Scientist speeds detection

Press, 19 February 1986, Page 21

Scientist speeds detection

Modern technology is helping to put the finger on criminals faster and more efficiently, says a leading British forensic scientist. Gone are the days when matching a fingerprint

meant laboriously wading through hundreds of huge books of prints, says the director of Scotland Yard’s forensic laboratory, Dr Ray Williams, who is on a speaking tour of New Zealand.

“There are millions of prints in the United Kingdom collection. It used to take many men weeks and often months to get an identification—that is, if the print was on file,” he said in Christchurch on Monday.

Advances in the art of detection were helping the net to close more quickly on the perpetrators of serious crimes, he said.

Lasers were being used to identify fingerprints that previously might have gone unnoticed. As prints were now stored in a compute; memory

r .w ~ rapid matching was possible.

Dr Williams gave as an example the recent English case of sexual assault and murder of a young girl in her bedroom by an Intruder.

‘‘By using the right scientific equipment we were able to find two sets of fingerprints on the win-dow-ledge, where the intruder had held on before dropping to the ground.

“The crime was committed on a Saturday and because of the speed with which police were able to match the fingerprints, a man was arrested on the Monday,” he said.

Dr Williams said he believed the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was able to provide New Zealand police with the sort of back-up in crime detection that his forensic laboratory gave in London.

“From what I have seen, the D.S.I.R. has high-quality scientists and equipment, which it shares here with the university, and should be capable of giving an excellent service.

"The main advantage we have in the United Kingdom is that we have considerably more experience in all the peculiar things that criminals get up to,” he said. Dr Williams is one of two forensic science experts in New Zealand as keynote speakers at a seminar on serious crime being held at the Police College in Wellington this week. The other is Professor Herbert Mac Donnell, who runs a laboratory in New York.

Both men have recently attended a forensic conference in Australia. Professor Mac Donnell, an authority on bloodstain splatters, will present papers on that subject as well as on firearms and fingerprints work. He was recently quoted in a report from Sydney as saying that the tests done by a scientist, Ms Joy Kuhl, in the Azaria Chamberlain case were faultless. He supported Ms Kuhl’s controversial evidence that foetal blood was found in the Chamberlain family car.