Introduction
The case I chose to write on is based on a DVD that we watched in class called ‘Beaten by a hair’. In this case, a woman was reported missing after she went to work and never returned home. After the police discovered a bloody pillow case in the woods, near her house, they linked it to the missing pillow case in the woman’s room, and then realized that they had a murder case on their hands. A mystery in the case was that one of the local neighbors had mentioned seeing the woman leave through the front door of her house but the evidence says different, so investigators had to find out who left the house that morning. I am interested in this case because it was very intriguing how the forensic officers put all the pieces
The highly trained dogs showed that the woman in fact did not leave through the front door that morning; but one of the woman’s neighbours said that she had seen her leave her house in the morning. The dogs also revealed that the woman that had been murdered actually left through the back door. Using the blood hound was a useful technique because they were able to see the path in which the girl went that night, and they had suspected she had been killed in her room and taken to the woods escaping through the back door. Although this technique was useful, it had created another problem ; the woman who had left from the front of the house was not the victim, so they needed to find out who it was. The methods used that played a major role in solving the crime were the analysis of the hair that the officers had found using DNA and using mass spectrometry. The investigators found a hair brush with many hair strands on it . The investigators took every single hair strand and examined them and by using DNA they matched the hair strands to previous records the victim had such as her blood tests. Not all the hairs had matched the victim’s DNA, and under further hair analysis they noted that it was not hair from the victim’s head. Detectives were trying to find suspects and suspected the gardener of the house because he was homeless and lived in his car which he parks at a