Professor Fiona Brookman

“I am generally motivated simply by a thirst for knowledge. My ultimate aim is to help to develop strategies that will improve homicide investigation practice and detection rates for these most serious lethal crimes. 

“I have spent most of my career to date exploring why people commit violent crimes and responses to violence, including how the police (alongside forensic scientists and prosecutors) investigate homicide and how it can be prevented. 

“The first edition drew upon research from my PhD, most notably interviews with murderers and the analysis of police murder files.  It was developed with my undergraduate students in mind not long after I finished my PhD in 2000.  I had designed and started to teach ‘Understanding Homicide’ here and there was no academic book that covered the broad range of topics that I wanted to include in that module.  This book benefits from all the data collection and research that I have been involved with since writing the first. This includes my shift in focus from research exclusively on homicide offenders, to research on how the police, forensic scientists, and others, investigate homicide and how it is adjudicated at court. It has also been substantially revised in terms of theory and research to take account of new ideas that have emerged about the causes of (lethal) violence and techniques to tackle it.

“My job has taken me to various parts of Europe to present research findings at international and national conferences, including Tubingen, Leiden, Oslo, Stockholm, and various parts of the US (including San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans) and, finally, to Brisbane in Australia where I was invited to give a key-note presentation on homicide investigation.  

“I have also spent time as a Visiting Professor at American University in Washington DC, where I also spent many months, on separate visits, gathering data on homicide investigation. That research involved me shadowing homicide detectives at work and involved some very memorable bits of fieldwork including darting around the woods at about four in the morning with a detective and a blood hound searching for a homicide suspect, attending a post-mortem in Baltimore, and sitting face to face with an undercover informant as he provided information about a (potential) homicide suspects movements. 

“But the favourite part of my job is undertaking research, sharing the findings and new knowledge with my students and other academics, and supervising PhD students. 

“In my spare time, I walk, eat out, do a little bit of Pilates, go to music events, and spend time out on scooters and at scooter rallies.  I have a small frame Vespa that I ride from time to time, in the summer mainly!"