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Using soil in criminal forensics

Listen to the latest podcast from Lorna

Not many people appreciate just how important soil can be in helping to catch criminals – it's not the first thing that springs to mind when people are asked how they might solve a crime. But every patch of soil has its own “fingerprint” if you know how to find it, which means that we can identify exactly where a bit of mud has come from even if its just a mud splatter on a pair of jeans or soil on the sole of your shoe.

I am part of a team that is helping to develop new ways of solving crimes based on sound science. The police have to collect accurate information and examine the evidence scientifically in order to bring a criminal to justice. The work that I am involved with helps to speed up an investigation by pointing the police towards the most likely places to find evidence and provides sound evidence to support or disprove an alibi.

Although we use a lot of complicated machinery in our work at the Macaulay Institute, the science behind it is quite simple, we look for patterns in the different bits of a sample and we use experiments to show up the patterns. By working with other organisations across the UK we are developing a system that can locate a soil sample from anywhere in the UK with a high degree of accuracy. We can even tell which garden a soil sample comes from in any street!

My podcasts will take you behinds the scenes of Crime Scenes Investigation and reveal how forensic science is used to bring criminals to justice. What do you think science sounds like now?

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PROFILE

Dr Lorna Dawson

Senior Researcher, Soils Group, The Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen

I am a senior soil scientist in the Soils Group at the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, and have over 20 years experience of research into how soils and plants interact. Much of my work has been looking at how plant roots form and grow, and how they adapt to changing soil conditions. I am also working on how climate change might affect plants, their roots and the soil they live in.

My work with Soil Forensics started a few years ago when I had the opportunity to work with forensic experts in the National Crime and Operations Faculty and the Forensic Science Service to develop better ways of using evidence from crime scenes to catch criminals.

This research project, based at the Macaulay Institute and funded by the EPSRC Crime Initiative, is developing analytical methods to help police gain valuable clues from soil. Soil particles stick to clothing, shoes, tyres and spades, and can be used to link a suspect, through examination of muddy pieces of evidence, to a crime scene.