At 82, Professor Patricia Wiltshire is the world’s leading ‘forensic ecologist’, who has brought some of Britain’s most notorious murderers to justice. ‘Pollen Pat’ tells David Collins how she could have solved the case of Sycamore Gap.
In crashing thunder and lightning, a team of forensic scientists and police officers gathered about a ditch and a hawthorn tree, both charred by a petrol fire, trying to understand the incomprehensible.
Professor Patricia Wiltshire, a forensic ecologist, was taking soil samples from footmarks around the ditch, carefully scraping the top millimetre of earth and placing it in a sample bag.
By her feet were the burnt bodies of two girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both ten years old, lying side by side. They were best friends and had been missing from their families in Soham, Cambridgeshire, for 13 days. One of the biggest manhunts in police history had ended here, by an old drovers’ road near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.
“Nobody will ever know the full truth of that story,” says Wiltshire, now 82. “You do your best with the evidence you have, but nobody will ever know the full picture.”
In 2002 countless detectives, crime scene investigators and forensics experts worked to reveal the mystery of the Soham girls’ murder. It was Wiltshire’s knowledge of plants, pollen and soil that would prove crucial in catching Ian Huntley, a local school caretaker. Just over 5ft tall, from the coal valleys of Monmouthshire, Wiltshire presented her evidence at the Old Bailey linking pollen on Huntley’s shoes and vehicle to the pollen found in the ditch. Huntley soon changed his story.
Since 1994 Wiltshire has helped in more than 300 criminal investigations and has written a new book about her work, The Natural History of Crime. She knows of only two other people in the world who could have undertaken the type of work she has carried out for the National Crime Agency (NCA) and police forces across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland — one in New Zealand and another in Texas who worked for the FBI. “One is dead and the other is retired.”
Met detectives and those around the country call her “Pollen Pat”. “Ah yes, or the Snot Lady,” she says, half-rolling her eyes, her Welsh accent still strong despite living in Ashtead, Surrey, for decades. The “Snot Lady” moniker comes from taking samples from a corpse’s turbinate bones, high up in the skull above the nostrils. This requires her to take the top off the head, going in through the empty cavity where the brain used to be. I point out not everybody would have the stomach to carry out such a procedure.
“If you can’t do the job, then get out of it and do something else,” she says sternly. “Go and sell lollipops. You’ve got to be strong, otherwise what’s the point? A policeman who can’t stand the sight of blood? I mean, c’mon.”
Wiltshire is friendly, intellectual, steely at times, and confident in her opinions. You have to be in her line of work. In major police inquiries, the competing interests of forensic scientists can be a minefield. It’s all about sharp elbows: evidence can be lost or damaged by the techniques of other experts; no one wants to be last in the queue to receive the crucial material, whether a murder weapon or a piece of clothing from the suspect or victim.
Wiltshire has choice words for one expert who refused to share his samples during their work on a child murder. “Great scientist, terrible investigator,” she says. “Not everybody can make the jump.”
I have met Wiltshire a few times; last year I recommended her services to a senior policeman on the Sycamore Gap case — the tree felled by vandals by Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. “They didn’t call me,” she says, “but I could have done that. All I would have needed to do was take [a suspect’s] shoes and some samples from the scene. Sycamore pollen doesn’t go very far … There would still be a halo of pollen around the tree. The person or people responsible would have got it on them.”
She gives me a tour of her house, where she lives with her second husband. “This is where I do my microscopy,” she says in her study, pointing to two microscopes against a backdrop of wall-to-wall shelves filled with books about soils, bacteria, plants, flowers.
She used one of these microscopes, a Leica, to help catch Huntley. She also used it in the case of Roy Whiting, who abducted and murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000 near the home of her grandparents in West Sussex. Whiting had pulled up in a van by a field where Payne was playing with her two brothers and younger sister and snatched her. After a huge search and a number of TV appeals by her parents, Payne’s body was found 16 days later in a shallow grave off the A29 at Pulborough. Wiltshire was able to help police by matching pollen, spores and soil on Whiting’s jeans, trainers, sweatshirt and spade to vegetation at the grave site.
Wiltshire also assisted police investigating the murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler by the serial killer Levi Bellfield in March 2002. Dowler’s body was found six months later in a wood in Yateley Heath, Hampshire, so badly decomposed that a cause of death could not be determined. Wiltshire helped to establish a timeline for the murder, working out that the leaves under Dowler’s skull were from the previous year.
Then there was Adam Hamilton, who murdered his girlfriend, Karen Doubleday, in Manchester in 2002. The couple had spent the evening at a local pub and left shortly before midnight. Wiltshire matched Hamilton’s jeans to an Ice Age fern found in the woods where he dumped Doubleday’s body after strangling her with a bra.
Not all investigations end with a conviction, of course. She helped out in the search for Suzy Lamplugh, the estate agent who went missing in 1986. Wiltshire was involved in excavation work around a meadow in Worcestershire, but the lead came to nothing. Lamplugh’s body has never been found and the murder remains unsolved.
Wiltshire is known for closing her eyes in the middle of a crime scene, imagining the crime unfolding and the plants with which the offender might have come into contact. “There’s so much to think about,” she says. “All those factors come into play and I’m trying to picture it all happening.”
How can she be so precise? Surely most plants and vegetation, at a local level, can be quite similar? “You go into a garden and you tell me where it is similar,” Wiltshire replies. “Every spot is different. That’s the beauty of palynology [the study of plant pollen and spores]. Geology — yes, the whole garden would be very similar. But plants If I took you to that oak tree " she indicates a tree in her garden, “do you think it would be the same as over here? Or here? There will be elements of the oak tree but it’s all about the quantities.”
We settle in the living room with a cup of tea and slice of homemade bara brith, a Welsh fruit loaf, and Wiltshire tells me about her sickly, bookish childhood. She grew up in a small mining village, Cefn Fforest, near Blackwood. On walks her grandmother, Vera, would point out birds’ nests, insects and plants they could eat such as hawthorn and wild garlic. Aged seven, at home in the kitchen, she jumped out and shouted “Boo!” while her mother was carrying a pan of hot chip fat. Wiltshire ended up covered in bandages for several years. As a child she suffered from pneumonia, measles, whooping cough and bronchitis, which left her with a chronic cough. Later in life she had a lung removed and today survives on just one (“which isn’t very good”).
“My schooling was messed up because I had so much time off and went to Newport to have my lung drained,” she recalls. “I’ll tell you what saved me as a child, and I’ve still got them — children’s encyclopaedias.” She takes me to a bookcase and leafs through the pages. “They are fabulous books for children. I learnt about electricity, the American constitution, Shakespeare’s poems.” She taught herself to knit and had an interest in rocks. “I’ve always collected rocks and minerals.”
Wiltshire attended Lewis Girls’ School in Hengoed, then moved to London aged 17 and worked in the civil service. She first trained as a medical laboratory technician at Charing Cross Hospital and studied for a botany degree, becoming a lecturer at King’s College London in the 1970s. She was taught by Francis Darwin, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and the Nobel prizewinner Maurice Wilkins, who helped discover the structure of DNA.
Wiltshire never had formal training in the forensic sciences. She left King’s to take a job as an environmental archaeologist at University College London, where she worked on excavations around the country helping analyse soils, sediments, seeds, shells, wood and animal and human bone.
Her life changed course again when in 1994 a police officer called and said he had contacted Kew Gardens for help with a case, and although they couldn’t provide any they knew a woman who might. A charred body had been left in a ditch in Hertfordshire and there were tyre marks in a nearby field. The police wanted to know if a car belonging to the suspects had been present. “They had an idea there might be maize pollen in the car to prove it had been in the field,” Wiltshire says. “I said, ‘I haven’t got a clue. I’ve never done anything like that before.’ But I said I’d have a look.”
She found that the pollen from the car’s pedals and footwell matched that of an agricultural field edge. When police took her to the crime scene, she could identify the exact spot where the body had been dumped from the types of flowers in a specific section of hedge. “That shook me rigid — that I could identify the precise spot,” she says. “I didn’t know the evidence could be so local. It taught me such a lot, that first crime scene.”
Her memories of the 2002 Soham murders, just eight years after that first case, remain vivid. She recalls the clumps of mugwort at the entrance to the track by the ditch where Wells and Chapman’s bodies were found; growths of nettles, docks, grasses, hedge woundwort and other coarse weeds; the canopy of hawthorn; chalk debris on the track’s surface giving way to orange Breckland sand.
She matched mugwort on Ian Huntley’s car to the drovers’ road by the ditch where the bodies were found; rat-tail plantain found on Huntley’s trainers and at the site; and hedge woundwort on his right trainer, also found at the site. She could prove he had been to the site at least twice and that his car had driven down and parked on that track. She also worked out the approach path Huntley had used to reach the ditch by analysing the regrowth of trampled plants.
“Of course, I was nervous,” Wiltshire says, sitting in an upholstered chair wearing a blue floral dress. “Especially in the Old Bailey. You don’t know what’s going to be asked of you. Outside it’s all marble halls, and then you go through a curtain and it’s there. And it was packed that day. It’s all hushed. And there was a big glass box with Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, his girlfriend, inside. And behind that was the press. I thought, ‘I can only do what I can do.’ The prosecution is on your side. They make it easy for you, you see? Then the other side start, the defence. And they’re trying to pull you down any way they can. It’s just a game.” Wiltshire shrugs. “They’re all great chums outside.”
It was shortly after Wiltshire and a geologist colleague presented their evidence that Huntley’s legal team admitted he had killed the girls — though he claimed it was an accident. He was sentenced to a minimum 40-year jail term; his fiancée, Carr, received three years for providing him a false alibi.
One of Wiltshire’s toughest cases was that of Steve Wright, the Suffolk Strangler, who murdered five women between October and December 2006. She linked pollen on Wright’s gloves and shoes to the woodlands where some of his victims were found, as well as providing police with evidence about how long two of them had been in a river by fungal growth on the bodies. “That was a terrible case. It was very hard having to go up to Suffolk week after week and seeing what he had done to those poor women,” she says. “It was very hard on me, that one.”
Wiltshire has had to learn to switch off emotionally. “You’ve got to be at the coalface if you’re going to do it properly. Crime scene, mortuary, court — you’ve got to have fortitude. You’ve got to have grit. You’ve got to be able to say, ‘I’m so tired but I’ve got to carry on.’ " She believes that women in particular have those traits in the field of forensics. “They have a lot of stamina and resilience, I think.”
Wiltshire left a “difficult” four-decade marriage at the age of 62; her daughter, Siân, died when she was 19 months old and Wiltshire’s book is part-dedicated to her. In it she writes about her empathy with the parents of Huntley’s victims, saying “my heart goes out to them, as I too have experienced losing my daughter in painful circumstances, and I know the gut-wrenching pain that results from it”. She tells me several times: “I hope you never have to go through anything like that yourself.”
For years Wiltshire could hardly admit she had a child, so painful was the memory. “She was the precious jewel in my life,” she says. “It was an autoimmune disease. She developed it at nine months and died at nineteen months. So, ten months in and out of Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital. Going to her cot. Thinking she would be dead, you know? It’s the one area that’s too painful. At the time nobody knew any of this. Being with David has allowed me even to say I had a daughter. Before that I couldn’t even say I had one.”
She met David, her second husband, at a memorial service for Francis Rose, the botanist and conservationist, in 2006. “We were planting a tree in his memory and it was very romantic,” she says. “I slipped and David caught me. We decided to walk through the woods together and I said, ‘Oh look, there’s a russula emetica [a type of mushroom], and he said, ‘Ah, it’s a russula, but I don’t think it’s emetica.’ I said, ‘Really, do you know anything about fungi then?’ Then he told me his name. I said, ‘Not the David Hawksworth? I thought you’d be about 90.’ His name had been about in the literature for ever, you see.”
Later he helped her on a murder case. “Norfolk or Suffolk Police, I think,” she muses. “I couldn’t identify a spore, so I asked David.” He managed to successfully identify the fungus and the rest, as they say, is history. They married in 2009. They have a collie called Ruby, a rescue dog from Romania that can be a handful. “She barks at people with ginger hair.”
The couple have worked on other crimes together. “They only get charged for one professor. Two for the price of one.” She laughs. One case involved the body of a man found headless and handless by a river near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Police wanted to know how long the body had been there and hoped plants and soil could provide the answer. Hawksworth noticed a fluffy white fungus growing just below the corpse’s ribs. Identifying the fungus — mucor hiemalis — as well as evidence of robust and fresh vegetation beneath the body and no fly activity, led them to conclude the victim had already been dead for more than a week before being dumped by the river.
Even at 82, Wiltshire is still working — she mentions an “interesting” case in New Zealand she is helping with. What will happen when she retires? The National Crime Agency once had a plan to teach people her casework in the laboratory. “It never happened,” she says. “That was about 20 years ago.” She believes forensic ecology is a dying art as police investigators have become overly reliant upon DNA.
“Police officers often think, ‘Ah, DNA, we’ve got them.’ But there are so many problems with DNA. It’s so sensitive. If I came and touched you, now you’ve got my DNA, and if you touch someone else, he’s now got my DNA on him. We don’t know enough about transfer in my opinion.”
What is her one piece of advice to investigators? “Be flexible,” she says. “Some forensic scientists can’t be flexible because they have certain techniques and protocols and it all has to be ticked off. But every case is different. Every case is unique. That’s the beauty of it and the beauty of the natural world. Every place is unique.”
Three killers ‘Pollen Pat’ helped convict
Roy Whiting murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000. Wiltshire matched pollen, spores and soil on his clothes to Payne’s burial site.
In Soham in 2002 Wiltshire matched pollen on the shoes and car of Ian Huntley to the ditch where his victims were found.
In 2002 Levi Bellfield murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler. Wiltshire helped determine how long her body had lain where he left it.
The Natural History of Crime by Patricia Wiltshire will be released in NZ on June 24.
Written by: David Collins
© The Times of London