Forensic History Crimes

'I love puzzles, and finding answers is the only truly enjoyable part of what I do.' This is because Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, her days spent at crime scenes collecting samples, standing over dead bodies in a mortuary, or looking down her microscope for evidence. Nature has given us a messy, imperfect world, but her job is to help make sense of it when we need it to most. A pioneer of forensic ecology - using the natural world to help solve crimes - Patricia has been involved in some of the most high-profile murder cases.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

Groundbreaking scientific analysis that breaks the JFK assassination wide open! Did a shot from the "grassy knoll" kill President Kennedy? If so, was Oswald part of a conspiracy or an innocent patsy? Why have scientific experts who examined the evidence failed to put such questions to rest? In 2001, scientist Dr. Donald Byron Thomas published a peer-reviewed article that revived the debate over the finding by the House Select Committee on Assassinations that there had indeed been a shot from the grassy knoll, caught on a police dictabelt recording.

Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities - beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books - sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least 2,000 cases in his 40-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes", Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest - and first - forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.

On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of their tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea: What if criminals left a psychological trail that would lead us to them?

Agatha Christie revelled in the use of poison to kill off unfortunate victims in her books; indeed, she employed it more than any other murder method, with the poison itself often being a central part of the novel. Her choice of deadly substances was far from random—the characteristics of each often provide vital clues to the discovery of the murderer. Christie's extensive chemical knowledge provides the backdrop for A Is for Arsenic, in which Kathryn Harkup investigates the poisons used by the murderer in fourteen classic Agatha Christie mysteries.

Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.

This is the first truly comprehensive book examining the life and career of the murderer who has become one of America's great supervillains. It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century.

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, as "a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer." She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness. She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer. And she was convicted in one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's strangest cases: the Pizza Bomber case, in which a pizza deliveryman died when a bomb locked to his neck exploded after he robbed a bank in 2003 near Erie, Pennsylvania, Diehl-Armstrong's hometown.

On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor - some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan - but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials.

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she became the mother of modern forensics and was instrumental in elevating homicide investigation to a scientific discipline. In 18 Tiny Deaths, Bruce Goldfarb weaves Lee's remarkable story with the advances in forensics made in her lifetime to tell the tale of the birth of modern forensics.

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before or since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings.

Viele Kinder lasen Enid Blyton oder Beatrix Potter - Carla Valentine war von klein auf verrückt nach Agatha Christie und rätselte mit, wer wohl der Mörder war. Diese frühe Faszination ließ Carla Valentine Forensik studieren, in Leichenhallen und in pathologischen Instituten arbeiten, doch von Agatha Christie ließ sie nie ab. Agatha Christie benutzte den Begriff "Forensik" noch nicht wie wir, doch auch sie beschreibt in ihren Krimis mit ihrer fachkundigen Beobachtung und viel Einfallsreichtum die Wendungen und Verwicklungen der einzelnen Fälle und überführt geschickt jeden einzelnen Mörder.

You will have ninety minutes to solve the murder. A startling declaration by a new Harvard instructor: sixty-seven-year-old Frances Glessner Lee. It’s 1945. Before her, six wary male students given to assumptions—especially when it comes to women without a formal education—are challenged to solve a real-life whodunit using Mrs. Lee’s creation, the crime scene diorama. Every detail is accurate. And every detail matters when solving a crime with no survivors…

The best of this year's true crime writing from master true crime authors RJ Parker, Peter Vronsky, JJ Slate, Sylvia Perrini, and Michael Newton, who give us nine new shocking case accounts of serial killers.

Some true crimes reveal themselves in bits and pieces over time. One such case is the Florida School for Boys, a.k.a. the Dozier School, a place where - rather than reforming the children in their care - school officials tortured, raped, and killed them. Opened in 1900, the school closed in 2011 after a Department of Justice investigation substantiated allegations of routine beatings and killings made by about 100 survivors. Thus far, forensic anthropologist Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her team from the University of South Florida have uncovered 55 sets of human remains.

Unsolved Serial Killings by R. J. Parker is a fascinating glimpse into the mindsets of cold-blooded serial killers. Complete with F.B.I. stats, profile classifications, and psychotic windows to peer into, this book is about the most horrific of criminals. There are some great examples of unsolved murders that leave the listener wondering, did the killer, stop killing, die, or go to prison on unrelated charges? A spellbinding new audiobook from an author with investigator in his blood!

In 1986, in northwest Austin, Texas, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed, with their son in the next room. In less than six months, he would be convicted of murdering her and sentenced to life in prison. In this detailed investigative piece of true crime journalism, Pamela Coloff picks apart how an innocent man was charged on insubstantial physical evidence and immature scientific evidence. In exploring Morton's story, Colloff examines the full cast of characters that made up the case.

A deep investigation into historical documents that prove the notorious outlaw Jesse James faked his own death The story of the notorious outlaw Jesse James’ assassination at the hands of Robert Ford has been clouded with mystery ever since its inception. Now, James’ great-great-grandchildren Daniel and Teresa Duke present the results of more than 20 years of exhaustive research into state and federal records, photographs, newspaper reports, diaries, and a 1995 DNA test in search of the truth behind Jesse James’ demise.