AT 83 years old, Patricia Wiltshire is the world’s leading forensic ecologist – and she should be, it’s a science she invented.
It all began 25 years ago when a local police force approached the biologist for help with a murder case they were working on. It was the start of a remarkable career in which she has applied her unique expertise to over 300 cases involving murder, rape and other violent crimes – all using previously ignored clues from nature.
She helped tie Ian Huntley to the Soham murders and was pivotal in the Sarah Payne case. She has also helped answer key questions in other complex cases – some in which only she can see the clues, be it a stray pollen spore inside a corpse which reveals the crime scene or a particular type of mud on a decapitated body.
But one case, revealed in her book The Natural History of Crime, now out in paperback, was one of the most bizarre.
When she took a call from a senior investigating officer asking for help solving a case, Patricia at first thought she was dealing with a particularly horrific attempted murder.
A man had been found in his home, covered in blood after being “stabbed twice through his anus up to his body” with a 45cm-long weapon. To add to the puzzle there was no clear sign of an attacker and the man, who had been heavily intoxicated, could not remember anything about what had happened.
“The funny thing is we found his belt and mobile phone in his greenhouse at the end of the garden,” a police officer said.
Patricia was puzzled too. “I squirmed and felt slightly sick at the thought,” she recalls. “It certainly required a macabre mind to envisage how anyone could have pierced this man right up into his abdomen through the anus and then put his clothing back in place.
“This horrific case was perplexing for the police, but my task was straightforward. Prepare what, if anything, had been picked up by the swabs, and examine the results under the microscope.
She set to work, but as she analysed the swabs from the man’s anus was surprised to find grains of pollen, including holly, privet, Ceanothus and other species typically found in a garden, rather than on the street or in the wild.
And because holly pollen in particular is heavy and insect-pollinated, meaning it does not travel far, then the incident must have happened close to the plant. Patricia wondered: “The victim of the injury had certainly been in his own garden, as was evidenced by his belt and telephone being left in the greenhouse; and the whole sickening event had probably happened in the garden rather than any woodland. But how could pollen grains from his own garden plants have been pushed right up into the middle of his body by something very sharp? And what was that pollen-laden thing that had pierced him so viciously?”
It was late in the year, the time many gardeners prune their plants, which results in a sharp spear protruding from the plant. It go Patricia wondering whether they were any recently-pruned holly bushes in the man’s garden. The answer came back: Yes, there were.
She recalls: “With my findings, I suggested that the drunk man might have tried to relieve himself and had inadvertently sat on a holly spike. He must have done this twice, and probably with some force. Perhaps he had stumbled, recovered, then stumbled again.”
Patricia’s theory was accepted and the case was closed. Patricia says: “I have no idea whether the man even survived but, if he did live, he would have been very severely incapacitated by his drunken tottering in his own garden.”
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