How modern crime scene techniques would have solved Jack the Ripper murders

Jean Milne, 69, was found stabbed and beaten at the bottom of the staircase of her Broughty Ferry mansion in October 1912.

Despite her extreme wealth and a circle of friends, she led a quiet life with a strong involvement with the church. Money had been taken and her legs were bound together.

"We re-looked at that case with a modern eye and the obvious thing is that DNA would have immediately have been used and most likely would have certainly narrowed down the suspects.

"It would certainly have been used to eliminate anyone who was in the frame."

She says it is likely that digital evidence as well as DNA, had it been available, would have helped solve higher profile cases such as the Jack the Ripper murders of Victorian London.

"Very few precautions were taken by the perpetrators of crime at that time because there was very little awareness, scientifically about what you could do," she says.

"So, again the major inputters to criminal investigations would have been DNA evidence but also digital. You leave your digital signature almost everywhere - when you walk out the door with your mobile phone, when you go into someone's house."

DNA is routinely used in criminal cases, particularly in Scotland, which is recognised as having one of the most advanced profiling methodologies in the world.

"What's changed most significantly is the enhancement in technologies that are being used to retrieve DNA samples," said Prof Nic Daéid, who is director of the award-winning Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science, based at Dundee University.

"Back in 1984 when DNA was first used in 1984 in court cases a blood stain or a biological fluid stain about the size of an old £50pm piece was needed. Now we can a profile from a single cell.

"It has led to almost a set of almost un-intended consequences mainly around how do we interpret the data we get from DNA profiles. We get far more complex, mixed profiles with contributions from more than one person.

"We are pretty good at un-mixing them if they are two or three person mixtures but really complicated when there are more contributors.

"We are trying to work our way through, using mathematics and algorithms."

READ MORE: Warning legal shake-up could 'downgrade' serious sexual crimes

She said research is advancing into the use of DNA to build up a complete genetic profile of a person including eye colour and stature. 

"The other area which is possibly going to overtake DNA is the use of digital evidence and how we get information off mobile phones, off computers, off hard drives and so on and  how do we reveal that information to the defence in a way that is fair and provides confidence to the courts that what we are doing is ethical and legal and fair."

She says she does not see a point where individuals in the UK will be required to be part of a biometric database.

"There's a lot of discussion backwards and forwards about this. Some countries look to be adopting that kind of thoughts and India is one.

READ MORE: 'Who knows what each of us is capable of?' Lin Anderson on the rise of Tartan Noir

"I'm not sure the UK will ever impose such a thing because it's a real balance between the rights of privacy versus the usefulness of having data sets like that but it's a very big set of questions that have to be answered.

"Debates are going on around things like facial recognition being used as a tool without the consent of those who are being scanned - that's a very big ethical debate as well."

Prof Nic Daéid was a forensic consultant for the BBC series Traces, which was screened earlier this year and starred Martin Compston and Laura Fraser and says some TV crime scene portrayals leave her shouting at the screen.

"We wanted to ensure we depicted the science as accurately as it was possible and they did a decent job.

"Only today, I was giving out about the way that fingerprinting was depicted in Silent Witness, which was completely wrong. It looked like the actor was painting the bonnet of the car with his brush rather than dusting.

"They are TV programmes, they are for entertainment. I think some of them try harder than others to bring that realism into the equation but that's not their main job."

READ MORE: One of Scotland's oldest unsolved murders to be re-visited by forensic team 

Prof Nic Daéid combines teaching with research and expert commissions, specialising in fire scene investigations.

She contributed to the public inquiry  into the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed at least 72 people on  June 14 June 2017.

The inquiry was told last week that London fire brigade (LFB) did not know how to properly deploy water equipment that could have doused flames all the way to the top of tower, potentially saving lives.

"Doing that level of work is never necessarily easy but our job is to lend our expertise, to be impartial, unbiased and to provide evidence to the best of your ability to provide closure for the victims and families.

The Leverhulme centre has developed a new online mystery game - The Curse of the Burial Dagger - which is already being used by secondary school pupils in Glasgow and is designed to spark interest in forensic science as a career.

She says there has always been a high number of women coming into the profession at masters level. "But what you don't see is women progressing into the higher ranks.

"Interestingly in Scotland we have just appointed our first female director of our forensic laboratory, the first in history.  So it's starting to shift a little but in general seeing women in those upper echelons in forensic science is unusual."