National Forensic Doctor
Chapter 377 - 377 344 Small Dosage

377: Chapter 344: Small Dosage 377: Chapter 344: Small Dosage Jiang Yuan spread out some photos on the table and began to ponder them.

This was his usual method, as many of his backlog cases started with photos.

The other police officers in the room were either looking at the photos with him, doing their work, or taking a break to play on their phones.

Song Jinyou paid close attention to Jiang Yuan’s expression and also stood up to take a look.

They were all photos they had seen before, some even taken by Song Jinyou himself.

He wasn’t sure if Jiang Yuan could discern anything new…

“I notice that there are quite a few people in the crowd of onlookers who appear repeatedly…” Mu Zhiyang ventured tentatively.

His conjecture was the simplest and most natural one.

Not to mention criminals revisiting crime scenes, most people would take special interest in the progress of the investigation after committing a crime.

It was a natural response, as having a criminal case hanging over one’s head would become the major event in life for most people, impossible to ignore.

Listening to Mu Zhiyang’s comments, Song Jinyou glanced at Jiang Yuan and said, “Everyone in the photos is from the village, and moreover, they were all taken two or three days after the crime occurred.”

Mu Zhiyang let out an “Oh,” as he came to understand.

Taking crime scene photos with a gap of two or three days between each and asserting a perpetrator’s presence amongst them would indeed be too imprecise.

If there were any irregularities at the scene, the culprit would have had two or three days to return and tamper with it.

The villagers’ curiosity would likely explain their presence as onlookers; after all, it was a village far from the city, and suddenly a group of outsiders, especially police, garnered normal public interest.

Furthermore, the timing of the photos could not cover everyone’s presence at the scene.

Consequently, using the onlookers in the photos as a basis for conjecture or analysis made little sense.

“In that case, the perpetrator still had the chance to destroy the evidence,” Tang Jia added from the side.

Song Jinyou nodded, “That’s the troublesome part.

Lanzhu Village is very secluded, and surveillance is impossible.

The moment an outsider enters the village, they get noticed and word spreads quickly.

There’s no chance of staying hidden.”

The expressions of the police officers present became more solemn.

Although it’s said that every contact leaves a trace, the difficulty of crime scene investigation soars if the scene is tampered with once, let alone twice.

Or in other words, for ordinary investigation personnel and technicians, the traces left behind are not the same.

This was equivalent to continuously altering an exam question and then asking students to solve it; naturally, those who tackled it later would have lower scores.

For those proficient in integrating knowledge, such difficulty was outside the scope of what could be expected from technicians at the local police stations or county bureaus.

Everyone then turned their gaze back to Jiang Yuan.

Jiang Yuan smiled, picked out a few photos of footprints from the pile, and said, “My thinking is, recognizing faces isn’t reliable, but there are fewer footprints at the scene, so we can still analyze them.”

In rural settings, surveillance footage and even DNA are not particularly useful, with the latter decomposing very quickly in such environments.

However, footprints in rural areas or the wilderness tend to be more helpful.

On the one hand, the soil in rural areas is often soft enough to retain footprints, and on the other hand, dust can also leave plenty of traces.

In the photos taken by Song Jinyou, there were a large number of footprints left by the fish pond, pigsty, and donkey pen.

Jiang Yuan said, “Compared to the photos of the crowd of onlookers, the footprints are actually closer to the actual scene.

Looking at the photos from these three cases, the footprints at the fish pond case are the most chaotic; it seems that people had been visiting the site for several days in a row.

However, the footprints from the dead pig and dead donkey cases are relatively well-preserved.

Although footprints from several days can be seen, it’s generally possible to distinguish the footprints from the day of the incident, as well as those from subsequent days.”

“What, you can distinguish them?” Song Jinyou was shocked and asked, “Can you tell the difference between footprints someone made today and the same person’s footprints tomorrow?”

“For the footprints made on adjacent days, in such conditions, there is a high probability of telling them apart,” Jiang Yuan explained.

“Looking at the soft ground footprints, you see the hardness of the edges and the color grayscale, all of which are relatively easy to differentiate…”

Song Jinyou laughed dryly, too lazy to look.

‘Easy to differentiate’—if that were the case, the forensic experts in the city might as well jump off a building.

Wang Zhong next to him also let out a chuckle.

As a crime scene technician, he had only a basic level of expertise in footprint analysis.

He even had to carefully examine marks to differentiate between pig and donkey prints.

“In summary, through footprints, we can at least narrow down a few individuals,” Jiang Yuan said without intending to offer a lecture.

Lecturing to experts makes sense, but to someone like Song Jinyou—Jiang Yuan didn’t need to convince him.

A direct order would suffice, so there was even less need to explain so much.

“This footprint appears with the highest frequency,” Jiang Yuan said, pulling over a photo and circling a footprint with a red pen.

“This footprint also appears frequently, and there are quite a few prints.”

“This one, too, appears each time, probably the third most frequent.”

“And this one, which also shows up every time.”

After marking four different footprints, Jiang Yuan continued, “The first belongs to a woman, between 46 and 47 years old.

Her height is 156 centimeters, and she weighs about 130 jin [approximately 65 kg or 143 lbs].”

“The second is a male, 51 years old, with a height of 165 centimeters, and a weight of 150 jin.”

“The third is a male, 32 years old, with a height of 172 centimeters, and a weight of around 170 jin.”

“The fourth is a female, between the ages of 52 and 54, with a height of around 155 centimeters, and a weight of 120 jin.”

As Jiang Yuan spoke, Tang Jia took notes beside him.

After he finished, Jiang Yuan reviewed the information again and pointed out, “From 1 to 4, the foot lengths are 21 centimeters, 24 centimeters, 24.5 centimeters, 22.5 centimeters, respectively.”

Tang Jia recorded as instructed.

Song Jinyou frowned as he looked at the photos, “You can tell the length of the footprints directly from the pictures?”

“It’s foot length, not shoe length, which means not the length of the shoe.

Remember to measure when you’re looking for the person,” Jiang Yuan paused then pointed to number four and added, “This one has a valgus deformity, quite a severe one at that.

Make a note of it.”

“Alright,” Tang Jia promptly annotated.

Jiang Yuan took another photo, handed the paper to Song Jinyou, and said, “I’ll trouble Chief Song to send someone out to look into these four people or bring them in for questioning.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Song Jinyou understood, were they narrowing the suspects down to just four people now?

If that was true, the case had just gotten a lot simpler.

A village with only a few hundred people to begin with, filtering by height, foot length, weight and the like, locking down four people was an easy task.

Likewise, if they could actually narrow it down to four people, finding the real perpetrator wouldn’t be too difficult.

Song Jinyou immediately dispatched several officers on the case, along with a few people from Jiang Yuan’s side, all heading straight to Lanzhu Village.

“The roads are a bit better now, but we probably won’t have any news until tomorrow.

Let’s rest a bit and have something to eat,” Song Jinyou’s politeness increased threefold.

Having heard Jiang Yuan can solve cases, witnessing him solving cases, and being part of a case solved by him marked three levels of ascension.

Now, Song Jinyou looked at Jiang Yuan as if he were a wish-granting Bodhisattva.

The following day.

Eight police officers brought back four criminal suspects.

Meng Chengbiao returned with them and before heading for the interrogation, he reported to Jiang Yuan, “It’s very likely Gan Jingying, the number one suspect.”

Jiang Yuan simply asked, “Couldn’t it have been multiple perpetrators?”

“No.

The rodenticide found in her home didn’t poison her chickens, ducks, geese, or pigs; and she had long-standing grudges with the victims.

Besides, Gan Jingying is volatile and doesn’t get along with anyone,” Meng Chengbiao stated his reasons and continued, “I’ll also look into this during the interrogation.”

Jiang Yuan nodded, he trusted Meng Chengbiao’s judgment in this regard.

Meng Chengbiao continued, “The other three suspects have relatively sufficient explanations for their presence at the crime scenes.

Only Gan Jingying, who didn’t go to watch the excitement during the first two incidents, left her footprints at the scenes…”

Meng Chengbiao was conducting the interrogation with a preconceived target in mind, which isn’t exactly standard practice.

But in the world of criminal investigation, there really aren’t set standards.

Gan Jingying all but folded without resistance, confessing the crime process.

Throughout the confession, Gan Jingying wept bitterly, cursing the villagers for their oppression and bullying…

Jiang Yuan and the others in the monitoring room listened with a touch of tedium.

Most of the suspects are like this, often attempting to justify the righteousness of their actions.

A cold fact is that most criminals believe themselves to be good people.

Therefore, if self-identity were the criterion, most parental education would be considered highly successful.

For seasoned cops like Song Jinyou, the threshold for sympathy is much higher.

After listening for a while, he commented indifferently, “Turns out she’s just a coward who only dares to poison in small doses.”

“No wonder you couldn’t detect any poison when you went there,” Jiang Yuan understood as well, this Gan Jingying had, in recent months, including the past few years, not just poisoned the animals that had died.

Whenever she was dissatisfied with someone, shed sprinkled a tiny amount of rodenticide, often mixing it into feed.

Under these circumstances, some livestock were poisoned to death, like the recent pigs and donkeys, but others’ animals survived.

And by the time Song Jinyou had sent his team over to take samples and bring them back to the Ningtai County Bureau for testing, any traces would be nearly undetectable.

Of course, the technical capabilities of the Ningtai County Bureau left much to be desired.

If there had been a human death, the test methods would have been different.

“Alright then.

Let’s move on to catching this person next,” said Jiang Yuan as he pulled up a file, the case he had worked on just last night.

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