How to Commit the Perfect Murder

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Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And when we met, it was murder.

Because today is our heart-to-heart special.

Robbie's also a big fan of Colombo, by the way.

And my wife is a big fan of you.

She's not, actually, she's annoyed with you at the moment.

You took me on too many tour dates last year.

Even she actually wanted me home eventually, and that's very rare.

You sent me a thank you card, actually.

Make it 200 dates next year.

And Brian, as you know, is also a big fan of just standing on mountaintops, wistfully looking across peaks towards the star, and occasionally, secretly, just pushing other mountaineers off.

And

so we thought we'd combine both of our interests.

And today's show is about how to commit the perfect crime.

And this will lead to Infinite Monkey Cluedo, in which Professor Cox kills Reverend Robin in the observatory with a six-inch refractor.

That reference, by the way, was for the Freudians in the audience.

Anyway, why are you using inches?

Brexit.

Now, we should make it clear, by the way, at this point, that though we will be talking about how to commit the perfect murder, the BBC takes no responsibility for the length of sentence you're given and your prison stay.

Yeah.

In today's show, we're exploring forensic science and psychology.

What makes a murderer, and is there such a thing as the perfect crime?

To help us find out, we are joined by a criminal psychologist, a forensic scientist, and someone who is known for doing a quite amazing foxtrot to kill a queen.

And they are.

I'm Dr.

Julia Shaw, criminal psychologist at University College London, and my favorite fictional detective is the detective in Blade Runner, who has to investigate not just where the replicants are and find them and deactivate them, but questioning the very nature of reality itself and where the memories and the replicants even come from.

Follow that one if you can.

So I'm Professor Sue Black.

I'm a forensic anthropologist.

I'm president at St.

John's College in Oxford.

And my favourite fictional detective probably has to be Rebus, for those of you who know the mind of Ian Rankine.

And I think I relate to Rebus because

he's stubborn, he's irritating, he's miserable, and he's just a Dan Doer Scott.

I'm Susan Kalman, I'm a television presenter, and my favourite fictional detective is the greatest fictional detective of all time.

And I will literally fight in the car park anyone who disagrees, DCI Jane Tennyson.

I had a cat, fun fact, called DCI Jane Tennyson.

And I put so many pictures of that cat on social media.

At one point, when you googled DCI Jane Tennyson,

a picture of my cat came up before Helen Mirren.

I also now have a cat called Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I'm trying for the same.

And this is our panel.

and Susan, thank you very much.

Because you had a bit of a difficult journey down and you and you managed to get here and you travelled all the way.

Not only have you travelled all the way from Glasgow, but you're also going to go back on the train that is the kind of the lady vanishes mysterious

possible murder train, isn't it?

And the thing that's interesting is a lovely experience is I'm the voice of the sleeper train,

so I hear myself saying toilet door locked.

Do you normally do that though when you just go to the toilet anyway?

Toilet door locked.

But I do.

I did it in the voiceovers in a special, someone I admire deeply, Kirsty Warks, kind of, because Kirsty Wark has authority and warmth.

So when I say, Welcome to Glasgow, I've done it in kind of a more Kirstie Wark-ish way, so people believe me.

This is the thing that Susan was saying.

When the train was stuck at rugby, and it was like an hour and a half, and people kept coming up to you and saying what's going on Susan because she's on the telly they presumed she'd know yes because I do travel shows and I had a large queue of people they were ignoring the Advante West Coast people and instead going because they know my name so it's like Susan do you know when the next train's going and I'd go I don't

and then they would just stay there and look at me

isn't that because it's because you're the voice of the toilet door that's right that's what it is it is.

So if you ever go on the sleeper train, you can hear me telling you the toilet door is locked.

Or, more alarmingly, the toilet door is unlocked.

Do you sometimes do that?

If you're on the train tonight and you get bored, signs go up and you've got the locked door.

Toilet door is unlocked.

I'm almost hoping you have insomnia just for that jake to happen.

I've never thought of doing that, but I'd be delighted to do that.

Soon.

Yes.

Yeah, I know.

Every now and again we actually get to the show but we veer away again very quickly.

Go for it.

Is there such a thing as the perfect crime or the perfect murder?

Well probably but we don't know what it is because if it was perfect we haven't found it out.

So it's only the imperfect crimes that we do actually detect.

Is there such a thing as a perfect or a good criminal then?

Is there a particular character type that makes it yes I think I'd make a good murderer's assistant.

So I'd like to think I have the problem problem with actually doing the deed and dispatching somebody.

My husband could probably do it, and he's certainly threatened to do it to some of our daughter's boyfriends.

And if he had, I would have had no trouble dismembering them and getting rid of the pieces.

So, I think we could make a perfect team.

You suddenly remember we didn't put a warning out before this.

Beginning to realise we most definitely should have done.

But is it, Julia, is there a particular personality type that lends

itself to criminality?

I mean, I would agree with Sue that we that the perfect murder exists probably, but we haven't discovered it.

Um I would also go and do the things that aren't statistically likely.

So

detectives are likely to look for a man, for example, for a murderer.

Then they're likely to look in the vicinity of where you have lived or where that person lives.

So do it far away from home and ideally do it with a weapon that can't be tracked, so definitely don't do it with a gun.

But in terms of the personality profile,

there's an assumption that being psychopathic is going to be good for you, which it might be because you're high on callousness and low on empathy, which makes it easier to hurt people.

But most murders are committed by people who it's a fight that gets out of control.

It's more someone who's aggressive, hot-tempered, and it's not a psychopath.

It's a passion, isn't it?

It's a moment of passion.

Murder is on television so much.

And more often than not, the murders that we see on television in terms of in dramas is incredibly well prepared.

It's a, you know, half the show is about someone planning.

It is that thing again of you know, someone puts an umbrella out of a chimney and connects it to a record player that's playing the 1812 overture and coincides the murder with the sound of the cannons.

But that must be, I mean, not just that example, otherwise, that level of preparation is very, very rare, I'd assume.

Most murders are not anticipated.

So it is a moment of argument.

It's alcohol-fueled, it's drug-fueled, whatever it may be.

And suddenly you're faced with a situation which has gone beyond where you ever expected it to go and you're left with with a body.

What do you do with it?

If I can give you a bit of advice, should you ever find yourself in that position, don't dismember, don't.

It's awfully messy.

I know.

Can I borrow your pen?

Yeah,

and then people think I'll go and drop the body parts in different places.

Every time you do that, you've gone from one potential crime scene to about six, so you're more likely to be caught.

So don't.

Do you know what?

One of the things I'm really enjoying about this conversation already, and

it's just started, is I'm fascinated because one day this might come in useful.

I've never done a show where the audience are just going, oh,

because the thing about it, I think, is that most people have at some point even fleetingly considered murdering someone.

You've considered it, you've considered it, you've thought about

more than one Susan.

We've all, fleetingly, and most of us say that silly, but we have potentially thought about it.

And I think most of the people who think about it, and like the distinguished guest over there, have absolutely no knowledge apart from what they've seen on the television,

which would make them believe that they could commit the perfect crime.

Because if you've watched all of these programmes, surely you have the background.

For me,

genuinely, people go,

is that not true?

I categorise my friends, it's interesting what you were saying, Sue, about your husband, into

would they help me if I committed a murder I'd help you and you would you

I wouldn't we've got this we've got the same name

this is strangers on a train

there's a sleeper leaving tonight and if they've both got tickets

can I just ask do you also classify your Oxford colleagues in such a way I couldn't possibly comment on that

but I think it's I think what what Julia's saying which is interesting is it's about who you are as to whether or not people could guess you were the type of person who would commit it.

The closest I think you can get to a perfect crime or murder is that no one would suspect you of doing that in the first place.

And I think it's that if you're a naturally happy, smiley woman who presents travel shows on the television, no one would ever suspect me of committing a hidden crime.

Oh, you've got that so wrong.

You are the second person that I would expect to do a murder.

The first, that woman called Jane who does all that singing on cruises, right?

I reckon that's what it is.

I mean in a way as long as Jane's the first suspect I'll be okay because I'll have time to get away but the murder the murder's just the first bit.

It's the clear-up of the murder that's the really interesting bit.

I was going to ask you because you said don't.

You tell us what not to do.

Do not dismember the body and distribute

what do you really don't like you saying that because I've never heard you because I think of you as being always saying lovely things about the wonderful world suddenly hearing you go do not dismember the body and also because it does sound like it's a public information

until the train has stopped and do not dismember the body

And certainly do not put it down the toilet without locking the door.

Slatiest bit of rail information for the audience here.

None of you get the 11.15 to Glasgow.

That's all I'm saying, right?

So

what is your advice?

Don't do it in the first place, is the best bit of advice.

That's taken advice, don't leave it, right?

Don't do it.

But what if I've accidentally

killed somebody?

And I think we should clarify not in a public place, because if it's in a public place, then games are bogie, CCTV, it's in a private place.

Let's get it more specific.

So, what private place is it?

It's the sleeper carriage.

No, I think it's the toilet.

I think the murder is done when the person goes to go, I was certain I locked the door, and that's when she does.

And I talked about the mirror.

Unlocking the door for the double checking.

Let's say it's my house.

What should I do?

I know I shouldn't have done it, blah, blah, blah.

How do I not get caught?

Ah, well, you see, you added the second bit there because the first thing you should do is, of course, phone 999 and say, you know, I've done something really bad.

Yes.

But if we assume that you've got no conscience

and you'd like to get away with it,

really the most important things are what not to do.

Don't bury it in your garden.

Your neighbours will see you.

Don't put it behind the bath panels.

It will smell within a few days, especially if you've got your central heating on.

Not these days, Sue.

You know, you probably haven't got a suitcase that's big enough to get the body into it, but you want to get it away from the premises.

But then you need to think about where do you go with the premises.

Your car, with the automatic number plate recognition, they're going to be able to follow wherever your car goes.

You need to go off-road.

Most bodies are found within a certain distance of a road because they're really heavy, unwieldy things to move about.

It is really difficult to dispose of a body, mercifully.

Unless you've got an incinerator.

And not a fireplace.

No, no.

Not enough places don't work.

Don't say it's a Santa accident.

I think it just fell while the farm was there.

Look at the bag of presents that's next to there.

Based on your experience in court, though, so those you've described them, the mistakes that people make having committed a crime.

Is that the common outcome that there are basically simple mistakes, reasonably easy to gather the evidence?

By and large, providing you've got the body, and that's the difficult thing.

So if if you know somebody's been murdered, finding the body can be the difficult thing.

So, I mean, there's a case in Scotland from the 1970s.

They're still trying to find where those bodies are.

The individual's now been convicted for it, but there's no body.

It's really difficult to get a conviction in the absence of a body.

Because, Julia, I'm just thinking about the fact that, again, in some of the early work of yours that I read as well, we have a desire, as we've, you know, we're all kind of talking, we've all shown that we have what you might call a certain amount of murder imagination, even if we might not commit the act.

Homicidal ideation.

Murder Murder fantasies.

There's research on them.

Homicidal idiation, right?

So that is, so that idea is, first of all, I think when we see a lot of the way the newspapers deal with people who might commit terrible acts, is there is a desire to believe that people who might commit a murder, etc., they're somehow separate.

So we can look on and go, oh, well, they must have the evil gene or whatever it might be.

But actually, in terms of what we know about people who might commit extreme acts, you know, how different are they to every single person sitting in this audience apart from him?

A lot of the work that I do focuses on deconstructing that difference between sort of the evil people, the evil monsters who do these heinous things like murder, and us, the good citizens of the world who don't do those kinds of things, who would never do those kinds of things.

And I think that division of good versus evil, which we're taught from childhood on, really, which I also think we should be deconstructing from childhood on, is hugely problematic because it leads to the dehumanization of people who have made bad decisions for whatever reason and done bad things.

I think all of us are capable of murder, given the right or, if you will, wrong circumstances.

And we've seen it play out over and over in history, right?

You see neighbors turn on each other in war.

You see people suddenly capable of what they think is defending their child, but turns out to be murder because maybe they're suffering from a delusion.

So there's lots of things that people are capable of doing if either their reality changes inside their minds or their reality changes in the physical world around them.

And that in the moment feels like the best thing to do or it's a fight that gets out of hand.

We assume, because the consequences are severe, that the reasons and the motivation for the act must also be extreme.

And yet, you know, when you look at the reasons, it's a fight over two pounds, and that's also why all of us are capable of it, because it's not the separate thing from it's well within the normal experiences and feelings that humans have.

Susanna, you spent time on death row.

Yes.

Visiting.

Could you elaborate?

So, a very long time ago, I did a law degree.

I completed it and was a lawyer for a while before I gave it up to join the glamorous world of stand-up.

And I did a course in American constitutional law as part of my degree, and I won a scholarship to go and work at an Applet Centre in North Carolina where we were trying to get people's sentences commuted from death to life without parole.

So, at the very least, they weren't going to be be put to death by the state.

Now, this was back in 1996, so forensics were not as advanced.

I mean, I didn't have a mobile phone while I was at university.

So, the people I was encountering are people exactly like you've been talking about largely,

where they had encountered a situation and had reacted and had killed somebody.

I did encounter a couple of serial killers, as we'd be called.

A woman who poisoned, as is typical often for women, six or seven of her husbands.

And a gentleman who, and it is one of the

kind of curious things, it's why I love crime fiction, but I also am aware of the fact it's not real.

So I went into death row rally prison to meet a gentleman who had killed a number of women.

And he used to go to trailer parks.

And if the women were blonde, he'd let them live.

And if they were dark-haired and dark-eyed, he would kill them because he was killing his mother to a certain extent.

lots of stuff going on.

They didn't tell me this before I went in because they wanted to see how he would react to me.

So,

but the thing about him was, you could sit next to him on the train or in the pub.

And I completely agree, there are no

monsters to a certain extent.

There are really odd situations where people are absolutely horrific, you know.

But a lot of the people we would consider consider horrific lived amongst us for a long time before they were caught.

And so

they are just like us.

And I think that's actually one of the things that's most frightening and most fascinating:

they are just like us, and you cannot tell.

We had to meet the victims' families as well to understand the damage that had been done.

But these people

were

the same as me to a certain extent.

And so,

what you're saying is

I completely understand it because I probably could have been friends with some of these people.

It's interesting, Julia, that as Susan said there, that you encounter murderers and they are in many ways people like us.

I'd actually correct that and not just say people like us, but they are us.

Yes.

Yes, so

what's the role of a criminal psychologist?

So in court, for example, or during an investigation,

what are you bringing to that process?

So there's lots of different sub-disciplines within criminal psychology and my specialism is in false memory, so memories of things that didn't actually happen and in particular I look at the evidence in front of me as to whether an investigation was conducted appropriately when it comes to the interview.

So were the right questions asked during a memory that was being recalled?

So you've got a witness in front of you, is the detective, the police officer, the person who's doing the interview, are they asking appropriate questions or are they leading and suggestive and problematic questions?

Are they feeding the witness pieces of evidence, for example?

Are they lying to the witness?

If we go to places like the States,

you can just make up evidence.

You can just create fake evidence, say, we've got CCTV footage of you, we've got your fingerprints at the scene, which is luckily not allowed here.

But there's still things that can happen here which are really leading and suggestive and we know can lead people to say things either slightly differently than they remember or can lead them to say things that they don't remember at all.

And the problem is that for people who are developing false memories, they don't know that it's happening.

And so you start with, yeah, I think I remember that.

And the police officer says, do you remember the white jacket?

And you go, no, maybe.

Oh, yeah, maybe.

The next time you're interviewed, what do you say?

There was a white jacket.

What do you say on the stand?

I definitely remember the white jacket.

Now, if that's a crucial piece of evidence, then that is a false memory that that person has, and they're recalling it confidently, it's going to be believed and potentially going to lead to a wrongful conviction.

So I look at the process through which memories were elicited, and I look at whether or not that was appropriate or not, and whether or not the memory could be false.

It seems quite almost fantastical to me that through suggestion, through questioning, I could remember something and feel absolutely confident I remember something that I did not remember that had not happened.

Is that more likely in a stressful situation, or is it actually just that anybody is susceptible to that process under any conditions?

We're all great at fabricating realities.

We're very creative.

Our brains are beautiful storytellers.

They really like consistency.

They like consistent, coherent narratives.

And so we turn experiences or pieces of experiences as we remember them into these linear narratives.

And what that means is that all of our brains can add bits that were maybe not sure initially that we guessed, we sort of guess at them, the guesstimates, the maybe.

Are we filling in the gaps?

Filling in the gaps, for example.

But then there's also, so my PhD involved, or my PhD research involved, implanting false memories into people's minds of committing crimes.

So I'd convince you that you assaulted someone with a weapon.

Susan's not happy.

If it's okay, I'm going to avoid eye contact with you for that.

So really, genuinely convincing that there are cases where someone was convinced they had committed a serious crime.

70% of the participants in in my research told me, fully confessed to crimes that they'd never committed, that never happened.

And other people watched the videos, other participants, and they couldn't tell the difference between the same person recalling an event that actually happened and this false memory.

Okay.

I was listening to this.

Because you're a lawyer.

I mean, is this a relatively modern

point of view in law?

Because was that available to you when you were practicing in the nineties?

I mean, all of this stuff.

And I find it it's really, really interesting because I did a forensics course at university, which is nothing like what's happening just now.

And I think when you look at the way police interviewed people, there's a very famous case in Glasgow called the Bible John murders, and it continues to be quite a notorious case.

And the way the scene was treated, the way

the victims were treated in terms of the preconceptions that the police had, because I know there's a big thing about if the police have a preconception about the victim, and they will often deal with it in a different way, often with women, particularly who are considered you know to have been going out late at night or whatever.

But it wasn't, and I find it terrifying because memory is one of the most terrifying things.

Your own

memory.

I had a vivid dream last night of when I was 13 and in the chorus of the pirates of Penzance.

I don't know if I was.

Do you know what I mean?

But I woke up thinking, that was great.

And I remember, and

was I in the Pirates of Penzance?

And the thing is, that memories can be so vivid,

even if you think of an interaction of last time you and I met, Robin,

we may remember it entirely differently.

And I think I can't even remember which car park it was now.

The point is, I think, that the best lawyers also play on that.

The point of all of this fundamentally when it gets to court is doubt.

And that's the thing you always have to remember:

is there a doubt in your mind that the person has done what they've done?

And lawyers will either say the police did what Julia's talking about

or say that there's a number of different ways that the evidence because the thing is, juries trust forensics almost implicitly and too much.

I don't know if

they do.

So if you were to imagine sitting in a court saying, now we're going to hear from a scientist,

there wouldn't be a ripple of excitement in the room because they think, oh, scientists, white coats, boffins.

If you say, now we're going to hear from the forensic scientist, everybody sits up and thinks, oh, this will be interesting.

And so there's already a sort of level of expectation of forensic science in that courtroom.

And you're so right, Susan, it is an arena, it's a play, and there are actors.

And some actors have rules that the others don't know about.

And so we can only ever answer the question we're asked.

If they don't ask the right question, we can't get the answer over.

And so you find the ways to make it clear to your own counsel that maybe there's a question they should be asking, and you hope that they'll pick up on it, and often they don't.

Because you've got to remember, our lawyers are not scientifically trained,

neither are our judges.

In a typical, if there is such a thing, there probably isn't, but a typical murder trial, I was going to say, but in a murder trial, how much emphasis and weight is given to the forensic evidence?

Because obviously, when this this system evolved, I don't know how many hundreds of years ago, there was probably no such thing, I guess, as forensic evidence.

And now it's getting more and more detailed and more and more advanced.

So, how much weight is placed on the forensic evidence now?

By and large, there's a lot of weight placed on the forensic science, but each and every case is very different.

So, if you look, for example, at the murder of Lee Rigby, so the fusilier who was murdered in London, there was so much CCTV footage and so many cameras.

Actually, very little of what happened was in doubt because it was all recorded.

Whereas, if you look at something like the murder of Geoffrey Howe, which was again a dismemberment while we were involved, then the forensic science was absolutely critical to the final outcome.

So, it does depend on each and every case.

But I think there is an awareness or a pseudo-awareness in the juries, who are, of course, the public, that they come to the jury thinking that they are forensically aware because they've watched Silent Witness.

And so they know exactly what it is.

And you just clarify that, the documentary Silent Witness, isn't it?

They know exactly that you can get a DNA sample in 40 minutes because that's the length of an episode.

But the reality is that it may take you weeks to get it.

So often we're the biggest disappointment to the jury on the planet.

You know, essentially, you mentioned DNA evidence, because I suppose really naively you would think that now you would do something like that.

You'd say, here is the DNA, it's your DNA, you are the murderer.

So what are the subtleties surrounding DNA evidence?

If I'm ever accused of murder, can you do it?

Because that was the sweetest, gentlest accusation.

Those may be more.

Every single show he makes is just building up his alibi.

But it wouldn't have been him.

He seemed like the sweetest particle physicist I ever saw.

So can you take us a bit through the history and how DNA evidence has evolved, and what are the flaws, the potential flaws?

Yeah, so I'm old enough to have done cases before we had DNA coming into the police courts.

And it was Alec Jeffries in Leicester who had his great Eureka moment where, God bless him, he was doing medical genetics experiments and he couldn't get them to work, so he was pulling his hair out.

He didn't have much, but he was pulling it out, and he realized the reason he couldn't get it to work is everybody's DNA was different.

And at that point, we just didn't know that.

Now, that was really important because the DNA research had all been undertaken through medical genetics.

So, the research was really well funded, which meant that the research was sound.

A lot of forensic science is not terribly well funded in terms of research, so it's a little bit sketchy in some places compared to others.

But the DNA was very well founded.

And so, early on, the police were able to say, That's a really interesting scientific technique.

I wonder if we could use it.

And that's what forensic science does.

It's a magpie, it steals everybody else's science and then applies it.

Because there's no such thing as forensic science, there is science, and when it goes into the courtroom, it becomes forensic science.

And that's the only thing that makes it forensic science.

So, when DNA came in, there was a little bit of

disbelief that this was going to be the great sort of panacea that was going to solve everything, but very quickly we realized just how important it became.

And we're now at a position where literally you just need nano, nano-levels of DNA because you can take a single cell and you can replicate it, and the DNA is there.

So we have no trouble now finding the DNA.

What we don't understand so much is how it got there.

So that if you are in a bar, for argument's sake, and it's a loud bar, and you shout to be heard, so literally around you, you're spraying everybody with your DNA.

It's a lovely thought,

and you're taking away Susan's DNA with you.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

It's very pretty, DNA.

You're very welcome.

It's very well-behaved, DNA.

And you take it away with you.

You go home and you commit a crime.

Susan's DNA can now be at that crime scene.

She's never been at the crime scene, but her DNA is there.

So, the interpretation of the DNA is what's important.

And we understand very little about transfer, so how it gets from one person to another, and sometimes even beyond a two-person contact, facts, to a third or a fourth-person contact, and then how long does it persist.

We don't actually know that research.

I'm quite notorious for terrifying crew members on the shows I do because the one thing that always stuck with me when I did forensics briefly was Low Cards theorem and I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it.

Every contact leaves a trace.

I love it.

I think emotionally it's true as well.

I take it emotionally, every contact you make with a human being leaves a trace, but physically, it's always stuck with me.

And I always say to sound guys and sound people because they're sometimes in my bra.

And whenever, if someone's making me up and I go, Do you know if something happens to me, your DNA is in my underwear?

I say, no, it's fine, it's just a forensic principle of every contact leaves a chase.

And they go, uh-huh.

Because they literally, and if I was found, if something happened to me and I was found, and I've worked with a lovely guy called Jamie, salt of the earth.

But if you swabbed, I did a dance at the end of the Christmas cruising special, and he had to put the microphone inside my underwear.

Right?

Yes, well, he didn't need to.

He had to for the line of the dress.

What exactly are you recording then?

So it wasn't voice.

So the mic didn't show in a low-cut dress, and so

he had to basically gaffer tape this mic into my pants.

Now, at that point, if something happens to me,

literally his DNA is salivas on my fragments.

He was just breathing.

But

heavily.

There are points where, if something had happened to me and you had excellently swabbed my clothing,

how did Jamie's DNA get into my bra and my underwear?

I'm picturing your Apple Watch also, your heart rate goes up, up, up, up, up.

So, like, see, this is when it began.

I was wearing what I technically call my dance pants to suck everything in, so I was breathing very heavily myself.

We've talked about DNA evidence, so in forensic science,

there's a progression.

Technology gets better, we are better interpreting the evidence.

In criminal psychology, where's the cutting edge at the moment, and where's that?

Which directions is research in that area pushing towards?

So there's some controversial stuff happening in neuroscience or neuro law,

where sort of the intersection of trying to introduce brain scans, for example, into legal settings, often met with pushback because it's often used for things like lie detection.

Is that the equivalent of a polygraph, which you said earlier just does not work at all?

Big fan.

It's nothing you see on television, but it's just nonsense.

But if you scan my brain, can you tell if I'm lying?

No.

Well, it depends.

So I might be able to see that you're creating something, that you're fabricating something, that your brain is thinking of something new as opposed to something old, but

it doesn't tell me any more than that.

Much like the polygraph can tell me that your arousal is going up, not in the sexy way, that your heart rate's going up, that you're maybe perspiring, right?

That sort of those kinds of things that it's measuring, which are often related to how nervous you are, which can be related to lying, but isn't necessarily, similarly with MRI stuff.

But I think the most important

applications of cognitive science, much like you were saying that you're sort of, it's all science and the only reason it's forensic psychology is because it's applied psychology.

And so, we just also steal from other psychological areas.

For example, I was asked today whether there's any research on false memories and neurodivergence, and whether people who are neurodivergent are more likely to be seen as unreliable witnesses, and whether there's any adjustments made for interviewing.

So, if you are autistic, for example, is there appropriate or reasonable adjustments that are made in how you're asked questions in the courtroom?

Because how you're asked questions might be more likely to affect how you present.

And oh, one thing we really love doing

in courtrooms is judging how people present.

We get so judgy.

We bring all our biases with us, and we go, oh, I don't believe him.

And it can be based on you don't like how he's looking to the left, you don't like her hat, you don't like whatever it is.

And we bring those biases in, and so that matters hugely.

And as far as I know, that research hasn't been done.

And so once it has been done, we can bring that in, and people like me can help train police to better interview.

We can help in courtrooms to bring that evidence in and say, hey, actually, maybe this wasn't done appropriately, so this evidence isn't as reliable.

So, there's lots of places where we can then take that research and bring it in.

There's two interesting things.

When you say that, sometimes we look at people and we go, oh, they look like they've done it.

You know, there's that kind of thing.

And I do think, again, how popular culture very often draws very simplistic images of people who are villainous or murderous.

You know, we still have that tradition.

If someone has any kind of facial anomaly or someone has some kind of deformity, you know, there's no, as far as I can see, there's no evidence to say that that is in any way, or, you know, just someone looks a bit lumpy or whatever it might be, there are so many ways in which, and in fact, and I I that worries me, that worries me that sometimes people who are already perhaps on the outside are made even further outside, and we make these snap judgments based on popular culture.

I mean, is that fair to say?

It's called the devil effect, which is that people who look bad are bad.

And it's that assumption that if you have a disability, for example, you look like the villain.

Think of stereotypical Batman villains, right?

There's a charity called Not Your Villain, which is just saying stop casting villains as people with visible disabilities.

You are stigmatizing further a group that is already often stigmatized.

Just to finish,

to get back to Infinite Monkey Cluedo,

let's say that Professor Cox has indeed

done away with the Reverend Robin in the observatory with the six-inch refractor.

How am I most likely to get caught?

Where is it happening?

It's in an observatory.

An observatory.

Well, hopefully, they've got no CCTV.

No.

Okay, so unlikely then.

You're going to have to get rid of the body.

It's getting rid of the body, you're going to get caught.

It's always getting rid of the body.

That's the most difficult thing.

That's the most difficult thing.

Because they're messy things, bodies.

Once you pierce them with something, whether it's a knife or a tractor, whatever it may be, the innards come out

and they make a mess and they get slippery and people get a bit put off by them.

And I'm really full of stuff as well.

One of those people who's, yeah.

In the muscular category, absolutely.

That's the hard thing, is getting rid of the body.

Yeah, that's where you're going to get caught.

And I think you'd said, actually, that there are experts that you can employ if you're a kind of a gangland kind of thing.

There are people whose job it is

to dispose of bodies that you encounter in court.

Yeah, we had a murder case and the body parts were found in two different counties.

And when we came to look at the body parts, we looked at them, my colleague and I, and said, This is someone who knows what they're doing.

Because when you go to dismember a body, if you don't know what you're doing, you tend to go and pick up the knife and you try to cut through something and find that bone is really difficult to go through.

This individual had jointed the body.

And so that's the point at which the police say, What sort of people?

And you go, well, human anatomists, forensic anthropologists,

surgeons, vets, you know, those sorts of things.

And we got all the way through to the courtroom.

And the individual that they had charged with the murder was a doorkeeper.

He was a bouncer.

And all the way through, his defence was, he's a bouncer, I've got no butcher experience, I've got none of this.

And eventually, at some point, through the courtroom procedures, he decided he would change his plea to guilty.

And that was the point at which he turned to his counsel and said, Well, it's not as if I haven't done it before.

And his job was that he had been trained how to dismember bodies.

So, where you have drug gangs, and if there is a body that they need to get rid of.

So, somebody will be the murderer.

The body will then be taken to the back door of the nightclub.

And this individual was a cutter.

His job was to dismember the body.

And the cutter then would pass the body parts to the dumper, and the dumper was employed to get rid of the body parts.

Now, our brave chap decided that he would cut out the dumper because he didn't want to spend money on somebody else, and he'd do it himself.

And that was how he got caught.

So, his expertise was brilliant, but he chose to take on the expertise of somebody else, and that was where he was an amateur.

The body parts were found so easily.

So, it was frugality that ruined him.

That just

saved a couple of quids.

Never scrimp and save on a good dumping.

No.

The door is closed and locked.

Now, we also asked our audience a question, and today that question was: if you could solve one crime, what would it be?

What have you got, Brian?

Stopping people wearing sandals with socks.

What's going on with all the astrophysicists called Brian who are good at rock music?

Conspiracy?

It's quite a flirtatious one, this.

I'd like to make it clear I did not write this.

Jerry wrote this.

Who abducted Brian Cox and replaced him with a younger version?

As there's no way he continued to look that young.

I mean, the delivery was deliberately done in that fashion.

Well, I was going to say, who was that?

Hmm?

Who was that?

Is that a name?

Name and phone number.

Jerry.

The crime against fashion, that's Robins Cardigan.

Well,

wearing wearing two very lovely badges today as well.

I do wonder if people like my

right people like my cardigans.

Final one is who killed the strawberry?

We still never know.

Thanks to our panel, Sue Black, Julia Shaw and Susan Cameron.

Well, so there we go, that's how to commit the perfect crime.

And next week, we're joined by Sally Gunnell to learn how to run fast.

So we've got everything covered.

And in the final episode, Joe Brown will be joining us to show us how to hide a file in a Victoria sponge.

So now nice again.

Nature.

Nature Bang.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley, I'm Emily Knight, and in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

With the help of evolutionary biologists, I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

And spongologists.

Is that your job title?

Are you a spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres.

It's science meets storytelling.

With a philosophical twist.

It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

So, if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.