History of Crime Scene Investigation

Death of an Emperor

44 BCE

Julius Caesar is assassinated. Following this event, a physician performed an autopsy, and determined that of the 23 wounds found on the body, only one was fatal.

Who determines cause of death

400

Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be the ones to determine cause of death in crimes.

Fingerprints

600

Fingerprints first used to determine identity. Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.

First forensic science book

1248

First forensic science manual published by the Chinese. This was the first known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.

Physical evidence

1784

First recorded instance of physical matching of evidence leading to a murder conviction (John Toms, England). Evidence was a torn edge of newspaper in a pistol that matched newspaper in his pocket.

Investigating poisoning

1806

German chemist Valentin Ross developed a method of detecting arsenic in a victim's stomach, thus advancing the investigation of poison deaths.

Photos

1854

San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.

Sherlock Holmes and the coroner

1887

Coroner's act established that coroners' were to determine the causes of sudden, violent, and unnatural deaths. Arthur Conan Doyle also publishes the first Sherlock Holmes story.

Fingerprint ID used in crime

1892

Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He created a system of fingerprint identification, which he termed dactyloscopy.

Investigations into blood markers

1901

Human blood grouping, ABO, discovered by Karl Landsteiner and adapted for use on bloodstains by Dieter Max Richter.

First fingerprint prisoner ID used

1903

NY state prison system implemented fingerprint identification.

Hair

1910

Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study.

Guns

1912

Victor Balthazard realizes that tools used to make gun barrels never leave the same markings, and individual gun barrels leave identifying grooves on each bullet fired through it. He developed several methods of matching bullets to guns via photography.

Voice recording

1960

A sound spectrograph discovered to be able to record voices. Voiceprints began to be used in investigations and as court evidence from recordings of phones, answering machines, or tape recorders.

Advances in residue detection

1974

Technology developed at Aerospace Corporation in the US to detect gunshot residue, which can link a suspect to a crime scene, and can show how close that suspect was to the gun.

DNA

1984

DNA fingerprinting techniques developed by Sir Alec Jeffreys.

DNA catches the criminal

1987

Tommy Lee Andrews convicted of a series of sexual assaults, using DNA profiling.

Faster fingerprint IDs

1999

FBI establishes the integrated automated fingerprint identification system, cutting down fingerprint inquiry response from two weeks to two hours.

Faster DNA IDs

2001

Technology speeds up DNA profiling time, from 6-8 weeks to between 1-2 days.

Footwear

2007

Britain's Forensic Science Service develops online footwear coding and detection system. This helps police to identify footwear marks quickly.

Detection after cleaning

2008

A way for scientists to visualize fingerprints even after the print has been removed is developed, relating to how fingerprints can corrode metal surfaces.

Facial sketches matched to photos

2011

Michigan state university develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.