Roger Byard – whose colleagues refer to him as ‘Doctor Death’ – has investigated some of the most traumatic deaths in Australia.
He’s also investigated some of the strangest.
The forensic pathologist told the latest episode of Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast about his baptism of fire into the profession, being called out to investigate the infamous ‘bodies in barrels’ Snowtown murders on his first week on call.
“I was called by the head of Major Crime one night … and I was so green,” he explained. “I didn’t realize that when the head of Major Crime calls you, it’s pretty serious.”
The Snowtown murders were a series of murders committed by John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner, and James Spyridon Vlassakis between August 1992 and May 1999, in and around Adelaide. A fourth person, Mark Haydon, was convicted of helping to dispose of the bodies. The trial was one of the longest and most publicized in Australian legal history, with Byard’s forensic evidence contributing to the convictions.
But while Snowtown may have been one of the most publicized cases Byard has worked on, it wasn’t the most bizarre.
“I’ve been collecting animal deaths,” he told Jubelin.
“Deaths from dogs, snakes, sharks, roosters, mackerel.”
You read that right. Mackerel.
“There was a bloke fishing in the Darwin Harbour and sharks were nearby, so this 25 kilogram mackerel jumped out of the water and sideswiped him,” he recalled.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” he continued.
But what about the rooster?
“There was a little old lady out the back collecting eggs,” he explains.
“Roosters, I understand, are nasty creatures. It went for her, and she had varicose veins and it just pecked her leg.”
Byard explains that he’s had a number of deaths come across his desk where people with varicose veins have experienced minor trauma and ended up dying.
“One case was a cat scratch,” he said. “People don’t realize, and this is the reason that I actually publicize this stuff, it’s not because it’s bizarre and weird, it’s to let people know that if you got varicose veins and you get a small hole, you need to lie down and put your finger over it and elevate it and you’ll survive. What [people] tend to do is wander around panicking and they bleed to death – completely unnecessary deaths.”
“But yeah,” adds Byard, “never trust a rooster.”
And while the stranger elements of Byard’s job might be headline-making, there’s a darker trauma that lingers.
“Nobody talks about post-traumatic stress with forensic pathologists, and yet every month of every year we go out to scenes,” he explained sadly.
“We see dismembered bodies, incinerated bodies. We see children that are being starved to death, vehicle accidents, dreadful scenes. And we have to not only immerse ourselves in it, we have to then describe it in great detail, understand it, then we have to present it to a jury and sometimes have our credibility attacked while we’re doing it.”
He explained that while his trauma has built up with each case he’s worked, so too has his understanding that he isn’t always going to find the answers.
“When I first started, I thought I was gonna find the causes of all these deaths – I was gung-ho,” he said.
“And then as I got further and further into my career, I realized that, no, I’m not going to find answers all the time. And I’m going to have to sit down with families and say, ‘I have no idea’. All I can say to them is, ‘it was nothing that you did’.
“ And also, a lot of the time they just want to meet the person that looked after their baby between the time when they saw the baby last, and when they saw their baby at the funeral home.”
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