Lines of Enquiry

00:08 My name is John Sweetman and this is Lines of Inquiry, Case Notes. 00:20 In Case Notes, we step away from telling one specific case in detail and instead take some time to reflect, to revisit past investigations and to respond directly to you, the listener. 00:32 These episodes are about opening up the conversation. We'll be speaking with expert guest contributors, diving a little deeper into the issues behind the stories and responding to some of the much valued correspondence that comes into our mailbox. 00:46 If you have a message you'd like to share, a case you'd like us to revisit, or someone you'd like to hear from on future episodes of Case Notes, you can get in touch with us at linesofinquiry at goloudnow.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at linesofinquirypodcast to keep up to date. 01:03 My guest today is Paul Curran, a retired detective sergeant with Angarda Siakana. Paul spent over 27 years working in major crime scene investigation, specialising in Garda photography, aerial and drone photography, and facial identification using EvoFit. 01:21 Over the course of his career, Paul attended and documented some of the most serious crime scenes, creating photographic records that could become an important part of an investigation long after the scene itself had been cleared. He also worked through a period of significant technological change, from the early days of his career to the introduction of new approaches to facial identification and the use of drones in forensic work. 01:46 Paul, you're very welcome. Thanks for coming. 01:48 Thanks, John. 01:50 So Paul, as I said there, you spent over 27 years, closer to 28 years working in the photography section, would that be right? 01:57 That's correct, yeah, in the Garda Technical Bureau. 02:00 So you were probably somewhat similar to me in that you would have come to the bureau reasonably junior in your service. 02:08 Yeah, I think I was just two years into my career. I'd say six weeks out of probation. 02:16 So I had been offered the position while I was still in training, but I had to finish my probation first. 02:24 Right, yeah. 02:27 But I had a background in photography. 02:31 When I left secondary school, I went to Kevin Street College of Technology, and I did a part-time certificate course in photography, and then went on to do a full-time diploma course. 02:46 And while I was doing the course, there was... 02:50 people within the course who were Garda members hoping to get into the Garda photographic section. And they had suggested to me, you should think about applying for the Garda, try and get into that line. And it was a part of the photography training that I really enjoyed. 03:12 The more technical end as opposed to the artistic end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So during my second year of the diploma course, I spent a couple of weeks in a vets, photographed the procedures, and then my final year project... 03:31 I was fascinated in the actual area of autopsies. And my final year of production, you got to pick what you did. And I decided to do a photo documentary of an autopsy procedure. So I approached James Street Hospital, explained what I was doing. 03:50 guaranteed that I would preserve the anonymity of the people there that were being examined, and would have seen maybe five or six post-mortems before I had even joined the guards. 04:04 So when I did my... 04:07 I did the project and had it all bound. Actually, very few people wanted to look at it, to mark it. They got somebody in from the College of Surgeons to mark my project. But I used that then for my interview for the Garda photographic section when I went for the interview because I was asked... 04:29 you know, this type of work is quite gruesome, and how do you think you'll manage? And I said, well, I'll show you an example of some of my work, and I brought out this bound booklet, and it was quite obvious that they knew I had no issues with the gory parts of the job. Yeah. 04:49 And then, like, I mean, you're saying you were studying photography in Kevin Street. 04:55 And what led you then to join the Guards? Was it, even at that stage, an idea in your head to get into the photography section? 05:02 Yeah, it was my end goal to get into the photographic section. And when I went for the interview for the Guards, I was told... 05:09 look, this could take 10 or 12 years before you get into that specialized area. But like I said, literally within six weeks of finishing my probation period of training, I started. So it all worked out very well for me. Within a week of finishing Kevin Street College, I finished on a Monday. The following Monday, I started in Tampermore. 05:39 When I started in the Bureau, which would have been a few years after you, I started in 97. And I remember it was still a few years off yet, the whole digital photography stuff. 05:52 Oh, yeah. 05:52 Because it was dark rooms and developing film and you couldn't go into the room if the red light was on and all that. 05:59 That's correct, yeah. So our color photography was... 06:04 We used a processing machine, which you put the film canister in, you got your negatives, and then would print it on a machine. But our black and white for finger mark photography and foot mark was done by hand, and we would be in the darkroom, and you'd be filling canisters with chemicals and taking your shots and rolling the film onto rails and putting them in. to the chemicals and everything done by hand. The thing is learning to control the light to capture a finger mark. 06:37 I don't know if you remember, there was work being done in the fingerprint lab and studio, and there was a huge backlog for... 06:46 few months and I spent a good three months doing nothing but finger mark photography with a colleague and what I learned was just invaluable and it meant you could bring that skill set to a scene so if you found a finger mark at a scene really nothing would phase you. You knew you had time to light it and photograph it correctly because sometimes you only had the one chance to capture it and do it right. 07:18 So it was, photography wouldn't solve a case, but very difficult to try and prove things without the photograph. And especially for finger mark photography, if you had a mark in blood or a mark in dust, something that was very fragile, it was imperative that you got that right and that it was well exposed and properly in focus, that you could produce prints that would be passed on then to your colleagues in fingerprints to search on the AFIS system. 07:54 And we worked on cases, John, where... The photograph was essential. Yeah. I know you mentioned in previous years the Mary Dillon case, and that was a very weak mark on the bonnet of a car. 08:09 Yeah, a mark in blood. 08:11 A mark in blood, and that took hours to capture that. Yeah. 08:19 had the tripod set up over the bonnet. The camera was precariously hanging on a tripod with a camera bag on the other end to act as a ballast. And every time I was focusing on the mark, the camera would start shaking and you'd have to wait until it stopped. 08:39 And there were long exposures then as well. 08:41 There would be, yeah. So it could be an eighth of a second. You couldn't hand-hold the camera and take the shot. It had to be. But even the... the camera with the mirror shooting up was enough to shake the camera. So I had to lock up the mirror on the camera. It was one of the medium format cameras we were using, the Hasselblad. 09:05 And you had a facility that once you had the mark in focus, you could lock up the mirror that it wouldn't, rise during the exposure and it was literally just the leaf shutter within the lens opening. 09:20 And yeah, I remember working on that case with you and we captured the... That's what made it like, I mean, that finger mark in blood. 09:31 But just going back a bit, Paul, we're talking about photographing crime scene marks and crime scenes, but that's only a very... That's only one part of what a Garda photographer's job is. Can you tell us a bit more about the other roles that maybe some people aren't aware of? 09:47 So the role of the Garda photographer was to record the scene as you found it, And that nothing would be moved. You would photograph everything step by step. You'd start off with your establishing photographs. So that could be outside the house or on the street. And you're basically telling a story and you're working your way into the locus of the scene where the body is and where there's, you know, signs of a struggle or whatever. 10:19 So you would work with, like you said, with the rest of the team and you'd make sure that the path is clear, that you're not stepping on marks, footmarks and blood on the floor. So everything would be photographed. You'd go into each room then. And you'd start off, you'd take a photograph from each corner of the room, taking in the whole room, and then working your way into areas of importance. 10:50 So like I said, it could be a knife on the ground. It could be something tiny like a hair or a fiber on a doorframe. So it wasn't just knowing everything. 11:03 how to take the photograph, but what you were photographing. 11:08 And I found that even though I had only a couple of years experience on the street as a uniform guard, having attended various scenes, you did get a feel for photography. 11:22 what was of relevance I've seen. And you'd know what you were looking for. And you had this sort of inquisitive mind. You'd be looking at something and thinking, that looks out of place. What's that doing there? Why are those keys there? 11:42 Why is that crumpled up? Something would draw your attention. And... 11:47 Once you did your general scene photography, then as the scene was further examined, if items were pulled out and something was found, you'd stop everything and photograph that. So it could be a knife hidden underneath a cushion or behind books. 12:09 So again, we worked as a team. Nobody would go on a solo run and throw it into an evidence bag 12:16 Yeah, look, I mean, it had to be photographed usually with a gloved finger pointing to it. And more often than not, you or whoever the photographer was would have a measuring tape or a rule of some sort there beside the item that's being captured before it's bagged and whatnot. Because, you know, like, I mean, you're doing a continuous visual document of the scene because it could be several years down the line before a case maybe gets to court or whatever. Absolutely. So there's nothing that's irrelevant. 12:48 It's better to have far too many photographs than missing one vitamin. 12:54 So let's look at something like a knife. 12:57 Not only would you photograph the knife in situ, but then you take close-ups of the blade. There could be blood on the blade. there could be finger marks on the blades that have to be later examined. You would photograph the make of the knife. As you said, the scale to show the size of it. Because this would be very important for the pathologist that if this was the weapon, that they would know that this could correlate to an injury on the body, that it's a certain width of a blade, certain depth of a blade. 13:31 And of course, you'd be... 13:33 documenting everything again with photographs for the pathologist. Absolutely. So you'd have pictures of a knife if the knife was a suspected murder weapon, wounds on the body. Because I think the whole thing is to make, if you're presenting these things as evidence, is to make it easily understandable to the layperson the best way you can with getting the most information across. But not only the crime scene stuff and the subsequent post-mortems, but then you could be up in a helicopter photographing the scene. 14:06 You could find you anywhere, Lee. 14:07 That was the thing. The no two days were the same. So yeah, you could be photographing finger mark exhibits one day. The next day you're asked to photograph an aerial photograph of a scene. So we'd go out to Baldonnel. This was before the Garda Air Support Unit was set up because I joined in... october 96 so the the air corps were still flying uh the old alouette helicopters and you'd be sitting in a seat you'd be strapped in with a with a harness and leaning out of the door you'd open the door and taking photographs from 2 000 feet up yeah and you would be showing an aerial photograph of showing maybe roads leading to a scene, escape routes, things like that. 14:56 So, yeah, it was varied work. 14:59 Very varied, yeah. 15:00 Yeah. 15:01 And then... You'd have the PR stuff then as well. 15:04 Yeah, well, on top of that, we provided all the PR photography for the job. So you might be asked to go and photograph an official opening of a Garda station or the commissioner signing a memo of understanding with... Somebody from the Road Safety Authority. 15:22 Or maybe even heading to Templemore to photograph new recruits. Absolutely. 15:27 It was so varied. 15:30 Another function we used to provide was media screening. So for big events, EU presidency, the royal visits, presidential visits, We would do media screening and all the cameras that were coming through, not only would people walk through the magnetometers and be wandered, make sure, but we would hand search all the cameras. 15:57 Right. 15:58 And we would take the lenses off, make sure it was a legitimate camera, that there wasn't a gun barrel pointing through it. 16:06 You know, like you were just talking here about, you know, how important it is, the preservation of evidence, preservation of exhibits and the scenes. And I could ask you, where does photography fit into that process? But it's, it's kind of a no brainer because it knits everything together. 16:22 Absolutely. And as I said before, we're photographing the scene as we found it. So you're not recreating a scene. That's the big thing about crime scene photography. It's recording a scene, not recreating. And one of the things we used to sometimes get asked was, can you take a photograph to show us the lighting conditions in photography? the room or on the street and the answer is no you can't you can't recreate the lighting conditions because you can take a photograph at three o'clock in the morning and by altering the exposure make it look like daylight yeah and the same with taking a shot during the middle of the day you couldn't make it look like midnight Well, I remember there was one job I worked on. 17:08 A fellow had been shot dead up one of the border counties and the technical bureau team was called up and we examined the scene and photographed everything. But unbeknownst to us, about three days after the local scenes of crime were tasked to go in to photograph the scene at half four in the morning when the shooting took place to show the lighting conditions. And we knew nothing about this. 17:37 And it was only at the day of the court case these photographs were produced that I wasn't aware of. And again, to try and show the lighting conditions and the scenes of Crime Man was asked about the settings on his camera. And he wasn't sure the technical aspect of it or the technical end. 18:00 And you could see from the metadata times the photos were taken at and the settings. We were told, right, come back after lunch with those details. So I was asked, will you give the technical evidence? And I said, I will, but I'm going to have to slate you for what you did because what you did was wrong. And you could see that the defense had already opened this little chink. Looking at these photographs, they were saying, look how dark it is. There's no way... The suspect could have been identified, but these photographs weren't showing a true representation of the scene. 18:35 So I got into the box and I explained the whole thing about what the human eye sees, how exposure can change. And he says, well, there's so much in it. I said, no, they bear no resemblance. So it basically shut down the defense completely. And very curtly, he said, no further questions. 18:58 you 19:06 Like, I mean, compared to you, I would have only attended, you know, far less scenes than you did over your career. But like you say, it was very much a collaborative thing because, you know, these scenes can be very often quite intense places with some maybe horrific stuff having happened there. 19:27 And that was the thing with the Bureau, even though we were told, oh, well, this is what we think happened at a briefing, it If that didn't fit in with what we found, we had a certain amount of autonomy that we could say, well, we can't corroborate that or we can't prove that because what we have seen and examined and photographed doesn't show this. So maybe you've got your story wrong or whatever you're being told by the suspect or the witness is different. 20:00 but you had the photographic evidence to show that. Now, as the years went on, not only with photography going digital, but we also got into the habit of doing a video walkthrough of a scene. So again, before anything was moved, we invested in these small handheld gimbal type cameras. So it's like a Steadicam on a gimbal. So as you walked around, it wasn't, it was a nice smooth image. 20:32 It wasn't juddery or whatever. 20:34 And you could do a walk around the scene, maybe five minutes. 20:40 and put it onto a fob and hand it to the instant room. So straight away, they had something that they could refer to, put it up on a screen, and it meant that people didn't have to suit up and come into our scene. Sometimes it was the real cut and dry cases that people thought, oh, there's nothing to it. These are the ones that could come back and really bite you badly. Unless, because you do have... 21:09 Just the one chance to do it and do it right. 21:12 Yeah. 21:12 So that's why it was, and it was, it was full on. It was a lot of pressure, but look, it was enjoyable work. 21:19 I mean, you wouldn't have stuck it for so long if you didn't get, get something out of it. And like, as I say, you spent 27, 28, nearly 28 years there. And again, hundreds, if not thousands of. 21:31 I'd say three, 350 murders. Yeah. 21:35 And that's, that's just, just the murders. Like, you know, let alone you talk, it could be arms fines, drug seizures, any manner of things. But, you know, I suppose it's like, ask it. You probably won't be able to give me a particular case or cases that have stayed with you. 21:52 There's a few now, and I know you've mentioned them before, the Haw family case up in Cavan. That was a tough one to work on. And I think any scenes like that where there's children involved, it's eerie. It's a different atmosphere. I remember we had photographed, I had photographed the whole scene, everything had been recorded. 22:18 All the different sections had done their bits, and we had got the bodies of the deceased out, the three young boys, the wife, and then the father. 22:29 And we were waiting for the hearses to... They were lined up outside the house. And I remember looking out and seeing five coffins on the patio in the back. I just thought, this is so wrong. This is just... This is eerie. 22:46 And there were certain things about that house, the playroom. They had loads of Lego toys that were all made up. Once they had been made, they were glued into place. 22:59 Glued together. 23:00 They were glued together. It was very sterile. 23:02 Yeah, yeah. Not played with again or taken apart to put together again. 23:07 So if it was a Formula One car, it was made into that and stayed as that and it was glued together. I remember just thinking, oh, this is, you know, you would get shivers. 23:21 I do remember, like I said, I was involved in the periphery of that. I examined some of the handwritten letters that were left behind. But I did speak to one of the fingerprinters that was on that job. And like that, he described that, you know, being out in the back garden with... 23:39 five coffins lined up and he looked at the washing was still on the line and that detail stuck with him that everything was normal when that was put out there yeah and now it's all gone like you know like and that's looking at the nasty aspects of things and things that stay with you and the hog case being one of those but are there moments in your career that are memorable and 24:02 I do remember the one case, unfortunately, was stabbed multiple times in Limerick. 24:11 And it was a textbook case, the way we dealt with it. We had a big briefing session before we went into the scene down in Henry Street Station. And we met the first responders, and they explained exactly what they did when they went in. They had received a call that this person person had been found and they told us what they had done with the scene so we went what you used to do was firstly secure a path to the body so the pathologist could do a preliminary examination at the scene and the one thing we noticed was a leather chair that was pointing in the wrong direction it wasn't facing the tv it was facing back to the back of the room and the fingerprint man was very interested in this leather chair and And there was lots of blood staining on it. 25:00 And it was a red leather chair to make matters worse. But he examined... his torch, and he's looking at it from all different angles. 25:11 And he says, I think I have a finger mark in blood. 25:14 Can you do something with a paw? So I set up the camera. 25:18 And again, going back to my training in the fingerprint studio, I said, right, this won't get me. 25:25 And I tried lighting from all different angles. And you had to light in such a way that you would bring up the The pattern of the finger mark, but not the texture of the leather, the grain of the leather. 25:40 And I'd say it took me a good 45 minutes, maybe an hour to capture the mark. But I was able to get it and it was on a digital camera. And we went down to our van and we had a screen in the back of the van. And I plugged in the camera into the screen and the fingerprint man is looking and he's counting. And he says, yeah, I have at least 15, if not 18 characteristics within that mark. 26:09 So I went down to the local station in Henry Street. 26:13 Got onto the lads in photographic section. I said, I'm sending a mark across on a secure network. One of the members up in photography resized it to one-to-one ratio at a certain thousand DPI, certain size. And it was sent over then to our colleagues in fingerprints to run it through the AFIS system. 26:38 And before we sat down that evening for the crime conference. 26:43 Back in Limerick, yeah? 26:43 Back in Limerick, the first crime conference, we had a name of a suspect. And we were able to say, the person's finger mark in that blood is such and such a person. And once that came, they got a warrant for his house. And we examined his house. And we were able to find items that had been stolen from the victim's house. 27:05 Yeah. 27:07 There was a set of keys that had been found in waste ground next to the suspect's house. There was a Tesco fob in it. I remember photographing it and then looking back through previous photographs taken the day before, And a wallet thrown down a toilet had the larger Tesco card with the exact same number. So it was the keys belonging to the victim's house. 27:32 The victim, yeah. 27:34 And everything just tied together. 27:36 That's mad. I mean, at the time, you might unconsciously think that these things are important, but it ends up breaking the whole case, like. 27:45 And it was great to be part of a team that had solved a case of that. That was one that really stuck out for me, as with the Mary Dillon case. 27:55 Would you think nowadays, with the advent of more technology and stuff like that, would it have made your job any easier? Do you think I think or it would have just maybe speeded things up? 28:07 I think it speeds things up. I don't think you can rush a scene. 28:11 No. 28:11 And I think with digital, unfortunately, people think that, you know, you can get photographs yesterday. You know, you still have to take your time. Because I used to teach scenes of crime classes and teach guys how to take photographs. And the one thing I would say to them was, guys, before you put the camera to your eye, just take a good look around the room. 28:34 Look at everything with your eyes. Because... People had a tendency sometimes just to go in and photograph everything and take everything up. Because I think if you just went in sort of pigeonholed and looking through just your viewfinder, you'll miss things. You might be so intent looking at marks in blood on the floor that you fail to see there's a splatter of blood on the ceiling. 29:03 Yeah. 29:04 are up on the light switch because you're not looking around. And that's something I learned, especially when I did the crime scene manager's course. So the crime scene manager was sort of the head person of a bureau team and would act as a liaison between the instant room and the bureau team. But you used to sort of try and see the scene in a holistic overall viewpoint and try and take everything in. And what I used to do as a crime scene manager, once the floor had been checked and we knew we weren't walking or we had to put down stepping plates, I would, with the ballistics person, we'd have a good look around and watch We'd have a little chat and say, right, this is what we've seen. 29:48 So everyone knew what was jumping out, what was relevant. 29:52 and get an overall look. I had a very much hands-on approach as crime scene manager. And I enjoyed that aspect of my work as well. 30:02 There's another thing I want to talk about, Paul, when I touched on the advent of technology and things, improvement over the years. But you were instrumental in getting the EvoFit system into the photography section. Could you tell us a bit about that? 30:18 Okay, so evil fit is, so I'm sure we're all familiar with the photo fit. These are basically a lookalike of a suspect. Back in the days, in its infancy, it was basically hundreds of different eyebrows, eyes, nose, that would be slotted together in a frame. Yeah. to try and build up a face. It was very blocky looking. 30:44 And then over the years, it became computerized, and you would sit down and interview a victim of crime or a witness, and they would be trying to describe what a person looked like. But it was very dependent on them having a full description of all the features. So they couldn't say, well, he had blondes, wavy hair but I can't remember the eyes nose or mouth because you couldn't put out just an image of a head with just blonde wavy hair but they didn't look very lifelike back in the days you'd see it on crime call and You'd be mortified seeing these old images because they all look the same. 31:29 And it looked like Mr. Potato Head was on the rampage around the country because they all look similar. So I had heard from another colleague in photography section about this system called Evofet. 31:45 And it was developed by a professor in the UK who was a computer engineer, a software engineer involved in the whole thing of building up faces. But then he studied as to why people remember certain things about faces. And he went off and did a doctorate in psychology. 32:06 And so he was able to constantly adjust his system to make it more... 32:13 User-friendly. And what it worked on, as opposed to description or recall memory, that's what it was called, it used recognition memory. So now you're shown an array of different faces. 32:28 Hmm. 32:29 And they were looking and trying to pick out faces that looked similar. 32:34 So the only starting point we needed was really just race and approximate age of a person. After that, they were looking at faces based on the shape of the face. And they were picking ones that look similar in shape. And then... You had another way of looking at the fleshiness and the coloring of the face. 32:59 Now with these images they're looking at, would they have been of real faces or just computer generated? Computer generated. These were not real people. But really good. 33:08 Very high quality, yeah. So it would keep going until they came up with a face that looked quite similar to the person they'd seen. 33:19 But then this is where the beauty of it came into play. There was these tools called holistic tools that changed the personality or character of the face. So they would look at this face and say, that's very like him, but he looks too pleasant. Yeah. Or he's too healthy looking. And you had, there was about 15 holistic tools and it was basically a sliding scale. And you'd say to the witness, right, for this one, I'm going to move left, going to move right. And you tell me when to stop. 33:50 Or you could add or take away a few years. They'd say, yeah, he's a bit younger looking. So by sliding it to one side, you'd take a few years off. Well, that's more like him now. And I had witnesses like just frozen, breaking down in tears and turn off the screen. 34:08 Because it was so close. 34:09 That's him. Yeah. Our style of interview. 34:14 You had to learn those skills. Would you get training in that as well? I imagine that have to be a fairly specific skill. 34:20 So it was cognitive interview technique. So you weren't asking them stuff that resulted in a yes or no answer. 34:28 You wouldn't say, did he have a big nose or small nose? 34:32 You know, it would be describe the nose. Tell me more about the nose. Tell me more about the, what can you remember about the eyes? Focus in on the eyes. You know, what can you remember? You know, it was all about them describing and something you were trying to bring them back to the moment of the crime, right? This person is grabbing your handbag. What, what can you hear around you? What can you smell off him? 34:57 Hmm. 34:58 And all of a sudden, you know, it would trigger something in their mind to say, oh God, now I remember, yeah, he had a little scar under his ear or one of the buttons was missing from his shirt or there was a smell of alcohol or stale cigarettes off or whatever. 35:15 And that would just open more and more images within their mind. 35:20 And when we moved from ProFit to EvoFit, our hit rate went from 7% to 30%. 35:27 And that would be like 30% of... 35:33 So 30% of EvoFits that we did led to a nomination of a suspect. 35:37 Right. 35:38 Either a suspect or it ruled somebody out. Yeah. But it was that good. 35:45 And I remember I got that system into the guards in 2015, and we did about 150 evil fits that year. 35:56 And it was great. And unfortunately, despite constantly trying to push the system, and put adverts up on the guard, the intranet system and whatever, and teach people about it. It's just a facility that's not been utilized. But it's something, you know, and I'm sure there's lots of guards listening to this podcast. So guys and girls, this is something you should always consider. You know, if you have a... a victim of crime, even if they only saw a face for a split second, sometimes that's all they need to be able to produce a really good face. 36:33 And it could save you three weeks of pouring through CCTV to find out the one bit of footage of your suspect. And he's got the head covered with a, you know, his face is covered and he's looking the other way. 36:49 And you know the way technology and AI and all this now, you look at videos now and they're recreating people that, you know, say film stars that were dead decades ago or so. You can't tell what's real anymore. But is it possible or do you think it's possible to use some of that technology that you see on TikTok every day to maybe reproduce a person and see if that's any benefit to a witness or whatever in a crime investigation? 37:16 I'd be very wary of it. Because you're letting an artificial intelligence or a computer decide, whereas the other process, the EvoFit operator, they're not deciding. It's all guided by the witness. Hmm. So if you have a computer deciding what it thinks a person should look like, you see it on people sending in Photoshop requests, trying to clean up an image. And what AI produces, it's a totally different looking person. 37:48 So I don't think it's, no. 37:51 The fact you can stand over it and say, this is... 37:55 what the witness remembers the person looking like. 37:59 And they have full control through it. The EvoFit operator is merely there to assist and help in the procedure in producing this image with them. But it's always under the guidance of the witness. 38:13 Yeah, it's just a shame that it's not, it's probably not just not known about. 38:18 It's not known about and it's such an invaluable tool to use. 38:23 And I know it's a long thing again to look back over and I've asked you what things stuck in your mind and, you know, what cases maybe were hard to get over and stuff like that. But what are you most proud of in your career now? 38:38 In my career, well, you know, I was very dedicated to the photographic section. I, like I said, spent nearly 28 years in there. I was doing something that I loved doing. And I think my work in tandem with the rest of the Bureau team led to conviction of criminals and people who had perpetrated these crimes. 39:03 At the end of the day, you have to remember that, you know, it's not only the victims you're doing this for, it's their families, the people they've left behind. And, you know, there is a sense of pride in that you've done your job well and to the best of your ability. I've tried to bring in new technologies. It's through the section when I was working as a sergeant towards the end of my career had a section in photographic section so I just hope that it The section only a few months ago celebrated 100 years in existence, the oldest special section within the guards. 39:48 And it would be great to see that they keep the place resourced with staff, with equipment, that it's not forgotten about. 39:59 And I do remember like in my early years, I remember sometimes covering three murders in a week because there was only maybe six or seven of us working in the section. At the height, we had 15. I think they're down to maybe 10 or 11 staff at the moment. 40:17 Yeah, well, I tell you, Paul, we could be talking here all day. 40:21 I know personally, I've very fond memories of working with you over the years, not only out at scenes and stuff like that, but just interacting in general within the bureau. You were one of those photographers that when it came to getting finger marks photographed, we knew you were going to do a good job because we weren't just going to get back a label in focus. We were going to get the mark in focus because you knew what you were looking for. But it's been really fascinating talking to you, Paul. And thank you very much for coming in. 40:49 Absolutely. Thanks very much, Sean. 40:51 Thank you for listening to this episode of Lines of Inquiry. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider giving us a five-star rating and review, sharing it to your story on social media, leaving a comment below, or simply telling a friend you enjoyed it. Your support helps us make more episodes. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email linesofinquiry at goloudnow.com. Lines of Inquiry is presented by me, John Sweetman. The podcast is created by Darren Cleary. Our executive producer is Owen Brennan. 41:22 Aoife Plunkett is our producer. Remember, in the end, everything done in the dark comes to light. 41:32 Music