History of Crime Scene Investigation by Cameron Zito

Death of Caesar

44 BCE

Autopsy first performed and only 1 of 23 stab wounds was found to be fatal

Who determines cause of death

400

Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be ones who determine cause of death

First use of Fingerprints

600

First used to determine identity. Arabic merchants took debtor's fingerprints and attached them to the bill.

First forensic science book

1248

Published by the Chinese. First known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.

First physical evidence used in case

1784

John Toms was first defendant matched to physical evidence linking him to a murder of which he was convicted.

Sherlock Holmes and the coroner

1887

Coroner's act established coroners' were to determine cause of sudden, violent, and unnatural deaths. First published Sherlock Holmes book by Arthur Conan Doyle.

First fingerprint ID used in crime

1892

Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. Created fingerprint system he called dactyloscopy.

Hair used in forensics

1910

Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study.

Crime experts build first lab

1932

FBI establishes its own crime laboratory, one of the foremost crime labs in the world

Advanced manual fingerprints

1975

First fingerprint reader installed at FBI

DNA catches the criminal

1987

Tommy Lee Andrews convicted of a series of sexual assaults, using DNA profiling.

Facial sketches matched to photos

2011

Michigan State University develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.