May 20, 2013
DNA and the transgender Gypsy super-criminal.
by Paul Buchanan
On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, Michele Kiesewetter, a 22-year-old police officer in the German city of Heilbronn, drove with her partner to the parking lot of the local Theresienwiese, a sort of fairground...
Apr 25, 2013
Steve Wright
The murders of five prostitutes by the Suffolk Strangler in 2006 set off one of the largest manhunts in British history. DNA evidence led to the arrest and conviction of a man who admitted he had sex with four of the five dead women, but was he the actual...
Apr 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...
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...
Sep 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...
Jul 3, 2012
July 3, 2012 An edited extract from Cold Case Files: Past crimes solved by new forensic science – available for Kindle in the United States on amazon.com. Hard copies available at www.panmacillan.com.au by Liz Porter Mark Chrystie relished the challenge of hunting criminals with...
May 21, 2012
Farah Jama (L)
Farah Jama, a 21-year-old Somali immigrant in Australia was convicted – based on contaminated DNA evidence – of raping a woman he had never met at a bar in Melbourne he had never been to. His exoneration, after 16 months in prison, led to important reforms in...
Mar 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...
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,...
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...