SINGAPORE – Dame Sue Black, a world-renowned forensic scientist, has spent her life immersed in the mysteries of death, a relationship that she first began to understand through the wisdom of her late grandmother.
“It was my (paternal) grandmother who talked to me from a young age about death. She would always say to me, ‘Death walks beside you every single day of your life, and at some point or another, your paths are going to cross, and if death is going to walk alongside you, best to make her your friend, because you do not want to walk every day with an enemy,’” said 63-year-old Professor Black.
Because her grandmother was born in the 1800s, it was improper to have a man as a friend. “Death to me has always been female,” she told The Straits Times.
At age five, she helped her father clean the animals he hunted to prepare them for dinner, and at age 12, she worked at a butcher shop.
“I was up to my elbows in blood, muscles and bones; and that seemed normal,” the British expert recalled.
It was natural that she went to medical school, but Prof Black found all the subjects “bored her rigid” until she spoke to the anatomists.
“What they said to me was, ‘You would be given a human body, and you would dissect that body from the top of the head to the bottom of the toes, and it will take you a year,’” she said.
When she worked with human remains in the dissecting room at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for the first time, she felt she “had come home”.
“I have always felt most comfortable in a dissecting room or a mortuary,” she said.
Prof Black believes that her work is a privilege and a responsibility – she needs to speak on behalf of those who could no longer speak for themselves.
“That’s a real privilege – whether from the dissecting room or the mortuary, you are trying to uncover who the victims were or what happened to them,” she said.
Prof Black, who spoke at the Global Young Scientists Summit in both 2024 and 2025, dealt with forensic anthropology in the early 1980s, before DNA was first used in forensics.
DNA evidence was used in 1986, when police in Britain needed verification of a suspect’s confession that he was responsible for two rape-murders.
Her first case, in the early 1980s, involved a young man who crashed his microlight plane off the east coast of Scotland. His body was washed ashore only two weeks later – damaged by the rough sea and in a very bad state of decomposition.
“I was not fazed at all by what was in front of me. I saw it as a puzzle. This was clearly a person, but who? His face was badly damaged and there were no fingerprints as the skin had degloved (torn away),” she said.
The only identifier was a birthmark just below his left nipple. The experience taught her the importance of forensics in helping families during their deepest grief – to provide them with closure.
In 2016, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the late Queen Elizabeth’s Birthday Honours for her services to higher education and forensic science. In 2021, she entered the House of Lords – Britain’s Upper House of Parliament – as Baroness Black of Strome.
She is currently president of St John’s College at the University of Oxford.
Prof Black said her most memorable case was when she was investigating the war crimes of 1998 to 1999 in Kosovo.
“I had just started writing the first textbook on identifying children’s remains… How do you tell if this was a two-year-old or a four-year-old if all you had were bones,” she said.
She cited a case in which almost an entire family was wiped out during a rocket-propelled grenade explosion. Eight children – from a baby just a few months old to 14-year-old twin boys – and the wife, her mother and sister were killed. Only her husband survived.
“Despite being shot in the leg, the man… came out when it was safe to dig a hole to bury fragments of his family so that they would not become a food source for packs of dogs,” she recalled.
A year later, the man gave Prof Black’s team permission to exhume the remains of his 11 loved ones, which filled only about 1½ body bags
“We found parts of the two-year-old, the four-year-old, the six-year-old, the eight-year-old, and the 12-year-old,” she said.
“(We) were left with the shoulder regions of the 14-year-old twin boys… One of the sets of upper limbs had a Mickey Mouse vest, and that was how we picked out one twin from the other as he was absolutely mad about Mickey Mouse.”
This case, she said, had changed her perspective on what was important in life.
“I had two little girls at home at the time, and it made me go home and say, ‘You know, I do not care if there are things on the carpet that need hoovering.’ What mattered was my girls knew they were loved.”
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