In 2006, a girl from the UK reported being abused by her father. She confessed to her mother, without being believed. She then took a camera and placed it in a corner of her room. She left it on all night for her to resume the horror her father inflicted on her. So it was. With that video, the young woman turned to the police, but in the video only the hands of the attacker could be seen. The police, however, knew who to contact to identify the man: they called Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist who has specialized in the identification of corpses for years and asked her “Can you identify the subject of the video only by the hands?” . Black and her team analyzed the images, focused on the veins in her hands, knuckles, freckles and scars, and came to confirm the girl’s father’s abuses. The anthropologist’s analysis was first admitted in a UK court and changed the history of the discipline. “We want to make it clear that the human body is really just layers upon layers of memory and memories engraved over time,” said the scholar, warning that “criminals must know that science is on their trail.”
Returning to the 2006 case, the parent was found “not guilty”. When Black, stunned, asked the reason for that verdict, her response was that “the jury did not believe the girl because during her confession the young woman did not cry”. But despite this, forensic science has changed since then and more and more analyzes of Black and her team have been admitted to the courts. As the expert explained, in an interview with The country, “There are more and more virtual crimes, scams and sexual abuse. Nobody would dream of filming themselves with a camera while robbing a bank », but not the pedophiles who instead« take photos and record because they want to share their crimes on the network and earn from those videos. Most of them are recognizable by the back of their hands with which they touch the victims ». And that’s why the smallest of details can be anything but insignificant.
The portrait of Sue Black at the National Gallery
She herself confessed in 2018 to having received abuse as a child but stated that it was not that episode that affected her career choice. “When I started identifying the hands of pedophiles in 2006, my career was already well established,” said Black. In fact, she inherited her fascination with her anatomy from her father, a Scottish hunter with whom she spent her childhood skinning rabbits and plucking killed pheasants. At just 12, Black started working in a butcher’s shop and at university she enrolled in Biology without hesitation, but also without having a clear idea of what she wanted to become. Until the second year she was asked for help in solving a case. Child’s play. And there she understood that her fate was written.
After studying Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen, Black was called three times to Kosovo to identify the human remains of the victims of war crimes, was able to recognize the people killed in the 2004 tsunami and is perhaps the only person in the world. to have flown from Verona to Glasgow with two human heads in his hand luggage. The Italian carabinieri had asked her for help in identifying two victims of Gianfranco Stevanin, the serial killer known as the Terrazzo Monster. And she herself said that part of the investigation could only be completed at her base in Scotland: “We decided to put each head in a sealed white bag and carry them in two designer bags, so that no one would suspect anything” .
Black’s team received a prestigious grant from the European Union to develop a hand identification system using artificial intelligence. “We would like computers to be able to do what we experts already do – explained the scholar -: see a hand and identify it by veins or wrinkles”. In this way, Black added, “by uploading all this information into a database, from fingerprints to wrinkles and veins, the chance that one individual could be confused with another is one in a million.”
The National Gallery of Scotland, an art gallery in Edinburgh, houses a portrait of Sue: the scientist is portrayed behind a green sheet and the painting is titled ‘Unidentified Man’, referring to her work in identifying individuals. from their remains. The anthropologist said he donated her body to the anatomy department at Lancaster University so that students can practice her dissection of her. “In this way – is her hope – I can continue teaching for the rest of my days”.