Victim: Zhen Yang (pseudonym), from Henan, studied at the university in Shanghai. 

Case summary: After graduating from the university in Shanghai, Yang had made a phone call with his parents, but they had an argument because his parents urged him to find a job to help support the lives of his little brother and sister. Unfortunately, after this call, the family had not heard from Yang for more than ten years.

According to the investigation, Yang could not get a job in Shanghai, so he followed one of his schoolmates to Guangzhou. In fact, they were both tricked into MLM (multiple-level marketing) organizations--which linked to the evil forces of society. Eventually, Yang was beaten to death and dismembered for quitting the organization. The group member finally dumped Yang’s body in an abandoned snake farm in Dashi town (it is called “Dashi Street” now). In 2020, a scavenger found part of Yang’s body tissue in a black plastic bag. 

After forensic identification, the body tissue was from a man in his 20s, who was about 1.65-1.70 meters tall, and the PMI (postmortem interval estimation) was about two to three months. Then, forensics extracted the DNA of the body tissue from its bone cells and successfully matched it with Yang’s DNA.

Case: In 1956, Bogle was found near the Sun River in Montana dead from a gunshot wound to the head, and someone had used his belt to tie his hands behind his back. The next day, Kalitzke’s body was found in an area north of Great Falls. She had been shot in the head, just as Bogle had been, but she had also been sexually assaulted. Since none of the numerous leads panned out at that time, the case eventually went cold. However, the Sheriff's office continued to work on the case and found a clue. In 2001, someone from the office sent a preserved sample which was a vaginal swab taken from Kalitzke’s autopsy in 1956 to a lab for testing, and they found sperm that didn’t belong to Bogle. With the help of labs and this clue, forensic genealogists created a DNA profile of the culprit and used the profile to search for potential matches. Finally, they found a man called Gould, but Gould had died in 2007. Based on the DNA testing of his remaining relatives, Gould was identified as the killer after more than 60 years.

Victim: Lin Ling, from Nanjing, studied at Nanjing Medical University.

Case summary: On March 24, 1992, four days after Lin's disappearance, police found her body under a manhole cover next to the school's teaching building. The victim was held upside down in a manhole cover, half naked, and there were signs of multiple blows to the head with blunt objects. The police judged that the victim had been raped and murdered.

From the crime scene, the police extracted DNA from all the objects and from the victim's body. At the same time, patrol found the murderer when he was washing his hands that night and thought he was a thief. So based on the description of the patrol officers, the police used simulated portrait technology to draw a general description of the murderer, and published in the local newspaper.

However, due to technological limitations at the time, the gene bank's data was incomplete, and there were no surveillance cameras nearby to show the murderer's whereabouts. The murderer was cunning, disappeared after the murder, so the case was dropped for a long time.

But the local police never gave up on the case until 2020, when they took advantage of a new technology called the Y chromosome bank, because men in a family are identical in their Y chromosomes (as long as there are no gene mutations). In an epidemic investigation in 2020, they traced the murderer's next of kin through the Y chromosome, which led to the murderer, Ma Jigang.

Even though the murderer reinvented himself, he was eventually found, thanks to new technology in the Y-bank and evidence carefully preserved by the police.

After investigation, Shaoping Du illegally constructed the playground civil engineering project of Xinhuang No.1 Middle School in 2003. As a supervisor of this project on behalf of school, Shiping Deng complained the project was too expensive and had quality issues. Shaoping Du held a grudge against him. On January 22, 2003, together with others, he killed Shiping Deng and buried his body in a pit in the playground of Xinhuang No.1 Middle School.

When the remains were exhumed, the skin tissue of the body was no longer present. Forensics scientists extracted DNA from the bones dug up at the scene as well as from clothing and suspicious residue. Through a DNA match with his families, the remain was finally identified as Shiping Deng.

This case of Simpson’s murder was full of suspicion. Simpson was convicted in 1995 of two counts of murder in the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and a restaurant waiter, Ronald Goldman. The criminal trial resulted in an acquittal because of flawed evidence and the Los Angeles city police failed to follow due process in their investigation

Accusers provided several pieces of main evidence: a glove, socks and bloodstain with Simpson’s DNA found in the scene that confirmed Simpson was the criminal of the murder case. Hair recovered from the scene matches Simpson's; police at the scene and Simpson’s house found the same pair of blood gloves, both gloves have the blood of the victim and the defendant. 

However, the process of detecting, preserving evidence had not strictly followed the rules of crime scene investigation, which made the case full of suspicion. One of the key pieces of evidence presented by the prosecution was the results of blood and DNA tests. Criminal experts agree that blood tests and DNA tests do not lie, but that the credibility of blood is greatly diminished if it is contaminated, mishandled, carelessly collected, or deliberately planted. In this case, when experts examined blood stains on the socks, they found high concentrations of the preservative EDTA. The preservative was added to a blood sample taken by police on the day of the murder.

Also, on a path leading from the victim's body to the backyard of the apartment, police found five drops of the Simpson’s blood, uniform and complete in shape. If Simpson had been stabbed during a struggle, a lot of bleeding at first and then a gradual decrease. So, blood drops are never uniform. In addition, the blood drop should be thrown during a fight or walking, landing in the impact state, so the shape of the blood drop is not complete. That’s why finally Simpson was judged acquitted and only civilly responsible for the deaths of two people.

The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969, operating in rural, urban and suburban settings. He targeted young couples and a lone male cab driver, and his known attacks took place in Benicia, Vallejo, unincorporated Napa County, and the city of San Francisco proper. Two of his attempted victims survived. The Zodiac himself claimed to have murdered 37 victims, and he has been linked to several other cold cases, some in Southern California or outside the state.

The Zodiac originated the name himself in a series of taunting letters and cards that he mailed to regional newspapers, threatening killing sprees and bombings if they were not printed. Some of the letters included cryptograms, or ciphers, in which the killer claimed that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife. Of the four ciphers he produced, two remain unsolved, and one took 51 years to crack. While many theories regarding the identity of the killer have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992.

Although the Zodiac ceased written communications around 1974, the unusual nature of the case led to international interest that has sustained throughout the years.^[4] The San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive" in April 2004, but re-opened it at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

 

Autopsy can see: The cornea of both eyes was transparent, and the pupil was large and round, with a diameter of 5 mm.Mild congestion of conjunctival membrane of both eyes, no abnormality was observed in bilateral external auditory meatus of oral and nasal cavity, epidermal peeling was observed at 1 cm *0.2 cm at the right nasal root, 1.5 cm * 0.4 cm at the zygomatic part on the right. The abdomen was highly distensed, and the abdominal wall tension was great, hard as stone, and no injury was observed in the abdominal wall. The stomach was extremely dilated, extending from the diaphragm to the pelvic cavity, and the stomach wall was thin, with a large amount of stomach contents in the shape of porridge, containing undigested food such as meat and vegetables. The stomach contents were about 8000 ml. Most of the gastric mucosa folds disappeared. The thickness of the stomach wall was 0.1~0.2 cm, and the mucosa surface was brown. Superficial mucosal hyperemia accompanied with old bleeding, vascular dilatation and congestion in myometrium, and partial gastric wall compression infarction the intestinal wall became thin in the area 145 cm away from the pylorus and about 120 cm away. Under the microscope of mucosal fold disappearance, the intestinal mucosa was widely leucolysis, and the intestinal wall became thin and about 0.1 cm thick

Pathological diagnosis: acute gastric dilatation
 

Short's severely mutilated body was completely severed at the waist and drained of blood, leaving her skin a pallid white. Medical examiners determined that she had been dead for around ten hours prior to the discovery, leaving her time of death either sometime during the evening of January 14 or the early morning hours of January 15. The body had apparently been washed by the killer. Short's face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears, creating an effect known as the "Glasgow smile". She had several cuts on her thigh and breasts, where entire portions of flesh had been sliced away. The lower half of her body was positioned a foot away from the upper, and her intestines had been tucked neatly beneath her buttocks. The corpse had been "posed", with her hands over her head, her elbows bent at right angles, and her legs spread apart.

Upon the discovery, a crowd of passersby and reporters began to gather; Los Angeles Herald-Express reporter Aggie Underwood was among the first to arrive at the scene, and took several photos of the corpse and crime scene. Near the body, detectives located a heel print on the ground amid the tire tracks, and a cement sack containing watery blood was also found nearby.

When he was questioned, the man changed his story multiple times before admitting to drinking 5 beers that afternoon. However, he also claimed that he worked during the morning sealing a cement garage foundation. Since he had lots of experience working with this particular sealant, he decided not to wear a respirator. 

The man was charged with drunk driving. His defense argued that the breath alcohol test was contaminated by the volatile solvents found in the sealant the man had been working with. The defense also claimed that this explained why the man failed the field sobriety tests, as exposure to the solvent could have caused severe impairment. 

The government proved this theory false by conducting an infrared breath test which failed to detect the presence of the relevant solvents. 

On August 17, 1980, at a campsite near Australia's famous Ayer's Rock, Chamberlain cried out that the dingogot her baby. A jury of nine men and three women came to believe the story and convicted Lindy Chamberlain for the murder of her ten-week-old daughter, Azaria.

However, in 1986, another case happened in Australia that a tourist was killed while climbing the Ayer Rock where numerous dingo dens. Suspicion was posted to the Lindy case and two problems were discovered. The first one was that it was possible that dingoes could attack children and took them away, while the second one was that because of the existence of fetal hemoglobin, it would lead to false-positive results on a variety of materials. 

On the ninth floor of the parking lot, police found a blue Buick with blood on the doorknob and items that identified the car as the victim's. A fingerprint was found on a tissue box in the back of the car, and a man's handkerchief covered with blood was found on the seventh floor of the parking lot.

Police found that blood type from the items was type O blood while the victim penny's blood type was B type, so that the trail of blood was from the murderer. Also, in the blood they found traces of freon and mechanical grease composition, through which they can preliminarily concluded that the murderer is engaged in some related to vehicle maintenance and repair work.

A number of suspects identified by police through Penny’s relationship network were ruled out since their blood types were not O, and the case was put on hold for 29 years. But Penny's father never gave up looking for the murderer, he found the famous detective Li Changyu at that time. 

After sorting out the case, Li Changyu decided that it was when Penny was defending herself that she cut the murderer, so he examined two important pieces of physical evidence -- the fingerprint on the tissue box and the handkerchief with blood, and extracted a set of fingerprints from the tissue box. Compared to the extraction of decades ago, this fingerprint is clearer and more helpful for solving the case. But unfortunately, no one matched them for years. 

As time passed, a big break in what had been a long shot turned up when a match for the prints finally appeared. The man was Grant, a garage employee who had been reported to the police by his wife for abusing her, and when the police took his fingerprints, they found that his fingerprints matched those left by the killer. In front of hard physical evidence, Grant admitted that he was going to the parking lot to steal a car, and then was injured in Penny's car, so he lost his mind and killed Penny.

In this case, the development in extracting and identifying technologies of fingerprints contributes a lot to the 29 years unsolved crime.

Amarendra developed a fever while in Pakur, so he decided to travel back to Calcutta to see a doctor three days later. He developed a high fever, swelling in his armpits, and early signs of lung disease. He fell into a coma on December 3 and died the next morning. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but lab results indicated the presence of the bacteria that causes plague. This was extremely unusual because there had not been a case of plague in Calcutta for three years. 

The Calcutta police’s investigation revealed that the half-brothers had been engaged in a dispute over their family’s Pakur estate. After a failed attempt to poison his brother, Benoyendra enlisted the help of a friend who was a physician. With his friend’s help he was able to obtain a plague culture under the guise of conducting research. He then hired an assassin to covertly infect his brother with the sample. Both the assassin and the needle were never found. 

In trial, a court found that Benoyendra and his friend conspired with an assassin to poison and kill Amarendra. They were both sentenced to death, but the Calcutta High Court lessened their sentences to life in prison. 

This case is significant because it is an early example of how forensic toxicology can be used to solve complicated cases. This case has also been described as one of the earliest recorded cases of individual bioterrorism. 

The police searched the bedroom where the murder had taken place and find a  fingerprint with blood on the door frame. So they  took the wood of the door with the bloody fingerprints and frame back to the police station. They asked the suspect Velasquel to check the thumbprints, but the results did not match. Then he called Francesca again. Surprisingly, her thumbprint matched. Francesca  had to admit that she killed her two biological children because she wanted to marry her lover.

 

The autopsy report concluded that the skin of the whole body was yellow stained with conjunctival of both eyes, and many scattered liver and skin congestion was observed in chest and back of neck and limbs. Histopathological examination revealed extensive central necrosis of liver lobules, extensive necrosis of proximal and distal tubules of kidney, extensive bleeding and edema of lung and other morphological changes. Huang Yang was believed to have multiple organ damage, such as liver and kidney, and died of multiple organ damage and failure caused by N dimethyl nitrosamine.

His body was found lying on the floor of the living room on his left side with his right leg extended and his left leg flexed at the knee. A compound bow was lying near his right foot. Protruding from the left medial back was a 19.5-inch length of the arrow with an attached 4-bladed broad-head tip. The back of the tee-shirt showed 3 distinct blood flow patterns: (1) blood flow toward the center belt loop of the pants of the deceased; (2) blood flow toward the right shoulder; and (3) blood flow in a gravitational downward direction toward the left side of the victim.

Autopsy findings showed no pathologic abnormalities were identified during the remainder of the internal examination. Toxicology revealed therapeutic levels of drugs. At the completion of the investigation, the scientists preferred that the case was a suicide.

Besides the manner of death, forensic scientists could analyze the potential way of suicide based on the bloodstain analysis. Theoretically, the victim could have either impaled himself with the arrow only or have used the bow in combination with the arrow. The bloodstain analysis suggests that the latter was the most plausible assumption when the victim was standing erect at some point prior to his final collapse and demise. The absence of blood on the hands and the depth of penetration with the arrow only protruding a couple of inches from the abdomen decreases the possibility of the victim impaling himself without the use of the bow.The victim was at one point standing erect with blood dripping vertically downward towards the center belt loop of his pants. Finally, the victim collapsed on his left side, resulting in the shaft of the arrow bending from its impact with an adjacent sofa and blood flowing gravitationally down toward his left side.

This case was not taken up soon as Siddharth Vashisht (suspect) who was also known as Manu Sharma had great political influence.
Media played an evident role in providing justice to Jessica Lal. Manu Sharma fired a .22 caliber pistol twice, the first bullet hit the ceiling which was shot as a warning to Jessica and the second bullet struck Jessica in the head at point-blank range.
The case was solved by forensic ballistics. The various firearm evidence including the two empty cartridge cases of the .22 caliber that were recovered from the crime scene helped in convicting the offender.

THE CAMM CASE: “A BLACK-EYE” TO THE BPA PROFESSION
After giving an overview of BPA history, the instructor mentioned that the bloodstain profession has taken a few hits with the 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that was critical of some of the practices of BPA in American courtrooms. He noted that one case in particular, the David Camm case in Indiana, has given the profession “a black eye”.

I had watched the CBS 48 Hours story on the Camm case several years earlier, so I was aware that former Indiana State Trooper, David Camm’s alibi had been corroborated by eleven men. He had been playing basketball at a church where his uncle was the pastor. The game started around 7 p.m., about the same time that his wife and two children were last seen alive.

The men played basketball for about two hours and David was there the entire time, according to those who played ball with him. At approximately 9:26 p.m. he arrived home and called his old post at the Indiana State Police after finding the bodies of his wife and two children in the garage of their home in Georgetown, Indiana.

David told police he found his wife lying on the floor of the garage. She had a single bullet wound to the head. He found his five-year-old daughter, Jill, in her seat belt in the back seat of his wife’s Ford Bronco inside the garage. Jill had been shot once in the head. His son Brad was slumped over the back seat as if he had attempted to escape to the back cargo area when he was shot. David said his son’s body felt warm, possibly still alive. David climbed into the back seat, carried his son out of the vehicle and laid him next to his mother so he could perform CPR. Brad died from the single gun-shot wound that entered just under his arm pit. At autopsy, the pathologist found possible evidence of a possible “sexual assault” in Jill’s vaginal area which immediately changed the dynamics of the homicide investigation. The demeanor of the questioning toward David became accusatory. However, a week earlier, the child’s pediatrician had noticed the same inflammation, but attributed it to aggressive wiping or possibly a reaction to bubble baths. A mandatory reporter, the family doctor was not alarmed. No report of child abuse had been made at that time.

Prosecutors decided to call in a bloodstain pattern “expert” who had a reputation for assisting in the prosecution of cases that were difficult to prove. Two days later, David Camm was arrested for first degree murder, based on an interpretation of eight tiny bloodstains on his t-shirt. The “expert” who had been called to the crime scene interpreted these stains as high velocity impact spatter from allegedly firing the gun that killed his family. Some of the leading experts in BPA, however, disagreed, and said the stains were caused by transfer from coming into contact with his 5 year-old daughter’s hair that was saturated with her blood when he removed his son from the vehicle.

Robert Stites was the so-called “expert” in crime scene reconstruction and bloodstain pattern analysis who arrived in New Albany, Indiana to assist Floyd County prosecutor Stan Faith. Stites, however, was merely a crime scene photographer who was working at the direction of Rodney Englert. The real “expert” was Englert, who was a Charter Member of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts (IABPA). Englert was not able to travel to the crime scene, so he sent his photographer.

Police were unaware at the time that Stites was unqualified to render opinions about blood-stain analysis, but he did. Prior to traveling to Indiana, Stites had never taken any courses on bloodstain analysis or crime scene reconstruction, and was not a member of any blood stain analysis organization. The Indiana State Police evidence technician, who was initially in charge of processing the crime scene, had strong reservations about the so-called “expertise” of Robert Stites. After watching Stites the seasoned CSI realized that Stites didn’t know what he was doing.

The CSI came to this realization after Stites claimed there was evidence of clean-up at the crime scene. He said there had been a clear watery substance added to the large volume of blood that flowed downward to the edge of the garage away from the wife’s head wound. It turns out that it was serum separation, which helped provide a timeline as to when the murders happened. A defense bloodstain expert calculated that it would have taken about two hours for the serum to separate, placing the time of death at around 7:30 p.m. Stites arrived at the crime scene on Sept. 30, 2000. On the following day, David was arrested based on Stite’s opinion that high velocity impact spatter was present on David’s gray t-shirt known as Area 30. The police officer who served the arrest warrant, had reservations about arresting David based on the opinions of Stites.

The affidavit that prosecutors drafted that provided probable cause to arrest Camm relied entirely on the opinions of Stites. Stites observed eight small blood stains on the front left side of David’s t-shirt that were less than one millimeter in diameter. The size of stains, he said, meant this had to have been high velocity impact spatter from being in close proximity to a fired gun.

Backspatter and forward spatter from a bullet penetrating a blood source at high velocity can project a fine mist pattern of blood stains; backward as the bullet penetrates the object and forward as the bullet exits. Blood stains from high velocity impact spatter typically are less than a millimeter in diameter, as is found on David’s t-shirt.

However, as I learned from my BPA training, “Both expectorate blood [aspirated from the mouth] and flies produce patterns that an analyst can misidentify as impact spatter”, according to Tom Bevel’s book Bloodstain Pattern Analysis: with an Introduction to Crime Scene Analysis. Bevel cautions that it is, therefore, important for the analyst to consider the full context of the crime scene.

EXPERTS FOR THE DEFENSE
Blood stain experts Bart Epstein, Terry Laber, Stuart James, and Paul Kish, some of the most respected bloodstain experts in the country testified for the defense. They expressed their professional opinions that the small spots of blood on David’s t-shirt were transfer stains caused by the t-shirt coming into contact with blood saturated strands of his daughter’s hair.

However, none of the State’s bloodstain experts reported observing high velocity impact spatter stains on David’s shorts. The absence of spatter stains on David’s pants adds strength to the conclusion that the stains on Area 30 were caused by transfer from the shirt coming into contact with his daughter’s blood soaked strands of hair.

The linear pattern of the stains is also not consistent with high velocity impact spatter. One would expect to see a conical pattern of dispersal from high velocity impact spatter (both forward and back spatter) when a bullet fired from a gun impacts a body of blood. However, the bloodstains on Area 30 form a straight line, a pattern that is more consistent with a transfer of blood from strands of hair from a head wound.

MISUSE OF BPA IN AMERICAN COURTROOMS
My first case involving Rodney Englert, was a Lawrenceville, IL woman who was facing the death penalty. In June of 2000, I received a phone call from Katharine Liell, a criminal defense attorney from Bloomington, IN. Ironically; she would later represent David Camm. Her client, Julie Rea, was a Ph. D. student at Indiana University. It was a cold-case. Three years had gone by since the murder of Julie’s son, 10 year-old Joel Kirkpatrick. On Oct. 13, 1997, at 4 a.m., Julie was awakened by her son’s screams for help. When she went into his room, she startled an intruder. He had just stabbed her son to death with a knife that came from her kitchen.

The elected state’s attorney resisted pressure from the sheriff and her ex-husband to place her under arrest. The prosecutor made a public statement that there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone. After he left office, a special prosecutor intent on charging Julie Rea with a capital offense was appointed to take charge of the investigation. The special prosecutor hired Rodney Englert.

Englert was able to see evidence of cast off bloodstains in his interpretation of the night-shirt Julie was wearing when she encountered the intruder. Englert opined that the cast-off stains were allegedly caused when the mother drew back the knife after repeatedly stabbing her son to death. Bloodstain interpretations previously made by forensic scientists from the Illinois State Police could only find transfer patterns consistent with the mother’s story about colliding into an intruder and struggling with the man. She had a black eye where the man had punched her in the face, and she had a gash on her arm that required sutures.

I told Julie’s attorney that if I was appointed to her client’s case, I would want to investigate whether Tommy Lynn Sells had been in the area at the time of the murder. A child serial killer, Sells had just been arrested in Del Rio, TX, for a similar crime in which he broke into a trailer at 4 a.m and used a knife from the kitchen to kill Kaylene Harris while her mother slept. However, prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty in a maneuver to avoid reforms that would have leveled the playing field by providing Julie’s defense with financial resources to investigate her innocence prior to trial. After Julie was convicted in March of 2002, Diane Fanning published Through the Window: The Terrifying True Story of Cross-Country Killer Tommy Lynn Sells. Sells had told Fanning about a murder in Illinois in which he had killed a child and was startled by the mother who came into the room. He said he would have killed her too, if he hadn’t dropped the knife. Crime scene investigators found the bloody knife on the floor at the doorway, where Julie said she encountered the man.

I was able to corroborate the confession with witnesses who reported to their sheriff an intruder who matched Sell’s physical description. Based on this evidence, Texas Ranger John Allen provided an affidavit supporting Julie’s petition seeking to overturn her conviction. However, after her conviction was overturned the same prosecutors and police investigators who got it wrong dug in their heels and decided to disbelieve the confession before consulting with Texas law enforcement authorities. They re-arrested Julie just as she was about to be released from prison and set her case for re-trial. A new jury, hearing the evidence of the serial killer’s confession found her not guilty in 2006. She was represented by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School pro bono. She subsequently received a Certificate of Innocence.

On June 2, 2003, a year after Englert’s testimony was used to persuade juries to convict David Camm and Julie Rea, an ethics complaint against Englert was filed with the American Academy of Forensic Science by some of the most respected bloodstain experts in the country alleging that Englert had misrepresented his education, training and experience. Subsequent to this, Englert filed suit against Herb MacDonell (regarded as the father of the BPA profession) alleging slander for calling Englert among other things “a forensic whore”, “liar-for-hire”, “a very smooth charlatan”, and “the Bin Laden of bloodstains”.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences released a critique of forensic science practices in U.S. courtrooms, noting that since the introduction of DNA testing in 1989 that “faulty science” was found to be responsible for the wrongful convictions of a number of post-conviction DNA exonerations. BPA was one of several disciplines that were faulted because of the interjection of “examiner bias” that may lead to erroneous conclusions when interpreting evidence like bite marks, tool marks and bloodstains. The report noted “many sources of variability arise with the production of bloodstain patterns, and their interpretation is not nearly as straightforward as the process implies”. The report found, “some experts extrapolate far beyond what can be supported”, and went on to conclude that “extra care must be given to the way in which the analyses are presented in court. The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous”.

DNA IDENTIFIES CHARLES BONEY
Four years after David Camm was arrested, his conviction was reversed in Aug. 2004, because prosecutors had unfairly inflamed the jury by introducing testimony about his extramarital affairs. Some of his affairs were with women with whom he worked at the Indiana State Police Sellersburg Post, which had taken charge of the homicide investigation.

A new team of investigators were called into the case to be “fresh eyes”. They discovered from their review of the file that there had been a grey sweatshirt that was foreign to the crime scene. The sweatshirt was found underneath Brad Camm’s body, where his father laid his son next to his wife.

The inside collar had the moniker “BACK-BONE” written in black ink. At the very beginning of the investigation the collar had been swabbed by a forensic scientist to identify the wearer’s DNA. An unknown male DNA profile was identified. Prior to David’s first trial his defense attorney asked the prosecutor, Stan Faith, (who had charged David) whether this DNA profile had been entered into CODIS, the FBI offender DNA database. The prosecutor told the defense attorney that it was submitted, but there was no hit. This was a false representation, which obstructed justice for David Camm.

Years later, after an appellate court reversed David’s conviction, Camm’s new attorney, Katherine Liell, requested that the DNA be entered into CODIS. In Feb. 2005, a CODIS hit came back identifying a career criminal named Charles Darnell Boney whose prison nickname was BACK-BONE. He had been released from prison a few months before the Camm family was killed. Known as the “Shoe Bandit”, Boney had a foot fetish and was sexually aroused by holding women at gunpoint and stealing their shoes.

One of the female troopers who arrived at the crime scene had noted in her report that it was odd that the shoes of David’s wife had been removed from her feet and were placed on top of the vehicle.

Now, it all made sense.

Although his wife’s shoes and pants had been removed, there was no evidence of a sexual assault in the conventional sense. So investigators dismissed the idea that the crime was motivated by the behavior of a sexual predator. But knowing Boney’s sexual predilection of being aroused by women’s bare feet and legs, the artifacts of the crime scene fit perfectly with his MO.

THE PROSECUTION COMPLEX
Chicago Sun Times reporter Tom Frisbie described the “Prosecution Complex” in his book Victims of Justice, about the infamous Nicarico case. Instead of seeking justice when new and exonerating evidence was found proving the innocence of Rolando Cruz, which included DNA and confession of a serial killer, the police and prosecutors who got it wrong tend to circle the wagons to fend off the attack on the original conviction. In that case, police and prosecutors were eventually indicted for a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Less than a month after DNA identified Charles Boney, his palm print was found on the door frame of the passenger side of David’s wife’s Ford Bronco. This palm print is consistent with Boney having reached inside the vehicle to fire the shots that killed 7 year-old Brad, and his 5 year-old sister, Jill, who was still seat belted inside the vehicle.

Earlier, a judge had lowered David’s bond. He was released to what remained of his family. His uncle, Sam Lockhart, who had been playing basketball that night with David, bonded him out of jail.

But now Boney was given a choice. He could be charged with the death penalty, or he could cooperate and assist prosecutors with their theory that Boney provided the gun to David Camm that he allegedly used to kill his family. Boney initially denied knowing David when he was interviewed in February. A month later, with this new and compelling evidence of his palm print, Boney’s life depended on which choice he made. Despite his previous series of proven lies, Boney changed his story, and now said he met David playing basketball and after this first meeting arranged to sell him a gun that he wrapped in his sweatshirt. However, this does not explain why David’s wife’s DNA is on the left sleeve of the sweatshirt. The autopsy revealed that David’s wife had struggled with the assailant and had injuries suggesting she had been choked.

Nevertheless, David was re-indicted for conspiracy to commit murder and has been confined to a prison cell ever since. Although Boney was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and remains in prison, he recently said he has every expectation of being a free man someday.

EXONERATING THE INNOCENT
The highlight of my BPA training was the arrival of Tom Bevel. He had been on the road most of that week testifying in court. During the noon break after his presentation, he told me about his work on a case in North Carolina where he had provided testimony of his interpretation of bloodstain evidence that had helped to exonerate an innocent man

On Feb. 10, 2010, he provided testimony for the North Carolina Innocence Project before an independent panel of three judges. This special commission was created by the state’s Supreme Court to establish an independent review of inmate claims of actual innocence called North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, the first of its kind in the nation. Bevel’s testimony persuaded the three judges that there was clear and convincing evidence demonstrating the innocence of Greg Taylor. Taylor was granted a full pardon on May 21, 2010, and was released from prison. He had been wrongfully convicted in 1993 of first degree murder based on erroneous testimony concerning bloodstain evidence. He spent nearly two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit.

A few years before that, Bevel had also assisted with the release of Tim Masters, an innocent man who had been convicted of murder in Colorado. In that case, Bevel reversed the previous opinion he had given that originally helped to convict Masters, after he had been provided additional evidence that had been concealed from him by the police detective who was later indicted for his alleged misconduct in the case.

Some of the real heroes in cases like this are guys like Tom Bevel, who dare to reveal their humanity by admitting when they get it wrong, but are willing to work to make it right.

(On October 24, 2013, David Camm, walked free after 13-years in prison after a jury in Lebanon, Indiana found him not guilty in a third re-trial. His case was the first exoneration for Investigating Innocence, which was started earlier that year. Bill Clutter, who started the project, was a member of Camm’s defense team and suggested conducting an animated crime scene reconstruction, which helped persuade the jury that David Camm is innocent. Students at the University of Indiana assisted Clutter and the Camm defense team in reviewing the case and provided a fresh set of eyes. (Read more about the exoneration here. )

Bill Clutter is a board certified member of the Criminal Defense Investigation Training Council. He started the Illinois Innocence Project in 2001, and is the Director of Investigations for a national innocence project called Investigating Innocence that he started in January 2013.