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.
I am so sorry for your loss. I'm afraid I have no idea how long it would take to dismember a body. That would probably depend upon the extent of the dismemberment and the tools used.
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That's actually two different issues. Moving a body can be determined by lividity--the blood pools at the lowest points of the body and becomes fixed, so if the lividity is not consistent with the position of the body, you can tell it was moved. I believe a pathologist would be able to see the signs that a body had been frozen (provided of course it hasn't completely decomposed by the time it's discovered) but I couldn't tell you what they are.
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Yes, about 60 times, and I may be going again this week. It's one of those 'doesn't rain but pours' kind of things. I might go twice in one week and then not again for months. It's incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, nerve-wracking and super not fun. You have no control over anything, not when you have to be there, not how long you have to be on the stand, not what kind of questions you'll be asked, and you get no warning of any of these things beforehand.
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I don't see why not. I'm sure a coroner's or medical examiner's would love to have a pathologist trained in excavating buried bodies and crime scenes. However if you want to work as a pathologist but also do archaology work for other agencies or take leaves to work on archaeological digs, you'd have to work for an agency that would be okay with you working as a pathologist part time.
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That's a determination a pathologist is going to make, not me. But they have told me that drowning is sort of a process-of-elimination conclusion, since there may or may not be water in the lungs whether or not the person died of drowning.Sorry I can't be more help!
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That depends on where you want to work and what kind of work you want to do. If you want to be a DNA analyst, take biology and biochemistry and don't worry so much about general forensics. If you want to work crime scenes, then you might want a forensic sciences program. The best way to know is to call places you might want to work at--say your dream jobs, even if they're in another state--and ask them what they require and what they look for. That's the only way to know for sure.
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School project?
All our jobs vary wildly, so what's easy and hard for me might be completely different for, say, a toxicologist or medicolegal death investigator. For me I would say the easiest is working with fingerprints in the office. It's tedious and time consuming, but not hard. The hardest part is testifying in court, which is inconvenient, nerve-wracking and often insulting on a number of levels.
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