This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Longread.

Hi, my name is Imogen West Nights and I'm the author of this Guardian Longread,

the Queen of Crime-Solving, which was published in March 2022.

This piece came about because my editor David Wolfe noticed a news piece about new evidence

being tested in the so-called

spy in the bag case.

In 2010, an MI6 employee called Gareth Williams was found dead inside of Red Holdall

in the bathtub of his flat in Pimico, and it was never established at the time.

What happened there?

But this new story was saying that their scientist, who was

leading the new evidence testing, was a woman called Angela Gallup, a forensic scientist,

who he hadn't heard of before, and I haven't heard of before, but he was then reading about

her and thought, you know, hang on a minute, this woman seems to have been involved in pretty

well every famous murder investigation in Britain of the past 30 it's.

You know, who is she? Is there someone worth doing a profile about? And it turns out she really was.

So from there it kind of became apparent also that by profiling Gallup's really extraordinary career,

you could also use that as a framework around which to hang a portrait

of how forensic science in general has risen and fallen in England and Wales over the last 50 years.

Unfortunately, not much has changed in the state of forensic science in England and Wales since

I wrote this piece. The problems that Gallup and her peers describe

that kind of plague forensic science and the Justin's system

...