LIsa Black
Cape Coral, FL
Female, 49
I spent the five happiest years of my life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now I'm a certified latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I also write a series of forensic suspense novels, turning the day job into fiction. My books have been translated into six languages.
Some people don't have enough to do!
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Trace Evidence, my first book, was optioned and I wrote the screenplay for it. But the producers couldn’t sell it and had to give up. I’ve had nibbles on other books but nothing yet. I keep hoping!
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Our police officers do, but I'm a civilian forensic specialist, so I didn't. (I also don't carry a gun, don't interview or arrest people and make a lot less money.)
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That depends entirely on where you work and what your job is. If you’re a ballistics expert, you’ll spend your days looking at guns and ammunition. If you’re a DNA analyst, you’ll be in a lab with micro tubes. If you’re me, you spend a lot of time looking at fingerprints and sometimes go to crime or death scenes.
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Police Officer
Have you ever been shot or seriously injured on the job?
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Sorry it took me so long to get back to you!
Yes, fingerprints are impressions made by the oil and sweat on our fingers. If a surface is very dusty, we take away dust on our fingers instead of leaving prints on the object. It will look like fingerprints should be there because there will be finger marks in the dust, but actually we just removed dust.
Hope that helps!
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On the victim’s body? Most likely not because after that much time the victim would most likely be skeletal remains only, if buried and certainly if on the surface. If the body was in some kind of container, sealed, it might be completely decomposed, mummified or preserved, depending on circumstances. If the killer’s blood or semen got on some object that was with the body, it could conceivably survive if protected, but it would be very unlikely to yield a usable DNA profile.
Hope that helps!!
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No. I do lots of stuff detectives don’t do, like lab analysis, scene reconstruction, latent print comparison, etc. And they do tons of stuff I don’t do, like track down victims/witnesses/suspects and interview them, run criminal histories, request search warrants, and so on. So our jobs are really very different. We are there to provide the forensic support for the case, but forensic topics are only part of any case. Hope that helps!
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