When no other evidence helped to catch a pedophile in London, the solution to the crime was in his hands — literally.

In 2006, the Metropolitan Police requested the support of forensic anthropologist Sue Black (awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2016) regarding a gruesome crime. A man was allegedly abusing his daughter in London, breaking into her room at night to commit the atrocity.

In such a helpless situation, it is difficult to come up with an answer to: how could she prove that the crime was being committed?

In the middle of this nightmare, however, she had an ingenious idea. The teenage girl placed a webcam recording her bedroom all night, so she could portray her father abusing her. It seems like a scene coming out of a gory horror movie — but sometimes, and this is an example, reality can be more disturbing than fiction. This effort led to the recording of eight-second long footage depicting the abuse.

Photo by Nikolay Dimitrov on Unsplash

As one can imagine, the quality of the video was far from great. It did not depict the perpetrator’s face in a way to imply his identity. When police analyzed the material, it was challenging to identify particularities in the scene.

The Metropolitan Police could not solve the case themselves — so they went to an expert, just like Lestrade went to Holmes in Conan Doyle’s stories.