Professor Peter Vanezis

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a scientist. Forensic pathology is his trade, patiently reconstructing the nature and the circumstances of death. He leads Britain's first task force on standby to investigate war atrocities, and his grim work has taken him to the killing fields of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Kosovo.

Presenter0:50

He's one of the pioneers of the so called Lazarus technique, a method of facial reconstruction which uses a laser to generate computer profiles from a skull.

Presenter0:59

He was born in Cyprus and moved to England with his family in the early fifties. He didn't speak any English until he went to school. He failed his 11 plus, but he decided early on he wanted to be a doctor, and worked hard to get to medical school and into the fascinating world that became his career. I'm not so much interested in the perpetrator but in the victim, he says. That's the way I play it. He's the Regis Professor of Forensic Medicine and Science at Glasgow University, Peter Venezes.

Presenter1:27

Yours is a job, Peter, which has been very much glamorized by television, by fiction, and so on. But

Presenter1:34

In reality the first question one has to ask is

Presenter1:36

Why do you do it? How come you chose to do this?

Professor Peter Vanezis1:41

That's a very difficult one actually Sue because I didn't really choose it at the very beginning. I decided to do medicine because I wanted to be a doctor in the conventional sense of the word to treat live patients. But I soon realized that pathology was certainly the field that I became interested in.

Presenter1:58

But it wasn't that you didn't have a good bedside manner and you don't need one with the dead.

Professor Peter Vanezis2:02

No, I I I did I had a reasonable bedside manner. I didn't do any harm to any of my patients in my early days. And in fact, I wanted to do cardiology. But it so happened that I wanted some laboratory experience beforehand to give me a chance of getting a reasonable job.

Presenter2:17

And you kind of fell into it.

Professor Peter Vanezis2:18

Yes, in fact I did, yes.

Presenter2:20

But I suppose the question I'm really asking is, how can you do it? How can you, if you like, particularly when one thinks of you're going to the killing fields and so on of Kosovo, Rwanda, as I say, how can you suspend the normal human emotion?

Professor Peter Vanezis2:34

I don't find that difficult in that sense because I've got hopefully a professional approach to it.

Presenter2:40

Of course, but I'm just asking if the man doesn't come through at some point, the human being, the

Professor Peter Vanezis2:40

Cool.

Professor Peter Vanezis2:45

Oh yes, it certainly does. And the difficulty sometimes is not to show it to the other people around you, because they all expect you to be able to do a job of work, and it doesn't do really to sort of break down

Professor Peter Vanezis2:59

in the middle of when you're doing your work.

Presenter3:00

Because if you crack, they might crack.

Professor Peter Vanezis3:03

The way they think is, well, if if the person who's actually more experienced than they are maybe their first post mortem they're looking at, ends up like this, what's going to happen to us? And also I suppose you do get used to it to a certain extent and you do have a lot of protective mechanisms.

Presenter3:12

Hmm.

Professor Peter Vanezis3:19

And one of them of course is the so-called black humour, which people can sometimes misunderstand if they're not used to working around pathologists.

Presenter3:26

But you have to have that. It's a kind of release valve, is it?

Professor Peter Vanezis3:26

But you have to have that. It's a kind of release valve. You have to have that. Absolutely.

Presenter3:31

But when I presume

Presenter3:33

As you say, I suppose you get inured to it when you see

Presenter3:37

You know, huge mass graves of people, you know, and you've seen it all in Rwanda and so on.

Presenter3:42

Wh when does it get to you the most?

Professor Peter Vanezis3:44

It gets to you the most afterwards when you start to think about it, when you put relatives next to the people that have actually died, when you can relate it to the living, and in particular when you relate it to children, especially when you see clothing of children and toys, that kind of thing, that go along with uh with the remains. It's the same thing when you have an aircraft accident and you see people that have died in that sense. It's the little things around them rather than the actual bits and pieces themselves.

Presenter4:14

So

Presenter4:15

But at the end of the day you can still go back to your lodgings and go and have a few beers with the boys, can you?

Professor Peter Vanezis4:20

Especially so. You need a few beers with the boys afterwards, I can assure you.

Presenter4:26

But while you're doing it, you become a different person. You're not the the the the fun-loving father who runs an exciting university department, which is which is what you are. That kind of person's put on hold.

Professor Peter Vanezis4:35

You put on hold while you're doing it during the day. In the evening y you try and forget about it. Otherwise it does become very, very stressful.

Presenter4:45

Tell me about the first record you want to play on this desert island.

Professor Peter Vanezis4:48

The first record is from Les Miserables. We've been twice or possibly three times with my wife to see it and my kids. This particular piece, empty chairs and empty tables, I find very poignant and I think probably very apt sometimes to the kind of work I do as well.

Speaker 45:07

There's a grief that can't be spoken There's a pain goes on and on

Speaker 45:15

Phantom faces at the window Phantom shadows on the floor Empty chairs and empty tables Where my friends will meet no more

Presenter5:34

Michael Ball and empty chairs at empty tables from Lim is Arab. Um Peter, your work is is by no means all grim. We should hasten to say that. You run something that you described in Glasgow as a fascinating department store, which seems like a strange analogy. What do you mean by that?

Professor Peter Vanezis5:51

Well, I mean it's fa certainly fascinating to me.

Professor Peter Vanezis5:54

We deal with a lot of broad subjects. We deal with drugs, we deal with identifying people, reconstructing people's faces.

Professor Peter Vanezis6:04

looking at DNA, obviously doing postmortems.

Professor Peter Vanezis6:07

We're now also looking at earprints as well and stuff like that. Ears. Ears, yes, indeed.

Presenter6:10

Ears

Presenter6:11

Is that unusual in airprint?

Professor Peter Vanezis6:14

It's it's becoming more and more popular now for the scene of crime officers at at uh robberies, etcetera, to pick up people's ears rather than just their fingerprints.

Presenter6:23

I saw one mentioned recently. Apparently some murderer had listened at the window to hear whether there was someone inside and he he'd been identified by his earprint.

Professor Peter Vanezis6:32

That's right, his left and right ear.

Presenter6:34

Oh, that he was one of yours?

Professor Peter Vanezis6:35

Yeah.

Presenter6:38

But tell me about this facial reconstruction, because how do you do it? What it means is if you have a skull of an unidentified person, and I think you had again quite a well-known one, a body at the side of Loch Loman, I think the Scottish police had, and nobody knew who he was, and you were able to put the skull on a table and create his face. How does that work?

Professor Peter Vanezis6:50

And the Scottish

Professor Peter Vanezis6:53

And you were able to

Professor Peter Vanezis6:57

In the old days it used to be done with clay, putting clay onto a skull cast, but now we do it by putting all the information from the skull into a computer using a laser scanner. And then we can use facial templates from a database of faces and put these on top of the skull and they mold on uh to take up the actual shape of the s underlying skull, so it takes the catch

Presenter7:17

You know sometimes we see adverts for for cars, for car designers, and suddenly you'll see that kind of three D image of the superstructure of a car floating across a screen. Is it is it like that? Is it sort of putting a sitting a face onto the bone, as it were?

Speaker 47:27

Uh

Professor Peter Vanezis7:27

Uh

Professor Peter Vanezis7:32

Yes, that's right. Not so exciting as that obviously, but I mean it it we do we do rotate it and it is in three dimensions. And and then we can add features such as eyes and hair.

Presenter7:41

How do you know that it's ending up as exactly like the person it's supposed to be?

Professor Peter Vanezis7:45

The point is, you see, it it won't. You've got to remember that they come to us when they have no other way of identifying the person. So all we're trying to do is to give some vague idea of the shape of the person's face to trigger recognition. Oh, it might be him. Then we go on to more definitive methods of identification, such as DNA, for example.

Presenter8:07

But when you did this with the unidentified body next to Locke Loman, in the end

Professor Peter Vanezis8:09

Explode.

Presenter8:11

The face that you created was shown on Crymot and he was recognized.

Professor Peter Vanezis8:13

Okay.

Professor Peter Vanezis8:15

That's correct, yes.

Presenter8:17

So it was recognizable, but when you saw the photographs of the real man, once the relatives had come forward, how close was it?

Professor Peter Vanezis8:23

Wasn't very close at all actually. The eyes and the hair were not quite right. We didn't have his glasses on. And I thought to myself, How on earth did they recognize him? And obviously the actual shape of his face was very, very similar. The features of the face. People just looked at the shape of his face, cheekbone structure, chin structure.

Presenter8:35

The features will be

Presenter8:39

You mention eyes. How on earth can you recreate eyes? Because there's no anthropological basis, rather, there's no bone.

Professor Peter Vanezis8:45

Well, w you go on the underlying skull, the actual width of the eye holes, the orbits, and you can get an idea of the actual general size of the eyes from that. But of course you can't tell if the eyes are slanted, it's very difficult, or whether they've got drooping eyelids. You can only guess at that.

Presenter9:01

Tell me about your second record.

Professor Peter Vanezis9:03

This is a Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

Professor Peter Vanezis9:07

I'd certainly admire some of the qualities that Freddie Mercury had.

Professor Peter Vanezis9:11

He really wanted nothing but perfection in his music, and I think this comes through very clearly in this particular piece.

Speaker 49:19

Mamia Mama Mia Mama Mia let me go be else in book has a devil put aside for me for me for me

Speaker 49:40

Shall we get it?

Presenter9:48

Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody. Now the face you you did create, of course, was of that five thousand year old ice man, Otzie, the guy who was discovered frozen.

Professor Peter Vanezis9:57

The guy who

Professor Peter Vanezis10:00

All on the

Presenter10:00

on on a glacier in the Tyrol apartment about ten years ago, I think.

Professor Peter Vanezis10:03

Nineteen ninety one, yeah.

Presenter10:05

You've now seen him.

Professor Peter Vanezis10:06

Uh

Presenter10:06

In the flesh, as it were, because he was thawed out, wasn't he, last year? And you had a look at him. What was it like being in the room with a 5,000-year-old body older than Tutankhamun for a while?

Professor Peter Vanezis10:09

Yeah.

Professor Peter Vanezis10:16

I think the only word that one can describe it as is awesome. It was unbelievable.

Professor Peter Vanezis10:22

It'll stay with me forever, that image of and also the fact that I was able to touch him and look at him, eyeball him eye to eye, so to speak. I mean there's so many relics of that age, but we're dealing with bits of skeletons and that kind of thing. But here we have a man that's flesh and almost blood. You can see his shape, you can see the tattoos on him, you can see he's still got his teeth, his lips, his eyes are still there, everything. It's absolutely amazing to be able to have that window into five thousand years ago into the Stone Age or early Copper Age and look at a man from that time.

Presenter10:59

When I hear about you um working on him like that, it's it strikes me that because there were I think there were lots of experts lined up to work on him, rather like astronomers waiting to have a go on the Hubble telescope.

Speaker 411:05

That's right.

Speaker 411:08

Sounds for me, yes.

Presenter11:10

But what did you find? What did you discover?

Presenter11:14

that was new about him when you finally got your hands on him, so to speak.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:18

I didn't actually discover anything earth-shatteringly new, but.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:24

When I looked at the back of his head, I saw that he had what looked like an injury.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:30

This is seen in all the photographs, but it was clear to me this wasn't an injury, that it was more likely to be where he'd lain for quite a long time. And there was also another mark over his spine at the top, which again looked like a pressure mark.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:44

That was important for me because it indicated that there's a strong possibility that he could have been taken there to be buried in a ceremonial burial.

Presenter11:55

So that he hadn't just died.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:55

Yeah.

Professor Peter Vanezis11:56

That's correct. That's correct. Yes. And since then I've also had the opportunity to look at X-rays of his ribs. And a lot of the injuries which they said had occurred just before death, in in my view, had happened well after death, after he'd been moved around by the inclement weather and moved from one spot to another to where he was finally found.

Presenter12:17

So it could have been a kind of ceremonial burial, could it? Because he had this copper axe with him, didn't he? Um and and so on. So perhaps he was perhaps he was someone quite important in his

Professor Peter Vanezis12:25

That's you.

Professor Peter Vanezis12:28

Yes, he had a copper axe which looked as if it hadn't been used.

Professor Peter Vanezis12:31

and he also had some arrows, which were not quite finished, and secondly were too long for him.

Professor Peter Vanezis12:38

And so they weren't the kind of arrows that you would use from the practical point of view, but were there for ceremonial purposes.

Presenter12:43

So he couldn't have pulled them with his arms. His arms weren't like.

Professor Peter Vanezis12:44

His arms weren't like that. And so that things like that and other tests that we're hoping to do in the future will clinch it for us that he was certainly lying on his back to begin with.

Presenter12:56

Record number three.

Professor Peter Vanezis12:58

The first seventy eight that I bought from Petticoat Lay Market, believe it or not, I can't remember whether whether it was nineteen fifty six or fifty seven, but it's uh Tommy Steele singing the blues.

Speaker 413:10

I never locked in the blues Cause I never thought I would

Speaker 413:17

Do you love

Speaker 413:20

Why'd you do me this away?

Speaker 413:33

You got the singing the blue

Presenter13:39

Tommy Steele singing the blues and memories of your youth, Peter. How old were you when you were convinced you wanted to become a doctor?

Professor Peter Vanezis13:48

Round about the age of fourteen, I felt I could, if I tried hard at that stage, have a chance of being able to do it.

Presenter13:53

But I wonder where the idea came from.'Cause your father your father and mother, your parents ran a a small clothes factory. They're in the rag trade, really, in the East.

Professor Peter Vanezis13:59

Actually, they're in the rag trade, really. They're in the rag trade in the eastern London, that's the only thing.

Presenter14:02

I mean, I presume they wanted you to come into the business.

Professor Peter Vanezis14:04

Well, my father had ideas that I could perhaps be a fashion designer, but

Professor Peter Vanezis14:09

I wasn't really that way inclined, to be honest with you.

Presenter14:12

But schooling was difficult, as I understand it um when I said in the introduction you came over from Cyprus when you were really uh quite small and didn't speak any English.

Professor Peter Vanezis14:22

That's right.

Presenter14:22

When did you start speaking English?

Professor Peter Vanezis14:24

At the age of five, really.

Professor Peter Vanezis14:26

I was told that I had to go to school on my fifth birthday and I was sat next to a little Greek girl who helped me learn English at that stage.

Presenter14:35

You're Greek Cypriot.

Professor Peter Vanezis14:36

That's right. And I really am not aware of when I started to be able to speak it properly, but it just seemed to come naturally. Once I was sat in class, I didn't seem to have much of a problem after that.

Presenter14:45

But you had a problem with the eleven plus.

Professor Peter Vanezis14:47

Yes, it was when we went back to Cyprus for about six months uh holiday and then when we came back I changed schools and my English had deteriorated a bit at that stage as well so I was placed at um fairly low class in the last year of my primary school so it meant that my chances of passing eleven plus were virtually nil at that stage.

Presenter15:07

So you went to a secondary mod?

Professor Peter Vanezis15:09

That's true.

Presenter15:09

I just get this impression of you kind of struggling against the system, really.

Professor Peter Vanezis15:13

I think the problem with the secondary modern system was that you had this sense that you were placed in in the rubbish dump and that uh you couldn't get out of it. And this was drummed into us, that there would there was this other school that was much better than yours and they were the ones that go to university. And of course you had to sort of convince people, no, no, it's not the way, just because we may have had a bad start.

Professor Peter Vanezis15:35

That's not the way it should be.

Presenter15:37

But you're obviously what all of that says is that you're someone who is very diligent. Once you've decided on something, you know, you don't let go. Once you're on the case, you're on the case. Is that you? Is that fair?

Professor Peter Vanezis15:49

I suppose you could describe it a little bit like that. Yes. I'm fairly tenacious at times. Some people would probably hate me for it as well, but no, I I I think I think I like to follow something through as much as possible.

Presenter16:04

Record number four.

Professor Peter Vanezis16:05

Record number four is an old favourite of mine. Actually I heard it on the British Airways airplane, believe it or not. It's a March of the Hebrew Slaves. And my next assignment hopefully will be in the summer in Verona, where I've got some friends. If I get another chance to look at the Iceman, I hopefully will be able to go and see Nabucco at the same time.

Presenter17:24

The chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi's Nabucco, sung by the Ambrosian Opera Chorus with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Mutti. So, uh, Peter Veneses, you you fell into forensics, you kind of went on attachment and never came back. Do you do you remember your first big case? You must do, the first time you stood in a witness box and defended your findings?

Professor Peter Vanezis17:45

Yes, I do. I was asked, in fact, how many uh murder cases I'd been involved in and how often I'd been to court, and I said this is my first time. So I suppose I was a bit at a bit of a disadvantage from the very beginning there.

Presenter17:58

What was the case?

Professor Peter Vanezis18:00

It was a case of a Maltese man.

Professor Peter Vanezis18:03

And he was found uh murdered in his room, and we had to work out how long he'd been dead. One of the interesting little facets of it was that there was also this dead Badrukar in his in his cage.

Professor Peter Vanezis18:15

And one police officer said to him, Doc, can you help us out with looking at how long that battery guard's been dead to work out the time of death, if he's starving and if he's been fed and all that kind of thing, you see.

Professor Peter Vanezis18:25

So uh I I thought I was on a loser to begin with on this one.

Presenter18:30

But as the cross-examination went on, did he make mincemeat of you? Because it was your first time, or did you.

Professor Peter Vanezis18:34

Um he tried to. He brandished um a piece of paper showing all the temperatures that he'd got from the meteorological office over the past week, because that helps us with time of death, you see. So he'd got all the temperatures of these surroundings and he had them all in Fahrenheit. So I took out a bit of paper and showed them to them in centigrade as well.

Presenter18:55

Oh, so you'd done it. You were there before in that.

Professor Peter Vanezis18:56

I'd actually anticipated that and it was thanks to my boss, Taffy Cameron, that in fact that I was able to anticipate that, because he called me into his office the night before and said, Look, you better be careful about this one and gave me some instructions on how to deal with it.

Presenter19:11

So you had a good teacher, obviously. You never had any formal training.'Cause I mean, let's be clear, forensics is actually the application of pathology for the law, isn't it? That's the definition.

Professor Peter Vanezis19:12

Obviously, you know

Professor Peter Vanezis19:20

That's right.

Presenter19:22

But no formal training, it was really learning on the hoof.

Professor Peter Vanezis19:25

Well nowadays it's slightly different. You don't get to do murder cases until you've had a degree of supervision and taken exams and that kind of thing. In those days in in London you were forced into doing it. You either sank or swam. And I was very lucky in that my first murder case, although we just talked about the case when I was in court was a very straightforward stabbing where I had a very wise old police officer who looked after me while I was there.

Professor Peter Vanezis19:52

And my boss was on the end of a phone i in case I got into trouble.

Presenter19:57

But you do, as you say, work very closely with these scenes of crime officers soccos as they're called in the trade.

Professor Peter Vanezis20:00

Is it soccos? Is that

Presenter20:03

Doesn't that make you less than impartial as a witness? Because, you know, again and we are educated in the main by television in these things, that the forensic scientist i talks all of the time to the guy who the d detective who's leading the investigation. I mean, you're coming to your conclusions as to what happened and who might be possibly guilty of it together, so you're not impartial.

Professor Peter Vanezis20:26

No, that that that's not quite right. What we're doing is we we are investigating how the person died. Yes, we have a story of what possibly happened and whether or not it could fit with that.

Professor Peter Vanezis20:40

That's an inevitable consequence of our examination. But at the end of the day we quite readily, if we're not happy with what we've been told, we would turn round to the police officer and say, Look, I'm very sorry, but it hasn't happened like this.

Presenter20:52

Record number five.

Professor Peter Vanezis20:54

Record number five is something which goes back to my school days really. It's by Xavier Kugat, and it's um something which has been remixed more recently by Shaft. It's a piece of music called Sway, which I used to enjoy when I was younger.

Presenter21:40

Sway, played by Xavier Cougat in his orchestra. You don't seem, um, Peter Venesis, to be a man who's concerned about being in the headlines. You're quite controversial on occasions. For instance, you accepted the brief, didn't you, of Mohammed Al Fayed after the death of his son Dodie and and the Princess of Wales to investigate whether or not their driver, Henri Paul, was drunk.

Presenter22:01

Did you do an autopsy on his body?

Professor Peter Vanezis22:05

No, I mean the intention was to do one and I went over to Paris after the death of the Princess Diana and

Professor Peter Vanezis22:13

I was hoping that the French would allow access to a second autopsy and for us to take some further samples. I mean this is normal practice in the UK and we do this all the time. Unfortunately, as soon as I uh arrived I was told that this was completely out of the question and that um I was limited as to what information I had as far as the original autopsy was concerned.

Presenter22:34

But you weren't happy with the samples you were given, were you?

Professor Peter Vanezis22:37

We weren't given any samples. That that was the problem. The samples, in fact, were taken by the pathologist who did the autopsy and they were examined by them. We weren't allowed to have any samples to examine independently in our lab in Glasgow at all.

Presenter22:51

But you weren't happy in any case with those samples because you knew where they'd been taken from, I think.

Professor Peter Vanezis22:57

That's right. The sample on which they based the original reading for the blood alcohol was taken from what I believe would be an inappropriate site which is from the heart cavity.

Speaker 423:06

Which is what?

Professor Peter Vanezis23:08

It's well recognised throughout the world that this is not where you take a blood sample from to look at for alcohol, particularly when you can take it from a vein such as in the leg or somewhere else, but far away from any site of injury, because alcohol is known to diffuse sometimes from the stomach into the chest cavity and can produce odd results and elevated results and that kind of thing. So that worried me, and that's why I made the comments that I did make on it.

Presenter23:35

Because you you implied that they were contaminated, as you say, and therefore they were unsafe. To your knowledge, have there ever been any samples taken from anywhere else in our Paul's body?

Professor Peter Vanezis23:45

Oh, yes. I mean, after after those comments were made and we did we did request to take further samples, they did go back and take further samples. They they'd actually had they'd already taken samples from elsewhere, but they hadn't tested those. They tested the one initially.

Presenter24:00

Because it's now absolutely accepted that the man was pretty well drunk very drunk. Is that fact now? Are you happy that that is fact, or do you still think that that's an unsafe conclusion?

Professor Peter Vanezis24:12

If we look at the laboratory results, the way they've carried out the analysis, etc., on the particular blood that they had, yes, I would agree that that's pretty safe. The problem arises in that no one else was allowed access to take any further samples other than the French. And secondly, we do not appear to have secure knowledge of the continuity of those samples. In other words, when they were taken from the body, when they were put and stored in the refrigerator before they were examined, whether they were labelled and so on. I mean, if there were other postmortems carried out in the same room.

Professor Peter Vanezis24:49

That could be a problem. So, in fact, there's still a few questions that need to be asked.

Presenter24:53

You're still unhappy about.

Professor Peter Vanezis24:54

I'm still in I'm still not entirely happy with it, no. And and and um I I've always felt that if we hadn't had this secrecy from the beginning, this would have been completely finished with ages ago. I appreciate that it was a French system, but bear in mind it was a British princess that was involved. It you know, th the we were as much an interested party as as they were.

Presenter25:17

Record number six.

Professor Peter Vanezis25:19

Record number six.

Professor Peter Vanezis25:21

I find it's a very beautiful piece of music. I first heard it when I saw the film The Raging Ball actually, and I just like it so much, so that's the only reason that I want to play it to be honest. It doesn't particularly remind me of anything else.

Presenter26:32

The music from the Raging Bull, of course, the Intezzo from Marscania's Cavalleria Rusticana, played by the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Giannandrea Gavizzeni.

Presenter26:41

DNA, of course, Peter Vinesis, has revolutionised forensic science. We now hear of files being reopened and rapists and murderers being caught decades after the crime. And indeed, you were involved most recently, I think, with the so-called railway killers, which happened in the early 80s. One man was caught and sent to prison for it. He then, some years on, started to say, actually, I had an accomplice.

Professor Peter Vanezis27:04

Correct.

Presenter27:04

How did your work corroborate his story?

Professor Peter Vanezis27:08

Essentially

Professor Peter Vanezis27:09

All I was doing was putting together all the pathology evidence to f to show first of all that they were all linked to each other.

Professor Peter Vanezis27:17

and then taking the story that the jailed person had given about his accomplice, then I was I was seeing whether or not the story he was giving was credible, or whether there were any accounts or parts of it which could not be true, and so on.

Presenter27:31

So in a sense you corroborated the evidence of of the man in jail, as you say.

Professor Peter Vanezis27:34

That's correct, yes. Duffy was saying he was he was giving an account of how the murders had taken place and how the other person had helped, and his account that he was giving fitted in almost exactly as to what we had found.

Professor Peter Vanezis27:50

And so the judge and the jury believed us when we said that this kind of action could not have happened by coincidence. And his story is very credible, and they believed the credibility of his story and rather than Malcahi saying that he didn't do it, so they chose to believe one rather than the other.

Presenter28:09

But was it finally DNA that that that really nailed the accomplice?

Professor Peter Vanezis28:13

DNA certainly put Malkahi there, showed that he'd um he'd had sexual intercourse with them, and then the story of the person that was jailed then brings up all the rest of the information, plus also the evidence of other witnesses who was who were alive.

Professor Peter Vanezis28:32

and al also placing him there as well. So so there was there there was a combination of things really.

Presenter28:38

Next piece of music.

Professor Peter Vanezis28:40

The next piece of music is uh Natkin Cole, and it's Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. Reminds me of London, and that's why I've picked it.

Speaker 428:50

That certain night

Speaker 428:55

The night we met

Speaker 428:59

There was magic abroad in the air

Speaker 429:06

There were angels dining.

Speaker 429:11

At the rich.

Speaker 429:14

And a nightingale sign

Speaker 429:19

And bah

Presenter29:20

Nat King Cole and a Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. Plenty of old um bones to dig up on your desert island, I suspect. Old castaways. Um is that what you'll do? Will you be happy doing that, or?

Professor Peter Vanezis29:33

Digging up bones, not really, no.

Presenter29:36

But there'll be space and time to relax. That'll that'll be a novelty for you, won't it?

Professor Peter Vanezis29:36

But there'll be s

Professor Peter Vanezis29:39

I'll have to say I probably get a bit lonely, to be honest with you.

Presenter29:42

Family too important.

Professor Peter Vanezis29:43

Definitely, yes.

Presenter29:44

You know a lot about death, as as we've heard. Uh does it hold any fears for you or?

Professor Peter Vanezis29:51

It would be silly for me to say that that uh I didn't worry about death. I think everybody does, uh but you j you obviously don't think about it, otherwise you go silly.

Presenter29:59

Some people do. Some people think about it every day, they confess.

Professor Peter Vanezis29:59

Some people do.

Professor Peter Vanezis30:01

Yes. Well, I mean I'm although I deal with it every day, I certainly don't. I'm more interested in uh in what's going on around me, in uh in my family and everything. I I d I'm not preoccupied with it.

Presenter30:12

But w I suppose what one fears is not death itself, but the manner of death.

Presenter30:18

How would you like to die?

Professor Peter Vanezis30:20

In my sleep, about two o'clock in the morning,

Presenter30:24

So you're just going to sit there and wait for it to happen naturally.

Professor Peter Vanezis30:28

I hope so.

Presenter30:29

I mean on your desert island.

Professor Peter Vanezis30:31

I hope so while I'm asleep.

Presenter30:31

So well I'm a

Presenter30:35

Last record.

Professor Peter Vanezis30:36

This really takes me back to my roots, I suppose. It's a version by Xavier Kugat of uh

Professor Peter Vanezis30:44

Greek song. It's very haunting and I really like to play it because when I first heard it, and I'd heard other versions as well, I thought Xavier Kugat version was absolutely the best.

Presenter31:25

Monsieur Lou played by Xavier Cougat in his orchestra and that's Greek, I think. Correct. Yeah. So if you could only take one of those eight records, Peter, which one would you take?

Professor Peter Vanezis31:34

Well, it has to be the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco.

Presenter31:39

Why?

Professor Peter Vanezis31:39

Why? Well, it's all about the uh Hebrew slaves being released from captivity, and I would certainly like to be released from captivity, being on a desert island to come back home with.

Presenter31:50

What about your book?

Professor Peter Vanezis31:51

I'd like to take a book which I certainly enjoyed reading many years ago. It's Christ Recrucified and it's by Katen Tsakis. I'd prefer to probably take the English version of it because it's easier for me rather than the Greek version. But it really portrays human nature in its every facet and what somebody can end up doing to their fellow human being, which I suppose in a way is something I have an interest in anyway.

Presenter32:19

And your luxury.

Professor Peter Vanezis32:20

It's fairly simple really. I wouldn't necessarily regard it as a luxury, I would regard it as a necessity probably, just to keep sane, and that would be to take plenty of photographs and a big photograph album of my family, my friends, and familiar surroundings.

Presenter32:36

Peter Vernetius, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Professor Peter Vanezis32:40

Been a pleasure.

Speaker 232:48

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.