Diane Cockle

I am currently a regular member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, stationed at Richmond in the Forensic Identification Section. I've been a member of the force for over 8 years and am a qualified forensic identification and fingerprint examiner. I've been posted to Quesnel and Squamish in General Duty and "E" Div. H.Q. and Richmond in the Ident sections. Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the RCMP forensic team sent to Thailand in January 2005 to assist in the identification of Tsunami Victims. Throughout my service (and previous to joining the forces), I have assisted RCMP detachments, other police agencies, forensic pathologists and the BC Corner service in the analysis of found remains and crime scenes involving human remains.

Research Interests: Forensic Anthropology; Forensic Archaeology; Taphonomy; Archaeology; Crime Scene Investigation; The search for human remains; The development of techniques to recover forensic evidence, including fingerprints, in association with decomposing human remains.

PhD Research: The Continuum of Human Decomposition and the Factors that affect it: The purpose of the research is to determine what the critical factors are that affect the rate of decomposition and bone deterioration in forensic contexts in each climactic region of Canada.

The vast database of forensic death investigations that exist in police records has rarely (if ever) been accessed by the scientific community due to confidentiality issues. A large scale study will be undertaken to create a regionally and situational specific model to see if PMI can be predicted. A number of factors including; time of year, micro-environmental context, manner and cause of death, stage of decomposition and established PMI will be assessed. The study will hopefully create a database from which to create theoretical models surround PMI. If it can be determined that there are predictive aspects to decomposition given specific circumstances, a predictive model could be created and made accessible to all death investigators to ensure that PMI estimations have a more objective rather than subjective basis.

Master's Thesis: The Fremont in Idaho; retracing the dispersal of Fremont peoples from Utah into Southern Idaho based on the analysis of Fremont artifacts recovered from Wilson Butte Cave and other regionally associated archaeological sites.