A forensic scientist spoken about the worst cases she has ever seen in a revealing interview – which includes details of how she identified one of the 7/7 London bombers.
Jo Millington, a blood spatter specialist who has worked for police forces across Britain for the past 25 years, shared details about some of the stomach churning crime scenes she has worked on.
The expert, from Reading, also revealed the common mistakes murderers make when killing, and explained why you can never totally clean up a crime scene.
Speaking to LADbible TV, Jo, who set up Spattered Ltd in 2020, revealed she managed to identify one of the 7/7 London bombers by testing a packet of peanuts for DNA.
The July 7 bombings, in 2005 – also referred to as 7/7 – were a series of four coordinated suicide attacks carried out by Islamist terrorists, targeting commuters travelling on London transport during the morning rush hour, and killing 56 people.
According to Jo: ‘The London bombings happened, it was all hands on deck for that incident, but the thing that I was involved with was the examination of the car that the bombers had used to travel down to Luton airport.
‘And it had been subjected to a controlled explosion to ensure it was safe. That car was then transported to London Laboratory where I examined it in a really secure environment.
‘What we were trying to establish was who’s driven it. So you naturally swab the steering wheel, and the gear lever, and the hand brake, and the bits and the bobs that people touch when they’re driving.
‘But when I went into the driver’s side and looked down into the pocket of the door – there was a little peanut packet.
‘You know, when you buy a bag of peanuts, it’s got that little cut so that you can tear the packet. Well that was torn and it was empty. And when I looked at the little tear, it looked a bit gnawed a little bit, [there was a] teethy mark, something like that.
‘And I thought to myself, “do you know what, if I was driving this car, and I got myself a packet of peanuts, how might I open it? I might tear it open with my teeth”.
‘We examine this peanut packet, and we swabbed around this little tear, and it generated a DNA profile that identified one of the bombers, beause he’d literally just eaten a packet of peanuts.’
Jo Millington (pictured) is a blood spatter specialist who has worked for police forces across Britain for the past 25 years
Elsewhere, the blood spatter specialist pointed out some of the common mistakes made by murders.
She said: ‘They go to quite extreme efforts sometimes to get rid of the evidence. But in every single case, every contact leaves a trace, right?
‘So it’s impossible, frankly, to eradicate every single jot of evidence in a crime scene.
‘So the mistakes that they make, apart from not really fully understanding the potential of forensic science, is they forget that they’re leaving traces of themselves on every surface that they touch, on every path that they take.
Jo continued: ‘You know, we’ve known about fingerprints for centuries, and yet it’s probably one of the main ways in which people are identified. So you kind of think to yourself, “how did you forget that you leave fingerprints?”.’
She recalled how one murderer used the blood of his victim to write ‘something horrible’ on the wall with his fingers and put an exclamation point at the end which had his finger print in it.
Recalling some of the worst cases she has ever seen, Jo described an ‘absolutely horrific’ murder which had a lot of blood evidence for her to analyse.
The expert also revealed common mistakes murderers make when killing – and explained how you can never totally clean up a crime scene
She said: ‘I once dealt with this scene which was absolutely horrific actually. The guy had got really catastrophic head injuries, and the weapon was like a machete.
‘The reason why the scene had come to the attention of the police, was because…there was a business which had rooms underneath this flat, and the blood was dripping through the ceiling into their office.
‘So you can get a feel for the amount of blood that’s available, and it was pretty horrendous.’
However, surprisingly, Jo admitted that it wasn’t the most shocking crime scene she has attended.
Looking back, she said: ‘So I went to the scene, it was in east London, and the suspect, ultimately, he was a really troubled individual. He was very seriously mentally ill, actually, but he was on a day release from his facility.
‘And he befriended this chap and he went back to his flat, and he ended up killing him. He dismembered his body and then he took his brain, and he cooked it up in a frying pan.’
Recalling some of the worst cases she has ever been to, Jo said she was called to an ‘absolutely horrific’ murder with a lot of blood evidence for her to analyze
Elsewhere she remembered another horrific crime scene, where a chopped up body was found in a freezer – but Jo was confused to find no visible blood at the scene.
She said: ‘When I walked in, I remember thinking, “where’s the blood? Why am I here?”. Because there was literally nothing visible to the naked eye.
‘And so we applied a chemical to enhance blood staining, and what it did was pick up traces of blood, which were indicative of a clean-up.
‘So there had been blood there, she had been dismembered in that space, but there’d been sufficient clean-up that none of that was really obvious anymore.
‘But it was only when we enhanced it with chemicals that we could see the traces that were left.’
