Christopher Hardy

And in fact, what I found was that they were small rings.

And so that is a potential signature of the time that that body had been freshly deposited there and decomposing because it had stunted those roots at a time when you'd expect to have rapid growth.

Most of my work has been violent crime.

However, forensic botany is the use of evidence from plant analogy and legal matters, and not all legal matters are criminal.

And so I'll give you an example.

Several of my cases have been in the food industry with quality assurance issues.

When a customer has a complaint because they found foreign objects in their cookies, then the maker of that cookie blames it on the provider of the spices that they use over in India.

And then the company in India says, no, no, no, we have food quality assurance ourselves and we would never have those types of contaminants.

And so then they bring me in as a third party.

And the step one is to identify what it is and then try to figure out how it got there.

And so there was a recent case where the company here in the United States had blamed it on the company in Southeast Asia, thought it was a contaminant in the spice called mace that they use in their cookies.

I was able to determine that it was actually grape stems, and it was traced back to the worker who had been eating grapes while on the job and had dropped the grape stems into the batter.

Myself, I have worked on a suspected poisoning case that turned out, because of my evidence, to not be conspiracy to poison.

So this is a case of where there's a couple who's going through a very, you know, kind of terrible divorce.

They still live together.

And one comes down in the morning and finds some weird seeds mixed in with their coffee beans.

Huh.

And so they accused the other of attempting to poison them because those seeds look like the seeds of oleander.

And if you know anything about the ornamental plant called oleander, which is more tropical, it's deadly poisonous.

And it's well known and it has been used in several poisoning cases.