Hidden Evidence, Revised Second Edition

Hidden Evidence, Revised Second Edition

If Sherlock Holmes had peered forward in time, he’d be amazed at how science has revolutionized crime-solving. As David Owen shows, scientific techniques helped crack each of the 50 cases in Hidden Evidence, Second Edition.

Forensic science has a long pedigree. The first case study in the book shows how, in 1775, Paul Revere identified the body of a friend killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill from dental work that Revere had himself performed. Other early cases include the D’Autremont Brothers, who murdered a train crew in 1923 and were eventually traced due to a gun’s serial number, and Stephen Bradley, whose 1960 killing of an 8-year-old was proven with help from Pekinese dog hairs, pink house mortar and rare cypress seeds.

From the case of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (in which fingerprints recovered on a bomb-making manual led investigators to Ramzi Yousef) to Craig Harman, whose 2004 prosecution came courtesy of a pioneering genetic technique known as familial searching, the value of science to sleuthing is made clear on every page. Fiber analysis, acoustics, ballistics, fingerprinting and DNA are just some of the techniques we see in action.

This new edition focuses on the increasing powers of DNA analysis and its pitfalls in proving both wrongdoing and innocence; profiles the value of plant databases in cases like the post-9/11 anthrax mailings; weighs the value of electronic and visual surveillance and more. It also includes 10 new cases, including Madeleine McCann, the missing 4-year-old whose mother was exonerated in part due to hair analysis proving that she was not on medication at the time of her daughter’s disappearance.

Is Hidden Evidence, Second Edition an informative and exhaustively illustrated guide to science’s power to solve crimes? That’s elementary, dear reader.

Softcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Firefly Books Ltd. ( September 02, 2009 )

Item #: 14-3766

ISBN: 9781554075409

Product Dimensions: 7.0 x 10.0 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 31.0 ounces