In 2013, two years into her doctoral studies on forensic jewelry, Maria Maclennan found herself in a mortuary for the first time. It was in Namibia, and she was there to help identify the victims of a plane crash that had killed everyone on board.
It was the first time she had put her theoretical skills into practice, examining pieces of jewelry found in the wreckage and using her knowledge of designs, materials and the industry to provide investigators with leads.
“Being a forensic jeweler is not really a job that actually exists,” Dr. Maclennan, 35, said during a recent interview at her office in Edinburgh. “In some ways, it’s something I’ve made up and am still making up as I go.”
Since then she has helped identify the victims of many catastrophes, including building collapses, natural disasters and a terrorist attack. And while the situations can be harrowing — sometimes, she said, the jewelry was all but fused to human remains — she has approached the job as a professional: “You’re wearing your forensic gloves and it’s all very methodical and detached and disembodied from the person, the human being.”
But there is a part of the process that she finds emotionally difficult. “It’s at the end, the returning, when you give the belongings back to the family, which really strikes me,” she said. “You look at the piece as a sort of a proxy or representation of the individual. Especially, I think, in the absence of the human body.”
She pointed at one of her own rings, a stainless-steel band made by her partner, an engineer, as a Christmas present. “Maybe it’s because I’m a jeweler,” she said, “but I look at a piece like this, recovered in an incident, and it’s not quiet. It’s not an object sitting silent. It’s like it’s screaming at me.”
A Durable Clue
Dr. Maclennan now is a member of a disaster victim identification team for Blake Emergency Services, based in Cheshire, England.
“Maria is the only one who does what she does,” said Carole Davenport, the anthropology and archaeology manager at Blake. “She’s at the forefront of a field that she invented. She took the skills she learnt as a jeweler and she applied this to the forensics world.
“Jewelry can be particular to areas, and there are certain unique things about jewelry that can help you almost read the life of a person. That’s what Maria does.”
For almost five years, Dr. Maclennan has also taught three-week-long programs on forensic jewelry at the Edinburgh College of Art, part of the University of Edinburgh, where she is a senior lecturer in jewelry and silver smithing. (She also just completed a Diploma in Diamonds and Diamond Grading from the Gemological Institute of America branch in London.)
Aditi Ranganathan, 22, a final-year student in textile design, attended two of the programs early in her studies. “I still talk about it to this day because I think it shows that as creatives we can exist in lots of different spaces,” she said. “A lot of people, when they think jeweler, they think, ‘Oh, wedding rings,’ but the fact Maria is able to use her craft to help people is something really cool.”
The primary tools of victim identification are DNA, fingerprints and dental records, Dr. Maclennan says. And while jewelry alone is not enough to make a scientific forensic identification, it does have a useful place as what she calls a “secondary identifier.”
“Jewelry is robust,” she said. “It can survive a lot of trauma, and sadly it can outlast the human body.”
In addition to obvious connections such as names or dates engraved on wedding rings, “there could be a physical clue or characteristic on the jewelry that tells us when it was made or purchased, or who it was made by or who it was purchased by,” she said. (In Britain, for example, some jewelry is stamped by a government assay office with icons called hallmarks, which indicate details such as the type of metal, the date and the maker’s mark.)
She also noted that jewelry sometimes could be a repository for DNA, pulling off her own chunky silver-ring set with a large citrine and showing it to a visitor. “If you look through the stone from the front, you can see all kinds of gunk on the back,” she said. “The jewelry industry is always telling us to clean our jewelry, but from a forensic perspective, if we don’t, it can be a very good vessel for DNA.”
Inspiration and Experience
Dr. Maclennan was born in Inverness and grew up on the Black Isle, a peninsula in the Scottish Highlands. As a child, she said, she loved rifling through her grandmother’s jewelry — “mainly big, elaborate pieces of costume jewelry,” she recalled.
She decided to become a jeweler, earning both a Bachelor of Design in jewelry and metal design and a Master of Design in design for services from the University of Dundee.
Her move into forensics began in 2010, during her postgraduate studies, when the university’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification was working with Interpol and other partners on a database to track missing persons and identify bodies. She answered an appeal to art students to participate and found herself working alongside forensic scientists for a couple of months, an experience that she said inspired her master’s project on forensic jewelry as well as her doctoral studies.
In the early stages of her career, Dr. Maclennan recalled, some law enforcement officers were skeptical of her skills, unsettled by her striking eye makeup and myriad tattoos. “Having a young female from an art design background was unusual,” she said.
But by now, she added, she has worked with more than 10 enforcement organizations across Britain, including Police Scotland, the British Transport Police and the College of Policing.
She has also worked internationally. In August 2023, for example, she spent a week in Brazil training federal officers who investigate gem trafficking and the illegal mining of precious stones in the Amazon.
“Maria is amazing,” said Fernanda Ronchi, 33, a geologist who is a forensics expert with the Federal Police of Brazil, specializing in gold, gems and jewelry. “I did a workshop — something we didn’t have in Brazil — on how jewelry can help solve missing-persons cases. They have families, friends, and they need respect. She knows so, so much and she is so dedicated.”
During the last couple of years, Dr. Maclennan also has collaborated with Kelly Ross, 57, who spent 24 years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and is now a consultant specializing in money laundering, fraud and financial crime.
They are developing a course to train jewelers in forensic techniques — something they hope would eventually be offered online, Dr. Maclennan said — and are working on some forensic jewelry techniques to help the police crack cold cases.
“What’s so fantastic about Maria’s work is not only the pioneering part in the further development of best practice in her craft, but also the way she shares it with the world,” Mr. Ross said. “She doesn’t keep it for herself, she publicly gives it away. It’s so rare!”
Familiar Items
For a long time, Dr. Maclennan said, she considered how to apply her skills to help identify some of the thousands of migrants who died each year while trying to enter the European Union illegally.
In 2020, she consulted Jan Bikker, a friend who, as a forensic anthropologist, worked with the relatives of migrants who went missing in Greece. He introduced her to Dr. Pavlos Pavlidis, the chief forensic pathologist at the University General Hospital of Alexandroupolis, in Greece.
For two decades Dr. Pavlidis has performed autopsies on migrants — about 500 of whom have been recovered since 2000 from the Evros River, which forms much of the border between Greece and Turkey and is known for its dangerous currents. Others have been found in various locations throughout the region after dying from hypothermia or starvation or as victims of wildfires.
They are buried in migrant cemeteries, but Dr. Pavlidis has been storing their belongings in his mortuary. Dr. Maclennan decided to create a database of those possessions, a project she called Identifying the Displaced, so families seeking missing relatives could search for familiar items.
Funded by four small grants — “a few thousand pounds here, a few thousand there,” Dr. Maclennan said — she initially arranged for the translation and recording of police files and analyzed what she described as “hundreds of thousands of autopsy photos” before beginning to examine the belongings.
Though most of the work so far has focused on the database, they have “identified a number of prospective leads, and Jan has followed up with family,” she said. As of early June, it listed about 500 objects, including Islamic tawiz amulets, Christian crosses, a signet ring with an image of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, eyeglasses and cellphones.
“At the moment this is limited to one small mortuary in Greece,” Dr. Maclennan said. But her dream is to secure enough funding to extend the project throughout the country and later to Italy.
“I hate the word closure, but people’s families need to know what’s happened,” she said. “And everyone has a right to an identity and to be laid to rest.”
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