Recently in Crime Scenes Category

This website is very informative and goes through everything from the crime scene to identifying the suspect.  What I thought was very informative is the identifying of the victim and how long the victim has been dead.  It goes through a time line of 0 days to 31+.  When looking at a time line for when a victim has been dead you must look at the body temperature, hardening, the eyes, skin color, pooling of the blood, the digestive system, and forensic entomology. 

Forensic entomology is the use of insects to determine the time line of death.  In this website it shows the physical appearance of a person in cooperation with insects present of the stage relative to the time of decomposition. 

When looking around this website it also shows the different stages of a case and what to do during theses stages, not just forensic entomology. The first stage is the crime scene.  It goes through discovering the scene, identifying the scene, recording the incident, to searching for the evidence.  The second stage goes through the autopsy which goes though the cause of death, time of death, manner of death, marks of violence, to storing the evidence.  The third stage is the identity of the victim.  This goes through facial reconstruction, DNA and dental matching, and blood analysis.  The fourth stage is the evidence, which is pretty much self explanatory. The next stage the suspect.  This goes through lists of suspects, psychological profiling, fingerprinting, and both spoken and written evidence.   The last stage goes through the weapons that can be used by the suspect.  

This website can be very useful in order to understand the different aspects of solving a case starting from the crime scene to the capture of the suspect.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/st_bloodstains

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/18/texas.plane.crash/index.html?hpt=T1 

 

A relatively new story that happened just this morning that involved a man that burned his house down and then ran his plane into an IRS building but left behind a disgruntled suicide note.  In the note there were evident signs of a rage against the IRS, but it is still not yet clear if it was a terrorist motive or just one man taking action against the IRS. A possible psychological aspect to the story could be a mental disorder of a manic episode that caused the man to take such extreme action.

 

The ever so popular TV show, The First 48 on AE.TV is one that you can count on for truth and facts. The first 48 is a show about homicide detectives that respond to a crime and try and solve it within the first 48 hours. These are real cases with the real people...no actors or replaying of a scene. What you see is what you get!
This show focuses mostly on people that go from suspicion to suspect, eye witnesses, and the interrogation, or interviewing. This really helps you see what a detective does from the moment they get that call.
You can also get a sense of how they figure out what happened and who was involved. They start with the facts that they have off hand and work their way down from there. The one thing that I have started to notice sense we have talked about it in class is the interrogations done by the detectives. In class we learned that a detective will tell you anything you want to hear. They will exhaust you mentally and physically, they will lie to you. Basically they will do anything to get you to confess or turn on anyone. If you notices, in most shows, the detective will either try and play friend, or yell and scream and lie to get them to crack. I find it interesting to watch, now that you really know what is going on.
I have posted the link to the First 48 TV shows. The one on the link I am posting is about a homeless man who is murdered, and a 911 call that has gun shots firing in the background. I urge you to watch the whole show and really pay close attention to the detail that goes into being a detective, especially the ones that do the interviews.
If you are interested after watching this show, you can watch many other episodes with different stories. They get very interesting!

http://www.aetv.com/the_first_48/video/index.jsp?paidlink=1&vid=AETV_SEM_Search&keywords=first%2B48&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=first%2540&utm_term=first%2048

http://www.aetv.com/the_first_48/video/index.jsp?paidlink=1&vid=AETV_SEM_Search&keywords=first%2B48&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=first%2540&utm_term=first%2048 

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/21/smiley.face.killer/index.html

I came across this theory while watching the evening news tonight. The disappearance of an ISU student has grabbed the hearts of Iowans and has had many people speculating. With lack of evidence police are might be turning to theory. Speculation surrounding the case has hinted that the disappearance might be related to a series of deaths that have been plaguing the Midwest for almost 2 decades. The Smiley Face Killer Theory is a working police theory that links over 40 different accidental drownings to a serial killer or group of killers. The circumstances of the cases are all similar. All the victims were 20 to 23 year old males who were popular and were in great academic standing. The autopsies of the victims show no sign of foul play but they do indicate that the victims were intoxicated at the time of their drowning. A series of smiley faces placed near where some the bodies were found lead many to speculate that the drowning were not by accident. In Lacrosse Wisconsin alone there has been a total of 9 different drown-victims and several more in the states of Iowa and Minneapolis. Speculation around this theory has grown so much that they have even made an official website for the theory.

http://sfkillers.com/?page_id=2.    

FBI has made an official statement on the subject that they do not believe these deaths are linking in any way and they are still ruling these drownings as accidental. There is still no word on ISU student that is still missing but the police have not ruled anything out yet.

Playing devil's advocate here, I am going to go along with the theory and pose some hypothetical scenarios. Firstly, regardless of if the recent disappearance of an ISU student is linked in any way to this theory, the deaths of nearly 40 other male college students is more than enough to raise an eyebrow at. The circumstances of the case might lead us to make some initial investigatory inferences. First, all the victims were male, college age, in good academic standing (deans list or above), and all were described as being popular. From that we could make some inferences that if a killer exists they might be someone who would have a grudge against these types of bright and popular males. Also all of the alleged drownings took place in the Midwest and northern U.S. States indicating that the killer or potential killers may live in the Midwest. This theory opens the doors for many different theories; could this be the work of copy cats? Could it be one killer or some sort of cult across several organizations on various campuses?

As I said above the FBI has made their official statement that there is no evidence to believe that these deaths are in any way related so I do not intend to stir up any feelings of paranoia, just merely playing devil's advocate.