This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Amoret Whitaker arrived at a crime scene in Cumbria where teenager Shafilea Ahmed's body had been found, the first thing she looked for was insects. She collected pupal cases, day-old maggots and adult blowflies in a jar, and picked fly-eggs off the corpse. Her goal: to determine how long the girl had been dead.
Whitaker, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum in London, has investigated 30 cases with police departments using forensic entomology: the study of insects on corpses. "As soon as somebody dies, their body starts to give off odours, which are attractive to insects like greenbottles and bluebottles," she explains. "If the body is found and newly-hatched maggots are feeding on it, we can work out how old the insects are, and therefore how long the person has been dead."
Whitaker, 48, came across forensic entomology when she spent three years at the Natural History Museum writing The Handbook of British Fleas. "The flies and fleas were kept together in the same gallery and the other person on that floor was my current boss, Martin Hall, who worked on blowflies in a forensic context," she says.
A whodunit fan who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, she asked Hall if she could work for him. "My first case was Shafilea Ahmed, whose parents were convicted of her murder," she says. After dating the maggots on her body and at the crime scene, Whitaker testified at a coroner's court that the girl had died as soon as she disappeared, which was six months before her body was found. "The parents were saying maybe she ran off with a boyfriend or a friend and hadn't died straightaway, so the time of death was crucial to the investigation," explains Whitaker.
She and her colleagues are working on questions such as how temperature affects fly development on corpses, and how long insect evidence lasts reliably at a crime scene -- a question that came up while investigating the murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, two years after her body was discovered. "My work is morbid but fascinating," she says. "Quite often the case actually raises more scientific questions, so it's a special case of science and society benefiting each other."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
