Maggots, Murder, and Men: Memories and Reflections of a Forensic Entomologist - Softcover

Erzinçlioglu, Dr. Zakaria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031231132X ISBN 13: 9780312311322

Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In MAGGOTS, MURDER, AND MEN a forensic entomologist, Dr. Zakaria Erzinclioglu--known affectionately as Dr. Zak or the Maggotologist--studies and outlines how insects can be used to aid a murder investigation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Zakaria Erzinclioglu was formerly Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University and also Director of the Forensic Science Research Center at Durham University. In his capacity as a forensic entomologist he is one of the most experienced scientists in the business. He is well known in England and has appeared in a number of television programs including The Witness Was a Fly for the BBC.

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Maggots, Murder, and Men

Memories and Reflections of a Forensic Entomologist

By Zakaria Erzinçlioglu

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2000 Y. Z. Erzinçlioglu
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-31132-2

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Foreword, 
Author's acknowledgements, 
CHAPTER 1: A very simple clue, 
CHAPTER 2: The nature of evidence, 
CHAPTER 3: The evidence of nature, 
CHAPTER 4: Foul, strange and unnatural, 
CHAPTER 5: Broken lives, 
CHAPTER 6: A medley of madness, 
CHAPTER 7: Cases of identity, 
CHAPTER 8: Past times, 
CHAPTER 9: Maggots and medicine, 
CHAPTER 10: The ends and the means, 
Notes, 
Further reading, 
Index, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

A very simple clue

'Who saw him die?'
'I', said the Fly
'With my little eye,
I saw him die.'

Anon., 'Who killed Cock Robin?'

Viewed dispassionately, a dead human body is a magnificent and highly nutritious resource. Such a resource, suddenly made available in Nature, will be rapidly colonized by various insects as well as other invertebrate animals. As time passes and decomposition progresses, different insect species will be attracted to the body at different stages of decay. Bluebottles and greenbottles will arrive to lay their eggs which hatch into maggots that feed voraciously on the tissues. Beetles will arrive, not only to feed upon the tissues, but also upon the maggots. Minute wasps will arrive to parasitize the maggots. Tiny flies, whose very existence remains unguessed by most people, will similarly arrive at various stages of decay and will leave tell-tale signs of their visits. Myriads of other creatures will arrive at various times, each to leave its mark for future interpretation by those who look into such things. On the basis of the fact that anything that changes with time can be used as a clock, the succession of insects occurring on a dead body can, in principle, be exploited as a measure of time since death.

This intriguing idea has an important application, for it can help to answer one of the most basic questions asked during a murder investigation: 'When was the crime committed?' Although this is one of the commonest questions a policeman is likely to ask himself when investigating a murder, it is also one of the most difficult to answer. Contrary to popular belief, based on so many crime stories and whodunnits, the doctor who attends the scene is usually quite unable to say anything very useful about time of death, except in certain special circumstances. The whodunnit medico, who says things like: 'Inspector, the murder took place at a quarter to two on the morning of Tuesday 23rd March', is a totally fictitious character.

In real life, forensic pathologists (medics whose expertise lies primarily in the determination of cause of death) can offer an opinion on time of death only during the first three days or so after a crime is committed. Forensic pathologists exploit three natural phenomena to help them answer the question of time of death. These are the onset and passing away of rigor mortis; the time taken for the temperature of the body to drop to that of the surrounding air; and the order in which the various organs start to decompose. All these changes take place and are over within two or three days of death; beyond that time there is no easily measurable pathological change that can be used to determine when the victim died.

But it is not only in the matter of time of death that insects can help in criminal investigations. They can also help us to discover thesite of the crime and how it was committed. They can tell us whether someone was a victim of blackmail; whether a crime was committed with malice aforethought; and whether someone's death was a suicide. They can shed light on crimes involving the smuggling of drugs; they can lead us to the home town of a murder victim; they can help us to identify a rapist; and many other things besides.

Curiously, the use of insects in the investigation of crime is a relatively new subject. Like most of forensic science, it began to take shape during the second half of the nineteenth century but, even today, very few people, including some police officers, know that it exists at all.

* * *

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, was a pioneer forensic scientist. It was he who introduced the idea of taking plaster casts of footprints. His Sherlock Holmes stories, which emphasize the central importance of physical evidence in criminal investigations, were actually used as instruction manuals by the Chinese and Egyptian police forces for many years, and the French Sûreté named their great forensic laboratory at Lyon after him. He transformed the very way criminal investigators thought about their work. We owe him a great debt of gratitude.

For a long time I believed that Conan Doyle, in spite of his great understanding of forensic matters, overlooked the evidence of the ever-present insects. In one of his short stories, Black Peter, in which a sailor, Captain Peter Carey, is murdered with a harpoon and pinned to the wall, Conan Doyle has Inspector Stanley Hopkins describe the scene of the murder to Sherlock Holmes in the following way:

'Well, I have fairly steady nerves, as you know, Mr Holmes, but I give you my word that I got a shake when I put my head into that little house. It was droning like a harmonium with the flies and bluebottles, and the floor and walls were like a slaughterhouse ... And there in the middle was the man himself, his face twisted like a lost soul in torment, and his great brindled beard stuck upwards in his agony. Right through his broad breast a steel harpoon had been driven, and it had sunk deep into the wood of the wall behind him. He was pinned like a beetle on a card. Of course, he was quite dead.'

In the conversation that follows, Holmes rebukes the young inspector for failing to notice any footmarks, saying, 'My good Hopkins, I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature.' Hopkins is contrite but, if he had had his wits about him, he might have retorted that although no flying creatures committed the crime they certainly arrived to bear witness to the event. For Sherlock Holmes totally ignores the presence of the flies and bluebottles, which were clearly inserted by Conan Doyle purely for dramatic purposes, not as evidence that could have been used to solve the mystery.

Ever since I first read this story many years ago, I have wondered whether Conan Doyle really could have overlooked the significance of the flies. Although Sherlock Holmes does not discuss them as evidence in Captain Carey's murder, their presence confirms the account of events given by various characters in the story. In fact, the description of the scene is so uncannily realistic that I have to conclude that Conan Doyle must have known something about the habits of flies. Let me explain.

At about 2 o'clock in the morning, Captain Carey's wife and daughter heard a loud bellow coming from the Captain's hut in the garden. They thought nothing of it, since the Captain often roared and bellowed when drunk. It was only at noon that someone went to the hut to investigate, since the Captain could be very violent when under the influence of alcohol, and it was then that his dead body was discovered, with the flies swarming around it. Within the hour,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 031231132X
• ISBN 13: 9780312311322
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland