Flights of the Forensic Imagination

"While the scope of the problem is daunting, Operation Identification has had limited, but meaningful, success. Since 2013, 36 individuals’ exhumed remains have been identified at their lab in San Marcos, Texas, halfway between Austin and San Antonio.

Returning from Star county’s La Grulla cemetery, where the Guardian had witnessed the recent exhumation of the six body bags containing migrants’ remains, to the project’s lab, Spradley gestured to hundreds of cardboard boxes lined up around the walls.

“This is not easy work,” she said. Each contains remains and personal effects, awaiting identification.

Over the next hundred-plus years, a tiny handful of books expounded on Abberline’s theory, though few credited him. In the meantime, the legend of Jack the Ripper grew and grew, becoming a cornerstone of the true crime genre and a classic trope of horror (not to mention a costume that you can find at Party City for $49.99, though, at the moment, it is grievously out of stock.) To this day, passionate Ripperologists pore over the autopsies and debate the various suspects. Most don’t take the Jill the Ripper theory very seriously (“Jack the Ripper being a woman is one of the most crackpot theories if not the most crackpot theory about Jack the Ripper,” writes user John Wheat in a forum on the Ripper site Casebook.org). But sometimes a nagging doubt creeps in. After all, the Ripper was never caught. What if we were looking at the wrong sort of person all along?

Today in Surrey, Butchart has been training investigators in what to look for at crime scenes and how to record it, how to recognise fastenings and fabric in order to date garments, and teaching terminology of non-western dress. “Describe it,” was her advice when discussing the discovery of things such as West African ankara fabric. “Don’t use the word ‘ethnic’, don’t infer interpretation – we need to produce a standardised set of language. One person’s sweater,” she explained, “is another’s jumper.”

(via 'Underwear dates well': how fashion forensics are helping solve crimes | Global | The Guardian)

The 40-year old artist currently lives and works in Chiba, Japan. It’s not exactly the type of place you’d imagine Ikehata’s deathly, decomposing imagery come to life. But then again, Ikehata’s understanding of reality comes from small fragments of moments both beautiful and sad. They often come from days when nothing special happens at all. “I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images,” explains the artist.

When her mother passed away last November, Cecilia Chan, professor of social work at the University of Hong Kong, arranged cremation and scattering of the ashes in a remembrance garden, in what is known locally as a “green burial”.

While Chan says green burial is “one of the most pragmatic options in a place this congested and costly”, it is not a popular alternative. “In line with traditional Chinese customs, we prefer to store our ancestors’ ashes in a niche at a columbarium,” says Kwok. “A physical place where we can pay respects, give offerings and receive blessings. Many Chinese people are still very conservative.”

Concerned that the city’s private columbarium operators were exploiting people’s desperation to store their loved ones’ ashes, the government introduced the Private Columbaria Ordinance in 2017 to regulate the industry. Now operators must reapply for a licence and meet stricter standards. So far no licences have been approved and critics worry the move will not ease costs.

Masuda says they’ve noticed an increase in solitary deaths, which he blames on the long-term ripple effect caused by the bursting of Japan’s real-estate bubble: most families now have two incomes, and elderly parents are increasingly left alone.

The numbers are certainly rising. In 1980, 4.3% of men and 11.2% of women older than 65 lived alone. By 2015, the figures were 13.3% and 21.1%.

Throughout the history of Western art, artists used a variety of metaphors to ruminate on life’s fragility. Particularly in the Netherlands, still life painting was used to explore these concepts. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, these paintings were often called vanitas (Latin for “vanity”). They used symbols like rotting fruit, musical instruments, watches, hourglasses, and bubbles to show decay and the fleeting nature of life.

Wilcox’s work is filling a gap in data on femicide, typically defined as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, said Jodie Roure, an expert on violence against women in the Americas. The federal government tracks domestic violence killings, referred to as intimate partner homicides, but doesn’t specifically compile data on femicide, Roure said, in part because the US hasn’t adopted a standardized definition for the term as in some Latin American countries.

Without a centralized system to gather data on incidents of violence against women and girls, those crimes are underreported, Roure, who is a professor at John Jay College, said. “The data that does exist we know is alarming,” she added. “Violence against women is normalized. And because it’s normalized we don’t see it as a crisis.”

The problems with the FBI’s photo comparison work plague other subjective types of forensic science, such as fingerprint analysis, microscopic hair fiber examination and handwriting analysis, said Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist who trains U.S. law enforcement on cognitive bias in crime laboratories. Dror is a researcher at University College London, frequently teaching at agencies like the FBI and New York Police Department on ways to minimize personal beliefs from influencing casework.

Even DNA analysis can be swayed by bias, Dror said. But pattern-matching fields like image analysis are especially vulnerable. Image examiners’ lab work is, generally, only seeing if evidence from a suspect “matches” that from a crime scene.

“Many of them are more concerned by what the court accepts as science rather than being motivated by science itself,” Dror said.