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44 BCE
Death of Caesar
Autopsy first performed and only 1 of 23 stab wounds was found to be fatal -
400
Who determines cause of death
Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be ones who determine cause of death -
600
First use of Fingerprints
First used to determine identity. Arabic merchants took debtor's fingerprints and attached them to the bill. -
1248
First forensic science book
Published by the Chinese. First known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases. -
First physical evidence used in case
John Toms was first defendant matched to physical evidence linking him to a murder of which he was convicted. -
Sherlock Holmes and the coroner
Coroner's act established coroners' were to determine cause of sudden, violent, and unnatural deaths. First published Sherlock Holmes book by Arthur Conan Doyle. -
First fingerprint ID used in crime
Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. Created fingerprint system he called dactyloscopy. -
Hair used in forensics
Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study. -
Crime experts build first lab
FBI establishes its own crime laboratory, one of the foremost crime labs in the world -
Advanced manual fingerprints
First fingerprint reader installed at FBI -
DNA catches the criminal
Tommy Lee Andrews convicted of a series of sexual assaults, using DNA profiling. -
Facial sketches matched to photos
Michigan State University develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.
