Murder; call me old fashioned but I’m not a fan, mainly for moral reasons but also,
it’s just so messy.
Thankfully, the law agrees with me and detectives have become ever more efficient at tracking
down exactly who is responsible for a particular crime.
The various techniques have become incredibly advanced and now involve some of the most
cutting edge science so it’s much harder to convict people on good old fashioned reasons
such as: “He has a shifty face” or “She just
looks like the type”.
No body part is safe from forensics these days, and it’s not just a dribbling obsessive
compulsive with dandruff that leaves behind saliva, fingerprints and skin, it’s all
of us.
So what are the various techniques that modern police put to use?
Today we learn; how to catch a killer.
Although the Chinese used fingerprints in the 700s to identify certain documents and
sculptures, it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that forensic science really
took off.
The fingerprint was star of the show for many years, since Sir William Herschel started
using it in India as a way to stop forged signatures from the 1860s onward.
In 1911, Thomas Jennings was the first person to be convicted of murder on the basis of
his fingerprints, with a number of experts on hand to give evidence.
And fingerprints replaced Alphonse Bertillon’s identification method called anthropometry,
which was a set of body measurements, found to be far more reliable as a way to ID people
than using early photographs or just asking “are you Dave?
No?
Okay, I guess you’re free to go”.
Strange though it seems, ballistic fingerprinting actually started much earlier than fingerprinting,
where an individual bullet was identified by its shape, not its fingers, in case some
of you were confused.
In 1835, the British police matched a bullet in a victim to a bullet making mold in the
killer’s house.
Unfortunately, we quickly moved away from mama’s home-recipe bullets and mass production
prevented this part of forensics, until Calvin Goddard invented the comparison microscope
in 1925.
The first real test of bullet identification was after the 1929 St Valentine’s day massacre
when Goddard proved that it wasn’t carried out by rogue cops but was in fact Al Capone’s
henchmen.
How romantic.
The next big jump was when British scientist Alec Jeffreys pioneered DNA profiling in,
appropriately, the year 1984.
Big Brother isn’t just watching you, he’s also collecting your skin.
Of course, since the dawn of civilization, the most important part of any crime is the
truth; who’s telling it, who’s hiding it, and what was Colonel Mustard doing with
it in the Billiard room?
In China, three thousand years ago, suspects were forced to fill their mouths with dried
rice and, after a short while, spit it out again.
Anyone who’s rice was still dry was found guilty of lying, since fear and anxiety were
known to reduce saliva.
The first lie detection device that was based on actual science, rather than some sort of
magic demon stick, was Lombrosso’s Glove, which measured blood pressure.
This eventually morphed into the polygraph we know today, you know the machine that everyday
answers the question for millions of avid TV viewers, “who was the father?”
It measures respiratory rate, blood pressure changes, and changes in galvanic skin response,
which is the bioelectric reactivity of the skin.
Of course, no polygraph is completely reliable since the responses they look for are not
unique to lying, they can be caused by simply being nervous.
Understanding the way a killer thinks and behaves has become a huge part of solving
cases, and providing the plots for a never ending sea of TV detective shows.
The birth of forensic psychology probably has its roots in the notorious Jack the Ripper
mystery, when an unknown killer terrified London with a series of bloody murders.
Lacking anything concrete, they tried to build an image of who their killer was, theorizing
as to whether his motivations were madness, sexual, religious or a delightful cocktail
of all three.
But the large proportion of forensic psychology is not trying to work out what kind of cereal
a mass murderer eats for breakfast, but more on deciding the mental health of people that
are going to stand trial.
The insanity defense is a legal classic and goes all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi,
in ancient Mesopotamia.
The Louvre in Paris houses a seven and a half foot stone slab, inscribed with much of the
law set by Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon.
It includes mercy for the insane and also gave us the famous “eye for an eye”.
It also says that you are liable for the lost crops if your dam leaks, which, speaking as
one of many responsible dam owners among us, I think is often overlooked in modern society.
Some forensic methods are a little more unusual, and no I’m not talking about using a large
woman called Ivanka to talk to the dead and tell us what Elvis was really up to the day
JFK died.
One thing you don’t hear often is, thank goodness for nuclear bomb testing.
But using the levels of Carbon 14 in human tissue to get an accurate age reading, has
helped a number of cold cases, all thanks to the atmospheric nukes we detonated during
the cold war.
This caused a noticeable global spike in carbon fourteen, which is a radioactive form of carbon
that does occur naturally but we doubled the level during these tests.
Since then it’s been declining so you can map the amount in tissue to approximate dates
of global levels.
Meaning we can detect exactly when someone died just by their carbon-14 levels.
Sometimes though, you don’t need science, you just need good old fashioned boredom.
Jim Scharf and Dave Heitzman, two detectives in Washington state, designed a set of playing
cards to give out to bored prisoners, printed with pictures of cold case victims.
Their logic was that the cards would get around and some prisoner with a grudge, or looking
to reduce their sentence, might give up a killer.
And it worked.
In 2011, the “get-into-jail-free” cards produced a conviction for the 1979 murder
of Susan Schwartz.
And what about the future?
I’m not talking about a Minority Report ability to stop murders before they happen,
but what tech do we have in the works right now?
For lie detecting, it would obviously be a great help to bypass all that obstructive
skin and facial expression nonsense and get right into the brain.
A functional MRI scan is thought to have a 97% accuracy level for lie detection since
it shows the increased blood flow to the brain, required to help you create an untrue story.
Unfortunately, it can’t be used on politicians as they are often shielded from the rays by
their unwieldy comb-overs.
Rumour has it one particular politician has developed an impenetrable golden mesh of hair
that enables him to lie with impunity.
And as for DNA, well gentlemen, I have some bad news for us.
It’s now possible to have a good guess at a man’s surname, just by looking at his
Y chromosome.
This male chromosome has been passed down fairly unchanged from generation to generation
so by building a database of old samples with names we know, the police can look for a similar
Y chromosome to yours and it’s almost a one in four chance that they can guess your
surname.
So, if you want to hire a hitman, either make sure he’s adopted or just called Agent forty…something.
So I hope this has been useful if you’re thinking about rounding up a crime-solving
team and, since I’m an equal-opportunities YouTuber, if you are planning a murder and
this video has helped you, then you are very welcome.
But seriously kids don’t try this at home.
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