IDS-Forensic Science

In term 3, during the sabbatical week, I went for an IDS course, where we learnt about forensic science. The course lasted four days, and we were exposed to many methods used to identify suspects, such as the length of the strides, fingerprint analysis, coding cracking and lip print analysis. We were also required to crack a murder case using two types of evidence, physical evidence and the evidence we got from suspects and eye witnesses. We formed groups of four and stayed with the group throughout the entire course, and we were required to make a presentation at the end of the course.

On the first day of the course, we were introduced to the crime and the evidence, as well as the programmes for the course and the schedule for the programmes. We were also given handouts that we were needed complete by the end of the course. We then proceeded to the labs to conduct experiments on our own, which was a very interesting and new experience, as lab lessons would normally be conducted after a teacher demonstrated, and we just follow. However, this time, we did not have much clue on how to do the experiments, and thus needed to figure out everything ourselves, which was tedious but yet at the same time, very meaningful, as we conducted the experiments by ourselves and learnt to be independent. One such experiment is figuring out how to crack a code, where we needed to try out many different methods of cracking before we cracked it. This is also is also more realistic as in the real world, we will not have any clue when we try to crack a code and will need to experiment with many different methods before finally solving the code. We were also given evidence of the crime scene such as blood smears and hair threads. When I first looked through the evidence, I was very confused with the murder case, as most of the evidence simply cannot give me any idea of how the murder happened. This makes the course even more exciting as it is just like a real murder case, where we need to figure out everything ourselves. However, after some careful reading and the Q&A session (a session where we can ask the suspects question, although their answers might not be real), I began to suspect Peter Hamilton.

On the second day, we had lab lessons, where we conducted many different experiments such as paper chromatography. We also had a session for us to brainstorm questions. From the Q&A session on day one, I can derive that more than one person was present at the crime scene with John lee (the victim). As a result, my questions on day two was mostly related to Peter Hamilton. However, the more I asked, the more confused I get. This is because the statements we got from the suspects and eye witnesses seem to contradict each other, and I had a very hard time distinguishing which evidence is reliable and which is not. At that point of time, I realised that solving a murder mystery was not as easy as it seems, and definitely much harder than the way it was portrait in CSI Miami. At one point of time, I actually thought of giving up and wait for the answers, but I quickly overcame that thought when I realised that it was quite fun to solve a crime bit by bit.

By the third day, I had a clearer picture of how and why the crime happened. The crime happened almost entirely due to dispute over money, and that Robyn Jones and Jane Liu are most likely innocent. However, one question always filled my mind, since the killer's height was 145 cm up till the arm, and the length of a human head is about 20cm, which adds up to 165cm, Peter Hamilton must not be the killer as he was about 180cm tall. However, he must be involved with the crime as what evidence points out. From this, I finally derived that he had an accomplice, but the question now will be, who?

On the last day, we finally figured out how the crime had happened and who was involved. However, the person that conducted the course, Mr Bill, gave us a lot of hints and guided us into solving the crime. I find that this was the result of one very serious problem, which is that we ask many irrelevant and unimportant questions, and do not think critically. As a result, Mr Bill needs to give us guide us on how to ask questions, before we actually solve it. I feel that I really need to improve on my questioning skills as I also asked some useless questions from the suspects, which not only does not give us a clearer picture, but also confuses us. We also had to make a presentation on what we had learnt, and the presentation is attached below. In conclusion, I feel that this course was very meaningful and I have benefited a lot from it. I hope that such courses can be held more frequently!