Arson Investigation: Insurance torchings, mob burnouts and arson murders: these crimes are designed to take all clues with them. But a solid case can be built from a heap of ashes.
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Tool marking: A tool used to commit a crime can often be the same tool used to solve it. The pattern a machine leaves on an item, the unusual way a tool crimps a wire, and even something as innocuous as the shape of a wood chip can lead to a killer.
A New York homebuyer gets more than he bargained for when a house inspection turns up a mummified corpse. For decades, the crime had gone undiscovered. The victim unmissed, and the killer unpunished.
Approximately 1.8 million Americans are reported missing each year. Some are runaways who find their way home, but others simply disappear. When foul play is suspected, investigators turn to forensics to find the missing.
Some people will let nothing stand between them and their goals. In their tortured minds, raw desire replaces all reason, and homicide becomes a convenient means to an end.
They know as much about crime as any crime fighter, or any criminal. They're the crime writers, and through their eyes we see murder most foul.
Using science as their most powerful weapon, investigators must find these hired killers and make them pay the true price of murder.
Explosives Investigations: The crime lab is the place where science meets murder. In New York State, Eleanor Fowler opened a small package, which as mailed to her home. When she lifted the lid the box exploded killing her instantly.
Arson Investigation: Insurance torchings, mob burnouts and arson murders: these crimes are designed to take all clues with them. But a solid case can be built from a heap of ashes.
When teenagers are driven to kill, their victims are but the first to fall. In three such cases, the families of the killers, as well as their communities, become the victims of violent crime.
For the forensic entomologist, the insects that nest in dead bodies are like tiny witnesses to a crime.
Time of death is an important consideration in a murder investigation, but when a killer freezes, burns, or grinds his victim, even the most skilled medical examiner would be at a loss about how to calculate it.
Investigators are always on the cutting edge of new forensic techniques that can help them solve cases more accurately. An experimental brain fingerprinting technique has already won the acquittal of a police officer accused of a drug charge.
Forensics in the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial: Millions watched on television as the jury rendered their verdict. Orenthal James Simpson was found not guilty of murder.
Some of the best clues come from the least likely places. Baffling crimes have been solved and criminals betrayed through evidence provided by insects, beer bottles, and other seemingly meaningless objects.
Every family has its secrets, and sometimes blood relations lead to bloodshed. When murder becomes a family affair, investigators must turn to forensics to uncover family plots.
Some people do get away with murder, at least for a while. Flush with their success, serial killers murder again and again. But each time they kill, they leave behind a few more clues, which ultimately lead to their undoing.
Ballistics: A corpse is found with a gunshot wound to the head the weapon lies next to the victim. It looks like suicide, but could it be murder? It's a question best solved by ballistics experts.
In Northern California, a fire rages in the middle of the night. A woman's charred body is discovered in the smoldering aftermath.
Terrorism: Thanks to new technology and, perhaps, the approaching millennium, terrorism is a growing international threat. The Oklahoma City explosion and the bombing of the World Trade Center are just two of the incidents of this growing problem.
The tiniest residue left at the scene can become a mark of distinction in the most singular and intimate of ways.
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