Late at night, the forensic doctor received a site investigation mission and reported that the landlady of a rental house had been found dead in the rental building. No suspicious suspicions have been found at the scene.
When we arrived at the scene, we found that the deceased was a middle-aged woman, in her forties, well-dressed, who was lying obliquely on the stairs between the third and fourth floors when she was found.
The informant was a tenant on the fourth floor of the rental house, and when he returned to the rental house from outside after the night shift at about eleven o'clock in the evening, he found the landlady lying on the stairs and immediately called the police.
On the surface, the case does not seem to be too suspicious. However, after an initial autopsy at the scene, the forensic doctor found more and more unusual places.
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First of all, the time of the discovery of the body was eleven o'clock in the evening, and by the time of the discovery, a large number of corpse spots had appeared on the body of the deceased, and there was even a clear corpse stiffness at the large joints. Corpse spots and zombies generally appear after a long period of death. In this self-built four-story rental building, each floor has six suites with bathrooms, it can be said that it is crowded all day, if the landlord dies on the stairs, according to common sense, his body should be found soon, it is unlikely that it will take such a long time to be found by the tenants who work the night shift.
Secondly, the posture of the corpse itself is also abnormal. Under normal circumstances, the body should still be soft for a period of time after death, if the deceased is lying obliquely in the stairwell, then the posture of the body must be affected by the stairs themselves, and it is unlikely that it will show a completely straight state like this body.
Again, another suspicious aspect is the small number of crescent-shaped abrasions around the lips of the deceased and the partial damage to the mucous membrane of his mouth, which suggest that the deceased may have been crushed before his death.
Thus, although it has not yet been possible to be dissected, the above-mentioned phenomenon of corpses already means that the cause of death is suspicious.
Based on these anomalous corpse phenomena, we have carefully analyzed that the stairs of the rental house are not the first scene of the case, and the deceased is very likely to be transferred to this location after dying elsewhere, which is the scene of the dumping of the body.
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So, who would have chosen the staircase of a rental house as the site of the body dumping? According to common sense, if the murderer killed outside the rental house, it is unlikely that he would deliberately transfer the body to the stairs of the rental house where the person came and went after the killing; however, if the murderer killed in the rental house, it is very likely that he would want to move the body out of the rental house for further processing after the killing, and in the process there may be a sudden intrusion of others, giving him the option of abandoning the body and fleeing. Therefore, we boldly deduce that the first scene of this case was in the rental house, and the murderer even hid in the rental house before he had time to escape!
So we quickly blocked the door of the rental house, preventing anyone from entering and leaving, and immediately sent someone to look through the surveillance video at the door to determine whether there were suspicious people entering and leaving. At the same time, the police station was notified to immediately send additional police to the rental house to support and protect the evidence on the spot. Together with a police officer, we searched each room from the fourth floor. Among them, in a house on the third floor, we found a male tenant who was cleaning and found several fingernail scratches on his face and arms. So we immediately took control of the suspect.
After interrogation, the suspect confessed that he had an argument with the landlady that morning because of his accumulated grievances, and during the quarrel, he lost his hand and covered the other party to death. After the incident, because he did not know how to deal with it, he laid the body flat on the indoor floor until late that night. Just as the suspect was preparing to take advantage of the late night to transport the body out, someone just went up the stairs, and in the panic, he could only discard the body in the stairwell and escape back to the room to clean up the scene.
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What about corpse spots and zombies?
Corpse spots and corpse zombies are actually early phenomena of corpses. After the body dies, the heart no longer beats, and the blood in the capillaries cannot be pumped to the high places of the body without pressure, so under the action of gravity, it follows the law of water going down to the lower part of the body that is not compressed, and gradually penetrates into the surrounding tissues, showing colored spots with unclear edges through the skin, that is, the corpse spots we observe in forensic science.
The plaques generally appear about two hours after death, and after five or six hours, they merge into large pieces. When the corpse spot is just formed, pressing with the finger will cause the color to decrease in color in a short period of time due to the compression; generally after twenty-four hours, the corpse spot is basically fixed, and the pressure will not fade.
Due to gravity, plaques generally appear in the lower parts of the corpse. For example, the corpse spots of vertically hanging corpses are mainly concentrated near the lower body and hands, and once the corpse spots are fused into pieces and fixed, they will not fade. Therefore, in some cases where there is a dumping scene, there is often a phenomenon that the body spot does not match the position of the body.
Cadaver zombie refers to the phenomenon that after death, various muscle groups stiffen and fix the joints to make the corpse stiff, which occurs mainly by the irreversible combination of actin and myocoagullin of skeletal muscle, myocardium and involuntary muscle [1]. Zombies do not occur until a certain period of time after the body dies, and there is a gradually increasing pattern.
According to observation, the time of corpse zombie is generally 1 to 3 hours after death, gradually developing from the head and neck to the whole body, and developing to the major joints of the whole body after 4 to 6 hours, usually the corpse zombie is most obvious in the 24 hours after death. Subsequently, as corruption occurs and develops, the zombie gradually eases and eventually leads to the softening of the corpse.
In addition to inferring the time of death, the zombie can also reflect the posture of the body at the time of death in some cases, such as the upright posture of the body in this case, which often indicates that the body was in a horizontal position at the time of death.
Corpse spots and corpse zombies are both early corpse phenomena. For example, the case mentions that the corpse spots of the deceased had fused into large pieces when he was found on the stairs, and there was a strong corpse stiffness at each joint, indicating that the deceased had a long time to die; combined with the scene environment, this abnormal corpse phenomenon attracted the attention of forensic medical workers.
The entire process of the case from receiving the investigation task to the discovery of the suspect did not exceed two hours, and blocked the murderer on the spot at the crime scene, which was really surprising in efficiency. The captain who led the investigation said that there was a certain coincidence factor in the case, and he had encountered it for the first time in his nearly two decades of work experience.
Many times, forensic work is to find suspicious points through details, look for clues, let the deceased speak, and bring the murderer to justice.
Bibliography:
[1] Xing Haowei,Wei Teju,Chen Yuchuan,Cheng Jianding. A Review of Forensic Research on Corpse Zombies[J].Journal of Guangxi Police Officers College,2008,21(S1):4-6.
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