Tip for reading list: The Man Who Talks To The Dead

“Bodies speak to me,” Dr Shepherd told GQ magazine in an interview last year.

This “man’s inhumanity to man”, as Dr Shepherd described it in the interview, pushed him over the edge in 2016, and left him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Britain’s top forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd has been cutting up bodies for 35 years, and reckons that he has perfomed over 23,000 autopsies in his career. Beginning with the Hungerford massacre of August 1987, he has examined the evidence in a very large number of high-profile cases — including the Clapham Junction crash of 1988 in which 35 people were killed, the 1989 Marchioness disaster on the Thames in which over 50 people died, the death of Princess Diana in Paris in 1997, the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people in the United States, the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005.

“Bodies speak to me,” Dr Shepherd told GQ magazine in an interview last year. “They give me answers, but the hardest thing [for the dead person’s relatives] to see is that the insertion of that knife into their loved one is an act of respect and maybe of love.”

This “man’s inhumanity to man”, as Dr Shepherd described it in the interview, pushed him over the edge in 2016, and left him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain’s Top Forensic Pathologist, is his memoir.

About his PTSD, Dr Shepherd told the BBC that although he was used to death, “there comes a moment when you can’t compartmentalise it”. The trigger, he said, had been the ice cubes in his drink that reminded him of Bali in 2002 when corpses had to be kept on ice to prevent them decaying — but the roots of the breakdown possibly lay in his first major case in 1987. “Maybe I should have gone to see a counsellor once a year,” he told the BBC.

In the book, he speaks of his fear of shutting his eyes, lest his mind be “pursued by body fragments”. “There were intestines. Spongy livers. Hearts that did not beat. Hands. The clawing stench of decay that took my breath away.” At times, he thought “it better to die than to live like this”.

Unnatural Causes, says the publisher’s promotional description of the book, “is a record of an extraordinary life, a unique insight into a remarkable profession, and above all a powerful and reassuring testament to lives cut short”.