After 6000 Autopsies, This Was The Case That Broke Him

0:01Speaker 1:It's Monday, March eighth in twenty twenty one, and police are gathered in a remote section of the Flinders Rangers in South Australia. They've been told they'll find the body of a twenty one year old woman here. Jasmine Corp was last seen leaving her job at Southern Cross Aged Care in Adelaide on Friday night. By Sunday, detectives were being told a story by her ex boyfriend. He said Jasmine had taken her own life and that he had buried her body more than four hundred kilometers from home.

0:35Speaker 1:So here they are, and they're about to uncover her shallow grave. Among those gathered is Professor Roger Bayard. He's the one that's going to determine exactly how Jasmine died. What he discovers will give him nightmares he hasn't experienced in forty years on the job. I'm Jemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. Professor Roger Bayard is one of Australia's most respected forensic pathologists and has spent more than four decades investigating sudden, suspicious and unexplained deaths. He is internationally recognized for his research into forensic pathology, sudden infant death, and unusual causes of death, and has worked on some of our country's most confronting homicide cases, like the Snowtown murders and the horrifying case of Jasmine kr.

1:42Speaker 1:He also helped identify victims of the Barley bombings in two thousand and two and the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand in two thousand and four. This is a man who has performed more than six thousand autopsies. In twenty twenty one, he was named a World Leader in forensic science. In twenty twenty four, he was named Tasmanian Australian of the Year. In twenty twenty five he became a Companion of the Order of Australia and in twenty twenty six. Just recently he retired from an impressive and wide ranging career.

2:18Speaker 1:As someone that works in and around death, Professor Bayard has seen some horrific things. The way he gets through it is focusing on the science, not the horror. Here's Roger Roger, thank you for joining me on True crime conversations and congratulations on your recent retirement. Was forensic pathology always what you plan to do if you go back to young Roger.

2:48Speaker 2:I was going to be an archaeologist, but thought, when on my teenage years, you don't get much money doing that, so maybe I'll do medicine, and no, I do do basically emergency medicine, and the qualified in general practice was going back to Canada to emergency medicine. And I was in Belice and I was snorkeling and it was so good I stayed a few extra weeks. And when I go back to Canada, no jobs in emergency. So basically by default I got into pathology, and then into pediator pathology and then forensic pathology. So it's been a sort of a downpill course really for years.

3:25Speaker 1:You mentioned four decades. You have seen so many iterations of your profession. Has it changed in the way you do your job? Given the advances in technologies.

3:38Speaker 2:It has. What we're using more often now is imaging CT examinations, So most forensic facilities have cts, so bodies get CT before an autopsy, which means that you can actually find a course to death, sometimes without even opening the body. So we're doing a lot more CT examinations with external examinations still not looking for any injuries or something untoward, and the CT can tell us if there's been a rupture at the heart or whether there's been a stroke. So that has changed things dramatic. It also adds to our standard autopsies as.

4:13Speaker 1:Well, because you have to include it as well.

4:17Speaker 2:That's exactly right. So, yes, we've been dragged out of the nineteenth century, sometimes reluctantly.

4:22Speaker 1:But I can imagine being able to use CT and not having to open a body for a family member, like if I had to imagine my loved one being chopped open to be able to be spared that like, that's a good thing.

4:36Speaker 2:It is a good thing. It's a good thing for families, for the pathologists or resources. But I often meet with families and you know, the particularly with babies, they want to meet the person who they want to ask the pathologists questions, but it's not really what it's about. They want to see the person that looked after their baby in the time that they last saw the baby to the time they saw him again or her, And you know, I explain that it's not chopping open it's it's it's a surgical procedure. Nowadays, we open the body cavity is really carefully treated with respect, and everybody knows that this is a tragedy, and I think that's important for people to hear.

5:17Speaker 1:It's interesting to hear say that, because, yeah, me using that word chopped, it's such a it's quite a violent word, but it's quite well. It is. It's medical. What you're doing. Is it almost like you have a process that you go through. You're you're doing the exact same thing kind of in every autopsy.

5:36Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely, there's a standard procedure of opening the three body cavities, examining the organs, taking them out, weighing them and slicing them and looking for disease and injuries, and then taking pieces for looking at under the microscope. But the there are modifications. For example, if somebody has maybe a back injury, you would you would dissect the act, which you would normally do. You may in a strangulation case where you would do a nectar section. So by that what you're doing you're taking every layer of the skin and the muscles, and you're looking for bruising and injuries and documenting it with photography, so you do modify them according to the case, but there is a standard process that should be followed and it is not always followed.

6:23Speaker 1:When you said that respect for the body and the family is a big part of what you do, can you expand on that, How do you make sure that a body is respected?

6:34Speaker 2:Essentially, pathologists are the last doctors that this person is going to see. So there are patients. So when the bodies come in, they come with the funeral director, they're in body bags, they're covered with sheets. They're brought into the mortuary on the trolley and the dissections perform on the trolley. There's not unnecessary moving of the body. The body is to this people, and that's that's the important part. And if you if you don't understand it, then you should not be doing forensics.

7:07Speaker 1:How many autopsies do you think you've done over a forty year career.

7:12Speaker 2:I lost count Actually was up to six thousand, I think, and then a few years ago I just stopped counting. But they're the autopsies I've done. But then I've seen tens of thousands of other autopsies as well. Because my colleagues are autopsy around me. So a large number of dead people.

7:27Speaker 1:I can see why you're done, Roger. That's a lot.

7:30Speaker 2:Yes, I agree. I feel it's funny. The last couple of months, I've been thinking back to cases and thinking, aback what I've done. I mean, I published over one thousand papers and twelve textbooks, and it makes me I feel exhausted.

7:45Speaker 1:I'm not surprised. You're a very accomplished man, well driven, I think. Can you remember your first autopsy?

7:51Speaker 2:Absolutely? Really, I remember my first autopsy. I remember my first pediatric autopsy. And my first autopsy was in Hobart in nineteen eight and I was a medical resident in the hospital and I was getting interested in pathology, and so the pathologist said, well, you know, I'll show you how to do an autopsy. And it was a patient I was looking after who had a disseminated cancer and he was going to die. And my boss said, you better go and tell him he's not going to make it, and also that I want an autopsy. So I sat down with this old fellow he was an old digger because it was a repatriation hospital, and gave him the bad news and mentioned the autopsy. And then he said, well, who's going to do the autopsy, and I said, well, it's actually going to be me. So he just sat back and thought for a bit. Then he just looked over and said, you know, son, you're going to be all right. So basically I looked after him in life, I looked after him in death, and he gave me a benediction for my career, which decades later still means a lot to me. In the first Pediatric Case was my first publication, actually as a little girl in Canada,

8:52Speaker 2:Genevieve who died of leukemia and said a very strange finding which we published. But I still use her in my textbooks and I still use her to teach, and in fact, I've just finished the fourth edition of My Sudden Death in the Young Book, and I've dedicated to gel and all the other young people who have contributed to it, so her memory continues.

9:13Speaker 1:Did you find the pediatric autopsies harder given it's a child or I guess like mechanically as well.

9:20Speaker 2:Well, I'm very good at the sections because obviously much smaller. And I was always interested in pediatrics. I did flying doctor work and did a lot of pediatrics there, and I've found pediatric case as harder as I get older, because when I first started, I thought, I am going to find the cause of death here, you know, I'm going to work it out, and it was very challenging. And then as I got older, I realized more and more that sometimes you're just not going to find out what's happened, and you know the impact of this death on families.

9:50Speaker 1:I know you don't just do crime, but you have seen a lot of crime and the worst things that humans can do to other people. Is that something you've had to learn to compartmentalize or how do you kind of process the things you've seen?

10:04Speaker 2:Well, just correct you. I don't do crime. I observe crime just of course the record, you do compartmentalize and when you're doing a case. I mean, I've had some horrific childhood cases, the assaults. One was a little boy who was I think kicked in the stomach and the de facto boyfriend who did it actually videoed him on his phone while he was dying. And you can't think about that while you're doing the case. The case is the order. If you start to get distracted, then you don't do a proper job later. Of course, one case I remember there was another little boy who been kicked in the stomach and he had a paratonitis. So when I opened the anominal cavity, there's this whiff of almost like sewage came in and I just just stopped me in my tracks because I realized what that meant, and so I had my back turned to the police. And everybody knows that sort of pretending to the second one.

11:02Speaker 2:I just got myself together. Yeah, occasionally at night you're you're sitting there in its cases that you don't expect to get through to you that.

11:08Speaker 1:Might Does it get easier dealing with death or do you have an interesting relationship with death?

11:15Speaker 2:Well, I see death as a part of life, and I'm actually an animist, and I believe that life is like a river and we're just an eddy in the river, and then when we go, we're still part of the life force, but the eddy's gone. It's not as we were. I think one of the mistakes in the West is we trivialize everything, but we're so terrified of death we hide from it. You know, you don't put grandma out on the kitchen table and have awake and everybody's standing around telling great stories. What you do is Grandma's putting a body bag whipped away. You may never see her again, and you know she's in a coffin and cremated. That's not a good way to say farewell. And I think we lose by not will not be able to say so well.

12:01Speaker 1:I think you're right there, because there are so many other cultures that that celebrate life after death much more than the Western world.

12:09Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm a very close friend who is from Samoa and she just went back the end of last year for the second burial for her mother. And what that means is mum was buried years ago, and the three daughters get together and they get the bones out, and they wash the bones and anoint them with oil, wrap them up in tapper, have them in the house and they have a second ceremony, and so it's very visceral thing, but it's it's a way of saying goodbye, you know, properly.

12:42Speaker 2:So other cultures I think do it better.

12:45Speaker 1:Hundred can't. I cannot imagine that happening at a Western funeral or a Western kind of well.

12:52Speaker 2:We're spiritually bankrupt. Actually, that's that's how I see it.

12:56Speaker 1:I tend to agree in terms of how much looking into crime was a part of your job. Can you kind of give us a bit of an overview because you worked in so many different areas, did investigating crime kind of take up a majority or how is that kind of it.

13:16Speaker 2:Varies tremendously depending on countries and jurisdictions. In some countries the pathologists will just do criminal cases, but here we do all sorts of cases. The current as Act of South Australia is basically any death is reportable, it's sudden, unexpected or doctor can't issue a certificates. So probably sixty percent of our case so just natural death right, And then we have a large number of suicides twenty five percent. Then we have vehicle accidents, and you get down to actual homicides, it's probably only about two to three percent.

13:48Speaker 1:Wow.

13:49Speaker 2:So although it occupies a lot of our time, because you know, with a standard case of somebody who's just dropped down there with a heart attack, you know very easy to quickly find the current artyage. Over with a homicide, you may be going for eight or ten hours. Is there a lot of injuries? Trying to work out which injuries are important? Is it an injury or is it not which injuries were lethal, the sequence of injuries, the type of injuries, sharp force, blunt force. Then you have to put it all together into a report and then go to court and be challenged, made to look like an idiot. There's a great quote of Jackson Lambs in Slow Horses, and I've put it in my book saying that sometimes talking to lawyers in court is like trying to explain Norway to a dog. It's just they asked questions I know you can't answer.

14:47Speaker 1:Well, it's one of those It's one of those careers that you There aren't many jobs where you get kind of criticized to the level that you do when you are standing up in a court room, like having your work dissected that kind of closely and horribly in like a cross examination. Like there's not many of us that have to go through that.

15:09Speaker 2:No, And it's interesting the games that were played. I was inter state and the defense said, you know, did you bring all the material that you base your opinion on with you to court? And I thought, well, the prosecutors smart enough to catch this, And I said no, I didn't. So you just raised an eyebrow and looked at the jury as if you know this is in competence. When the prosecutor came, he said, you didn't bring all of the material? Did you? Said no? He said why not?

15:34Speaker 2:I said, because, as you are aware, it fills ten boxes and it wouldn't fit on the plane. And so in that instance the jury thought, ah, so the other lawyer was actually trying to put one across.

15:47Speaker 1:Did you enjoy working in homicide, especially if it ended up with you having to go to court?

15:53Speaker 2:Oh? I wouldn't say I enjoyed. I find an interesting process. Yeah, it's quite stressful, be very to measure the blood pressure of pathologist in the witness box when they're being hammered. Sometimes it's interesting. This adversarial system, I think, you know, is a bit of a problem. Going back to SMOA, I was over there doing autopsis for the government and there was a homicide. A young fellow had dropped a rock on another kid's head. They were both reasonable young blokes, but they were both drunk. There they don't have juries.

16:29Speaker 2:They have a council of elders. And the judge said to me, why don't you come down and stand beside me and explain to the council, And they had a translator, and it's interesting the elders speaking saying you what I was saying, but it was also translated. But the two lawyers were not really at each other's throats. So I got the feeling that I've already thought, this is just a tragedy, and let's, you know, let's find out what happened to see what we can do. But that that was a very meaningful court appearance. Other times, you know, you'll get asked the same question five hundred times, or you'll get asked a question that's about five minutes long with a whole lot of double negatives in it, so that you know you don't you're really not quite sure what's going on. In that case, you can go to the the judge and say, I'm sorry, you're on it, but you know, I can't ask the question the way it's put to me. It will confuse the jury. And I've had judges saying just answer the question, doctor, okay.

17:26Speaker 1:You also get put in scenarios where you your evidence or findings might be put up against another experts. Would that happen very often?

17:36Speaker 2:Oh? Yeah, quite often. And the problem is the more technical case, the more difficult it is. For juries to sort of sort it out. So if you have some sort of you know, bespeckled, bald, be it, an old guy saying one thing, and you've got similar guys saying another thing, often the juries will just negate both of them. So that's too complicated. So what what the court or what the other side has done is they've created a reasonable doubt. So one of the things that's developed in curture reason is it's called hot tubbing, and it means that two witnesses will be in the same box at the same time. And that's fascinating because I find that people who have pathologies, who've got quite outlandish theories really tone them down when I'm sitting beside them looking at them, because my facial expression will be you know what, I'm allowed to do that? And then the lawyer will say, you know, do you have an opinion on that? To press a byad, the side that calls me calls me professor.

18:37Speaker 2:The side often the other side caused me mister to reduce my status. I don't care. My father was called mister for eighty years. But what they'll say is, what do you think of that statement? I said, Well, I'm a bit confused because I'm not aware of any literature that supports that, and this, this and this, and so it has to be then answered at the time, So it speeds things along, and I think it it makes it easy. It's also like pre trial conferences. Let's just have a conference with everybody and see what we can agree on and what we can't agree on.

19:07Speaker 1:I think you've already kind of answered this, but I'm going to ask you bluntly, what do you think about our current court and justice systems given your involvement in them.

19:16Speaker 2:I think it does a spectacular job. Given how fragmented society is, mistakes are made, but I think that generally the system is a safe system. I'm not so supportive of juries. I prefer judge alone because then you can get the reasons why they made the decision. I've got judges who are friends who much prefer jury trials. I think it's just it brings out more information. I do like the European inquisitorial system rather than our adversarial where you get to talk about things you have the conferences.

19:54Speaker 2:It's less aggressive. So I think, yes that given what we've got, it does a pretty good job.

20:03Speaker 1:Maybe just toned down the aggression. Yes, yes, indeed, let's go back to the autopsy room. When you are investigating a crime, would you have the detectives in there with you? How does it work in terms of I know you do report after the fact, but how involved are the detectives and the police very involved.

20:26Speaker 2:Some of our cult and safety people want the police to stand behind the room with a glass between them and me, and I won't have that. I'll go to a death scene and talk to the police. You know, what's happened, who might it be, how could this have happened? What are questions that we need to do? What are samples should be taken? There are crime scene officers there as well who look after that. They're very skilled, but we're all talking about what is the possibility? And then at the autopsy, I'll have the crime scene officer and I will have one or two detectives sitting in the room and we're talking about things. What could this not be?

21:05Speaker 2:What could it be? We try and do it as quickly as possible so that they can get information. If they have somebody that they suspect, they can then ask them questions and I'll have information from me to say, well, it was a stab wound with a double sided blade, not a bullet wound.

21:23Speaker 1:After the break, Roger talks about his time working on the case of Jasmine cor who was buried alive. I want to talk about some cases so can people can really understand how your work works. I want to start with Jazmine, which was one of the harder kind of cases in your career. She was murdered in twenty twenty one by her ex boyfriend. He at first denied ever being involved in her death, and he just admitted to burying her body, told police where he had buried her.

21:55Speaker 1:Can you talk us through your involvement, because that was one of the cases where you went to the scene as they exhumed her body, just meine correctly.

22:02Speaker 2:Wasn't one of the harder cases. It was the hardest case, and after that I really started to think about retirement. I think that it was so horrific that something actually broke in me and I lost I don't know the enthusiasm perhaps, but yeah, I wanted out after that.

22:26Speaker 1:So you went to the crime scene when they exsumed her body. You couldn't tell in that moment what had happened.

22:33Speaker 2:Could you well, I'll take you back a step. I was phoned on a Sunday night about her death and Taverick Singh, the perpetrator, had suggested they had a suicide pact and then she went through with it, but he didn't. Then he was very it was so complicated but stupid. He on the day before he was seen on CC footage of a hardware store getting a shovel in cable ties. He then lent his car to a friend, and all of this is a matter of public records, so I can talk about it. He put his phone in the back of the French's car, and when he was abducting Jasmine, his friend went south. He then had her in the boot with a blindfold and her legs tied for five hours.

23:26Speaker 2:She didn't have any head injuries. She didn't have any drugs on board, so she was completely aware of what was going on. Then he took her up north and as she's lying in the boot, she can hear him digging the hole and he dragged her into the hole and then just filled the soil around her. When the body was taken out, the question was was she dead before she went into the ground, And he was just hiding the body, and when we got her back to the mortuary we did a CT scan. We could see material in her airways and at autopsy there was soil in her mouth, in her trakar bronchi down into the lungs in her esophagus, so she had inhaled soil and she died from being buried alive, which is one of the I mean, people have nightmares about that sort of thing.

24:11Speaker 1:Yeah, is that why it horrified you so much? Just imagining the cruelty of her death.

24:18Speaker 2:Yeah, she was a very sweet little Ponderabi woman who had come over from India to learn nursing and was working in a nursing home. And apparently from everything we hear, she was just a lovely person. And he apparently was considered a reasonable fellow and until he wasn't. It's interesting he finally pleaded guilty. And it's the only trial I've ever gone to, this sentencing because I wanted to. I wanted to put my eyes on this fellow, and I expected something like Charles Manson, but just this average looking nerd.

24:51Speaker 2:It brings to the point of, you know, is it in all of us to do this? Who knows?

24:57Speaker 1:Did you find attending the sentence helpful for you while trying to process this case, or no.

25:07Speaker 2:They're not really nothing really helped. Talking to my colleagues helped, and that's what we do.

25:14Speaker 1:You also did the Barley bombings in two thousand and two, if I'm correct.

25:20Speaker 2:Yes, Yes, what.

25:21Speaker 1:Is it like working over overseas in these countries that perhaps don't have the facilities that you're used to.

25:30Speaker 2:It's challenging. They're very hot, they don't have good refrigeration units, so the bodies are all decomposed, and it's confronting. I mean, the smell's extraordinary. And with the tsunami there were just so many children and families. It was so distressing.

25:50Speaker 1:Because it is a completely different experience having one body in a like a kind of like an operating room sit situation and then having open air thousands of bodies like that. Is that is world's apart in terms of experiences.

26:08Speaker 2:Yes, it's it's terrific. And the mortuary were working in was actually there was a temple room and we had didn't have running water, and there was material on the ground out of the body bags and there are probably five teams working in this confined space. So yes, it's it's completely different, and there's something you know, you're not trained. We read about it until you're actually there, you don't realize how how complex is. The Tirees did a spectacular job.

26:40Speaker 2:They really were well organized, but resources were strained in those instances.

26:45Speaker 1:Are you looking for causes of death or is it mainly just identification?

26:52Speaker 2:Combination of both. We're looking for anything untoward. And I've written a paper called the Hiding in Plane Sight. What better place to hide a homicide victim than amongst hundreds of other bodies? And I talked about the crime rate in London during the Blitz and that went up. How easy would it be to just walk along behind somebody you want to murder, hit them with a brick, throw them into a bomb site and it would be assumed that it was part of the bombing. When I was in Thailand, one of the mortuary tenders said, come in, have a look at this, and there was a coffin and he took the lid off and there was a perfectly preserved body of a young woman, and so I got the entire authorities there. I don't know what happened, but she had been that coffin had been under a whole lot of other coffins which would actually taken off. Now, if we hadn't moved those coffins, she would have then decomposed, and you know, you would think, yes, she's one of the victims of the drowning.

27:48Speaker 1:That It's just mind boggling, isn't it that that like that that could happen. I guess it's probably happening in every major disaster that we hear about.

27:58Speaker 2:I suspect. So, I mean, if you're trying to hide a what better place Snowtown?

28:01Speaker 1:We have to talk about Snowtown because that is one of the most notorious kind of murders, serial killings in Australian history. Take me back, because it was nineteen ninety nine that those bodies were found, eight bodies in a barrel, a few other bodies buried elsewhere. And you were fairly early on in your career, weren't you.

28:22Speaker 2:I had just started full time at forensics three weeks before, and this was my first week on call and I got called by the head of Major Crime about the Snowtown bank vault and barrels and really had no idea what was going to happen. But we got the barrels down to Adelaide and examine them there. And that was not easy because what if I go and drums are very heavy. These were full of fluid. We didn't know whether it was acid or what it was, so we had to test it for toxic chemicals. And then we had to work out how to actually empty the barrels without losing any evidence because as a fluid come out, if there are bullets in there, you miss them. So we had to sive all the remains and then pull the bodies out, the eight bodies, and we gave them a to f and then did testing. We examined them for identifying features like tattoos and the dentists in the DNA.

29:18Speaker 2:Surprising it didn't work and people are stout of it that they say, well, you can get DNA out of dinosaurs, but the problem with this is a bad environment. It's wet and no oxygen, the DNA breaks down. So the identifications were with traditional fingerprints and features like that.

29:36Speaker 1:How long did that take you? I can imagine that's not you know, a one day thing. That's it sounds like weeks of work.

29:42Speaker 2:It took a couple of weeks, and then of course the legal side of it, and I think the trial went for a year. It was very, very time consuming.

29:53Speaker 1:How did you determine how those people had died when there were so many things happening in those barrels.

30:01Speaker 2:Well, I had two colleagues who were working on They were working on most of the cases, and there were gags in some of the mouths. Sometimes you just couldn't determine. Body that I examined was skeletonized, so I couldn't tell how they died. It was difficult to identify injuries because of the puture faction. There were stories about being tortured with electricity and sparklers to the genitals. There was one case of cannibalism and we did find a piece of flesh that was missing off off a leg. I think, so there were some very bizarre things that went on there.

30:41Speaker 2:But in a way, the cause of death wasn't all that important, given that you know you've got dismembered bodies and barrels that these fellows are you know, obviously handled and been actually driving on the countryside. They had them in the back of a trailer for a while.

30:56Speaker 1:In terms of cases you've worked on in your career, do you look back on that one as like, it's hard to say enjoyed. But was that, like I can imagine, it was a puzzle trying to work all of that out. Is that or was it just so hard to do something so intricate like that?

31:13Speaker 2:It was just you take it a step at a time, and you know, each case an individual case, and then you go from that to the next one. I must admit that that's one of the few times I've had nightmares after there. I woke up one on the Saturday, just bolt up writing better think three in the morning and said to my dog, what have I done? You know, I've moved from pediatrics into this. It's it was interesting and challenging, and I'm glad I don't have to do it ever again.

31:45Speaker 1:Yeah, in terms of attending court for Snowtown, that would have been one of those cases where the media attention because they wouldn't be media attention for every case you appeared on, but that one, I can imagine would have been huge. Which was that overwhelming for you having the media as an added element, not really.

32:08Speaker 2:Because you used to delivering evidence, but I remember the I think it was with the committal all I talked about was putre faction or autolysis, which is two methods of breaking down their bodies, puture factions bacterial and autos just breaking down. So that's what I spent most of my time on. And when I walked out a little about twenty camera crews in front of me, and I'd forgotten about them. I burst out laughing, and somebody said, you know, you were the only person in the whole history of that trial that came out of the court laughing.

32:34Speaker 2:I thought, yeah, not a good look.

32:36Speaker 1:Why were you laughing because you'd just forgotten.

32:39Speaker 2:I was just well, I'd been talking about trivia and here's twenty camera crews wanted to get my picture up.

32:46Speaker 1:Next, Roger tells me about how he was involved in Sally Clark's conviction being dismissed. I want to move on now to Sally Clark, the UK mother who was convicted of the murder of her two sons nineteen ninety nine. That conviction was dismissed in two thousand and you were asked to review that case for the defense.

33:08Speaker 2:If I'm right, yeah, two thousand and three. I think it was the second quarter of appeal. Convicted in ninety nine, one Quart of Criminal Appeal upheld the sentence, and then I was asked by the defense to look at them for the second court.

33:22Speaker 1:You cited significant and ongoing problems in the investigation of the deaths of those two boys. I'm curious, is this a case of the pathologists involved not understanding pediatric pathology or what do you think went wrong?

33:37Speaker 2:Partly, I mean, I find it really difficult to understand. I mean, if I could go through the cases, I mean, Christopher died at eleven weeks and at autopsy they said there was an injury of the inside of his lip, which is significant in their baby, and there were bruises on his legs. But they put the cause of death as lower respiratory infection, so he had enough respiue infection to kill it. And then I think the beginning of ninety eight Harry died. And with Harry, they were both with Sally alone at the time. With Harry, they found all sorts of things that said this is shaken baby syndrome.

34:15Speaker 2:They found bleeding at the back of the eye, they found the laceration of the brain. They found all sorts of things. Now when this was reviewed, Oh, also he had two fractured ribs on the right hand side. When this was reviewed when Sally had been charged with murder with shaken Baby, the retinal hemorrhages, the bleeding in the eyes weren't there. That was just congested vessels, and the doctors in the hospital when they've been trying to resuscitate him, it hadn't seen retinal hemorrhages. So the retinal hemorrhages was wrong.

34:47Speaker 2:The laceration of the brain was a cut cause when the mortuaru tenants were removing his brain, and that's not a feature of shaking baby anyway. And a lot of the other things didn't drive. And so what they did, rather than actually say, let's take a deep breath and review all, they sell it's obviously inflicted suffocation, and the pathology reasons for that were pretty dubious. They went back and reviewed Christopher because of that, and you remember he had died from a severe recipe infection. Well that's gone now they say it's also inflicted suffocation. There. The problems with Chrystal were that the bruises on the legs weren't noticed by the doctors in the hospital or the police, and then people trained to look for this. When you have what you think is a bruise, you cut it so that you actually see the hemorrhage and the tissues underneath.

35:38Speaker 2:Otherwise it might be libidity. The post mortem staining this wasn't done. The grounds for saying that was inflicted suffocation were pretty shunky. You know Harry as well, Again, photographs not taken, tissues not sampled, The fractured rib on the right hand side, it couldn't be seen on my croscopy. There was supposed to be a fractured dislocation of rib on the right hand side as well, that hadn't been photographed properly, so you couldn't review it. The retinal hemorrhages, as I said, weren't seen by the doctors in the hospital.

36:12Speaker 2:It was a mess, actually, But she still was convicted. And then it transpired that the examining doctor had pathologists had withheld information from the court. I don't know why, but Harry had microbiology cultures that showed staphlococcasaureus, a very nasty bacteria, a pure growth in five different sites. So he clearly died of Scepsis what about Christopher? Well, you can't tell, because you know there wasn't enough documentation, so I called Christopher's death unascertained and Harry's death due to sepsis, and Sally was. The conviction was quashed in two thousand and three, and then she died of a mixed drug and alcohol toxicity several years later. Whether it was deliberate or accidental, don't know, but if you look when she came out of court, she said, there are no winners.

37:04Speaker 2:And you think of her husband, Stephen, who's lost his wife and two boys. What a sad story that is. There was the whole issue too with Soroy Meadow, a very distinguished pediatrician in the UK, who said there's a one in seventy three million chance of this being due to SIDS, and that was then looked at and people said. There was an editorial I think in the British Medical Journal saying convicted by mathematical error because just because one case has happened, it doesn't have any bearing on whether another case will happen. So he was castigated for that.

37:34Speaker 2:But I also blame the defense. Why didn't they query it, Why did they let that through? I mean, nobody thought those kids were sins anyway, So it's just a red herring, So it was a mess of a case.

37:46Speaker 1:I couldn't help but think of Kathleen Folbeck while reading about Sally. You know, another young mother convicted over the murder of four children. Eventually all of that was quashed quite recently. Do you see similarities there? Or I know that Kathleen Folby her children It was all to do with genetics and stuff, but originally she was it was a sid's death, and then she got convicted with murder. And it just makes me think, like, how often is this happening that mothers have been convicted of murder when there's all these other reasons at play.

38:22Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think it occurs very often. The fact that it occurs at all is clearly a problem. I appeared for the defense with Kathy actually got forty years, so it shows you how good my evidence is. But I think, stepping aside from the genetic stuff, there were reasons that these children could have died anyway. Laura, for example, had this full blown marcarditis inflammation of her heart that was ignored in favor of inflicted asphyxia. Sarah had a very strange shaped back of her palette, and one of the boys was was epileptic, So I don't think think you need to evoke genes. I worry a bit about genetics, and I did give a talk to the Medical Legal Society in New South Wales and on Kathy, and I just said, what I'm here for is for you to tell me how you know the kids died from this mutation rather than with this mutation. Three have the cardiate mutation, Sarah, Laura, and Kathy. Well, Kathy is still alive, so it's not immediately lethal. The two boys have this mutation that causes lethal epilepsy in mice, not in children. So I don't understand the genetics, and nobody could really explain it to

39:36Speaker 2:me at this meeting. But as I said, I don't think the case ever should have got up because I think they were You know, although you have a lot of death in the family and people talk about Meadow's law, one death is SIDS, two is undetermined, three is homicide. That's a denial of natural justice. It's also not Meadows law as de Mayo's law. So you text some medical examine who came up with that for sir Roy. So again a number of issues and a very tragic case I mean for babies dead.

40:09Speaker 1:You're saying that genetics aside, she should never have gone to prison because there was enough reasonable doubt in the evidence.

40:16Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my belief.

40:17Speaker 1:Sudden infant death, We've mentioned it a few times. That is an area that you specialized in, isn't it. Why did you decide to specialize in that area.

40:25Speaker 2:Well, as I said, I'd done a lot of pediatrics. I've done flying doctor work, I've done pediatrics in hospital, and then when I started pathology, I just realized that parents shouldn't shouldn't have to see their children die. There's a great quote of Euripides, What greater pain immortals bear than this to see their children die before their eyes? And so I just thought, well, if I can work on these cases and find preventative strategies will work out what's going on, then that's a good thing to do.

40:55Speaker 2:And that's how I deal with these cases. Otherwise they're just so. But looking at accidental deaths, we worked very hard in the nineteen nineties and got legislation changed about unsafe cots, and so we're not getting the number of deaths in cots that we used to. You know, kids being wedged or hanging from things. So that was that was a victory. I've done a lot of work in SIDS and I did some work with Harvard University and we found that there's a chemical called substance P in the back of the brain that controls breathing, controls heart rate, it also controls head and neck movement. And so we found substance P was decreased in some SIDS babies significantly.

41:38Speaker 2:And we've asked for years why don't they just lift their heads up when there's face down aras that is, they don't because they can't. So I think we're putting together pieces of the jigsaw, and that's that's important.

41:52Speaker 1:Before your guidelines, how many children do you think we were losing to SIDS?

41:56Speaker 2:Well, it's we used to. There were I think fifty in the eighties a year in South Australia. Now they're about five. But one of the terrible things is the sleeping position. You know, we found out that sleeping face down is a bad thing. They should sleep on their backs. But if you go back historically, particularly in the States in the fifties, pediatricians doctor Benjamin Spock were advising parents to put their babies to sleep face down, and there was a pediatrician, Abramson, who said, look, we can't do this.

42:29Speaker 2:I'll suffocate and it's been calculated with something like I think in the UK and Europe sixty thousand babies died because of that medical initiative. Now you don't hear that very often. Wow, this medicine doesn't like to admit errors. But that was a mistake. Wasn't evidence based. The thought was if they're on their backs, they'll they'll aspirate, vomit, inhale it and that doesn't happen.

42:51Speaker 1:But it also makes you think like that's more than an error, is it? Could criminal charges have been involved there with that kind of advice.

42:59Speaker 2:Well, I think it was incredibly well intentioned and it made sense, and a lot of medical initiatives are like that, but when you examine you think, nah, maybe that's not the best thing to do.

43:12Speaker 1:We recently covered the suspicious death of Australian Jason Rigby in Fiji. I don't know if you remember this. You gave some comment for sixty minutes just last year on that it was ruled a suicide in a very short investigation. They are now treating it as homicide. What were your thoughts when you heard about that case and that ruling.

43:34Speaker 2:Well, I haven't actually reviewed the evidence since the TV program, but I think the stab wounds and the scenario didn't make all that much sense, and so my opinion was it should have been treated as a suspicious case from the word go. And that's what happens. If you have a stabbing. The first thing you got to ask yourself is has this person been stabbed? Have they done it themselves? And there are various ways of differentiating, you know, self inflicted stab wounds from inflicted stab wounds.

44:05Speaker 1:I was going to ask in a suicide case, is it hard to determine if it was done to them or if they've done it to themselves in any kind of form of suicidal death.

44:16Speaker 2:Sometimes, I mean one of the Snowtown cases was thought to be a suicidal hanging, but he was actually strung up by the perpetrators. So that's an example of mist homicide. With stabbings, if you stab yourself, often there are multiple stab wounds. There's not just one wound, and you have what to call hesitation cuts, So you've got one cut, a very superficial cut, because it's very difficult to hurt yourself. So there may be multiple little inside wounds that aren't significant, whether it's say a homicidal cut throat or probably just one cut from one side to the other. With suicidal little wounds, when people stab themselves in the chest, say they're often lying on a bed or a couch, they take off their clothes that you don't stab through clothing, and it doesn't go through bone, It just goes through soft tissue. And there's just probably one stab wind into the heart and the knife will be in sight you.

45:16Speaker 2:So those are the things that help you sort of differentiate. Also with a stab wound. If somebody's being stabbed, they tend to try and get away. They may fall over, there may be blood, force, trawl or an other things.

45:27Speaker 1:And stabbing yourself to death is not overly common, is it.

45:30Speaker 2:No, not really, It's most of our suicides are carbon monoxide, are hanging, or or drugs.

45:38Speaker 1:This is a bit of a big question, but what is the most unusual death you've seen. I know that that is another area that you've specialized in.

45:45Speaker 2:I suppose a lot of them, actually, But there was an oldly woman who was pecked by her rooster, which was out collecting eggs and she had Barica's veins and she bled to death from that. I published that because it was strange, but as to give advice. So if you have varicas veins and you get a small cut, don't walk around, lie down, elevate the leg, put your finger over it, and you know, pressure a medical alert button or phone somebody. And I got phone costsm all over the world, people saying thank you so much of that advice. My grandmother's got varicas veins. I worry about it.

46:19Speaker 2:So I've developed an approach to pathology called preventive pathology. All my clinical colleagues think that, you know, the pathologist knows everything, but he's always too late, which is a bit rude. But what this is is taking lessons to the mortuary like that one and putting it out there so that simple, simple things can be considered and people can actually prevent them from dying.

46:43Speaker 1:What do you think would be the proudest achievement from your career?

46:47Speaker 2:My book Sudden Death in the Young it's now and it's fourth edition as I just submitted it on the weekend. But it's a it's a summary of all of the possible causes of sudden unexpected up the age of thirty five, and I it's yes, it's it's I really am proud of it. It's also proud of getting the AC last year. That was a nice sort of recognition of of of my career. So those two probably, Yeah, getting the A C.

47:17Speaker 1:That's a that's a good time to go. Yep, I'm done, I'm out.

47:21Speaker 2:That's exactly right.

47:23Speaker 1:I'm curious do you consume true crime in your in your regular day? Do you watch documentaries listen to podcasts or is it too much for you? Having worked.

47:36Speaker 2:Crime fiction? Actually, I really like reabs and inspector banks, so I to read a lot of that. It's interesting to see the angles that authors come up with. And you know, I mean Patricia Cornwall Cake Scarpetta was based on a friend of mine in New York, so sort of connections there, and I call it witless silence. I think it's silent witness. But the doctor there was based on another friend, Helen Whitwell in England. So things weave through these stories that they're fascinating.

48:15Speaker 1:What about watching these forensic pathologists on screen? I can imagine you would sit there going that wouldn't do that, wouldn't do that, that's not right.

48:23Speaker 2:I think the only television program I enjoy forensically is Inspector Rex. He's a even a C grade forensic program from Vienna where Inspected Rex the German Shepherd sold all the crimes. The thing about Inspected Rex is that he's not trying to guestimate the time of death like they do on Silent Witness. You know, they'll all the time of death was two minutes past midnight. Yeah, plus and minus about six hours. There's a lot of well, I have to compress a whole investigation into an hour, so it's understandable that there are inaccuracies. But yes, I don't tend to enjoy the portrayal of forensic pathologists on TV.

49:03Speaker 2:A lot of them are these sort of dottery old guys with glasses and beards and bald heads that make, you know, a lot of black humor. So it doesn't seem real to me.

49:12Speaker 1:Are you telling me that you can't, as a pathologist tell the exact time of death. It's more of a window.

49:19Speaker 2:Absolutely, there are so many different I've called timing the Achilles Heel of pathology because you know, although there's a process that you go through, like you know, the body temperature decreases and the body gets stiff. It's different for different people in different environments. So there's a lot of inaccuracies there. Interestingly enough, there's a very complicated German chart for measuring temperatures and working out time of death, and it was reproduced in Bernard Knight's textbook, and a colleague of mine from South Africa a few years ago pointed out that the reproduction actually has thrown out the parameters, and so anybody who's using the chart from the textbook would get the wrong time of death. You've just got to be very cautious. I mean, gastric emptying time used to be. You know, people say, oh, yes, they died two hours after this or whatever. All I say is, you know, if there's food in the stomach, they died or were murdered sometime after they ate. Because if you're terrified, sometimes the gas entering time is really quick. Other times, if you're injured, it may be very slow. We get

50:27Speaker 2:people who have been in ICU for say four days, and they've still got food in their stomach from before the accident. So again there's a lot of variability, and I think that's one of the things in modern forensic pathology that we've getting much better out of saying I don't know. And I like doing that in court with juries because if I say to a question I really don't know, I can tell the jury thinks, oh, well, okay, he doesn't think he knows everything. So when he does say he knows something, then we can probably put more faith in it.

50:59Speaker 1:Professor, you've retired. Now you're passing the baton to the younger forensic pathologists.

51:05Speaker 2:Of the world.

51:05Speaker 1:I just throw it into the mortary and left of Australia. What is your advice to the profession. What are you hoping to see from the profession and what do you think makes a good forensic pathologist? What values do you want to see upheld.

51:21Speaker 2:I think compassion and curiosity are the two most important points, and a work ethic. I've seen a lot of younger pathologists who don't see to be really interested in the job. Clearly, working as much as I have is something that most people would not want to do. But my boss said to me once when I started forensics. He said, if they're paying you to do something you enjoyed, then it's not work, And as I said, I've treated it like a puzzle to work out causes of death and prevention strategies.

51:58Speaker 2:And I really like writing literature and history of my best subjects at high school, so I've continued that and that to me, every paper I write has to have a particular point that I'm making a change in practice or a new observation, and that that I think is what young pathologists must do. I don't think of it as a job. I think of it as a vocation, and I'd like people to treat it like that.

52:26Speaker 1:Well, Professor Bayad, thank you for everything you've done all of the I was going to say millions. It feels like millions of texts and kind of findings you've had over your forty year career. And thank you for joining us.

52:39Speaker 2:Thanks Demm, it was a pleasure.

52:43Speaker 1:Thank you to Roger for joining us on this episode. You can find links to Roger's books in our show notes. Make sure you're following our show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for updates on this story and all the stories we cover. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another true crime converce Station