Fans of true crime will have the opportunity to get down to the nitty-gritty of crime scene analysis when two forensic scientists’ talk about their work in early September at WORD Christchurch Festival 2026
Thomas Coyle and Ruben Miller have worked on challenging investigations at the scene and in the lab and have published The Dead Speak and The Blood Says Otherwise respectively which offer insights into their careers. They will be joined by former Christchurch mayor and former Labour Government Cabinet Minister Lianne Dalziel for a discussion on their experiences at Tūranga on Saturday 5 September.
Both men came to New Zealand as migrants, Ruben came from the Netherlands and Thomas from England and both considered different careers before moving into forensic science. Ruben dabbled with special effects in movies and Thomas applied to be in the navy before deciding on a life of crime detection.
Thomas and Ruben are open about their motivations and some of the strange situations their training and work put them in. Thomas was part of a team that helped identify many people killed by a 2004 tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, and he details in his book the work and how he coped with the devastation. He was also part of a team that faced similarly challenging work in Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake. Ruben writes about how his work led him to build an understanding for people from all walks of life, and as a result he developed a deeper empathy for people caught up in crime.
Early in their careers both men found their introduction to working with corpses confronting and you can’t help but wonder if their senior colleagues made those initial interactions with cadavers deliberately challenging.
They are irritated by TV shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation which glamourise the job and lead fans of the show to believe forensic analysis and crime solving can be resolved in a matter of hours which is far from their actual work experience.
Similar to detectives, forensic investigators sometimes end up trying to think like criminals as they try to penetrate the motivations of perpetrators. The confronting scenes they have to analyse plus the pressures of delivering evidence in a courtroom result in a very stressful occupation. Both writers write about the different pressures they faced and some of their coping mechanisms.
Thomas Coyle was awarded a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for services to forensic science in 2024 and has analysed over 20,000 crime scenes. With more than 20 years' experience in forensic science, Ruben Miller now reviews cases as a consultant and works in criminal justice reform.
WORD Christchurch Festival 2026
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Crime and Forensics
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