Forensics

March 19, 2012

One of the most sensational cases that Dr. C. B. Gopalakrishna investigated from the Forensic Science angle was the history-making Alavandar murder case. Even though more than half century has passed since the murder and its trial that shook South India, it is still being talked about and discussed as excitedly as it was 50-plus years ago. This writer wrote a TV serial based on this case in Tamil, which was produced by the Dhina Thanthi Group-owned TV Division, and telecast over Doordarshan some years ago. The serial turned out to be a major success.

by Randor Guy

The noted Madras morning daily, The Hindu, carried a short news item one morning during August 1952. It had a sensational headline that caught the reader’s attention at once. "CITY BUSINESSMAN MISSING!"

A complaint had been made at the Law College police station in Esplanade, Madras that a person named Alavandar was missing, and his whereabouts were unknown. The complainant was a well-known businessman of the city, a big dealer in fountain pens and the owner of the noted firm Gem & Company, M. C. Cunnan Chetty.

Who was Alavandar? A man in his early 40s, during World War II he had worked as sub-divisional officer at the Army Headquarters at Avadi near Madras. He belonged to the Hindu Vysya community to which M.C. Cunnan also belonged. Known as "Komati Chettis," the Telugu-speaking members of this community are traditionally businessmen and many of them wealthy. But Alavandar was not. After his discharge from the British Indian Army service he looked around for a living and chose to have a small business of his own. Plastic goods.

The age of plastics dawned in India, soon after the World War II and caught the fancy the Indian consumer. The articles were colorful, light, and not so expensive. Plastic articles became the fashion of the day and Alavandar thought that it was a good line of business. His fellow Vysya, Cunnan Chetty, kindly gave him a small space in the frontage of his pen company for him to display the goods and conduct his business. Gem & Company drew many customers and it seemed a fine venue of business for the novelty of the day.

Alavandar also had another line of business. Selling saris on installments. The installment business was something new in Madras during that period. With its easy terms of payments and possession of the goods it found ready acceptance and took firm roots. Though some criticized it as "buying on the never-never," it found its place in the economy of the country and the world too.  (According to law goods bought on the installment plan never really belonged to the user until and unless the last installment was paid. Until then the lessor was the legal owner and he had right to seize the property at any time for default in payment. That was why it was called buying on the "never-never" system of purchase because the article never legally belonged to one until the end.)

Jan. 9, 2012

(Photo used by permission of BlueStar Forensic)

Extra-marital affairs are accepted in France. Wives and husband who indulge in them are even admired. It means that a woman, though married and probably a mother, is still attractive and desirable to the male of the species, and that despite marriage and fatherhood a man remains virile. Yet, occasionally, a spouse will cry “Stop!” and when the philandering continues, the result can be foul murder.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, early in the morning, Florence Bourgade dialed the telephone number of her sister.

Yves and Florence

The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold – just 42° F – in Moigny-sur-École in the Department of Essonne, 36 miles south of Paris, and the 42-year-old’s news was as chilling. Her husband, Yves, 44, had only got back home in the early hours of that morning after a night of drinking and he’s being very abusive verbally and she did not want their children to witness such behavior. Could she therefore send them over for a couple of days? The next-door neighbor would be dropping them off on her way to work. It was the February school vacation.

That call was not the first that Florence made that morning.

Her first call had been at 6:45 a.m. She had called her husband’s employee to say that he would not be in that day.  Her husband was a self-employed mason.  “Yves has blown a fuse. He has left,” she told the man. What she had said in French was Yves a pétée les plombs for which “blowing a fuse” is a polite translation.

At 7 a.m. she had made a second call. She had called her neighbor to ask if she could bring over the children for her to look after for that day. “She wanted me to take the children, but I had to go to work which I told her,” the neighbor would later testify to the police.

Fifteen minutes later Florence had made yet again another call. She had again called her neighbor to ask if she could, on her way to work, drop the children off at her sister’s house. The neighbor had replied that she could do that, yes.

Florence’s sister lived 10 miles away in the town of Barbizon, so, as the neighbor had to go in that direction, dropping the children off would not make her late for work, but, all the same, within 15 minutes she was at the Bourgade house.  The three children, two boys and a girl, aged respectively 12, 10 and 5, were still in bed and were told to get dressed immediately and quickly.

“I understood that Yves was not well,” the neighbor would also later say in her testimony. “I thought of the alcohol.”

She knew that Yves Bourgade drank.  In 2004 there were only about 500 houses in Moigny-sur-École and not even 1,500 people lived there, so it was not easy to hide that a spouse habitually returned home in the early hours of the morning and in an inebriated state.

Florence’s family and friends, although they did not live in the village, were also aware of the drinking. They also knew that Yves was a womanizer. And it had not been necessary to stick their noses into the couple’s life to have known about the women because Yves bragged about his exploits. He even made it his dinner conversation. He did not appear to care that his wife was at the table tending to their guests for whom she had prepared a splendid meal.

The two had been married since 1997 but they had been partners for more than 14 years and Yves had not ever been faithful.

May 16, 2011

Kathleen Marshall

Andrew Fitzherbert was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the basis of DNA evidence alone.  His case shows that it is often not the technology or the science but the supervising biologist’s subjective interpretation of the results that is the crucial factor in assessing whether a suspect sample and a crime-scene sample “match.”

 by Mary Garden

 On Friday, February 27, 1998, between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., veterinarian Kathleen Marshall (subsequently dubbed the “Catwoman”) was murdered in the downstairs clinic of her home in Wilston, on Brisbane’s northside. Her decomposing body with 52 shallow stab wounds was not discovered until Sunday afternoon when two directors of the Cat Protection Society of Queensland (CPSQ), of which Marshall was president, visited her home. Sixteen cats and three dogs, unfed and distressed, were upstairs.

The police investigation initially focused on members of the CPSQ where power struggles and infighting had been a common occurrence, intensifying during the six months before 52-year-old Marshall’s death. In April, however, Ken Cox, a forensic biologist from the John Tonge Center, announced that he had found male blood in the crime-scene samples. Investigators decided to eliminate every male person involved in the deceased’s life, beginning with male members of the CPSQ and any male connected to a female member.

March 3, 2008 updated July 25, 2008

After serving 17 years for the 1988 murders of his adoptive parents, Marty Tankleff's conviction was overturned by an appellate court in December, 2007. On July 1, 2008, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that he would not retry Tankleff.

by David Kirschner, Ph.D.

The Martin Tankleff courtroom saga may finally have come to an end. Tankleff, 36, was released from prison in December, 2007, after serving 17 years for the 1988 gruesome murders of his adoptive mother and father, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, in their Belle Terre, L.I. mansion. An appellate court overturned his 1990 conviction, because of "new evidence," suggesting that somebody other than Tankleff might have committed the crimes; and on July 1, 2008, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that he would not retry Tankleff.

After an extensive five month investigation/review however, Cuomo did not exonerate Tankleff, stating that "although there is some evidence that the defendant Martin Tankleff, committed the crimes charged, after 20 years the evidence is insufficient to . . . prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did so. . . There was no sign of a break-in or of a robbery, and the defendant who was the only other person in the house, was unharmed. . . The defendant made vague but incriminatory statements to a family member and direct confessions to some fellow inmates in prison.

Benjamin Rosenberg, Cuomo's chief trial attorney, concluded that making a case against Tankleff was no longer feasible. Legal technicalities and changes in the law would bar prosecutors from trying him in his mother's murder. Another factor in the decision not to retry Tankleff is the passage of time, resulting in "dimming recollections" of some witnesses and the deaths of others.

Cuomo also stated he had no plan to indict any of the possible killers Tankleff named, saying, "We have found no forensic evidence linking any of these persons to the murder."

A stunning report was issued by the Department of Justice in 1996, reporting on 28 cases of men who'd been convicted of violent sex crimes, including murder, and were then freed from prison based on DNA tests.

by J.J. Maloney

DNA Exonerations:   Part One

DNA Exonerations:   Part Two

DNA Exonerations:  The Actual Cases

These 28 cases could be the tip of an iceberg -- since the report points out there are still states that do not accept DNA evidence.  Additionally, many convicted men cannot find an attorney to go to bat for them, or the resources to pay for testing.  There also is no codified method for routine DNA testing for cases that have been long resolved.  Finally, many jurisdictions routinely destroy all evidence after appeals have been exhausted.

The importance of this report, however, is that it challenges society's underlying assumptions about criminal law.

The first, and most important, assumption to be challenged is the credibility of eye-witness testimony.  In case after case, the rape victim made a firm identification of the assailant  -- the government's evidence seemed bulletproof.  Yet DNA testing resulted in that defendant not only being freed from prison, but in some cases successfully suing for wrongful imprisonment.

One of the more startling findings of the study is that 20 percent of the DNA tests conducted reveal that the person charged with the crime was "excluded" by the test -- meaning the blood of the defendant did not match with the semen, blood, hair or other body cells found on the victim or at the scene of the crime..  This was based on more than 20,000 tests conducted at the time of this study, with half of those coming from the FBI's laboratory.  An additional 20 percent of tests are "inconclusive."

The FBI's vaunted crime lab is a scandal of atrocious forensic science. Its "junk science" permeates the U.S. criminal justice system as it bogus "findings" routinely punish the innocent and set the guilty free, affecting thousands of lives in the process.

by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne

Scientific crime solving or sci-crime – it is an image upon which much of the FBI's awesome reputation is based. Humans are fallible, are inclined to lie and are often motivated by anything but the truth. The history of crime fighting in the United States is littered with eyewitnesses who misidentified a suspect, defense lawyers who persuaded juries to find reasonable doubt, and suspects who had credible alibis. The physical evidence on the other hand is the silent, definitive witness. The traces of explosives on Timothy McVeigh's clothes in Oklahoma City, the bloody shoe-prints left by the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Los Angeles, the saliva traces recovered from the sealed envelope of a letter claiming responsibility for the bombing of the World Trade Center…all these offer certainty. And certainty equals proof.

The means of making physical evidence proof is forensic science, the application of science to legal processes, the application of science to crime-fighting. Together or apart, the words "forensic" and "scientific" are today commonly used as everyday adjectives that imply definitive, detailed and comprehensively argued. It is an image burnished by popular television detective series like "Quincy" and the coverage of big cases by Court TV, an image epitomized by the source of the country's most famous forensic science, the FBI's crime lab.