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.
Biology would help with the natural fibers (like cotton or fibers from plants, or hairs from animals like wool) and chemistry helped with analyzing synthetic fibers with polarized light or fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Those last two don't work on natural fibers because they're not consistent all the way through like a synthetic fiber, that comes out of a machine.
Fiber analysis was usually only examined in cases of stabbing, strangling or bludgeoning, where there had to be close physical contact between victim and suspect. (A gunshot didn't mean there had to be contact.) It was only a small part of my days. Very little is done any more because you can only say the fibers are consistent with having come from a particular sample, you can't say they did, as in DNA or fingerprints. You can't even give a statistic for how likely it would be to find a particular fiber unless it came from the suspect, etc., because we can't know how many items with that fiber are in the environment.
Only collection would be done in the field, to do anything more you would need the microscopes and the equipment at the lab.
Hope that helps!
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As far as I know, no. The DNA tests of the shirt will just show a mixture of the victims, so that the analyst would only be able to say the blood could have come from these two or three people--in other words there are no alleles that definitely couldn't have come from those three. But because it is a mixture, they can't say it did come from these three exact people. And they couldn't tell, again as far as I know, which blood was deposited first.
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That's called the 'CSI Effect' and it can be a problem for juries to have unrealistic expectations. One instructor described it as "Juries don't know as much as they think they know, but they really do know a lot more than they used to know."
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It depends on what you're talking about--was what contaminated with what? Lots of things can be contaminated with things without results being affected. Take blood, you can mix blood with paint or dirt or maybe oil or types of soap and that won't affect the DNA profile. If you mix it with bleach or other blood, it will. So if you had, say, heroin, and it gets mixed with fingerprint powder or cotton fibers, it's still going to test as heroin. If you mix it with cocaine, maybe it won't. (Controlled substances are not my field.) So 'contamination' is not a one-size fits-all word.
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Contamination may make it impossible to get a DNA profile, or the profile might show a mixture. It will not cause a profile to look like someone else's DNA. Or it may have no effect at all. It depends what is contaminated with what.
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Bodies begin to deteriorate immediately, but the process might progress more slowly or less slowly depending on temperature, humidity, exposure or any medical conditions of the victim.
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I’m so sorry for your loss. My advice would be to use rubber gloves and take the items to a porch or some dry outside spot if it’s not going to rain for a while, or the garage or utility room if so. If you’re sensitive to smells you might use swimmers nose plugs or a bandana tied over your face. Spread the items out on a clean paper bag or newspaper (or wax paper if there’s some pieces of paper in his wallet you want to keep. Anything that can be wet, like car keys or plastic cards, dip or wash them in a container of water with some bleach in it, then let dry. Let all the stuff in the wallet dry if necessary, then keep what you want and discard the rest. Some of the smell will dissipate the longer its left to dry but if it’s something that can’t be soaked in bleach, you may never get a smell completely out, as far as I know. Best of luck.
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