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5.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction entices us to indulge our every temptation to create a video-
tape replay of the crime event. As we’ll see in the next chapter, reconstruction
is more properly viewed as an ordering of events in relative space and time,
using physical evidence plus any other available information. However, his-
torically, some criminalists’ overinflated belief in their powers of reconstruc-
tion have led to skewed expectations by both the public and judicial system
regarding the information that can be provided by physical evidence associ-
ated with a crime. Perhaps because of pressure to “solve” a particularly
horrendous crime, even the most well-intentioned and educated criminalists
have succumbed to overinterpreting the results of a physical analysis.
Fiction writers gave the science of detection a jump start, in the process
quite unintentionally paving the way for far-reaching and often unreasonable
expectations. Unfortunately, news reporters and journalists, in their incessant
quest for sensationalism, have continued to inflate the capabilities of physical
evidence analysis carelessly, completing a vicious circle in which the public
expects miracles and some scientists feel compelled to comply. In 1958,
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58
Principles and Practice of Criminalistics
Eugene Block, formerly a San Francisco police reporter, published a book
entitled 
The Wizard of Berkeley
, hardly an unassuming title. The short leader
on the book jacket promises, “The extraordinary exploits of American’s pio-
neer scientific criminologist, the world-famous Edward Oscar Heinrich.” The
first anecdote tells of a well-known case involving a Southern-Pacific railroad
murder on the California–Oregon border. In keeping with the book title,
Heinrich was apparently able to discern that a pair of dirty overalls found at
the scene
…were worn by a left-handed lumberjack accustomed to working around
fir trees. He is a white man between 21 and 25 years of age, not over five
feet ten inches tall and he weighs about 165 pounds. He has medium light
brown hair, a fair complexion, light brown eye-brows, small hands and feet,
and he is rather fastidious in his personal habits. Apparently he has lived
and worked in the Pacific Northwest. Look for such a man. You will be
hearing more from me shortly.
We almost expect Heinrich to tell us what the man had for breakfast the
morning of the crime. (A detailed description of the case may be found in
Sidebar 3.
These leaps of faith seem to have reached their heyday in the 1950s in
the infamous breeding ground of modern criminalistics, Berkeley, California.
In the first edition of 
Crime Investigation
, Kirk reports his deductions from
an examination of a glove left at the scene of a burglary.
a. The culprit was a laborer associated with building construction
b. His main occupation was pushing a wheelbarrow
c. He lived outside the town proper, on a small farm or garden plot
d. He was a southern European
e. He raised chickens, and kept a cow or horse
He reports that after apprehension of the suspect, all of the inferences were
confirmed except that the individual in question drove a tractor rather than
pushed a wheelbarrow. This, he rationalizes, was a reasonable misinterpre-
tation because his observation of greater wear on the inside surfaces of the
fourth and fifth fingers of the glove, as compared with the other three fingers,
could have been caused either “by thrusting forward on wheelbarrow handles,
but it also could be — and was — caused by pulling on sloping tractor levers.”
Our intent in calling attention to these common examples of how crim-
inalistics was practiced in the earlier part of the century is not to demean
these two very capable scientists, without whom the profession would not
be what it is today, but to emphasize how the pressures of the media and the
public might encourage overinterpretation of physical evidence, and to point
out the shift in the thinking of the field that has occurred since that time.
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The Evolution of Forensic Science
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