When the Fur Flies, He’s the Man to Call
When it comes to fatal gunshot wounds, forensic pathologist Richard Stroud likes to examine things from the inside out. The bruising and tissue trauma, the size difference between entrance and exit...
View ArticleTiny Clues from a “Gentle Drowning”
Investigators with the California Highway Patrol found the body of a 15-month-old toddler bobbing on the surface of Bear Creek in Merced in May 2002. The pitiful discovery followed by a few hours a...
View ArticleGraphing the Voice of Terror
Last November’s split verdict on the Osama bin Laden tape was more than another disagreement between the United States and Europeans over the al Qaeda threat. It was a salvo in a war that is heating...
View ArticleNew Science for the Murder Victim Search
Right behind employee parking for the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, a line of bushes all but hides a gray privacy fence. More than 7 feet tall and topped with razor wire, the...
View ArticleHi, Pedophile … ! Meet Yur Worst Nitemare :-)
August 14, 2003: On the night of the great blackout, as the last waves of New York City workers walked over East River bridges and those with no way home settled down to sleep in lobbies or on...
View ArticleDNA and a New Kind of Racial Profiling
Nothing in American police work is more controversial than racial profiling. Minorities are targeted for small offenses in the hope of uncovering bigger crimes, and the practice has generated...
View ArticleDrug Cartels Raise the Game for the Mule Trackers
Special agent Chris Trojan pulls into the parking lot of a convenience store in Ozone Park, Queens, and spots a half dozen colleagues lingering out front, exchanging morning banter and finishing...
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This Germ Could Save Your Life
It’s a drizzly morning on New York’s Upper East Side, and Rockefeller University microbiologist David Thaler is sipping a double espresso amid the retro-hippie pillows and dangling paper stars of Java...
View ArticleWill Terror Laws Give Science a Chill?
It’s impossible to miss the note of fear in the voices of prominent American bio-scientists. Laws rushed onto the books after 9/11 introduced new criminal penalties for improper handling of potential...
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What the Cold Nose Knows
Juries love dog testimony. As witnesses go, nothing beats a canine for sincerity and trustworthiness, and nothing brings a little light into a dismal courtroom like the goofy grin and thumping tail of...
View ArticleBlood Is the Ink, Crime Is the Story
If not for the plaster cast on her leg, Paulette Sutton would be rolling in blood. Instead, she slouches in a doorway, watching her partner ram his bloody shoulder against a wall, drop to his hands...
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Why Give a Dead Man a Body Scan?
A light shines under the closed door of a radiology suite, down a darkened hallway deep inside the University Medical Center in Bern, Switzerland. Outside the building, under the glow of a fluorescent...
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