No Bones Unturned by Porntip Rojanasunan

Author:Porntip Rojanasunan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814721493
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

In order to understand how meticulous and observant the forensic scientist should be in the collection of evidence, I have examples from two cases which are legal murder cases with suspiciously ‘perfect’ crime scenes and ‘clear’ evidence.

In the first case, I was notified that there was an extrajudicial killing of a criminal in a drug dealing incident. When I reached the scene, I saw that the criminal’s car was parked with its door open on the driver’s side. I walked a little further away from the car and found the criminal’s shoe lying on the road. The body of the deceased was located even further away by about 50 metres, lying on its back. A pistol was lying besides the fingertips of the right hand, as if it had dropped there after a gunfight.

Whenever I saw such an ‘obvious’ crime scene, I would often ask: is it real? People think that when a person is shot with a gun in his hand, the gun will fall near his fingertips. However, from my experience of shooting cases, there are many ways in which the gun might fall to the ground. It all depends on the posture and position of the person at the time he is shot. It is not a certainty that the gun would fall near the fingertips of the right hand every single time.

Such thoughts are the reason why the police dislike me.

The right arm of the deceased was stretched out next to the body. The left arm was bent and the left hand laid over the stomach. There was a watch on the left wrist, facing up. I could see a bloodstain on the watch face and on the skin of the wrist near the watch. This was strange because a bloodstain like this does not occur naturally. Immediately, my sense of suspicion heightened. I thought that it was likely that someone had used his hand to smear blood on the watch and wrist, and laid the hand over the stomach. One way to test my hypothesis would be to run a DNA test on the bloodstain. If someone had done what I suspected without using gloves, there would be traces of his sweat mixed with the DNA of the blood. At that time, I was merely a pathologist at Ramathibodi Hospital, and gathering evidence was not part of my duties. Therefore, I could not do anything.

I examined the wounds and found that the deceased had been shot above his left breast. The entry wound was oval-shaped with ragged edges. The top edge was wider than the bottom edge, showing that the bullet had been shot at a diagonal angle from top to bottom. According to forensic science, if the bullet had entered at a straight trajectory, the entrance wound would be a fairly symmetrical round circle. But if the bullet entered diagonally from any direction, the shallow scratch marks around the wound would be wider at the direction from which the bullet entered, which made it possible to estimate the direction from which the bullet had been fired.

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