Beyond the Tape: The Life and Many Deaths of a State Pathologist

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Just finishing up here, Doc, then you can give it all a once-over.’ Vinnie let his camera rest against his chest. ‘She’s lying in an awkward position so I can’t see too much.’ A few years later guns entered the fray. "Up until then, Glasgow had a reputation as 'Stab City' and it was mainly knife crime we were dealing with," she says. "There was a change in the gangland killings. All of a sudden, we had this spate of shootings."

So the pathologist may not be the pathologist I knew. It will be a hybrid, a radiologist/pathologist.” Absolutely, I’m not the life and soul of the party! All I’ve ever done is talk about work and so I’ve had to learn a new language because if you meet a wee wifey in Tesco you can’t turn around and go, “Did you see about that death the other day?!” So I had to learn how to do small talk! Donning the sequins and spray tan, Marie is world away from her esteemed career which saw her on every high-profile murder case in the country. Dr Marie Cassidy has admitted she’s ‘missed a lot in life’ due to the nature of her career ahead of her DWTS debut on Sunday evening. Pic: Barry McCall Photography When Harbison retired in 2003, Cassidy was appointed state pathologist and, like her predecessor, her name became known in Irish households, as she was often seen when a murder or tragedy hit the headlines. Over 30 years of practice, she has performed thousands of post-mortems and dealt with hundreds of murders.Whatever has been happening in the day, I need to just look at nonsense, read nonsense or whatever so it just clears my head of the day, and I can then concentrate on the family. That’s the way I’ve always worked.” She became a member of the Royal College of Pathologists in 1985 and a forensic pathologist the same year, making her the first female full-time forensic pathologist in the United Kingdom. The belt was taken as evidence and sent to the forensic science lab which confirmed the staining was Mary's blood. The problem was it made me become a bit reclusive," she says. "I thought: 'Well, I can't go out and get rip-roaring drunk' because people would be going, 'Is that not Marie Cassidy falling over in the street there?' In the 13 years you worked in Glasgow you say you did some 5,000 postmortems. How many in your 14 years did you do here?

Its synopsis reads: “Dr Terry O’Brien has recently arrived in Ireland from Scotland to take up a position as state pathologist. Soon after, a body is found in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Rachel Reece, host of the popular true crime podcast ’Ireland’s Missing Women’, has been brutally murdered.The scene, we learn in a gripping though upsetting first episode of a new season of Dr Cassidy’s Casebook (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm), was Grangegorman, a shuttered mental hospital converted into sheltered accommodation. Manuela’s mother and father set up the Manuela Riedo Foundation in Ireland to raise awareness of and prevent sexual crime in the country. It helps to fund charities and agencies who provide support to victims of rape and sexual violence. Shame on us: they lost a Swiss angel and we gained vital services for victims of sexual assault.

Cassidy cites this as an example of great detective work. In fact, she is highly complimentary about the work of the gardai. There’s not much I can do about people who think that it’s a bit odd. Well, it is — the whole thing is very odd — but I’m just there to have some fun. It’s an opportunity to do something you haven’t done before,” she said of the response. But that doesn't make good telly. It then became good telly once they had Silent Witness and CSI because they could make it glamorous. Suddenly forensics was becoming sexy and glamorous. I was like: 'Excuse me, I have been doing this for years …'" Dr Marie Cassidy — state pathologist for two decades — has signed a two-book deal for a crime fiction series set in Dublin inspired by her career. She said they didn't plan to get married but her mother said they couldn't live together without tying the knot.

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The house’s commanding vista was, that afternoon, marred by a haphazard arrangement of garda cars and vans. Viewers were happy to see the show on their screens but sad to hear of the tragic cases, as they took to social media to praise the former state pathologist. A Dublin man gave a false confession to the murders and spent nine months in custody before it was found that he had lied, while Nash, who was already serving two life sentences for a double murder of a Roscommon couple, confessed to the murder before retracting his statement. Mark Nash, who was sentenced to two life sentences for a double murder he committed 18 years prior, was sentenced to two more life sentences in 2015. Pic: Rolling News