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Rape, murder no match for pollen
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She has cracked murder and rape cases from microscopic remnants of pollen clinging to a victim or suspect's clothing, shoes and at a crime scenes. Dr Milne, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia's Centre for Forensic Science, highlights some high profile successes while tracing her personal and professional journey to become Australia's foremost pollen sleuth. Her book, A Grain of Truth, will be launched at Subiaco library on Friday, August 26 at 6pm. She has juggled motherhood and lecturing of students to earn a living while working day and night to do further research and to investigate criminal cases. Her first WA case was that of Donald Garlett, jailed indefinitely in 1999 after a series of horrific home invasions and attacks and rapes on women across Perth from 1994 to 1998. The attacks had been widespread among the suburbs and had been linked by DNA evidence to one person, but police did not know who he was or where to find him. The breakthrough came when Dr Milne was asked to examine a pair of shoes discovered in a stolen getaway car that was found crashed near the scene of one of the attacks several years earlier. Police asked Dr Milne to help pinpoint where the suspect may work or live by analysing soil, mud and plant material for its pollen contact. An unusual amount of straw and a mysterious, large grass-like pollen, eventually identified as that of an immature wheat plant, led Dr Milne to advise police to look for someone working in the chaff-cutting industry in the York and Northam area. At each outdoor crime scene - ideally before the surrounds are trampled by others - Dr Milne works with a botanist to identify and take samples of the surrounding vegetation and soil to get a "snapshot" of the vegetation. Dirt samples from victims and suspect's fingernails, bodies and clothing, vehicles and other objects of interest can then be analysed to see if the snapshot matched, she said. "It's possible, for instance to tell if someone has been murdered where their body has been deposited or whether a suspect was at the scene of a rape," she said. "Sometimes the body has been moved and it is possible to detect this in the same way." "Each plant family produces a different type of pollen, and while they have general similarities, each species is slightly different," she says. "I can look down a microscope and tell if pollen is from a gum tree, wattle or grass. "But then I have to narrow it down to an exact species within that type - in WA there are 13,500 different species of native plants and each has pollen with an individually distinguishing structure." Identifying pollen species together with the proportions of each in a soil sample gives clues as to the geographical area of origin, as each region is typified by a particular mix of species, she said. Wind-pollinated plants produced up to 100,000 pollen grains per anther which are spread over large areas. But insect-pollinated plants - those with brighter flowers - only dropped pollen up to a few metres from the plant, she said. "Pollen from wind-pollinated plants tells about the vegetation of the region and pollen from insect pollinated plants tells about the local area." Through her book, Dr Milne follows the trail of evidence in her first case, in 1997, of 27-year-old Queensland woman, Samantha Hall. Samantha's estranged partner and father of her two sons, Michael Bodsworth was eventually arrested and then convicted of her murder through pollen evidence. Samantha's body was found in bushland at Noosa Heads amongst flowering wattle bushes but Bodsworth asserted he had spent the night of the murder in Gympie, almost an hour away. The victim's car was found parked outside a nightclub in Gympie. Police had evidence that Samantha was killed at her home in Gympie and two tiny wattle flowers found in her car matched those where her body was found. Dr Milne was able to distinguish between pollen of wattle found in Noosa and other areas and compare it to pollene found on Holden's clothing and in and around the car. "As he had pulled Samantha out of the car his back had brushed up against the wattles," she said. At the time the case was Dr Milne's first professional challenge, but she now keeps a photo of Samantha next to her computer "as my inspiration," she said. Samantha's parents, Lyn and Malcolm Hall, now parents to their grandsons Michael and Corey, encouraged Dr Milne to write the book to highlight the devastating impact of domestic violence. "They wanted the story told to show the impacts of domestic violence - they and the boys are also victims," she said. The case cemented Dr Milne's belief in the usefulness of palynology to crime work, something she struggled to convince her two young daughters through the seven years it took to complete her PhD at the University of Queensland. She recalls her daughter Belinda at the age of twelve commenting about a friend's mother who was doing a PhD on cancer saying: "What you're doing isn't very useful is it?" But now at 23 and 20 her daughters are "pretty proud" Dr Milne said, and are sharing some of the media attention her book and work have generated. While being a forensic expert is "flavour of the decade" it had not been a planned or easy career path. She started as a physical education teacher - "blonde hair, big boobs and sporty" - and then went to university to study zoology. She accidentally ticked geology as a unit and found she loved it, realising that in all her overseas travels her major souvenirs had been rocks. Her interest in pollen developed from there, as most palynologists worked in geology where pollen samples were used to date rocks. "Crack some rocks open and inside there will be well-preserved pollen which can tell a lot about when it was deposited," she said. Demonstrating the same grit needed to investigate her cases, Dr Milne has faced treatment for thyroid cancer, marital breakdown and single parenthood. At times, she said she had survived on social security while pursuing her investigative passion. She won't be drawn on her involvement in any current cases but works "six days and four nights a week" on forensic work, teaching UWA and presenting to police on palynology techniques. "I am very driven," she said. She was asked to work on the Schappelle Corby case but was not able to access samples due to a communication mix up, she said. "I may have been able to work out where the cannabis came from as it tends to collect the pollen of the region where it was grown."
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