato sandwich they examined during a restaurant inspection was human blood. It was. Gallop was able to hire full-time employees and move her operations out of her house in the late 80's.

Gallop has started to write books about her career in order to leave a record of her work. Her first book, When the Dogs Don't Bark, came out in 2019. A few months after we first met, I went to a meeting between Gallop and Jane Smith in a barn where they were working on a second book, which came out earlier this year. Gallop sat flicking through an archive of case files with her pearlescent turquoise nails, happily mumbling things under her breath.

Gallop has to be careful about what she puts in her books because they could be used to get away with murder. Gallop and Smith talked about an element of forensic technique that is not public knowledge. They decided that it was too revealing to include.

Gallop is often described as someone who likes people. The fact that people like her is more important than her work. She needs to persuade people to use her services and to successfully communicate between the police, lab, the court and the shareholders in order to be a scientist, but also a canny businesswoman. Deb Hopwood, an expert in hair analysis who left the FSS to work with Gallop, told me that Gallop has a warm, slightly goofy charm. Gallop brought a Buzz Lightyear toy to a series of strategy meetings that Anne Franc was a part of. When the team's energy flagged, she would press a button and the toy's wings would come out.

Gallop set up another company in 1997 to offer forensic expertise to the police. It was no longer legal for the FSS to have a monopoly on forensic work for the police, and forces in England and Wales had to pay for this work out of their own budgets.

Gallop offered to look into the cold cases of police forces for a better price. Her pitch was that if forensic alliance didn't solve the case, nobody would complain. The police could take the credit if they did. Gallop was offered a particularly grim case by a detective. In 1997, a woman named Alice Rye was found dead in the bedroom of her home on the Wirral, with a kitchen knife in her eyes. The initial investigation did not find any conclusive evidence. In 1999, Gallop's team reexamined the initial evidence and found the prime suspect's genetic material. He was sentenced to at least 18 years in prison. Smith said that she brought a different type of thinking.

Gallop was asked by South Wales police to review a case that had been unsolved for more than a decade. A sex worker was found dead in a cramped, dingy flat above a betting shop in the docklands on February 14, 1988. White had been stabbed more than 50 times and the flat was covered in blood.

The initial investigation was a failure. Three of the five men who were tried for the murder were sentenced to life in prison. Stephen Miller was White's boyfriend and had confessed to watching Tony Paris kill her. Their convictions were overturned two years later. Miller was questioned by the police for a total of 13 hours over the course of four days, during which he made a false confession. There was no evidence to tie the three men to the crime. The police said that the three men were still the prime suspects and that they had only been released on a technicality.

When South Wales police commissioned Gallop and her team to take another look at White's murder, it was because of the advances in DNA techniques. Blood was not found from the victim or any of the suspects in White's flat. Its presence had never been explained. The chances of finding new evidence were not very high eleven years later. The police sprayed the entire flat with luminol, a chemical used to detect blood, which caused the destruction of DNA. Since the murder, the flat has been painted twice. Gallop thought they could still find blood that could yield a DNA profile if they looked in the right places. Gallop knows which stones to turn and when.

The police removed wallpaper from the bedroom where the attack took place. Gallop attached the strips to the boards in order to reconstruct the room. She found out that there was a section of the skirting board that had blood spatter on it by looking at the blood spatter patterns on the wallpaper. She had the police cut out this section and brought it to the forensic access lab, where she asked April to remove the paint. It took two weeks of delicate work with a scalpel, but finally, under the paint, was the tiny piece of dried blood they were looking for.

A sample of blood yielded a profile. They ran a search for people with the same genes but not the same one, and found them. A 14-year-old boy had committed a minor crime. He wasn't a suspect because he hadn't been born when the murder was committed. The police were interested in speaking to his family, including his uncle. Gafoor gave a DNA sample after the police tracked him down. Gafoor went to buy a lethal dose of the drug. The police were able to intercept him before he killed himself. Gafoor pleaded guilty to the murder of White. He was sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in prison for his conviction.

Gallop was called whenever police forces needed to conduct big cold case reviews. She was asked to examine forensic evidence relating to the death of Princess Diana. Gallop helped establish that there were no grounds to support allegations of a murder conspiracy involving the Royal Family.

The FSS, which had been funded for decades, was declining fast during the same period. The organisation had reduced the time it took for cases to be heard from almost a year to six weeks, but this had come at a cost. A lot of the scientists thought that the impact on quality would be made.

There were failures. Damilola Taylor was killed in south London in 2000. There was no evidence that could be linked to any suspect. In 2003 the Metropolitan police gave Gallop this case to review, and she and her team discovered a bloodstain on a trainer that belonged to one of Taylor's suspected killers, a local boy called Danny Preddie. Danny and his brother, Richard Preddie, were sentenced to eight years in youth custody after being found guilty of killing someone.

Money can be the main obstacle to solving a case. Police budgets increased between 2000 and 2010 The progress was undone by the coalition government and then the Conservatives. Police budgets in England and Wales have been cut by more than 20% in real terms over the last five years. One of the more niche approaches Gallop is skilled in is searching for textile fibre evidence, the tiny bits of clothing you leave wherever you go. The process of taping involves a scientist pressing strips of sticky tape all over the surface of an object, picking up tiny pieces of debris. They examine each strip under a microscope. It costs a lot and takes a lot of time. This is not the kind of work police want their budget spent on. The police officer wants a new patrol car out on the ground.

Gallop has seen how useful taping can be. The murders of Richard and Helen Thomas, middle-aged siblings, took place in 1985 and were known as the Pembrokeshire coastal path murders. The house was burned down after the shootings. Four years later, a member of the public told a policeman that they had seen a large swarm of flies on a stretch of clifftop. The bodies of a husband and wife were found here. They had also died of gunshot wounds. Both sets of killings were not solved. A Dyfed-Powys detective named Steve Wilkins noticed a possible connection between the murders and the sexual assault of some teenagers in 1996. He commissioned Gallop to review all three cases because he suspected John Cooper, a 62-year-old farm worker from the local area, who was serving a 14-year prison sentence for armed robbery, was due for parole.

Wilkins didn't have an unlimited budget for these reinvestigations. He told Gallop and her team that they were to look for evidence of genetic origin. For months, they searched in the obvious places: the rope that had been used to tie Peter Dixon's hands, items of Gwenda Dixon's clothing that had almost certainly been handled by the killer. They did not find anything. Gallop's team was hamstrung. They wanted to look for clothing fibers that could connect John Cooper's clothes to the crimes.

Wilkins ran out of money and patience after 18 months. She convinced him that they should meet at the police station, even though he threatened to take the case away from Gallop. I asked Wilkins if he remembered the confrontation. I was reminded of something William Clegg said to me when I spoke, that it was a bit like trying to tell off a very stern headmistress.

Gwenda and Peter were covered with branches from nearby trees. Gallop suspected that the killer had been wearing gloves and that was the reason for the trouble finding the genetic material. If that was correct, the gloves would be on those branches. The branches had been sitting in evidence bags at the police station for almost two decades. Gallop and her team were able to prove that the gloves they were looking for came from Cooper. They found a small piece of blood that belonged to one of the victims after taping other items of Cooper's clothing.

Gallop and Wilkins remember the moment very vividly. Wilkins was in the car when the phone rang. Wilkins said to pull over. Wilkins said that he proposed to her after Gallop told him that she and her team had found the DNA linking Cooper to the crime. Cooper is currently serving four life sentences after being found guilty of the double murders.

They wouldn't have found the DNA if they hadn't looked for textile fibres. The murder of Stephen Lawrence was solved by the examination of textile fibres. Bob Green, vice-president of the Chartered Society of forensic Sciences, told me that tapings of evidence are being less and less used.

Gallop gave me a tour of the main forensic access lab, which is located in an anonymous business park. Here, a team of 24 scientists do their daily work: examining tissue samples from victims, studying textile fibres from crime scenes, using the in-house firing range to determine how far an attacker was standing from their target, and so on. An empty Colin the Caterpillar cake box sits on one of the desks in some areas, but not in others. One of the internal windows that we passed was blacked out because one of the scientists was working on body parts in there.

Gallop's pride was visible as we toured the lab. The current state of forensic science in England and Wales is not reflected in the shiny facilities of Forensic Access. Gallop, who describes herself as anappalling optimist, is worried. The high point for forensic science in England and Wales was in the mid- to late 2000s. The FSS was closed in 2012 because it was too expensive.

Gallop believes that the decision is disastrous because the government used to fund important forensic research through the FSS. The training that Gallop received in her early career was lost when the FSS was abolished. Gallop wrote that rather than being closed, the FSS should have been modernized and made commercially viable.

The closing of the FSS has resulted in police forces starting to do more testing in their own laboratories, rather than outsourcing the work. Jim Fraser is a forensic scientist at the University of Strathclyde. Police officers with no training in forensics are often tasked with choosing which simple forensic tests to have carried out. Younger forensic scientists are being trained in how to do just one or two of the tests on the menu, and not much more. He said that the police have messed with forensic science in England and Wales.

Gallop admitted to me later that she had had some really nice cars. Gallop spoke about the crisis in the criminal justice system in England and Wales as we drank tea in the garden. Since 2005, legal aid has been cut by almost half, and the courts have a lot of cases to adjudicate. The general quality of forensic work continues to decline as police increasingly do work that she believes should be done by specialists.

Sometimes the talk of cuts and declining standards can sound abstract, because of a lack of research that could yield something at some point in the future. The real meaning of forensic science is felt in the lives saved. I spoke to Damilola Taylor's father, Richard, in February. He agreed to speak to me about what Gallop and her team meant to him, but he is still upset about what happened to his little boy. It would have been a lifetime of depression for me and my family if the evidence that helped convict the killer had not been found. It helped us get some closure. Being able to move on.

Gallop met John Actie, one of the wrongly accused men, a few months ago. He was in jail for two years. The meeting that took place in Actie was being filmed for a documentary that will air on Channel 5 in April. It was a moment that Actie will never forget.

Gallop doesn't often see the people involved in her cases. She had never met someone who was wrongly accused of a crime before. She said it made her determined to continue to do her part. She went back to work.