Forensics Detective Reviews Crime Scene Investigations, from 'Dexter' to 'CSI: Miami' | Vanity Fair

during my time as a major crimes forensics detective i worked about 20 000 crime scenes today karen is going to break down fictional crime scene investigations to determine what hollywood gets right and wrong [Music] what i want you to understand is that crime scenes are very difficult there are infinite number of possibilities so when we go into one we have to go in with an open mind with objective means and we have to gather all of our evidence appropriately so that everything can go to court first up dexter in this scene dexter a blood spatter analyst investigates a crime scene look at the bloods pattern look at the patterns it tells a story you see this big pond of blood right there that's from the initial stab this is pure hollywood i don't know what a pond of blood is a pond is what fish are in a pond is not what blood is we don't use a term like that i don't know what all those red strings are either when we reconstruct what's called an impact pattern we can take up to six to ten different small blood droplets and draw them into three-dimensional space and that's apparently what they were trying to do with these red strings here but not only is that ridiculous it doesn't tell me anything about the crime scene whatsoever the male victim was standing right here and the killer plunged his knife into the shoulder severing the carotid artery and noticed the long thick heavy drips that stain on the wall is not like anything we would find at a crime scene that looks like the prom scene from the movie carrie there's nothing that those strings are attached to on that wall that is meaningful at all i also don't know how you would reconstruct a crime scene using a non-pattern like that and then deduce that the person came across with a knife this way in that way crime scene reconstruction is very detailed it's very objective so it's not just walking into a crime scene and then just positing what you think happened based on the patterns at the scene you have to do a lot of leg work now over here you have nice clean sprays of blood and that can only happen when you're holding something light and moving quick nice sharp slices through the body no splashes no drips clean and easy clean and easy if i were to classify what hollywood has attempted to recreate on that wall it would be termed something along the lines of cast off and cast off happens when blood adheres to an object and that object is swung through the air and the adhesive properties of blood are overcome by that force and they land in a linear arc on the available surfaces and they can leave a line and depending on the weapon used the line can be very thin such as with the tip of a knife or they can be thicker such as with a baseball bat or a tire iron but again these are things that take the scientific method they take objective means to measure and to recreate so this is just nonsense so we're looking for a sushi chef yeah sushi chef is possible wouldn't be my first choice but hey you never know now what now i eat and last but not least in this clip nobody's wearing a tyvek suit nobody's wearing shoe booties nobody is wearing gloves he snaps one photograph and splits for dinner nothing about this scene has anything to do with reality overall i think this is a hollywood hot mess it is a non-forensic nightmare and i may have a nightmare tonight now that i've watched it next up fargo season two in this scene the local detectives investigate a crime scene at a local diner put my coat on her seemed only right i put my coat on her seemed only right no no no that is only wrong we never introduce evidence to a body and she's not gonna get cold i promise so we've got some pretty major blood stains at the entrance there that means we need to find an alternate entry point we don't want to walk over those bloodstains because we could alter them we could introduce our own shoe prints our own dna other things into that crime scene so as soon as that door was opened and the blood was present there on the floor trying to find an alternate route would have been the appropriate thing to do account three dead saw the waitress in the parking lot i think she caught one there then staggered out gunman followed made things permanent well if the gunman followed according to this very very rapid reconstruction and you have snow outside you should be able to find some shoe prints in that snow leading to the body where the waitress was along with a bullet trajectory through her body or a penetrating injury into her body that can place where the shooter was where she was and it may be able to give you some identifiable characteristics in those shoe prints how's betsy you mean you didn't call her before you came over well yeah just being polite give you a chance to talk about your feelings should you be so disposed she's good ordered this kid of recipe cards saw it on the tv so now every night we eat delicacies of the world as much as i love this banter because it's just adorable that doesn't happen at a crime scene when we keep things clinical we keep things linear we keep things objective swapping recipes is something that we do outside of work outside of the crime scene as tempting as it might be it's inappropriate skid marks yeah i see them of course connecting those this deal here would be what we call jumping to a conclusion maybe maybe not i don't know but here's the thing you can measure those skid marks you can take samples of the rubber from those skid marks you can find out a width of the undercarriage of the vehicle that created them and maybe it'll lead you to a car based on the number of bodies i think we got one car too many in the parking lot whoa he just picked up that money with what appears to be possibly blood on it with his gloved hand and it's a leather glove it's not a new clean latex glove that is a huge no-no when you take evidence from a crime scene like that not only are you contaminating it with things that might be on your glove he's reached into his pocket he's held his pen he's taken notes he may have even pulled it off with his fingers at some point so he's introducing all of that onto that dollar bill and if that is blood on it that is a major clue so the first thing that we would have to do is document it photograph it test that substance on it to see if it's blood and then package it appropriately for the laboratory next up iron man 3. in this scene tony stark uses some high-tech forensics to reconstruct a crime scene i've compiled a mandarin database for you sir drawn from shield fbi and cia intercepts initiating virtual crime scene reconstruction we do have tools that will reconstruct a crime scene in three dimensions there are 3d scanners they not only take a 360 degree view of the crime scene they can do ceilings and the floors so that when we upload it into a computer we can actually tilt the entire scene and take measurements from one area to another that are extremely accurate so although this is really futuristic and cool it is not that far out of the realm of possibility the heat from the blast was in excess of 3000 degrees celsius any subjects within 12.5 yards were vaporized instantly no bomb parts found in the three mile radius of the chinese theater we just heard that this explosive device created 3000 degrees celsius well that would be equivalent to about 5400 degrees fahrenheit to give you some comparison the surface of the sun is 5700 degrees so that's some serious map and if you have an incendiary device like that that goes off at that high of a temperature i'm pretty sure that vaporized is the correct term but there would be a very large blast radius not just at 12 and a half yards away it would be a lot bigger talk to me happy [Music] when is a bomb not a bomb never you need four things to make a bomb you need an energy source you need a method of containment you need a method of initiation and you need some material that will create an exothermic or heat reaction without one of those things it won't work next up csi miami in this clip a brand new investigator makes a horrible mistake in the lab you talked me through what you're doing okay this is a jacket worn by our suspect hector rivera we believe that he stabbed gabriel cervantes so i'm gonna run what's called a luminol test it was luminol luminol is a compound that when it interacts with the iron and hemoglobin it'll uh luminesce this is true luminol is a chemoluminescent compound and when it comes into contact with the heme in blood it will create a bluish green glow and we can get that to be even brighter okay i just wanted to really pop on film yes oh yeah yeah that's the money shot no no the more you spray a liquid like that onto a surface the more you're going to dilute the stain that can make it extremely difficult for the dna analyst to extract the white blood cells that are needed for a dna analysis so the fact that he's spraying this luminol on the sleeve and over and over and over again he's diluting that sample my results are zero zip there's no dna on the jacket i don't see how that's possible the luminol you have a significant blood spatter it was actually uh more than significant scenic glow is amazing oh i bet it was problem is the more luminal you spray the more you dilute the blood exactly there's another problem here he said it was a stabbing and there was significant blood spatter luminol is used on crime scenes that have been cleaned up we don't use it to find evidence where there's significant blood it's unnecessary we have other means and methods to do that so not only did he spray luminol on a jacket that had significant blood on it that we could have found with other methods he diluted it to the point that the dna analyst wasn't able to extract enough for a sample okay all right i get it so what do we really got here ryan too much luminal i can there's no dna what do you mean if you want to get this guy you're going to have to find some other way it is possible that there is no dna left on the sweatshirt it's a chemical and anytime you introduce a chemical to dna there is a chance that some of the alleles or parts of the dna could break down and degrade and make that sample not a full profile next up silence of the lambs in this clip the investigators are inside of a small town autopsy suite looking at a body from buffalo bill okay sterling the menthol under the nose is a nice hollywood touch but here's the problem with menthol it's designed to open your nasal passages so when you put that under your nose you're trying to do it to not smell the decomposition it's better to just deal with it because when you put that under your nose it opens your nasal passages and makes the smell worse and i may know this because of experience star-shaped contact entrance wound over the sternum a muzzle stamp at the top wrong for death wrongful death when you have a contact wound where a muzzle stamp meaning the barrel of the gun is literally pressed against the skin you are going to have a stellator star-shaped entrance wound so that description is spot-on what else do you see sterling well he's not local her ears are pierced three times and there's a a glitter nail polish it looks like town to me two of her fingernails are broken off and there's there's dirt or grit under them those are really great observations and not only would we swab under those nails for that dirt or grit and then compare it to samples that we took from the primary crime scene where the body was found we would also clip her nails off and then those would be tested for dna another thing that i really appreciate about the scene is jody foster's character coming to the realization that she is face to face with a victim of a heinous murder and she plays it so well you can see it in her face you can see that she's a little nauseated you can see that she's very very upset and that really does happen she's got something in her throat when a body comes out of the water lots of times there's like leaves and things in the mouth what is that some kind of seed pod no sir that's a bug cocoon but there's no way that could get way down in there like that unless somebody shoved it in there the one thing that i really liked about this scene was when they did pull that cocoon out of the throat jody foster fixated it with alcohol when you have entomological samples which are bug samples you have to preserve them somehow and alcohol is definitely one of the preservation methods that we use next up no country for old men in this scene local sheriffs investigate a crime scene on horseback it's the same tire tread coming back it's going made about the same time too you can see the sights real clear when we have tire tracks and shoe prints and a scene like this that's in the middle of nowhere it's very difficult however if you can see tire tracks that are leading to a crime scene that you're headed to riding a horse over top of those tire tracks isn't going to do anybody any favors we have to photograph them we would have to cast them with some kind of material and recover them so that if we find a matching tire on a suspect vehicle the analyst at the lab can do comparisons what calibers you got there sheriff nine millimeter a couple 45 acps somebody unloaded on that thing with a shotgun the fact that he picked the casings up with his bare hands is not good now there's no need to do dna swabs there's no need to process those casings for latent prints we haven't documented their location to find out where the shooter may have been standing when they exited the kind of gun that he was firing also you have nine millimeters and 45s that could be one suspect with one gun in each hand it could be a suspect with the nine a suspect with the 45 and then you have another person with a shotgun so were the two shooters or were there three we will never know because all of that evidence has now been manipulated and moved before it was documented how come you reckon the coyote think banana i don't know this is hollywood gone awry this is what happens when you don't pay attention to small things like opening doors without thinking there looks to be a victim in the driver's seat of that car with a bullet wound at the back of their head that might be important you have the other guy on horseback kicking dirt onto the bodies on the ground so this is just hollywood taking a lot of really bad liberties what's that mexican brown dope oh these boys is all swole up never never touch evidence with your bare hand especially narcotics one of the ways that drugs get into your system is through absorption in your skin another way is through inhalation through the air so not only did he touch it with his bare hands he flipped it into the air and now he's inhaling those particles into his lungs so it's really important that any evidence that's at a scene you leave it the way that it is you document it with photography and then you use very tightly gloved hands and you take that sample and you place it into a sealed envelope for the toxicologist next up body of proof in this clip a medical examiner tries to determine the cause and manner of death at an autopsy well she's obviously an excellent physical condition calluses on her feet few minor scars healed bite marks on the left forearm both posterior and anterior probably canine that was a quick conclusion skin is notorious for moving for being pliable so when you have bite marks on skin it's not that easy to make a determination and you never ever get a perfect impression even from a canine or a human so a forensic odeontologist would need to be consulted to look at those bite marks and to see if there's anything to glean from them keeps her nails clipped a little bit chewed any dna under them all in good time detective this is the kind of contentious relationship that will not work i've said before this is a team effort and being this contentious with the medical examiner is inappropriate she has a job to do the detectives have a job to do we have to work in concert for the victim so that we can find the answers i see a beautiful young woman who ate well and kept fit for whom a boyfriend did she break up with him look deeper she showed signs of stress a workaholic was she up for a partner did she piss somebody off was somebody jealous out to get her the answers are all here because that's what we do i honor the body for what it tells me about angela swanson's life okay we have a lot of lane crossing going here the medical examiner's job is to determine the cause and the manner of death their job is not to go into the victimology into the background of that victim that's the detective's job they should have a lot of that information already or they should be about to go find out about it did she have a bad breakup does she have enemies does she have uh some people who she may owe money to things like that that's the detective's job i'm gonna get some coffee [Music] the skull collapsed into the occipital lobe in a v-shaped depression there are flecks of rust throughout your murder weapon is heavy maybe cast iron square with a dull edge possibly a large plumber's wrench or some kind of mallet a detective yeah i take mine with cream no sugar i would really like to know how she knows all that information when we haven't even seen the injury yet when a body goes in for autopsy one thing that the medical examiners have to do especially if there's long hair like i have is you have to shave their head especially if there's injuries to that head and when there's blunt force trauma such as what she's describing with a large pipe or a large wrench there will be some telltale signs on that scalp to help us identify what that tool might be but we can't see it until we get rid of the hair and we wouldn't be able to make conclusions about the actual item of evidence what caused those injuries until we did a lot more investigation last up boondock saints in this scene an fbi agent uses eccentric methods to investigate a crime scene [Music] see [Music] the first thing about this clip that i actually liked was he put gloves on so we always wear personal protective equipment gloves are a bare minimum which is a good thing the music not so much it's hard to concentrate on a crime scene when you have music blaring in your ears also the cd player we don't bring extraneous things into a crime scene ever because not only can that introduce trace evidence into a crime scene it can also bring the crime scene onto your stuff [Music] that's a big no-no you don't eat you don't drink you don't smoke inside of a crime scene ever it is inappropriate what are you gonna do you're gonna ditch the cigarette butt inside the crime scene so now we don't know what might be evidence and white what might not be plus you're introducing things from the crime scene into your mouth crime scenes are not clean crime scenes are gross this is an alley full of garbage you don't want that stuff in your mouth [Music] [Applause] [Music] what i see wrong here is the body is the jurisdiction of the medical examiner or coroner so fbi agents investigators we aren't allowed to touch or manipulate the body without a representative from the medical examiner or coroner [Music] present [Music] i have no idea what he's doing i don't know what he was putting on the hand i honest to god don't even know what that is is it blood does it die is it this is a perfect example of hollywood taking complete liberty with forensics because that made no sense at all so overall it looks like hollywood goes over the border most of the time but sometimes they do get it right believe me crime scenes are not this sexy they are not this entertaining so if you're liking what you see on television and film just remember it's hollywood it's not reality you

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: karen smith, forensic scenes, true crime, reviews, forensics detective, forensics detective reviews, forensics detective reviews crime scenes, forensics detective reviews crime scene investigations, vanity fair forensics, forensics detective vanity fair, vanity fair reviews, true crime reviews, true crime vanity fair, vanity fair true crime, forensics detective true crime, forensics true crime, dexter review, csi review, crime scene investigation, crime scenes, vanity fair

Id: zRRYBe12FEA

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020