The Guardian Longreads: How to identify a body: the Marchioness disaster and my life in forensic pathology

In the late 1980s in the UK, there were a series of disasters that claimed many lives. Few, if any, of these disasters could exactly be called an accident. They almost all exposed major systems failures. In March 1987, the car and passenger ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge because the bow door had been left open: 193 passengers and crew died. In August 1987, Michael Ryan went on a killing spree and shot 31 people in Hungerford before killing himself. In November 1987, a lit match dropped down through an escalator to the Piccadilly line at King’s Cross station, causing a fire that claimed the lives of 31 people and injured a hundred more. In July 1988, the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea, 120 miles (190km) north-east of Aberdeen blew up, killing 167 men. [...]

In mass disaster management, false identification is the biggest fear. This is obviously hideous for everyone, especially if a family later begins to suspect they may have buried the wrong body. The coroner rightly wanted the most secure and accurate identification methods that were possible. Today, we have the option of DNA analysis, but it was not available to us then. The two most secure means were still fingerprints and comparison of teeth with dental records. The problem with dental records is that you, of course, have to know the name of the missing before you can begin to search for their dentist, and only when the name of the dentist is known can you request their records. That was clearly going to take a long time. [...]

People find it hard to believe that, in mass disasters, visual identification is unreliable, especially so when death has been traumatic, or the body has been immersed in water. But even the uninjured and undecomposed dead are often simply not recognisable to those who knew them as animated individuals. Without life, facial expression or movement, robbed of our essential selves, our bodies can look very different. The fact is that relatives, even immediate family, when they are under great stress, are very likely to make mistakes. They may identify a body that isn’t their relative. Or they may not correctly identify a body that really is their loved one.

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