Don’t try this at home…
As an undergraduate, I did forensic medicine in second year as one of my elective courses. It was fantastic; anatomy, pathology, toxicology, ballistics, proper CSI type stuff. One of the lectures covered “How to identify a body”. They discussed using things you found on the victim, like drivers licence, DNA samples, dental records etc. But then they also touched on unusual body modifications, whether natural (like missing fingers) or unnatural, like tattoos and piercings. Our lecturer was a top bloke; a really well respected forensic pathologist who had worked on a number of high profile cases.

He introduces the slides on “Tattoos as a form of identification” and goes through some bog standard blurb about a unique tattoo making a positive ID of an unknown body much easier. He then says, with a huge grin on his face “and I’d like to illustrate this with an example, if I may.” He presents a case of a middle-aged gentleman of seemingly no fixed abode who had been discovered dead in an alleyway. He had no ID on him and no one had reported him missing. It was however suspected that he might be a fairly regular visitor to some of the more dubious hostelries in the locale. A quick sweep of said establishments and a chat with the regulars did indeed show that the man in question was known in that area and was positively ID’ed from the description that the police gave to the drinkers.

“He was identified by a rather unusual home made tattoo,“ said the Prof, and put up a picture of the body.

The guy had “BOB MARLEY” tattooed across his forehead.

But he’d done it himself.

In a mirror.

So it was backwards.


There's really nothing I can add to that...
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Mon 4 Dec 2006, 12:59, Reply)