Murder will out

When the 24-year-old Angela Gallop started working at the Home Office forensic science service, her boss lost no time in telling her that ‘a woman’s place is in the home — literally, at the kitchen sink’. Many years later, having contributed to solving some of the UK’s highest profile criminal cases, Gallop may have remembered those words with a smile as she mopped the office floor. This was no display of domesticity; she was in pursuit of a murderer.

A man had been accused by his wife of killing his boss. The wife said that the spatters of blood on the wall of the fast-food café where they worked had resulted from her husband’s violent kicks and punches to the owner’s body. But the defendant claimed that the blood streaks were his attempts to mop up the mess where his wife had carried out the murder. Professor Gallop thought to re-create the scene with old transplant blood she’d acquired from the lab. The pattern left behind by her mop’s strings closely resembled the stains on the wall at the crime scene. Perhaps the husband was telling the truth after all. Through these ingenious reenactments, Gallop has demonstrated time and again that being the country’s top forensic scientist is a place comfortably enjoyed by a woman.

Things could have been so different. Her PhD at Oxford was on sea slugs. But frustrated with the low stakes of her work, she swapped the creatures’ slimy trails for criminal traces. Her forensic apprenticeship in a brusque male culture helped to ‘disengage the emotional side of my mind and focus on whatever scientific puzzle I was trying to solve’. Yet when she held up the tiny sweatshirt of a two-year-old boy, her stoicism was sorely tested.