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Here’s How YOU Can Identify the Bones Found in Your Backyard

When the topic of identifying skeletal remains arises, two world-renowned renowned forensic anthropologists immediately come to mind—Dr. Elizabeth A. Murray and Dr. Kathy Reichs. Both experts are at the top of their profession and are two of approximately 100 anthropologists certified as Diplomate by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology.

Law enforcement and other investigators around the world have relied on Drs. Murray and Reichs, as well as other forensic anthropologists, for their help with solving high-profile criminal cases, and to help identify recovered bones.

However, in many instances, on-the-scene law enforcement investigators don’t have speedy access to experienced experts, and they need to know right away if the bones they or someone else discovered are human. This immediate knowledge helps them decide whether the remains belong to a person, and if what they have before them could be a crime scene, or the found bones are those of an animal, which could be the remnants of a family pet, wild animal, or farm livestock.

Knowing the differences between the two bone types (animal and human) could mean a significant saving in costs and/or wasted time of valuable resources if the bones are of bovine origin, for example. If the remains are likely human then it’s time to initiate a full-blown criminal investigation with all the bells and whistles.

So, what do cops and other people with little or no training do when they need to quickly determine if bones are human or animal?

Well, they could turn to OsteoID, a new tool designed to help identify the type of skeletal remains.

Designed by Dr. Heather Garvin and her group from Des Moines University Osteopathic Medical Center, OsteoID is an easy-to-use online tool in which anyone can use simple measurements and morphological information to determine whether a particular bone is human. If not, OsteoID points the user to which animal species it belongs. It’s that simple, and best of all it’s free! Even better, it’s available to everyone, including authors who want and need this sort of detail in their next mystery or thriller.

Here’s how it works.

Users first view a series of high-quality photos to help determine the identity of the bone(s) in question (humerus, tibia, femur, etc.). Once identified, the user is prompted to enter basic measurements—bone length, etc.). The program then returns detailed photos and, when available, 3D surface models/images, of the potential species to allow for comparison.

The list of species included in the system includes (from the OsteoID website):

Mammals: Humans, Black Bear, Brown Bear, Cow, Elk, Moose, White-Tailed Deer, Mule Deer, Pig, Horse, Sheep, Goat, Coyote, Wolf, Domestic Dog, Domestic Cat, Grey Fox, Red Fox, Racoon, Opossum, Rabbit

Birds: Golden Eagle, Goose, Chicken, Duck, Turkey

Turtles: Box Turtle, Snapping Turtle

For more, please click here to visit the OsteoID website.

In 2012 Dr. Elizabeth Murray was a featured presenter at the Writers’ Police Academy. Her session included a discussion about skeletal remains and the tools associated with identification. She also provided information about NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) and some of its success stories. Since 1986, Dr. Murray has been involved in forensic and historic skeletal investigations worldwide.

In addition to working as a forensic anthropologist and professor of biology at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio (now retired), Dr. Murray is also the author of the books The Dozier School for Boys: Forensics, Survivors, and a Painful Past Death, and Corpses, Cadavers, and Other Grave Matters, a fascinating, enlightening nonfiction book for YA readers about the science of death. As an expert, Dr. Murray has also appeared on local and national television and in numerous documentary programs, such as Forensic Files and Skeleton Stories, and she’s featured in productions such as New Dominion Pictures’ series Buried Secrets.

To read about how Dr. Elizabeth Murray helped solve a complex murder case using core samples from a human skull, click here.

Dr. Kathy Reichs was a featured presenter at the 2013 Writers’ Police Academy. Her talk focused on how she transforms her real-life forensic experiences into fiction, in the form of books and the TV show Bones. Bones, of course, is based on Dr. Reichs’ career and her bestselling books of the same name, featuring protagonist Temperance Brennan. She was an executive producer of the show.

The following is from Dr. Reichs’ website:

“For years she consulted to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and to the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. Dr. Reichs has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. As part of her work at JPAC (Formerly CILHI) she aided in the identification of war dead from World War II, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Reichs also assisted in the recovery of remains at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

It’s ALMOST TIME!

2024 Killer Con registration opens in January 2024.

Be ready to sign up because this is a KILLER event that’s not to be missed!

Visit a homicide scene and solve the case using tactics, tools, and techniques learned throughout the event.

2024 Killer Con Guest of Honor is internally bestselling author Charlaine Harris.

Click the link below to visit the Killer Con (Writers’ Police Academy) website to view the schedule of events, classes, instructors, and special guest presenters.

2024 Killer Con

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Isotope Fingerprinting: Storing Food and Water in Your Hair

Isotope fingerprinting can be used to analyze a single strand of human hair for the purpose of determining a person’s location during recent weeks, months, and sometimes years. Obviously, this type of geographical tracking can be extremely useful to law enforcement when investigating murder cases.

These particular isotopes are found in the DNA-free keratin protein shaft of a hair, and contain a sequential record of dietary and metabolic behaviors of the contributor.

Stable isotope analysis (SIA) uses, for example, stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotopes of human tissues to learn a victim’s dietary preferences.

Properties of various municipal water districts, even in cities and towns adjacent to one another, or within a large metropolitan city with more than a single water supply, can provide water that is isotopically distinct from one another and from other local water sources. Therefore, using unique stable oxygen and strontium isotope signatures, SIA reveals the source of an individual’s drinking water (a person drinks local water and the isotopic record of the water is captured and retained their hair).

There are many uses for Stable isotope analysis (SIA), including:

  • Food authenticity

  • Sports doping

  • Criminal forensics

  • Archaeology

When used in conjunction—stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotopes, along with stable oxygen and strontium isotopes—investigators are armed with a formidable geolocation tool for pinpointing a region of origin, or the path of recent travels of a murder victim. This is especially helpful when an investigation involves unidentified human remains.

Other Uses

Sample analysis of illegal drugs can reveal their sources (location), discovering whereabouts of clandestine laboratories, and even the trafficking routes used by dealers.

Stable isotope forensics is also used help to determine whether drugs, explosives, fibers, and other evidence share a mutual foundation or past. It’s utilized to differentiate counterfeit products such as pharmaceuticals and food products from authentic articles, and it’s used to determine if an athlete has used drugs to enhance their performance.

The World Anti-Doping Agency requires stable isotope analysis for doping analysis in sports. It’s also used to detect steroid abuse in cattle.

Analyzers, such as Elementar’s AnthrovisION, are the devices and included software used to determine the origin of a sample.

Isotopes

Scientists divide isotopes into two main types: radioactive and stable.

Stable Isotopes

Stable isotopes, those used in criminal forensics, sports doping, and archaeology have a stable proton-neutron combination and do not exhibit signs of decay/radiation.

The stable isotopes used in the testing/analyzing described in this article are oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen and carbon.

Radioactive Isotopes

When an atom has too many or too few neutrons, it is unstable and decays. As a result, these isotopes emit radiation that includes alpha, beta, and gamma rays.

Radioactive isotopes are used in medicine, agriculture, food industry, pest control, archeology. Radiocarbon dating uses the carbon-14 radioactive isotope. In medicine, radioactive gamma rays are used to detect tumors inside the human body. Exposing food to a controlled level of gamma rays kills many types of bacteria.

 

 

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Solving Murders Using Maggots and Canned Tuna

Female blowflies lay eggs, hundreds of them, on moist and juicy decaying matter that’s rich in microbes. These egg-laying sites include, among others, rotting food and the decomposing corpses of animals and humans.

Immediately after hatching, the creepy offspring of their fly parents—maggots—go to work using enzymes and bacteria to break down their food source into a mouthwatering broth.

Blowfly maggots consume their tasty meals much in the same way as gluttonous Sunday afternoon diners at all-you-can-five-dollar-buffets—heads down and without stopping to breathe.

Maggots, though, have an advantage over human buffet-eaters. They’re able to enjoy their feasts while simultaneously breathing through their specially adapted rear ends. Humans, however, are forced to come up for air at least once or twice during a roadside steakhouse feeding frenzy.

In addition to having poor table manners, maggots are a useful tool for homicide investigators. In fact, the first known instance of flies helping out in a murder case was during the 13th century, when Chinese judge Sung T’zu  investigated a fatal stabbing in a rice field.

Flies Don’t Lie

At the scene of the murder, judge Sung T’zu instructed each of the workers to lay down their sickles. Soon, attracted by the smell of blood, flies began landing on one of the sickles, but not the others. Sure, the murderer cleaned their weapon prior to the judge’s arrival, but the faint odor of the victim’s blood was still present. It was clear to T’zu who’d committed the killing. In 1247, T’zu wrote about the case in the book The Washing Away of Wrongs, the oldest known book on forensic medicine.

Today, in murder cases, a maggot’s rate of growth can help estimate time of death. For example, when detectives find maggots on a body that are in their early larvae stages, when they’re 5mm in length, officers then will have a pretty good idea that the victim has been deceased for only a day and a half, or so.

When maggots ingest human tissue as nourishment, they simultaneously absorb remnants of substances previously consumed by the deceased, such as illegal and prescription drugs, and poisons. Subsequently, traces of those substances are retained within the bodies and exoskeletons of the maggots.

An insect’s hard external skeleton is made of chitin, a substance that’s similar to the keratin protein from which hair is formed. Since an insect’s chitin stores consumed toxins for a long time, and blowfly maggots shed their exoskeletons twice as it passes through each of three larval stages, a toxicology analyses of those exoskeletons could be helpful in determining the drug use of the victim, poisoning as a murder weapon, and more. This is an especially important tool when working with skeletal remains. In fact, a forensic analysis of insects is more dependable than hair as a means to detect drug use immediately prior to death.

Mummy-“Flied”

How long are substances (toxins, etc.) retained in an insects exoskeleton? Shed fly puparial cases been used for toxicological studies of mummified bodies found weeks, months, an even years after death. Some scientists believe it’s possible to detect drugs in the insects associated with ancient skeletal remains. After all, cocaine has been discovered in the hair of 3,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, so why not the same for the bugs who once feasted on those bodies?

Most evidence, of course, comes from live maggots collected from the body at the crime scene. Those specimens are gathered by crime scene investigators and transported to a forensics laboratory for testing. The trick is keeping the wiggly maggots alive until an analysis is performed. Therefore, some scientists recommend that crime scene investigators stock cans of tuna as part of their evidence collection kits.

Pop the top on the can and maggots are then able to feed on the tuna until they’re properly secured and handled by a qualified forensic entomologist.

It’s also important to place maggots in a container with air holes (even though they breathe through their butts, they’ve still got to breathe to survive).

Now, who’s having tuna for lunch today?

Yum …

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Making a Good First Impression: Preserving Footprints In Snow and Mud

Footprints in the snow

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

The familiar phrase above is actually from an ancient Greek work of Herodotus describing the Persian system of mounted postal carriers. The phrase is also inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York City, and is sort of the unofficial creed of letter carriers across the country.

Another group of people who closely adhere to those words are criminals. Yes, this menagerie of lawbreakers—pickpockets, robbers, rapists, murderers, and the like—pay no attention to the weather when planning and plotting their devious acts against property and their fellow humans.

And, when the criminals do their dastardly deeds, even in bad weather such as the snowstorms we’re experiencing on the East Coast, law enforcement officers must do what it takes to bring the offenders to justice. Unfortunately, crime-solving often involves traipsing around the woods in the mud, snow, sleet, and freezing rain while trying to find a footprint or two.

One method of identifying and locating a bad guy is to do as they did back in the old west, and that’s to track the thugs back to their hideouts. Sure, following broken twigs and disturbed vegetation is one method. Finding and making castings of footprints and/or tire tracks in the dirt and dried mud is another.

But what about prints in the snow? After all, we know that casting materials generate heat, which causes snow to melt and deform the impressions left by footwear.

So how do investigators overcome the challenge of melting snow in and around footprints?

Well, our good friends at Sirchie have the perfect solution to the problem.

A squirt or two of Sirchie’s Snow Impression Wax provides an insulating medium between the heat-generating casting material and the surrounding snow. Once the spray contacts the snow it locks in the impression details while the casting material hardens.

Shake-N-Cast (center in photo below) is a kit containing a pre-measured water pouch and dental stone.

Apply pressure to break the water pouch and then shake to mix the two ingredients. No messy containers and no casting material on a detective’s shiny shoes. There’s enough material in a kit to cast an adult-size shoe up to 15″ long.

Metal casting frames are adjustable to fit all shoe sizes and most tire treads.

While we’re on the subject of impression evidence, the spray above—Dust and Dirt Hardener—is used to strengthen impression evidence (tire tracks, footwear impressions, etc.) found in loose or sandy soil.

The material keeps the soil intact under the weight of the casting material.

Finally, liquid silicone is often used for producing exact replicas of various impressions, including tire and footwear, jimmy marks, and even fingerprints.

Liquid Silicone is incredibly temperature tolerant, and can withstand cold down to -70F and heat to +500F.

Sirchie Silicone Casting Kit

The material sets within three to five minutes.

So there you go. Now your fictional CSI team need not worry about collecting evidence in the snow, or mud. Well, as long as they keep a can Sirchie’s Snow Impression Wax handy.

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Sir Alec Jeffreys and the DNA Testing of Over 5,500 Men, All to Catch a Single Killer

As the result of a DNA experiment on September 10, 1984, Alec Jeffreys discovered the technique of genetic fingerprinting. At the time, Jeffreys worked as a researcher and professor of genetics at the University of Leicester.

At 9.05 a.m. that September morning, the life of Alec Jeffreys changed forever, as did the entire world of criminal investigations and paternity cases. It was, as Jeffreys calls it, his “eureka moment.”

Jeffreys’ DNA fingerprinting was first used in a police forensic test to identify the killer of two teenagers, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. The two young women had been raped and murdered in 1983 and 1986 respectively.

A 17-year-old boy with learning difficulties—Richard Buckland—confessed to one of the killings but not the other.

The detective in charge of the case was skeptical of Buckland’s odd confession and his involvement, or lack of, in the second murder. The detective recently learned of Alec Jeffreys’ breakthrough discovery and figured, well, he thought he had nothing to lose so he contacted the scientist to ask if he thought his new technique could prove that Buckland had murdered both young women. The top cop was in for a surprise.

Jeffreys agreed to see what he could do and extracted DNA from Buckland’s blood and from semen taken from the dead girls’ bodies. Then he compared them, immediately seeing that the girls had been raped by the same man. However, Buckland’s DNA was completely different. He had not been in contact with either of the victims.

Police had the wrong man and, after three months in jail, Buckland was released from custody.

Detectives then came up with a wild plan. They decided to set up an operation to gather the DNA of every man in the area. Eight months later, after eight months of sampling and testing, 5,511 men had given blood samples. Only one man had refused to cooperate and after testing all those samples, still no match to the semen samples collected from the victims.

Among the over 5,000 men who provided blood samples was a 27-year-old baker and father of two young children named Colin Pitchfork. Three years earlier, police had questioned him about his movements on the evening that Lynda had been murdered. But nothing came of it.

In August 1987, over a year after the killing of Dawn, one of Colin Pitchfork’s coworkers was in a local pub having drinks with friends and somehow Pitchfork’s name entered their conversation. One member of the group, a man named Kelly, admitted that he’d impersonated Pitchfork and took the blood test on his behalf. Kelly told the group that Pitchfork asked him to do this for him because he’d already taken the test for another friend who had a criminal conviction and was afraid of taking the test a second time. So Kelly agreed. Pitchfork then doctored his passport by inserting Kelly’s photograph in place of his own and then drove Kelly to the test site where he waited outside while Kelly’s blood was drawn.

A few weeks later, one of the people in the pub passed along the information to a local policeman. Kelly was arrested and he confessed to the impersonation. By the end of the work day Pitchfork was also in custody. One of the detectives who questioned the Pitchfork asked him, “Why Dawn Ashworth?”

Pitchfork nonchalantly replied, “Opportunity. She was there and I was there.”

So this is how it all started. A drop of blood and a semen sample met a small electrical charge (see images of the process below). The result was a few blips on an x-ray film that resembled a grocery store product bar code. Each of us has one of those bar codes that is unique to us. And it was Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys discovered the secret to finding and reading those codes.

I knew of this incredible story and was reminded of it when Denene and I recently watched Code of a Killer, the television mini-series based on these events.

Joseph Wambaugh told the story in his 1989 best selling book The Blooding: The True Story of the Narborough Village Murders.

Finally, after watching the TV show I recommend taking a moment or two to watch Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys lecture about his discovery, and you may do so below.

DNA testing by electrophoresis (gel testing) … the process

Weighing the agar gel.

Mixing the gel with water.

Gel in chamber.

Forensic Facts

Injecting DNA into the gel.

Attaching electrodes to the chamber.

Introducing electric current to the gel.

Completed gel is placed onto an illuminator for viewing.

 Gel on illuminator.

*My thanks to Dr. Stephanie Smith for allowing me to hang out in her lab to take the above photos.

Completed gel showing DNA bands

DNA bands

DNA Facts

  • DNA is the acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid.
  • DNA is a double-helix molecule built from four nucleotides: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C).
  • Every human being shares 99.9% of their DNA with every other human.
  • If you placed all the DNA molecules in your body end to end, the DNA would reach from the Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times!
  • Humans share 60% of our genes with fruit flies.
  • We share 98.7% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees and bonobos.
  • If you could type 60 words per minute, eight hours a day, it would take approximately 50 years to type the human genome.
  • Humans share 85% of our DNA with a mouse.
  • We also share 41% with a banana.
  • According to a study conducted at Princeton University, all humans, including Africans likely have a bit of Neanderthal in our DNA. This was a fascinating discovery since until these findings were released in 2020 it was believed that Africans did not have Neanderthal DNA.
  • Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869. However, it was not until 1943 that scientists came to understand that DNA was the genetic material in cells.
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