In the aftermath of the very worst plane crashes, forensic science
can find itself pushed to its absolute limits. Amid the flames and
wreckage, getting a fingerprint, dental record or even a simple DNA
sample can be next to impossible. Wallets are burned, belongings
destroyed. But some personal artefacts do survive the carnage:
metal, precious stones, diamonds. Enter a forensic jeweller.
Well, the forensic jeweller.
“‘Forensic jewellery’ is actually a phrase I coined myself to try to
make it easier to describe what I do,” says the world’s first/foremost/
only forensic jeweller, Maria Maclennan, with a laugh. “It just seemed
like a nice universal phrase to describe using items of jewellery to try
to identify victims of disasters, homicide or crime.”
A petite 30-year-old Scottish woman covered in tattoos and piercings,
Maria isn’t exactly the figure you’d expect to be sifting through a
body-strewn disaster scene for clues. But for the past half-decade,
in conjunction with Interpol and various international disaster
agencies, Maria has been developing an entirely new field of forensic
science. “I want to hold my hands up and not take all the credit for
creating a brand new paradigm,” she says. “But the use of jewellery
was very sporadic before. There’d never been a standardised
international procedure for how to deploy it in this way.”
If you think forensic jewellery sounds like a strange field of
endeavour, you’re not alone. Yet Maria tells me her research has
identified 12 different areas where forensic jewellery has been of
use. These range from disaster victim identification through to
crime scene analysis, murder/suicide differentiation and even serial
killer psychology. “Serial killers often take tokens from their victims
that allow them to relive their crimes,” Maria explains. “A lot of the
time, those tokens are highly personal – perfumes and jewellery,
particularly earrings and necklaces.”
The advantage in many of these cases is jewellery’s inherent
durability. “The nature of a disaster means that fingerprints and DNA
evidence are often completely wiped out,” Maria says. “But jewellery
can withstand extreme temperatures, building collapses, submersion
and time.” Maria cites the 9/11 attacks in New York: “Investigators
were still going through the debris years after the Twin Towers
collapsed. But they weren’t recovering bodies, they were recovering
jewellery.” It also helps, she says, that gemstones are particularly
good repositories of skin cells and DNA.It’s hard to imagine what would naturally lead someone down this
path, and Maria’s own journey has been satisfyingly unplanned.
A self-described “jewellery obsessive” from the remote Scottish
Highlands, Maria moved to Dundee as a teenager to study jewellery
design at the local university. “Those courses nurture your creative
side and your technical skills, too,” she says, “but they’re very
much geared towards you becoming a self-employed, independent
craftsperson, and I never really wanted that.”Doing a generic Master of Design while waiting for inspiration
to strike, Maria found herself on secondment with a team of local
police officers, embalmers and forensic scientists. “We came up
with a collaborative project that looked at improving the use of
personal effects in the process of disaster victim identification,”
she says. Suddenly, all the knowledge she’d accrued through
her studies – the understanding of hallmarks, serial numbers,
engravings, metallurgy and chemical composition – took on a new
and unexpected significance. “It really opened up my thinking as
to what was possible with jewellery, and allowed me to dip into
the more historical and conceptual dimensions of the craft.”As a way of furthering her study, Maria signed up with a disaster
management agency. Her first foray into the field, helping to clearmaria maclennan uses precious
trinkets to help identify the dead.
WORDS LUKE RYANthe forensic
jeweller
creative people