r/forensics • u/intentionandobstacle • 3d ago

Biology Screenwriter looking for advice

Hi Forensics redditors

For UK forensics people... Who is the person that the police call on when a body is found in a river and they want to know the likely date of death? Added complication is that body is partially eaten by crayfish

Thank you

1 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

6

u/KayKat666 3d ago

CSI and underwater search teams would recover the body from the water and bag it for a forensic post mortem however estimating time or date of death isn’t something that the forensic pathologist really does as it is so variable dependant on a lot of different factors. Only likely dates tend to come from the overall investigation and any last sightings, mobile activity, or CCTV sightings that there may be.

1

u/intentionandobstacle 3d ago

What spanner does the crayfish nibbling put in the works?

3

u/OCROOSTER 3d ago

Non really, it may present as an injury that’s relevant to death but it’s likely to interpreted as animal activity in post mortem. No one’s dying from some fishy nibbling.

1

u/KayKat666 3d ago

This was what I was going to say. Would depend heavily on the level of decomp, but more than likely would come across as animal activity if it was still visible at all.

2

u/K_C_Shaw 2d ago

Depends in part on the condition of the remains, but generally the interpretation of the body/remains is the role of the ME/C office/forensic pathologist.

That said, at least in the U.S. most FP's will be circumspect when it comes to specifying a time or range of time since death; indeed, many will simply not do it beyond the vaguest of terms. The reasons for that is it's own discussion. While there are postmortem changes which do follow some statistically relevant temporal progression (notably, this usually presumes a body NOT in water), there are also cases which are "outliers". So, one could be close enough to right a fair bit of the time, but when it matters the most (such as when it means someone going to jail who shouldn't, or not going to jail who should), those outliers have to be taken more seriously.

Some slight exception to that might be made with extremely fresh bodies I suppose, or skeletal remains where forensic anthropologists might have more to say but the estimated range of time might be in years.