If it were not for Canberra's Renee Wilson, a man who murdered his girlfriend may have roamed free and left a family to mourn without justice.
The young woman was found hanged in her home in Timor-Leste, a tragic scene initially written off as a suicide by investigators on the remote island, 745 kilometres north of Darwin.
But an officer trained by Ms Wilson, a forensic scientist, noticed something that felt entirely wrong - the victim's bare feet were nearly touching the ground.
Remembering Ms Wilson's lessons on the importance of shoe impressions, the officer dusted a nearby chair for clues, and up popped a distinct tread pattern - one that did not match any shoe in the house, but perfectly matched the victim's boyfriend.
It was this investigative intuition that led the murderer to confess, and gave answers to a grieving family.
"[The boyfriend] started changing his story, saying 'Oh yeah, I was there ...' [Dili police] noticed that he had scratches, started to look at him in more detail, and he eventually said he had killed her," Ms Wilson said.
It was a triumph of a crime scene examination laboratory spearheaded by Ms Wilson, who is coming home after spending four years in Dili transforming the way the island's police force solve crimes.
After she was told she was too tall to be a ballet dancer as a teenager, New Zealand-born Ms Wilson decided she would teach young dancers.
By her early 20s, she grew tired of teaching and decided to move to Australia where she began working with her cousin in the weight loss management industry.
However, the job felt unfulfilling and pushed the arts graduate to pursue a part-time master's degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University.
"I had a child and needed to work as well, I remember spending a lot of nights and early mornings writing assignments," Ms Wilson, who worked at the Health Insurance Commission (replaced by Medicare in 2005) to pay the bills, said.
She then went from studying the ancient dead to the "recently deceased" and completed a diploma in forensics from the Canberra Institute of Technology before applying to work with the Australian Federal Police in her 40s.
"I didn't realise how often I would rely on my anthropology skills," Ms Wilson said, referring to her work in victim identification at natural disaster sites and aircraft crash scenes.
In the bush capital, Ms Wilson mostly worked on burglaries and car theft cases, including a break-in at a brothel in Ainslie which was later found to be illegally breeding Siamese cats.
"When we were fingerprinting and adjusting the scene, we were getting like little paw prints everywhere," she said.
Ms Wilson had access to all the fingerprint powder she needed when working on "volume crime", her bread and butter, in the ACT.
That all changed when she flew to Dili during the COVID-19 pandemic to set up a forensic laboratory for the Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste as part of a partnership in the Pacific.
"I walked into basically an empty shell of a laboratory," Ms Wilson, or mana (meaning elder sister in Tetun), said.
She trained members of the local police force how to chemically develop fingerprints on different surfaces, eliminate prints, present evidence in court, and even photograph a crime scene.
Ms Wilson soon discovered Dili's small policing budget could not pay to import powders and solutions needed for fingerprinting purposes and had to rely on foreign donations.
In an attempt to find local substitutes, the expert effectively replaced costly examination materials with simple items like turmeric, hair gel, baby powder, charred pumpkin, and even bottled petrol sold on the roadside for $1.
"I was making fingerprint powders out of charcoal, betel nut and chalk, all sorts of different things," Ms Wilson said.
"We started making our own fingerprint powders and our own chemicals ... when you compare them with the commercial products, they are on par, if not slightly better sometimes."
Her DIY tactics, including Dili Dust (made from chewed up betel nut), captured the attention of Australian universities leading to her co-authoring multiple research papers on forensic innovation.
Her booklet of recipes for forensic examination titled Chemical substitutes for fingerprint re-agents (sustainable and affordable alternatives), can be found online for free.
The Dili that Ms Wilson walked into is a city still rising from its own ashes following a brutal 25-year Indonesian occupation that culminated in the capital being completely razed to the ground in 2000.
Despite its urban classification, the city functions less like a metropolis and more like an expansive network of tight-knit villages where "everyone knows everyone's business," and petty disputes are handled organically by a village elder.
In Dili, property crimes are virtually non-existent, instead, the streets see a high volume of opportunistic crimes, such as drive-by mobile phone snatchings from the backs of speeding motorbikes.
Ms Wilson said Timor-Leste, like Australia, had high rates of domestic violence, adding that a serious lack of access to abortion in the country also caused high rates of infanticide.
It is also common to come across historic crimes on the island when locals go looking for outdoor toilets, she said.
"They dig their toilets, and frequently when they dig, they find human remains. If you're digging a decent hole, you're probably going to find human remains in it. It could be from Indonesian times, Portuguese times, or further back," Ms Wilson said.
She said Dili's mortuary, unfortunately lacking a DNA database and profiling capabilities, holds several hundred human remains waiting to be identified.
"Timor gets in your blood. I've gotta say it's one of the places that the people are just beautiful souls," Ms Wilson said.
The forensic adviser will celebrate her 62nd birthday this month before returning to the ACT and taking a well-deserved break and long-service leave.
