How fast can bodies be identified? & Proof of Murder

ECathers said:

The situation: several bodies are discovered in the aftermath of a house fire. The bodies would presumably be discovered by the firefighters during overhaul of the building. At that point, the fire immediately becomes a potential crime scene. Police are notified, and the medical examiner is notified. All work on overhauling the building is delayed until the proper authorities arrive, unless the chances of fire increase.

When the medical examiner arrives, the body is reviewed in situ. Only after the medical examiner approves is the body removed by the fire department. This process takes several hours.

My characters have a suspicion of the identities and inform the police of this. By this I assume you mean that the character can provide a probable name for the deceased. This speeds up the identification process.

Assuming at least one of them has relatively recent dental records on file and they don't have to go with DNA, how fast would police be able to confirm the identity? Real world is going to be two or three days. Let's use you as the victim here. The day after, or two days after your death in the fire, an autopsy is performed. At this time, x-rays of your mouth would be taken for the purpose of dental identification. Meanwhile, the police have a tentative ID of you. They then have to find your dentist, and obtain the dental records from the dentist. Question can arise as who has authority to release the dental records.

Once they get both x-ray sets, a match is attempted to be made. Usually going to take a couple of days, and maybe as long as three to five days. Matching dental records is not as easy as people like to describe it on TV.

In case it matters, the location is a small town in upstate NY and based on the number of bodies in the fire (4-9 or so) it's a high profile case. Yes they were all murdered. All bodies in NY are examined by State's Medical Examiner. It doesn't matter where in the state that they die.

Also what method of murder would be most likely to still be proven after a fire? The baddies don't use guns, so that's out. Even though the story takes place in modern times, they are more likely to have used some sort of archaic weapon. Poison, bow, knife, sword, axe and garrotte are the most likely. ETA: Oh and spear too. Depends upon how badly burned the bodies are. However, any penetrating wound can nearly always be found after a fire. Lungs will be clear of smoke, indicating death occurred prior to the fire.

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Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

ECathers said:

The situation: several bodies are discovered in the aftermath of a house fire.

My characters have a suspicion of the identities and inform the police of this.

Assuming at least one of them has relatively recent dental records on file and they don't have to go with DNA, how fast would police be able to confirm the identity?

In case it matters, the location is a small town in upstate NY and based on the number of bodies in the fire (4-9 or so) it's a high profile case. Yes they were all murdered.

Also what method of murder would be most likely to still be proven after a fire? The baddies don't use guns, so that's out. Even though the story takes place in modern times, they are more likely to have used some sort of archaic weapon. Poison, bow, knife, sword, axe and garrotte are the most likely. ETA: Oh and spear too.

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Were they all murdered by the same method? Did the murderer attempt to cover the murders (make them look like something else), or was it just kill ppl and dump all the bodies in a pile in the house and torch it and hope that hides the evidence? Where in the house are the bodies?

The size and business of the department and me's office will determine much of the former. It's not so much the time it literally takes to do the id, it's when it's recognized that it's a crime scene (probably very early, though that too depends on who's working, but arson investigators are generally good at that), finding bodies, moving bodies, morgue backup, getting records, etc., etc.

The latter depends on a lot. All the same method, a method designed to disguise, what level of fire and how long were the bodies in it, etc., etc., etc.

I mean if you go after ppl with an axe, and they're conscious and unrestrained for some period, there will likely be very, very obvious signs of that after even a very hot, prolonged fire because you're probably going to have very deep wounds.

If you're careful and, say, restrain people in such a way as to minimize marking, expose them to enough smoke (with a respirator on yourself) to cause incapacitation then unrestrain them and chuck them around in more natural-looking circumstances, and/or cut them in a shallow but devastating manner while they're on something that will both contain all the blood and completely burn, that'd be much harder to detect.

Things learned from the school of CSI:
-No smoke/ash in the lungs would be a dead giveaway that he was dead before the fire.
-If there's a broken bone that doesn't "fit" with dying in the fire, that could also be a clue that something's amiss. Specifically I'm thinking of the floating bone in the neck that can only be broken when a person is strangled, but it could conceivably be any bone.
-If they die from a stabbing wound, the knife or whatever might have nicked/cut the bone, and a forensic anthropologist may be able to use it to identify the cause of death.
-If you poison them, I think there could still be traces of the poison in the flesh/bones (whatever's left of them). But that may depend on the means of poisoning and how long they are poisoned. i.e. if you dose him with arsenic for months before he dies, there will almost certainly be something in the bones. Not sure about quicker acting poisons.
-But in the same vein, if you kill them with an airborne poison (like carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, etc.) I'm fairly sure there would be poison in the lungs.

Just to provide a bit of correction to CSI.

melindamusil said:

Things learned from the school of CSI:
-No smoke/ash in the lungs would be a dead giveaway that he was dead before the fire. It's possible to suck in super-heated air and die that way, and then there is minimal ash in the lungs. You also want to find ash in the throat, nose, and mouth. You'll also see some redness/burning of the nose and mouth. It is possible, although not very probable to not have any ash inside the body and have a fire related death.

-If there's a broken bone that doesn't "fit" with dying in the fire, that could also be a clue that something's amiss. Specifically I'm thinking of the floating bone in the neck that can only be broken when a person is strangled, but it could conceivably be any bone. You don't break a bone dying in a fire. You might fall into a fire and break a bone in the process and die from inhaling smoke, but the two are separate causes. A bone broken after death is distinctly different in signs from a bone broken while you are alive.

-If they die from a stabbing wound, the knife or whatever might have nicked/cut the bone, and a forensic anthropologist may be able to use it to identify the cause of death. Bodies very rarely burn down to the skeleton. Internal organs are usually roasted but other then that, in good shape. A burn victim is recognizable as a human, although most people will lose their lunch. Bodies, unless you use a backhoe to tear apart the building putting out the fire, come out in one piece, and pretty much all there.

-If you poison them, I think there could still be traces of the poison in the flesh/bones (whatever's left of them). But that may depend on the means of poisoning and how long they are poisoned. i.e. if you dose him with arsenic for months before he dies, there will almost certainly be something in the bones. Not sure about quicker acting poisons. It shows up mainly in the blood, and not all of the blood will boil off.

-But in the same vein, if you kill them with an airborne poison (like carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, etc.) I'm fairly sure there would be poison in the lungs. Again, this will show up mainly in the blood.

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All bodies found in a fire are treated as potential crime victims, until proven otherwise. Of course, if the fire originated at the wood stove, and the victim was found in his bed, then the likelihood of crime is very low, and the investigation is accordingly not going to have a high priority. But if the fire fighters see an injury, you tell your officer immediately, AND secure the area. Officer tells incident command, and police become involved immediately (police will be on the scene of a major fire).

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

jclarkdawe said:

Just to provide a bit of correction to CSI.

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What?? You mean that the stuff on CSI isn't completely accurate?!?!


As an ex substitute teacher... Unfortunately I can tell you that, if you are a warm body and can keep the class relatively under control (I.e. if you can keep the volume down), the school district is pleased. Granted, that was a pretty large school district, but it's still disappointing that they don't really care if you actually teach anything. If you wanna play games all day, that was fine as long as there are no blood-curdling screams involved. (So you should have no trouble getting your baddies into the school!)

Keep in mind too that dental records for these individuals may not exist. Records get lost and purged, practices close. Some people just don't go to the dentist. Plus, for a dental record match, you have to have a pretty good idea of who your decedents are to begin with, especially since there isn't a centralized database for dental records like the FBI has for fingerprints.

As a corner/forensic anthropologist, I've had cases where having the dental records would have been the best and fastest way to ID someone, but ran into all of the problems I've listed above.

Good luck with your writing!

If the individual hasn't been to the dentist for years, the records might have already been archived off site. That can add additional days to weeks to sort through, if it suits your plot.