After 6000 Autopsies, This Was The Case That Broke Him

In March 2021, police in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges uncovered a shallow grave containing the body of 21-year-old Jasmeen Kaur. What forensic pathologist Professor Roger Byard discovered during her autopsy, soil inhaled deep into her airways revealed a horrifying truth: Jasmeen had been buried alive. In this episode of True Crime Conversations, Gemma Bath sits down with Professor Roger Byard, one of Australia’s most respected forensic pathologists, following his recent retirement from an extraordinary career. He opens up about investigating the horrific Snowtown murders, identifying victims of the Bali bombings and Boxing Day tsunami, and what four decades on the frontline of death has taught him. LINKS If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. Contact Full Stop Australia https://fullstop.org.au/ on 1800 385 578, 7 days, 24 hours. GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. CREDITS Guests: Roger Byard https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au Producer's: Tahli Blackman & Ella Maitland Video Editor: Julian Rosario Audio Designer: Tegan Salder Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Gemma Bath?

  It's Monday, March 8th in 2021, and police are gathered in a remote section of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. They've been told they'll find the body of a 21-year-old woman here. Jasmine Core 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 400 kilometres from home. So here they are, and they're about to uncover her shallow grave. Among

• 0:41Gemma Bath?

  those gathered is Professor Roger Byard. 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 40 years on the job.

• 1:02Gemma Bath?

  I'm Gemma 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 Byard 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 recognised 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 Core. He

• 1:42Gemma Bath?

  also helped identify victims of the Bali bombings in 2002 and the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand in 2004. This is a man who has performed more than 6,000 autopsies. In 2021, he was named a world leader in forensic science. In 2024, he was named Tasmanian Australian of the Year. In 2025, he became a companion of the Order of Australia. And in 2026, just recently, he retired from an impressive and wide-ranging career. As someone that works in and around death, Professor Byard has seen some horrific things. The way he gets

• 2:24Gemma Bath?

  through it is focusing on the science, not the horror. Here's Roger.

• 2:34Gemma Bath?

  Roger, thank you for joining me on True Crime Conversations, and congratulations on your recent retirement. Was forensic pathology always what you planned to do if you go back to young Roger?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I was going to be an archaeologist, but thought, when I'm my teenage years, you don't get much money doing that, so maybe I'll do medicine. And, no, I was going to do, basically, emergency medicine, and I qualified in general practice. I was going back to Canada to do emergency medicine, and I was in Belize, 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 paediatric pathology, and then forensic pathology. So it's been a sort of a downhill course, really, for years.

• 3:25Gemma Bath?

  You mentioned four decades. You have seen so many iterations of your profession.

• 3:32Gemma Bath?

  Has it changed in the way you do your job, given the advances in technologies?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  It has. What we're using more often now is imaging, CT examinations. So, most forensic facilities have CTs, so bodies get CT'd before an autopsy, which means that you can actually find the cause of death sometimes without even opening the body. So, we're doing a lot more CT examinations with external examinations, the external, looking for any injuries or something untoward. And the CT can tell us if there's been a rupture of the heart, or whether there's been a stroke. So, that has changed things dramatically. It also adds to our standard autopsies as well.

• 4:14Gemma Bath?

  Because you have to include it as well?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So, yes, we're being dragged out of the 19th century, sometimes reluctantly.

• 4:22Gemma Bath?

  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 01

  It is a good thing. It's a good thing for families, for the pathologists, for resources. But I often meet with families, and, you know, particularly with babies, they want to meet the person who, they want to ask the pathologist questions, but that'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 a surgical procedure nowadays. We open the body cavities very carefully, treated with respect, and everybody knows that this is a tragedy. And I think that's important for people to hear.

• 5:17Gemma Bath?

  It's interesting to hear you 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 doing the exact same thing, kind of, in every autopsy?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. There's a standard procedure of, you know, opening the three body cavities, examining the organs, taking them out, weighing them, and then 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 dissect the back, which you wouldn't normally do. You may, in a strangulation case, where you would, do a neck dissection. So by that, what you're doing is 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,

• 6:19Speaker 01

  but there is a standard process that should be followed, and it is not always followed.

• 6:23Gemma Bath?

  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?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Essentially, pathologists are the last doctors that this person is going to see, so they're our patients. So, when the bodies come in, and they come in with funeral director, they're in body bags, they're covered with sheets, they're brought into the mortuary on the trolley, and the dissection's performed on the trolley. There's not unnecessary moving of the body. The body is a treat to those people, and that's the important part. And if you don't understand that, then you should not be doing forensics.

• 7:07Gemma Bath?

  How many autopsies do you think you've done over a 40-year career?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I lost count, actually. It was up to 6,000, 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, you know, tens of thousands of other autopsies as well, because my colleagues are autopsying around me. So, a large number of dead people.

• 7:27Gemma Bath?

  I can see why you're done, Roger. That's a lot.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree. I feel, it's funny, the last couple of months, I've been thinking back to cases, and thinking back what I've done. I mean, I published over 1,000 papers and 12 textbooks, and it makes, I feel exhausted.

• 7:45Gemma Bath?

  I'm not surprised. You're a very accomplished man.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Well-driven, I think.

• 7:48Gemma Bath?

  Can you remember your first autopsy?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 7:52Gemma Bath?

  Really?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I remember my first autopsy, I remember my first paediatric autopsy. And my first autopsy was in Hobart in 1981, 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'd 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.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  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. And the first paediatric case was my first publication, actually. There's a little girl in Canada, Genevieve, who died of leukaemia, and she had 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 it to GL and all the other young people who have contributed to it. So, her memory continues.

• 9:13Gemma Bath?

  Did you find the paediatric autopsies harder, given it's a child? Or, I guess, like mechanically as well?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Well, I'm very good at dissections, because they're obviously much smaller. And I was always interested in paediatrics. I did Flying Doctor work, and did a lot of paediatrics there. And I've found paediatric cases 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 realised more and more that, you know, sometimes you're just not going to find out what's happened, and you know the impact of this death on families.

• 9:50Gemma Bath?

  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 compartmentalise? Or how do you kind of process the things you've seen?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Well, just to correct you, I don't do crime, I observe crime, just, you know.

• 10:08Gemma Bath?

  Of course.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  You do compartmentalise. 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 know, you can't think about that while you're doing the case. The case is the odd, if you start to get distracted, then you don't do a proper job. Later, of course. I, one case, I remember, it was another little boy had been kicked in the stomach, and he had a peritonitis. So when I opened the abdominal cavity, this whiff of, almost like sewage came in, and it just stopped me in my tracks, because I realised what

• 10:56Speaker 01

  that meant. And so I had my back turned to the police and everybody, and I just sort of, you know, pretending to dissect, well, I just got myself together. Yeah, occasionally at night, you're sitting there, and it's cases that you don't expect to get through to you that might.

• 11:09Gemma Bath?

  Does it get easier dealing with death? Or do you have an interesting relationship with death?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Well, I see death as a part of life, and...

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Uh, 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.

• 11:32Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Um, I think one of the mistakes in the West is we trivialize everything, but we're so terrified of death. We, we hide from it. You know, you don't put grandma out on the kitchen table and have a wake and everybody's standing around telling great stories. What you do is grandma's put in a body bag, whipped away. Um, you may never see her again and, uh, you know, she's in a coffin and cremated.

• 11:53Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  That's, that's not a good way to say farewell. And I think we, we lose by not, uh, not being able to say farewell.

• 12:01Gemma Bath?

  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 01

  Absolutely. Um. I have a very close friend who, um, is from Satmua 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, they get the bones out and they wash the bones and anoint them with oil, wrap them up in tupper, have them in the house and they have a second ceremony.

• 12:32Gemma Bath?

  Wow.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And it's a very visceral thing, but it's, it's a way of.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Saying goodbye, you know, properly. Um. So other cultures, I think, do it better.

• 12:45Gemma Bath?

  Hundred percent. I can't, I cannot imagine that happening at a Western funeral or a Western kind of world.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  We're spiritually bankrupt, actually. That's, that's how I see it.

• 12:56Gemma Bath?

  I would 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, or how was that kind of?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  It, it varies tremendously depending on countries and jurisdictions.

• 13:19Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Uh, in some countries, the pathologists will just do criminal cases. But here we do all sorts of cases. Um, the coroner's act of South Australia is basically any death is reportable. It's sudden, unexpected, uh, or doctor can't issue a certificate. So probably sixty percent of our cases are just natural deaths.

• 13:37Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, right.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And then we have, um, 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.

• 13:48Gemma Bath?

  Wow.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So although it occupies a lot of our time, because, you know, with a, with a standard. Case of somebody who's just dropped down there with a heart attack, you know, it's very easy to quickly find the, um, the coronary artery blockage. Over with a homicide, you may be going for, um, eight or 10 hours. These are a lot of injuries, trying to work out which injuries are important. Is it an injury or is it not? Um, which injuries were lethal, the sequence of injuries, uh, the type of injuries, sharp force, blunt force. Um, then you have to put it all together into a report. And then go to court and be challenged, um, made to look like an idiot. Uh, there's a great quote of Jackson Lamb's in, um, Slow Horses.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  And I've put it in my book, saying that sometimes talking to, um, lawyers in court is like trying to explain Norway to a dog. Um.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It's just, they ask questions I know you can't answer.

• 14:47Gemma Bath?

  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 courtroom. 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 01

  No, and it, it's interesting, the games that are played. I was, uh, interstate and, um, the defence said, uh, you know. Did you bring all the material that, um, you base your opinion on with you to court? And I thought, well, the prosecutor's smart enough to catch this. And I said, no, I didn't. So he just raised an eyebrow and looked at the jury as if, you know, this is incompetence. When the prosecutor came, he said, you didn't bring all of the material, did you? I said, no. He said, why not? 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.

• 15:47Gemma Bath?

  Did you enjoy working in homicide, especially if it ended up with you having to go to court?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Uh, I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. I find it an interesting process.

• 15:56Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Um, it's quite stressful. Uh, it'd be very interesting to measure the blood pressure of a pathologist in the witness box when they're being hammered. Um, sometimes, um, it, it's interesting. Um, this adversarial system, I, I think, you know, is a bit of a problem. Going back to Satmua, I was over there, um, doing autopsies for the government. And there was a homicide, a young fellow had dropped a rock on another kid's head. Uh, they were both reasonable young blokes, but they were both drunk.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  There they don't have juries, they have a council of elders. And the judge said to me, why don't you come down and stand beside me and, and explain to the, uh, the council? And they had a translator and it was interesting, the, the, the elders could speak English, saying 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 everybody thought this is just a tragedy and let's, you know. Let's find out what happened and see what we can do. But that, that was a very meaningful, um, 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.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  So that, you know, you don't, you're really not quite sure what's going on. In that case, you can, um, go to the, um.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  The judge and say, I'm sorry, your honour, but, you know, I can't ask the question the way it's put to me. It will confuse the, the jury. Um, and I've had judges say, just answer the question, doctor. Okay.

• 17:26Gemma Bath?

  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 01

  Uh, yeah, quite often. Um, and the problem is the more technical the case. The more difficult it is for juries to sort of sort it out.

• 17:44Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  So if you have some sort of, you know, bespectacled, bald, bearded old guy saying one thing. And you've got similar guy saying another thing, often the juries will just negate both of them. So that's too complicated.

• 17:56Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  So what, um, what the court or what the other side has done is they've created reasonable doubt. So one of the things that's developed in courts recently 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, uh, because I find that people who have, um, pathologists who've got quite. Outlandish theories. Uh, really tone them down when I'm sitting beside them, looking at them. Um, because my facial expression will be of, you know, what? Um, you know, I'm allowed to do that. And then the lawyer will say, you know, do you have an opinion on that, Professor Byatt?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Uh, the side that calls me, calls me professor, the side, often the, the other side calls me mister, um, to reduce my status.

• 18:42Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, right.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't care. My father was called mister for eighty years. But, um. What they'll say is, you know, what do you think of that statement? I say, 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. Uh, so it speeds things along and I think it, uh, it makes it easier. 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.

• 19:07Gemma Bath?

  I think you've already kind of answered this, but I'm going to ask you bluntly, what do you think of our current court and justice systems, given your involvement in them?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I think it does a spectacular job, um, given how fragmented society is. Mistakes are made, but I think that, um, generally the system is, is a safe system. I'm not. So supportive of juries. I prefer a judge alone because then you can get the reasons why they made the decision. Um, 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. Um, where you get to talk about things, you have the conferences, um, it's, it's less aggressive.

• 19:56Gemma Bath?

  Hmm.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Uh, so I, I think, yes, that, um, given what we've got, it, it's, it does a pretty good job.

• 20:03Gemma Bath?

  Maybe just tone down the aggression.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, indeed.

• 20:08Gemma Bath?

  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 a report after the fact. But how involved are the detectives and the police?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Uh, very involved. Some of our health and safety people want the police to stand, uh, behind, you know, 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 that should be taken? There are crime scene officers there as well who look after that. They're very, very skilled, but we're all talking about what, what is a possibility. And then at the autopsy, I'll have the crime scene officer and I will have, um, one or two detectives. Um, sitting in the room and we're talking about things, um, what could this not be?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  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 they'll have information from me to say, well, it was a stab wound with a double sided blade. Not a bullet wound.

• 21:23Gemma Bath?

  After the break, Roger talks about his time working on the case of Jasmine Core, who was buried alive. You know the drill. You pick the couch, pay the deposit, then wait twelve weeks praying it matches the living room. Let's skip that. Mamma Mia is giving one lucky subscriber a five thousand dollar voucher for B two C.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Furniture to spend on pieces that are in stock and ready to ship right now. High end style, zero weight. To enter, head to mamamia.com.au/subscribe. You'll unlock all our subscriber only podcasts, articles and our fitness app, Move. Already subscribed? You're already in the running. Offer ends October 31st. Ts and Cs apply.

• 22:06Gemma Bath?

  I want to talk about some cases so people can really understand how your work works. I want to start with Jasmeen, which was one of the harder kind of cases in your career. She was murdered in 2021 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. Can you talk us through your involvement? Cause that was one of the cases where you went to the scene as they exhumed her body.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Jasmeen, if I'm correct, it 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 wandered out after that.

• 23:02Gemma Bath?

  So you went to the crime scene. When they exhumed her body, you couldn't tell in that moment what had happened, could you?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Well, I'll take you back a step. I was phoned on a Sunday night about her death. And Tavrik Singh, the perpetrator, had suggested they had a suicide pact. And 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 CCTV footage at a hardware store getting a shovel and cable ties. He then lent his car to a friend, and all of this is a matter of public record, so I can talk about it. He put his phone in the back of a friend's car. And when he was abducting Jasmine, he, his friend went south.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  He then had her in the boot with a blindfold and her legs tied for five hours. 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 what she did 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 trachea, bronchial, down into the lungs, in her esophagus.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:47Gemma Bath?

  Yeah. Is that why it horrified you so much, just imagining the cruelty of her death?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was a very sweet little Punjabi woman who'd 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 until he wasn't. It's interesting, he finally pleaded guilty and it's the only trial I've ever gone to this sentencing. Cause I wanted to, I wanted to put my eyes on this fellow and I expected something like Charles Manson, but it was just this average looking nerd. It brings to the point of, you know, is it in all of us to do this? Who knows?

• 25:33Gemma Bath?

  Did you find attending the sentence helpful for you while trying to process this case? Or?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  No, not really. Nothing, nothing really helped. Talking to my colleagues helped and that's what we do.

• 25:50Gemma Bath?

  You also did the Bali bombings in 2002, if I'm correct?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 25:57Gemma Bath?

  What is it like working overseas in these countries that perhaps don't have the facilities that you're used to?

• 26:06Speaker 01

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

• 26:26Gemma Bath?

  Cause it is a completely different experience, having one body in a, like a, kind of like an operating room situation. And then having open air, thousands of bodies, like that is, that is worlds apart in terms of experiences.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yes, it's horrific. And the mortuary we're working in was actually there is 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 completely different and it's something, you know, you're not trained. We read about it, but until you're actually there, you don't realise how complex it is. The ties did a spectacular job. They really were well organised, but resources were strained.

• 27:19Gemma Bath?

  In those instances, are you looking for causes of death? Or is it mainly just identification?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Combination of both. We're looking for anything untoward. And I've written a paper called Hiding in Plain 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 tenants said, come and 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.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And so I got the Thai authorities over, I don't know what happened, but she had been, that coffin had been under a whole lot of other coffins, which we'd 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.

• 28:24Gemma Bath?

  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.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I suspect so. I mean, if you're trying to hide a body, what better place?

• 28:37Gemma Bath?

  Snowtown, 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 1999 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?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  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 examined them then. That was not easy because 44 gallon 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 the fluid would come out, if there are bullets in there, you'd miss them. So we had to sieve all the remains and then pull the bodies out, the eight bodies.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  And we gave them A to F and then did testing. We examined them for identifying features like tattoos. We had the dentists in, the DNA surprisingly didn't work. And people are astounded at that. They say, well, you can get DNA out of dinosaurs, but the problem with this is it's a bad environment. It's wet and no oxygen and the DNA breaks down. So the identifications were with traditional fingerprints and features like that.

• 30:12Gemma Bath?

  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.

• 30:18Speaker 01

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

• 30:29Gemma Bath?

  How did you determine how those people had died when there were so many things happening in those barrels?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Well, I had two colleagues who were working on, they were working on most of the cases and there were, there were gags in some of the mouths. Sometimes you just couldn't determine. Body that I examined was skeletonised, so I couldn't tell how they died. It was difficult to identify injuries because of the putrefaction. 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 a leg, I think. So there were some very bizarre things that went on there.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  But in a way, the, the cause of death wasn't all that important, given that, you know, you've got dismembered bodies in barrels that these fellows have, you know,

• 31:26Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Obviously handled and been actually driving around the countryside. They had them in the back of a trailer for a while.

• 31:32Gemma Bath?

  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?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  It was just, you take it a step at a time and you know, each case is an individual case. 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 that. I woke up one on the Saturday, just bolt upright in bed, I think three in the morning. And said to my dog, what have I done? You know, I've moved from paediatrics into this. It's.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  It was interesting and challenging and I'm glad I don't have to do it ever again.

• 32:21Gemma Bath?

  Yeah. In terms of attending court for Snow Town, that would have been one of those cases where the media attention, because there wouldn't be media attention for every case you appeared on, but that one, I can imagine, would have been huge. Was that overwhelming for you, having the media as an added element?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Not really, because you're used to delivering evidence. But I remember the, I think it was with the committal, all I talked about was putrefaction or autolysis, which is two methods of breaking down a body. Putrefaction is bacterial and autolysis is just breaking down. So that's what I spent most of my time on. And when I walked out, there were about 20 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. I thought, yeah, not a good look.

• 33:12Gemma Bath?

  Why were you laughing? Because you'd just forgotten?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  I was just, well, I'd been talking about trivia and here's 20 camera crews wanting to get my picture.

• 33:22Gemma Bath?

  Up 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 infant sons, 1999. That conviction was dismissed in 2000. And you were asked to review that case for the defence, if I'm right?

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2003, I think it was, the Second Court of Appeal, convicted in 99. One Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the sentence. And then I was asked by the defence to look at the Second Court.

• 33:58Gemma Bath?

  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 paediatric pathology? Or what do you think went wrong?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Partly. I mean, I find it really difficult to understand. I mean, if I could go through the cases, I mean, Christopher died at 11 weeks. And at autopsy, they said there was an injury to the inside of his lip, which is significant in a baby, and there were bruises on his legs. But they put the cause of death as lower respiratory infection. So he had enough respiratory infection to kill him. And then, I think, the beginning of 98, 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. They found bleeding at the back of the eye, they found laceration of the brain, they found all sorts

• 34:58Speaker 01

  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. It was just congested vessels. And the doctors in the hospital, when they'd been trying to resuscitate him, hadn't seen retinal hemorrhages. So the retinal hemorrhages was wrong. The laceration of the brain was a cut caused when the mortuary attendants were removing his brain. And that's not a feature of shaken baby, anyway. And a lot of the other things just didn't jive. And so what they did, rather than actually say, let's take a deep breath and review all this, they said, oh, it was obviously inflicted suffocation. And the pathology reasons for

• 35:43Speaker 01

  that were pretty dubious. They went back and reviewed Christopher because of that. And, you know, remember, he had died from a severe respiratory infection. Well, that's gone now. They say it's also inflicted suffocation there. The problems with Christopher 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 can actually see the hemorrhage in the tissues underneath. Otherwise, it might be lividity, the postmortem staining. This wasn't done. The grounds for saying that was inflicted suffocation were pretty shonky. Now, Harry as well. Again, photographs

• 36:28Speaker 01

  not taken, tissues not sampled. The fractured rib on the right-hand side, it couldn't be seen on microscopy. There's 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. Retinal hemorrhages, as I said, weren't seen by the doctors in the hospital. 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 Staphylococcal aureus, a very nasty bacteria, a pure growth

• 37:10Speaker 01

  in five different sites. So he clearly died of sepsis. What about Christopher? Well, you can't tell, because, you know, there wasn't enough documentation. So I call Christopher's death unascertained and Harry's death due to sepsis. And Sally was, the conviction was quashed in 2003. And then she died of a mixed drug and alcohol toxicity several years later, whether it was deliberate or accidental, I don't know. But if you look, when she came out of court, she said, there are no winners. 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 Sir Roy Meadow, a very distinguished paediatrician in the UK, who said there's

• 37:52Speaker 01

  a one in 73 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. But I also blame the defence. Why didn't they query it?

• 38:14Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Why did they let that one through? I mean, nobody thought those kids were SIDS anyway. So it's just a red herring. So it was a mess of a case.

• 38:22Gemma Bath?

  I couldn't help but think of Kathleen Foulbig while reading about Sally, you know, another young mother convicted over the murder of four children. Eventually, all of that was quashed, quite recently, really. Do you see similarities there? Or I know that Kathleen Foulbig, her children, it was all to do with genetics and stuff. But originally, she was, it was a SIDS death, and then she got convicted with murder. And it just makes me think, like, how often is this happening, that mothers are being convicted of murder when there's all these other reasons at play?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't think it occurs very often. The fact that it occurs at all is clearly a problem. I appeared for the defence with Cathy, and she got 40 years. So it shows you how good my evidence is. But I think, stepping aside from the genetics stuff, there were reasons that these children could have died anyway. Laura, for example, had this full-blown myocarditis, inflammation of her heart. That was ignored in favour of inflicted dyspnea. Sarah had a very strange shaped back of her palate. And one of the boys was epileptic. So I don't think you need to evoke genes. I worry a bit about genetics. And

• 39:40Speaker 01

  I did give a talk to the Medical Legal Society in New South Wales on Cathy. 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 cardiac mutation, Sarah, Laura and Cathy. And Cathy's 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 me at this meeting. So, but as I said, I don't think the case ever should have got up, because I think there were, you know, although you have a

• 40:21Speaker 01

  lot of deaths 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 Meadow's Law, it's De Mayo's Law. It's a Texan medical examiner who came up with that before Sir Roy. So, again, a number of issues. And a very tragic case. I mean, four babies dead.

• 40:45Gemma Bath?

  You're saying that genetics aside, she should never have gone to prison because there was enough reasonable doubt in the evidence?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my belief.

• 40:53Gemma Bath?

  Sudden infant death, we've mentioned it a few times, that is an area that you specialised in, isn't it? Why did you decide to specialise in that area?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Well, as I said, I'd done a lot of paediatrics, I've done flying doctor work, I've done paediatrics in hospital. And then when I started pathology, I just realised that parents shouldn't, shouldn't have to see their children die. There's a great quote of Euripides, "What greater pain can mortals bear than this to see their children die before their eyes?" And so I just thought, well, if I can

• 41:26Speaker 01

  work on these cases and find preventative strategies or work out what's going on, then that's a good thing to do. And that's how I deal with these cases. Otherwise, they're just so tragic. But looking at accidental deaths, we worked very hard in the 1990s and got legislation changed about unsafe cots. And so we've 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

• 42:11Speaker 01

  decreased in some SIDS babies significantly. And we've asked for years, why don't they just lift their heads up when they're face down? Orange, that is, they, they don't because they can't. So I think we're, we're putting together pieces of the jigsaw. And, and that's, that's important.

• 42:28Gemma Bath?

  Before your guidelines, how many children do you think we were losing to SIDS?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's, we used to, there were, I think, 50 in the 80s a year in South Australia, now there are 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 50s, paediatricians, Dr Benjamin Spock, were advising parents to put their babies to sleep face down. And there was a paediatrician, Abramson, who said, "Look, we can't do this. They'll suffocate." And it's been calculated as something like, I think in the UK and Europe, 60,000 babies died because of that medical initiative. Now, you don't hear that very often.

• 43:13Gemma Bath?

  Wow.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Because medicine doesn't like to admit errors. But that was a mistake. It wasn't evidence-based. The thought was if they're on their backs, they'll, they'll aspirate, form it, inhale it. And that doesn't happen.

• 43:27Gemma Bath?

  But it also makes you think, like, that's more than an error. Is, could criminal charges have been involved there with that kind of advice?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  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 them, you think, nah, maybe that's not the best thing to do.

• 43:48Gemma Bath?

  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 60 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?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't actually reviewed the, the evidence since the TV programme. 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 suspicious case from the word go. And that's, that's what happens if you have a stabbing. The first thing you've got to ask yourself is, has this person been stabbed or have they done it themselves? And there are various ways of differentiating, you know, self-inflicted stab wounds from inflicted stab wounds.

• 44:41Gemma Bath?

  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?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Sometimes. I mean, one of the, 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 missed homicide. With, with stabbings, if you stab yourself, often there are multiple stab wounds. There's not just one wound. And you have what are called hesitation cuts. So you've got one cut, a very superficial cut, because you, you know, it's very difficult to hurt yourself. So there may be multiple little inside wounds that aren't, aren't significant. With, let's say, a homicidal cut throat, there'll probably be just one cut from one side to the other. With suicidal, there'll be

• 45:32Speaker 01

  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. You don't stab through clothing. And it doesn't go through bone, it just goes through soft tissue. And this is probably one stab wound into the heart and the knife will be in, in situ.

• 45:52Gemma Bath?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  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, you know, blunt force trauma and other things.

• 46:03Gemma Bath?

  And stabbing yourself to death is not overly common, is it?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  No, not really. It's, it's, most of our suicides are carbon monoxide or hanging or drugs.

• 46:14Gemma Bath?

  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 specialised in.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I suppose, no, a lot of them actually, but there was an elderly woman who was pecked by her rooster, which was out collecting eggs. And she had varicose veins and she, she bled to death from that. I published that, not because it was strange, but as to give advice. So if you have varicose veins and you get a small cut, don't walk around. Lie down, elevate the leg, put your finger over it and, you know, press your medical alert button or phone somebody. And I got phone calls from all over the world, people saying, "Thank you so much for that advice. My grandmother's got varicose veins, I worry about it." So I've developed an approach to pathology, I call preventive pathology. All my clinical colleagues think that, you know,

• 47:03Speaker 01

  the pathologist knows everything, but he's always too late, which is a bit rude. But what this is, is taking lessons from the mortuary like that one and putting it out there. So that, you know, simple, simple things can be considered and people can actually prevent them from dying.

• 47:19Gemma Bath?

  What do you think would be the proudest achievement from your career?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  My book, Sudden Death in the Young, it's now in its fourth edition, as I said, I just submitted it on the weekend. But it's, it's a summary of all the possible causes of sudden unexpected death up to the age of 35. And I, it's, yes, it's, it's, I really am proud of it. I was also proud of getting the AC last year. That was a nice sort of recognition of, of my career.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  So those two, probably.

• 47:52Gemma Bath?

  Yeah, getting the AC, that's a, that's a good time to go, "Yep, I'm done. I'm out."

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly right.

• 47:59Gemma Bath?

  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 for so long?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  I like crime fiction, actually. I really like Rebus and Inspector Banks. So I, I do read a lot of that. It's interesting to see the angles that authors come up with. And, you know, I mean, Patricia Cornwall, Kate Scarpetta was based on a friend of mine in New York. So there's 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 are fascinating.

• 48:51Gemma Bath?

  What about watching these forensic pathologists on screen? I can imagine you would sit there going, "No, wouldn't do that, wouldn't do that. That's not right."

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I think the only television programme I enjoy forensically is Inspector Rex. He's a,

• 49:04Speaker 01

  even a C-grade forensic programme from Vienna, where Inspector Rex, the German Shepherd, solves all the crimes. The thing about Inspector Rex is that he's not trying to, you know, guesstimate the time of death like they do on Silent Witness. You know, they'll say, "Oh, the time of death was two minutes past midnight." Yeah, plus or 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. A lot of them are these sort of doddery old guys with glasses and beards and bald heads that make, you know, a lot of black humour. So it doesn't seem real to me.

• 49:48Gemma Bath?

  Are you telling me that you can't, as a pathologist, tell the time, exact time of death? It's more of a window?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There are so many different, I call the 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 the Bernadette 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

• 50:38Speaker 01

  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 gastric entering time is really quick. Other times, if you're injured, it may be very slow. We get 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're getting much better at is saying, "I don't know." And I like doing that in court with juries. Because if I say to a

• 51:22Speaker 01

  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 on it.

• 51:34Gemma Bath?

  Professor, you've retired now. You're passing the baton to the younger forensic pathologists of the world.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  I just threw it, I just threw it into the mortuary and left.

• 51:44Gemma Bath?

  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?

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I think compassion and curiosity are the two most important points. And a work ethic.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  I've seen a lot of younger pathologists who don't seem to be really interested in the, 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 enjoy, then it's not work." And as I said, I've, I've treated it like a, a puzzle to work out causes of death and prevention strategies. And I really like writing. Literature and history were 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

• 52:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:02Gemma Bath?

  Well, Professor Byard, 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 40-year career. And thank you for joining us.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Thanks, Gemma. It was a pleasure.

• 53:18Gemma Bath?

  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 Conversation.