A FORENSIC expert called in to help solve Sarah Payne’s murder has revealed the tiny detail she’ll never forget 24 years on.

Forensic ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire has spent decades using nature to help jail some of Britain’s most notorious killers.

She told The Sun how she investigated the crime scene after 8-year-old Sarah disappeared from a field in West Sussex in July 2000.

It was Sarah’s muddied black shoe, found abandoned on the side of the road, that eventually led to the conviction of known paedophile Roy Whiting.

Pat said: “I never saw it, which was really a great shame. I would have liked to have had an opportunity to sample that sandal. Finding the sandal was critical to the enquiry.”

Patricia released a book earlier this year about her career helping to put away Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright and Milly Dowler’s killer Levi Bellfield.

Using her expert knowledge of plants, pollen and soil she has aided 300 criminal investigations over the past three decades.

Patricia told The Sun: “I have been able to help police find bodies and I haven’t even left my study.”

Now exactly 24-years-later, Patricia has revealed her impact on the probe after Whiting kidnapped and murdered Sarah.

Sarah disappeared on a Saturday evening, while playing with her three siblings in a cornfield near her grandparents’ home in West Sussex.

Patricia said: “I well remember sitting on the sofa eating my breakfast, with the newspaper on my lap and watching television at the same time. Pictures of Sarah filled both.

“I immediately felt for her family and hoped to goodness that she was safe. Faint hope, however, because if not located quickly, these children are invariably found dead and, although difficult to accept, that is an unfortunate fact.”

Sadly, Sarah’s naked body was found 17 days later by a landowner in a shallow grave next to a hedge, 12 miles away from where she had disappeared from.

Patricia said when police initially contacted her for advice after Sarah went missing she wondered if it was still possible to find the girl.

But, as the search dragged on Patricia eventually visited the field where Sarah had been playing and started to build an ecological profile of the area.

Sara Payne campaigned for ‘Sarah’s Law’ which will allow people with children to ask the police to disclose information on sex offenders in the area

When police told Patricia they had found the girl’s body, the forensic ecologist could compare the survey with information she collected off the body.

Patricia was able to determine that Sarah’s body hadn’t “been dug up anywhere else” and had been found where she had been killed.

Patricia said: “That’s an important thing, because sometimes murderers move bodies, but this was her primary resting place.”

Police had already suspected that Whiting could be the killer, but arrested him six days later when he stole a car and crashed it.

He was jailed for 22 months and the crime gave the police the opportunity to carry out a forensic examination on his belongings.

Patricia said: “If they do find a suspect, can we implicate that suspect with where Sarah was found with other places that were relevant.”

Patricia was able to match pollen, spores, and soil found on Sarah’s body and at the site she was buried at to Whiting’s jeans, trainers, sweatshirt, and spade.

She said: “The hedge itself was important… when I did get his [Whiting’s] red sweatshirt, I could recognise the hedge on it.

“I think he fell into them, because Sarah, bless her, she had stinging nettle all over her as well and when you came to the end of the stinging nettles, that’s where the grave was.”

I have been able to help police find bodies and I haven’t even left my study

Professor Patricia Wiltshire

One key piece of evidence was the sandal of Sarah’s discovered on a road.

Cops found a petrol receipt in Whiting’s car from a nearby petrol station to where where the sandal was found.

But Patricia said she never got given the shoe to test it, which was a “great shame”.

She said: “As it happens it didn’t really matter, because the most important items were Whiting’s clothing, that told it all for me.”

Sarah’s clothes have never been found, and Patricia believes they most likely could be buried on a golf course.

She matched a soil profile from Whiting’s spade to Chiltington Golf Course, but when the army searched the area they never found the clothes.

Now she wonders if Whiting had been at the golf course at some point doing “reconnaissance” looking for a place to bury Sarah.

“Everybody who contributes to a case is only given fragments of it, everybody would be looking at it in a fragmented way, except for the main police officer in charge who has everything in his finger tips.”

Patricia said she felt “great sorrow” for Sarah’s family when Whiting was convicted.

“To think you have men like this roaming around, he had past behaviour, bad behaviour of different sorts.”

After her death, Sarah’s parents campaigned to change the law so other parents could find out if a child sex-offender was living in their area.

Police will reveal details confidentially to the person most able to protect the child (usually parents, carers or guardians) if they think it is in the child’s interests.