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Dr Henry Lee is a forensic scientist called a crime reconstruction expert with substantial qualifications, including service with the Connecticut Department of Public Safety and a professorship at the University of New Haven. Privately he has been hired by both the prosecution and defense in some high profile cases. He may be best known as a witness for the defense in the OJ Simpson trial for murder. Lee has written several other books on forensics before this one. There are five cases in the present book, at least two of them well known: The Scott Peterson Case, The Elizabeth Smart Case, The Michael Peterson Case, The Duntz Brothers Case, and the Myers/Fontanille Case. For the Scott Peterson and Michael Peterson (no relation) cases, Lee was retained by the defense, and in the other three by the prosecution. For some of the cases he was called to testify at trials, while for others he worked behind the public scene. In his write-ups in this book, he goes into considerable detail to demonstrate how evidence is discovered, collected, and analyzed. Nothing is considered insignificant, not the smallest hair. He analyzes DNA evidence, Global Positioning System evidence, a cut window screen, a single fingerprint, the difference in forensic value between hair roots and hair shafts, and numerous other possible clues. It's especially enlightening to learn how much can be discovered from patterns of blood left at the crime scene, how much from bullets, how much from clothing. Lee gives both objective findings and subjective conclusions. The former can be valuable to mystery writers who need to know great details about evidence; for example., I can conceive the possibility that a brilliant denouement based on evidence analysis might come about at the conclusion of a crime novel. However, I found Lee's conclusions not so easy to agree with in all cases. I did agree with his opinion in the Scott Peterson case, where the jury verdict was guilty. Although I personally believed (and still do) that Scott Peterson murdered his wife and unborn child, Lee's reasoning persuaded me that the evidence presented at the trial was not sufficient to prove the defendant guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Novelist Michael Peterson (no relation to Scott Peterson), in a completely separate case, was accused of murdering his second wife Kathleen in Durham, North Carolina, in 2001, after he notified the police that she fell backward while climbing the stairs in their house and died. Investigators believed that he beat his wife with a fireplace tool. The prosecutor was all the more convinced it was murder when it was discovered that years earlier while in Germany (where Michael Peterson worked as a consultant for the US government), his first wife had fallen down a staircase and died, in which case the US army and the German police ruled the death as accidental. Following Michael Peterson's trial for murdering his second wife, the jury found him guilty. Lee, who worked for the defense in this case, asks, "Does anyone believe Michael was so foolish that he did not realize a prosecution team would link the two stairway cases?" Here I cannot agree; I have heard of too many cases showing that the mentality of a murderer, even though sane, is not the same as that of a completely rational person. There is a lot of interesting and valuable detail in this book. As a sheriff's endorsement on the back cover has it, "This book will be required reading for all of my investigators and crime scene personnel." Certainly, but I feel it would probably be more useful to the specialist than the general reader, for whom, indeed, there may be too much detail.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, July 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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