witness talks, but has no voice, where doctors are caring, but hold out no hope. their mission is to search for the truth and they do it with the help of up-to-the-minute forensic technology, working in hand emcan a centuries-old procedure, the autopsy. the basic procedure is pretty much the same and i don t think that will ever change. it s a technique that louisville kentucky medical examiner dr. tracy curry relies upon upon to establish a cause of death in an investigation and we ll show you exactly how it s done. every autopsy follows a similar pattern. first, the body is photographed to help create a permanent record of the evidence. this is tracy dictating and dr. curry dictates her findings for the file. the name of the game for this job is document, document, document. we don t know where that case is going to be. we don t know what questions
dr. craig goes on to examine the clothing found at the scene. it is shredded in places and badly torn, possibly by wild animals. she looks at the women s jeans recovered from the site. there was a lot of animal activity. so i think most of the shredding is probably from that. no pockets. and this the fabric feels a little more fragile than just a couple months. so july, august might be about right. because this is it just shreds. i was trying to determine if those tears were perhaps from a knife or from animal activity. and i was able to determine that all of it was from animal activity. she works methodically, like a code breaker deciphering enigmatic evidence. she notices that the skeleton s back bones are highly unusual. there are unique growths on his vertebrae that developed as he aged. so this is unique?
ear. 5/16 inch parenthesis, horizontally. generally with wounds to the torso we do those how many inches above the heel and we re using stable anatomic landmarks. the circular penetrating gunshot wound. the appearance of a gunshot wound can help dr. quarry estimate the distance where the gun was fired. contact wounds where the gun was held against the skin surface looks significantly different than from several feet away. it s important physical evidence for police investigators who are interviewing eyewitnesses and suspects. soot or smoke emerge from a gun, along with the bullet. those things travel variable distances. what i look for on the skin surface is a presence of that soot which will tell me that the gun was relatively close, a close-range wound. she shows what s called stipelling or tattooing which is
i think that i have a greater appreciation, a greater empathy for the parents in that in those situations. being a parent myself. we all make personal associations. all of us do, whether we want to or not. her career spans years of seeing the consequences of painful deaths. but she says some cases haunt her like no others. one of the toughest cases in the long run, for me, was the case of the camm children who were killed in southern indiana. it was a notorious case. in 2000 a former indiana state trooper named david camm shot to death his wife and two children. it was can i stop for a second? wow, that came out of nowhere. it s a rare crack in her professional veneer. dr. corey tries to regain control but then need to take a break to compose herself. what was especially disturbing for dr. corey in that case was the killer left one of his
in a pair of blue jeans. a woman s blue jeans, i think they said. sassoon was the brand. craig is an expert in body parts and skeletal remains, who s worked on some of the most notorious cases of our times. she s reconstructed cult leader david koresh s skull at waco and proved that he died by a bullet wound to the head. she investigated the oklahoma city bombing and helped to identify victims of september 11th. barbara and i are going to go ahead. this is the time when you re getting close, adrenaline s starting to pump and you re starting to think back through your files. now, what do i remember about working a case like this? what am i going to forget? putting together a plan. the bones that had been found so far are marked with orange flags and the dogs are given their scent. find it, abbie, find it. dr. craig evaluates the condition of the bones. how bleached they are by the sun and whether they re covered in vegetation.