PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "“Justice is one thing, but there’s a process behind it as well, and the CCRC can’t just reopen a case because people don’t like the outcome. You’re heard in the courtroom and the jury makes their decision. And that’s where we are, I believe, with Letby. Mark McDonald [Letby’s new lawyer, a criminal defence barrister] is presumably trying to find sufficient quantity and quality of evidence to change the mind of the CCRC. There are specific criteria that have to be met for them to be able to reopen it. But it’s a very strange case.” “I have no opinion on her guilt or innocence, but when you look at the fact that there was no expert witness put forward for the defence, what on earth is that about? How is a jury supposed to make an informed decision about which side of the argument they believe when they’re so mismatched? To me, it seems as if something went wrong.” “I don’t think the case is going to go away any time soon. And you have to ask, if it goes to retrial, how does she get a fair trial when it’s been all over the media? There are no winners in this.”
-------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Britain’s top forensic scientist: Something went wrong in the Lucy Letby trial," by Senior feature writer and editor Jessany Calkin, published by The Telegraph, on June 24, 2026. "Jessamy Calkin has been writing for the Telegraph for more than 25 years and is the Senior Feature Writer and Editor for The Telegraph Magazine. She is highly regarded for her forensic long-read interviews and in-depth profiles, having sat down with icons ranging from Princess Anne and David Attenborough to Maggie Smith. Her versatility extends beyond celebrity portraiture, as she frequently contributes insightful pieces on conservation and Formula One."
SUB-HEADING: "Dame Sue Black is disconcerted by the lack of forensic evidence in the Letby case, and reveals how a child abuse victim sparked her career. "
GIST: "Prof Lady Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome – her official title – is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. As a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropologist, she has identified human remains in the aftermath of war and disaster all over the world, and her research has led to the convictions of war criminals, paedophiles and murderers. She has written several books, hosted the BBC documentary series History Cold Case and collaborated with crime writers, including her friend Val McDermid.
But we meet in the airy sitting room of her lodgings at St John’s College, Oxford, where she has been president since 2022. It has picture windows overlooking the Canterbury Quad, some very intriguing Tudor portraits and large sofas upon which, she tells me later, my DNA is now liberally dispersed. She is an imposing presence – a self-described “middle-aged Celtic red-head” – funny, feisty, brainy and extremely articulate.
She is about to publish a new book, An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial, which looks at forensic science throughout history and particularly the role it plays in law enforcement and the courts. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for the name of Lucy Letby to come up in our conversation. Black, 65, is disconcerted by what happened in the Letby case because, given that there were no witnesses, no CCTV, no forensic evidence and no confession, everything depended on the testimony of experts. But when it came to the defence, “there were no medical or statistical experts put forward at all”.
Now that Letby has been found guilty and two appeals have failed, her only hope lies with the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission). “And they would have to agree that there is new evidence,” says Black. This is a lengthy, ongoing process and no date has been set for a decision.Due to extensive media coverage, including claims of misrepresented statistics and other ambiguities said to have arisen during her trial, public opinion in the Letby case has become conflicted.
“Justice is one thing, but there’s a process behind it as well, and the CCRC can’t just reopen a case because people don’t like the outcome. You’re heard in the courtroom and the jury makes their decision. And that’s where we are, I believe, with Letby. Mark McDonald [Letby’s new lawyer, a criminal defence barrister] is presumably trying to find sufficient quantity and quality of evidence to change the mind of the CCRC. There are specific criteria that have to be met for them to be able to reopen it. But it’s a very strange case.”
“I have no opinion on her guilt or innocence, but when you look at the fact that there was no expert witness put forward for the defence, what on earth is that about? How is a jury supposed to make an informed decision about which side of the argument they believe when they’re so mismatched? To me, it seems as if something went wrong.”
“I don’t think the case is going to go away any time soon. And you have to ask, if it goes to retrial, how does she get a fair trial when it’s been all over the media? There are no winners in this.”
An Expert Witness, her third book, looks at the origin and history of forensic science, from how justice was dispensed in medieval times (when trial by ordeal was considered a valid way of establishing guilt: if the person was innocent, God would intervene and save them) right up to the latest developments in DNA profiling and the influence of AI. It also examines the role of science and forensics in the courts, illustrated throughout with lurid cases from history that Black has selected, alongside significant and fascinating cases from her own long career.
Before the landmark discovery of DNA fingerprinting by Alec Jeffreys in 1984 (“one of the nicest scientists I have ever had the pleasure to meet”), methods of identification were more spurious. There were fingerprints (fingerprint evidence was first used to solve a murder in 1902), and to a lesser extent footprints and even earprints.
Black herself has made innovative headway in developing techniques and building databases to confirm or challenge someone’s identity based on the vein patterns of their hands. This has had far-reaching consequences in the courts and has become important in the prosecution of paedophiles, who often film or photograph their actions, and occasionally a hand or finger is visible in the image.
This research was inspired by a 2007 case that Black describes as a turning point for her, a story she “will keep telling until the day I die in the hope that it will reach the ears of the brave young woman at its centre, and she will recognise it as her own”.
The case concerned a young girl in her early teens who claimed that her father was coming into her room at night and sexually abusing her. She told her mother, who did not believe her, but had the presence of mind to leave the camera on her computer running, and in the early hours of the morning it recorded a right hand and forearm coming into view and touching the girl in the way she had described.
She took the video to the police, who arrested her father. He denied it. All she had to support her claim was the video of the hand and part of a forearm. But on close study, the superficial vein patterns on the arm were distinctive. Black, with her vast knowledge of anatomy, was called in to investigate.
At the time, this method of identification was in its infancy. However, comparing the images would reveal something: Black would be able to say whether the father was categorically not the person in the video, but could not confirm that he was, because the statistical research had not yet been done to establish how high the probability was of another person having a similar vein pattern.
The pattern of veins in both images was identical. Black gave her evidence. The jury found the father not guilty.
Black was “dumbfounded”, she writes, and asked the prosecutor what might have gone wrong. The prosecutor replied that the jury didn’t believe the girl because she had not cried in court. “This was so outrageous it made me want to scream,” she writes. “It was beyond my comprehension... that she could be disbelieved just because she had managed to hold her composure.”
It’s a case that has haunted Sue Black ever since. “I felt she was wronged,” she says now. “A teenage girl who was being abused, who had the presence of mind to leave her camera running and go to the police, and then go to court – that is inordinate bravery. And then he was released back into the family home.”
Subsequently, and with the help of large research grants, including one of €2.5m from the European Research Council, Black returned to her laboratory determined to undertake all the necessary scientific research to establish adequate statistics to prove that the human hand is unique.
“My hope is that if she ever reads my book or hears me telling the story, she’ll recognise it as her case, and find me. Because she has been the inspiration for all the research in hand identification since. We’ve secured at least 30 life sentences for paedophiles, and more than 500 years of prison sentences, where we have assisted in prosecutions.”
“Other people around the world are now following the methodology. And this is not my legacy, it’s hers.”Sue Black has been many things. “But in my heart,” she says, “I’m an anatomist.” Her passion for anatomy started young. She was born in Inverness, one of three children, and grew up on the west coast of Scotland; her father was a cabinet maker and upholsterer. From the age of 12, Black spent every Saturday and all her school holidays working at the local butcher’s, up to her elbows in muscle, bone, blood and viscera, “and I loved every minute of it”.
Inspired by a biology teacher whom she idolised, she studied biology at Aberdeen University, where she dissected her first corpse. That triggered her passion for anatomy. This was just before Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA as a tool that would change the standard of evidential admissibility forever. “Forensic science was about to become a world of two halves, pre- and post-Jeffreys,” she writes, “and my personal encounters with it would be right on the threshold of the biggest leap the world has ever seen in investigative support.”
In 1986, she received her PhD in Human Anatomy, a subject she then lectured in at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and at Aberdeen University, meanwhile helping police to analyse and identify human remains. She started working in a similar field for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UN, and in 1999 she received a call from a pathologist at Glasgow University asking her to go to Kosovo to gather evidence of war crimes. She was the lead forensic anthropologist. It was a life-changing experience, one she wrote movingly about in her first book, All That Remains.
The humanitarian situation was critical, and the team had to be constantly on alert for IEDs (improvised explosive devices). At one point they had to excavate the grave of a family of 11, including eight children, killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. The father had escaped death and had buried the bodies himself, but allowed them to exhume the remains. “He was the most amazing man and he was worried that God wouldn’t be able to find his family, and that each member needed to have a separate grave so that God could find them,” she told Desert Island Discs in 2015. Her team painstakingly identified all of the remains, including differentiating between twin 14-year-old boys. “He thanked every single member of the team for what we had done – for him it meant everything.”
This traumatic experience had a profound effect on her. After she returned home, Black “body-mapped” her own three daughters, Beth, Grace and Anna, meticulously logging birthmarks, moles and identifying features.
In her second book, Written in Bone, published in 2020, Black writes about the case of an 11-year-old boy who took his own life. He was living with his grandfather who turned out to be a paedophile. In an X-ray, the boy’s bones showed signs of Harris lines, which occur when the growth of a bone has been temporarily impaired due to poor nutrition or psychological trauma. “And it felt natural to include my own experience, because I may have had my own Harris lines,” she says now.
She is referring to the fact that when she was nine, she was raped by a delivery driver. She had originally revealed this for the first time in 2018 for a book that she and Ruth Davidson collaborated on, called Women Who Lead. (“Bloody Ruth Davidson. Dreadful woman, I love her.”) Black says she hadn’t intended to talk about the experience, “but she asked me ‘Why are you so committed and determined?’ and for some reason, I decided to tell her. And once you’ve told it once, it’s easier to tell again.”
Black didn’t report the assault at the time, but she told her mother 10 years later. “When I did have the courage to tell her, she didn’t believe me, and that confirmed to me that I should just keep my mouth shut.
“My mother was... I love my mother. She was the kindest, sweetest, most amazing woman. But she wanted life to be rosy, she didn’t want to have to confront the difficult things in life. Her own mother died before she was two, her grandmother died when she was four, and she was brought up by her great-aunt and her husband, who were wonderful. But she was needy, and she never wanted to acknowledge the dark side of life.”
Black was very close to her father, but she didn’t tell him about the rape either. “I absolutely worshipped and adored him, but he would have felt that he’d failed me – and that was the last thing I wanted. He hadn’t failed me, but I didn’t want him to feel that way.
“When you speak to people of my age, there was a fair bit of abuse, on some level, throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – it was a different world. We tended – incorrectly, I think – to compartmentalise it and take the blame for it, to not talk about it, and want it to just go away, rather than outing it for the crime that it was.
“I don’t think incidents of abuse have declined, and I don’t think men have learnt from it. But I think we are stronger as women and more prepared to stand up for ourselves.”
In 2003, Black was appointed professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology at Dundee University (where she instigated a campaign to raise £1m to build a state-of-the-art mortuary, which was named after Val McDermid) and 15 years later took up a very different post, one that hadn’t existed before, as pro-vice-chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University. On leaving Dundee, she vowed to stop teaching, and when she left Lancaster for Oxford in 2021, she vowed to stop taking on forensic cases (though she still does a little intelligence and advisory work for the Government, which she can’t discuss).
As president of St John’s, she has “responsibility for everything that goes on here”: “I chair 22 committees, I have a governing body that has 62 members, and my job is primarily to put matters of the college in front of them and guide them in what are the right decisions to make.” This can include everything from appointing new associate professors to monitoring investments and choosing new chairs for the chapel.
Recently, Black co-chaired a multi-year investigation into the state of forensic science in England and Wales, and the resulting report, with the suitably morbid title Forensic Science in England and Wales: Pulling Out of the Graveyard Spiral, was published last year. She is worried that the future of forensic science is under threat, as for budgetary reasons, she says: “It’s very clear that in England and Wales, it’s going into the domain of police labs.
“For a number of years it was a commercial market, with big and small companies. There were new techniques coming forward, solving cases that hadn’t been solved before. But what happened then was that police budgets started to contract.
“When the police investigate, they need scientists, but if they procure external scientists that costs a lot of money, so the logical thing is to bring science into their own domain, so we’re starting to see the creation of regional forensic science labs. I think that’s a very poor idea.
“If you’re innocent until proven guilty, then you have a right to defence, and that means you should have access to the same levels of expertise. Do we want it done cheaply or do we want it done properly? If we want it done properly, we have to resource it. We have to have a justice system that we have faith in, and at the moment it is so budget-driven.”Black’s five-year contract with St John’s ends next year, but she’s been asked to stay for another five. “And when I retire from here, whenever that is, I’m going back across Hadrian’s Wall and heading home. I don’t know what I’ll do, but it will be something very different.
“I’m a great believer that when you leave somewhere, you have to leave something behind, because you have to create space for new things. I need to move on and I need to keep trying something different.”
Moving on is a theme in her life. And this is encapsulated in the small tattoo which I spot on the inside of her wrist. Earlier this year, Black’s husband of more than 30 years appeared in court charged with forgery, after Black discovered that he had forged her signature and removed her name from their joint bank account to disguise how much money he was spending on his new girlfriend. She brought in the police. In court, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a supervision order and 100 hours of unpaid work. They are undergoing divorce proceedings.
She doesn’t want to discuss any of this, as “it’s still ongoing”. But she shows me the tattoo. “It’s a triquetra [a geometric symbol formed by three intersecting arcs] – which represents the three stages of a woman’s life.” Underneath the triquetra are the letters RVM. This she added after splitting up with her husband. “I set up my own company [for her book royalties], which is RVM, which stands for Rear View Mirror. Meaning that everything else is in my rear-view mirror.”
Meaning that you’ve moved on? “I’ve moved on. So that’s RVM. Well of course I’ve not moved on – but I’m doing my best.”
An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial by Dame Sue Black (Transworld Publishers, £22) is on sale July 2, 2026.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
SUB-HEADING: "Dame Sue Black is disconcerted by the lack of forensic evidence in the Letby case, and reveals how a child abuse victim sparked her career. "
GIST: "Prof Lady Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome – her official title – is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. As a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropologist, she has identified human remains in the aftermath of war and disaster all over the world, and her research has led to the convictions of war criminals, paedophiles and murderers. She has written several books, hosted the BBC documentary series History Cold Case and collaborated with crime writers, including her friend Val McDermid.
But we meet in the airy sitting room of her lodgings at St John’s College, Oxford, where she has been president since 2022. It has picture windows overlooking the Canterbury Quad, some very intriguing Tudor portraits and large sofas upon which, she tells me later, my DNA is now liberally dispersed. She is an imposing presence – a self-described “middle-aged Celtic red-head” – funny, feisty, brainy and extremely articulate.
She is about to publish a new book, An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial, which looks at forensic science throughout history and particularly the role it plays in law enforcement and the courts. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for the name of Lucy Letby to come up in our conversation. Black, 65, is disconcerted by what happened in the Letby case because, given that there were no witnesses, no CCTV, no forensic evidence and no confession, everything depended on the testimony of experts. But when it came to the defence, “there were no medical or statistical experts put forward at all”.
Now that Letby has been found guilty and two appeals have failed, her only hope lies with the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission). “And they would have to agree that there is new evidence,” says Black. This is a lengthy, ongoing process and no date has been set for a decision.Due to extensive media coverage, including claims of misrepresented statistics and other ambiguities said to have arisen during her trial, public opinion in the Letby case has become conflicted.
“Justice is one thing, but there’s a process behind it as well, and the CCRC can’t just reopen a case because people don’t like the outcome. You’re heard in the courtroom and the jury makes their decision. And that’s where we are, I believe, with Letby. Mark McDonald [Letby’s new lawyer, a criminal defence barrister] is presumably trying to find sufficient quantity and quality of evidence to change the mind of the CCRC. There are specific criteria that have to be met for them to be able to reopen it. But it’s a very strange case.”
“I have no opinion on her guilt or innocence, but when you look at the fact that there was no expert witness put forward for the defence, what on earth is that about? How is a jury supposed to make an informed decision about which side of the argument they believe when they’re so mismatched? To me, it seems as if something went wrong.”
“I don’t think the case is going to go away any time soon. And you have to ask, if it goes to retrial, how does she get a fair trial when it’s been all over the media? There are no winners in this.”
An Expert Witness, her third book, looks at the origin and history of forensic science, from how justice was dispensed in medieval times (when trial by ordeal was considered a valid way of establishing guilt: if the person was innocent, God would intervene and save them) right up to the latest developments in DNA profiling and the influence of AI. It also examines the role of science and forensics in the courts, illustrated throughout with lurid cases from history that Black has selected, alongside significant and fascinating cases from her own long career.
Before the landmark discovery of DNA fingerprinting by Alec Jeffreys in 1984 (“one of the nicest scientists I have ever had the pleasure to meet”), methods of identification were more spurious. There were fingerprints (fingerprint evidence was first used to solve a murder in 1902), and to a lesser extent footprints and even earprints.
Black herself has made innovative headway in developing techniques and building databases to confirm or challenge someone’s identity based on the vein patterns of their hands. This has had far-reaching consequences in the courts and has become important in the prosecution of paedophiles, who often film or photograph their actions, and occasionally a hand or finger is visible in the image.
This research was inspired by a 2007 case that Black describes as a turning point for her, a story she “will keep telling until the day I die in the hope that it will reach the ears of the brave young woman at its centre, and she will recognise it as her own”.
The case concerned a young girl in her early teens who claimed that her father was coming into her room at night and sexually abusing her. She told her mother, who did not believe her, but had the presence of mind to leave the camera on her computer running, and in the early hours of the morning it recorded a right hand and forearm coming into view and touching the girl in the way she had described.
She took the video to the police, who arrested her father. He denied it. All she had to support her claim was the video of the hand and part of a forearm. But on close study, the superficial vein patterns on the arm were distinctive. Black, with her vast knowledge of anatomy, was called in to investigate.
At the time, this method of identification was in its infancy. However, comparing the images would reveal something: Black would be able to say whether the father was categorically not the person in the video, but could not confirm that he was, because the statistical research had not yet been done to establish how high the probability was of another person having a similar vein pattern.
The pattern of veins in both images was identical. Black gave her evidence. The jury found the father not guilty.
Black was “dumbfounded”, she writes, and asked the prosecutor what might have gone wrong. The prosecutor replied that the jury didn’t believe the girl because she had not cried in court. “This was so outrageous it made me want to scream,” she writes. “It was beyond my comprehension... that she could be disbelieved just because she had managed to hold her composure.”
It’s a case that has haunted Sue Black ever since. “I felt she was wronged,” she says now. “A teenage girl who was being abused, who had the presence of mind to leave her camera running and go to the police, and then go to court – that is inordinate bravery. And then he was released back into the family home.”
Subsequently, and with the help of large research grants, including one of €2.5m from the European Research Council, Black returned to her laboratory determined to undertake all the necessary scientific research to establish adequate statistics to prove that the human hand is unique.
“My hope is that if she ever reads my book or hears me telling the story, she’ll recognise it as her case, and find me. Because she has been the inspiration for all the research in hand identification since. We’ve secured at least 30 life sentences for paedophiles, and more than 500 years of prison sentences, where we have assisted in prosecutions.”
“Other people around the world are now following the methodology. And this is not my legacy, it’s hers.”Sue Black has been many things. “But in my heart,” she says, “I’m an anatomist.” Her passion for anatomy started young. She was born in Inverness, one of three children, and grew up on the west coast of Scotland; her father was a cabinet maker and upholsterer. From the age of 12, Black spent every Saturday and all her school holidays working at the local butcher’s, up to her elbows in muscle, bone, blood and viscera, “and I loved every minute of it”.
Inspired by a biology teacher whom she idolised, she studied biology at Aberdeen University, where she dissected her first corpse. That triggered her passion for anatomy. This was just before Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA as a tool that would change the standard of evidential admissibility forever. “Forensic science was about to become a world of two halves, pre- and post-Jeffreys,” she writes, “and my personal encounters with it would be right on the threshold of the biggest leap the world has ever seen in investigative support.”
In 1986, she received her PhD in Human Anatomy, a subject she then lectured in at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and at Aberdeen University, meanwhile helping police to analyse and identify human remains. She started working in a similar field for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UN, and in 1999 she received a call from a pathologist at Glasgow University asking her to go to Kosovo to gather evidence of war crimes. She was the lead forensic anthropologist. It was a life-changing experience, one she wrote movingly about in her first book, All That Remains.
The humanitarian situation was critical, and the team had to be constantly on alert for IEDs (improvised explosive devices). At one point they had to excavate the grave of a family of 11, including eight children, killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. The father had escaped death and had buried the bodies himself, but allowed them to exhume the remains. “He was the most amazing man and he was worried that God wouldn’t be able to find his family, and that each member needed to have a separate grave so that God could find them,” she told Desert Island Discs in 2015. Her team painstakingly identified all of the remains, including differentiating between twin 14-year-old boys. “He thanked every single member of the team for what we had done – for him it meant everything.”
This traumatic experience had a profound effect on her. After she returned home, Black “body-mapped” her own three daughters, Beth, Grace and Anna, meticulously logging birthmarks, moles and identifying features.
In her second book, Written in Bone, published in 2020, Black writes about the case of an 11-year-old boy who took his own life. He was living with his grandfather who turned out to be a paedophile. In an X-ray, the boy’s bones showed signs of Harris lines, which occur when the growth of a bone has been temporarily impaired due to poor nutrition or psychological trauma. “And it felt natural to include my own experience, because I may have had my own Harris lines,” she says now.
She is referring to the fact that when she was nine, she was raped by a delivery driver. She had originally revealed this for the first time in 2018 for a book that she and Ruth Davidson collaborated on, called Women Who Lead. (“Bloody Ruth Davidson. Dreadful woman, I love her.”) Black says she hadn’t intended to talk about the experience, “but she asked me ‘Why are you so committed and determined?’ and for some reason, I decided to tell her. And once you’ve told it once, it’s easier to tell again.”
Black didn’t report the assault at the time, but she told her mother 10 years later. “When I did have the courage to tell her, she didn’t believe me, and that confirmed to me that I should just keep my mouth shut.
“My mother was... I love my mother. She was the kindest, sweetest, most amazing woman. But she wanted life to be rosy, she didn’t want to have to confront the difficult things in life. Her own mother died before she was two, her grandmother died when she was four, and she was brought up by her great-aunt and her husband, who were wonderful. But she was needy, and she never wanted to acknowledge the dark side of life.”
Black was very close to her father, but she didn’t tell him about the rape either. “I absolutely worshipped and adored him, but he would have felt that he’d failed me – and that was the last thing I wanted. He hadn’t failed me, but I didn’t want him to feel that way.
“When you speak to people of my age, there was a fair bit of abuse, on some level, throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – it was a different world. We tended – incorrectly, I think – to compartmentalise it and take the blame for it, to not talk about it, and want it to just go away, rather than outing it for the crime that it was.
“I don’t think incidents of abuse have declined, and I don’t think men have learnt from it. But I think we are stronger as women and more prepared to stand up for ourselves.”
In 2003, Black was appointed professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology at Dundee University (where she instigated a campaign to raise £1m to build a state-of-the-art mortuary, which was named after Val McDermid) and 15 years later took up a very different post, one that hadn’t existed before, as pro-vice-chancellor for engagement at Lancaster University. On leaving Dundee, she vowed to stop teaching, and when she left Lancaster for Oxford in 2021, she vowed to stop taking on forensic cases (though she still does a little intelligence and advisory work for the Government, which she can’t discuss).
As president of St John’s, she has “responsibility for everything that goes on here”: “I chair 22 committees, I have a governing body that has 62 members, and my job is primarily to put matters of the college in front of them and guide them in what are the right decisions to make.” This can include everything from appointing new associate professors to monitoring investments and choosing new chairs for the chapel.
Recently, Black co-chaired a multi-year investigation into the state of forensic science in England and Wales, and the resulting report, with the suitably morbid title Forensic Science in England and Wales: Pulling Out of the Graveyard Spiral, was published last year. She is worried that the future of forensic science is under threat, as for budgetary reasons, she says: “It’s very clear that in England and Wales, it’s going into the domain of police labs.
“For a number of years it was a commercial market, with big and small companies. There were new techniques coming forward, solving cases that hadn’t been solved before. But what happened then was that police budgets started to contract.
“When the police investigate, they need scientists, but if they procure external scientists that costs a lot of money, so the logical thing is to bring science into their own domain, so we’re starting to see the creation of regional forensic science labs. I think that’s a very poor idea.
“If you’re innocent until proven guilty, then you have a right to defence, and that means you should have access to the same levels of expertise. Do we want it done cheaply or do we want it done properly? If we want it done properly, we have to resource it. We have to have a justice system that we have faith in, and at the moment it is so budget-driven.”Black’s five-year contract with St John’s ends next year, but she’s been asked to stay for another five. “And when I retire from here, whenever that is, I’m going back across Hadrian’s Wall and heading home. I don’t know what I’ll do, but it will be something very different.
“I’m a great believer that when you leave somewhere, you have to leave something behind, because you have to create space for new things. I need to move on and I need to keep trying something different.”
Moving on is a theme in her life. And this is encapsulated in the small tattoo which I spot on the inside of her wrist. Earlier this year, Black’s husband of more than 30 years appeared in court charged with forgery, after Black discovered that he had forged her signature and removed her name from their joint bank account to disguise how much money he was spending on his new girlfriend. She brought in the police. In court, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a supervision order and 100 hours of unpaid work. They are undergoing divorce proceedings.
She doesn’t want to discuss any of this, as “it’s still ongoing”. But she shows me the tattoo. “It’s a triquetra [a geometric symbol formed by three intersecting arcs] – which represents the three stages of a woman’s life.” Underneath the triquetra are the letters RVM. This she added after splitting up with her husband. “I set up my own company [for her book royalties], which is RVM, which stands for Rear View Mirror. Meaning that everything else is in my rear-view mirror.”
Meaning that you’ve moved on? “I’ve moved on. So that’s RVM. Well of course I’ve not moved on – but I’m doing my best.”
An Expert Witness: Forensic Science on Trial by Dame Sue Black (Transworld Publishers, £22) is on sale July 2, 2026.
The entire story can read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
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