It was a routine weekend and I was returning from an interview with reporter Damien Brook when we stumbled across a serious fatal road accident.

We were known as “blue watch” at the paper because we had the habit of finding major incidents which usually required the help of emergency services including a fire in a building which was next to the house which we shared.

I shot a couple of frames of the scene but when Damien said she was probably dead the nerves kicked in. I started shaking as the adrenaline hit hence the shaky result in this photo.

This was the first time I had seen a dead body even though she was covered with a tarpaulin. So we headed back to the office. It was just across the road from where I was living at the time.

I was sill new to the job, two months in, but on the Monday my chief photographer asked me if I had any more shots but I had to admit that I had not.

I said that I had found the experience unnerving. Having said that he went out and got a photo of the police witness appeal sign which made the front page and saved the day.

Having said that I reckon the blurry photo still could have been used even though it was not pin sharp because it faithfully recorded the scene.

Having said that I became more hardened to to scenes of crime during my years in Barrow as I witnessed the fallout from incidents over the years and this is a case in point.

And it just goes to show the different approach by police in the 1990s and the present day. We got this call about a stabbing in Barrow and when we arrived at the scene we could actually get right beside the crime scene. It is a good job that the pics of phone box covered in blood were not published in colour because of the blood covering the phone box.

Contrast that with when I was at the News & Star in Carlisle when the detectives put a very wide cordon around the crime scene where someone had been stabbed and we were kept very much at arms length to preserve the crime scene which seemed a bit excessive.

From the North West Evening Mail on Monday, November 23, 1992 and Wednesday, October 30, 1995.