A single image often becomes newspaper shorthand for a tragedy. Think of the blasted 7/7 bus or the ragged facade of the Grand Hotel in Brighton after the IRA bombing, writes James Randerson.
When Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed on December 21 1988, it was the image of the aircraft's cockpit ploughed into the ground that would forever say "Lockerbie bomb". But that image was a source of great pain to the wife of one of the victims.
"For 12 years she had suffered, thinking that the body in the photo under a sheet was her husband," Kathryn Turman, director of the office of victim assistance at the FBI, told the American Academy of Forensic Science (AAFS) conference in Seattle yesterday.
Ms Turman was in charge of liaising with the families of the victims and passing on information as the forensic effort unfolded. She is still in contact with some of them now. In the Lockerbie widow's case, Ms Turman was able to put her mind at rest by telling her the body in the photo was actually one of the cabin crew.
She told the AAFS meeting that giving as much information as possible to families was vital in helping them to come to terms with tragedy. "What they imagine is worse than the truth," Ms Turman said. "People can come to terms with the truth; it is harder to come to terms with what you can't know."
By all accounts, the families in the Lockerbie tragedy were treated particularly badly. The bomb claimed the lives of 270 people, 259 on the plane and 11 on the ground. The average age of the passengers on the flight, coming home for Christmas, was just 27.
The nightmare started for the families when they found out about the disaster, either from the news or when they reached JFK airport to pick up relatives. At first, information was sparse and there was no central point for discovering what had happened and who had been on the flight. The information line set up by Pan Am kept families on hold for hours with the chirpy tones of "I'll be home for Christmas". According to Ms Turman, "buddies" assigned by the airline to the families were instructed to collect information about them for use if they sued the company.
Ms Turman's talk was about a group of American families and a Scottish community united in grief. "The people of Lockerbie reached out to the families," she said. When the Americans came over to see the crash site for themselves, the Lockerbie community took them in. The crash investigators were able to show relatives the precise location, in many cases, where their son, daughter, sister or husband had been found.
One Scottish policeman helped one family greatly, according to Ms Turman, by describing how he had found two brothers close together, their arms outstretched, reaching for one another.
When the police released the personal effects of the victims, volunteers in Lockerbie cleaned and wrapped each item individually before sending them back to the family along with a personal message. This all helped the families of the American victims to realise they were not alone.
James Randerson, the Guardian's science correspondent, is at the AAFS conference in Seattle.
You can read his earlier posts from the conference here and here
