Christopher Hardy

That would be difficult, but certainly possible.

But in that case, you know, it's pretty well established in the ecological literature, but also even in the forensic literature, that every single body of water, even similar bodies of water,

have a very unique community of algae.

Algae, even though they might have the same species, the relative abundances of those species can vary from one pond to the next.

And it forms almost like a fingerprint-like profile of that particular pond.

And so if that was an alibi for the defense, certainly we could look at that pond and we could look at that community profile

on his clothing at that pond, but also at the crime scene pond, and determine whether or not that was a well-supported alibi.

Well, you know, it's not just placing a suspect at a crime scene.

It's also determining timing and manner of death.

You know, there's certainly cases in which there's no suspect developed right off the bat, but you find a dead body in the woods and you need to determine, you know, when that body got there because that helps narrow the window, you know, the timeframe to search for missing persons.

And then once you've identified a missing person and when they got to that locality and that condition, then you can target suspects.

So timing is one thing that I'd like to talk about if you've got time for that.

Sure.

Well, you know, I'll just make the call out to forensic entomology really quick, which is pretty well established that different insects colonize a body, a corpse, you know, after the body is dead.

And you can use the colonization of those different insects as a pretty good timing of how long that body had been there.

Now, when it comes to plants, you know, we're not necessarily working on that scale of like a week or two weeks necessarily.

We can, you know, for example, a recent case that just happened and it hasn't resolved yet in Pennsylvania, where I live in the United States, was we found a body that was fully skeletonized in the woods.

The police called me in to look at the site and we were able to find that there had been moss and roots growing around the bones.

And one thing about roots in particular is just like a cross section of a tree trunk, you can count the rings and determine how old they are if it's from a woody plant like a tree.

And so I was able to take that and determine that the body, that the roots had been growing around those bones, those roots were exactly four to five years old.