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The Ancient Babylonians use fingerprints for criminal records and business transactions.
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This Chinese book is the first written recording of the use of medicine to solve crime. It describes how to tell a drowning from a strangulation; and describes the use of insects to detect blood.
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Bartolomeo da Varignana performs the first medico-legal autopsy in Bologna, Italy.
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The French Duke of Burgundy is killed, and missing teeth are used to identify him.
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Sir Thomas Browne discovers adipocere, a wax-like substance that is formed by the body fats of corpses.
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In Lancaster, England; John Toms was tried and convicted for the murder of Edward Culshaw. The pistol wad was found in Culshaw's headwound, and matched a torn newspaper found in John Tom's pocket, thus marking the first known instance of matching evidence.
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After being recruited as an informant for the French police, Vidocq establishes the Sûreté Nationale, the first civilian police and later, the first detective force.
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Spanish-born French chemist Mathieu Orfila publishes the Treatise of General Toxicology. He later performs the first Marsh test in the 1840 LaFarge poisoning case.
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Jan Evangelista Purkyně publishes a thesis describing 9 configuration groups of fingerprints. However he does not recognize their individualizing potential and continues on to more advanced discoveries in physiology and anatomy.
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Scottish chemist James Marsh is called in to a murder trial, and performs a standard test. However when he presented it in court the resulting arsenic had dissolved and the suspect was aqquitted due to reasonable doubt. He develops a much better test, which he publishes in The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1836.
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Jean Servais Stas, a chemist, first successfully identifies vegetable poisons in body tissue; after giving evidence in the Belgian Court that Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé had poisoned his brother using nicotine extracted from tobacco leaves.
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The German scientist Christian Friedrich Schönbein first discovered the ability of hemoglobin to oxidize hydrogen peroxide, which causes it to foam. This is the first presumptive test for blood.
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The first reported use of forensic hair-comparison is by pathologist Rudolph Virchow, who recognized its uses and limitations.
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Criminal Jurist and examining Magistrate Hans Gross publishes the Handbook for Coroners, Police Officials, Military Policemen, thus marking the birth of the criminalistics field.
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Karl Landsteinder indentifies the blood groups A, B, and O; and this is later adapted for blood stains by Austrian forensic scientist Max Richter.
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President Theodore Roosevelt establishes the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Max Frei-Sulzer develops a method of using tape to pick up trace evidence.
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Paul Kirk publishes Crime Investigation, one of the first comprehensive criminalists and crime investigation books.
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After his 1966 succes in developing the immunoelectrophoretic technique for haptoglobin typing in bloodstains with colleague Brian Wraxall; Brian J. Culliford of the Britsh Metropolitan Police Laboratory continued to work with bloodstains, and publishes this collection of his progress 5 years later.
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Sir Alec Jeffreys used DNA profiling, which he developed in 1984, to identify Colin Pitchfork as the murderer of two young girls. In the process he also exonerated an innocent suspect.
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Based on an RFLP analysis by Lifecodes, Tommy Lee Andrews was convicted of a series of sexual assault in Florida.
In the same year takes place New York vs. Castro, in which the admissibility of DNA was seriously challenged. This prompted a series of certification, accreditation, and standardization in the forensic and DNA community. -
The FBI contracted with Mnemonic Systems to create Drugfire, an automated imaging system made to compare marks on shell casings and cartidge casings. During this year, Thomas Caskey of Baylor University of Texas publishes the first paper suggesting short tandem repeats for forenic science.
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Because of public concern of the statistical interpretation of forensic DNA evidence; the National Research Council Committee on Forensic DNA formed a second incarnation (NRC II) published The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence. Also in this year the FBI introduced the AFIS fingerprint database. meanwhile in Tennessee, mitochondrial DNA typing was used for the first time in an American court.
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The FBI establishes a new DNA database, which enabled interstate cooperation in solving crimes.
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The FBI upgraded its computerized fingerprint database and added the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The FBI then signs the Memorandum of Understanding with the ATF, that allowed NIBIN to facilitate the the exchange of firearms data between Drugfire and IBIS.
