No place for the faint
As we celebrate 100 years of
women in policing, Insp Fran Poole
reflects on her often confronting
career in crime scene forensics.
STORY RICHARD CANN POLICE MONTHLY
AND SNR SGT JO-ANNE KENWORTHY, FSG
MAIN PHOTO SASHA WOOLLEY PUBLIC AFFAIRS BRANCH
V
ery early in her forensics
career, Insp Fran Poole
discovered that she could cope
with the substantial psychological
demands of crime scene
examination.
A month after she joined crime
scene in 1989, then Cst Poole
attended what remains Australia’s
worst road accident. Two full
tourist coaches, each travelling at
100km/h, collided head-on near
Kempsey. There was no evidence
that either driver had applied
brakes and the impact left one
bus embedded in the first five
rows of the other bus. Thirty-five
people were killed and another
41 were injured.
“It was the first time I had to
deal with mass casualties,” said
Insp Poole. “It was two days
before Christmas and victims’
families were showing up at the
12 Police Monthly February 2015
morgue waiting for their loved
ones to be identified. We were
really under pressure, working
with pathologists one minute to
carry out the post mortems, then
rushing out and preparing a body
to be identified
by the family the next.
“I have used that experience
on subsequent jobs as a gauge
for how I was coping. I remember
thinking afterwards, if I can deal
with that, then I can pretty much
say with confidence that I can deal
with anything.”
Dressed for success
There were only a handful of
women doing crime scene work
when Insp Poole joined the u
RIGHT Insp Fran Poole was among
the first to don specialist overalls
hearted
February 2015 Police Monthly 13
Physical Evidence Section, as
the Forensic Services Group was
then named. It was a plain clothes
area of policing and women were
expected to wear the equivalent
of the men’s suits and ties.
“I wore dresses or skirts and
heels to look as professional
as I could,” she said. “I felt very
uncomfortable going out to crime
scenes back then wearing stylish
clothes and high heels as it was
totally impractical and made doing
the job awkward.
“We did have blue mechanic’s
overalls and gumboots that we
wore at fires and smelly post
mortems. But most of the time
there was nowhere private to get
changed. I remember attending a
building fire in the city and having
to change into my overalls on the
footpath, much to the interest of
firemen and passers-by.”
The unsuitable nature of her attire
was highlighted when Insp Poole
attended a fatality at Central Station
during peak hour. Dressed in high
heels, stockings and a pencil skirt,
she had to climb down a steel
rung ladder and get under the
train to photograph the victim.
After doing this, she realised that
getting back up the ladder to the
platform would be difficult.
“The skirt was tight fitting and
I couldn’t lift my leg high enough
to reach the first rung of the ladder,”
she recalled. “So I took my shoes
off, threw them onto the platform,
then pulled my whole skirt up to
my waist to climb up. People on the
platform proceeded to wolf whistle,
clap and yell out comments.
“I decided, from then on I was
not going to wear skirts and heels,
so I started wearing slacks and flat
shoes. It didn’t take long for the
other women in the office to
follow suit.”
Specialist overalls were issued
in the late 1990s and Insp Poole’s
was one of the first units to be
given fitted overalls as official
Expert on the
world stage
uniform, as worn by all crime scene
investigators today.
A decade ago, personal
protective equipment became
mandatory when processing
crime scenes.
“With OH&S training came a
better understanding of the hazards
associated with crime scenes and
cross contamination principles,”
she said. “When I started in crime
scene, there was no DNA. We
could only get a blood grouping
from a bloodstain the size of a 20cent piece. We didn’t know about
contamination and there was no
personal protective equipment
apart from gloves.”
Crime scene photography has
also been transformed since Insp
Poole’s early days when she lugged
around a heavy 12-shot Rolleiflex
film camera.
“You needed to be pretty good
at photography to select the right
camera settings for different sorts
of crime scenes. I always found fires
to be the hardest to photograph
– black on black. Today, with
digital cameras, officers can take
hundreds of photos and check the
exposure is right after each shot.”
A modern profession
The most significant step forward
in the NSWPF’s forensics capability
came with the introduction of
formal qualifications for crime
scene examiners in 1993, said Insp
Poole, whose own introduction to
forensics was a two-week course
that covered the basics of fires,
deaths and vehicle identification.
“It was a very steep learning
curve,” she said. “You were thrown
into the deep end and had to swim.
I relied on being taught on the job
by more experienced crime scene
examiners, which was a bit ‘hit and
miss’. You learned your mistakes
when you went to court and never
made the same mistake again.”
Insp Poole was one of three
women in the inaugural class for
Insp Fran Poole’s career has seen her
work on some of the world’s most high
profile cases, and the biggest disasters
alongside experts from around the globe.
Genocide in Bosnia
LEFT Fran Poole
as an attesting
probationary
constable in 1986
14 Police Monthly February 2015
More than 7000 Muslim men and boys were executed by Serbian
forces in the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War in July 1995.
Three years later, Insp Poole was deployed to Bosnia to help the United
Nations identify the cause of death of thousands of victims exhumed
from mass graves. She led the crime scene team in the mortuary for
the final 12 weeks of the mission.
In an attempt to hide the genocide, Serbian forces had used front end
loaders to dig up the bodies and rebury them hundreds of kilometres
away. Insp Poole’s team needed to differentiate between damage to
the bodies caused by the front end loaders and damage caused by
bullets. However, the bodies were so badly disfigured and decomposed
that often more evidence and information could be obtained from
the clothing.
“I had published a research paper on ‘fibre fracture morphology –
the Forensic Diploma. From the
19 officers enrolled in the first
course, three remain in forensics
today with Insp Poole the only
woman.
“It really wasn’t until after the
diploma was introduced and
I obtained that formal qualification
that I felt truly confident in
processing crime scenes, preparing
briefs and presenting evidence
in court.”
This experience has made
her passionate about improving
education for forensic officers.
She helped develop a national
forensic qualifications program to
standardise training and create
a robust pathway to formal
qualifications.
ballistic versus severance’, so I was able to link through each of the
items of clothing that the victims were wearing to ascertain whether
it was likely bullet damage and track it through to where on the
body it may have travelled,” she explained. “The pathologist then
examined the body to see if there were any nicks in the bones that
were caused by a bullet.
“This was tedious and time-consuming work but by the end of the
mission we had enough evidence to indict the Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic. It was huge to be given the responsibility to help
indict one of the perpetrators of such a large-scale genocide.”
Now one of our most experienced
FSG officers, Insp Poole describes
her quarter of a century in forensics
as “the most fantastic journey ever”,
but her career could easily have
followed a different path.
“I joined the NSWPF because
I wanted to be a motorcycle cop,”
she admitted. “I did a stint in
highway patrol but soon realised
ABOVE Insp Fran Poole, third
from right, in 1995, celebrating
80 years of women in policing
it wasn’t for me. After three years
in GDs, I transferred to Forensics
and have never looked back. It was
the best decision I ever made.” n
motives and helped convince Martin Bryant to plead guilty, thus
avoiding a trial.
“Each shot was at close range proving his intent to kill each
person individually rather than the theory of spraying bullets and
killing people randomly,” she explained.
“Based on this compelling evidence, Bryant admitted to the killings
in this fashion and pleaded guilty. It was a big win for the families of
the victims and to the many survivors who then didn’t have to give
evidence in court, which would have been extremely traumatic.”
The Boxing Day tsunami
The Port Arthur massacre
In May 1996, Insp Poole was part of a NSWPF team sent to Tasmania
following the Port Arthur massacre. There she encountered peculiar
difficulties, including the need for an officer to guard each body from
Tasmanian Devils which circled the crime scene.
Four NSWPF crime scene examiners, two ballisticians and two
supervisors were tasked with processing the scene inside the Broad
Arrow Café where 20 bodies lay. They were able to trace Bryant’s
steps from the juxtaposition of the fired cartridge cases, the blood
splash patterns and the gunshot damage to each victim’s head.
The case proved particularly satisfying for Insp Poole because
the evidence they gathered proved vital in illustrating the shooter’s
Six months after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami had killed more than
230,000 people, Insp Poole was deployed for a three-week rotation
in Thailand to coordinate ante-mortem and post-mortem information
at the central information centre in Phuket.
Experts from each of the countries with missing people came
together for this important operation. Every day, about 70 forensic
experts would work in the centre to identify victims by matching
primary identifiers such as fingerprints, DNA and dental records to
ante-mortem information provided by relatives.
“I really enjoyed working with forensic people from all over the
world, side by side, for a united cause in returning bodies back to
their families,” Insp Poole said.
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