“It looks like a fortress, a secure building of 11,000 m² on 5 levels.” This is how Christel describes the forensic police laboratory she has been managing since February 2023. A place where 170 officials work together, especially experts each specializing in different areas: “It requires a lot of knowledge and skills. One can be an expert in DNA fingerprinting, in transpapillary revelation, or in ballistics,” she explains on the show ‘Un jour une vie’ on RTL.
The main mission of the forensic police is to connect crime scenes with the perpetrators. For this, teams rely on objects containing various traces called seals. These precious clues are collected directly from the scene of the crime, and can sometimes be very numerous: “We can go from one seal, up to 500, for a major event like the Paris attacks in 2015,” she asserts. The director explains that the analysis times vary greatly: “The most relevant ones are analyzed very quickly. And then, as the searches and investigations progress, waves of seals arrive and it takes several months to examine them,” she affirms.
After several years at the helm of the laboratory, Christel has a clear view of the criminal world: “The perfect crime does not exist according to the forensic policewoman that I am. We will do everything possible to try to search for the maximum of traces, whether DNA, fingerprints, to provide objective elements to justice.” The director states that the criminal inevitably leaves a clue behind, recalling a case that is a perfect example: “A janitor killed his wife, dismembered the body, put it in a garbage bag, and then went on vacation. On the garbage bag, there was adhesive tape (…) By examining this tape, we saw that it had been cut with teeth. We took a sample and that’s how we traced it back to the husband.”
A cigarette butt can be planted at a crime scene without someone knowing
Christel Sire-Coupet
If traces sometimes require a detailed investigation of the terrain, other crime scenes offer more obvious evidence: “It was a soldier who had been stabbed in La Défense. The investigators from the criminal brigade, by looking at the CCTV cameras, realized that the culprit, in his escape, lost his sweater that he had tied around his waist.” After analyzing the garment, the director and her teams indeed found the identity of the killer. But the criminal can also try to deceive the police by leaving false clues: “A cigarette butt can be planted at a crime scene without someone knowing. When DNA started to appear in investigations, it could be seen as the queen of evidence. So we should not skip the investigation process.”
Pas passionate about her profession, the director still wants to debunk the myths propagated by fiction, such as the series ‘CSI’: “It’s a distorting mirror, there is truth and falsehood. It still remains a caricature, since it is an American series. They go on the field. In France, the forensic experts from the laboratory do not go on the field,” she explains. Even if this profession remains fantasized by many, Christel concludes by putting things into perspective: “We are ordinary people.”
