This is The Guardian.
Hi, my name is Imogen Westnites and I'm the author of This Guardian Longread,
The Queen of Crime Solving, which was published in March 2022.
This piece came about
because my editor David Wolf noticed a news piece about new evidence being tested in the so-called spy in the bag case.
In 2010,
an MI6 employee called Gareth Williams was found dead inside a red hold-all in the bathtub of his flat in Pimico,
and it was never established at the time.
What happened there?
But this new story was saying that the scientist who was leading the new evidence testing was a woman called Angela Gallup,
a forensic scientist.
who he hadn't heard of before and I hadn't heard of before but he was then reading about her and thought you know hang on a minute this woman seems to have been involved in pretty well every famous murder investigation in Britain of the past 30 years you know who is she is there someone worth doing a profile about and it turns out she really was so from there it kind of became apparent also that by profiling Gallup's really extraordinary career You could also use that as a framework around which to hang a portrait of our forensic science in general has risen and fallen in England and Wales over the last 50 years.
Unfortunately,
not much has changed in the state of forensic science in England and Wales since I wrote this piece.
The problems that Gallup and her peers describe that kind of plague forensic science in the Justin system are ongoing three years later,
but I'd say it will be Yeah,
interesting to see in say a decade whether their predictions that certain forensic skillsets will be lost does actually come to pass.
Welcome to The Guardian Long Read,
showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to TheGuardian.com forward slash long read.