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A Brief History of Forensic Entomology

By Mark Benecke

Source: Raw version of an article for Forensic Science International Vol. 120, p. 2-14 (2001)

Abstract

Apart from an early case report from China (13th century) and later artistic contributions, the first observations on insects and other arthropods as forensic indicators were documented in Germany and France during mass exhumations in the late 1880's by Reinhard, and Hofmann, whom we propose recognizing as co-founders of the discipline. After the French publication of Mégnin's popular book on the applied aspects of forensic entomology, the concept quickly spread to Canada and the United States. At the time, researchers recognized that the lack of systematic observations of forensically important insects stood in the way of their use as indicators of post-mortem interval. General advances in insect taxonomy, and ecology helped close this gap over the following decades.

Many early case reports dealt with alleged child homicides, including the suspected use of sulphuric acid. In this context, it was shown that ants, cockroaches, and freshwater arthropods could produce postmortem artifacts suggestive of child abuse.

After the World Wars, few forensic entomology cases entered the scientific literature. From the 1960's to the 1980's, Leclecq and Nuorteva were primarily responsible for maintaining the method in Central Europe, with a focus on case work. Since then, basic research in the United States, Russia, and Canada has opened the way to the routine use of entomology in forensic investigations. The following article gives a brief overview of historic developments in the field. A major focus is on work done between 1850 and 1950. Since sources from that time remain difficult to track down, the article also includes a historic bibliographical overview on forensic entomology of that era.
Introduction

Hundreds of arthropod species are attracted by corpses, primarily flies (Diptera), beetles (Coleoptera), and their larvae, but also mites, isopods, opiliones, and nematodes. These animals feed, live, or breed in and on the corpse, depending on their biological preferences and on the state of decompostion [e.g., 1,24,38,43,46,59,69,63,74,82,103].
Since arthropods are by far the largest and most important biological group on Earth (they outnumber even plants), they can be found in a wide variety of locations including crime scenes. This opens a wide range of applications for forensic entomology, the investigation of insects recovered from crime scenes and corpses.
The following article gives a brief review of the historic sources describing the development that led to the present state of the art. An attached bibliography both documents the earliest efforts made in the field and facilitates access to early studies, research results, and case reports.

Medieval China to 19th century

The first documented forensic entomology case is reported by the Chinese lawyer and death investigator Sung Tz’u in the 13th century in the medico-legal text book Hsi Yuan Lu (one possible translation: "The Washing Away of Wrongs") [97,98]. He describes the case of a stabbing near a rice field. The day after the murder, the investigator told all workers to lay down their working tools (sickles) on the floor. Invisible traces of blood drew blow flies to a single sickle. So confronted, the tool’s owner confessed to his crime and ”knocked his head on the floor” (fig. 1). Leclercq and Lambert re-enforced the observed preference of certain blow flies for blood in 1976: They found Calliphora vomitoria on a corpse six hours postmortem laying eggs into blood (but not on the wounds) of the deceased.
In addition to medical and legal experts, sculptors, painters, and poets have closely observed the decompositon of human bodies, noting, in particular, the effects of feeding maggots. Early documents illustrating maggots on corpses date to the Middle Ages, including woodcuts from "Dances of the Death" (15th century, fig. 2), and the intricately cut ivory carving, "Skeleton in the Tumba" (16th century, fig. 4, [11]). Such artwork accurately depicts the insect-mediated pattern of body mass reduction, particularly the skeletonization of the skull and the reduction of internal organs, with large parts of the skin left intact (figs. 2,4). The poem "Une Charogne" by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) must be mentioned in this context, too, since it contains clear observations on the decay of human bodies, including an accurate reference to the sound of maggot masses on corpses: "Like water and the wind running/Or corn that a winnower in rhythmic motion/Fans with fiery cunning" [9]. A century earlier, in 1767, the biologist Carl von Linné made the observation that three flies would destroy a horse as fast as a lion would (in the sense of them producing large masses of maggots) [75].

Early cases from France

During mass exhumations in France and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, medico-legal doctors observed that buried bodies are inhabitated by arthropods of many kinds. In 1831, the famous French medical doctor Orfila observed a large number of exhumations [79]. He understood that maggots play an important role in the decomposition of corpses (fig. 3).
The first modern forensic entomology case report to include an estimation of postmortem interval (PMI) was given by the French doctor Bergeret in 1855 [12]. The case dealt with blow fly pupae and larval moths. Though Bergeret was by profession a hospital physician (at the Hopital Civil d'Arbois), his interest in cadaver study is clear, as he states that a corpse dealt with by him resembled those he had observed found in other locations (i.e, "in the hot and dry lands ("pays chauds") on the cemetary of the Capucins of Palerme", or "in Toulouse"). His original report to the court was dated March 28, 1850. In his journal article, next to a long description of the criminalistic impact in the trial, he also describes the court proceedings.: "Within three years, four different tenants [i.e., families] lived in the flat. The first of them left in December 1848, and the person examined started to live there at the end of 1844. I [i.e., Bergeret] was brought to the house of Mme. Saillard [i.e., the landlady] in rue du Citoyen, 4, (...) to examine the corpse of a child. (...) Length of corpse: [46 cm]. [Then details on measurements of bones, state of internal organs, etc. follow.]. The questions we had to deal with now were: 1st -- Was the child born regularly/at the right time, 2nd -- Was it alive when it was born, 3rd -- How long did it live, 4th -- How did it die?, 5th -- What was the time interval between birth and death?" Questions 1 to 4 were answered with classical forensic pathology. Question 5 was commented in the following way: "To answer this question, legal medicine must check with another science, the Natural Sciences." However, Bergeret does not state whether he worked together with another person.

In his paper, Bergeret gives a brief overview on the life cycle of insects in general. He mistakenly assumes, however, that metamorphosis would generally require a full year ("une annee entiere"). Furthermore, he assumes that females generally lay eggs in summer, and that the larvae would transform to pupae (he calls them nymphes) the following spring and hatch in summer. Some details of Bergeret's calculation: "The eggs of the larvae we found on the corpse in March 1850 must have been deposited there in the middle of 1849. Therefore, the corpse must have been deposited before this time interval. Next to the many living larvea there were numerous pupae present, and they must come from eggs that have been laid earlier, i.e., in 1848. (...) Could it be that the corpses was deposited even before that time [i.e., 1848]? The fly that emerges from the pupae that we found in the body cavities, is Musca carnaria L. that lays its eggs before the body dries out. We found other pupae of little butterflies of the night [moth], too, that attack bodies that are already dried out. If the body was deposited, say, in 1846, or 1847, we would not have found those larvae [since they would have hatched]. In conclusion, two generations of insects were found on the corpse, representing two years postmortem: on the fresh corpse, the flesh fly deposited its eggs in 1848, on the dried out corpse, the moth laid their eggs in 1849."

In retrospect, one should understand that Bergeret did not focus on forensic entomology in his report but used the method as one forensic tool among others. Indeed, the mummification of the cadaver appears to be his overriding issue of interest in this case. Bergeret references Orfila in the matters of both mummification and forensic entomology. He also clearly notes the lack of knowledge concerning insect succession on corpses in his day.

In 1879, the president of the French Society of Forensic Medicine, Brouardel reported another early case [15]. Paul Camille Hippolyte Brouardel, born in Saint-Quentin on 13 February 1837, became a member of the French Academy of Medicine in 1880. He worked on tuberculosis, vaccination, and legal medicine. His numerous medico-legal accounts include practical guidelines for his colleagues in the morgue. A contemporary said that "his work is conscentious, clear, methodic, and serves as a model."

In his report, after referencing the work of Bergeret, Brouardel describes the case of a newborn child that was autopsied by him on January 15, 1878 [15]. The mummified body was inhabited by several arthropods, including butterfly larvae and acari (i.e., mites), which led to a request for assistance from Monsieur Perier, professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and army veterinarian Pierre Mégnin. Perier reported that the body was most likely dried out before it was abandoned. The determination of mites was left to Mégnin whereas Perier determined the butterfly larvae as "chenilles d'aglosses", i.e., larvae from the genus Aglossa (small moth, family Pyralidae). From the state of preservation, and from the larvae found, Perier stated that the baby may have been born and died the summer before ("de l'été dernier probablement"), i.e., around six to seven month before the corpse was autopsied.

Mégnin reported that the whole body was covered with a brownish layer composed exclusively of mite skins and mite feces, but not living mites. Inside the cranium, he found large numbers of a single mite species. Initially, a few larval mites must have been carried to the corpse by other arthropods. Mégnin calculated that on the whole body, 2.4 million acari were present dead or alive. He also calculated that after 15 days, the first generation with 10 females and 5 males had developed; after 30 days, 100 females and 50 males; after 45 days. 1,000 females and 500 males. Finally, after 90 days, 1 million females and 500.000 males were present. Since this was the number of individual he estimated being on the corpse, he made a conservative guess and reported that the corpse must have been abandoned for at least five months (three months of mite development, preceded by two months for desiccation) but more likely seven to eight months. This is the same case as Case No. 12 in Mégnins "La faune de cadavres" (see below), and Mégnin states that this is his "prémiere étude médico-légale" (first medico-legal study) [63].

This case also illustrates nicely how early researchers in the field investigated the use of molds, slime fungi, crustaceans, mites, and plants in addition to insects.

Further mass exhumations

On April 6, 1881, the German medical doctor Reinhard reported the first systematic study in forensic entomology [85]. Dealing with exhumated bodies from Saxonia, he collected mainly Phorid flies taxonomically identified by the entomologist Brauer in Vienna. He also described beetles in graves older than 15 years. In some instances, he found the insects breeding within cracks of adipocire. But Reinhard concluded that their presence may have more to do with their feeding on plant roots protruding into the graves rather than any direct association with the corpses. Reinhard's work remained well known for a long time, and in 1928 an extensive citation of his paper appeared in the work of the Phorid fly expert, Schmitz [88] and elsewhere [49].

Another entomological report of exhumations, this time from Franconia, was given by Hofmann in 1886 [41]. Hofmann found Phorids, too, and identified them as Conicera tibialis Schmitz, today known as the "coffin fly". (FOOTNOTE 1.)

Around the same time, the 60-year-old doctor Jean Pierre Mégnin started to develop his theory of predictable, ecological waves of insect life on corpses. Mégnin, born in Herimoncourt (Doubs) on 18 January 1928, went to school at the Ecole d' Alfort from 1849 till his graduation in 1853. In 1855, he became an army veterinarian. His books include "Maladies de la Peau des Animaux" (Animal Skin Diseases, 1867-1882), and "Maladies parasitaires" (Diseases caused by Parasits, 1880). Mégnin likewise worked on Acari (publications in this matter date between 1876 and 1879), and reported some of his results in his book "Faune des Tombeaux" (Fauna of the Tombs, 1887) [60]. No affiliation to a university or a Museum of Natural History was mentioned in his articles, and because he became a member of the French Academy of Medicine in 1893, one might conclude that he considered himself primarily a medical doctor.

Megnin drew on his 15 years of medico-legal experience with corpses in publishing 14, mostly brief, papers between 1883 and 1896 [e.g., 61,64]. He found fault in the dissertation of his younger French colleague George P. Yovanovitch, of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris, on the same subject (1888, [113]). Mégnin was under the impression that Yovanovitch’s data were not sufficiently precise [62]. Previously, the two researchers had co-operated in the sense that Yovanovitch was allowed to use Mégnin's data, including tables of mites and the successional table of five cadaverous fauna waves that Yvanovitch titled Toilers on the Dead ("Les Travailleurs de la Mort", obviously being a pun related to the book Toilers of the Sea ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer" by French author Victor Hugo, 1866)).

Finally, in 1894, Mégnin published his most important book La Faune des Cadavres (figs. 5,6). In it, he expanded his former theory of four insect waves for freely exposed corpses to eight successional waves. For buried corpses, he reported two waves. The book dealt with larval and adult forms of a number of families, and its drawings focused on wing venation, posterior spiracles, and overall anatomy of the insects for identification. Mégnin also describes 19 case reports, including his own cases between 1879 and 1888. (Some of the cases were in co-operation with Brouardel.) He cites his original statements given in court as well as the basic questions asked of him as an expert witness.

In addition to advancing the science of forensic entomology Mégnin's work greatly popularized the subject. His contributions to our knowledge of the arthropod fauna of graves and the general fauna and flora of mummified, or otherwise decayed, corpses was later honoured in the naming of the mold Endoconidium megnini [45].

In 1895, inspired by Mégnin, the Canadian researches Wyatt Johnston and Geoffrey Villeneuve, of Montreal, started a number of systematic entomological studies on human corpses [48]. The two scientists write of Mégnin: "(...) in no single instance did the results of the inquiry go to show that M. Mégnin's deductions were erroneous. (...) The chief danger to be feared from Mégnins imitators is that they might tend to indulge in guesses having no very solid basis and to apply rules to countries and climates where they were inapplicable." They aimed to refine the work of Mégnin, and to adapt it to their local faunas.
Another study on this subject had already been set up by Murray Galt Motter, "Volunteer in the United States Bureau fo Animal Industry", and his co-workers a few years previous. Shortly after, in the summers of 1896 and 1897, Motter‘s group systematically and critically checked more than 150 exhumed corpses from Washington, D.C. [74]. In his report, Motter provides brief descriptions of the entomological findings as well as brief comments on soil type, grave depth, etc.. A speech that he "read before the public section of the British Medical Association" in 1897 carried the title "Underground Zoology and Legal Medicine" [73].

Another report in 1895 came from Sweden where Schöyen gave an overview of work that could be applied to the investigation of "gravenes fauna", or the fauna of graves [89]. However, he refers primarily to species already mentioned in Reinhard's and Mégnin's publications.

The only forensic entomology studies of that time no longer available are those performed by Hough in New Bedford from 1894 to 1897, as he never published his data.

Turn of the century

Previous forensic insect studies by the German doctors Klingelhöffer [51] and Maschka [58], and the forensic pathologist Stefan von Horoskiewicz from Krakau University (then Austria, now Poland) [44], had focused on the bite patterns of cockroaches and ants.. Klingelhöffer, a district medical doctor responsible for the Frankfurt area, relates the case of a poor family, whose nine month old, sickly baby died on May 26, 1889, and was autopsied three days later, on May 29. In the meantime, the local "doctor responsible for the poor" had filed a report to the police because he had observed patches in the face of the child, leading to the father’s arrest. During the resulting autopsy, the "patches" were noted on the noseand lips and to proceed downwards from the child's mouth. The tongue was not discoloured, but bleeding on the tip. Of particular interest to the police was confirmation of their suspicions that the father had tried to make the child drink sulphuric acid, a common method of poisoning at that time. However, Klingelhöffer found no signs of poisoning, and concluded that the abrasion-like patterns had most likely been caused by cockroaches. The father was realeased after three weeks in prison.

Horoszkiewicz dealt with a similar case, in which a child was autopsied in April, 1899. The autopsy found no internal signs of violent death, however, numerous abrasions could be seen on the nose, cheeks, lips, and chin, with more obvious marks on the surface of the neck and backside of the left hand, fingers, genitals, and the inner thighs. When questioned by Horoszkiewicz, the mother stated that when she came home from preparing for the funeral, the body of her child had looked as if it was covered with a black shroud ("mit einem schwarzen Leichentuche bedeckt") of cockroaches, but she did not see any abrasions at that time. To verify whether the cockroaches could be the sole cause for the abrasions, Horoszkiewicz put pieces of fresh tissue from human corpses in glasses filled with cockraoches. While no obvious signs of cockroach feeding were apparent immediately after the feeding activity, they became visible when the skin dried, explaining why the mother had not seen the abrasions but the medical examiners had.

Similar cases were reported by medical examiner Maschka from Austria who became involved in high profile cases in the modern sense of the phrase. In one case, he found abrasions on a child whose body was discovered in a well [cit. after 4]. It was believed that a sexual offender may have abused the child and then strangled, or throttled, it before throwing it in the well. Maschka, however, concluded that the lesions must have been caused by arthropods. In another case, it was thought that a father may have killed his three-day-old child by forcing it to drink sulphuric acid. The father, however, stated that he had put the child, after it had died of natural causes, near the window at 22:00 hrs on April 14, 1880. He reported that on 04:00 hrs the next day, the child's head, located under a blanket, was already covered with ants. Maschka’s findings at autopsy were consistent with the father’s account.

Another experimental account was given by Eduard Ritter von Niezabitowski, also a medical examiner at the Medico-Legal Insitute of Krakau University. His experiments were performed from May, 1899 to September, 1900, using aborted fetuses and cat, fox, rat, mole, and calf cadavers that he put on the windowsill in the institute as well as in a nearby vegetable garden [76]. His observations dealt primarily with flies: Calliphorids, Lucilia caesar, Sarcophaga carnaria, and "Pyophila nigriceps" (most likely, cheese skippers (Piophila casei)); but also included beetles, mostly Silpha, Necrophorus, or Dermestes. His important contribution to the field was the experimental proof that human corpses share the same fauna with animal corpses, both vertebrate and invertebrate.

Meanwhile, turn-of-the-century France and Germany enjoyed a general increase in interest in zoological studies including invertebrate life. As evidence, we see the great success of two popular book series from that time, Alfred Brehm’s Thierleben (Life of The Animals) [99], and even more Jean Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques (Souvenirs Of Insect Life) [29], among other topics specifically dealing with carrion beetles and blow flies. These books, still well-known to the public in Central Europe, inspired an interest in entomology in large numbers of people. Among the lasting benefits of this popularity are numerous ecological studies that continue to be drawn upon in forensic case studies today.

In 1907, Claude Morley published an article in England dealing with the question of what species should be classified as carrion beetles [72]. He stated that during ten years of collecting he found that winter was "almost the best time" for carrion beetles and that there are (so-called) carrion beetles that are not carnivorous but "act as final dissoluters to the ancient carcase. (...) it is still a mystery to me what N[ecrophorus] vespillo feeds upon." Papers like this were the early basis for the systematic ecological studies that have influenced forensic entomology since the 1920's.

Circa the World Wars

Beginning in the 1920s, species lists and monographs on forensically important insects were finally published [e.g., 38,53,84,91], with a focus on ecology, metabolism or anatomy e.g., 14,19,20,22-24,27,34,39,40,46,52,57,66-68,70-72,81,84,93,94,100-102,104-108,111,112]. Pest control, and "maggot therapy" were both of growing interest during this period, and many contributions stemmed from these fields [e.g., 5,7,35,36,42,47,53,82,86,95,96,109,110], creating a major scientific source for interpretation of forensic insect evidence. In the context of pest control, for instance, it was found that adult flies may be present near dying persons, or animals before their actual death [21]. It also became popular to investigate the entomological status of ancient mummies [28].
The interest in maggots on corpses remained high in 1922, when Karl Meixner, professor at the Insitute for Legal Medicine in Vienna and Innsbruck reported cases in involving bodies that quickly disintegrated while being put into storage in the institute's basement [65]. This rapid disintegration was most dramatic with juvenile corpses. Apart from references to Orfila [79] and Mégnin [60-64], no further data was collected by Meixner.

A few years later, Hermann Merkel, professor at the Insitute for Legal Medicine in Munich, extended Meixners observations with case reports that demonstrated that the circumstances of death could influence the course of insect succession. In a case from summer 1919, a son had killed his parentsand stored the bodies next to each other for three weeks. At autopsy, the bodies were found to be in different states of decomposition: The obese body of the mother (shot in the heart) was in full bloated decay, with both eyeballs destroyed by the actions of maggots and numerous maggots already present inside of the (liquifying) brain tissue. Her internal organs were comparably intact and no maggots were present inside of the fat layers. By contrast, the father's slim body had already been infested with numerous maggots in all cavities, with all internal organs destroyed, and pupae already developed. The reason for the increased maggot presence in the father's body was that he had not only been shot but also repeatedly stabbed. This attracted flies to deposit eggs not only in the facial area but also into the wounds [69]. In another case, Merkel found the mummified body of a person who died at home, with not one single maggot being present [69].

In Italy, G. Bianchini, director of the Institute for Legal Medicine of Bari University, wrote a "contribution to the practical, and experimental study of the fauna of corpses" in 1929 [13]. Bianchini’s case report deals with the corpse of a four-year-old child that had dried-out lesions of the skin on the ears, arms, the abdominal area, and the upper side of the thighs. Arthropods collected from the body included mites, "very small scorpions", small beetles, and ants. Identification of the ants was performed by professor Carlo Minozzi, and after further experimentation, Bianchini concluded that the lesions must have been caused by ants of the same species as found on the corpse within a period of around 24 hours. A former case report of Raimoni and Rossi (1888) dealt with the influence of Gammarus pulex, a freshwater crustacean, on corpses. The authors found that Gammarus can produce large numbers of small needle-like lesions. In their case report, it was concluded that a body had been stored in a freshwater containment [cited after 13].

The only case report during the 1930's seems to come from Josef Holzer, medical examiner at the Institute for Legal Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria. Holzer investigated the type of destruction caused by caddis-flies feeding on corpses submerged in freshwater. In an actual case from April 1937, he found that caddis-flies had destroyed all skin layers of the thighs up to the lower border of a pair of shorts as well as larger parts of the facial skin [fig. 8]. It was late winter/early spring with low temperatures, and there had clearly been no blow-fly maggots present. Holzer had never observed such patterns of destruction, even in cases where caddis-fly casings had actually been present on corpses. Therefore, he collected caddis-flies from the body of water in which the corpse had been found and put them in three aquariums containing an aborted fetus, a rat, and a guinea pig, respectively. In doing so, he demonstrated that caddis-flies were the cause of the lesions observed on the child [43].

K. Walcher from the Insitute for Legal Medicine in Munich also reports that he found maggots entering the spongiosa of long bones to reach the bone marrow (circumstances: suicide, post mortem interval 100 days outside). Since the skeleton was intact, Walcher suggested that the animals crept through Foramina nutritia, tiny gaps in the bones that allow blood vessels, and nerves to enter the bones [103].

After the World Wars

During the 1940's, only a note of Bequaert seems to deal with the use of insects to determine the postmortem interval [4]. In the 1950's, Hubert Caspers from the Zoological Institute and Museum of the State Hamburg introduced the use of caddis-fly casings as a tool for forensic investigation (fig. 7). The body of a dead woman, naked except of a pair of red socks, and wrapped in a sack, had been found in 1948 in a moat of a windmill [16]. The question was if the body was disposed there immeditaly after the killing, or if it was stored elsewhere before it was dumped. In a caddis-fly casing (most likely of Limnophilus flavicornis L.) that was found on one sock, fibers of the red socks had clearly been used to build the casing. However, the fibers were only found at the very top, and the very bootom of the casing which meant that the fly had already built her case before she entered the sack. She then finished the casing (fibers on top), and attached it to the sock (fibers on bottom). Since the attachment procedure lasts at least some days, it was estimated that the body was laying in the water for at least one week. Further criminalistic evidence led to the conclusion that the entomological result indicated that the body had been stored elsewhere before it was dumped. With the description of Caspers' case, our historic survey on forenesic entomology ends.

Final remarks

Between the 1960's and mid-1980's, forensic entomology was maintained primarilyby medical doctor Marcel Leclecq (Belgium) [55,56] and professor of biology Pekka Nuorteva (first, Helsinki Zoological Museum, later, professor at the Department of Environmental Protection and Conservation, University of Helsinki, Finland) [77,78], with a focus on case work.
Since then, basic research and advanced application of forensic entomology in the United States, Russia, and Canada has opened the way to routine casework. By now, researchers worldwide use entomology in criminal investigations including murder and other highprofile cases [For. Sci. Int. ].

FOOTNOTE 1 The Phorid fly collection of Schmitz is now at the Museum Alexander König in Bonn, Germany.

Acknowledgements

Pekka Nuorteva and Marcel Leclercq contributed to this article by generous gifts of reprints of their papers. The librarians of the Central German Library of Medicine (ZBMed, http://www.zbmed.de/), Cologne, and the Ehrmann Library, New York University (NYU) Medical Center (http://library.med.nyu.edu/), as well as Madelaine Nash from the former library of the Chief Medical Examiner's Office, Manhattan, helped to trace the historic sources for this article. Proof-reading was performed by Saskia Reibe, Cologne, Germany (bibliography), and Jessica Snyder-Sachs, Alpharetta, USA (text). I would like to thank them all for their valuable contributions.

References (*)

(*) Historic references until 1945 only. -- A searchable, extended version of the bibliographic data given in this article will be available at http://www.benecke.com/fespecial.html after its publication.

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Figures

Fig 1: Chapter 5 of Sung Tzu's Chinese book on Forensic Medicine deals with a case of stabbing solved by use of insects: Adult flies detected blood on the killer's sickle. From [10].
Fig 2: Close observation of decomposition of human corpses built the basis for these figures. Left: A "Dance of the Death" (ca. 1460, from: W. Stammler: Der Totentanz, Munich, 1948), right: grave of Robert Touse who "experts the resurrection of the dead" (exact time unknown, from [11,54]). Note that maggots are displayed similar to snakes, or worms (on the left picture), and that all heads are already skeletonized.
Fig. 3: Early account of insects on corpses that were already determined to the species. From Orfila's & Lesueur's Handbook for the use at exhumations [79].
Fig. 4: Top: Typical pattern of decay caused by maggots (head is left, rib case if partially skeletonized). Bottom: Realistic artistic representation of the same postmortem decay as above (ivory "Skeleton in the Tumba", 16th century, Schnütgen Museum, Cologne, Germany).
Fig. 5: Figures of flies from Mégnin's faune de cadavres [63]. Top: "Pyophila petasionis Duf.", middle: "Sarcophage carnaria Meig.", bottom: "Lucilia Caesar Rob. D."
Fig. 6: Figures of beetles from Mégnin's Faune de cadavres [63]. From left to right: "Silpha obscura" (adult and larva), "Saprinus rotondatus" (adult and larva), "Hister cadaverinus" (adult), and "Tenebrio obscurens" (adult and larva).
Fig. 7: "A caddis-fly casing as a tool in criminalistics." The casing was not only used to suggest a possible post mortem interval but due to the fibers it was built of, it could also be connected to the socks of a dead woman. From [16].
Fig. 8: Influence of caddis-flies on a child's body; case investigated by Holzer. From [43].

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