Liz Porter

April 18, 2013

How bite marks can lead to convictions.

by Liz Porter

Criminals are regularly nabbed because they make stupid and careless mistakes. The burglar who robbed a safe at the up-market Haigh’s chocolate factory in the South Australian capital city of Adelaide is a perfect example. He was caught by his own bad manners. On his way to burgle the establishment’s safe, he toured the factory’s display area, helping himself to samples and biting into several chocolate bars. He then threw the uneaten leftovers on the floor – from where police collected them. If he had taken his uneaten chocolate home – or neatly disposed of it in a rubbish bin – he might never have been caught.

The robbery took place on a weeknight in early February 1996. Office staff arriving for work at the inner suburban factory the next morning discovered that an intruder had broken in through a skylight. He had used an axe and jemmy to bash the alarm system off the wall and had then overturned the office safe, making a hole in its back and removing the $1,800 inside. The workers also spotted the partially eaten chocolate bars the thief had dropped on the floor, and noticed that he had also stolen chocolate from a display area nearby.

Nov. 12, 2012

George Kaufman

The first criminal investigation in Australia – and one of the first in the world – to use DNA to solve a case.

by Liz Porter

The affluent middle-class suburb of North Caulfield, in the southern Australian city of Melbourne, is the kind of area that sends real estate brokers into rhapsodies about “lifestyle” and “leafy outlooks.” Narong Road is located in the very heart of this safe and conservative area. Quiet, respectable and offering a mix of low-rise apartment blocks and spacious houses, it’s a popular address for religious Jewish families because of the short walk to the nearby Caulfield synagogue on the Sabbath.

Yet, over four years in the early to mid-1980s, this pleasant little street became the favorite hunting ground of a brutal and coolly efficient rapist.

The attacks, which began in March 1982 and continued until September 1986, were on women aged from their 20s to 55 and living in the southeastern Melbourne suburbs of Caulfield, Armadale, St. Kilda or areas adjacent to them. There were odd patterns in their occurrence, with intense bursts of activity followed by periods of quiet. Five rapes took place between March and July 1982, the first in Narong Road. Then, between September 1984 and January 1985, there were five more – beginning, again, in Narong Road. A hiatus of almost 18 months followed. Then the rapist resurfaced in July 1986. Once again, his first victim lived in a flat in Narong Road.

With his face masked by a balaclava or clothing and with gloves or socks on his hands to avoid depositing fingerprints, the rapist left so little in the way of traces that the 1988 police operation set up to trap him was dubbed “Operation Shadow.”

Sept. 17, 2012

Handwriting analysis example from the University of Kent

 The School Stalker is an extract from Written On The Skin– an Australian Forensic Casebook by Liz Porter, joint winner of the 2007 Ned Kelly Prize for best true crime book.  This book is available in a Kindle edition. Hard copies from the author: trager@netspace.net.au

by Liz Porter 

The attractive young female teacher had been delighted to get a job on the staff of an inner-suburban boys-only high school in the Australian city of Melbourne. But in late 1996, within months of her arrival, she began receiving offensive handwritten notes, accusing her of having sex with some of her 15 and 16-year-old year students. A letter from an anonymous parent was also sent to the school principal.

The opening of the 1997 school year triggered a resumption of the notes, including a second letter to the principal, and the targeted teacher became increasingly distraught. The letter suggested that the young woman had been behaving in an improper way towards some of her male students and threatened to “seek legal advice” about it.

“On many occasions,” this “concerned parent” wrote, “my son has mentioned that this lady uses inappropriate and suggestive comments to year 10 boys in class.” The “parent” also drew attention to the teacher’s appearance – her ‘very short dresses which leave little to the imagination.”

When the teacher turned to the police, Detective Tony Warren, then based at a station near the school, was assigned to the case.

Although the teacher had destroyed some of the early notes she had been sent, dismissing them as pranks, she had soon begun keeping them, and had collected a considerable number to give to the detective. One note described her as “a big slut who roots boys in year 9 and 10.”

Aug. 13, 2012

Skulls on the beach of Punuk Island Alaska

by Liz Porter

The science

Many experts start their forensic science timeline in 1810, when a German scientist did a chemical test for a particular ink dye on a document. Three years later, Spaniard Mathieu Orfila published his Toxicologie Générale, as a result of which he is usually regarded as the father of modern toxicology.

In 1835, Londoner Henry Goddard, a member of the Bow Street Runners, the unofficial police force set up by the writer and magistrate Henry Fielding, initiated the use of bullet comparison when investigating a burglary. He spotted a flaw in a bullet lodged in a bed’s backboard, matching it both to other bullets in the suspect’s gun and to the mould from which the bullets had been made. This enabled him to solve the crime. The butler did it, then invented a story about a masked intruder to cover up his own “inside job.”

In the following year, English chemist James Marsh, inventor of a method to measure small amounts of arsenic ingested or absorbed by a human body, used the technique in the trial of a man accused of poisoning his grandfather. But the jury, confused by the complexity of Marsh’s testimony, acquitted the man. As a result, the scientist improved and simplified his method into a technique that was easier to explain to lay people, devising a test for arsenic in dead bodies which became known as the Marsh Test.

In 1850, French physician Marcel Bergeret was able to exonerate a couple accused of killing a baby whose mummified remains had been unearthed while they were renovating their apartment. Workmen removing brickwork behind the mantelpiece had discovered the remains. Bergeret carried out an autopsy on the body, finding some moths and larvae from a flesh fly on it. Using his knowledge of the succession of insects that visit dead bodies, he calculated that the moths had grown from eggs laid in 1849, meaning that the flies must have laid their eggs on the newly dead body in 1848, when it was walled in, before the current occupants had moved into the apartment. Suspicion was then directed at previous occupants, specifically a young woman who had appeared at one point to be pregnant but had never been seen with a baby. She was arrested and tried for murder but was acquitted because the cause of her baby’s death could not be established.