In most homicides, police rely on motive to pursue a murderer. But when the killer is a stranger the crime may go unsolved for years. It takes a full arsenal of forensic techniques to trace a lethal encounter.
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Killers often attempt to deflect attention away from their crimes by hiding the remains of their victims. Bodies may lay hidden for years before they are discovered.
Forensic Botany & Geology: Plants help provide oxygen and nutrients for existence. Soil is the fertilizer of life. Yet both can yield clues to the time and location of a person's death.
In Northern California, a fire rages in the middle of the night. A woman's charred body is discovered in the smoldering aftermath.
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.
When a theft is committed, something valuable is stolen. But when a criminal needs a new identity, theft becomes a matter of life and death.
911 receives a desperate call in Fort Worth, Texas. A man's wife is shot. Forensic investigators search for clues in unlikely places, hoping the victim herself could provide information needed to determine how and why she died.
There's never a good reason for murder, but some killers are particularly brutalchoosing their prey at random or with no apparent motive and then cunningly covering their tracks. Even so, telltale clues remain.
A teenager is abducted on a shopping trip. Two hikers disappear from the Appalachian Trail.
An abandoned car outside Philadelphia brings heartbreak to a family and terror to a community. A young woman is dead, the killer gone. But the marks of his passage remain.
DNA analysis overturns the convictions of three men who have spent years behind bars, paying for crimes they did not commit.
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.
Drowning deaths often look like accidents and water can destroy the scant clues the killer may have left behind. Investigators must turn to forensic science to solve cases where the victim is found dead in the water.
Accidental deaths, suicides, disappearances, and fires they're an everyday part of an insurance investigator's life. But cases shouldn't be taken at face value. Forensics has become a tool for exposing insurance fraud.
A dog can be a dead man's best friend. Dogs have been trained to sniff out corpses, drugs, explosives, and missing persons. They're often the first to find the essential clue that sets an investigation in motion.
They say that a burden shared is a burden halved, but when partners team up to commit murder, the weight of their guilt remains just as heavy. Investigators must rely on forensic science to capture partners in crime.
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.
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.
Solving crimes may begin with gut intuition, but advanced science provides investigators with irrefutable proof. When criminals go to great lengths to mask their crimes, Investigators must step up the challenge and remain forever undaunted.
Men don't have a monopoly on murder, but it's still extraordinary when women kill. Though female killers are as deadly as males, they choose less violent methods.
What does it take to prove murder if the victim cannot be found? Investigators must go to extreme lengths to catch the killer when the victim is presumed dead.
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