LIsa Black
Cape Coral, FL
Female, 49
I spent the five happiest years of my life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now I'm a certified latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I also write a series of forensic suspense novels, turning the day job into fiction. My books have been translated into six languages.
No. I do lots of stuff detectives don’t do, like lab analysis, scene reconstruction, latent print comparison, etc. And they do tons of stuff I don’t do, like track down victims/witnesses/suspects and interview them, run criminal histories, request search warrants, and so on. So our jobs are really very different. We are there to provide the forensic support for the case, but forensic topics are only part of any case. Hope that helps!
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Arson investigations, bitemarks...though those might be difficult to do experiments on. Best practices for visualizing superglued fingerprints depending on the surface? Genealogical tracing?
Best of luck!
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Why do you post questions that need to be deleted? Most people have better things to do.
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Probably everyone gets interested in the field because it looked interesting in a TV show. But by the time you’re sufficiently trained to actually get a job, you’d know that it’s not like TV.
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Border Patrol Agent
How easy is it to forge a US passport?
Zookeeper and Animal Trainer
Are a lot of people in your line of work vegetarian/vegan?
Magician
How do you feel about magicians on TV who reveal how tricks are done?
I have absolutely no idea.
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Sorry it took me so long to get back to you!
Yes, fingerprints are impressions made by the oil and sweat on our fingers. If a surface is very dusty, we take away dust on our fingers instead of leaving prints on the object. It will look like fingerprints should be there because there will be finger marks in the dust, but actually we just removed dust.
Hope that helps!
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Yes, I love true crime. I read pretty much the entire section of the downtown branch of the Cleveland Public Library while I was a secretary before I got into forensics. The books I write are fiction but I'd love to write true crime.
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