Last updated at 16:36, Wednesday, 18 July 2012

THE popularity of television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Bones and Silent Witness have resulted in an explosion of interest in the grisly field of forensic sciences. But are these shows an accurate representation of what happens when a crime is committed in Barrow? ROSS TYSON went to sort the fact from the fiction

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THE bright red blood contrasts starkly with the grotty grey mattress onto which it has been spilled.

Jagged shards of glass from a broken mirror lie guiltily on the bed.

For the uninitiated, it is a confronting sight. But for Paul Davis, it is just another day’s work.

Mr Davis is one of half a dozen crime scene investigators in South Cumbria.

He has been dusting for fingerprints, swabbing for blood and photographing the locations of murders, assaults, arsons, break-ins, rapes, robberies and more for 25 years.

“It’s not for the squeamish,” he says.

“If you’re freaked out by flies and maggots then this isn’t a job to apply for.”

The evidence Mr Davis gathers at this Barrow crime scene could be vital.

The 42-year-old is dressed in the familiar white protective coveralls, booties and gloves, and is armed with the two main tools of his trade – a camera and a fingerprint kit.

He enters the flat and looks quickly in each of the four rooms to get an initial impression of the crime scene.

“We’ve got destruction in the bedroom and we’ve got what could be the weapon used, which is the broken shards of that mirror,” he says.

“It’s important that I record how it is at the moment before I start recovering things, so I’m going to take some photographs showing the layout of the bedroom, then we’ll see if there’s any actual evidence on the broken bits of glass and recover those.

“Then we’ll have a check around and make sure there’s nothing else important lurking about.”

The flat is squalid. Its front door opens to a set of stairs leading up to the living quarters and the stench of stale cigarettes and lager fills your nostrils.

Stepping over the broken blades of a ceiling fan we climb the stairs.

The walls are covered in stains that to the untrained eye seem like clues, but they are not.

To the right of the landing is the bedroom – the crime scene – where strewn clothes, shoes, broken furniture and rubbish provide a buffer between our feet and the filthy carpet.

More clothes cover the bathroom floor to the left and graffiti decorates the walls where the paint has long ago peeled away.

Straight ahead is the lounge room where the evidence of drug use is clear. Next to it is a surprisingly clean kitchen.

It is sparse and notable only for the make-shift sharps container filled with syringes.

“What I’m basically doing is sequential photography to tell the story of where things are in the flat in relation to other things, which makes it easy then to explain the scene to a jury a year later, and after that I’ll get close-ups of the actual evidence,” he says.

Mr Davis, who lives in Kendal with Jane, his partner of 11 years, and their seven-year-old son Alex, began his career as a crime scene investigator straight from school at 17, at a time when an aptitude for problem solving outweighed the need for scientific know-how.

Now, as technology has advanced, nothing short of a degree in chemistry or biology will suffice and the increased interest in forensics created by the hit TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spin-offs has made it a highly competitive field.

Mr Davis’s father was a crime scene investigator before becoming a detective. With a keen interest in police work but no desire to join the force, he chose this path.

“I’d seen the effects (that being a police officer) can have on home life, so this was a way for me to achieve what I wanted to do without the confines of being a police officer,” he says.

“It is quite a demanding job, though. You are working shifts and can be on-call 24 hours a day and away from home for long periods of time.

“If you’ve had a particularly stressful day, it can lead to a little bit of ‘You’ve been very quiet tonight’, but without your family to help it would be a lot more stressful.”

Having finished taking pictures, Mr Davis begins to carefully pick up and place the pieces of the broken mirror – some of which are smeared with blood – into evidence bags.

“What I’m trying to find is the offender’s fingerprints, because the glassy, mirror-like surface is very good for retaining prints – as anyone who has ever cleaned a bathroom mirror will know,” he says.

“In this instance we’re lucky because the alleged offender and the victim are both alive and we can see what their stories are and whether the evidence supports what they’re saying.

“If we had a scenario where someone is lying there dead, that’s when it becomes more complex and you have to interpret things.”

With the evidence bagged and ready to be taken away for analysis, Mr Davis is ready to move on to his next job.

He says being a crime scene investigator is both challenging and rewarding, but that his day-to-day duties probably differ markedly from what people might expect from watching the television shows.

“It’s probably one of the reasons why I’ve never watched one of those programmes,” he says.

“I think I’d be screaming at the television all the time, saying ‘that’s not how it is, it doesn’t happen like that!

“The main thing is that we’re not trying to prove anybody’s guilty.

“What we’re trying to do is establish and reveal the facts.

“I’m just an expert witness giving evidence to a jury and that information can be used to convict, or allow the jury to find somebody not guilty.”

First published at 16:06, Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk