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.
This is certainly possible, but would be a very iffy way to frame someone. First you have to talk this other person into cooperating while you make a mold of their finger. THen you can use some epoxy based putty to cast the finger. Provided this goes well the pattern should be an exact duplicate, so that's good. Now you have to coat that with something to form a fingerprint. Don't use your own sweat and oils in case we do touch DNA on the print. On CSI they used cooking oil spray, which might work but depending on how long or short it is until the print is processed, it might be too soft and just smear when the tech powders it. Then you have to put this cast finger to a piece or pieces of evidence that you are SURE the crime scene tech will print. This is where it gets tricky. Say you stage a break-in and you put it on the window frame or broken glass. Maybe the frame is too rough to hold a decent print, maybe the tech fingerprints 15 pieces of broken glass and then gives up. Maybe you take great pains to put it on the murder weapon and then a traumatized witness or a clumsy tech smudges the print when they pick it up. Maybe you leave it on a note in the victim's pocket (paper is also very iffy!) and then EMS cuts the shirt off and leaves it in the driveway or throws it out in the ER or it gets soaked in blood. THEN when the tech lifts the print, it needs to look consistent with the 'background' from the item and the manner in which it was gripped. Of course if the rubber flakes off into the print that might get more attention than you want. THEN if we decide to do DNA analysis on the print (which is possible even after it's been processed with powder or superglue) the DNA results might be utterly negative or show animal strains (?) or whatever. Again, that might raise a red flag with an analyst, or they might simply figure that there wasn't enough sample to get a profile. So you MIGHT get away with it. Or you might not.
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I actually haven't done DNA analysis in a lot of years, and that was before STRs (the method mostly used now) but from what I pick up from the analysts, yes, it's not like TV where you wait in the hall for your DNA results. It's a time consuming process and at certain points there's no way to do it quickly. First they have to determine if DNA is present. Then they have to estimate about how much is present, to know if they need to 'amplify' the same or not or how much. Then the actual testing is done. During all this they also need to run positive and negative controls and do other quality control measures. There's also paperwork, lunch breaks and I doubt too many labs operate round the clock. Then of course there's first-in, first-out; your case doesn't get to jump the line, so how long it takes depends on how long that line is. At our state lab it used to be close to a year, but things have gotten much better and now it's more like weeks to months. If we want something more quickly, we can send it to a private lab which can promise us a one-week turnaround--for $1800 PER sample. But even disregarding queues and monetary considerations, even if the lab dropped everything else and worked overtime, it would still take a couple days.
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We had a person borrow money from a kind elderly gentleman, then ask for more and beat him to death when he refused. The person then went home and mailed the victim a check, trying to show that the debt was being paid and there was no ill will. That's what passes for extreme cleverness in my neck of the woods.
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Every part of a fingerprint is unique to the person. Whether the latent print has sufficient information to identify it to a person depends on its clarity and volume and the experience of the examiner. There's usually more activity around the center of the finger pad than at the edges or the tip, for example. But exactly how much of what type of information an examiner needs to make an identification--unfortunately there's no simple answer for that. Fingerprints aren't like DNA, there's no handy table of X allele plus Y allele times population data, so there's no neat way to quantify it. On this topic, my pet peeve: When characters on TV say "It's just a partial." Unless your perpetrator stood at the crime scene and rolled his fingertip over something, from one edge of the nail to the other, then EVERY latent print is a partial!
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How do you decide who gets into your club?
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I actually do not know that, sorry. I attend autopsies but only to observe, so I don't have anything to do with that--but I can tell you that the organs (except eyes or bones) are all dissected and examined so they would definitely be no longer transplantable. So organ harvesting is done before the autopsy.
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No, I have not. I don't really have any favorites about forensic anatomy in particular, though I borrow Postmortem by Koehler & Wecht from my co-worker often. I also liked the books by Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Thomas Noguchi. My favorite forensics book is probably Colin Beavan's Fingerprints.
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I had seen dead bodies at funerals, of course, but other than that the first time was at an autopsy. It was strange because it was one of the rare cases in which the victim practically looked like he was sleeping. Almost always a dead person LOOKS dead, you can tell at a glance (something they rarely perfect on TV). But in this case it was a young man who had simply slipped on icy steps and hit the back of his head, so that was very sad too, to think that life could be lost so easily. Otherwise the autopsy isn't that horrible--there's no gushing blood, for instance, because the heart isn't pumping. It's the smell that gets you more than anything--it's not (most of the time) so much bad as strange. I think our bodies know more than our minds at that point and they know something is wrong. So the answer is I felt a little sick, but didn't actually get sick. We'd have lots of classes (police academy, nursing students) come through the coroner's office and while many would get a little queasy and have to go sit down, we rarely had anyone actually either throw up or pass out.
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