You see them in the police procedurals all the time: the person every cop turns to when they want to know about the body. I can’t count the number of short scenes in morgues featuring someone kitted out in scrubs tossing around information like time and cause of death.

Obviously, it’s someone with extensive medical knowledge, but that’s where things get complicated. Are they a coroner? A medical examiner? A forensic pathologist?

It’s not sexy and can be tedious, but documentation is the most important aspect of crime scene investigation. Everyone relies on having accurate information about the scene and any evidence (or lack thereof) inside. Oftentimes, lawyers and police officers never see the crime scene itself and just rely on the hopefully extensive documentation of it.

So, how do we document crime scenes?

Working on the climactic action scene where your protagonist lands a crucial punch? Awesome! Did they just break their arm getting interrogated by the villain? Could still be awesome, but readers might be puzzled. Superheroes and normal people can temporarily shrug off pain when the adrenaline is pumping, but broken bones are hard to use even if they don’t hurt.

Last week, I talked about some of the typical ways in fiction that characters dispose of bodies. As it turns out, one post just isn’t enough to cover all of the fun methods writers have tried (hopefully not in real life!) to get away with murder, so here is part two.

As the title says, in today’s blog, we’ll be looking at interesting ways that authors have created for their characters to dispose of bodies, but with an eye for realism. Forensic scientists love debating this topic and most of them have a preferred method of disposal that they’d love to tell you about.

Bones might not seem like a big part of your identity, but they can say a lot more than most people think! Everything from who you are to where you lived and, sometimes, how you died.

Sex
Many parts of your skeleton reflect your sex, especially your pelvis. Female pelvic bones create a wide opening, allowing a child’s head to potentially pass through the birth canal. Males, on the other hand, have much narrower openings because they only need to accommodate the intestinal endings.

Age
There are a number of ways to estimate age from bones, but the most precise is the teeth. Children grow teeth at precise ages which makes the skull very useful in age estimation. The ends of long bones are also helpful by looking at which ends have fused since the ends of our bones fuse at given ages. However, once someone is over the age of 25, it becomes a little less precise.

Identity
One of the most common uses of your bones after death is dental identification. Since most people frequent a dentist and get periodic X-rays, it’s easy to compare an unknown body’s teeth to dental records on file. It’s a great way (besides fingerprints) to help investigators put a name to a face.

Where You Live
It’s all about the food! Scientists can test bones for their strontium levels to see where someone has spent the past few years. Geographical regions’ foodstuffs have unique strontium levels which have been recorded so that investigators can compare their findings and home in on where the person has been eating and for how long.

Ethnicity
Forensic anthropologists have spent many years gathering specimens from regions all over the world and taking measurements. Nowadays, scientists can input skull and long bone measurements into special software that compares your measurements to the thousands of ones taken. It delivers a report giving probabilities of where the person’s ancestors came from.

Height
You might think that without your complete skeleton no one will be able to tell how tall you were. But actually, a scientist just needs your long bones! By measuring your femur (your thigh bone), a forensic anthropologist can make a pretty good guess about your height.

Prior Injuries
Your bones heal just like the rest of you. But, as anyone who’s ever needed a cast before knows, they take a while. Once they’ve healed, your body tries to avoid another break by forming a bone callus over the healed area. This helps protect you from repeated injury to the same spot and shows scientists where you were hurt in the past. Some people have metal pins or plates inserted with serial numbers. Those can be matched to medical records.

Cause of Death
While it’s true that there are plenty of ways to die that wouldn’t be reflected in your bones, skeletal remains are often a vital clue for medical examiners and coroners in determining a person’s cause of death. Stab wounds, blunt force trauma, gunshot wounds, and even cancer can all affect the bones in unique ways.

Ever wondered how forensic scientists figure out how old someone was just by examining their bones? It’s like something out of a mystery novel, but in the world of forensic anthropology, it’s a common—and fascinating--practice. This is the first in a series of blogs looking at what you can (and can’t!) tell from a skeleton.

Growing Pains: Childhood and Adolescence
When we're young, our bones are like puzzle pieces that haven’t quite fit together yet. Forensic anthropologists start their age estimation by examining features that change as we grow.

• Dental Development: Teeth are incredibly telling. Kids get their baby teeth first, followed by their permanent teeth. By looking at which teeth have come in and their stage of development, experts can estimate the age of children and teenagers quite accurately.
• Bone Growth Plates: In younger individuals, the ends of long bones, like those in the arms and legs, have areas called epiphyseal plates. These plates gradually turn into solid bone as a person matures. By assessing how these plates are fusing, scientists can estimate the age, especially for teens and young adults.

We all leave fingerprints behind every day. Anyone who wears glasses or owns a mirror has likely needed to clean them off. No matter how often we wash our hands, a natural buildup of grease on our skin means that we can’t stop leaving fingerprints. It may be annoying to clean, but they can get criminals in a world of trouble.

Let’s talk about how law enforcement (and writers) use fingerprints to finger the culprits.

The History of Fingerprinting
People figured out early on that fingerprints are a good way to identify someone. Ancient civilizations used fingerprints as seals or signatures on important documents and contracts long before paper was invented. However, the idea of using fingerprints in criminal investigations didn’t happen until much later.

By Harri Blomberg - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=794690

The Total Station pictured above must be accompanied by one or more prisms mounted on a long stick with a back target (pictured below). You sight through the Total Station's scope to record the elevation and position of the prism. By taking multiple readings, you can recreate the crime scene later.

Most people think of death as an either-or proposition: you’re either dead or alive. I’m not here to dispute that (sorry, zombies!). Instead, I want to talk about what a body goes through immediately after death. These are known as the stages of death or post-mortem changes.

If you’re a mystery writer, you’ve probably written about a medical examiner or detective estimating the time of death based on some or all of these stages. Even if you haven’t, most people have heard the term ‘rigor mortis.’ In fact, that (and a few others) are the go-to ways for investigators to predict when the person died during the early post-mortem interval (up to 72 hours after death).