Henry Goddard noticed a flaw in a bullet that was traced back to the original bullet mold.Ī few years later, a doctor "experimenting" with the corpses of dead soldiers in Malta discovered that body temperature dropped at regular intervals following death, and could be used to determine time of death. In 1835, a former Bow Street Runner employed by Scotland Yard was the first documented case of law enforcement comparing bullets to catch their man. He is the first to be credited with attempting to use a microscope to assess blood and semen stains.īy the early 1800s, the recognition of fingerprint patterns was studied, but decades would pass before that observance was applied to criminal and personal identification. Professor Mathieu Orfila, an expert of medicinal chemistry at the University of Paris, became known as the Father of Toxicology in 1813 after he published Traite de Poisons. This discovery led to the eventual ability to detect arsenic poisoning. In 1775, Karl Scheele realized he could transform arsenious oxide into arsenious acid, which, when combined with zinc, produced arsine. The book became an official text for coroners. As he so wisely said, so many hundreds of years ago, "The difference of a hair is the difference of a thousand li." (A li is the word that designates the distance of a mile in the Chinese language). In a book written by Sung Tz'u called The Washing Away of Wrong, the author observed that water collected in the lungs of drowning victims and that strangulation could be assumed by damaged cartilage in the neck. Suspicion of motive and the word of others against a possible murderer took precedence over any other facts, and when all else failed, torture was readily available to procure a confession.ĭuring the middle of the 12 th Century, ancient Chinese were credited with being the first to attempt to define the difference between natural death and criminal intent. For example, a man found in a body of water would naturally have drowned, while a man found lying broken and bloodied along the side of a road would have naturally fallen and possibly been dragged by a horse. In ancient times, the manner of death was naturally assumed by where and how the victim had been found. Before the discovery and impact of DNA in the early 1980s, the advent of fingerprinting in the early 1800s and even before photographs were used in the late 1800s to capture images of killers on a victim's eyeballs, as was the case during the investigation of the world's first documented serial killer, Jack the Ripper, criminal investigators were using the science of forensics to solve crimes. Despite common misconceptions, forensic investigation has been practiced, in one form or another, for thousands of years.
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