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Excerpt from Body, Crime, Suspect -
Investigating Crime Scenes
Most crime scenes contain hairs and fibres that can be important in proving that a suspect was there. When most people think of fibres, they imagine pieces of thread. But often the fibres collected at a crime scene are tiny and not clearly visible to the naked eye. There may be millions of them. They have to be painstakingly collected.
Officer Durning did this a few inches at a time. He peeled off some clear adhesive tape and patted he surface of each item — the carpet, the couch cushions. He transferred the tape, and the fibres clinging to it, to a white backing and labeled it. Then he peeled off another piece of tape. Depending on the scene, taping could take hours.
Each piece of evidence was packaged, sealed, labelled and logged. At each stage of a homicide investigation, all of the evidence had to be accounted for. The police did not want to be accused of sloppiness or of allowing anyone to tamper with the evidence.
After the obvious pieces of evidence had been collected, Officer Durning moved to the next stage of his search. He wouldn’t yet rearrange anything in the crime scene, but he would introduce new elements — things like powders to “lift” fingerprints and footprints, and spray-on chemicals.
He and his team dusted for prints on the desk, the filing cabinet drawers, the computer plug that had been pulled from the power bar and saw blood on it. The cord would have to be removed from the computer and the blood checked.
From Body, Crime, Suspect- Investigating Crime Scenes. Copyright © 2001 by Norah McClintock. All rights reserved.
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