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.
The job requirements are whatever the hiring agency says they are, so it could be anything from a high school diploma to a PhD in genetics. The only way to know is to call the department or check their website for job vacancies.
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Hair is just dead cells, so once something is there, it stays there. Hair grows at about 1/2 inch per month, in general (mine, to my frustration, grows much more slowly). So if your hair is longer than say 6 inches, the cocaine will still be there. If your hair is much shorter, then I don’t know what’s happening.Hope that helps.
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Possibly, I suppose. If they were swabbed thoroughly and the swabs picked up a few skin cells, then it would be within the realm of possibility.
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Almost certainly, no. Unlike television, real forensic equipment is designed to test for certain things. For example the mass spectrometer in the toxicology department is set to test for illegal narcotics and not heavy metals such as arsenic. If arsenic is suspected, it could be detected with a different instrument or different parameters programmed into the same instrument. So I doubt there is any equipment that could be set up to detect microscopic amounts of photographic chemicals, if a photo would even shed any.
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Private Detective
Have you ever turned down a job because you thought it was too dangerous?
Las Vegas Cab Driver
Do people ever ask you to keep your meter off in exchange for a cheaper fare?
Sommelier
Do you occasionally get a little turned off by wine snobbery?
See above.
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Once in a great while something will catch me when I’m not expecting it. But very rarely.
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I'm not sure what you mean: a) how long after a print is left will ninhydrin still detect it, in which case I can say from my own experiment that there's little rhyme or reason to this, sometimes older prints develop better than newer ones or vice versa, or b) how long does a print developed with ninhydrin last, and the answer to that is that ninhydrin is a dark purple dye, so it is permanent, though it will continue to develop so that the entire page may eventually turn purple so we use a fixative chemical on the now-visible print so that will stop the ninhydrin from darkening the paper further. I hope that helps!
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