Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Deborah Blum, Beth Amos, Michael Stier, and Melanie Hampton Killer Clues: The Art and Science of Murder  September 23, 2011 UP627   cc >> Deborah Blum: Hi, well, I apologize for the delay, but we're glad to see you here at the first Wisconsin Science Festival.  I do want to mention, in case you didn't do this, we're having a raffle, you saw it in the program, and these prizes up at the front, which include, I'm going to come down here.  The prizes in front of me, we're going to do a drawing for them at the end of this session. If your name is not on a piece of paper in this little canister, you would want it to be there if want to be entered for the drawing before this session is over. These prizes include a complete set of Annelise Ryan's Mattie Winston Mysteries, all autographed. Some autographed copies of my book, The Poisoner's Handbook. A fingerprinting kit from the Madison Police Department, which will be very handy to you someday I know, and some travel mugs from the Madison Police Department. And Beth Amos, one of our speakers, has also generously donated 119 syringe pens, which we'll be giving away as well at the end, and you need to use those very carefully. So welcome. My name is Deborah Blum. 

I'm fortunate to be the moderator of this very distinguished panel. I came to it through being the author of a book called The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. My book is set in the 1920s, and it's really the story of two scientists trying to build a way, to find a way to catch killers when there really was no forensic medicine at that time. There were no chemists attached to cities or police departments, and, in fact, this was in a period that people used to refer to as the golden age of poisoners, because it was so easy to get away with those kind of murders. And you may know this already, but at that time, the nickname for the poison arsenic was the inheritance powder. So that gives you a sense of sort of how pervasive this was in society. After I did this book, I started thinking about this. We live in an age in which we take for granted. We live in what I'll call the CSI kind of era. We take for granted that we have forensic scientists working to help us solve murders, to detect crimes, working willingly with the police department. 

That did not used to be true in this country, and, in fact, we did not formally start teaching forensic medicine until the 1930s. The first department to teach forensic medicine wasn't established in this country until 1934. So in the early 20th century, instead of having scientists and police officers work together, they often worked against each other. And one of my favorite cases from my own book in the mid-1920s, involved a case, a very gruesome case involving a dismembered body, a lethal gas and many bloody knives in which, literally, in the court room the scientists were on one side, the police were on the other, and they were accusing each other of not knowing the answer to the crime. We have come a long way since then, and our idea of what a murder is, how to solve it, how we approach the catching a criminal has changed hugely thanks to these changes. So my idea for this panel was that we would bring together a real variety of perspectives and knowledge and viewpoints on the art and science and murder. I'm lucky to have with us three really distinguished practitioners from our area here in Wisconsin, and I'm going to briefly introduce all of them. Beth Amos, who is next to me here, is an ER nurse working in Stoughton, who is also a very successful writer of suspense and murder mysteries. Her most recent series features a former nurse turned assistant coroner named Mattie Winston. And the third of those books, Frozen Stiff, just came out this month. 

When I was doing the research on her books, I was rather impressed to see that one of the people who had given her a "I love this book" notice was Tess Gerritsen, who writes the Rizzoli and Isles mysteries and had asked her to please, please write more. Next to her is Melanie Hampton, who works in the CSI Division of the Madison Police Department. Melanie has been a law enforcement officer for more than 12 years and a crime scene investigator in the forensic unit in the city of Madison. She has a master's degree, I'm thinking in environmental. What was your master's? >> Civil engineering. >> Civil engineering, and a long background in working in science. And to my far left is Dr. Michael Stier. Dr. Stier is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine here at the University of Wisconsin. Prior to coming here in 2001, he was a medical examiner in Charlottesville, Virginia, and an instructor in pathology at the University of Virginia. He specializes in not only autopsies and forensic science, but child death and seizure deaths. 

We're going to begin with Beth. I've asked each of them to give you a brief picture of how they see the world of murder, and then we'll take questions. You're welcome to stay at your seat or come up here, Beth. >> Beth Amos: I'm going to try and stay seated. Can everybody hear me okay? Yes? No? Yes, okay, all right. All right, thank you for the very nice introduction. I do want to clarify that you'll notice that the name of the author on the books that are being given away that are mine, is not Beth Amos, because I write under a pseudonym for this particular series. The pseudonym is Annelise Ryan. The reason for that is twofold. Number one, if I was your nurse in the emergency room... 

[LAUGHTER] You might feel a little uncomfortable knowing that I spend my spare time thinking of clever and unique ways to kill people. [LAUGHTER] Number two, it's a marketing ploy that's used by the publisher. I had some other books that were published under my real name back in the late '90s that were more thrillers rather than mysteries, and all of those used hard science as well as dabbled a little bit in some of the softer sciences, as well. My very first book called The Cold White Fury was actually, two different things that stimulated that idea. One was a newspaper article that I read in the Richmond Times Dispatch. I lived in Richmond, Virginia, at the time. And it was about studies on serotonin, and how serotonin can affect aggression in people. The second thing was a patient many, many, many years ago in another state and another life, it feels like, who was a Vietnam vet, and he had some shrapnel in his head, and he used to come into our ER all the time and tell us that people were talking to him through the metal in his head. We were pretty sure that there was nobody talking to him, but you never know. And I took those two things and combined them together and ended up coming up with a pretty good novel for it. 

It was actually the first novel I was able to sell. My second novel was actually involving organ cloning, which is something that wasn't being done then, but I think is being dabbled with a little bit with now. But it also played around some with alien abduction scenarios. And then my third one actually involved restoring sight to the blind using a method that was only being explored back then. It is actually now being used to restore sight to blind people. And the softer science that I used in that one was actually interpreting auras. The person who had sight restored was seeing auras. My current series is much more forensic-oriented because, as Deborah said, it's a nurse who becomes a deputy coroner for the medical examiner in a small town in Wisconsin. There's a lot of Wisconsin humor in the books. There's a lot of humor in the books. 

I know people don't think death is funny, but there's a lot of stuff about death that can be funny. And I don't see anything wrong with laughing. I think, actually, laughter is the best medicine. For my current series, the actual impetus for that series, interestingly enough, came about when I was going for my bachelor's degree in Richmond, Virginia. I had an opportunity to do an independent study in sociology where I was looking at people who work with death and dying on a regular basis. I was a hospice nurse at the time, so I was kind of curious about people who work with dead bodies, dead people. What makes them do that? Is there anything about those people that's common? Is there anything that drives them to it? Something in their personality, their background, where they grew up. So I crafted this study and then I spent time with funeral directors, hospice workers, homicide detectives; they were very entertaining. And also the medical examiner's office in Richmond, Virginia, with Dr. Marcella Fierro, who is actually sort of the character that the Kay Scarpetta character is based on that Patricia Cornwell writes about. And one of the things that I was worried about is I had never seen an autopsy before, so I was a little concerned about whether or not I was going to be able to deal with it. 

I had seen surgeries, and I had seen people cut open, so I wasn't too worried about that, but those were live people in an OR. I had seen all kinds of manglings and injuries, because I had worked in an ER before. So I had seen a lot of stuff, but I had never seen a dead person cut open that way. So I was a little concerned about how I was going to do with it, and I was hoping for a very ordinary type of autopsy, just a basic, died yesterday, simple autopsy. The first one that I got was actually a teenage boy who had drowned three months before, and had just surfaced. So he had been in the water for quite some time, and so I was a little nervous about how I was going to be able to deal with this. So I stood by watching as they began the autopsy, and when they finally cut him open, the one thing that I was really worried about was smell, because smell can be a very potent trigger for things, and I was worried that it was going to smell really bad, and that was going to affect me. But when they cut him open, the first thought that I had in my head was, hmm, the inside of a dead body doesn't smell all that different from the inside of a live one. And just like that, I went, what a great line for a novel. [LAUGHTER] And that actually became the first line in Working Stiff, which was the first book in the current mystery series. 

So it was sort of art and science blending together there. The scientific part of it being the autopsy, and then the artistic part of it being my brain going, hey, that would make a great first line for a novel. I do spend a lot of time trying to think up clever ways to kill people off, which does make some of my patients nervous, those who know who I am. There's so many different areas of science, I was looking back through some of my other plot ideas, and different books and different things, I have all the different areas of science that I've looked at and explored in developing ideas and plots for books, and all of them have something to do with forensics. I was looking at agriculture with plant hybrids; obviously anatomy for your cause of death; anthropology, the study of bones; biochemistry, like bacterial activity on decaying flesh; biology; botany, plant evidence; chemistry, like potassium levels in vitreous fluid which can be used to determine time of death; gas chromatography; computer science; Earth science. Earth science involved like soil analysis and diatoms. If you don't know what diatoms are, they're funny, cute little single-celled algae that form in water, and they actually have these silica type outer shells, and they come in all kinds of interesting shapes and sizes. Entomology, which is bug evidence. Environmental science, is there presence of some kind of polluting substance that could help somebody figure it out. You got fingerprint and footprint analysis, genetics, mathematics, like figuring out the geometry of a bullet path. 

Medicine, diseases, exposure to contagion. Microbiology, blood type. You have odontology, which is bite mark analysis. Pathology, or autopsy, and I'm sure Dr. Stier will get into that a lot more. Physics, ballistics, blood splatter analysis, tool markings. Those are things that are involved with physics. Psychology, not a science in some respects the way we all think of hard science, but psychology certainly is involved with figuring out motives for people, figuring out, identifying nervous ticks in people when you're interviewing them. I use those, I employ those quite a bit, and that's something as a nurse that I think I have a fairly good skill with myself. Sociology, like geographic analysis. And then zoology, animal behavior. 

If you have a body that some animal has scattered the bones, or if you find some sort of rare scat on somebody's shoes, zoology, animal behavior could help you figure that crime out. So the basis behind all this is Locard's Exchange Principle. Every where you go you take something with you, and you leave something behind. The perfect example of that is if you come to my house and you can leave without a pet hair on your clothes, you're pretty impressive, because I could probably pick one off right now. I have two golden retrievers who shed like crazy, plus a couple of cats. And anybody who comes into my house leaves with a few of my pets' hairs on them. Usually people that come into my house leave something behind also though. You shed hairs all the time. You shed skin cells. You walk through things that can fall off of your shoes. 

So all these little things, you can put all those clues together and help build a story by using science. And that's basically what I do when I come up with the plots for my stories. There's also a saying in medicine that when you hear the sound of hoof beats, you're supposed to think horses and not zebras. And that means you're supposed to look for the most obvious causes first, not the real obscure bizarre ones. I always go for the obscure and bizarre ones, when I'm working on my novels because I like the zebras. The zebras the ones that people don't think of right away. And if you're writing a mystery novel and you want to keep your readers guessing, the zebras are the better ones to look for. Occasionally, that mentality actually helps me find a zebra in a patient that I'm caring for in the ER. There's been one or two times when I've gone to the doctor and said what about this, and they go, oh, I hadn't thought of that, because it's a zebra. So how does recovered evidence help solve a crime? It's not just finding the evidence, but it's also understanding that evidence and interpreting it properly, and that's something I'm sure my other panelists are going to go into a little bit. 

In fiction and in real life, people make assumptions, and you have to make sure that you're following the scientific process if you're going to make assumptions in solving a crime. If I'm writing a mystery novel I can use assumptions to kind of muddle things up if I want to, which is something that my other panelists probably don't have the privilege of being able to do. In Working Stiff, in my first book, I actually used a rare genetic disease that provided a link between two murder victims and eventually helped solve the crime. I've used misinterpreted evidence. I had, let's see, in Frozen Stiff, which is the most recent book, there's a lot of evidence that points to a particular culprit, but that's not the person who's actually committed any of the crimes that are being investigated. In Scared Stiff, there's a medical condition that leads to a misinterpretation of time of death. In the novel that I actually just finished writing last night, as a matter of fact, it's the absence of something rather than the presence of something that eventually helps figure out the crime. So for me, it's like taking all of these little scientific pieces like a deck of cards and dealing them out and trying to figure out which ones I'm going to use and how I'm going to use them. And in a lot of ways, the creative writing process is very similar to the scientific process. I have this wonderful little graphic that I printed off of the scientific process, and I was reading through it and going, that's exactly how I write a book. 

With the scientific process you start out with asking a question, and with my writing process I ask what if, which is a fun question to get your imagination going. Scientific process next, you do background research. I do my forensic research. You construct a hypothesis next for the scientific process, and I construct a plot for my novels. The scientific process, you test with an experiment. I test with a first draft. You analyze your results, you draw conclusions. I edit and assess for believability and continuity. For scientific process, your hypothesis proves true, in which case, you then report your results. If it works when I write my novel, then I have story lines and evidence that all follows and is continuous, then I have a final draft. 

But in the scientific process, if your hypothesis proves wrong, then you've got to go back and think, and try again, sort of go back to the start. And that's the exact same thing I have to do with my writing. I've tried different clues and tried to use different things in my writing, and it's like that's just not working. I can't make it work. So I have to toss that out, pick another card from the deck, go back and start over. So it's not a real linear process for me. To me, I think science and art are very much connected, and I think it's a very thin line between the two of them. I've had science in my life pretty much from the get go. I've always loved science. My father and I used to sit and watch science shows on TV all the time when I was little. 

My field of nursing certainly is a scientific field. I'm not sure how the artistic part of it got involved, but I guess I have a small artistic side, not a big one because I can't draw worth a darn, I can't play an instrument worth a darn, can't sing worth a darn. So my only artistic ability really is the writing, and science has played a huge role in that for me, and I don't see how I could ever write anything that didn't involve science. And that's pretty much all I have to say. So I'm going to hand it off to Melanie. >> Thank you, Beth, that was wonderful. [APPLAUSE] >> Melanie Hampton: Okay, I want to thank Deborah for having me on this panel. I don't often get to talk to people. [LAUGHTER] I'm crime scene. We don't interview people, which is kind of one of differences between what you see on TV and what happens in real life in most cases. 

You'll probably also notice, I'm not wearing civilian clothes, I'm not wearing heels, I am wearing my very shiny court shoes. So you're all being treated to my court uniform today. Our crime scene investigators are uniformed officers. We've all been patrol officers for at least five years, and that kind of experience is something that's very valuable when you're working a crime scene. But it is a different path to go the forensic route, than to go the detective route. In the Madison Police Department, the parallel rank to my rank, which is investigator, the parallel rank would be detective. They're the ones who do the interviews, who do the writing of warrants and writing of subpoenas, in most cases. Actually, in my role doing computer forensics, I do write some of those things, but that's because it's a little bit of a different kind of world. When I try to explain to, like, friends and family what I do, it's easy for me to say, okay, you think CSI, that's what I do. Law & Order, that's what detectives do. 

That's kind of how this works. But it's not at all like it is on TV. I think most people realize that. I don't have a lovely lab with glass walls where I can just whoosh things around, and come up with a database that would match rooftop material to some particular manufacturer at this particular date and time with a delivery man that happens to live at 122nd Street. That does not work. A lot of it is very tedious, very time consuming, very, very detail oriented, and the answers are not two or three steps down the road. They are three, four, or five steps down the road. And a lot of the things that we do may not necessarily even point directly an answer, but are all supportive of painting that picture. It's very important that we work together as a team, that there's communication, that we value what each person in that team brings to the product in trying to work that scene. We are seeing something called the CSI effect, if you've heard of that. 

We're seeing that in the court room, where jurors are actually believing that forensic science, or those of us who are practicing forensic science, or evidence technicians, can deliver what they see on TV. There are expectations of things like finding DNA, expectations of matching fingerprints that are not necessarily based in reality. But this is what makes up our selection of people for juries, and needs to be addressed throughout the course of a trial which makes for a very tough job for someone like me, as well as the prosecutor, to try and decipher, what were the scientific methods that were used. And sometimes, since my background is in engineering, when I hear them saying the scientific methods, a lot of times I think yeah, scientific, see the world of engineering is applying those scientific principles, but actually then making something out of them, not just kind of dealing in the theory and such. So I see the forensic science or forensic practitioning a lot closer related to engineering than to a strict science. I think that's one of the reasons why I gravitated toward the forensic department. And that's the reason why I joined the Madison Police Department. I did my bachelor's here at UW in civil engineering, and I went to Northwestern University for a master's in civil engineering, came back here to UW with a National Science Foundation fellowship working on my PhD and decided that that just wasn't where I wanted to go. So I never did finish the PhD. I broke my adviser's heart, but I took all of that experience to the Madison Police Department with the intent of going into forensics. 

Of the other people that I work with, we've all been of that mind set where when we came onto the force we knew we were going to go and do forensics. It's a different mind set. Madison is very unique in that we do have our own forensic services unit, 24/7. There are three shifts of people who do nothing but respond to crime scenes and process evidence. There are 12 of us to cover the 24/7, and so oftentimes, given vacations and training, and all the other demands and such, there might be one of us for the entire city at a time. Then, when a major event happens then the phone starts ringing, and everybody gets called in and we all start rolling to the scene. I think we're the third largest crime scene unit in the state next to the State Crime Lab, obviously, and then Milwaukee. The Crime Lab are not commissioned officers. In Madison we are all officers. I have a strong opinion in that being a commissioned officer is something important in doing that role. 

There have been instances when suspects have returned into what were secured crime scenes and have attacked the crime scene staff. One of the men that I worked with did have to shoot a suspect. I worked a sexual assault scene, where I was upstairs in the bedroom diagramming where the sexual assault had taken place, and it was between a husband and a wife. The officers assured us the husband is at work, we're going to go get him now. Husband's at work, grandma's downstairs with the daughter. Okay, so I'm doing my work upstairs, suspect comes into the room. Starts making for a closet. I don't know that he's not going for a gun in the closet, so I have to rely on my experience as an officer as well. I have to maintain my training in fire arms, in defense and arrest tactics to be able to take a suspect down, cuff him and secure the situation until I can get other officers there. So we are by far not in secure and completely stable environments. 

That's why I appreciate all of the training that I have received still as a commissioned officer. It means we're responsible for an awful lot. We've kind of got two jobs to do, but I think that's really best. Some of the things that we do then, so what do these 12 people do on a 24/7 basis? A lot of photography and videography. One of our sole responsibilities is documenting what's there. So we finally went to digital. It took us quite a while. We actually only went to digital a couple years ago. Otherwise, we have been using medium format film cameras. You could take 15 pictures at a time, and the negatives were about that big, but you got great pictures. 

So photography and videography. We dust and do other processing to find latent fingerprints. We do fingerprint comparison. Despite what you see on TV, fingerprint comparison is done by a human. It's not done by a machine. I would not trust a machine to do fingerprint comparison. We investigate arson. We document autopsies. I've been in the autopsy suite on several occasions with Dr. Stier, to my left, which is always a fun occasion. Well, not always. 

Oh, sure it is. He's a great guy. [LAUGHTER] We do traffic crash reconstruction. My civil engineering degree comes in really handy for that. So learning how to, we also do forensic mapping of crashes and crime scenes. Juries are expecting an awful lot out of forensics when they're in the box, expecting to find out, well, what was the scene like. And so the best that we can do to truly and accurately depict that scene, the better off. Blood spatter analysis, that's always fun. That's one of the best things I'd like to demonstrate for the junior high kids. It's all geometry, but they love it. 

I get a little stressed out. One of my areas of expertise, though, is computer forensics, and that's a relatively new field. I've been doing it almost exclusively. I go out to major crime scenes now, but almost exclusively I'm in the lab doing computer forensics. So I analyze computers, cell phones, digital cameras, any kind of flash memory for artifacts and other data that are related to a crime. It has to be done in a forensic manner, meaning that we have to examine it in such a way that we're not changing the evidence while we look at it. So you know if you turn on a computer, just by the act of turning that computer on, you've changed it. So we use special tools and special processes to freeze the data as it currently exists from when we got it, and then use other tools to examine the data that's in it. Carving out deleted files, looking for really minuscule pieces of data and dates, and times and things that might give us pieces of information relating to that crime. Things that are all relating to the who, what, where, when and why. 

Those are the big ones. Timeline, a timeline is huge in almost any kind of case, and if you think of how often people use their cell phones, use their computers, what they're looking at and when they give us huge insight to timelines and to what's going on in someone's head at a given time. I can talk a little about how we would respond to a call, probably like a major scene is more interesting. We do an awful lot of routine work and that would be just one investigator showing up to take photos or to dust for prints, or both. Pretty much everything is going to involve photography. But on a major scene, if one of us is working, we start rolling out to the scene of, say, a shooting, or a major sexual assault homicide, something of that sort. We'll immediately start calling other people in, because no one investigator can do a large scene by themselves, not at all. It takes a team approach. At that point we start dividing up the work. Who's going to do the videography? So you have a videotape of how things were right when everybody got there. 

Who's going to start doing photography? Who's going to do the evidence collection?  And that will usually be a couple of people. Then who else is going to start mapping out that scene? Every little piece of evidence, where is it, so that we can create a picture, we can create that map of it later on. It takes hours. Hours and hours. And we take the same kind of painstaking detail on a fatality vehicle crash, as well. That's why the roads get closed sometimes for a few hours, if you're on the Beltline and something terrible like that has happened. Now we do an awful lot of swabbing on scene for DNA. DNA is something I'd like to talk about for a little bit, because that's kind of one of the big issues in forensic science at the moment. My little girl is in third grade and they're already teaching her something a little bit about DNA. Basically that we kind of all have something and it's unique to us, kind of like a fingerprint. 

Fingerprints are actually more unique. Your DNA is very durable, yes. It's very chemically stable. It can be washed away and chlorine bleach can destroy it. It can be destroyed by UV. So if something is sitting out in the sun for a long time, that can degrade it. But DNA is also transferable. So on TV a lot of times you'll see somebody touch something, then they'll do the big close up shot and somebody takes a Q-tip and they'll swab up some little skin cell and then off the soundtrack goes, and they're doing the little pipettes into the centrifuge and presto, it's this one profile. Yeah, not so much. Since DNA is transferable, this table has probably been brought in here by two people. 

They may or may not have their DNA on it, depending upon who maybe they shook hands with or something that morning it may be on here, too. I shook hands with a couple of people earlier. If I touched this, if I have their DNA on my hand, it may be on here now too. So we could end up with a real soup, and mixtures in DNA analysis are very, very common. That's by far the norm. Unless you're dealing with a stain that is specifically one substance. We look at a blood drop, and it's one blood drop. Then overwhelmingly it will be one pattern. But to look at a surface where there isn't a visible stain, it's just a surface, take a swab, the chances of getting that nifty little skin flake that has that one profile that pops out and then they go to the database and it says their last known location and everything, no. That's not quite how it works, at all. 

The absence of DNA as well does not necessarily mean the person wasn't there. It just means that that particular sample, that particular swab, doesn't have it on there. But it doesn't necessarily prove a negative. You would have to look at the totality of the circumstances. You have to look at the entire picture to make that judgment. One of the things that I think, I'd also like to clarify, that's different than TV is that usually you see Gary Sinise or the red-haired fellow, what's his name? >> Horatio. >> Yeah, Horatio Caine, but I forget the actor's name. David Caruso, there we go. He takes off his sunglasses first, and then off he goes to go get the suspect. He's got it all figured out in his head. 

In forensics we can't approach it that way, because one of the things that the system is depending upon us to be is in pursuit of fact and unbiased. I'm not there to go after a particular suspect. I'm not there to form a judgment and prove that judgment. I am there to gather all the facts as best and accurately using the best methods that we have at our disposal to the best of my ability. That's our job. It's not simply to support the prosecutor, not at all. It's not to support the detective. That's one of the reasons why we don't do an interview, and then go process their apartment. That separation is important, and it's a good way of making that system work. I think I'll close with one of the things I wanted to comment on with what you had to say about a live body smelling the same as a dead one on the inside. 

Oh, lord, I hope not. [LAUGHTER] So when we go out to a really, really, really nasty death scene, the smells are such that you get them in your head, and you know that smell. There is nothing else that smells like that smell. It's something you instantly remember. We'll put on Tyvek suits, masks, and booties to try and keep it out of your hair and out of your clothes. It gets in your hair. It gets in the hair in your nose, and then you're still smelling it. So when we've been on some really tough scenes, one of the secrets I have is we'll take Vicks VapoRub and put that up your nostrils. It keeps you from smelling the decomp quite so bad. So that's kind of one our little tips and tricks. 

>> Blum: Remember that. >> Hampton: Remember that one! [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] Whatever, I just don't want to smell it. The death scenes, and I think I have probably, by far the images that I've seen doing computer forensics have been more bothersome to me than anything that I've had to process out on scene. On scene, because it is very much coming in after the fact, it's a lot easier to deal with and know that we just have a job to do, and we get it done to the best of our ability. But I'm very happy to be here today to give you a little insight into what the forensics unit at MPD does. Doc? [APPLAUSE] >> Blum: That was great, Melanie, thank you. And now Dr. Stier. >> Michael Stier: All right. I'm going to stand, because I'm one of those people that talks with my hands. Before you leave, young man, I want to ask if we can dim the lights that go towards the board a bit, because this is going to be entirely a visual presentation mostly. 

[INAUDIBLE] There we go, okay, thank you. I want to echo what Melanie said and that is a lot of what you folks see on television is not exactly the way it's done in real life. However, there is a lot of parallelity. A lot of the script writers in Hollywood have folks like myself and Investigator Hampton on staff to give them ideas and some guidance. So what you're seeing on the media is really a hybrid of Hollywood and the excitement that they want to foster in a television program, and some reality. One of the things that they always talk about and they say time of death was 5:55pm, or whatever. This is very rarely the opportunity to establish, because time of death is something that is not concrete. Unless you were there when the explosion occurred, or when the gun went off it's very difficult to determine. There are a variety of parameters that we as forensic scientists, me in particular as a forensic pathologist, use to try to give a window of time of death. They include temperature of the body, it's called algor mortis. 

We don't use that very often, because temperature of the body is dependent upon a variety of factors, which include temperature of the environment, clothing and its ability to insulate which is variable, also the subcutaneous insulation we have that is the fat under the skin, and varies from person to person and fat is actually fairly insulating. So we don't use algor mortis very much. There is another feature called rigor mortis or that is the stiffening of the musculature in the postmortem time after death. If any of you have ever had the unfortunate situation of a pet that died or experienced an animal that died or something that was deceased for some hours, and you move it and you notice that it's stiff, it's because the musculature contracts and lends to this process called rigor mortis. That's a whole other subject. Lastly, there is a process of change of color of the skin surface. That is what I'm going to focus on. So rather than trying to go over many different things and have you leave here going, well, I heard a lot of little stuff, I'm going to try to really teach all of you livor mortis, so when you leave here you know what livor mortis is. So again thank you, Deborah, for inviting me and thank you for the introduction. I'm a professor of forensics at the UW. 

So let's start with this question: what happens when death occurs? Well, there are a lot of things that happen, but related to livor mortis or the change in color of the skin, is related to the fact that blood circulation stops. So right now everybody in this room has a pulse. You have the heart that is beating. Blood is circulating. It is traveling away from the heart in vessels called arteries. It is traveling back to the heart in vessels called veins. But when you die, eventually the heart stops, and that circulatory process stops. At that point, blood will redistribute within the vessels according to the forces of gravity. I think most of you here are old enough to understand forces of gravity, maybe there's a couple that don't, but gravity is what's keeping us all in our seat right now. That's what keeping the water in this bottle toward the base here. 

Gravity is a force that exists all around us, except in the higher levels of the atmosphere. So when a person dies and the blood circulation stops, gravity pulls the blood in the vessels towards the surface closest to the center of the Earth. So if someone dies on their back and lays on their back for some time, the back of that person will become more purplish-pink. That color is called livor mortis. Whereas, the surface of the body away from the surface on which the body is resting will become very pale. So the color of skin changes, as I've mentioned, and this color change is called livor mortis. Now, how does livor mortis relate to timing of death? Well, livor mortis is a time dependent process. So once circulation stops, it begins and then there is a gradual change in the degree of livor mortis. After a certain point in time, roughly 8 to 12 hours after, let's see, roughly 8 to 12 hours after death, this redistributed blood will clot and become fixed. Okay? Now what does that mean? Prior to this time interval, let's say someone dies on their back, and about three hours or four hours after they have passed away, someone comes along and says, gee, Bobby had a big wallet and he always carried a few hundred bucks, let's roll him around and get the wallet out. 

And they roll him over to maybe look for something in the pocket. The body is moved at that four-hour interval, that livor mortis will shift to the front of the body. But after about 8 to 12 hours, this redistributed blood, the livor mortis will become fixed, such that if the person is moved after this 8 or 12 hours, that pattern, the livor mortis will be present on the back. So when they bring me someone that they say, Doc, let's say, Investigator Hampton goes out to a scene, they say, well this person was found laying on their stomach in an alley, and I look at the person, and we check their whole body out and I see that the livor mortis, let me correct myself, found laying on his stomach, and we look at the body in the morgue and I see that the livor mortis is in the back. I'll say, well, he may have been found on his stomach, but it looks like he died and was on his back for some time prior to being found. Now the reason that this window is so broad is because there are a lot of variables that we possess that influence that. Persons that are on medicines that thin the blood, such as aspirin or Warfarin, or other things that you may be taking will cause blood to stay more fluid out to this 10- or 12-hour interval. So there are a lot of variables that affect this. And that's, again, part of that CSI effect. You can't say that at eight hours, it's always going to be fixed. 

So before this interval, livor can be redistributed, as I mentioned, but livor can also be blanched by firm digital pressure. And what I mean by that, and I'll show you pictures of this, is when you have an area of this livid discoloration, or of this purple discoloration, you push on it with your finger, and if it becomes pale, you know that the person had died approximately 8 to 12 hours prior to that observation being made. I'm going to go through a bunch of images and test you folks on this at the end. It should be kind of fun. No, really. And livor mortis won't form at all in areas where there's pressure on the skin. So the same example, someone dies on their back, and the back of the skin becomes kind of purplish, you'll see the color of livor mortis, but say their buttocks or the back of their shoulders will not have livor forming, because the blood cannot get into that. Okay? I'll give you an example that you can all do right now. The color of your skin as you sit here is due to several things. It is due to the pigmentation that is inherent to your heritage and your ethnicity. 

It's a reflection of the lighting that we have, but it is also a manifestation of blood circulating in the skin. So if you take the back of one hand and with the opposing hand, take a finger and push on it very firmly for about three or four seconds and then take your finger off, you'll see that there's a pale mark, right? Then in about four to six seconds it's all filled in again that's because you have a pulse and you have circulation. On a deceased person, they don't have a pulse or have circulation, but in these areas of lividity, if you push on it firmly, and there is a blanching effect like we just did the experiment on the hand, you know that the person died approximately 8 to 12 hours before that observation is made. I'm going to show pictures from autopsy cases, just to prepare you. I have screened these photos so that they're not the real extreme things. I think they're fine for this audience, but I just need to prepare you all. So this an image here, and again if we can turn the lighting down a tad more now that would be helpful, because I like to really have these things project. If that's possible. I'll give these folks a minute while I talk. What you're seeing here is an interface. 

You're seeing the edge of the side of someone that I've examined. As far as you can without compromising the videography is great. So in the upper half of the image, you have this very pale skin that is without circulation and there's no circulation going on at all here. But this is pale skin that is towards the surface of the body. So the surface is at the top of the screen. The surface on which the person is resting is at the bottom of the screen. So in the lower half of the image down here, you can appreciate this kind of purplish discoloration. Can everybody see that? Okay, so this purplish discoloration that we're seeing in the lower part of this image is livor mortis. Okay? Again, it's not all black and white. Some of you may notice this is very pale up here. 

It is more purple down here, and there's kind of a pink interface here at the transition. So things are not always black and white. There is a zone of gray, if you will. So, again, livor mortis is the collection and the pooling of blood according to forces of gravity. In areas of skin that are in contact with a rigid surface, livor mortis will not form. So what you're looking at here is the skin of the side of someone who is being examined at autopsy. In the left half of the image, you have this purple color of livor mortis. You all appreciate that? Okay, this person died in contact with something rigid, and that rigid object was in contact with the skin in the right half of this image. You see in the right half on the same patient, there is a pallor or a paleness, and there is no lividity or no livor mortis. Do we all appreciate that? Okay, what I'm going to do in the next image, just to let you know, is I'm going to grasp this edge of the cut skin and pull it down, and you're going to see what the vessels look like under the surface of the skin, which is a manifestation of how lividity forms and why it looks the way it does. 

So pulling this skin down, you will see that in the left side of this image you see the purplish discoloration, you see how prominent the vessels are, and how congested they appear? This is what's giving the image of livor mortis from the surface of the skin. Okay? You see in the other half of the image on the same patient, there is no blood pooling in the vessel here. There are blood vessels here, you just don't see them, because there is something rigid in contact with the skin on this part. Okay? So this is what lends to pattern formation that we recognize at autopsy which is very useful. Autopsy, as Investigator Hampton said, in death investigation is very much a team effort. So we're putting it all together and it's really a blast. I'll tell you, I really enjoy what I do and I encourage all of the young participants in this forum here to pursue your dreams, regardless of what anyone else wants you to do. I took a lot of heat for going into the work that I do, because it's kind of morbid. I guess it is. It's kind of smelly, and it's fairly challenging. 

When a patient dies and comes to me, they don't come and say, hey, Doc, I've got some chest pain here or, hey, I've had a bad headache for the last three days. They are deceased so they have sustained the ultimate complication of an illness. It's all up to me, pretty much, to figure out what's going on. So, as I've stated, just with a person lying on their back you will have areas of lividity forming, or livor mortis. You see here this is the neck of someone and there's livor mortis here, and there's livor mortis along these edges, and in the curved surface of the back, where the person was on contact with the surface of their floor, you have no livor mortis here. Do you all see that? Now what do you suppose these ridges are? These irregular lines that we have here? Yeah, wrinkles from clothing impart a specific pattern. That's what this is. You see that. So now we're going to go through some relatively simple exercises to see what kind of patterns you can recognize from these images. So if someone is laying on a particular object, that object may make an imprint and we'll go through, and you'll see some of these right now. 

Okay, so this is the back of someone that was laying on a particular object. That object is reflected here in this pattern. What is that pattern? >> A comb. >> That's a comb, that's right. That's pretty easy. This one is both easy and difficult. This is the chest of someone. There is an object that is right here, and while you study that and try to gather what kind of object that is, I'm going to tell you that this curved part here, and this here, and these two, are related to this. So what do you think the main object is in the center of this image? TV remote, okay. Any other guesses? Yes. 

[INAUDIBLE] A what? [LAUGHTER] Okay, TV remote is really good. Anybody else want to take a guess? [INAUDIBLE] A strap of a case. Well, I'll tell you, it is, in fact, a TV remote. So whoever guessed that is right on spot. This is the TV remote, and this is part of the thumb, this is part of the palm and these are two other fingers. So this person was clutching the TV remote and passed away with the remote in hand on the chest. So that's what you're seeing right here. Here's part of the hand and then this is the remote. Do you all see that now? >> So did it require pressure on it? >> It does definitely. You came in late. 

This is all pressure from gravity. >> So they were on their stomach? >> That's correct. They were on their stomach. Next one here. This is one is kind of generational. Some of you folks my age and a little older will get this, and some of the young folks may not. >> A phone cord? >> A phone cord, yeah, but not from a cell phone. This is the old type of phone that was attached to the wall with kind of that curly cord. So yes, that's a phone cord. Let's see where we are. 

Okay, so this isn't going to be much longer here, we want to have time for questions. By the way, if you have a question for any of us, me included, that's a general question, I ask that you kindly wait. But if you have a specific question that relates to what you're seeing in the image, it would be appropriate to ask while I'm giving the presentation so we don't have to bring the image up again. So as I mentioned, lividity or livor mortis is blanchable in the first 8 to 12 hours of death. So at an autopsy one of the things I'll do, is I'll examine a decedent, and I'll say okay, here's an area of lividity and I'll take my gloved hand and I'll push on that, and then see what it looks like. If it looks like this and leaves a mark or an imprint, that means that it is blanched, and that indicates that the person passed away approximately 8 to 12 hours prior to me performing the test. I have only one more slide. I don't want you to speak up just yet. This is the last slide for now. So this is an image of the back of someone at autopsy. 

So this is an autopsy table. They did not die here. Okay? They did not die here, but there's the back. The head is off to the left on the image, and the legs are off to the right. So this is an autopsy table. And just from this image, I want to know what you think about how long before this photo was taken did this person lose their life? And you can look at it and study it. What's that? >> Less than eight hours. >> Less than eight hours, we have over here. Eight to 12 hours, or less than 8 to 12. Okay, that's about the same, but I like your answer better, because of the variability that I mentioned. 

Any others? You've got really pretty intense lividity here. But we've got something going on here and we've got something going on here. Any other guesses? >> How long has he been on the table? >> Half an hour, 20 minutes. Anyone else? Do you all agree with that 8 to 12 hours? You don't think it's someone suffering from the very rare but fatal spotted butt disease. [LAUGHTER] No, in fact, you are correct. It is less then 8 to 12 hours, because what you're seeing here is a pattern of the autopsy table. You see this with the stainless steel and then the holes, the perforations are actually forming a pattern on the decedent's buttocks. So this pattern was formed at this table, not where the person died. The same thing with the line here on the person's back corresponds with this support ridge on the autopsy table right there. So now, with that said, you all understand livor mortis, and I thank you very much for your attention. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Blum: Well, I think we're very lucky to have this distinguished group of panelists walk us through crimes from so many different perspectives. We are now hoping that you have some questions for each and any of them. If you do, I'd like you to put up your hand. I'll call on you and then I'll repeat your question to make sure everyone can hear it. Over here. [INAUDIBLE]  So the question has to do with investigating a fire scene. There's some suggestion that or science suggests that some of the assumptions we've made about arson were incorrect. Have you seen this change at the Madison Police Department? >> Hampton: Well, arson investigation is a two-pronged approach. From Madison Police Department we have several detectives and one of our investigators, actually, who have specialized training in arson investigation, but the Madison Fire Department does take the lead on those investigations. Certainly, criminal charges would come as a result of that two-pronged investigation. 

Arson investigation isn't something that I have specific specialized training in. One of the effects of only having 12 of us to do 24/7, is that we all kind of have to adopt a bit of a specialty. So we can all do the major crime scene photography, videography and scene response, but then if we tried to be experts in everything, we'd go nuts. So I've got computer forensics and the fingerprint comparison. I do more with photography and videography. But I can't say I would know the answer to your question because I'm not as versed with the arson investigation. >> Blum: Right here. >> One question for Dr. Stier. Do you often get patients or people who have died within that eight-- Do you often get patients within that 8- to 12-hour time frame so that you have a chance to do this? It would seem like often you wouldn't have that opportunity. >> Stier: Well, the patients that I see, and I do call them patients, because I'm a physician and I'm making a terminal diagnosis, the range is extreme. 

It's more extreme than any other medical specialty. We do see patients that have died in that short interval. The best postmortem exam, the best autopsy is conducted as soon after death as possible. But that's not always possible. So we, as this last image showed, that person had passed away within 8 to 12 hours prior to the autopsy, but my longest interval is 30 years. I autopsied someone in May of 2006, that passed away in May of 1976. >> Blum: And did you fix time of death? [LAUGHTER] >> Time of death wasn't the question, but it was a spectacular case. It was adjudicated. It's gone through the courts, but I will, if anyone has specific interest about that case, I'll make some comments off-record later. >> Blum: There was a question over here, I thought. 

Back here then. [INAUDIBLE]  >> Stier: I can repeat the question. The question is, is on a deceased patient, if you apply pressure and show blanching lividity pattern, as I showed, does that refill? The answer is, usually not. It depends. If you have the opportunity to examine someone very soon after death, we're talking two, three, four, five hours, it may refill, and sometimes it does. But the closer you get towards that 8-hour time, 8 to 12 hours, the less likely it will refill. I should also mention, since you asked that question, there is a gray zone where you can have a mixed pattern, say about somewhere between five to six hours, where some of the lividity will actually start to form and stay, and if the person is repositioned, the lividity may have a secondary pattern of redistributing. In fact, I just encountered that where a person had a dual pattern of lividity, indicating death on the prone position, or in the front, but also had a lividity pattern indicating that they were on their back. That's exactly what had occurred. The person had died and was on their front side for probably four to six hours, and then was shifted to their back. 

And, again, it takes a lot of experience and a lot of observational skills to dissect what we see at the autopsy table. >> Blum: Yes? >> There have been three major revolutions that I can think of in crime detection from the beginning of the last century. Fingerprinting, ballistics analysis and now DNA, and undoubtedly many lesser revolutions. Where do you think the next, from which branch of science do you think the next big revolution is going to come? >> Blum: And all three of you are welcome to take a crack at that. What do you think the future, the next brilliant revolution in forensics will be? >> Hampton: Well, actually the National Academy of Sciences just released a report not too long ago evaluating the state of forensic science. The report was pretty harsh on the forensic sciences community saying that a lot of, that there lacked a lot of standards, credentials, and certifications and such, that it wasn't uniform and indeed it's not. In Madison, we have 12 investigators for 24/7 forensic response. We're sworn officers, but our crime lab are not sworn officers. We have different levels of training. Training is not something that is dictated by what certifications are needed. 

It's dictated by what funds we have available. There are branches, municipal law enforcement throughout the rest of the state, where they don't have anybody. So there's no one there to respond in a timely fashion. It's as fast as crime lab can respond, which may be a couple hours or so. In terms of the science of it, major revolutions and such, probably won't trickle down to municipal law enforcement until the state of the forensics community and forensic science, I wouldn't call myself a scientist in the role that I am. I'm more, based on my experience in engineering, I really see that parallel to being an engineer. It's more of a forensic practitioner. But the biggest work that needs to be done is in the standardization, the credentialing, really making uniform and lending more reliability and creditability to the methods that are applied so that when we get to the court system, everyone has faith in what's being presented. >> Stier: I would agree and also it would be a huge thing, it would be nothing short of a revolution if we could unify death investigation in this country. Right now, it is completely a hodgepodge. 

If you look at the map, there are counties that are still under coroner's jurisdictions, and coroners are of varying capacities. Some of them with many years of experience are fairly good. Some of them with lesser experience, they're only as competent as their experience. The requirements for a coroner means that you have to be living in the county in which you serve, you have to be 18 years old, and you have to be a non-felon. You don't have to be an investigator. You don't have to have a college degree. You don't have to have any of this. And as Melanie said, the agencies that respond to different crime scenes vary all over the place. As Deborah mentioned, she worked in Virginia, I worked in Virginia as well. Virginia has a fairly good system where they have a state medical examiner system that is run by physicians with death investigators that have to have some competency in the field. 

I will only reiterate that the best death investigation is done by a team effort, and the team is only as good as the weakest link. But if we could get a unification of death investigation systems in this country, it would be nothing short of monumentous, really. >> Amos: All right, I've got a slightly different answer. Actually two answers. I think two things are going to revolutionize crime solving and investigation in the future. One is the growing prevalence of cameras, and big brother everywhere we go. More and more things are getting caught on film, computers with cameras. I had to buy a new laptop computer and it had one of those little built in web cams. And I got to tell you, I'm a little paranoid about it. I keep it covered with a piece of paper all the time. 

[LAUGHTER] Not that I'm doing anything bad, but you just never know. The other thing I think more scientific-wise that I think maybe a future thing is brain mapping. Being able to interpret brain processes and such for either memory capture, or lie detecting or something along those lines. There's a lot of really great advances being done right now with brain studies, so I think that's a good potential for a future. >> Blum: I've been wondering, I'm probably going to follow up with you, Melanie, on this about computer forensics. One of the things is I've looked at poison cases, and a number of the poison murders that I've looked at, the evidence has been against the poisoners that they went and researched the poison on their home computer and that search was found on the hard drive. And, in fact, there was a case a couple years ago, it was in Kenosha. I don't know if you all remember this, but it was a doctor who murdered his wife. He had put antifreeze in her wine. And when that all spun out, it was a fascinating case, but they found all of his searches for antifreeze, and how it kills you, and what the best liquid drink to put it in on his computer. 

I've been forever saying to people do your research at the library, which is probably not what Melanie wants to hear. [LAUGHTER] But one of the things I've wondered is, if I did do it on my home computer, how much can I really hide? Or can you find it all, even if I'm trying to erase it? Go ahead and scare them. >> Hampton: Computer forensics is a very new area in terms of crime scene response, because your computer can be the crime scene, or it can tell you an awful lot of information about it. And there is actually, the Caylee Anthony case actually involves computer forensics. One of the big points of contention was one computer forensics examiner said that there were 80-some-plus searches for chloroform. Another computer forensic examiner analyzed that hard drive and said no, I don't find nearly that many. I think there were like three, or one, or something of that sort, I don't remember the exact numbers. It depended upon what piece of software they were using and interpreting the results of that software correctly. Kind of an embarrassing moment for the sheriff's department deputy who did the computer forensics exam on that machine and reported results that didn't have the appropriate, without the appropriate interpretation. Back when I first started doing computer forensics about five years ago, it was dead box forensics, that is, power gets taken from the computer, you bring the box in and we take the hard drive out of it, hook it up to our forensics machine and create an image of it so that we're working from a bit by bit copy. 

That's a copy of all of the space, not just the space that has files, but all the space on it. Even the space you think is empty but it's probably not. Dead box forensics then was great. We would find probably almost everything in there. People just didn't delete a lot of stuff, didn't wipe a lot of stuff, and the size of the hard drives was significantly smaller. 20gig hard drive was like, woo-hoo, we can store all sorts of stuff on there. Nowadays, hard drives are about 1.5 terabytes, or so, at least. That's huge. Encryption is being used a lot more often now. Secure web browsing, secure methods of deleting data, it's getting harder and harder to find artifacts of web browsing, and find artifacts of files being touched, and such, using dead box forensics. 

It's not impossible. In a lot of the cases we deal with the information that's on the computer that we're looking for, they're storing it, they're keeping it, they're collecting it, they want to have images and such, and so those are things that we're going to find. Cell phones are just about as big as computers now, and that's another huge area for forensic work. Mostly because there are so many different operating systems, so many different vendors, and there's no reason for them to standardize. Unlike Windows and Mac where you basically have two platforms, for cell phones it's all over the place and they change within months, not just years. So trying to keep up with forensic methods to analyze cell phones is really quite a task. It's resource intensive in terms of time, in terms of training, and in terms of equipment. Thousands upon thousands of dollars to go into machines and processing and such, to do this kind of work, and it's not the kind of money that's just easily available for a municipal police department. That's another one of those areas where collaboration, regional cooperation would be helpful. >> Amos: I just want to say that if anybody around me dies a suspicious death and they look at my computer, I'm screwed. 

[LAUGHTER] Because I Google all kinds of interesting stuff. [LAUGHTER] >> Blum: Actually I could probably say the same thing. And in fact, just yesterday I was flying back and I caught a cab from the airport, and I was saying to taxi driver I'm going to go give this talk about my book, Poisoner's Handbook, and literally the taxi driver says to me I know how to kill people, you put tomato leaves in their salad. And for a moment I thought, okay, my life has gotten so weird. [LAUGHTER] But, of course, then I go back and I'm looking up, can I kill you with a tomato leaf. [LAUGHTER] Not very effectively apparently. My husband's safe still. [LAUGHTER] I know we're running a little bit behind, because the session before us ran so late, so we'll only take a couple more questions, if there are any more questions. Yeah, way back here. Is there a microphone for her? So. 

 >> What has been the youngest person that each of you have worked on that have died? >> Blum: Could you repeat that? You're interested in a specific murder case? >> No, she wants to know what the youngest person is that any of us have worked on who has died. So the youngest death. >> Blum: Okay, so the youngest murder victim. The case involving the youngest person that you've worked with in a criminal investigation. >> Stier: Preborn. >> Blum: Could you explicate? >> Stier: Not really. It's a case that is probably Supreme Court material, but depending on definition of life, and what not, but I've examined fetal patients. And I suppose the other question is oldest and probably patients in their 90s. >> Hampton: I've had several infant cases as young as, I think, a couple of weeks or so. Infant cases are always hard. 

>> Very. >> Amos: As a nurse, I've certainly taken care of pretty much every age death-wise, including some of the preborns as well as newborns and very young babies. >> Blum: So we get into the fact that murder isn't always quite such a fun subject, right? Other questions? Anything else? Yes, over here.  >> Hi, I'm just a little more curious about establishing the time of death, and kind of for both of you. If, for example, you've got a body that had been murdered 15 to 50 hours ago, how close could you get? Could you get within a couple of hours, or is it a range of 15 hours, and then how does that affect solving the crime, and are there any clues when you're investigating the scene that would help establish the time of death? Every TV show they kind of start with, "What were you doing between 10:00 and midnight?" >> Stier: I can give you a real easy quick answer and that is that time of death is established by a variety of parameters. It's not just livor mortis. It's also rigor mortis. It's also cell phone records. It's also when was the last time you picked up your mail? What are the dates of expiration on things in the refrigerator, for example. Again, computer records. 

It's a combined approach from the law enforcement investigative side of cell phones and what not, and then what we see at autopsy. And that's why that window that I offered, 8 to 12 hours, is so diverse. I've had cases where a person was actually a homicide victim, and was deceased we know for sure over a week, and they had no features of decomposition, no livor mortis, and that could be explained, because the murder involved a fire arm and the person had bled in the process of sustaining that injury, and livor mortis is dependent upon blood in the vascular system. So we can get pretty good, but it's certainly not to the minute unless you have satellite imagery that shows something happening, but it's really a combined effort. And, again, working as a team you can get pretty close. You can narrow it for several hours in some cases, and in some cases you come as close as saying within a day or two of such and such a date. So the accuracy is really fairly divergent. >> Hampton: I would just echo what Dr. Stier has to say. It really is dependent on all those different factors. Having looked at as many cell phones as I have, those really do show how connected we are. 

I've found cell phone text messages that I believe were probably sent within minutes of death, that was an overdose case. Those kind of things can happen. But the team approach is the only way that you can really narrow down that kind of thing. >> Blum: When you're writing a murder mystery, Beth, do you make an assumption about the accuracy, the medical ability to determine time of death? How much do you rely on the idea that as we do hear on television that you can narrow the time frame down very precisely? >> Amos: I try to keep my books as realistic as possible. I occasionally exercise a little bit of poetic license, but not usually with the science, more with the process or the timelines of getting the evidence. Time of death has been an issue in a couple of the books. It's not a clear cut issue. There's a fairly large time frame. In one, the time of death, as I mentioned, was actually altered by a disease in a way. So that's all I can say. 

>> Blum: So the next time you see a crime show on TV and they identify the time of death within 10 minutes, you have permission to roll your eyes. [LAUGHTER] Is there one last question? Yes, right here. [INAUDIBLE]  ...what percentage of those could be caused or attributed to alcohol?  >> Blum: Like is alcohol a factor in crimes ranging from murder to suicide, and do we have a kind of statistical sense of how frequently it's a player. >> Stier: The relationship of alcohol to premature deaths is really epidemic. Mostly from accidents, drinking and driving, drinking and bicycling, drinking and ice fishing, drinking and dancing, drinking and doing just about anything, alcohol is an impairing compound. Even drinking and sitting home on the couch you might be at risk for falling off the couch. I had a student who did a study with me, and of the accidental deaths, I think it was somewhere between maybe 20% and 30% involved alcohol, or some degree of intoxication. As far as homicides go, I don't have a better number for you because, fortunately, I don't work in Chicago or in other urban-- I'm not saying Chicago is bad at all, but I'm saying in more urban centers where the activity of gang and drug is more dense and there's a higher homicide rate. We really live in a fairly safe community. As far as suicides go, there is some indication that drugs are involved in suicides, but more so psychiatric things because, of course, most persons who commit suicide have an underlying cause of depression. 

>> Hampton: I think in looking at the, say, the past 10 years or so within the Madison community, certainly homicides have been, I'd say the major factors have been drugs. Drug activity has been a factor and domestic violence. Alcohol can certainly fuel domestic violence, absolutely, but I think those are our two major players within the Madison area specifically related to homicides. >> Blum: I'd like to thank our terrific panel. [APPLAUSE]    program, and these prizes up at