Super Time Detective

On Tuesday, August 8, the Forensic Laboratory of Jincheng Judicial Police Bureau.

It was nine past five in the morning.

On the dissecting table, the processed bones were reassembled into a human form. Ye Huairui, Ouyang Tingting and Zhang Mingming stood by the bed and began to examine the skeleton.

When a suspicious body is found, the first thing that should be determined is how long the person has been dead.

Determining the time of death is usually an important task in forensic autopsy, because determining the time of death is crucial to clarifying the nature of the case, narrowing the scope of investigation, and identifying or excluding suspects.

Open a mystery novel at random, and the author will tell you that there are plaques about one hour after death, rigor mortis appears in two to three hours, rigor disappears in 48 hours, and the corpse rots due to corruption in three to five days. It becomes swollen, soft tissue liquefies after a month, and returns to nature after a year.

However, in fact, the phenomenon of corpses is affected by many factors. It is not that simple to accurately infer how long a person has been dead through the phenomenon of corpses.

When Ye Huairui was studying at the University of Pennsylvania, he had seen a very interesting case.

One evening, the police received a report that a man and a woman were found dead in a villa, suspected of homicide.

After investigation, the detectives preliminarily judged that the female deceased died of gunshots, while the "desert warrior" as the murder weapon was held in the hands of the male deceased—he used it to shoot through his head.

It seemed obvious that the man had shot the woman and then killed himself by swallowing the gun.

The only problem, however, was that the degrees of decay of the two bodies were completely different.

The female corpse has already appeared a gigantic appearance, and the death time is about five to seven days; while the male corpse only has a branch-like dirty green rotten vein network on the body surface, and the death time should be within the interval of three to four days.

According to forensic speculation, the time difference between the two deaths was at least 24 hours.

In this way, the case is very inconceivable.

Because, this means that after killing the female victim, the murderer returned to the crime scene 24 hours later, or simply lived next to the corpse for a day, and then committed suicide with a gun.

Regardless of whether it is the former or the latter, this is really unbelievable, it is really against the logic of normal people's thinking, and it can be called abnormal.

While the forensic doctor was still struggling with this weird time difference, another piece of evidence appeared.

When the murder happened, two teenagers happened to be playing near the villa when they heard gunshots.

The two of them insisted in unison that they heard three shots in total, the interval between the two shots was very short, and the last shot was about 5 minutes apart.

The police have confirmed that the "desert warrior" used as the murder weapon at the scene fired a total of three bullets, two of which hit the dead woman, and one remained in the murderer's own head.

If the testimonies of the teenagers are correct, the time difference between the death of the murderer and the victim is only 5 minutes, so there should not be such an obvious difference in corpse corruption.

There is no way, the detectives and forensic doctors can only return to the scene of the crime.

This time, they finally discovered the reason for this peculiar corruption discrepancy.

The local area is a desert area, and the temperature difference between day and night is obvious. When the sun shines directly at noon, the ground temperature is close to [-] degrees, and the temperature will drop to about [-] to [-] degrees at night.

The scene of the crime was a villa. The female deceased was shot and fell in front of the French windows facing southwest, with the curtains open.

In this way, the afternoon sunshine in the desert will bring high temperature and heat to the dead woman's body, raising her body temperature and becoming the most suitable breeding ground for bacteria to grow.

The murderer committed suicide by swallowing a gun in the corner of the entrance, which happened to be the angle between the stairs and the wall, and the sunlight was completely out of it. Compared with where the victim was, it was obviously much cooler.

In addition, the female deceased was more plump, while the murderer was tall and thin. The difference in body size between the two exacerbated the difference in the rate of decay of the remains. It was a strange phenomenon for a whole day.

Because the reporting time was at dusk, when the detectives and forensic doctors entered the murder scene for the first time, the sun had already set, so they did not pay attention to the orientation of the French windows, and naturally they did not consider the impact of sunlight on the decay rate of the corpse.

Therefore, inferring the time of death from the phenomenon of the corpse is an ancient and traditional method in forensic science.Its results cannot be very accurate, and the influence of various factors needs to be considered comprehensively, which is far more difficult and profound than the "common sense" written in detective novels.

Go back to the bone corpse that Ye Huairui and the others are investigating.

The soft tissue of this corpse was softened and liquefied through decay, and almost completely dissolved and disappeared. The hair and nails had already fallen off, leaving only a dry bone.

Under normal circumstances, after two or three years after the corpse is buried in the soil, the soft tissue will turn into a muddy gray color, and it will easily liquefy and fall off, and the process of ossification is considered complete.

The bones that have been buried for more than ten years will completely dry up. After another 300 years, most of the organic matter in the bones will degrade and become light and brittle.

But in fact, the process of ossification is also affected by many factors.

Such as temperature, soil properties, burial depth, coffin tightness and so on.

Corpses exposed to air turned to bones more easily than those fully submerged in water, and bodies submerged in water decomposed faster than those buried in mud.

If there are insects involved, this process will be accelerated quickly.Under the right conditions, for example, fly larvae can eat an adult carcass down to a skeleton in as little as a week.

On the contrary, if the corpse itself is less prone to corruption and is stored in a well-sealed and dry environment, the process of ossification will be astonishingly slow.

There are often passages like this in various fantasy novels and film and television works:

A thousand-year-old female corpse was dug out from an ancient tomb. When the coffin was opened, it was found that her face was ruddy, her skin was delicate, and her face was lifelike, as if she had just fallen asleep. Unfortunately, her peerless beauty could not last long. It's rotten to the bone.

Of course, so far, no one has been able to provide samples of such a thousand-year-old female corpse, but under certain conditions, it is not uncommon for the remains to be buried underground for several years or even decades, and they are still well preserved.

In one case, a newborn was brutally strangled to death right after birth.

His small body was wrapped layer by layer, then stuffed into a plastic bag, and finally packed into a well-sealed polyethylene box and buried in the wasteland.

The newborn has not eaten, there are very few bacteria in the intestinal tract, and the environment in which the body is preserved can effectively isolate the outside air and moisture from entering. With the addition of the two, when the body of the child is dug up again ten years later, the body will still be Relatively intact soft tissue can be seen.

This corpse was dug out by Ye Huairui and the others, so they naturally knew the environment in which it was buried.

The corpse was not buried deep, only a piece of tarpaulin wrapped it, the soil of the burial site was moist and loose, and Jincheng was warm and rainy all year round, so the speed of the corpse's bones would not exceed three years at most.

In addition, there was almost no soft tissue left on the skeleton, which could be said to be completely dry. That's why when police officer Huang asked, forensic doctor Ye said that this person had been dead for at least ten years.

However, "more than ten years" is a very wide range.

Just relying on the phenomenon of corpses, it is really impossible to predict the time more accurately.

Fortunately, there are other clues.

The first molar on the right side of the mandible of the bone corpse is an alloy denture. Dentures of this material and inlays are almost impossible to find now. On the contrary, in the 90s, such gold teeth can be inlaid in dental clinics all over the street.

"However, even if it's dentures, it can't explain anything, right?"

Zhang Mingming took a picture of the mandible and said:

"After all, a person may have just had dentures installed and died, or, before death, the dentures had been installed in his mouth for ten years."

"Yes."

Ye Huairui nodded, "So, here is another more interesting piece of evidence."

He shook the few pages of A4 paper in his hand towards Zhang Mingming, "It's in the pocket of the deceased."

After they cut out the inner pocket of the deceased's shirt, they sent it to the physical evidence next door together with the banknotes inside, as well as the steel coins and chips found in the trouser pocket, and they just got the appraisal results.

"In the pocket of the corpse is the 81 edition of the Gold City coin issued by the Bank of Atlantic, with denominations of two hundred, one fifty, three ten and four five; the coins are also of the 81, one one and one fifty. "

"Well... that's going to be interesting."

Zhang Mingming is an aborigine who has lived in Jincheng for 32 years, so he has a little understanding of Jincheng's local currency history.

"If I remember correctly, this edition was released in January 82, right?"

He raised his chin towards the bone corpse on the dissecting table:

"In other words, the time of this person's death should have been after January 82 at the earliest."

Ye Huairui nodded: "Exactly."

Since 1905, the Kincheng government has given the Bank of Atlantic the exclusive right to issue Kinjo banknotes.

Until January 1980, the Jincheng government carried out a major reform of the financial system and established an official Jincheng issuing agency.

Since then, the newly issued banknotes continue to bear the title of the Bank of Atlantic Ocean, which is essentially issued by the Bank of Atlantic Ocean, while the coinage is in charge of the newly established Jincheng issuing agency.

So on January 1982, 1, the new version of banknotes was officially issued, which were the 11-year-old Jincheng coins in the pockets of the deceased.

The previous old banknotes are out of circulation, and the out-of-circulation banknotes are withdrawn by the Atlantic Bank within a time limit, and the deadline for recovery is December 12 of that year.

Zhang Mingming asked again: "How many chips?"

"The physical evidence says it's a casino chip from a hotel in the west of the city."

Ye Huairui quickly glanced at the remarks on the appraisal certificate:

"However, the hotel said that this chip has been eliminated for a long time—since June 86, 6, it has never been used again."

The author has something to say:

The reference materials for this chapter are the two books "Forensic Science" (Human Health Edition) and "Forensic Anthropology" (Human Health Edition), as well as the article "Macau Currency History".