RP400 Cracking the Case

RP400 Cracking the Case
It is China in the year 1247. Song Ci has just written Washing Away of Wrongs, a book that contains the first written accounts of forensic science— the type of science that is used to answer legal questions. The book tells of an investigator who travels to a remote village in order to solve a murder mystery. After examining the murder victim's wound, he tries out various weapons on animal corpses to identify what kind of weapon the murderer used. He then gets the villagers to bring their scythes to the center of town. Flies start to accumulate on one of the scythes because it still has trace amounts of blood on it. The villager who owns the scythe breaks down and confesses to the murder.
Hundreds of years pass. It's late nineteenth century France. Alexandre Lacassagne conducts a study into the relationship between bullets and guns. His work lays the foundation for the modern practice of ballistic fingerprinting, which is how investigators match bullets to the gun that fired them.
Next, Argentine policeman Juan Vucetich shocks the world in 1892 when he uses a suspect's fingerprints to convict her for a murder. Mr. Vucetich's technique for classifying fingerprints would eventually spread to police departments all over the world.
Another breakthrough occurs in Germany about 15 years later. Margarethe Filbert's murderer is captured after investigators use soil samples taken from the murderer's shoes to verify his movements on the day that the crime took place.
In 1987, a British man named Colin Pitchfork becomes the first criminal to be convicted using DNA fingerprinting evidence. Investigators believe that a 17-year-old would have been wrongly convicted for the double murders if not for the DNA evidence proving he was innocent.
Nowadays, police forces the world over have taken these past breakthroughs and integrated them in order to facilitate police work. For example, American government agencies have created vast databases containing DNA, fingerprint, paint type, tire tread, and weapon and bullet manufacturing information.
It seems that the life of a criminal has gotten a lot harder since the days of just having to wash off your scythe thoroughly.