Fiendish murders have been occurring over the past year in Cambridge...

Mrs. White, a DNA expert, has been found dead (on a number of occasions!) on the floor bleeding from a head injury, the murder weapon lying nearby, and the only chance of solving the mystery was through forensic science.

All was not as it appeared however; Mrs. White is played by Wendy Bendy, one of Anglia's "family" of crime scene mannequins, and the crime scenes have been set up by Grahame Bell and Jocelyn Pryce, two lecturers in Forensic Science at the Cambridge campus.

The events are part of a regular series of outreach summer schools arranged by Dr. Paul Elliott for inner city school children to have an insight into university life, and to see the fun that can be had whilst studying for a degree.

The students are each given workbooks, which give details of the victim and the suspects, with space to record the evidence they obtain, along with quizzes and puzzles to solve as the day goes on.

To gather the Forensic evidence the students are given an introduction to crime scene examination and then shown how to examine various items in the crime scene itself; they swab the blood, recover hair from the dead woman's hand, powder the murder weapon, recover any fingerprints and finally compare these fingerprints with each of the subjects to identify suspects. They are shown how to extract DNA, before being told how DNA is profiled and given images of the DNA sequence for each of the people and those of the blood and the hair.

After an intensely busy but interesting day the students have to collate their findings and give their conclusions to the rest of the group. We can't give the answer away, but suffice to say they need to have listened to the clues given in the presentations by the lecturers, made a convincing fingerprint identification, understood the importance of DNA profiling, and be willing to consider where the technology behind Dolly the sheep might have lead. In the past there have been a number of very outrageous scenarios suggested; with the most outlandish being only slightly stranger than the truth!!!

If anyone wishes to have further details of this scheme or get involved please contact Paul Elliott in the Life Sciences department.