Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Bastards of Forensic Science
Episode Date: April 25, 2024Robert is joined again by Dr. Kaveh Hoda to continue to discuss why Forensic Science really doesn't work. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Oh man, wow.
That is the funniest thing anyone has ever said
on this show and we're gonna have to,
I mean obviously we've already edited it out
because it's also definitely an actionable threat
against.
What I can't believe, Kava, is that you even had
their home address.
Wow, what a bit.
You know, you learn these things when you're a doctor.
It's important to know as much about someone as you can.
Hopefully. Anyway, welcome back to part two everybody. This is Behind the
Bastards, a podcast where every week we get as close to getting our guest
Dr. Kava Hoda in trouble with the authorities as possible without actually
doing it. Gonna happen one of these days.
Gonna happen one of these days.
Thank you for having me back.
Kava.
Yes, Robert.
How do you feel so far,
talking about bite mark analysis?
I think it's really interesting.
I think forensic, quote unquote, science
is a fascinating topic
because it's such an important part of our legal system.
And as we discussed in the first episode,
if you haven't listened to it,
you should go back and listen to it.
Like, why are you listening to this one
and not the first one?
That'd be weird.
Maniac.
Yeah, maniac, but I kind of dig it too.
So if that's your thing, then I'm down with it.
But long story short, I think it's really fascinating
to like see how some of these things
that aren't really based in the science
as I would see it and as I'm used to,
how it's grown and how it's used,
unfortunately, in these really tragic cases,
and I'm assuming you probably have more of like,
people being sent to prison for crimes they did not commit.
And it's a really interesting time to do it too. And I don't
know if you're going to go into this. You probably aren't, but you know, cause we're
OJ Simpson died recently. And in his case, there was a lot of DNA evidence and I'm not
like an OJ Simpson, like an official by any chance. I don't know much about that case,
but I know there was DNA evidence and it seems like it was around 94 when it was still pretty new to people.
And I don't think people really knew that much about DNA evidence at the time.
So I think it could have made a pretty big difference, his case, maybe if it was done
now as opposed to then, for example.
And that's part of forensic science as opposed to bite marks and maybe fingerprint fingerprinting which seem a little bit softer in that regard of those science
So I think it's really fascinating. I'm not bummed out yet. Although there are
Sad aspects I'm just got sent to prison for 30 years who was innocent
Now I sound like a fucking monster. Thank you very much
An innocent man.
An innocent man.
We're just innocent men like that one font meme.
But I do think it's a really interesting topic
and I think it's a super important one.
So I'm glad you're doing it.
Yeah, actually Kava, I have a different opinion
about the OJ Simpson case than a lot of people.
I half watched that TV show about it a few years back,
and I was kinda fucked up at the time,
but I currently believe that Ross from Friends
was the murderer.
That would make sense.
That would answer a lot of questions.
The way he kept saying juice just didn't sit right with me.
Quick aside, did you know that OJ Simpson
had like a prank show? Yes. And like it was this terrible terrible prank show made no sense
It was so silly and stupid and like the catch line was hey, you've been juiced like when you come out
Man, that's that's that's great
Robert likes to bring up that Ross from Friends played Robert Kardashian in that OJ
It's one of the funniest pieces of casting ever Robert likes to bring up that Ross from Friends played Robert Kardashian in that OJ series.
One of the funniest pieces of casting ever.
You bring it up often.
It might be your Roman Empire,
if the Roman Empire wasn't your Roman Empire.
Well, the problem is that specifically Ross from Friends
shouldn't be allowed to play other people
because he's always just gonna be raw.
I can't believe you was Robert Kardashian's
screaming juice at your friend.
I believe the guy who played OJ is OJ.
He was great, but you're just,
you're always Ross from Friends now.
I'm sorry, I'm not.
You're a millionaire, it's fine.
Yeah, he's okay with it.
I'm sure he's okay with it.
Like Leonard Nimoy is okay or was okay being Spock,
I think at some point.
He got used to it.
You just, that's what happens.
Yeah, he made peace with it,
judging by the titles of his biographies.
You can't be anything else but one thing.
That's what you're doing to this person.
To Ross from Friends, yes.
That's what he is forever.
Oh, he's earned it.
And he's a murderer, I think.
So, we just finished our episode
talking about people versus Marx,
which is kind of this court case
that really helps to provide the popular grounding
for bite mark analysis as a thing that's real.
Now, this case established the,
at the time that this case was adjudicated,
the established practice was that scientific evidence
should not be accepted into a court case
unless the said evidence was generally accepted
by the relevant
scientific community.
This was known as the Frye test based on the court case that established the standard.
Again, we're all talking about like matters of precedent here.
Byte Mark analysis, like the kind performed by Vale and Levine in this case, was not based
on generally accepted odontological science because why would odontologists have done this, right?
Like it's not really relevant to most of dentistry,
even to trying to do this thing, right?
It just, there wasn't an established kind of practice
around how you should do this.
But an exception was made to the Fry Test
based on the reasoning that bite mark matching
was so simple any lay juror could look at a cast of a bite
and a cast of a perp's teeth and tell if they matched.
Because the eyeball test could tell if a bite mark
matched a set of teeth,
it should be admitted into court case, right?
And like, you can see how like the stereotypical layman
who's dumb
might buy that, but also I feel like maybe this is just
a matter of it happened at a different time
because when I read that, I wanna scream inside.
Like, no they can't, no they can't.
Why would you think people could match a bite
to a cast of teeth?
That doesn't make any sense at all, fuck you.
I think our faith in people has really just gone down in general is what I'm hearing here
and I can't disagree with it. But it does on the surface seem very reasonable. It's
like, okay, well, you, you, this is a very simple imprint of this person has a really
weird like shit mouth. You should line it up with these things. It seems like it would
make sense. It's like to the general public, I could totally see that.
I understand how this whole disastrous train of events got moving, right?
How the momentum got built up behind it.
So the eyeball test, this is going to wind up being kind of like, it's sort of a disaster
that this gets established as a way to verify whether or not a new forensic science
should be trusted because it creates this very dangerous situation.
After Marx, a whole host of new kinds of experts start coming forward using different kinds
of pattern matching forensic techniques like matching shoe prints or tire treads or bits
of hair based on visual signs alone.
This bite mark analysis case, People vs. Marks,
it opens the floodgates on a lot of nonsense
getting introduced as forensic science.
And the positive side of this is we get a shitload
of TV shows based on forensic analysis, right?
This is where all of them come from,
this idea that there's all these,
every crime scene, there's all these little clues and you can, can you know, you could any little thing can match the shoe prints
You can do this and like none of this stuff works
It either doesn't work at all or it doesn't work as well as the experts who make their living based on convincing you what works
perfectly are going to claim and because they've now reset the standard from
And because they've now reset the standard from forensic science has to be generally accepted in the field to like well If it's an eyeball sort of thing you can introduce it, you know, it looks good enough
Yeah, it's kind of like we talked about too before which is like I think like in general in terms of law
They if something's been set once then it lasts
It's a precedent but like on top of that like judges are probably more willing to allow things than to keep things out of the trial
If they don't understand it because if someone could present a you know convincing enough
Argument that sounds like they know what they're talking about. I could see why judge would be like, okay
This guy sounds smart enough. We'll we'll leave it in and the jury can do what they will with it
Yeah, I it makes me think like rewatching Star Trek the next generation as I'm usually doing
We're very lucky that all of those screenwriters went to Hollywood rather than decided to do this because they could have created some
Technobabble bullshit that would have locked a lot of people away
Yeah, whoever was writing Jordy skill. It's a skill.
Yeah, whoever was writing Geordi's dialogue could have been very dangerous in another
career.
This is the second show I've done with you where we get into the Star Trek.
I feel like we should just do a whole episode on Star Trek, The Next Generation.
There's nothing I'd love more, but I feel like there's also a million of those shows.
Look, listeners, find a rich, crazy person who will pay for me to do a show on Star Trek
The Next Generation and I'll do it.
But I feel like there's a lot of that.
Anyway, so after Marx, the burden of proof when you're introducing science into a lot
of these cases has shifted drastically.
No longer do experts have to show their processes in line with an established scientific field.
The burden of proof is on the defense attorney to create doubt against the claims of an expert.
The success of dentists like Levine and Vale opened the floodgates to a whole host of men
who were even less qualified, pushing to convict people based on analysis that is even less
scientific.
And the reality of bite mark analysis is that it was always questionable.
Harward, the Navy man that Levine got convicted after arguing that only he could have bit
Teresa Perrone, was ultimately proven innocent and released after losing 30 years of his
life to the criminal justice system.
And a lot more people lose precious time as a result of this bullshit, sometimes all the
time that they had,
thanks to the fountain of forensic conmen
enabled by people V. Marx.
Fabricant cites this infuriating story in his book,
Junk Science, quote,
"'The Connecticut Supreme Court adopted the eyeball test
"'in state V. Mark Reed, a rape conviction
"'involving the use of hair microscopy,
"'a technique that matches two hairs together
"'through visual observation
"'of the interior characteristics of human hair.
Hair matching evidence was admissible, not because it had been scientifically validated,
but because jurors were free to make their own determinations as to the weight they would
accord the expert's testimony in light of the photograph and their own powers of observation
and comparison.
10 years later, DNA proved that the juror's powers of observation had led to Mark Reed's
wrongful conviction.
He was innocent. The negroid hair, a racist anachronism still used in forensics today, matched to Reed was in fact the pubic hair of his accuser, the white woman who had identified Reed a black man as her rapist.
Oh my god.
That's disgusting.
Oh my god.
That's just real bad. That's just real fucked up.
Just give me a moment. Just give me a moment.
Just give me a moment. Let's all sit with that for a second. God damn it. That's so rough on so many levels.
Yeah, it's it's I mean part of why and again the primary reason this is bad is because a lot of innocent people are getting
convicted. The other reason it's bad is because outside of these quacks doing hair matching,
there are people who are really trying hard and using
scientific methods to try and catch murderers and rapists, which is important. And this also,
it makes it impossible to trust them, you know, the way that we should be able to. That's part
of why that like this is so comprehensively vile. what's happened with this industry of grifters
that have subsumed forensic sciences.
Can I ask a question?
And this is probably not something you're privy to,
but do they ever, in your reading or research for this,
did you ever come across a case of a expert,
like in one of these soft sciences here,
forensic sciences, that was then later asked about a case
that had been overturned because of DNA,
and did they ever, did they still try to fight it,
or were they like, yeah, it was a mistake,
we made a mistake, was there any response from them?
Usually no response.
I can't find a single case of a guy being like,
oh yeah, you know what, I horribly fucked up
and my entire life has been a lie.
And when you say it like that,
I guess it makes sense why they don't do it,
but like, man. Yeah, yeah.
I, you know, I don't know.
Cause it's tough because like,
again, there are real, you have to,
if somebody's out there committing rapes and murders,
they should be identified and stopped.
And there are going to be different scientific techniques
that are developed over time
that will allow to make those kinds of identifications.
And just because the people doing it are human,
they will fuck up sometimes
without it being them being irresponsible,
just because people are imperfect, right?
The same way that doctors will fail to save patients
who could have been saved
because that's the reality of the world.
But at the same time, when I read about cases like this
with people doing this bullshit like,
you hear hair matching, you think like,
oh, well, they're probably getting DNA
from the hair and matching it.
No, they're looking at two hairs and saying,
well, this is clearly a Negroid hair.
That guy should do as much prison time
as the guy who got wrongfully convicted.
You know, if COVID taught us nothing else,
it's that you have to,
the people you should trust the most
in terms of the expert opinions
are the ones that admit when there is limitations
and when there's some doubt.
When anyone tells you this is the exact answer
to a novel or new issue,
you have to take that with a grain of salt
because nobody wants to bring on like that
That person onto their show like no cnn fox They don't want to bring someone onto the show that says like well, you know, there's a lot
We don't know yet. We're still trying to figure it out. They bring on the person that's like
Oh the answer to this is don't rub your eyeballs
And that's a hundred percent the way that's going to keep you from getting sick with covid, etc
It's the same thing that happened. We just had this case where Israel struck
an Iranian embassy in Syria,
and Iran responded by firing missiles and drones
into Israel and online.
When all this started,
the number of people who were like,
this is World War III, right?
Is like, you can wait.
You can wait to know,
not that it's not important to care about this,
but you sitting at home in fucking St. Louis, Missouri,
you don't need to have an opinion
about what the fallout for this is going to be
the night that it happens.
Just give it a day or two until we know some more
about what's actually happening, right?
You know, that's, I, people.
Sophie has a look on her face.
I think I know what she's gonna add here.
Oh, I'm waiting to see if you'll do it.
Listen, I'm not gonna correct the way he says Iran.
You know what?
I petition that we now refer to Iran as Iran and Iranian
because I love Robert that much.
Okay, you hear that out there?
So people out there.
Please stop messaging.
Please, please, please stop messaging me
to correct the way Robert says Iran.
I love the way he says it.
I've given up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I've accepted the way that you.
In response to that, I'm gonna make a grand gesture
that I think might be able to heal
some of the damage in this world.
Austin, Texas, now a suburb of Tehran.
Oh, fair enough.
I think it's a good idea.
I think the tacos that are gonna come out of this
will be incredible.
Oh my God, the food that will come out of this alone.
Listen, you can't take the food from us.
You can say a lot about us,
but you can't take our food from us
and you put us in Austin,
I bet you we'll make some magic happen.
I know, the kinds of barbecue science
that will come out of this marriage outstanding.
Yes.
Anyway, back to bite mark analysis.
So in those early publications of bite mark analysis that before they actually got this
sort of up and running as a quote unquote science, Levine and his cohorts had acknowledged
that there are issues.
You can't really analyze bites in soft tissue the way that you can analyze bites in cartilage,
which is why they were so excited about the marks case, right?
Because it was a good, what's called a three dimensional bite that they could actually
cast. But as soon as bite mark analysis is accepted as
forensic science, they dropped this whole, well, soft tissue bite marks aren't really,
you can't really, you know, analyze them reliably and just started going hog wild with identifications.
Vail, the dentist from the Marx case, testified two years later, this time as a certified
member of the AAFS Forensic Odontology branch, about a bite mark in a young murder victim's
thigh.
This was exactly the kind of bite that earlier had been acknowledged as a bad fit for analysis,
but now the court praised the superior trustworthiness over scientific bite mark analysis rather
than less reliable kinds
of forensic science.
The reality is that there was very little science of any kind around bite marks.
Once the nucleus of forensic dentists had earned a place for themselves in the AAFS,
they set up a forensic board and locked the field into a system where newbies apprenticed
themselves to established physicians.
And the practice of bite mark analysis became a thing of wisdom handed down
rather than a thing of empirical study.
And part of the problem here,
part of what makes this impossible
for science to develop out of this, right?
It is possible in certain cases
to match teeth to a bite mark.
I'm not gonna say that's a thing that you could never do.
But the number of cases in which you could actually
do that responsibly is a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of cases in which you could actually do that responsibly
is a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of cases that involve a bite. There's no incentive
financially to be honest about that, to say this is not a good candidate for bite mark
analysis. If your job is selling bite mark analysis, like your financial interest is
in saying every case, oh yeah, I can tell you some good stuff about that bite mark, right?
You know, it's not like it's not like these people I imagine
You know
Like there are expert witnesses in different fields of science and there are people who come from other places and they get paid for it
And you could argue about that but they're coming from places where they already have like jobs doing other things
They work at a university where they're a professor and they do research, or they're
a doctor in a case and then they have their own practice and then they're asked to do
this.
If your field exists solely to be an expert witness, essentially, then that seems strange
to me.
That does seem a bit problematic. I mean, I assume defense lawyers will use that argument,
but I could see that being questionable.
A lot of times they don't know too,
or they don't feel like they can,
because again, in their heads, like,
I'm just some lawyer, this is a doctor, you know?
It causes problems.
And again, we should note that like,
in any of these cases,
forensic evidence is not the only evidence,
there's other stuff going into it,
but a lot of times forensic evidence
is what cinches these bad convictions.
And this is like acknowledged at the time
by like the prosecutors and shit that like,
yeah, it was that bite mark analysis
that got us this conviction.
So again, what you have with this kind of growing field is you've got this board at
the AFS that are able to certify people as like these are the real bite mark analysts.
And this becomes like once you're in that the only way to become a bite mark analyst
is to get approval from these people who are already very biased in such a way as to like
make this be a profitable
industry.
And obviously mentorship is a necessary part of any medical field, any scientific discipline
really, right?
And that's not a bad thing.
It's not bad that, you know, most doctors have mentors when they're younger doctors
with more experienced doctors.
But what you get with these forensic boards is more akin to a medieval guild than anything
we would associate with modern science.
There is no kind of open peer review structure built into the field, and the only people
watching out to see if people are practicing utter bunk are other people who have a vested
financial interest in maintaining the reputation of their field.
This becomes a problem when con men find their way into practicing bite mark analysis.
And that brings me to the hideous story of Michael West.
A dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
West decided to become a bite mark specialist
when he realized there was a potential fortune to be made
in becoming the amazon.com of bite forensics.
Oh my God. At the height.
Oh, that's such a terrible phrase.
What a terrible phrase. Oh my God.
Kava, do you know much about like conducting an autopsy and how much time that takes and stuff?
I've worked on cadavers, but I've never actually been on a true full autopsy. I assume it's a very long time
It's a long process. There's a lot to do
It is pretty involved and and so it should have seemed weird to people that at the height of his career in the early 90s
West was conducting between 1200 and 1800 autopsies a year.
And the amount most experts will agree is a lot
for a dentist.
That's so many.
For a dentist.
For a dentist.
That is quite a few autopsies for a dentist.
Wow.
It sounded like a lot. And then I remembered also dentist.
He's a dentist.
Yeah, this is not a guy who was like an expert of autopsy
or like, you know, you know, that's a job.
Not like a dentist in the doc holiday old west
where that meant he could be like a surgeon as well.
Like modern day.
Yeah. Wow.
Now I know what you're saying here, Kava.
Are there even that many murder cases
where somebody gets bitten?
And the answer is no.
But West developed an ingenious method
for turning any run of the mill death into a homicide
with bite marks that he could match to whatever victim
he was hired to look over.
And I'm gonna quote from journalist, Radley Balko,
writing for Reason.com, describing this West's methods.
Kava, you are about to have a conniption fit here.
Quote, a fluorescent black light flicks on.
West is now employing a much ridiculed technique
he invented for identifying bite marks,
which he modestly calls the West phenomenon.
He claims that by using a black light and yellow goggles, he can find bite marks, knife serrations, and other tears and abrasions to the
skin that no other expert can see. Okay, can we start by the fact that he calls
it the West phenomenon? What a douchebag! Holy shit! Oh my god, that shit gets you flung into the sea!
Oh my god, like, naming it after yourself into the sea. Oh my God, like naming it after yourself,
this ridiculous, like it has to be yellow goggles,
like he's like studied UV lighting or some shit like that.
What a terrible, I don't need to know anymore about him.
I don't like him.
Oh, you're about to hear a lot more.
So once he's found these bite marks,
West can have a judge compel whoever's been accused
in the case and get a castmate of their
teeth right then he simply takes the cast and he uses it to put bite marks on the dead body
Thus creating the evidence that he was hired to find there are video tapes of him doing this
During an autopsy West conducted on a 23 month old baby named Haley, Olavo
During an autopsy, West conducted on a 23-month-old baby named Haley Olivo. Quote, West's hand then enters the frame, holding a plaster dental mold taken earlier
that day from Jimmy Duncan, who was accused of killing this kid.
Using the replica of Duncan's teeth as a weapon, West repeatedly presses and jams the
front bite plate directly into Olivo's cheek.
Over two minutes, he does this 17 times.
At 6.57 he starts dragging
Duncan's mold across all of those face beginning near her lips then scraping
the plaster teeth down her face to her jaw. He does this for another minute.
Wes next moves to all of those elbow and uses the cast to impress Duncan's
dentition into an old bruise hospital record show she suffered weeks before
her death. With the lights out, Wes continues to jam the plaster cast
into the girl's cheek, elbow, and arm.
Over the course of the 24 minute video,
Wes pushes the cast of Duncan's teeth
into the girl's body at least 50 times.
I know I don't usually ask you to like skip ahead for me,
but can you blink twice if it ends badly
for this motherfucker?
It definitely doesn't, so.
God damn it!
Okay, hold on.
I mean, it doesn't end well for him, but it doesn't, so. God damn it! Okay, okay, okay.
I mean, it doesn't end well for him,
but it doesn't end the way it should end,
which is him being flung into the sea.
Yeah, I was hoping for subsist from some pain.
No, it should aim, it should,
this is the story should end with him tripping
and falling into a bubbling cauldron of herpes.
A cauldron would be great.
Yeah, a cauldron of herpes feels valid here.
That's kind of the end I was hoping for.
Okay, let's hear more because I'm deeply disturbed.
Real quick though, I'm sorry.
Someone was recording him doing this?
Like there's hidden camera recording of this?
Yeah, this is an autopsy.
Yeah, they have to film him.
They're like recorded. Yeah. And this is, so this is like it's hidden camera recording of this? Yeah, yeah, this is an autopsy. Yeah, they have to film them. They're like recorded.
Yeah.
Okay.
And this is, so this is like, it's reviewed
and like this is part of what starts this guy
kind of being unwound as an expert.
But in this specific case,
the footage that shows him creating bite marks in the corpse
was not entered into evidence.
So it had no role in the initial trial of the man
accused of murdering Haley.
His charge was raised to capital murder
and the bite marks were cited as one of the reasons why.
But in the time between his exam,
between the exam West conducted
and the actual trial over this death,
West was discredited due to reporting
around his deeply questionable methods,
including this video.
So the prosecution just shopped around for another dentist.
They tried Lowell Levine, but he was familiar enough with West's shady ass behavior to
turn them down.
He's like, no man, I'm not that dumb.
Like absolutely not.
Yeah, maybe shady, but not that shady.
Yeah.
Eventually they found a dental examiner who looked over photos West had taken of the fraudulent
exam he'd carried out and confirmed that the defendant had left the bite marks. Balco writes, despite West's disintegrating
reputation and the fact that the bite mark evidence was derived from his work,
Louisiana 4th Judicial District Judge Charles Joyner ruled in 1995 that the
video contained no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant, a finding
hotly disputed by all the forensic specialists consulted for this article,
and that therefore prosecutors didn't need to hand it over.
The state maintained at first that, the defense is somehow hoping to drag Dr. West into this
case in order to create ancillary issues for the jury.
But by 1996, prosecutors relented and gave defense attorneys the video.
But Duncan's attorneys never showed the video to their own dental examiner.
This point would have become crucial
since the bite marks were the only physical evidence
used to elevate Duncan from a negligent guardian
to a lethal child rapist.
I don't understand though,
like, okay, I have so many questions.
One, did this West guy not,
I mean, why would he do that knowing he was filming it?
Did he think no one was gonna see it?
I think he thought he was explaining as he's doing it.
Basically like I'm testing,
this is where I see the bite marks or whatever.
But he's making the bite marks.
Right.
Yeah, I think he thought nobody
was gonna really care to check.
And they didn't for a while.
People that are like that level of bold feel untouchable.
And I think he thought he could just get away
with doing this and it sounds like he did.
Yeah.
Wes and the other dental examiner,
there's another guy in the room with him there
during that autopsy, an examiner named Kane.
Well, fuck that guy too.
Yeah.
They fall out of favor because journalists
like Balco start writing about their methods,
but West continued to testify as an expert until 2001.
What stops him being cited as an expert in court cases
is that in 2001, a defense lawyer decided to test him
by sending him a cast of an active defendant's teeth
and photos of bite marks from a closed solved homicide case.
West confirmed that the dental mold matched the photos
of the bite marks.
So, you know, basically there's an active case going on.
The defense lawyer sends him a cast of the defendant
in that case, Keith, teeth, and then photos of bite marks
from a completely different homicide
that has already been solved.
And West is like, oh yeah, this guy made those bite marks.
And like, okay, so you're just full of shit, right?
Yeah, I mean, why would you believe,
the defense lawyer's trying to make you look dumb
and you just help them, right?
This person seems, it's insane to me
that this person was able to do this.
Well, they also seem pretty incompetent.
What's really insane is how little the fact that he's obviously a fraud helps the people that he had able to do this. But they also seem pretty incompetent. What's really insane is how little the fact
that he's obviously a fraud helps the people
that he had helped to get convicted.
In 2003, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that quote,
just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot
does not mean without something more
that he was wrong here.
In a trial for another man he'd helped to convict.
A broken clock, it's right twice a day. So is Dr. West.
Yeah, and Jimmy Duncan, the guy convicted in the case
where he's fucking dragging a bite, a tooth cast
across a dead baby, still on death row as of 2023.
And it's one of those things where, again, there's
other evidence a lot of the time.
But in Duncan's case, the only physical evidence
was from West, right?
Like it's...
So how has that not been, how, I mean,
maybe this is ongoing, but like,
how come the Innocence Project
isn't working with him on that?
Is there just too much of...
They are, it's just like this,
the fact that like something seems clearly fucked up,
number one, doesn't mean that you're going
to get court rulings that revisit, you know, those cases. Like it's just not it's a pain. It
takes a lot of people who are exonerated as a result of the
Innocence Projects work. It can take years or decades you know. Right and he might
have done the case. I don't know the knowledge but like you know with
what evidence you know if that's the only evidence, then it's highly suspect.
And certainly there are a lot of cases where he matches a bite to a perp who did do the
murder, but that also does like, he could still be lying.
There's just other evidence, right?
Like, you know, the cops got the right guy and they brought him in and he just agreed
with, you know, what the cops already thought.
And in that case, he was right because that guy happened to
do it but yeah it gives you an idea just like how fucking sketchy a lot of this
is now one thing we should all know at this point about scientific
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So, the fact that scientific disinformation
spreads if left unchecked is why you have to fight
vigorously against people who want to deny basic facts
of reality for their own profit.
If you ignore, say, an anti-vax doctor
claiming vaccines cause autism to make a fortune
for himself, in a few years, you might have
presidential candidates screaming about
vaccine ships or ivermectin in schools full of kids
with whooping cough.
The field of forensic science has the same issue.
I would even go even further than that
and say it could be something even more subtle.
Like some doctor who says, or I'm sorry, not doctor,
but some famous actress says putting a jade egg
in your hoo-ha helps with such-and-such there is now I feel
There's a direct line to that that anti-vax president
You know now I used to not care that much now
I do any bit of this misinformation can lead eventually to this cascade eventually you get
RFK jr. Like killing Simone babies. You know, this is how it happens.
That the derangement like, yeah, it's a kind of cancer.
It acts that way at least.
And for an example of just how bad it can get,
I wanna turn now to the story of Dr. Arpad Voss.
Now on paper, Kava, Arpad Vasa is as legit as it gets.
This guy's got a PhD in forensic anthropology.
He works with the University of Tennessee's world famous body farm.
He even has a Ted talk.
And most of that Ted talk sounds pretty reasonable to me, notably not a scientist.
But it sounds good.
It's a lucid look at how human decomposition is impacted by various factors and how cadaver dogs often labradors
Work by smelling different chemicals that are a product of said decomposition
And then about 70% of the way through his TED talk we get this our next step is to
develop our own labrador
is to develop our own Labrador, an electronic version.
We may not be good at a lot of things, but we can nail those acronyms, okay?
This instrument was designed specifically
for two purposes, one to track the chemical plume,
and the second to give the operator an idea
of which area has the highest concentration.
Because where the body is
is where the concentration will be the highest,
and as the plume migrates, it moves away.
So, what he is selling here,
and the reason he brings up an acronym,
is that his device,
that is basically a mechanical corpse-sniff sniffing dog is called the Labrador
And the Labrador in this case is an acronym for lightweight analyzer for buried remains and decomposition odor recognition
And to be honest, that's a pretty good acronym. Um, like
He did a solid job. They had to work through it. They had to work through it
They had a lot to work with and and they came up with something, yeah.
They made it happen.
The device looks like a bulky metal detector.
It looks like a metal detector
with extra shit glued on it, right?
If you were, again, say you were doing a Star Trek episode
and you needed a future metal detector,
you'd get a metal detector
and you'd throw some shit on it, you know?
That's how this thing looks.
It's, yeah, anyway, his device is,
this is bullshit, right? But it makes his device is, this is bullshit, right?
But it makes sense that something like this might work,
right?
If a dog can sniff out a buried cadaver,
and dogs can definitely do that,
we should be able to someday design a device
that can fulfill the same role electronically.
You know, that makes sense.
And perhaps someday we will.
But Dr. Voss's gizmo does not use anything
that we would call regular science.
Instead, it functions on the principle of a divining rod.
Do you know anything about divining rods or dowsing, Kaveh?
We're talking about the old, old school
like dust bowl era stuff where someone would walk around
with like a stick with two prongs and try to find water.
We sure fucking are, yeah.
That's great, that's fucking great.
If you haven't been piled on this particular bit
of esoterica, dowsing or dividing rods go back a long time,
at least about 500 years,
and variations of the practice probably predate that.
The basic idea is that you get either a Y-shaped piece
of wood or two curved copper rods,
or there's a couple other variants of this,
and you walk around looking for water
or whatever underground,
and when the two rods cross or
the Y-shaped stick gets pulled down, that means that it's right below you, right?
When the rod or rods move or whatever, that's a sign that you're standing above whatever
you're looking for.
And dowsers have claimed over the years they can find everything from underground water
to buried treasure to corpses.
And this is done in a couple of different ways.
I'm not gonna labor on all of the different ways.
It is generally considered officially to be a pseudoscience
because repeated studies have not been able to show
that dowsing is any more accurate than random chance.
Seems like it'd be easy to prove that, yeah.
Yes, the explanation for why the sticks cross
or get pulled or whatever is something called
the ideomotor effect.
And this is when suggestions, beliefs, or expectations cause unconscious muscular movements. Most people are probably
broadly familiar with the concept. What's happening here is not wildly different from
what happens with cops and drug sniffing dogs, right? While dowsing has its origins primarily
in finding water, which is why it's also often called water witching, Dr. Voss is one of a number
of people who think it can and should be used to find human remains.
He always frames this as focused
on both giving the families closure,
in the case of hikers who died somewhere off trail
and their bodies were never found,
and of course, aiding in murder investigations.
And before we get into this grift, and it is a grift,
I wanna cite one paragraph from an article
on Dr. Voss and Mother Jones.
In June, 2021, scientists from the FBI laboratory, George Mason University, and the U.S. Army
Criminal Investigation Command conducted a controlled blind test to evaluate the ability
of dowsing rods to detect buried bones.
A control group of participants was asked to look at nine holes and to identify which
ones they thought contained bones.
A different group did the same thing using dowsing rods, which they didn't have experience using for this purpose according to the study. The scientists
determined that neither method worked. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Dr. Voss called that
study useless. And in his opinion, wrong though it is, matters, because he gets to train a lot of
cops and forensic investigators. He wrote back in his email that he teaches his students
proper dowsing and the 17 scientific principles
that quote, make the rods work,
which took me years to find out.
Oh my God.
First of all, if your whole grift is based on doing
what a dog does, but not as well,
like what a lame grift.
Like we already have dogs for that.
Like what's the point of-
I just thought that,
what are the scientific 17 of them?
What are those scientific principles?
Yeah.
The fact that he has a Ted Talk
and it probably goes into that.
I mean, it just goes to show that like,
you know, not everyone who gets a TED Talk
is fucking really an expert on anything.
I guess you gotta, I mean,
that's a little disappointing actually.
I kind of assumed they'd have some level of like,
you know, criteria that has to be met to give a TED Talk.
You have to assume the TED Talk Booker person or whatever
isn't a forensic scientist.
It would be weird if they were.
And this guy is a forensic scientist
with impressive credentials who trains FBI agents.
What is he saying?
Again, it looks like a metal detector with some extra shit put on it.
He is teaching them to douse for corpses.
He has them walk around with copper rods where there are bodies buried so that they can find
them.
I mean, okay, I bite.
What is the, I wanna know,
what is it about the dead body, what pheromones?
Because you know what is true?
For example, there are researchers off the coast,
the Farallon Islands here in San Francisco
who study orcas when they attack sharks.
And when a shark's body dies,
it releases, they think, a certain pheromone
that acts as a warning sign
To other sharks to keep them away
So there is a pheromones that have been theorized to be released after death
What is that what he's saying is that the body's releasing certain odors or hormones that this device is picking up?
Bodies do release certain like odors that you couldn't again
That's what like a cadaver dog is smelling right?
Yeah, if you can't like physically smell obviously smell the can smell a dead body that's right in front of you.
If it's like buried or something, cadaver dogs can find them sometimes, right?
Right.
What he is doing is he's out on the body farm where they take dead bodies and they put them in various
situations to see how decomposition works and also to train like investigators and stuff.
And so he's walking around places where he and others
know bodies are buried and they are dowsing
and eventually finding them.
And what's really probably happening is a mix of
they know there's a body somewhere,
there's obvious signs that a body was buried
and the ideomotor effect takes care of the rest, right?
That's what I think is actually happening here.
But what he is telling people is that you can douse
for corpses and you can't, you just can't.
It's not real science.
And again, if it was real science,
he wouldn't say I spent years figuring it out.
He would say, here is all of my peer-reviewed research
showing why this works.
There would be a body of,
people would dedicate their lives
If you could walk around with copper rods and they would somehow point out dead bodies underground
Yeah, someone would dedicate their life to figuring out why
That would be interesting. Yes, people would be doing it all the time
By the way, because people go on beaches looking for like loose change. Imagine how much loose change people do go down
Yeah People go on beaches looking for loose change. Imagine how much loose change people find. People do go dowsing a lot.
So again, there's not data to prove that this works,
but it doesn't matter because Voss is an instructor
at the National Forensic Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Here's how that Mother Jones reporter attended his class
where he's teaching police officers,
and here's how he described it.
There are no official dowsing rods at hand,
but that doesn't matter.
You can use the flags, Voss offers.
Bend them like you would coat hangers.
Fred Ponce, a private detective from Miami
with a dark mustache and beard, gets right to it.
He tears the red plastic rectangles off two stakes
and spaces his hands to measure about 12 inches
of straight steel, then bends the remaining metal
into handles.
Holding the stakes like six shooters,
he walks over one of the suspected grave sites.
The stakes cross. He does it again. They cross. And again, they cross.
I'm not kidding, Pont says, marveling that his DIY grave finder seems to be working.
And again, reasonable people would go like, well, you're at a body farm.
You know they buried bodies around here. Most people who bury corpses
probably aren't good
at like hiding all of the evidence.
And the fact that you're trying to convince me
this is real science, you could say,
literally any metal you bend works for this.
What else works that way?
I don't expect, okay, I don't expect that much,
but like we're expecting like an 18th century technology to help us,
yeah, whatever, to help us find these corpses.
I feel like we've gone wrong.
I feel like we've done, like law enforcement's gone astray.
I feel like something-
It might be fair to say that at this point.
Reasonable people, and only reasonable people
listen to this podcast, might say,
that sounds like nonsense.
But Dr. Vasa's class is among the most loved portions
of the 10-week training course
at the National Forensic Academy.
It costs students, mostly crime scene investigators
from agencies in 49 US states, $12,000 of your tax dollars.
So that's cool. The academy itself is widely respected. in 49 US states, $12,000 of your tax dollars.
So that's cool. The Academy itself is widely respected.
The Washington Post called it
the Harvard of hellish violence.
VASA's techniques are used all over the country
by real law enforcement officers
in spite of the fact that a lot of this
is just obviously bullshit.
And for evidence of that,
I'd like to turn back to the Labrador,
which we opened this portion of the episode discussing
That July 5th 2012 TED talk is not one of the more popular TED talks
It's got like 14,000 views at present
But the fact that Voss got a TED talk might suggest to some people that his Labrador was a real product
As far as I can tell it is not not. The device never launched commercially. When asked about this, Dr. Voss always claims
he has a patent on the device, as if that matters.
Mother Jones cites Diane France,
director of the Colorado Human Identification Laboratory.
She notes, you can patent anything.
It doesn't mean that it works.
It just means the design has to be different
from other products.
Diane noted that she's never seen the Labrador,
let alone been able to test it.
Mother Jones could only find one expert
who claimed to have used the device,
and that expert was Michael Hadzell,
president of the nonprofit Peace River Canine Search
and Rescue Association from Englewood, Florida.
He claims to be field testing the device
and that it has a 60% success rate,
but did not provide any data on this whatsoever.
And I will note that a guy testing a device without backup
and saying it works 60% of the time
is remarkably close to saying it works about
as well as the flip of a coin.
Super, super bullshit.
No error rate study.
Again, getting back to that thing we talked about
in the first episode, error rate study.
This is exactly the flip of a coin.
And no one will ever do a study on this
because it's nonsense and there's only,
it's a device that doesn't exist, obviously.
As I've noted repeatedly, there's a lot of problems
with the way that police use dogs forensically,
but we know that dogs can smell this stuff.
And part of how we know it is
we have studied their noses extensively.
Like we have, there's data on how sensitive a dog's nose is
because it's science.
Because people noticed dogs seemed supernaturally good
at something and rather than just saying,
well, that's good enough for me,
they figured out the underpinning reasons why,
because that's how real science is done.
The patent application itself lists the device, actually this is the application I think for
a successor device to the Labrador that's the improvement on it, lists this corp sniffing
gadget as having two L-shaped antennae that allow it to channel electromagnetic waves.
In other words, he basically built a divining rod
in the form factor of a metal detector.
I've updated it.
I've now called it Theranos.
You're gonna love this device.
Yeah.
I found an analysis, one of the best write-ups
of this guy as a con man comes from the website
pctmissing.org.
The PCT is the Pacific Crest Trail, right?
This is, it's the same,
the Appalachian Trail is kind of the other one in the US.
You've got these two massive long continent wide trails
that like, for a lot of people,
it's their whole life ambition to do the PCT
or to do the Appalachian or to do both of them, right?
And because-
Sickos, absolute sickos.
I don't know, parts of it seem appealing to me
and then I think of how tired I'd get.
Oh my God, God bless them.
I'm so glad somebody wants to do that, yes.
It's very impressive.
Obviously, it can be dangerous, right?
People die doing this with some regularity.
Obviously not most people who do it,
but it's not uncommon for people to go missing.
And so there's this website, pctmissing.org,
that both covers these missing persons cases.
And what they're doing here is kind of as journalists
trying to advocate to families
that are being preyed upon by Dr. Voss.
Quote, the full patent makes more references
to divining rods.
And during the Casey Anthony trial in 2011,
Dr. Voss admitted to dowsing for graves as a hobby.
Now, when I read that, I said, what the fuck?
And I clicked the hyperlink
on the words Casey Anthony trial.
And that hyperlink took me to a Casey Anthony trial
fan cam YouTube account that includes cut up videos
of Dr. Voss' testimony during the Casey Anthony trial,
where he was employed by the prosecution
as an expert witness when they were trying to prove
that that toddler's dead body had at one point
been in the trunk of Anthony's car.
So the prosecutors want Voss to show
that because he could find chemical evidence
of like the chemicals released by a decomposing body,
that the dead kid had been in Anthony's trunk, right? That's why they have him on, right? Here's how Mother Jones describes Voss's
performance in the Casey Anthony trial. Voss claimed that an air sample from the
trunk revealed high levels of compounds consistent with human decomposition
based on his research. An analytical chemist from Florida International
University testified that Voss's testimony wasn't backed up by scientific
evidence and that many of the compounds Voss's testimony wasn't backed up by scientific evidence,
and that many of the compounds Voss identified could have been emitted by food wrappers and
other trash recovered from Anthony's trunk.
Anthony was acquitted, in part because of doubts about the air sample from the car,
legal experts said at the time.
Now, that's all fucked up, and by the way, before you get into it, I don't know anything
about the Casey Anthony trial.
If you have a strong opinion about that, I'm not making an opinion on the verdict of that trial.
What I am having an opinion on
is Dr. Voss' testimony during that trial.
Because-
Even being a part of it.
Why is this guy a part of it?
This is like, no matter how dumb-
This guy should not be in a fucking courtroom.
Unless he's being charged as a con man.
No matter how dumb you think things are,
it's just like they get dumber.
Like, are there children running the courts? Why why is this happening why is he even a part of
it the price he's got again he has really good paper qualifications but
when he actually gets on the stand it's so fucking funny and I'm actually gonna
play you a bit from this video collage of his testimony during the trial. At VAS, A-R-P-A-D, V-A-S-S. I think I can make a logical, not logical, but I can make
a conclusion.
You know, it's just another corroboration of what my nose tells me is correct.
Did you do any other instrumental examinations of the carpet piece?
That you, significant ones? I don't think I would call any. We don't know what the carpet piece. Significant ones.
I don't think I would call any. We don't know what the source is. It could have been from decomposition or it could have been from gasoline.
Is there a specific established chemical odor signature for human decomposition?
A clear and specific one to human decomposition only.
I do not think so.
You are not a chemist.
Correct.
You're not an analytical chemist.
Correct.
You're not a biochemist.
Correct.
And therefore you really can't testify as to the chemistry and the makeup of things of which you have no experience, correct?
Well, if I've never looked at something, yeah, I'd suppose that's true to a certain extent, yes.
But you do not list what you got your PhD in. Could you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury
what you got your PhD in? Anthropology. Now that was during the prior hearings.
Now look, anthropology is a- That was great.
It's so funny. I like that. That's such a good cross-examination. Because look, there
are actually a lot of anthropologists in forensic science, right?
There's a lot of things about anthropology as a discipline that are relevant, you know,
especially when you're talking about like digging up people who were murdered years
ago and buried and like all that stuff.
Obviously, forensic scientists are useful.
What they are not is chemists.
And if you are, as an anthropologist, claiming to have developed this like novel technique
of measuring chemicals that are specific to human decomposition, I'm going to need to see that somebody who
knows chemistry professionally has been involved in that process.
Back this up. Oh my God. It's so disheartening. The thing about it that's kind of a bummer
is that like, you know, I get it if he would come across on the stand as being like really
knowledgeable, authoritative, but it doesn't even seem like that he can't like fake it that well, like, you know
I'm gonna be a grifter. You got a he's not even good at it
It's gotta be both that like a lot of cops are just not all that bright and also I assume one-to-one
He's charming enough that like he makes you feel like he knows what he's talking about
But he does not look good up on that stand. No
It's a bad grift, I don't know how it's worked at all for him. I mean, you got a Ted Talk out of it.
It's remarkable. Yeah, he sure did.
A consummate professional. Dr. Voss doesn't just make his money teaching CSI guys and consulting badly on court cases.
He also reaches out to families who have lost loved ones. Some of these people do speak highly of him. Delana Hall Bodmer's sister, Gina, went missing in June of 1980
with a man named Stephen Epperly. Her body has never been found, but Gina is sure Dr.
Voss located it. Because his device signaled a frequency he matched to her specific corpse
in eight locations, which he claims means she was dismembered and buried in eight different areas.
Now Epperly had already been convicted in a rare no-body homicide.
I think it's actually one of the first no-body homicides convictions in Florida.
But what they're looking for is where was she buried?
He says, well, I found evidence she was cut up and buried in these parts.
They find some bone fragments near where he picks out. I haven't found any confirmation that they were human.
The last article I read said they were like
still being analyzed, but it seems like if they were,
he would be trumpeting that.
So maybe again, if you spend a lot of time in the woods,
you run into a lot of bones.
Sure, right.
And I've definitely seen bones where I'm like,
well, yeah, that could belong to you.
It's just a little shard of bone.
I can't identify what it is.
I assume a doctor, a scientist of some sort could, but.
Is he reaching out to these people directly
or are they coming to him for?
I think it's a mix, but a lot of times
I do think he does reach out,
especially if it's like a big case.
He's also famous enough that some people
who are desperate to find their lost loved ones go
to him.
This is still happening.
He's still doing this.
This is something that's still occurring.
That's why that Pacific Crest Trail website is covering him, because he's been sort of
preying on people who have lost loved ones on the trail.
And again, we just brought up this case, this woman, Lana, whose sister was murdered in
1980.
She's clearly someone who was mourning a lost loved one and desperately hopes to get some kind of closure using what she
thinks is science. She also is looking to, again this is very sad, part of
why she's working with Dr. Voss is that he's kind of convinced her that they, by
figuring out how to use this device and using her sister's case as a case study,
they could also use this thing to use this device and using her sister's case as a case study,
they could also use this thing
to find abducted children, right?
And this presents an opportunity to Lana
where she thinks like, maybe I can make something good
come out of my sister's death.
And I understand that impulse, right?
But this is not science and it's not,
Dr. Voss isn't gonna help anybody.
Like she has been taken for a ride by him.
And I think that's pretty gross of him.
There's more realistic science behind the Ghostbusters proton
packs than there is this device that he has.
And they also look cooler.
And like this is, and he's able to sort of use this.
It's just, it's, I mean, I just, it's amazing how much money you can make
in this country, in this world with a grift. It's amazing.
And what's even more amazing is Dr. Voss's patented, Find Your Dead Loved One service,
the primary sponsor of this episode of Behind the Bastards. And Kava, when Dr. Voss came to me and
said, I want to sponsor a podcast episode on forensic science lies. I said, it seems kind of weird because
we're definitely going to tear you a new one. But he paid us
$170,000. So here's the man.
He's a swell guy.
I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist and former deputy sheriff. In my
new podcast series, Cold-Blooded, the Apollo Jim Murders, I'm embedded in the cold
case investigation into the death of firefighter Billy Halpern.
It's just a little shame, you know, that they took him from us.
Experienced this investigation in a truly unique way, knocking on doors, uncovering
new evidence, including the DNA of a
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I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s. She looked like a million bucks.
With zero qualifications. She had a Harvard plaque. Tricks her way past a wall of lawyers and agents. She's got all of these
Maseratis and Bentley's all in the driveway. Is it like a mansion? Yes, it's
a mansion. That this queen of the con uses to scam some of the biggest names
in professional sports out of untold fortunes. About six million. Approximately $11 million.
Nearly $10 million was all gone.
Employing whatever means necessary
to bleed her victims dry.
She would probably have sex with one of her clients.
Hide your money in your old Richmond
because she is on the prowl.
Listen to Queen of the Con, season five,
the athlete whisperer on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Anyway, we're back.
So again, I can't blame Gina for wanting
to get something positive out of her sister's murder, but I
can blame Dr. Voss for, in my opinion, taking advantage of her and a lot of other grieving
people.
Case in point, a shitload of folks who've lost loved ones on the PCT.
People like the family of David O'Sullivan, a 25-year-old from Ireland who went missing
in the spring of 2017.
Voss scanned for his body from a helicopter with his Labrador and gave GPS coordinates
to where rescuers would find the body.
A Mountaineer went to the coordinates and found nothing.
Oh, Sullivan is still missing three years later.
Or was still missing three years later.
Again, if people out there listening,
trying to figure out what this Labrador thing is,
it's just like a dumb looking metal detector.
It's a box of nothing.
It's nothing.
Like how would that, how would you, from working from like an inch away, I don't think it would
work much less from a helicopter.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, I'm going to quote again from Mother Jones here.
And this is them talking to the family of David O'Sullivan.
Voss cost us a lot of money and gave us false hope,
which was much worse.
The Lost Hiker's mother, Carmel O'Sullivan,
wrote in an email, adding that she now doubts
Voss ever found a missing person.
Families are at their most vulnerable at this time,
and will try desperate measures.
Voss is such a fixture in the I lost a loved one
on the PCT community that the first article,
again, this website has done it right above him because they feel a need to warn people in the community lost a loved one on the PCT community that the first article, again, this website has done a write-up of him
because they feel a need to warn people
in the community about him because he's a fucking predator
is what some people might argue.
He cites a patent file, or the guy who wrote that article
in PCTmissing.org cites a patent filing
for this successor device to the Labrador,
which is called the Inquisitor.
And I'm not really curious about what the acronym stands
for, but I do want to read this quote
from that PCT Missing article.
I've reviewed 27 cases Voss worked,
and I can't find a single one where the Inquisitor detected
an actual missing person or their remains.
I know of one missing hiker case in which Voss
and his device walked within feet of the remains
and totally missed it.
We know this because the missing person was found
by accident many months later,
well outside the area detected by Voss and his inquisitor.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, I mean, shame, you know, the thing is that
he does it once, you know, shame on him.
He makes a living off of it, shame on us for that happening.
Right, there's a broader problem.
This is a systemic issue now.
The article of that PCT Missing article,
which again, I would not surprise
that this is a community, right?
That there's enough missing people
and that it's enough of a thing
that folks who are particularly really into the trail do.
But I was impressed at the degree of rigor in the article
that this guy put together on Dr. Voss.
It's really quite good.
The author of that talked to Dr. Monty Miller,
director of forensic DNA experts,
to provide an analysis of the patent
for the Inquisitor device.
Dr. Miller has a PhD in biochemistry, not anthropology,
which makes him somewhat more qualified
to draw conclusions on biochemistry.
Quote, in a six page report,
he thoroughly debunked the inquisitor's ability
to locate dead family members using your fingernail clippings.
That's what Voss was advertising.
You give me your fingernails
and I will find your loved one using my magical gadget.
Wow, that's so rad.
For an example of how ridiculous this is,
it's hard to get DNA from fingernail clippings.
Right.
Like it's not, you can do it, but it's not easy, right?
Like it's one of the more difficult things
in DNA related science.
You certainly cannot put your fingernail clippings
in a box that then finds your son's body.
That's just not real.
Yeah.
I don't like this guy.
I mean, whenever you tell me about these grifters that are able to pull off these scams, allegedly,
I don't know if he listens, or if he's litiginous, but like, it almost is a part of me that's
just like, that's pretty, I wish I had that confidence. I wish I had this level of confidence in my skills
to be like, to try and sell something like this.
It's kind of inspiring in a weird way.
I hate to admit that.
It is.
It's awesome.
And like the literal sense of that word,
and that you have awe at the audacity of this motherfucker.
Yeah, and it's working.
He's like, he's like, this is it,
or he wouldn't keep doing it.
It may not be working as well now.
That's a little unclear to me.
Sources at the UT Forensic Anthropology Center
say Voss is no longer associated with their department.
The author of that article I cited
talked to a PhD who specializes in LIDAR.
This person described Voss as predatory.
To date, there are no scientific studies
backing up Voss's claims.
Person who wrote that article claims he charges $300 an hour
plus expenses and a retainer for his services,
which is deeply, again, if your fucking kid is missing,
you'll do anything.
If you can be convinced, obviously.
For his part, Voss told Mother Jones he's not out to take advantage of anybody, a statement made almost exclusively by people out to take advantage of other people.
He states that his fee is minimal and that he's worked pro bono in the past, a statement
wonderfully vague enough that it means almost nothing.
He does note that he also operates with more recognized tools,
like cadaver dogs and chemical tests.
Curious then, that he makes such a point
about his patented body-stepping machine
that no one can seem to prove has been studied
in any kind of objective repeatable way.
Eric Bartling, an anthropology professor
who was former president
of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology
says Voss's services are not scientifically valid. Helen Gilking, director of the Forensic Anthropology says Voss's services are not scientifically valid.
Helen Gilking, director of the Forensic Anthropology Lab at the University of North Texas Center
for Human Identification, adds,
Part of the problem has to do that Voss doesn't belong to any of the usual organizations or
societies.
He's operating in a society of consumers who have been conditioned by all sorts of
forensic scientific fantasy in the popular media.
As a result, there is no shortage of potential victims."
I don't fully agree with her because again, he is associated with some reputable thing like organizations.
He's like been teaching cops the fucking body farm.
It's not weird that people think he's got qualifications. Part of the issue is that
this is not just a VAS thing. Like the whole field of forensic science,
all the different fields of forensic science
are riddled with like issues in adequately determining
whether or not different techniques
are valid in repeatable science.
This is a problem again and again.
We're not even gonna get into it in these episodes
because there's so much else,
but like one of the big findings
of the last couple of decades has been that a huge amount of what used to be called
arson analysis, like burn analysis, was just wrong.
People were convicted all the fucking time
based on an understanding of what sort of patterns
in a fire indicated arson
that were not necessarily indicators of arson
that could happen in totally accidental fires
and fires that are started electrically
that they were like, this only happens when you pour fuel, right?
Was completely bucked.
People went the fuck in prison for this shit.
It happened.
It's all over the goddamn place.
And it's because once people have the idea to start doing this as a method of forensic
analysis, they just start doing it in court for money rather than building up a body of science around it first, you know
Again, it's like it comes out of like the legal system and law enforcement as opposed to coming out of like the traditional
Sciences where they come out of yeah
Yeah fundamental flaws
Yeah
So and while Vasa is a particularly noteworthy example of the problematic aspects of having
little in the way of objective standards for any kind of practitioners of forensic science,
he's not nearly alone.
This brings me to Dr. Richard Vorder Bruges, who has used his unparalleled skill in denim
identification to ID a bank robber, Wilbur McCreath, who was sentenced to prison for
92 years.
Now look-
You're trying What identification?
He's matching like pants and shirts on camera,
like the pattern of creases and folds in them
to prove that it's the same shirt,
not just like an identical,
because obviously a lot of people buy
the same versions of the same shirt.
You have to prove that like this is the shirt on camera
is the shirt this guy owns, right?
And he's doing that by like doing wrinkle analysis,
which is like-
Wow, wow, that's awesome.
It's one thing if there's a guy,
like say a guy holds up a liquor store
and you see he's wearing a certain shirt
with a specific pattern
and there's three cigarette burns in the shoulder
and you find a shirt with the same pattern
and cigarette burns in the same way.
That's some evidence, right?
That would definitely be reasonable to introduce, right?
What he's doing is much sketchier than this, right?
Look at this, there's a photographic comparison
for this bank robbery case where you can see
how kind of unclear the actual clips
from the bank camera are,
and you can compare that with like the pictures they have of
The suspect and his shirt and it's just a bunch of like arrows pointing at nothing
Like I can't even see what they're claiming is like the the unique wrinkle patterns that prove these are the same
So for listeners what we have on the screen right now is a bunch of pictures
So for listeners, what we have on the screen right now is a bunch of pictures, black and white,
taken from surveillance photos of like a plaid shirt,
you can't really tell the color.
And there is like, just like Robert mentioned,
a bunch of arrows literally pointing to,
it could be anything.
It just looks random.
Random arrows sort of pointing here and there,
no discernible like arrangement. In the concept I'm guessing here is like,
like for example, my shirt right now,
there's like these folds and wrinkles
around my like armpit for example.
Like they would check that, put an arrow there
and be like, let's fold here is very specific,
which is like, which seems pretty un-reproducible to me.
This like seems like absolute garbage.
Every guy in Pittsburgh has this shirt.
It's one thing to say, you know,
I've done open source analysis that has been cited
in courts and stuff, right?
And like, when you do it, it's stuff like, okay,
well this person is wearing a mask,
but they have an article of clothing
and there's another picture of a person
who is wearing the same mask,
who has the same article of clothing, and then a
picture of them without the mask wearing that clothing. And you can also see evidence of like
there's this part of a tattoo in the picture of the person without the mask that is present in the
picture of the person with the mask. And like, you know, these other, you know, there's a ring or
something that you can see in all these other pictures. And like, we can sort of suggest that
this is the same person in all these pictures because these things are really consistent, right?
And there's enough of them that it would be really weird
if like, that it's very unlikely
that it's like not the same person, right?
Whereas Bruges is just saying, he literally says,
based on the photos I just showed you,
there is a one in 650 billion chance
that these are different shirts.
Oh my God, where did he get that number from?
What? Holy hell. What? God, that's, where did he get that number from? What?
Holy hell.
What?
What a bold statement, man.
I'm gonna need to see your fucking math.
Yeah, come on.
I don't even know math,
but I'm gonna need to see you prove that to me.
It's a pretty specific number too.
Make that calculation, bro.
ProPublica notes, quote,
"'There is no body of work, at least not outside of the FBI,
on clothing pattern matching.
There is no data available detailing the number
of identical shirts created during manufacturing runs
or how many variations an examiner should expect to find
in a lot of manufactured clothes.
Nor is there any specific training required
to turn an FBI examiner into an expert on clothing features.
From what's been obtained by ProPublica,
the only requirement seems to be a functioning pair of eyes
This is the end through they even say the brand of this shirt. They're using as an example. Oh, I'm sure yeah
I'm sure they do somewhere like you can't for the gap everybody had that sure it's not a specialty
It's like a red plaid shirt. It's a plaid shirt. It's a plaid colored shirt
This is not some specialty item, Jesus Christ.
My God, we're so desperate.
We're so desperate.
This is how bad it is, how bad we are at solving crimes
as we are turning to stuff like this.
Yeah, it's amazing stuff.
The FBI has claimed in court filings
that patterns of wrinkles in jeans and shirts
are as unique as fingerprints,
which really gives up some of the game here.
Fingerprints are accepted as a flawless method of scientific identification, though as we started
these episodes by saying they are not, so if you want to make your much sketchier tactic look
acceptable, you have to tell the jury it's just as reliable as fingerprinting. ProPublica continues,
like anything else, this science is prone to confirmation bias, but in these cases, it's much worse.
FBI image examiners aren't given control images or items to guard against this.
They're only given images and the items investigators believe are evidence, so it guides examiners
to inevitable conclusions.
The research tends to be little more than finding ways images and items match, working
backwards from the assumption that the item being examined is evidence of a criminal act.
The entire body of this quote unquote wrinkle matching science rests on a 20 plus year old
case involving a pair of blue jeans.
Let me show you the photographic evidence.
Can you even see the fucking wrinkles in these pictures? Okay, so we are looking at two side-by-side photos.
Very old, grainy, black and white photos.
Are they supposed to be the same pants?
Yes.
Okay, one is a straight leg jean.
That's like a stovepipe style.
The other one is like almost a wide leg or a boot cut jean.
What, what, what? and they're clearly different colors.
I can even tell they're different colors in black and white.
And the denim print is completely different.
Ah, the stitching is different.
And this is all bullshit, sorry.
I mean, like I would, okay, here's the thing.
If there was some computer analysis that like really honed
in on like a section of like the fiber and they said,
oh, you could see there, there's a problem here
with the stitch.
Like the stitch here is a unique mess up.
Like this is like a one in a whatever thousand chance
of having a mess up like this.
Then that sort of makes sense.
But literally this seems to be a science where it's like,
look, the jeans are wrinkled here and here and here and these jeans
Over here are also wrinkled in a similar sort of way
They must be the same person like you know how pissed I would be if I got sentenced
Ironiously to jail because of this like it would be even worse than going to jail without doing the crime
It would be because of this.
I went to jail.
I'd be so furious.
These are completely different jeans.
The styles are not the same.
You got straight stovepipe and you got wide leg boot cut.
What the fuck are we even talking about here?
This is bullshit.
Sorry. It's so frustrating.
I'm shocked for a lot of jeans.
I know what I'm talking about.
I will say the good thing is that
the field of wrinkle analysis is not as respected
as it once was because of a lot of-
Oh really?
Because it's based off of this?
Okay, sorry.
Because the Innocence Project folks
got a lot of people's convictions overturned
based on really shoddy,
this specifically being very shoddy science and it's forced the Justice Department to change
their requirements around this. DOJ standards now mandate that their
scientists and experts not unequivocally claim that fingerprints or bullets or
hair analysis can determine which bullet fired a gun or which hand left a print
or which had grew a hair quote to the exclusion of all others.
This is the kind of claims they were making about stuff
like bullet analysis, wrinkle matching,
that like, because of my expertise
is like an FBI trained fucking wrinkle,
I can, these are the same pants
to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
They cannot say that anymore, right?
The DOJ guys, right?
People who are actually working
for the Department of Justice, you know,
doing forensic analysis can't say that anymore. guys, right? People who are actually working for the Department of Justice, you know, doing
forensic analysis. Can't say that anymore.
Great success. I'm so glad we got that very basic thing.
Yeah, yeah. So at least that's good. So yeah, you know, there's a lot that's angry, frustrating
about this today. There's more here I wanted to go into. We're already running so long,
but I do feel like I would be remiss if I didn't at least let you know about the latest
Bullshit forensic science that I came across which is the exciting field of 911 call analysis
this is the result of a
Deputy police chief Tracy Harpster from Dayton, Ohio who had no particular experience
solving murders
prior to attending a course at the FBI Academy in 2004.
He met a teacher there that he thought was fucking great,
and he decides to go get his master's degree
at the U of Cincinnati,
and his thesis involves he listens to 100 recordings
of 911 calls.
Half are from innocent people,
and half are from people who were guilty
of the crimes they were reporting. He then analyzed the calls for clues on the cues guilty people
gave off. Now this study is peer reviewed, but it is a peer reviewed. It's labeled in
the, where it was published as exploratory research. So it's not, it's not, when I say
it's a peer reviewed study, that doesn't mean that a bunch of scientists agreed this is
a great way to determine whether or not people making a say it's a peer-reviewed study, that doesn't mean that a bunch of scientists agreed this is a great way to determine
whether or not people making a 911 call committed a crime.
They agreed that like, this is interesting
and more research should be done, right?
And in fact, one of the people who helped him with this
has like gone on to be like,
I think what he is doing is not acceptable now.
Cause what he now does is teach cops all around the country
for huge amounts of money,
how to tell if people are guilty based on things in 911 calls. What kinds of things? Well, if you use the
word please, you're probably guilty in a 911 call. If you say huh in response to
a dispatcher's question, that's an indicator of guilt. If you say something
like please help me, that could mean that you're guilty. Please huh and please help me that could mean that you're guilty And please help me are like three of my favorite things to say. Yeah, it's it's cool
I want to I want to quote from a ProPublica analysis. That's just
fucking infuriating
This is a Colorado sheriff's deputy who asks harpster to analyze the 911 call of a widow suspected of murdering her husband quote
The widow said the word blood for example and that's a guilty indicator. Bleeding however is not. She said somebody at
different points which shows a lack of commitment. Witnesses to a crime scene
should be able to report their observations clearly, Harpster and Adams
wrote. She was inappropriately polite because she said I'm sorry and thank you.
She interrupted herself which wastes valuable time and may add confusion. She
tried to divert attention by saying God God, who would do this?
Harpster and Adams commented, This is a curious and unexpected question.
This is fucking insane.
Yeah. This is like 1984 level of like...
This guy, this widow gets convicted. Yeah, maybe she did it.
There was other evidence, you know
But this is some of the evidence they can Victor on and that makes me very uneasy because this shit is
Bullcrap, right?
The whole idea that like witnesses to a crime scene should be able to report their observations clearly
Have you fucking met a crime scene witness? Have you watched if you talk to someone who just saw a violent act committed?
Right. It's they're bad at doing that. They're terrible. I mean, understandably so. That's like
what they've just experienced. I mean, it would be like, there's a part of me, I get why all these
things work because they're all fun. Like it's all fun. Like this is like, wouldn't it be fun to be
able to detect if someone's lying based on like some subtle cues like that?
You know?
But cops love being able to take like a five day course
and say, now I can tell when a 911 call is a lie
by a murderer, you know?
Like I have these skills.
It seems like it would be a lot of fun.
I get why people like it, but like we have to take,
we have to learn as a country to take a step back. Just take a step back every now and then and look at what we're doing. This might not
He has taught police and continues to teach police officers in 26 states at this point
researchers
20 researchers from seven federal government agencies universities and advocacy groups have tested his methods against other samples of 911 calls to see if the guilty
Indicators that he points out do correlate with guilt and these studies have consistently found no
Relationship from most of the indicators. Oh wow separate studies FBI behavioral analysis unit experts warned law enforcement officers that
their results contradicted Harpster's and police probably
shouldn't be using this shit.
Despite that, the FBI repeatedly suggests his,
like recommends him as an expert in cases.
So, it's good.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Again, no matter how dumb it seems to be,
it just, there's new levels of dumb that I discover.
Yeah, I love it.
I'm sure we'll be learning more about this guy.
ProPublica seems to be, has been reporting
quite a bit on him lately, so that's good.
Anyway, don't call 911.
I'm not sure I can back that one.
I'm gonna be, normally when we do an episode and it's I I can shut it off in my brain right away
Because we do so much of what we do. I'm gonna be mad about the gene thing for a really long time
It's it's it's good stuff look folks if there's a lesson here again
Never call 9-1-1 always take justice into your own hands.
That's the safe way to do this, you know?
Yeah, no, I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
The doctor didn't say that.
The doctor on this podcast didn't say that.
The one true reverend doctor on this podcast
did not say that.
Well, I don't know.
What I will say is if you call 9-1-1 don't use the word blood yeah
Say please mean don't hesitate just start yelling at them. I guess that's the only way to do it. Yeah
Yeah, a tonal shrieking. Yeah, there you go a
Shriek a tonally and give them your address. That's it.
Cool stuff.
I'm fantastic.
I'm mad.
Well, that's my job done.
That was fun.
All right, everybody.
That was fun.
Dr. Hoda, anywhere people can find you?
Please listen to my podcast.
I like it when people listen.
I enjoy that very much.
It's called The House of Pod. It is a fun medical podcast, and I know you're thinking Please listen to my podcast. I like it when people listen. I enjoy that very much.
It's called The House of Pod.
It is a fun medical podcast.
And I know you're thinking you probably wouldn't like
a medical podcast, but you will.
You will and you will listen and you will like it.
I think there's a good chance you might enjoy it.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate this.
It's always so much fun for me.
And look, folks out there, if you're a lawyer,
prosecutor, DA or whatever I have started advertising my services as a
uniquely skilled guilt science expert
Which basically means you pay me $1,500 and I'll look at a guy and go oh, yeah
I'm other fucker did it and I'll do that in a courtroom, you know
Mm-hmm. So when this episode ends, can we just do a quick round
of two truths and a lie and see if we can guess
who's lying and who isn't?
There we go.
We can even do it on air too, but I really wanna see
if I can guess when you guys are lying.
Okay, okay, let's do it, Kaveh.
That seems like a fun way to end our episode
about pseudoscience and law.
Come a little closer to the screen.
I wanna see if the facial micro-expressions are learned.
Our micro-expressions?
Sure.
Let me move my window over so I'm looking directly at it.
Okay, perfect.
Now, Robert, please tell me if you would, I'm going to ask you a couple questions and
I want two of them to be true and one of them to be a lie.
Oh my God.
What was the name of the street you grew up on?
Seeger.
That's true.
No, it's not.
Dammit!
Damn it!
It's absolutely a lie.
All right.
I don't even remember this name.
I mean, it actually might be true
because I have no idea what street I grew up on.
Like it depends on what do you even mean by that?
Like I lived in so many places as a kid.
I remember like a couple of the streets.
Well, you know, I guess it's not an exact science.
What we're learning is the very few things are.
Ask me a question.
Okay, Sophie, how many times have you seen the movie Titanic?
You gotta look at me when you answer this though.
You can't look down like you're doing.
That looks suspicious and I think you're lying already.
Yeah, yeah.
I think we should arrest her.
I'm counting.
And now are we talking ever or?
Whoa, my goodness.
In the last year, I guess?
I don't know.
Okay. Yeah. Twice. That's obviously a lie. That's a lie. Oh my goodness in the last year I guess I don't know yeah
twice That's obviously a lie. No one's watched Titanic twice. I watched it twice. That was the truth. I would never lie to you
I would never say I thought it was a lie because I assumed you'd watched it a lot more no
Once it theaters on the anniversary and once at home, I would never lie to you, you are my friend.
Okay, you're right, this is a difficult past.
Robert would lie to you to prove his friendship.
Oh, just for fun, just as a bit sometimes.
Yeah, I mean, and I am really good
at detecting when people lie,
is what everyone thinks, and nobody is.
Nobody is.
Nobody's very good at it.
Nobody is.
I'm a terrible liar.
That part's okay, because none of human civilization
would work if we were all good at telling
when we were being lied to.
So much of peace and tranquility in civilization
relies upon us not catching every little lie somebody tells us.
Oh my god, if you could read people's minds, it would be absolute chaos.
Things would be terrible.
And to end this out, I would like to plug that we have a new show launching momentarily on Cool Zone Media
hosted by Jamie Loftus. It's a weekly podcast called 16th Minute of Fame.
Look for that.
If you're brave.
Speaking of failures in the criminal justice system,
Jamie still has not been brought to justice
for those murders and-
She's innocent!
She's innocent!
I forgot the name of the city I lied about
for doing the murder.
Grand Rapids!
Oh, I thought it was Gary, Indiana for some reason.
Gary, Indiana, maybe she did in Gary, Indiana.
Come back next week. We're on our investigation into Jamie's crimes and Gary will have pursued
Labrador dousing bodies. Yeah, get Dr. Voss on the case. I don't know. I need to see all of Jamie's jeans
We got to do a gene
Make sure the creases don't match too much.
My goodness.
Fuck.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist and former deputy sheriff.
In my new podcast series called Blooded, I'm embedded in the cold case investigation into
the death of firefighter Billy Halper.
Experience this investigation in a truly unique way, untangling
secrets that may reveal the answers to not only one case, but almost a dozen. Listen
to cold blooded, the Apollo gym murders on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Imagine you're a fly on the wall at a dinner between the mafia, the CIA, and the KGB.
That's where my new podcast begins.
This is Neil Strauss, host of To Live and Die in LA.
And I wanted to quickly tell you about an intense new series about a dangerous spy taught
to seduce men for their secrets and sometimes their lives.
From Tenderfoot TV, this is To Die For.
To Die For is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Tameka D. Mallory.
And it's your boy, Mike Saunders, General.
And we are your hosts of TMI.
And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network,
breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture
and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for
generations to come. Listen to TMI on the Black Defect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple
podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right.