Forensic scientist Angela Gallop has helped to crack many of the UK’s most notorious murder cases. But today she fears the whole field – and justice itself – is at risk
Early one morning in June 1982, a smartly dressed man was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in central London. The dead man was carrying two Patek Philippe watches, one on his wrist and one in his top jacket pocket, both of which had stopped. The pockets and seams of his suit trousers contained 5kg of bricks and rubble. He was also carrying a forged Italian passport and about £10,000 in cash. The next day, police in Rome confirmed the man’s identity. His name was Roberto Calvi and he was the chair of an Italian bank with close ties to the Vatican. Calvi had been missing for at least six days. He was due to appear in an Italian court the next week to appeal against a conviction for illegally transferring several billion lira out of the country. The press called him “God’s Banker”.
Calvi’s death was recorded as a suicide, but his family believed he had been murdered, possibly by the mafia. In 1991, almost 10 years after Calvi’s body was found, the family hired Kroll, a private detective company, to carry out a new investigation into his death. To review the evidence, Kroll in turn hired a forensic scientist named Angela Gallop. In the previous five years, Gallop had gained a reputation as an expert prepared to go beyond the methods favoured by her peers – the straightforward DNA tests or fingerprint comparisons – in order to solve a crime. “She was meticulous, very open-minded, and her scientific methods were second to none. There weren’t many others doing it in quite the same way,” said Michael Mansfield, a barrister who often worked with her at the time.
