Angela Gallop

"I started specialising in cold cases in the firm that I co-founded, Forensic Alliance, back in the late nineties."

"It was a sort of happy accident when I look back on it now."

"Prior to setting up this company I had been doing quite a lot of defence work which included supporting lawyers representing people accused of crimes when there is forensic evidence against them."

"I began to notice that standards for police were slipping slightly and I couldn’t help but think there might be a better way of doing things."

"I set up Forensic Alliance specifically for the police and one or two forces, particularly local ones, took us up on this and it gave us an opportunity to show just how good, imaginative and different we could be."

"The cold case work I have done has mainly been for the police, who tend to get in touch with me when they’re reviewing a case after a lapse of few years and who think there might be some new technology in the forensic line that might help."

"Been approached by the families of victims or the lawyers representing them and so we’ve started reinvestigating something because of that."

"You need to be briefed on everything properly by the police because usually the crime will have happened years beforehand."

"You need to study photographs of the crime scene, and read all relevant expert reports and eye witness statements taken at the time."

"The next thing is to find out what exhibits might still be available to examine in the case, and that can be really difficult."

"There are several cases that we’ve worked on where we’ve been back and forth to the Forensic Science Service (FSS)."

"We haven’t got anything else’ but where we know they must still have something."

"I wanted a more immediate audience for my efforts, and one day a friend of mine showed me an interesting advert in the paper for the Forensic Science Service ."

"People come to us from around the world for help with their forensic services."

"We can’t do anything alone."

"Solving crime scenes takes the work and expertise of many people, not just me."

"It was his family who commissioned the work because they couldn’t believe he would have committed suicide."

"I hadn’t expected to be called out so I was wearing oversized clothes that belonged to my boss."

"Walking through a muddy area with massive boots until we came to the murder scene, he victim was a young woman."

"I was worried that I’d faint or throw up but I had to be professional."

"I owe it to everyone else who works on a case, and to those people who have been killed, to do the best job I can."

"People always hate when scientists use the word ‘imaginative’."

"They think you’ve been inventing your results."

"But it is critical."

"There were only about six people in the world who cared what I was doing."

"There was a marble basin in one of the bathrooms we did all our blood grouping in."

"We used the ballroom for our big X-ray crystallography machine."

"There was so much to get through, police were sending whole wardrobes of clothing."

"With everything, I’ve always just thought I’m gonna make this bloody work."

"Just became incredibly tense, his knuckles were white and he was frozen in the doorway in the house."

"I thought, oh Jesus, he could take it out on the messenger."

"There are one or two things we don’t want people to think too deeply about."

"It would make our job a lot more difficult."

"Maybe we just keep that one up our sleeve."