Three months after I became Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia in March 1998, a young female graduate student was sexually assaulted and murdered by an unknown intruder. I suspected that this was not the first time that this perpetrator had struck and so I directed our detectives to go back over old cases to see whether they could find any evidence of previous attacks by the same person. After spending months searching through old files and sending large numbers of DNA samples to the laboratory for analysis, our investigators reported to me that they believed that he had struck almost exactly one year earlier. In fact, they were now pretty sure that during the summer of 1997 he had sexually assaulted four women under similar circumstances: undetected intrusion into the victims’ apartments during the early morning hours while the victims were asleep in their beds.

The Art of Investigative Interviewing, Second Edition, details the techniques that can be used by interviewers in any setting to detect indications of deception and respond to them appropriately. With all-new case studies and a new chapter devoted to interrogative ethics, this revised edition has been entirely updated while maintaining the lively, instructive writing style of the first edition. Drawing elements from psychology, philosophy, and sociology, Charles Yeschke applies the theory of human need to the process of investigative interviewing. This theory is the most important component of the successful interview and is crucial to an investigator's ability to correctly interpret human behavior.

A postmortem X-ray of a male homicide victim reveals a bullet lodged next to his spine. That he was shot is clear. How recently? is what death investigators must determine. The answer: the absence of scar tissue surrounding the bullet proves the victim had been recently shot. And while the average person may find tattoos to be creative and aesthetic, to the trained death investigator, they can actually be the key to aiding in the eventual identification of a body. They say the dead can't speak. But in the fascinating field of forensic pathology, the deceased can tell an elaborate story, especially when death investigators know what clues to look for. The first volume in the new Forensic Pathology Atlases: Causes of Death Series, this book takes an in-depth look at the determination of the time of death, postmortem changes, and identification. In TIME OF DEATH, DECOMPOSITION AND IDENTIFICATION, you'll learn through the extensive use of photographs and discussion how estimating the time of death can rarely be accomplished with scientific accuracy. You'll learn about the numerous changes the body undergoes after death, and how positive and probable identifications are made. For death investigators, law enforcement officers, attorneys, and anyone else involved in forensic death cases, TIME OF DEATH, DECOMPOSITION AND IDENTIFICATION is a "must have" resource.

In Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys, leading forensic scientist John Trestrail offers a pioneering survey of all that is known about the use of poison as a weapon in murder. Topics range from the use of poisons in history and literature to convicting the poisoner in court, and include a review of the different types of poisons, techniques for crime scene investigation, and the critical essentials of the forensic autopsy. The author also examines what is known about poisoners in general (psychological profile, types, and statistical analyses) and their victims (who gets poisoned, investigative considerations, and classic symptoms of poisoning). Two chapters probe the problems of proving poisoning and convicting the poisoner in court. Comprehensive and informative, Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys offers forensic scientists, police and private investigators, forensic psychologists, and criminal prosecutors a unique one-volume summary of the knowledge and techniques needed to solve the near-invisible crime of poisoning and convict the perpetrator.