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.
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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That depends entirely on where you want to work and what you want to do. If you want to do DNA analysis and testify in court about it, you may need a PhD in genetics. If you want to work at crime scenes bagging and tagging evidence, you may need only a high school diploma, with added hireability for advanced degrees. The only way to know is to check job opening notices or call the agencies and ask. Best of luck to you.
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No, I've never regretted it. And your job title is whatever your agency says it is, so 'forensic scientist' and 'csi' can mean different things in different agencies, so you can certainly be both. the first implies you work mostly in the lab and the second implies you work mostly in the field, but depending on the size of the agency and any specialization you have, you might do both equally or they might be completely separate.
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Supposedly, but I don’t know of any cases personally.
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Farmer
Do friends with office jobs look down on what you do?
Nurse Practitioner
As gender roles continue to evolve, are you seeing a rise in the % of male nurses?
Meter Maid
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Sorry, I wouldn't know anything more about it than anyone else. Try Google. Or watch the excellent miniseries, "American Crime Story: The Run For His Life." It was great.
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In my personal experience, I have only testified to bloodstain pattern analysis once, and it didn’t really tell anything significant about the case because there was blood everywhere, and the fingerprints in blood weighed more than the patterns.
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We’ll hold the scene as long as we need to get everything done, and that could be a day or two or three, but for a kidnapping it probably wouldn’t be more than a day, just enough to collect all the victim’s stuff, and collect fingerprints, hairs, fibers, anything that might belong to the kidnapper. We eventually get tired and want to go home (though we can go and come back, so long as it hasn’t been ‘released’) and the police department don’t really want to hold it longer then absolutely necessary, because they have a cop or two sitting there doing nothing but guarding the scene, and it takes them off the road. Hope that helps!
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