Bugging Your DNA

 

Everybody hates mosquitoes. They irritate, they bite, and they carry disease. In fact they are likely the most deadly creature on Earth since they spread malaria through many regions of the world. They also spread things like yellow fever and Zika – – – and a host of other nasty little problems.

But can mosquitoes place you at a crime scene? If so, how would this work?

Let’s say investigators come to a murder scene and find a smashed and dead mosquito on the bed sheets near the corpse. It might be reasonably assumed that this mosquito bit someone and that person then killed it, leaving it where it fell. Could that be used to ID the killer?

It appears that human blood can remain in the mosquito’s stomach for up to two days. And if this is extracted, it can be used in DNA profiling. So the mosquito at the crime scene could be collected and tested, and if DNA were found, a profile could be generated and lead back to the killer.

Esoteric, but fascinating.

 

Holmes, Thorndyke, Locard, Gross, and the Modern CSI

There are no bigger names in the history and development of modern crime scene investigation than French investigator Edmond Locard and his Austrian counterpart Hans Gross. These two men shaped the development of crime scene investigation and even today their techniques create the cornerstone of forensic science. Locard’s Exchange Principle underlies every forensic technique.

EDMOND LOCARD

HANS GROSS

They were also great fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke. Locard even suggested that students of police procedure read the Sherlock Holmes stories and learn from his techniques.

Both the real-life investigators and the fictional ones had one thing in common: the careful and meticulous approach to any crime scene, taking care to collect all useful evidence, while not damaging or contaminating it.

In my book Forensics For Dummies, the methods and techniques used to evaluate a crime scene and collect evidence are explained in great detail. Check it out if you want to know more about the techniques that saw their origin more than 100 years ago.