Members of the Investigation Team

There are many different members of the investigation team that are involved in the process of a criminal investigation. Different members of a team contribute to a case in specific areas such as the forensic scientists contribute to the collection, preservation and analysis of evidence. 

A few of the members of the investigation team are listed below:

• Police
• Forensics
• Scenes Of Crime Officer
• Consultants
• Crown Prosecution Service

Some of the evidence that was collected in the investigation of the moors murders is listed below:

• Hatchet that killed Edward Evans
• Tape of Lesley Ann Downey
• Pornographic Photos
• Edward Evans' Body
• David Smith's Witness Statement

Each piece of evidence was handled by different members of the investigation team for different reasons. The police handled all the evidence found at the scene when they conducted their initial investigation into the moors murders and when they followed leads from the initial investigation. Only the police handled every single piece of evidence as their role is to investigate and find potential leads for new information to further the case and so they handled different types of evidence such as the witness statement of David Smith and the body of Edward Evans. Other members of the investigation team would handle other more specific pieces of evidence such as a consultant would handle Edward Evans' body to determine the official cause of death to the later provide this evidence in court to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS would not deal with the body directly however, pictures would be provided so that in court they can be referred to if necessary. The tape of Lesley Ann Downey would have been handled by forensics as well as consultants and the CPS as with it being such a delicate type of evidence, not many people would want to have heard it play. The CPS would have played the tape in the trial to show the court the evidence that was collected from Manchester Central Station that was found in lost luggage that Brady had tried to hide there.

The evidence should have been secured by using a variety of methods such as the Chain of Custody that logs who accesses evidence and for what purpose they have opened it. Because of the time of the case, I cannot find out if there was a chain of custody followed and if it was followed correctly; however, because of the time period, there was no communication between different police forces and this has shown that if these crimes had been committed in more recent years, they would have not killed as many children as because there is a program, Command and Control, that police forces all over the UK use to upload case files onto so if a similar case is already on the system, it flags up to the user and shows that there has been more cases similar. But because there wasn't a link between police forces in the 1960s, Brady and Hindley were only caught after DCI Joe Mounsey took over the cases of the missing children in Manchester area only to find there were more children missing than anticipated.