Twisted Investigation: How the Italian police got the Perugia Murder Case so wrong

It was the most famous murder mystery in the world.

Two young women, one, British, Meredith Kercher, murdered, the other American, Amanda Knox, falsely accused. 

There were rumors of sexual games and orgies - all with the backdrop of the gorgeous, Italian renaissance town of Perugia.  

The problem was - almost none of it was true.  The case gave way to seventeen-years of trials, mistrials, newspaper stories and scandals.   

Now, for one of the first times in the podcast world - a forensic investigator looks at the evidence, how it was gathered and how a real investigation should have been done.

Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
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Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

Twisted Investigation The Mistakes in the Perugia Murder that Shook the World

Declan Hill: [00:00:00] It was probably the most famous murder mystery in the world. Two young women, one British, murdered, the other American, falsely accused. There were rumors of sexual games and orgies, all with the backdrop of a gorgeous Italian Renaissance town. The problem was that almost none of it was true. The murder gave way to a 17 year process of trials, mistrials, newspaper stories and scandals.

So for one of the first times in the podcast world, we have a real scientific investigator looking at the forensic evidence and how it was gathered. And as he speaks, you'll learn about how a real investigation should have been done. Welcome to Crime Reefs.

[00:01:00] Peter, let me start by saying I've got a sour taste in my mouth on this particular story as we were researching. In the last week, we found the news that in Perugia right now, there's an eight part series going on a dramatization of this particular awful murder and the co producers are one Monica Lewinsky and two Amanda Knox and I don't know how you feel about it, but that gives me a really sour taste in this because at the heart of this case is a poor, innocent British student Who was raped and murdered.

So I'm not going to mention the American student's name. Again, I've mentioned it once and that's it. I'm going to mention Meredith Kircher, who was the victim. The behavior of people involved 

Peter Valentin: sometimes makes it difficult to look at the forensic evidence. Yes, as objectively as we need to and I think that's part of the problem and I think that might have contributed to what happened the first time around and it [00:02:00] contributes to how the behavior now is perceived.

Declan Hill: So let's get just cracking on here, because this was a case in 2007 that electrified the media. There was an American student, very good looking. There was a British student, also very good looking. There was all kinds of allegations of sexual play and then this bloody murder at the heart of it. Can you just talk us through just in general, the general outline of this case before we get into the specific forensics?

Peter Valentin: I think you laid out the dynamics very succinctly, I think very quickly there were a lot of demographic issues that made this case very palatable to a worldwide audience. You had two young women, one British and one American. You did have the, at least the possibility of there being a sexual motive or component to it that added to the allure.

of the case, [00:03:00] and from my experience, those things often combine to create media attention. And I've seen that there are cases that are extraordinarily tragic, that get almost no media attention whatsoever. And there are other cases that get a great deal of media attention, and you're sometimes left to wonder why.

Why do people focus on one case and not the other? And And this is me being very cynical here for a moment. So forgive me, but you realize at least in part what the profit motive is of those in the media. You realize, at least in some respects, why they choose to focus on some cases and the other and not the other.

Declan Hill: Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the [00:04:00] world. Welcome to Crime Waves, where we do interviews with the best investigators to bring you the insights that no other true crime podcast will do. And on this episode, we're examining the infamous Perugia murder case that involved two young students.

We're speaking with Professor Peter Valentin, a former senior detective in the major crime unit of the Connecticut State Police, who's now head of the University of New Haven's Forensic Science Department. He's also a leading courtroom expert on crime scene reconstruction and analysis. He gained his PhD in nanoscience and advanced technologies at the University of Verona in Northern Italy.

Now, before we return to the episode on appeal. If you like this kind of factual based analysis with investigative experts like Peter Valentin, then please support us. And I don't mean financially. We never ask for money or run commercials on our program, but please like, [00:05:00] subscribe, follow us on whatever podcast platform you use.

If it's YouTube, hit that red button just below the screen to subscribe. That will help our numbers in a massive way and is super appreciated. Now back to the interview, there was also at the heart of it Perugia, which I've been to, which is a beautiful Italian Renaissance town, absolutely gorgeous, but really a small town in the middle of Tuscany.

And there was a cultural issue. I think the American student was behaving in ways that the local Italian authorities just thought was inappropriate. She was sitting on the lap of her boyfriend. A few hours after the discovery of her roommate with her throat slit. And this violent killing that must have played in some way a role in their motivation, not motivations, but their thoughts as an as investigators.

Peter Valentin: I'll say this. I have, I would say some potentially relevant or instructive [00:06:00] experience here that I spent some time or considerable amount of time in part of Italy that, yeah, that, that did not have a great deal of American tourism. And in fact, I spent a lot of time not encountering any other Americans at all.

Uh, and when I finally did, I had no trouble picking them out that they. Practically shouted the fact that they were American by their behavior and how loud they were. in their behavior when I finally did encounter them on the street. And it was so jarring compared to the typical behavior of the other European tourists in the area that I was in.

And of course the Italians that lived in the area that does that feed into a stereotype of the typical American potentially in the absence of other Americans, right? [00:07:00] For the typical Italian person to be exposed to, does it create a narrative of the typical American that at least in some way contributes to this discussion?

It'd be naive for us to say, no, it doesn't. 

Declan Hill: Yeah.

Two points. To be fair to the Americans as a Canadian, they're on their holiday. in Italy, or they're traveling abroad. So they're not at home. Their mom and dad aren't around. They're not behaving with some of the restraints that you would have in your home country. But there is that definite cultural issue.

Italy, Italians do not order ham and pineapple. It's just on their pizza. It's just not a thing that you do. Let's go to your professional passion in your specialty, which is forensic reconstruction, working through how people gather evidence from a potential crime scene. And when you reviewed the case files for us, what are the [00:08:00] things that leaped out at you in terms of what the Italian investigators had done wrong?

Peter Valentin: I would say the thing that was The most interesting was the crime scene video and how it chronicled what I can only characterize as their incompetence. And that is, let me say this, it's very easy for me to say that 17 years In the future, this is a generation removed from when that scene was investigated.

So it is sometimes very easy to look with hindsight on how an investigation was conducted and say, you would have done it differently, but at the same time that the investigation was done somewhat haphazardly, they also simultaneously tried to over interpret the DNA evidence that was recovered. And so the, you can't have it really both ways.

Yeah, and I think this is true. This is true of any [00:09:00] stereotype, right? It's an unfair characterization of somebody that is certainly not supported by the facts, right? An individual set of facts, but be that as it may, it is. You know, a, a way of casting some sort of larger characterization on somebody in the absence of specific information.

And could you see how that was done in this situation? Could it be a way of looking at a person's behavior and seeing it in a more insidious way? Or sinister way, simply because it was from a different culture. I think that those of us as Americans do that all the time. This is probably at the heart of any xenophobic behavior.

We just simply look at the behavior of others outside of our own culture with a, with a degree of skepticism and concern. Um, that's unwarranted, that's of, uh, that's fearful, [00:10:00] and is that at the root of what happened here? Again, this, I think this is, you know, again, this is probably outside of my expertise as a Reconstructionist, but, um, I see this in many of the cases that I work that I'm always left struggling to wonder, like, why did this case go in the direction that it did?

Because if the case was simple, I wouldn't be involved, and I always look at if the facts were so clear, Why is the case so challenging to solve or why there's such differing opinions and very often there are these confounding set of Circumstances and very often these are mixed in. 

Declan Hill: There are also people starting with a false premise and then the logic goes from there as you were saying before.

Let's go to your professional passion and your specialty which is forensic reconstruction, working through how people gather evidence from a potential crime scene. And when you reviewed the case files for us, what are the things that leaped out at you in terms of [00:11:00] what the Italian investigators had done wrong?

Peter Valentin: I think a lot of people When they understand like why are you wearing Tyvek, right? Why are you wearing the protective suit? Why do you wear gloves? Why do you wear booties? Why do many investigators now wear particulate masks over their face? And I think initially some people think it's to prevent yourself from getting something from the scene on yourself, but it's really to prevent you from being the vector for contamination or the movement of evidence within the scene.

So the idea that you would put on booties outside and then walk inside and then not change those booties or that personal protective equipment once you're inside demonstrates a level of ignorance as to what the personal protective equipment is for. So if you put on gloves when you walk into a scene and then you never change those gloves, or I've seen this very [00:12:00] often with booties, right?

You put on booties, it's not to protect your shoes, although that is a side benefit. It's to prevent the cross contamination of evidence within the scene, right? We don't want evidence from one room, 

Declan Hill: right? 

Peter Valentin: We don't want evidence from outside of the scene coming in, and we don't want evidence from within the scene being transferred from one place to another.

Declan Hill: But there were questions about how they were using their gloves, which seemed to be pretty obvious. Keep your gloves on and change them when necessary. Tell us about that, please. 

Peter Valentin: And this goes to the heart of the over interpretation of the DNA. So, if you are handling evidence with the same set of gloves, what, what appears to be, let's say not the entire time, but if you're handling [00:13:00] multiple items of evidence with the same set of gloves, isn't it fair to assume that you might be the reason that DNA winds up on an item of evidence and not because The DNA was put on that evidence because that person contacted it,

Declan Hill: right? What else did you see when you were reviewing the file? 

Peter Valentin: Oh, I think the most important, again, the video becomes the, let's say the foundation for the errors here. Okay. And because, I'll say this, I, because in teaching investigative or crime scene investigative techniques, Video actually is probably one of the easier techniques, one of the easier documentation methods to do, [00:14:00] right?

Cause everybody takes videos, right? TikTok, Instagram, right? It's the easiest thing to do. However, in practice, it turns out to be one of the more difficult techniques for people to perform effectively. 

Declan Hill: How, so? 

Peter Valentin: there is a way to and everybody's watched a video where you almost need Dramamine because you are disoriented because people are moving too quickly.

The camera shake is such that you become disoriented. And so there is a level of pre planning when you create a crime scene video where you need to be very deliberate. And if you don't know why you're creating the video, I think it's fairly obvious that you won't know whether or not you've done that correctly.

And, interestingly, there's lots [00:15:00] of good information out there about how to take good crime scene photographs. What are good techniques, how to set your camera, what kind of cameras to use. There's not a lot out there. Oh my goodness, I think we need to re record this. Okay. And they don't have a protocol.

And so they grab a camera and they just start recording because if they had a protocol, it wouldn't be to do what they did. Because again, what the video did was chronicle all the mistakes that they made. And I could, I could actually tell you, um, I would say this. So the first thing is, again, have a plan.

The idea is if I was going to, Declan, if I was going to show you my house, Before I ever turn the camera on and hit record, I would have to think about how would I approach the [00:16:00] house, which entrance would I use, which way would I walk through the house to minimize the confusion that would result from you watching this video and you never being there.

Declan Hill: And 

Peter Valentin: right. And it's almost, uh, it's akin to cinematography as part of a movie production. 

Declan Hill: Right. But what were the Perugia police not doing when they were, when in their video 

Peter Valentin: engaging in any thought. Okay. And they just walked in and looked up and down. And it's almost as if they were. experiencing the scene for the first time as they were holding the camera and recording.

And that is not what they should have done. Now, I don't know if they did that, or if they actually walked through the scene first, and then stepped outside, and then decided to record. [00:17:00] But the first failure, if you will, is that they didn't plan for how the video should be organized. 

Declan Hill: Your third thing that you notice that they've done wrong, or that leapt out of you as a mistake.

Peter Valentin: This is important too, is I would not, I recommend very strongly that you don't ever use audio, and there's audio in this recording. Now it's in Italian of course, but, and the reason why I strongly suggest that you don't use audio, there's multiple reasons, but I'll just give you a few that jump out at me.

Most people hate silence. And so you might think it's intuitive that if you were recording a crime scene video, that what you would want to do is narrate that video and explain, uh, [00:18:00] I'm in the living room and I see this, that, and the other thing. But if you understand that when in the sequence of documentation, when the video is done, you don't know very much, the video is essentially done almost immediately after you've secured the scene.

And ideally, after you first walk through the scene to ensure you've walked, you understand what's ahead of you, right? We call it a walkthrough, not very creative term, but we walk through the scene once, take some very rudimentary notes, just so we understand what the tasks are before us. You know, do we need things that we don't have?

Are there people that we need that we don't have, you know, on hand? Is there equipment that we need? Are there any environmental concerns? Any evidence that's precarious? Once we understand all of that, the video comes next. So [00:19:00] the video really captures the scene in the state as close to, you know, our arrival as we have as possible.

Declan Hill: And thus you can analyze it later. It's not just something contemporaneous. It's something that you would look at three weeks, three months, three years later as a, as this is the scene as quickly as possible after the actual crime had been committed. 

Peter Valentin: It is, and we follow it up with photographs. So you know, we have another documentation that we also can use for that purpose.

Right. But the video is one that I would say is for general consumption, right? It's for the, for the lay person to view it. It also lacks the resolution that that still photography has. But what I don't want to do is, I don't wanna add commentary to it, first off, because at this point. an hour into my arrival at the scene, if that, I [00:20:00] don't know anything.

And the information I do know is likely, is certainly incomplete, but it's also likely inaccurate because it's only the information I have from an emergency call, right? A call to 911, it's a witness interview at best, So it's not very reliable. And so if that's my sole basis for determining what has evidentiary value and what doesn't, I've already made a mistake.

And so if what I'm doing is using that very ill defined understanding of my scene to then determine what the evidence is, and then I'm narrating my video with that knowledge, I'm going to miss things. And then I'm going to also mistakenly inflate the [00:21:00] importance of other things. So I 

Declan Hill: wouldn't mean for minutes, hour possibly.

Yeah, 

Peter Valentin: exactly. And so there's simply, there's no reason for me to narrate because I'm going to overemphasize things that I think are important now. And I really don't have a reason to reliably believe that. 

Declan Hill: And so Perugia police were narrating through this. Not particularly well planned out video as well, were they?

Peter Valentin: The first few minutes they were somewhat quiet, but I could hear conversations in the background that were certainly people talking about things and every conversation is potential fodder for defense because everything that you say that is later proven to be incorrect or inaccurate can now be used in juxtaposition [00:22:00] to what you've later determined to be the fact that you're working or the facts that you're working with.

So it's better to not say anything, but we don't know how to do that. We can't stand silence. So if I'm recording, if I'm holding that camera, 

Declan Hill: we're talking away. 

Peter Valentin: They were talking in the background. They were swinging that camera around. With no concern whatsoever about the ability of the person viewing that video later to actually absorb the information that was recorded.

And again, no real organization for how they were moving through the scene. What? Look, I'm not a forensic 

Declan Hill: guy, but surely even I would know that's wrong. You're immediately contaminating things. 

Peter Valentin: Yes. Right. And quite literally, you're watching them contaminate the evidence. And so they, you can say [00:23:00] without any exaggeration, what they did was they chronicled their own contamination of the evidence, their own incompetence for you, because had they not done that, Much of what you would have said would have been somewhat speculative, 

Declan Hill: but now you see them collect about it.

Yes. I saw we have a brilliant student producer, Kendall Colmer on this one. And she found one of the, there was a video of one of the gloves that the officers were wearing and there was actually dirt marks on the thumb and forefinger. Tell us about a bit about that, please. 

Peter Valentin: Yeah, and so the challenge is how do you know that they're the same gloves, right?

Because a disposable glove looks like a disposable glove. However, if you can see the same mark on the glove from one image to another, so now they're seeing this very low level of [00:24:00] DNA that they potentially themselves transferred that creates this mess. 

Declan Hill: So that's the DNA test that they did after they collected, quote, all this evidence.

And again, I should point out, Kendall has done a fantastic job. She, she found a case where the guys dropped Some of the quote evidence on the floor and another guy picked it up. Not only you can tell me by dropping on the floor. You're contaminating it by different people picking it up and holding it up to the light and showing it off to each other.

It just to get back to your example earlier. It just seems like a bunch of tourists wandering in and around the Coliseum or something taking a video. 

Peter Valentin: Yeah, I'll give you a great example. Maybe this is a good example for you and I, Declan, but imagine if you turned your radio to a frequency where there was no station and you turned up the volume and you'd hear static in the background, right, you'd hear noise.

[00:25:00] And so this is very similar to what you're doing when you're amplifying the DNA, trying to look for very trace amounts of DNA, you're going to pick up what amounts to noise in the background. And that noise, if you will, is the trace amounts of DNA that is being transferred by the investigators Because of their, their poor, their poor handling of the evidence and their poor contamination mitigation efforts.

Meaning, they're not switching their gloves. The way that we teach this now, every time your hand touches something, you switch out your gloves. Right. You touch your phone, you switch out your gloves. Your hand hits the surface. You switch out your gloves because it's that sensitive 

Declan Hill: and I presume particularly because American student is also [00:26:00] sharing an apartment with Meredith Kircher.

So it's not as if her DNA isn't going to be around and about that apartment anyway. 

Peter Valentin: Yes. And that's the important part is that, and in particular, The video was very instructive for some of these items of evidence because I watched how they collected some of the evidence. And what I watched was, what I would essentially characterize was, they created a mixture.

There was something that was a reddish brown stain that subsequent test, testing would indicate was a human blood stain. But when they collected it, they took an area that was much larger than the actual blood stain itself. Like they actually took a gauze pad, and And they,  [00:27:00] can only describe it as they wiped an area, like you're actually cleaning a countertop.

Declan Hill: Wow. 

Peter Valentin: They wiped an area much larger than the stain itself. And what you can imagine is that, was that an area where somebody potentially walked barefoot in, at some point prior to that bloodstain being deposited? So when you wipe an area so large, then you not, you start to get area beyond the bloodstain itself.

Yes. 

Declan Hill: Yes. 

Peter Valentin: I have no idea why you have a mixture. So, are they potentially creating mixtures almost every time? There was another one where they did the same thing on a door handle. So, they have a reddish brown stain on a door handle, and I watched them do the same thing on the door handle. They didn't just swab the door handle.

They wiped the entire door [00:28:00] handle clean. And what did they do? Create a mixture. 

Declan Hill: So they mixed everybody who's touched that door handle with the blood, which may have the perpetrator's DNA mixed in into it together. They made a DNA soup essentially. 

Peter Valentin: Yeah, certainly the DNA. And there was something intriguing that I saw about what they inferred was a, an impression of the knife on a piece of fabric.

Declan Hill: Tell us about that. 

Peter Valentin: It reminded me very much of a similar logical error from another famous case, the Sam Shepard case, which was the basis for the fugitive. 

Declan Hill: Okay. Tell us a little bit more. 

Peter Valentin: So I'd say there's this psychological phenomenon called pareidolia, where we look for things we recognize in [00:29:00] abstract patterns.

And this is a lay person's definition. Right. And we can all lay in the grass and look up in the clouds and see an animal, right? There's no animal in the clouds. It's just our desire to see patterns or things we recognize in otherwise abstract or random distributions. 

Declan Hill: Okay. 

Peter Valentin: And so in the Sam Shepard case, there was a distribution of blood on a pillowcase.

And that distribution was thought to be of a surgical instrument. And that was important because, um, uh, Marilyn Shepard was thought to be killed by her husband Sam Shepard. Who was a surgeon, who was a doctor and that pun not intended was instrumental in his. His arrest and conviction, but that was a clear.

I'd say a clear example of pareidolia where you are. [00:30:00] Seeing a pattern where one didn't exist. You're creating order out of chaos. And when I saw this similar interpretation of an otherwise abstract pattern on the pillowcase, I thought the same thing. I've seen enough bloodstains where bloodstains on fabric are very hard to interpret.

Declan Hill: Was there another thing that just stuck out at you, Peter, as a, as an expert like yourself?

Peter Valentin: I think there was really just a rush to make everything fit. I would say this, let me add one other layer to this. And I've seen this in a lot of other cases that I've been exposed to, cases that I've worked on and consulted on that. This reminds me of cases [00:31:00] where you have an agency that doesn't have a lot of experience with homicide investigations, but they also don't have the.

willingness or confidence to admit that they don't, they're in over their heads. And so they press on longer than they should. And so they make unforced errors, 

Declan Hill: not they've started with that false premise. And they've just like cracking on that line. Um, Kendall, are there any questions that you have for Dr.

Valentine? 

Kendall: How do you think that this would have been handled differently if it were committed in the States?

Peter Valentin: I'd love to say it would have been handled differently everywhere. 

Declan Hill: And I'm laughing already with that answer, yes. [00:32:00] 

Peter Valentin: But I don't think I can. I, I would, now this is hard for me to say for a couple of different reasons because I'm also a pining on this 17 years later. I'm recognizing that there are safeguards in place for how forensic testing is reported out that would, I would say, catch a lot of this.

But In many respects, we are, I would say, not in opposition to each other, but, you know, the forensic side of things and the investigative side of things, we don't exist to confirm each other's priors. We often operate independent of each other, which, while not always in execution, working as designed, in theory is very good, right?

I, if I'm working on the investigative side, should have very limited influence over me as the forensic [00:33:00] scientist, right, because I should not influence the outcome. So if I'm picking up evidence at a scene, I should therefore not be the person analyzing evidence because then I have a stake in the outcome.

It really depends on where the investigation takes place if I'm being frank about things. If this were to happen in. a jurisdiction with a fully staffed investigative component with a crime scene function that investigated this type of crime with enough frequency.

My hope is that we would do a lot better. 

Declan Hill: We, we looked at the Jeffrey Epstein case where the FBI in the middle of Manhattan came in six or seven hours after the body was [00:34:00] discovered. The scene wasn't secured. They went around, they did a quick assessment of what evidence was necessary, and then they allowed the prison to destroy everything else.

So I'd love to be able to wave the flag and say, Oh, we would be much better than the Italians. But even in downtown Manhattan, mistakes like that can happen. 

Peter Valentin: Yeah. 17 years on, we're not immune from making these, we're not immune from engaging in confirmation bias. It's part of it fueled through a cultural, cultural barrier, cultural ignorance.

Right. I think the other thing, too, is that there is, again, I, this, I, I'm, I'm, my basis for commenting on this is fueled from my time in Italy, that there is a, an emotional component to the Italian media that I didn't see in the United States, or I don't see in the United States, that perhaps fuels an urgency to things.

That [00:35:00] certainly exists in the United States, but I think we tend to be a bit more patient. And I think that, that probably played a role here. 

Declan Hill: Kendall, other questions? 

Peter Valentin: Yeah. 

Kendall: No, that's it. 

Declan Hill: Elizabeth, you know nothing about the Perugia murder. Or at least you haven't done the research, the in depth research that Kendall has.

Listening to Dr. Valentine, listening to this conversation, do you have any questions?

Declan Hill 4: I just think it's very interesting how the Italian police were almost neglectful in the way that they handled the case. And I think that it would have had a very different outcome if it was handled differently. 

Peter Valentin: Now, here's the thing. They didn't think they were being neglectful. They thought that they were doing what they [00:36:00] should have done, and this isn't a matter of training.

And again, I can't speak to that, but this is a problem in the United States. And not to get, not to bring again, too much psychology into things, but on what area of the Dunning Kruger curve are these Italian investigators, right? Did they have a day of training and thought they understood everything? The more you do this, the more you realize how challenging this is and why I suggested in my previous answer that you want an agency that does this often enough that they have some experience that you want to have it, you want to have an agency that does this enough that they've had a case.

Go in an unexpected direction because until you've had that happen to you, you have this false sense of confidence. And that certainly happened to me, or I like you, you believe your own hype. And it's only when you have a case, go [00:37:00] spectacularly sideways where you're like, Oh my goodness, I can't predict this.

All my, all I think I know doesn't help me and it forces you to be much more deliberate about things. So I guarantee you those Italian investigators thought they were doing good work. And they had no idea how badly they botched this. And frankly, look at how defensive they were throughout this entire thing.

What an international scandal the whole thing turned into, and frankly, how defensive a whole country became, because it wasn't just the investigators, right? Couldn't we all, we could extrapolate this to the whole Italian judicial process. 

Declan Hill: Yeah, it struck me as weird that the British came in because it was their woman who had been killed, and the British tabloids got involved.

We were trying to figure out, Kendall, the student producer, and myself, how many different trials of [00:38:00] one crime were going on. Because at one time, there was the person who was actually eventually convicted of the crime, broke into the apartment. attacked Meredith Kircher, sexually assaulted her, and then cut her throat.

And that was it. That was the end of the crime. It was none of the other embellishments. But his crime, his trial was going on. But at the same time, the Italian judicial system is still trying the American student and her Italian boyfriend. Um, Peter, thank you very much to have an over an hour with an expert like you on this kind of work is amazing.

I really appreciate your time and I really hope that you come back on crime with 

Peter Valentin: my pleasure.

Declan Hill: for listening to this episode of crime waves on some of the mistakes in examining the forensic evidence by the Italian police in that Perugia murder. Our guest was Professor Peter Valentin, a former senior detective and now head of forensic [00:39:00] sciences. At the University of New Haven. And our extraordinary student producers are Kendall Colmar, Elizabeth Scalzo, and Angie Paulus.

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