Setting: Small town Indiana (US), Present day.

Search terms:  Suspected foul play, Death ruled accidental, Who determines cause of death, How long does autopsy take, Nest material, Can a homicide later be ruled accidental.

MC loses her parents to carbon monoxide due to a blocked furnace flue. Detectives suspect that MC may have tampered with the ( Read more... )

Since joining this community I've been appointed Associate Dean of the School of Law, Policing and Forensics. I've just added a link for Q&A aimed at writers: http://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/law-policing-forensics/answers/

If you can't visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in person, there's still some interesting stuff on their blog, including this link to NYPD historical crime scene photos from the pre-WWI era, which the Museum used as reference for one of the homes they refurbished (since crime scene photos show homes that haven't been tidied up for visitors ( Read more... )

Setting: Fantasy world; no gunpowder. Continental climate.
Edit: make that humid continental climate, like American Midwest/ Central Canada, or southern Siberia. Also, the soil is supposed to be quite fertile, probably chernozemic.

Situation: Characters exhume a body.

Facts:

1. It’s a body of a formerly athletic white man aged 25-30. He died from ( Read more... )

Setting: New York (Manhattan), 1947 ( Read more... )

Setting: Quasi-middle-ages fantasy (magic is present but irrelevant), desert conditions (similar to New Mexico desert ( Read more... )

** ETA: Thanks for the input. On reflection this story thread doesn't work on several levels, so I'm scrapping it. ***

( Never Mind. Good resource in the comments, though )

You'd think this would be an easier question to find the answer to online, but apparently not! ( cut for bodily fluids (in the context of sex, not violence) )

Slightly creepy question that makes me wonder what someone would make of my google history: what is the best way to slit someone's throat? Preferably without getting drenched in blood ( Read more... )

So this is a weird question that is hard to research without people thinking you are a serial killer, but here goes: the set-up is an alternate history of Classical Rome, set about 400 CE. The religion still includes regular sacrifices, but instead of focusing on the smoke rising into the sky, it focuses on the blood soaking into the ground. So ( Read more... )