Uncovering History and Identity: Turi King on DNA, Mysteries, and Forensic Science

Laura: Turi King, we are so lucky to have you with us! You presented this morning, and also were on a panel on where evidence meets narrative. So, talking about what happens from science to podcasting to TV shows. And so, before we get into your show, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself in case there’s anybody (I’d be surprised if there is), but anybody who doesn’t know about what you do.

Turi: So, I am currently the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, but my background is actually in archaeology. So, first in Canada, then in the UK. And then I got really interested in how you can use genetics to answer questions in history and archaeology. So, I ended up going to Leicester and doing my master’s and my postdoc. I was really lucky. I had Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting, on my PhD, panel. So, I completely lucked out. And then I got asked to lead on the identification of King Richard the Third. So, if anyone’s heard of me, it’s usually because of that. So now I’m an academic. I do a lot of kind of ancient and forensic DNA, but I also do a lot of television. I’ve just been asked to do kind of more and more. So, I host a true crime podcast at the moment called Head Number 7. I work in documentaries, but I also work on a television program called DNA Family Secrets.

Laura: Well, we’d love to ask you about that. Can you tell us about the show and how that started for you?

Turi: So, people had kind of heard about me anyways because I, you know, I do vary a bit. The bits of kind of science that I do often has… It’s of an angle that’s of real interest to the general public. So, people had heard about me and the work I’d done on various bits and things. So, I got contacted by this production company known as Minnow Films, and what they wanted to do was a programme about using DNA to answer questions like finding family members. The first two series that we did, it had this particular format where two of the stories would be kind of a family history. One like, I don’t know who my father is or I’m donor conceived or that kind of thing. And then there was another one which would be a medical angle. So, it would be somebody like, I know there’s this genetic disease in my family, and I want to know if I’m a carrier. And I loved that as a geneticist because you think, well, it’s genetics answering questions in kind of family history, but also this medical angle. And we did that for the first two series. And then they had kind of viewer feedback. And actually, the viewers were really interested in the family history side. So, series three has all been family history. And basically people come to us with kind of three main questions with an overarching one. So, one is I’m adopted; I want to know who my parents are. One or the other might be donor conceived or they would like to know… Usually it’s actually about donor siblings, less necessarily about the donor. And then one could be, I don’t know who my biological father is, and that’s either because they’ve grown up not knowing, or increasingly these days, people take a DNA test, and they realize their biological father can’t be the father they thought it was. And across all of this is often usually something around ancestry. So, someone who’s adopted doesn’t know what their ancestry is and they’d like to know. So, we use DNA to help people with all of those.

Laura: I think that’s remarkable. And I actually didn’t know that it started out with a medical component as well before it went more into the family history. Can you tell me a little bit about what the show means to you? I know on the panel, it was really interesting to hear how it began from you focusing on the scientific portion, but then you can’t help but get involved in the stories.

Turi: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I say to people, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. So, we have people who come to us with really deep stories about about identity. I think it’s about who they feel they are and their place in the world. And I think that… I mean, I love it. I am so incredibly privileged to be a part of this program, to be able to use science to help these people. And it was very sweet. As I said in my talk, when they came to me, they were like, we have this lovely presenter, Stacey Dooley. She’s going to be doing more of the touchy-feely side. And then you’re the scientist kind of straight down the line. I was like, “oh my goodness, you have the wrong girl,” because I am this massive empath and I just can’t help but kind of feel what they’re feeling to some extent. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we’re filming, I kind of feel like we go into a bit of a bubble and it’s like just me and them and you don’t even know the camera’s there and I’m just talking them through their results. And people complain that I talk really slowly on the program, but it’s because I’m telling people information that is deeply affecting them and who they are. And I often say it’s like you can see who they are is kind of like for them changing in front of your eyes, and they’re processing all of this stuff. So, I go quite slowly. But yeah, I love it. It’s an amazing program. I am so lucky to be a part of it.

Laura: I love that you go slowly, because these are such sensitive and emotional topics and something that somebody’s maybe wondered about their whole lives, and now they’re hearing something that could change their life.

Turi: Oh, completely. Yeah. And I think that it’s being sensitive to that, to the fact that they’re going to be hearing something that is going to change their place in the world, how they perceive themselves. And I think it’s being really sensitive to what they are likely to be going through. And that’s one of the things that’s so important on the program. We have a counselor, we have social workers, we have all the support in the background. And I think the other really important thing about the program is that we are slightly unusual in that we show the reality of DNA testing, in that sometimes we’re not able to answer somebody’s question completely. We might be able to get them to a certain point and we always say, “look, give it six months, a year or two years. Your question might be answered.” We may never be able to answer it, but it’s that reality of sometimes things aren’t tied up in a nice, neat little bow. It’s often complicated. These are humans that we’re dealing with and difficult emotions. And so, it’s something where sometimes it doesn’t work out all like really amazingly and lovely. And so, we’re trying to be there to support them for that. And then you do get these, these ones where it’s just amazing where they’re enveloped into a family and that resolution for people I think is really important.

Laura: I think it’s really interesting too. Do you think having this public forum has changed people’s understanding of the limitations and the capabilities, as you said, you know, things may be answered in the future as the technology changes. And I think the average person is now learning so much more than they ever knew before.

Turi: Yeah, I completely agree. And I know that that’s one of the things that people go, “But wait a minute, you didn’t answer their question.” And that’s what’s so important about our program, is that we show that reality that it doesn’t always work out completely right. And it can take time. And I think if people start to understand that that’s what the reality of DNA testing is, I think that’s a really valuable thing that we can give people so that they know themselves when they’re working on this, and sometimes they don’t solve it. They don’t think it’s not about me, it’s about this is where we are with the DNA matches.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. Are there any surprising or memorable stories, something you could share?

Turi: Oh, my goodness. Which one?

Laura: Well, exactly 1 or 2. Yeah. We would love.

Turi: So, I think the one that affected me most in the first series was somebody called Margaret, who I talked about a little bit. So, she knew she was adopted. She knew her mom was Irish, and she had waited and waited. You know, she has kids and she’s looking after everybody else, and she retires. And she finally thinks, “No, I’m going to see if I can find out who my mom is.” And she’s very much aware that “I may have left this too late. And I don’t know, even if you can find out who she was, the chances of her being alive are so slim.” And she was alive, but she had dementia, so it’s that bittersweet of you can meet her, but she might not remember you. But she tells this amazing story of going over and, you know, meeting her mom and her mom holding her hand. And, we think, from what she was saying, seemingly knowing who she was. And that was hugely poignant for her to meet her. And her mom suddenly passed away a few months later. So, it was this case where she’d done it just in time. And so, it was so incredibly moving. And so, with each series, I’ve gone home to my husband and gone, “This is my Margaret for the next century”, I think, because he knew. I mean, I think this is the thing; it is impossible not to really care for these people and to hope to be able to answer questions for them. And all of them are amazing. Um, yeah. Just such extraordinary stories, these people.

Laura: I think it’s been fantastic to watch the trajectory… Did you ever think when you were working on the Richard the Third that this would be your future?

Turi: No. So, I had done little bits of television during my PhD, because, and this is lovely, there’s this growing interest in DNA and how it can be used to kind of connect past and present family history, social history. So, I love all of that. So, I have been doing little bits. The Richard the Third project obviously kind of put things on steroids a little bit, but to have the luck to be involved in a program like this? Yeah, incredible. And if you had said this to me, you know, when was it? We think it’s about a decade ago that we last spoke. Exactly. And to be here now. I’m just ridiculously lucky. Yeah.

Laura: I think it’s your talent and kindness. I mean, I’ve loved watching what’s happened. It’s amazing. And you’ve been in the news again recently? Yes.

Turi: So, this is the Kaspar Hauser case. So, I have a really lovely colleague slash friend called Walther Parsons, who will be known to the forensics community. And he contacted me a few years ago saying he had a particular case. He couldn’t tell me what it was about, but would I be happy to be involved? And it was the Kaspar Hauser case, (and I had never heard of Kaspar Hauser even when he told me what it was about), but apparently incredibly famous in Europe. So, this is a case where a young lad who’s about age 16, turns up in Nuremberg, 1828, and he can barely walk or talk. He can write the name Kaspar Hauser, but doesn’t seem to know what it means. He tells the story about having been kept essentially in a dungeon for as long as he can remember. Somebody is feeding him and giving him water, but thinks there must be opium in it because he never sees anybody. Somebody is looking after his personal hygiene, like, you know, doing his hair and cutting his toenails and that kind of thing. So, somebody is kind of looking after him and he says that, you know, before he’s released, somebody comes, teaches him how to write his name and teaches him how to say, I want to be a cavalryman like my father was, and then walks him to Nuremberg and drops him there. So, he becomes a little bit of a celebrity. And rumors start to swirl because people think he might be the hereditary Prince of Baden.

So, to understand this story, you have to go back a few generations where there’s the Grand Duke of Baden and he marries twice. So, the dukedom is only going to pass down through the male line of the first marriage, and it has to exhaust that before anyone from the second marriage can become the Duke. And what happens is it passes down a couple of generations and then this couple… So, this is Carl and his wife, Stéphanie de Beauharnais. They have five children, including a son who’s apparently born quite healthy but then dies about three weeks later. So, the dukedom kind of ends there and people start going, “Oh, wait a minute. The dukedom then passed to someone from the second marriage. Was it actually the second wife who swapped these babies at birth type thing?” So, she’s apparently supposed to swap in the sickly child of one of her servants. And that actually this lad, Kaspar Hauser, is that hereditary prince, now 16 years old. So, it’s been this long, long running kind of theory about this. So what Walther was asking was whether or not we’d be the second lab that was involved in testing hairs from this and female line relatives of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, and showed that it couldn’t possibly be. He wasn’t the hereditary Prince of Baden. So that’s kind of finally put that one to rest. There had been a study that had been done previously, about 20 years ago, but there had been some questions around it. So, this hopefully now kind of corroborates that and hopefully finally ends that story.

Laura: It’s so interesting because it’s really steeped in, you know, controversy and mythology and conspiracy.

Turi: Yeah, yeah.

Laura: How does that feel then when the science, you know, answers the question?

Turi: I love it. I mean, don’t you love that that these days you can now use science, genetics, new technologies to be able to say something about historical questions in the past. It basically goes back to… So, I was sitting there in a lecture in Cambridge and it was the Romanov case. So, Erika Hagelberg was talking to us about the Romanov case. I had been doing archaeology up to that point, and that was the case that turned it for me, that I was like, that’s what I want to do. And that’s what set me off on this trajectory. And now I get to work on cases like that, you know, solving mysteries using DNA. I absolutely love it.

Laura: I think it’s just it’s remarkable. Both sides. How do you balance, you know, DNA, family secrets, and then, you know, the academic side and working on, you know, individual projects like this.

Turi: It’s a lot of work. But I also consider myself ridiculously lucky, which makes it much, much easier to do. But of course, I absolutely love the academic side. And then I love that I get to work in television and radio, and it’s bringing sometimes quite complicated scientific subjects to the public. I love doing that kind of thing. So yeah, again, just the amount of luck in my life, I think to be able to work on these various things, I yeah it’s great.

Laura: Well, I think part of it is just attracted to you as well. I mean, I really do. What are you working on now or what do you plan for the future?

Turi: So I’m working on a whole bunch of different cases. Um, some of which are under NDAs, so I can’t tell.

Laura: I would assume.

Turi: Yeah. So that is the really nice thing is, having done this project, you do get people contact you to work on, on different things. So, one of the projects I’m working on is Jamestown, Virginia. So first permanent English settlement in the US. And working with the amazing archaeology team there and, you know, trying to identify individuals. So yeah, so I love that project. That’s one of my favorites that I’m working on at the moment.

Laura: I can’t wait to hear what you find out. That’ll be incredible.

Turi: Yeah.

Laura: Well, you’ve definitely been with us a couple different times, so we always like to ask, you know, what are you looking forward to here? Why do you come back? How is this valuable for you? I mean, we were so lucky to have you on the panel today. But you know what? What makes you say yes?

Turi: Oh, my goodness. Well, first of all, it’s a ridiculously prestigious conference, so to be able to come is amazing. I love catching up with people. I’ve just had lunch with somebody who is really sweet, so we’ve always corresponded and things like that over internet. We’ve had Zoom chats, but to actually meet her and have a chat with her in person… So, it’s the networking, it’s the finding out what the latest technologies are. Yeah, I always love coming to ISHI. It’s always a fantastic conference.

Laura: Well, we are so lucky to have you this year. And thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. I always enjoy it so much.

Turi: Thank you for having me. Thank you.