IT was two o’clock in the morning, in the days before mobile phones and satnav. Once again, forensic pathologist Dr Helen Whitwell had got lost on the way to a murder scene. Stopping at a pay phone in the middle of nowhere, she called Nottinghamshire police headquarters, who sent a detective to find her.
A while later, as the cop car she was travelling in finally reached its destination, Dr Whitwell spotted that TV crews and Press photographers were already swarming. Quickly, she ordered the detective at the wheel to pull into the drive of a nearby house. As she opened her bag, the officer expected to see it packed with the tools of her grisly trade.
read more on tv Instead, the Home Office pathologist pulled out make-up, a hairbrush and perfume. “If you think I’m going to face the Press at 3am without my slap on, think again,” she told her bemused driver. Adding the finishing touches, she then stepped out of the car to face the cameras as she dodged inside the police cordon to examine the corpse.
Nigel McCrery , a Nottinghamshire policeman at the time, recalls: “The pathologists I had dealt with up until then were crusty old men with beards and socket sets. Most read in News TV “And then Dr Whitwell turned up. "She was young, beautiful, blue-eyed, with long blonde hair — not at all what you would expect.
“She was probably the cleverest woman I’ve ever met, with the intellect and the brain of a planet. "But she was also eccentric. "Helen loved Champagne and .