Forensic Evidence: A Case Study

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With this information, police arrested John Taylor on October 16th, 2001. John Taylor initially denied the prosecution of murder. He said she was at his house in his bed, but he did not murder her. Teirnan fell off his bed, banged her head. Believing she died, he panicked, lifted her up by her scarf and buried her in the woods. The prosecutors then used the pathological evidence that the amount of decomposition did not match up with the time of burial. John Taylor became a convicted killer charged with murder, rape and abduction in July 8th, 2002. It was clear on November 26th, 2000; Taylor abducted Leanne Tiernan in Houghley Gill, took her back to his house, sexually assaulted her and then strangled the teenage girl with her scarf. He was sentenced to serve two life sentences with no chance of parole. In February 2003, forensic scientists were able to link Taylor’s DNA with two cases of unsolved rape in the 1980s. The first victim a prostitute and the second victim a mother left alone with her eighteen month old daughter. Once again, the court charged Taylor with two more life sentences for rape. Forensic scientists took advantage of technology, more specifically DNA databases to reveal the truth of past, …show more content…

Two ways of identifying the significance of physical evidence includes Identification and Comparison. Identifying a substance requires the process of determining a substance physical and chemical identity. This helped solve the crime of Leanne Teirnan in several ways; for example, the police used Leanne’s fingerprints to identify her body, which led the officials solving the crime through the clues found with her body. Comparison techniques helped officials as well. This process helped determine if two substances possessed the same origin. For example, the forensic scientists used this idea to discover the red nylon fiber on Teirnan was from Taylor’s

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