Recent criminal cases such as the “Torso in the Thames”; “Lady
in the Lake” and murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman all
relied heavily on evidence provided by a variety geoscientists.
So how can mineralogy, geophysics and geomorphology assist in
criminal investigations? It was 101 years ago that Hans Gross
(an examining magistrate) published a handbook for his
colleagues outlining types of trace evidence useful in criminal
prosecutions. In this, he included soils, rock dust and paints
and thus gave legal weight to ideas that had been aired only in
popular stories such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes. The adherence of particles from a scene of
crime on suspect's clothing and footwear then became part of
established criminal investigation, embodied in Edmond Locard's
Exchange Principle “whenever two objects come into contact,
there is always an exchange of material”. The champion of
forensic geology (what we in the NW Europe would term
geoscience) for over 30 years has been Raym