Mummies: A New Method For Analysis

 

After death, some corpses mummify rather than decay. This more likely will happen in very dry environments but can happen in almost any circumstance. If the corpse dessicates (dries out) more quickly than it decays, mummified remains are produced. These corpses are leathery, dark brown, and appear as if the skin has been “shrink wrapped” over the bones. They also can be very difficult to analyze.

For years, rehydrating finger pads with water, glycerin, and some other liquids, has allowed investigators to obtain fingerprints from mummified corpses. Now it seems that Alejandro Hernandez has found a way to do this with an entire mummified corpse. Very interesting.

 

 

Shoeprints on Clothing: A New Forensic Science Technique

Dr. Kevin Farrugia and his fellow scientists at the University of Abertay have developed a new technique for imaging latent (invisible) shoeprints left on clothing. The finding of any shoeprint is dependent on many factors, not the least of which is the substrate on which the print is laid down. Glass and other smooth, firm surfaces are best, and coarse surfaces such as carpets are often an insurmountable problem for crime scene investigators. Dr. Farrugia modified existing technology to develop his new technique, which could prove useful in future criminal investigations.

 

 

Sasquatch Lives!! Maybe

Sasquatch has been a Pacific Northwest mythical creature for many decades. Sitings and even videos have routinely been knocked down and proven to be hoaxes. Not so fast. Now, anthropologist Jeff Meldrum has analyzed some new tracks and has found evidence that they might indeed be real.

 

His evidence?

The toes, as revealed by analysis of the tracks, seem to grip rocks, curl to grab the soil on inclines, and at times splay out presumably for better balance. Things a rubber or plastic fake foot couldn’t easily do. But more importantly, many of the tracks revealed friction ridge patterns. This is important since only primates have such ridges.

 

Another interesting finding was that there appeared to be scars from old injuries on the soles of the feet. When such injuries heal, the dermal ridges tend to curl inward as part of the healing process. Such healing was found here. Something that would be very difficult to fake.

So does this mean that Sasquatch lives? Maybe, maybe not. Hopefully there is more to come.

 

Footprints as Accurate as Fingerprints?

I don’t mean the friction ridge patterns on the soles of our feet. We know these are as individual as the ridge patterns on our fingertips. But what about the pattern with which our feet strike the ground? Could these also provide individualizing evidence? The answer just might be yes.

 

 

 

Each of us walks with a different gait pattern, meaning that our footsteps are aligned and spaced in a unique pattern. Some people march, others swagger, and still others shuffle along. Also the way our foot strikes the ground is unique. If a method can be devised to analyze heel strike, foot roll, and push-off then perhaps this might be useful evidence. In a recent paper published in the British Journal of the Royal Society Interface a group seems to have developed a process for obtaining three-dimensional images of footprints and their studies have revealed that this analysis is highly individual. They quoted and accuracy of 99.6%. If this turns out to be the case, then the analysis of footprints left in sand, soil, or another soft material might prove to be a useful forensic science technique.

 

Q & A: Can the Bruise Patterns on My Victim Be Matched to the Attacker’s Hands?

Q: In a new book, my heroine is framed for a murder that involves a beating through martial arts techniques followed by a fatal push. Are there wound specifics that help authorities determine whether someone was pushed? Could the bruising left by the attacker’s knuckles, hands, or feet be compared to a suspect’s foot or hand?

J. Pearce, Toronto, ON, Canada

A: Pushing almost never leaves bruises that would help distinguish a push from an accidental fall. If the victim were restrained by hand, then bruises that matched the attacker’s fingers might be found on the victim’s arms or legs. It takes a great deal of pressure to restrain someone and this can cause bruising.

The ME might be able to determine whether the bruises and injuries on the victim resulted from a fall or a series of blows with hands or other objects. Rocks and concrete and other objects that the victim might have fallen on can leave bruises just as hands and bats and other weapons do. Often ME can discern a distinctive pattern that would distinguish exactly what made the bruises. Or not. It can go either way.

For example, a rope or a chain used for strangulation or to restrain the victim can leave behind bruises that reveal the braid or link pattern. A blow from a baseball bat or a flat board would leave different bruising patterns—the bat a narrower bruise with diffuse edges and the board a wider bruise with sharper edges. Bite marks often leave bruises that reflect the teeth pattern of the biter and these can sometimes be used to match to a dental impression made from a suspect.

Knuckles could leave a row of round bruises. The size and spacing could be used to rule out certain hands as having delivered the blow while leaving those of a similar size and spacing on the suspect list. The same could be true for the edge of the hand or foot. Either could leave a linear bruise that reflected the thickness of the side of the hand or foot. This would be less clear than would be the knuckles. Again, this could exclude certain suspects.

If the attacker wore a ring with an initial or other distinctive pattern, this pattern could be reflected in a bruise that could be matched to a suspect’s ring.

In your scenario, if knuckle or hand edge bruises were found that did not match the size of your character’s hands then she might be excluded as having made them. If the bruising pattern matched the size of her hands, this would not be conclusive evidence against her but would not remove her from the suspect list.
For more info on trauma patterns, check out HOWDUNNIT:FORENSICS

 



 

Guest Blogger: Lisa Black on Fingerprints

THE STATE OF FINGERPRINTS TODAY

One of the most pervasive and annoying myths of those perpetuated by television shows is that a cop somewhere in Nowheresville, Florida can put an unknown print into his computer and search the fingerprints of anyone who has ever been fingerprinted in the United States, including job applicants and military personnel. This is not true. This has never been true, and is unlikely to become true at any point in the immediate future. Someday, yes, but not in time to make the deadline for your next book.

Here’s how it really works: I am a latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I scan in unknown prints (generally called ‘latent prints’) collected at crime scenes or from pieces of evidence. I search those against ‘known’ prints, which are the ten fingerprints and two palm prints collected from each person arrested in my town. I can also do a remote search of the database in the next town, because they are on the same software system. I cannot remotely search the county or state database, because they use different software and though the company has been working on a conversion patch for years, it has not yet been accomplished. However, as of about a year ago we are receiving the known prints for their arrestees—apparently that conversion patch has been accomplished—so I am in essence searching their database, but only the past year’s portion of it. With me so far? I have no access to the state database; when a latent goes unidentified, we make a copy for ourselves and then send the original print off to the state, where some counterpart of mine has to scan it and mark its information and redo all the work that I have already done. All of the county goes to the state, so when the state database is searched we’re also searching the county portion that I have not had access to. We have made hits this way (good!) but it takes four to five months (not so good!).

If all of this sounds like a haphazard patchwork of practices, it is. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and constantly-improving technology is constantly extending my reach (just as we’ve gone from rotary dials to being able to watch videos of your grandchildren on a phone the size of a slice of cheese).

So who does have that all-seeing national database of fingerprints? The FBI…so to speak. Not because they have a supercomputer with tentacles snaking throughout the computers of every police department in the US, but because every police department sends a copy of the known prints they collect to the feds to enter in their database. They receive all job applicants, too, but it used to be these were only checked via classification system to see if the applicant had a criminal history. Now, reportedly, thanks to the ease of modern technology these prints are also being scanned into a searchable database. It does now have military records, but only since 1990.

And these are only known prints. The FBI cannot search every print from every burglary in the US—no computer is that huge. If I had an entire family slaughtered, or some serial killer at work, then we would pack up the latent prints and contact the FBI with our pleading tale and send the prints off to wait in a queue with the other slaughters from across the country. It would take months, not less time than a commercial break while I sit in front of my monitor (which would be quite unhelpfully flashing the picture of every single print it searches…why exactly it would be wasting bytes on such pointless graphics has always been a mystery to me) sipping coffee and looking sexy in my lab coat. This would not be possible, and not only because lab coats are stiff and bulky and quite untailored. I cannot put in an unidentified latent from Nowheresville, Florida and hit on, say, an unidentified latent from Bupkiss, Iowa, thereby connecting our two crimes…maybe the same killer is at work? I’d better get together with the handsome detective in Bupkiss and do a crossover show…alas, no. Things don’t work that way.

Again, if this all sounds haphazard, it is. You can only work with what you got. Here in my little burg we identify a latent print in 11% of our cases in which usable latent prints are submitted. Considering the vast and sundry circumstances at play, this is an excellent record

So go find your local latent print examiner and give her a hug. I can assure you her job looks so much more glamorous on TV.

Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue, working as a forensic scientist in the trace evidence lab until her husband dragged her to southwest Florida. Now she toils as a certified latent print analyst and CSI at the local police department by day and writes forensic suspense by night. Her fifth book, Trail of Blood, involves the real-life Torso Killer, who terrorized Cleveland during the dark days of the Great Depression.

 

Twins, DNA, and Fingerprints

In 2008 police in Gwinnett, Georgia arrested Donald Smith for carjacking and murder. There was no doubt that they had their man. Witnesses identified him, a nearby security camera backed them up, and DNA evidence found at the scene matched Donald. Donald insisted they had the wrong guy and that the crime must’ve been committed by his twin brother. Yeah, right. We’ve heard this one before.

But fingerprints found at the scene did not match Donald but rather his brother Ronald. It turns out that they were identical twins and therefore shared DNA but not fingerprints. Donald was telling the truth and brother Ronald found himself in custody.

It was a similar case that brought down Bertillonage, the anthropometric identification system devised by Alphonse Bertillon in 1882. The need for a foolproof method of identification had dogged criminal investigations for many years. Eyewitness accounts were all that was really available. But Alphonse devised his system to correct this deficiency. Fortunately around the same time Sir Francis Galton, William Herschel, and Sir Edward Henry were doing their landmark research into fingerprints. The result was a clash of these two systems in the famous Will West case.

First a little background:

Anthropometry (anthrop means human; metry means to measure) is defined as the study of human body measurements for use in anthropological classification and comparison. Simply put, it is the making of body measurements in order to compare individuals with each other.
Using anthropometry, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon developed the first truly organized system for identifying individuals in 1882. Believing that the human skeleton did not change in size from about age 20 until death and that each person’s measurements were unique, he created a system of body measurements that became known as bertillonage. According to Bertillon, the odds of two people having the same bertillonage measurements were 286 million to one.

This belief led Bertillon to state that all people could be distinguished from one another by key measurements, such as height, seated height from head to seat, length and width of the head, right ear length, left little finger length, and width of the cheeks, among others. His greatest triumph came in February 1883, when he measured a thief named Dupont and compared his profile against his files of known criminals. He found that Dupont’s measurements matched a man named Martin. Dupont ultimately confessed that he was indeed Martin.

For many years, this system was accepted by many, but by the dawn of the 20th century cracks began to appear. The measurements were inexact and subject to variation, depending upon who made them. And because the measurements in two people who were of the same size, weight, and body type varied by fractions of a centimeter, flaws quickly appeared and the system was soon discontinued. Its death knell tolled with the famous Will West case.

Though landmark in its importance, this case was an odd comical coincidence. On May 1, 1903, Will West came to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The records clerk apparently thought that the man looked familiar, but the new inmate denied ever having been in the prison before. As part of his intake examination, anthropometry was performed and officials were surprised to find that Will’s measurements exactly matched those of William West, another inmate at Leavenworth. The two men even looked eerily similar as if they were twins.

They were brought together into the same room, but each stated that they were not brothers. Fingerprints were then used to distinguish between the two Wills. Leavenworth immediately dumped anthropometry and switched to a fingerprint-based system for identifying prisoners. New York’s Sing Sing Prison followed a month later.

But was the similarity between Will and William West just a bizarre coincidence? Not really. A report in The Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1980 revealed that the two actually were identical twins. They possessed many fingerprint similarities, nearly identical ear configurations (unusual in any circumstance except with identical twins), and each of the men wrote letters to the same brother, same five sisters, and same Uncle George. So, even though the brothers denied it, it seemed that they were related after all.

 

Fingerprints and the Forensic World (Part 3)

In 1858, Argentine police officer and scientist Juan Vucetich was born in present-day Croatia (then part of the Habsburg empire). He came to Buenos Aires in 1884. He was apparently a music, languages, and mathematics prodigy.

In 1888, he joined the provincial police in La Plata, where he studied anthropometry, but soon became convinced that anthropometry was flawed, resulting in mistaken identities and the imprisonment of innocent people. He turned his attention to the budding science of fingerprinting.

Vucetich developed a method of classifying fingerprints into four different types, a system that is still the basis for the one used in Argentina today. The biggest test of his fingerprinting system came in 1892, when it was used to resolve a murder, a first in the history of criminology.

On June 29, 1892, in the city of Necochea, Francisca Rojas killed her six- and four-year-old children by slitting their throats. She then superficially stabbed herself and said she was also a victim of the attack. She accused neighbor Ramón Velázquez. She apparently did so because she blamed Velázquez for telling her husband of her infidelity. Velázquez denied having killed the children.

Buenos Aires provincial police chief Guillermo J. Nuñes sent police officer Eduardo M. Álvarez, a colleague of Vucetich and well-versed in his fingerprinting techniques, to investigate the crime. At the crime scene, Álvarez found a bloody fingerprint on the door and showed that it came from the mother and not from Velazquez. Rojas was tried and convicted.

Vucetich’s methods attracted great attention throughout the field of criminology and his system quickly spread. Fingerprinting had arrived and it soon became the preferred method for individual identification.

 

Fingerprints and the Forensic World (Part 2)

Anthropometry and Bertillonage

Anthropometry (anthrop means human; metry means to measure) is defined as the study of human body measurements for use in anthropological classification and comparison. Simply put, it is the making of body measurements in order to compare individuals with each other.

In 1882, using anthropometry, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon developed the first truly organized system for identifying individuals. Believing that the size of the human skeleton did not change after about age 20 and that each person’s measurements were unique, he created a system of body measurements that became known as bertillonage. According to Bertillon, the odds of two people having the same “bertillonage measurements” were 286 million to one.

This belief led Bertillon to state that all people could be distinguished from one another by key measurements, such as overall height, seated height from head to seat, length and width of the head, right ear length, left little finger length, and width of the cheeks among others.

His greatest triumph came in February, 1883, when he measured a thief who said his name was Dupont and compared his profile to those of known criminals. He found that Dupont’s measurements matched a man who had been arrested in 1882 under the name of Martin. Under questioning, the thief finally admitted that he was both Martin and Dupont, but that his real name was neither Martin nor Dupont.

For many years, this system was accepted by many jurisdictions, but by the dawn of the 20th century cracks began to appear. The measurements were inexact and subject to variation, depending upon who made them. Also, since the measurements in two people who were of the same size, weight, and body type varied by fractions of a centimeter, flaws quickly appeared and the system was soon discontinued.

Its death knell tolled with two famous cases:

The Will West Case:

Though landmark in its importance, this case was an odd comical coincidence. On May 1, 1903, Will West came to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The records clerk apparently thought that the man looked familiar, but the new inmate denied ever having been in the prison before. As part of his intake examination, anthropometry was performed and officials were surprised to find that Will’s measurements exactly matched those of William West, another inmate at Leavenworth. The two men even looked eerily similar.

They were brought together into the same room, but each stated that they were neither brothers nor related in anyway. Fingerprints were then used to distinguish between the two Wills after which Leavenworth dumped anthropometry and switched to a fingerprint-based system for identifying prisoners. New York’s Sing Sing Prison followed a month later.

Was the similarity between Will and William West simply a bizarre coincidence? Not really. A report in The Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1980 revealed that the two were actually identical twins. They possessed many fingerprint similarities, nearly identical ear configurations (unusual in any circumstance except with identical twins), and each of the men wrote letters to the same brother, same five sisters, and same Uncle George. So, even though the brothers denied it, it seemed that they were related after all.

Bertillon reluctantly agreed to add fingerprints to his bertillonage profile. However, he only added those of the right hand, which proved to be a huge mistake.

The Mona Lisa Theft:

On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. The thief left a clear thumbprint on the glass that protected Da Vinci’s masterpiece. To assist investigators, Alphonse Bertillon added his profiles to the investigation. Unfortunately, he had no classification system to streamline the search through his thousands of data cards, resulting in he and his assistants spending several months digging through his files. They found no matches. Two years later, the police apprehended Vicenzo Perugia and his prints matched the one found at the crime scene.

It turned out that Perigia’s prints were among those in Bertillon’s files all the time. Why no match? The print found at the scene was from Perugia’s left thumb, while Bertillon’s files only contained that of the right. This unmasked yet another flaw in Bertillon’s anthropometric system and led to it falling into disfavor as a means for identification.

 

Fingerprints and the Forensic World (Part 1)

The History of Fingerprinting

The evolution of fingerprints as a method of identification was a long, slow journey of nearly 3000 years. The milestones in this process include:

Prehistory: Early pot makers “signed” their works with an impressed finger or thumbprint, which identified the work as their own.

1000 BC: The Chinese used fingerprints to “sign” legal documents and criminal confessions. It is unclear whether this was a ceremonial practice or a true method of personal identity

Ca. 1000: Quintilian, a Roman attorney, exonerated a blind man accused of murdering his own mother by showing that a bloody palm print found at the scene had been placed by someone else in an attempt to frame the unfortunate man.

1685: Marcello Malpighi, professor of anatomy at the University of Bologne, was the first to recognize fingerprint patterns when he wrote of the “varying ridges and patterns” he saw on human fingertips. He was the first to use the terms “loops” and “whorls” in describing these patterns.

1823: Johannes Purkinje of Breslau University devised the first system for classifying fingerprints. He listed nine basic patterns and laid down rules for their individual classification. These rules and patterns are the basis for today’s classification systems.

1858: To prevent fraud in contracts and pension distributions, Sir William Herschel, an English civil servant stationed in Bengal, India, required that the natives sign contracts with a hand imprint. He is perhaps the first European to recognize the individuality of such prints. He also kept a record of his own prints and showed that they did not change over a 50-year period, a discovery that was of paramount importance to the development of fingerprints as a forensic tool.

1880: Henry Faulds, a physician and surgeon at Taukiji Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, wrote that fingerprinting could be used for personal identification and suggested that it might be useful for identifying criminals. He also recognized that latent (invisible) prints could be exposed by dusting them with powder and used this method to exonerate a man accused of thievery. The man was arrested and his prints were checked against one the thief had left on a window, but they didn’t match. Days later the real thief was found, his prints matched, and he confessed.

1883: Even Mark Twain understood the discriminatory power of fingerprints and used the technique in his books, Life on the Mississippi and Puddin’ Head Wilson.

1892: Sir Francis Galton published his classic textbook, Finger Prints, the first book on the subject. He described three patterns within the prints that he called loops, arches, and whorls. More importantly, he gave convincing evidence that no two prints were identical.

1892: Juan Vucetich, a police official in La Plata, Argentina became convinced that fingerprints could be used to identify criminals and devised a classification system that is still in use in most of South America. He published a book on the subject in 1894.

1892: Argentina became the first country to use of fingerprints to solve a crime. On June 18, 1892, the illegitimate children of Francesca Rojas were murdered and she accused a man named Velasquez. Alvarez, a police investigator who trained under Juan Vucetich, discovered that Rojas had a lover who had previously stated that he would marry her if she did not have children. A bloody fingerprint found at the scene matched Rojas’ right thumb and she confessed.

1897: Herman Welcker compared his own prints taken in 1897 with ones he had taken 41 years earlier in 1856 and found they were unchanged, thus supporting the findings of William Herschel.

1899: Sir Edward Henry devised a classification system based on five types of prints. His system is the basis for those used in Britain and America today.

1901: Edward Richard Henry was appointed head of Scotland Yard and adopted a fingerprint identification system in place of anthropometry.

1902: Burglar Harry Jackson became the first person in England to be convicted by fingerprint evidence when he left his thumbprint at the scene of his crime.

1903: The New York State Prison system instituted the first systematic use of fingerprints for criminal identification in the United States.

1910: Thomas Jennings became the first United States citizen convicted of a crime by use of fingerprints. Tried for murder in Chicago, Jennings was convicted and the verdict was upheld on appeal, making his case a landmark in the use of fingerprint evidence in court.

Near the end of the 19th century, fingerprints weren’t the only identification method being studied. The field of anthropometry vied with fingerprints to become the standard method for identification. Until an odd and landmark confrontation between the two methods settled the issue. I’ll discuss that in Part 2 of this three-part series.