Law and older: Veteran murder investigator puts police past and present under the microscope

As a forensic scientist, Professor Jim Fraser is familiar with examining matters in minute detail.

His 40 years of experience saw him drafted in to investigate ­murders committed by notorious serial killer Robert Black, as well as the deaths of schoolboy Damilola Taylor and Gareth Williams, the GCHQ code-breaker.

A lifetime poring over the most brutal cases in living memory has given him a unique perspective on how crimes are investigated. For one of the country’s most respected scientists, the evidence is damning.

“These are cultural problems facing the police, not just here in the United Kingdom, but around the world,” says Glasgow-born Professor Fraser. “Culturally and institutionally – I’m not talking about individual cops – I’ve seen throughout my career a tendency towards action when more reflection was needed.

“Take the investigation of the Robert Black case. There was a ‘let’s get on with it’ attitude when we weren’t sure what we were supposed to be getting on with. The two big questions arising from that investigation is that many police forces are not that good at collaborating with other police forces.

“There are often too many big egos involved, or conflicting procedures or conflicting opinions about what to do next. I’ve seen it all too often and it still goes on.

“You can have all the systems and structures and procedures. A lot of the time they are followed but a lot of the times they are not. And once you have an ­investigation that crosses police boundaries it immediately becomes more complicated and less efficient.”

Professor Fraser’s experiences are laid out in a new memoir, Murder Under The Microscope. It gives his perspective working in forensics with the Met, Kent, and Lothian and Borders police. And it was the Scottish force, with whom he worked in the 1990s, that received his most scathing assessment.

“When I worked in Lothian and Borders at that time it was a pretty poisonous organisation, and I wasn’t alone in thinking that,” says Mr Fraser, who is associate director of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research. “I got abuse there I hadn’t encountered before.

“I was in the middle of doing some complicated lab work that couldn’t be interrupted or it would be ruined. Somebody came in to say the detective inspector wants to see you and I said I’d be out as soon as I’d finished. He was told, ‘tell the f****** technician to get out here right now’. I have left some humdinger ­stories out of this book. Another time is when I asked to see some photographs from a crime scene. The reply was, ‘we don’t give photographs to you people’. ‘You people’ sums up the attitude of some officers.

“There are police, and then there are ‘you people’. You didn’t count if you weren’t a police officer. I didn’t experience that in the Met in London, but it was common in Lothian and Borders.

“This isn’t just police and ­scientists, this is between police and anyone who isn’t a police officer.” Most individual officers are good people, stresses Mr Fraser, “it’s mostly that training when it comes to the science of investigations is lacking, or it isn’t applied”.

Since he began his career in the 1970s, forensic investigation has gone from a niche profession to one that attracts scores of keen students to Strathclyde University in Glasgow, where he lectures.

Books and TV shows – think CSI – have popularised and romanticised the job. Yet breaking into the profession is almost more difficult than solving a decades-old cold case.

“Forensic science is a very small industry indeed,” he says. “Even in the ’70s I was told more than 100 people applied for the job I applied for. When I worked in Edinburgh in the ’90s, more than 400 people applied for a job back then. These days even more apply for a single advertised position.

“It’s harder than ever to get into the profession now. I’d advise students to back more than one horse – think it through carefully.”

Students raised on a diet of US detective shows are also more common in his lectures. Professor Fraser is quick to disavow them of a notion it is a rock-star profession, however.

“The reality is dramatically ­different from what you see in on television and books,” he adds. “And it differs even from what you’re taught in classrooms, too, even the best institutions. It’s all very well having the intellectual capacity to deal with the science. There are things like deadlines to contend with. When you’ve got a complicated decision to make the last thing you need is a load of pressure on you.

“Occasionally you do get a ­student who thinks they know it all because they’ve been watching the telly but, fortunately, they’re rare. And, with a bit of work, they can be brought round. I’ve now heard it described as a rock-star profession, which is quite funny. I think I’d rather have been a real rock star.”

There’s not much glamour involved in taking samples of blood from a crime scene or examining photographs of a brutal murder, Mr Fraser explains. For 40 years he’s been exposed to the aftermath of some of the most horrific murders. It only gets harder, he believes, as time goes on. “I dealt with it as a younger man but I’m not convinced I could deal with it now,” he adds.

“As you get older you begin to realise how fragile the world is. Back then very little of it fazed me much. The ­analogy I draw is with medicine and nursing. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s just that if you get too emotionally engaged, you can’t do your job – much like a surgeon.”

Seeing his first post-­mortem examination was a rite of passage. “A forensic scientist spends most of the time in the lab,” he says. “At some point you have to see your first post-mortem. I was warned by the wily old cop I went with. He told me if I found myself getting a bit fixated with the post-mortem that I should look away, or walk away because otherwise I was probably going to pass out.

“The first post-mortem was a routine one – an old woman who died of natural causes. I didn’t have too much trouble until I thought it was probably someone’s granny.

“I’d done exactly what he’d told me not to do. So I just sort of stopped engaging with it. If you’re the type of person who can’t do that then it’s not the job for you.”

Murder Under The Microscope by Professor Jim Fraser, out now