'Death is part of your daily life': Ex-homicide detective reveals what it's REALLY like to discover a dead body - and why it's not like Silent Witness

Daily Mail​

28-07-2025

Investigating grisly crime scenes on a notorious strip dubbed 'Murder Mile' would be a baptism of fire for most trainee detectives.
But for Damian Allain, the scourge of knife crime and shootings in Peckham, south-east London, in the late 1980s was what spiked his interest in becoming a homicide detective for Britain's biggest police force.
Having served 31 years in the Metropolitan Police, the former detective chief inspector has been confronted with harrowing crime scenes that most of us will never face in a lifetime.
It's a far cry from what you see on BBC hit drama Silent Witness, he admits, joking that you wouldn't have a pathologist, in this case actress Emilia Fox, 'running around trying to investigate the murder'.
From finding a bloodied woman beaten and strangled to death in the shower cubicle of an office to staring down at the disfigured face of a man who was burned alive in the boot of a car in a twisted revenge plot, Mr Allain has seen it all.
'Death is part of your daily life,' he tells MailOnline in the brutally honest assessment you would expect from a hardened detective who has worked on the frontlines of homicide crime for three decades.
It is clear that having worked on hundreds of murder cases, attending countless crime scenes and post-mortems, Mr Allain has become astonishingly desensitised to seeing dead bodies.
'It's obviously quite shocking,' he concedes. 'But you're there to do a professional job and you put any anxieties aside. You've got to crack on and just investigate the circumstances. There's a great sense of professional pride that takes over.'
Seeing murder victims is something detectives just get used to, he says, adding: 'You're immersed in that environment. You go to post-mortems and crime scenes and see death as part of your daily life.'
The harder part, Mr Allain admits, is meeting the victims' grieving families and supporting them when they see the beaten or burned bodies of their loved ones.
He says in the past 'you would actively dissuade families to view the remains', but the 'culture has changed' and relatives often want to see the remains to 'see their loved one for the last time'.
Mr Allain added: 'No two people grieve the same way, you do get different reactions... I've had every emotion in front of me from families being perfectly lucid - not visibly distressed - through to people flailing around on the floor in grief.'
'Sometimes there's even anger directed towards you because they see you as the authority.'
His first homicide case, in 1991, was a 'nasty' murder in Peckham where an old man was queuing up in a benefits office when three men dragged him into a disused warehouse and beat him to death.
'This guy was clubbed to death and then they set the whole building on fire,' he recalled. 'This poor guy's remains were found and I was the exhibits officer on that case which was quite unusual for a trainee detective back then.'
Mr Allain, now a lecturer in policing, criminology and the criminal justice system at Brunel University of London, tells MailOnline about three memorable cases that have stuck with him throughout his career and beyond his retirement in 2017.
The first case that sticks in Mr Allain's mind was finding the beaten and strangled body of New Zealander Cathy Marlow, who was murdered in her office block in Vauxhall by her ex-colleague Matthew Fagan, in 2007.
Ms Marlow was killed after a cruel quirk of fate put them in the same place at the same time. She had come into work on the weekend only to find Fagan, who had been fired from the company, stealing computers.
Ms Marlow's body was found in a shower cubicle at her office after she was tied up and throttled with her own scarf at the offices of market research company Research Now.
Mr Allain was met with a grisly scene, where the walls and floor of the office were smeared with blood.
'She suffered a really significant head injury, there was lots of blood. And there were drag marks in blood down a corridor into a shower room and she was found slumped. in a shower room. The actual cause of the death was strangulation.'
Mr Allain said he 'vividly' remembers Ms Marlow's family coming over from New Zealand after her death. 'Just imagine that you live on the other side of the world, and you get a call to say she's been murdered in her office block in the way that she had been,' he said.
'I just remember them being very lost really. They were in shock and didn't know where to turn and of course they were in a foreign country.'
The detective also managed to piece together how the murderer proceeded to then steal the laptops as they found his blood - indicating there had been a struggle - under the desks where he had gone to disconnect the cables.
The murderer had tried to claim he was mugged in Peckham at the time the attack took place in a bid to provide a false alibi.
However, CCTV showed him going to and from the premises and when he was eventually charged and his name released to the public, someone called to say he had sold them the laptops on the following Sunday.
Mr Allain admitted that forensic evidence is absolutely crucial when first approaching a crime scene as it brings the 'scene to life to determine what's happened' which can help you start to identity lines of investigation.
Another case which sticks in the mind of Mr Allain after all these years is the grisly love triangle murder of a TV executive in February 2012.
Gagandip Singh, 21, was bundled into the back of a boot before the vehicle was set on fire in Blackheath, south-east London.
Harinder Shoker, 20, was sentenced to life with a minimum of 22 years for murder, while Darren Peters, 20, was jailed for 12 years for manslaughter.
Mr Singh was murdered in a cold-blooded revenge plot after he allegedly attempted to rape 20-year-old Mundill Mahil. Mahil, who lured Mr Singh to her university house in Brighton, was jailed for six years for causing grievous bodily harm.
The victim was unaware that Shoker and Peters were waiting for him in the bedroom and they violently attacked him, wrapped him in a duvet and put him in the boot of his Mercedes before taking the car to Blackheath and burning it.
Mr Singh was still alive when the car went up in flames and died of breathing in toxic fumes.
Recalling the gruesome case, Mr Allain said: 'When he arrived, he goes in there and he's basically battered with a camera tripod and he's bundled into his own Mercedes and then driven up to Blackheath, where they torched the car.'
He continued: 'Obviously, we've got a situation where there's disfigurement of the body. It obviously makes life slightly more difficult.
'When you've got fire involved, of course that destroys any potential often for forensic evidence as well.
'You've got little or no chance of getting any sort of DNA or any other trace evidence, and you've obviously got the added where you've got to identify who the victim is, because visual identification is often impossible.
'You've got to manage the family as well in terms of do they want to see their loved one? We would never accept a visual identification, but obviously, once we know who the victim is, either through odontology or through DNA, the family may well want to view the body and that happened in this case.
'The mother and her daughter [Gagandip's sister] were insistent on seeing him which is difficult to manage.'
The victim's sister, Amandip Kaur Singh, previously relieved the harrowing moment on 5Star, saying: 'Having to see the burnt body is something I can't believe, I don't know how we got through that.
'There was no skin, he had gone charcoal colour. His eyes had sunk in. He didn't even look like a human. It was scary, but he was my brother so I had to go.'
Mr Allain said the case was 'memorable in a number of ways'.
'I think we picked that job up on a early Saturday morning, and by Wednesday we charged three people with murder and it was quite fast moving investigation.'
Despite the fast investigation, the detective also encountered stumbling blocks that could have hampered the investigation.
There were five students living in the house, none of whom contacted the police and left the address, while a neighbour subsequently told police they saw two men carrying a 'bulky object covered in a duvet' to the boot. He took down the number plate but only told police when they carried out house to house inquiries.
Mr Allain explains: 'So you've got five medical students there who know something really bad has happened there. They don't contact the cops.
'And obviously you've got someone down the street who's seen something suspicious and didn't call the cops, which is fine, but it's a good example of the fact that don't assume that because someone's seen or heard anything that they are going to contact you.'
The third case he recalls investigating was the gruesome murder of George Francis, a career criminal who was linked to the £26million Brinks-Mat heist.
Mr Francis, 63, was shot four times at his haulage firm in Bermondsey, south London, by contract killers in 2003.
Terence Conaghan, from Glasgow, and John O'Flynn, from Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, were convicted of murder.
Mr Francis was savagely shot in the face, back, arm and finger after he tried to collect a £70,000 debt from a business contact, his Old Bailey trial heard at the time.
The gangster was found slumped in the front seat with his legs hanging out of the front passenger door after he was gunned down while collecting a newspaper from his car.
Mr Francis, described by prosecutors as a 'career criminal' with a 'chequered history' is believed to have played a role in helping to dispose of a large part of the Brinks-Mat gold bullion heist in 1983.
Adding to the 'Brinks-Mat curse', he was the ninth man linked to the robbery to be killed
Recalling the case, Mr Allain told MailOnline: 'That was quite an interesting case. It was challenging in a number of ways, because it cut across not just homicide, but organised crime.'
In grisly detail, he revealed: 'It was an execution style shooting as well. The guy just turned up for work and he was just shot point blank range in the head. He was shot four times.
'It's quite chilling to think that the guy's just driving to work and then, all of a sudden, he's been shot in quite a cool and collected fashion.'
Mr Allain explained how one of the first decisions to make in this case was whether you are going to 'extricate the body from the vehicle or take the vehicle with the body inside to a sterile location where you can conduct forensic work'.
Mr Allain and and his team were able to snare the killers after a pair of glasses and a cigarette left at the scene showed traces of O'Flynn and Conaghan's DNA.
Despite working on some horrific murder cases, the former detective is incredibly matter of fact when it comes to discovering dead bodies.
He tells MailOnline: 'I think your initial feeling is dependent on the circumstances. You can be shocked in terms of how that person has died. With Cathy Marlow, she's died in her office block in quite an horrific attack... that does make you stop and think and it is quite shocking.
'But then there's a great sense of professional pride that takes over and think in terms of the mindset of just as horrific as this is, it is now my job to try and unpick what's happened and how it's happened, and start to bring offenders to justice.'
The former detective says while he enjoys the odd investigative drama, his real obsession is true crime.
He explains: 'It's interesting when you watch Silent Witness because you see the pathologist running around trying to investigate the murder, which obviously doesn't happen... it's totally in the world of fiction.
'There is a balance to be struck in making entertaining television to the public and having some level of continuity about policing practice.'
'Some of these dramatized murder series are pretty true true to life, and others go off on a bit of a fictional tangent sometimes, with a view to entertaining the public.
'I do watch occasionally some of these dramatized programs. But I also watch quite a lot of true crime,' he said.