CSI and Forensics

On 14 February 1929, St Valentine’s Day, four men disguised as police walked into a garage on North Clark Street, Chicago, lined up the seven people inside against the wall and shot them dead. At the height of the 1920s - the era of Prohibition, which was dominated by gangsters - the murder of seven men stunned the nation. It was later revealed that Chicago mobster Al Capone ordered the ‘hit’ but that the real target, mob leader George ‘Bugs’ Moran, escaped the carnage. Ultimately, the St Valentine’s Day Massacre turned the American public against urban folk heroes like Al Capone and ushered in a new era - the Depression.

Photographs taken at the National Army Medical Museum, MD

  Add to that crimes like hunting endangered animals (for meat or wall trophies or protection of personal property) and the Oregon lab becomes an extremely busy enterprise. It’s also the only forensics lab used by the 154 countries that have signed on to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meaning that shipments of animals arrive in Ashland from around the globe.

5. You may be covered in a wax. After putrefaction, decay moves quickly to turn the body into a skeleton. However, some bodies take an interesting turn on the way. If a body comes into contact with cold soil or water, it may develop adipocere, a fatty, waxy material formed from the bacteria breaking down tissue. Adipocere works as a natural preservative on the inner organs. It can mislead investigators into thinking a body died much sooner than it actually did, as was the case of a 300-year-old adipocere corpse recently found in Switzerland.

UK Forensic Investigators prepare to enter the crime scene of a beheading.

Picture 4: Damon in autopsy.

homicide victim with 17 stab wounds

Crime scene photos from the Chi Omega sorority house.

The blue tent to the left containing Eric & Dylan’s bodies as they were being removed from the school.

Mary Reeser, born in 1881, was found almost completely consumed by fire in her Florida home in 1951. The odd thing about the discovery of her body was that part of her left foot was left completely unscathed, and the extremely high temperature required to cremate a human body did not cause damage to the room or objects around the pile of ash which remained. The FBI investigators called in Professor Krogman from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine, in the hopes that he might explain the mystery. He said: “I find it hard to believe that a human body, once ignited, will literally consume itself — burn itself out, as does a candle wick, guttering in the last residual pool of melted wax…. Just what did happen on the night of July 1, 1951, in St. Petersburg, Florida? We may never know, though this case still haunts me…. I cannot conceive of such complete cremation without more burning of the apartment itself. In fact the apartment and everything in it should have been consumed. I regard it as the most amazing thing I have ever seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague fear. Were I living in the Middle Ages, I’d mutter something about black magic.” The mystery has never been solved.

A corpse sitting up due to rigor mortis, which occurs two or three hours after a person or animal dies, the muscles start to stiffen and become rock-hard. This phenomenon progresses in a downward, head-to-toe direction. In 12 to 18 hours the body becomes stiff as a board. While in rigor mortis, you can only move the joints only by force, breaking them in the process.

This is where Ted Bundy brought some of his Utah victims.